a little catching up

How do you like the new layout? This blog needed a change. I tried to think of a new title...but couldn't. "baby steps" has been what I have called this place since I went into the hospital a little over two years ago and my babies went into the nicu. It seems like I had a lot more readers then. People would comment in passing about how they kept up with H&L's progress through checking my blog. I even had pretty regular and numerous comments in the comments sections. These days, I don't know if anyone reads at all - if they do they certainly stopped commenting.

The running joke among my husband and friends has been that "blogging is dead." I said to him, "I don't even know the point anymore; no one comments and I can't blame them, I don't have that great or controversial to say hardly ever." And he said, "well you shouldn't blog for them, you should blog for you." Well I'll try that out, more often, and more interestingly, and maybe more controversially, for me.

But back to the name. I tried to change it once to something like "Sound Mind Sound Body Sound Soul" or some other cheese like that but came back to this one: "baby steps." It is fitting I suppose since, probably, a lot of my posts have to do with updates on my children and being a mother or just every day life. But, also, I think that "baby steps" is an appropriate metaphor for my life in general since everyday I continue to learn and process "growing up". So "baby steps" it is.

O.k. so in my last post I mentioned that I was reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. This book was recommended to me by my husband who attended a small Methodist Liberal Arts College in the deep deep South. He often says that he loves his school because it helped in grow in academics, of course, but it also helped him grown in his faith because every class he took challenged him to think for himself. He said the book was about "Leavers and Takers." When I first heard this term I immediately thought of another post I have read before over at The Spivey Life. I thought the book would be about lazy people and not as lazy as those people people. I was wrong, sort of. The book, as I mentioned is a conversation between a gorilla and his human student about how the world "got to be the way it is." I will not try to give any kind of summary or real synopsis of the book because I think if this at all interests you then you should read it for yourself. However, I will pose a few questions that were raised in the novel... questions that Ishmael asked the man that have MY wheels turning.

-why do humans teach that this world was created for humans?

-why do humans teach that evolution AND/OR creation ended after humans?

-why do humans feel that it is right and necessary to be the only species to take from, steal from, and murder each other AND other species in order to get what they want?

-is there an unspoken law of survival and food chains etc. that every other species follows that humans feel they are exempt from and if so why?

-will humans continue to live "this way" until we extinguish all natural resources and essentially commit global suicide over a period of thousands or millions of years? and if we knew a solution... a better way to live, could we do it? what would it take?

The book did not shake my faith in any way really but it did,however, cause me to think differently, and for that I applaud the author.

That is really all for now...