raising beezelbub

As my friend and colleague Roy said recently about this blog: "Yet another experiment in the woods? Oh Lord...."

I did a Google search for other blogs named "living deliberately," and turned up a depressingly large number--depressing, that is, if you're into originality. So I guess the concept isn't that original, which isn't all that surprising. Thoreau is still required reading for most of us, sandwiched somewhere between Native American hymns to the Great Overspirit and Tupac's lyrics. Thoreau is one of the more instantly dig-able writers that we read in school. I mean, how can you argue with the idea that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation? And how attractive is the implication that, recognizing this idea, WE as his attentive audience are not part of the mass of men? And then again, Thoreau himself wasn't all that original--most of his ideas are pretty derivative, even if they are provocative. So his point of view is something that we get, I think, even if we don't totally agree.

But even if it's not original, I do stand by my basic argument--that there are things in life that are worth your time to to do, and there are things that are worth your time to avoid. Even if the doing (or the avoidance) is largely symbolic, it's good to make a stand sometimes, even if it's in a small and essentially self-serving kind of way. After all, Thoreau's time in the woods stands as a thing of beauty and inspiration, even if it did serve the secondary purpose of getting him out of the family pencil factory. As Thoreau himself says (paraphrasing J.C., of course--very unintentionally postmodern of him) "Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations." Anyway, you get the idea.

One of the main reasons we decided to move out of the suburban environment where we were living was the fact that we thought it would be good for the kids. I guess that realistically there are trade-offs. We may be trading the dope-smoking in the park for dope-growing in the woods, and gang-banging at the mall for meth-making in the trailer. But hope springs eternal.

After you have kids, you begin to realize that your potential for leaving an imprint in the world has just increased exponentially. Like those signs that say "leave no trace" at a campsite, some days, the best you pray for is just that your kid doesn't turn out to be the next Dylan Klebold.

Since it's Sunday, here are some recent thoughts on religious issues from my three-year-old Ginny, Beelzebub in training:

On the Noah's ark story:

Why won't God wash away the world again? He really ought to, because there are a lot of bad people around...

On the story of Mary Magdelene washing Jesus' feet with her hair:

She's going to need a lot of conditioner to get out those tangles.

On the Last Supper:

All they got was bread and juice? Had they been bad?

On the story of Moses:

Would Baby Daniel fit in a basket?

And my personal favorite--on the story of the Crucifixion (or as she says "when the bad guys got Jesus"):

So why did Judas sell Jesus for thirty pieces of silver? I would have asked for forty...

So I guess parenting and all that comes with it is just a roll of the dice, and our prayers are sent up to improve the odds. Some days I like the odds better than others! But really, I guess all life is an experiment. An experiment without a control group--a case study, if you will. And the experiment, for us, would be happening whether we'd chosen to move out to the woods or not...