27 January 2004: Bless You

Email from Mom! Yay!

Hi Nick!

Your journal entries are always interesting and thought-provoking for me. [...]
 
I have a different point of view on God bless you.  To me it's like a short prayer for someone who sneezes; a kind of empathetic I care about you.  I don't say it as a should, even though I agree with you that there are social situations in which we've learned that it's proper to do so.  There are even times that I don't say God bless you in the company of somebody with whom I'm very close, especially if they're having a sneezing spell, but I do sometimes.
 
Dad and I are doing well.  I felt really good yesterday because I successfully completed some climbing moves that I either haven't tried before or was unsuccessful at completing before.  I suspect that Tai Chi has  helped.
 
Hugs to [Dragon Lady] !
 
Love,

Ma

 

Hi Ma!

It's always good to hear from you. I hope you don't mind that your letter, and this response, are going to end up in today's journal entry.

When I compose my journal entries, I just sort of rant and ramble, and then, while I'm formatting them and adding the links and such, I edit out anything that doesn't quite work for me. The "Bless you" bit almost got edited out, because I knew very well that there were exceptions - people who said "Bless you" consciously. You were the first such exception who came to mind, even though I couldn't actually remember a specific instance of you saying "Bless you."

In the end, I decided to leave it in, not because I think it's always true, but because I figured it might help make one or two people more conscious, in some small way, which I think is always a good thing. That is, if it inspires just one person to think about what it means to intentionally choose to "silently let a sneeze be," and if, as a result, that person learns something about the holy power of Silence, then it will have been well worth me coming across as a judgmental crackpot (anyone whose opinion I still care about has long since learned to accept and forgive my judgmental crackpot side anyway - the best of them find it as funny as I do, and a couple of the really sick ones even think it's endearing).

I frequently have the sense that, in a given entry, or even (as in this case) a given paragraph, I'm writing for just one specific person, and most of the time I don't know which person it is, and never will.

Anyway, the "Bless you" bit has excited more comment - pro and con, offended, grateful, and amused - than anything I've written in a while. Which is hilarious, in a way, since I wrote about crossing the Abyss (one of the central goals of the Hermetic magickal tradition) in the same entry, and got only three pieces of mail about it (two congratulations and one technical question, all from people I'd never met or heard of). I never know what will get me mail, and what won't. One of these days, I'm going to write something that inspires all my readers to contact me, and then I'll finally know who all of them are.

Congratulations on the climbing breakthroughs.

I'm learning Spanish in school. It's hard. Fortunately, Dragon Lady speaks it fairly well; we're trying to use it around the house as much as we can.

Hugs to Dad!

Love,

Your Kid

•     •     •

For all of you long-suffering readers who have found my writings about the Initiations lab (which have dominated this journal for the past two months) to be utterly opaque and incomprehensible, check out the latest addition to our little online journaling community: Corridor of Madness.

Corridor of Madness is the brand new journal of Mindwarp, a new friend I just met through the Initiations lab. I mentioned him in my January 22nd entry, “Chesed,” under a different name – but then he started his journal (on the same evening I mentioned him, in fact, though I didn’t find out about it for a couple of days after that), and he’s posting his journal entries under the name “Mindwarp,” so I went back to the “Chesed” entry and changed his name to “Mindwarp” in the place I mentioned him (yes, I’m allowed to do that).

Anyway, Corridor of Madness was started specifically to chronicle Mindwarp’s experience in the Initiations lab (though I certainly hope he keeps it going permanently).

So how does this benefit you? Well, this was Mindwarp’s first experience with Paratheatrical Research. He’s very young (shockingly so), and, unlike me (and despite his name and the name of his site) he’s still sane, coherent, and in posession of a full head of brain cells. So, unlike me, Mindwarp has acutally begun his account of the lab with an astoundingly clear, orderly, and detailed explanation of what the paratheatrical lab work entails – what we actually do, and why, and in what order, and what the terms mean, and all of that other useful stuff that it would never have occurred to me to mention, even if I were capable of presenting such information coherently.

Which I’m sure I wouldn’t be if I tried.

Which I didn’t.

So. Yes. Corridor of Madness. Check it out.

It might help.