Letter: Valentines

Happy Valentines Day!

It snowed again. ERGH!

On Wednesday I went diving, a normal enough chain of events... except that when we came up after our fourth dive, something happened. I got out of the water, started putting away my gear, changing into my clothes you know, the stuff one normally does when you get out of the water. My dive buddy didn't get out though. After I was in my clothes he called out, "Help." What followed is difficult to describe as I tried to keep him and myself calm through him losing the ability to move his limbs. The ambulance was called, paramedics came and we managed to get him out of the water, out of his gear and onto a stretcher.

He asked me to call his sister and tell her what happened, while I finished packing up the rest of his things and brought his car (we carpooled up) down to the hospital. So, I called her and told her what I knew, but in the confusion of the moment we weren't sure which hospital he had been taken to, so I had to try and keep her calm and tell her what was happening. I felt so helpless, there was information that I had, but I didn't know how to tell her, I wonder if that's what the early apostles felt as they tried so desperately to tell their followers everything they could to help them return to God. Only to have the message unclear. "As through a glass darkly." The dive buddy is okay, they finally gave him O2 (like we had been telling them to do for a while) and he started to recover quite quickly. They aren't sure what happened to him.

I was listening to some of the TED talks this week, TED is a conference held annually whose premise is to share ideas worth spreading. Basically the worlds smartest people get together and share ideas on how things should work. A friend of mine got me interested in them last year and I've been perusing them a bit since. One that I noticed (after he posted it on his blog) was a talk given by Elizabeth Gilbert the subject was creative juices. She talked in particular about how in the Greek and Roman days the belief was that each person was given a genius or daemon that would whisper the ideas to their minds. This being was who was responsible for the worth of the work that was created.

She says that this serves two purposes, one: it protects the author from pride. The idea isn't theirs, it is the daemon's. They were just the tool for the expression thereof. Also, if it stunk... well, that wasn't you that stunk, it was the daemon. And it wasn't until much later that people started being described as being a genius for their works, rather than having a genius in their work. The part that made me want to mention it though is that occasionally a dancer or an actor would have this Genius come upon them and inspire them to greater heights than they could previously have attained. This again, wasn't the person... but the genius that aided them. The Islamic faith took this idea and said that it was in fact Allah that was doing this, and they would chant, "Allah." when these particularly amazing events happened.

Then they invaded Spain! The phrase became Spanish and eventually it morphed into the modern day term, "Ole."

Hope you have a wonderful Valentines day(I'm repeating myself, deal with it) and weekend in general.