midnightish rambling

    I believe in the connection of the mind, body, and spirit. In lds doctrine (doctrine? Not sure if it's official, but imma use it for this discussion), the soul is composed of the union of body and spirit (which, I guess, makes the mind/consciousness part of what the spirit entails? ANYWAY)

    Someone told me tonight that I have a lot of spirit in me. Does everyone have spirit proportional to body? And in the same ratios? How does that work?  So, fun idea: what if our spirits work like our bodies? We are born with little spirits (I know that we cultivated our spirits before we were born, though. Does that mean that some people are born with more/different spirit than other people?) And then our spirits automatically grow as we do. How can they not, when shaped by so much life, with all of the hardship and love it holds? Our bodies do that too—they get bigger as we get older and even just keep changing all our lives, even when we don't disrupt their defaults. Aging. 

BUT. Caveat. Because it is evident, through warmth and light and love, that some people are housing spirits that are definitely not default. I know that I've met some of these people in my life. They have created homes that feel similarly warm,  have raised children who are beginning to be similarly loving. That doesn't just happen all by itself. These individuals have worked hard to become this way. 

    Why wouldn't our spirits work the same way as our bodies? Doesn't god operate on the same laws through every plane? Laws of sowing and reaping, laws of natural consequence. So our spirits are like our bodies. Just as we work out and gain weight through muscle mass, our spirits can become more tightly packed (denser, of necessity, as we work to grow our spirits) into our same frames (with maybe even some seeping out the seams and that's why people can feel strong spirits in other people. And when we feed our spirits junk, we gain spiritual weight of that which is not dense, but simply fattening—it fills and dulls us, limiting our senses and capacities. And I know I've experienced this in myself. Short and long term. It's the human condition, I think.)

    I find it interesting to think of my spiritual inclinations as muscles that I can exercise or allow to atrophy. I think this frame of thought can help us feel more control over the progression of our minds/spirits. And also, it can help us feel better when it seems hard to mark our spiritual progress over time—anyone who has ever done or done much research on long-term physical fitness can attest that it's important to focus on little daily things, and avoid discouragement from perceived lack of results. Because the results will be subtle and spread out. 

    And just as mental/emotional balance makes it easier to stick to long term fitness plans—and just as consistent exercise is shown 5 thousand jillion times to improve our baseline mental and emotional health—it's important that we balance our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual improvement. Someone treating their body with respect and care will be, in the short and long term, more baseline attuned and receptive to the spirit than someone who is not, for example.

    So that is the word blurb that I wanted to do to for a preliminary refinement on this new maybe-concept. And it's also really late, like 1:30, which is past the midnight time which is why the title says midnightISH. Goodnight all.

temple road

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you.

—1 Peter 3:15

       I'm not always quite sure of how I feel about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I'm an ordinary person, so there are lots of mundane things that I wonder and struggle with sometimes. However, when it comes down to it, my spirituality is the fulness of all things that I doubt and know. It doesn't just occupy a single aspect of my life, and it does affect the mundane too.
       Tonight, as I drove along the temple road alone, I thought about lots of things like my family and the other people around me. I am so glad I have people in my life like these, let me tell you. I can't shout from the rooftops loud enough how much I love them.

       But anyway, I was thinking about my testimony. Here's how that usually tends to track:
       "Hmm. So. Can I really say I know the church is true? Do I have a testimony of the Book of Mormon? I don't read it every night. I gain so much comfort from it, though. I dunno about the restoration either. I love Joseph Smith. And I love the restoration story, what a wonderful concept. Man. Oh man, I'm so glad I get to be with my family forever. That's the plan of a god who loves." And so on.
(About that last part—one thing I have become consistently sure of is our loving Father. I know with personal confidence that Heavenly Father loves me just as much as anybody else, and that he loves everybody else just as much as He loves me. I can tell you till I'm blue in the face, but you have to find out for yourself. I encourage you to seek signs of His love in your life. I promise you that in His time, you will come to learn for yourself that Heavenly Father loves and knows you.)

       I follow this line of thinking and end up deciding that for me, love is enough. I have decided to trust my feelings. Over time I have spent much time with the scriptures, and I simply cannot deny how much better they help me to feel. Likewise, I simply cannot deny the way prayer brings me comfort. This summer especially, with all its moments of crisis, the best help for me was always—though not always applied—a full dive into humble prayer and humble scripture searching. I can't deny the impact of the sacrament. I can't offer reasoning for the way the whole value of these things becomes so much greater than a sum of their parts.

       In the way I interact with and analyze the world, there are certain rules and policies that I function by almost without knowing it. We all have these; as humans, we hunger to package things up neatly and make them easy for us to apply—this is why we are always making concepts into things like Truths and Principles. One thing I believe strongly in is a world that follows a pattern of natural consequence—with certain actions will always come certain reactions (and with practically everything else we just don't know what the heck's gonna happen so you've just gotta be careful. haha.) An extension of that concept is the following Truth: good trees produce good fruit, and unwholesome trees produce fruit that is likewise, and so by a thing's fruit ye shall always be able to determine the value and truth of the thing.

       Tonight, as I drove along the temple road alone, I decided that love is just another way of knowing something. In fact, I will tell you why love might be the truest way to know truth: it's because God is the root of all love, and likewise knows all truth.
       So, maybe my confidence in things like the Book of Mormon and the veracity of the Restoration are a little behind the curve sometimes. But that confidence can always increase through developing love for things like the Book of Mormon, the prophet Joseph Smith, personal prayer, and our living prophet Thomas S. Monson.
       It all starts with your personal relationship with the Lord. In whatever small or big way works for you, today start finding that relationship and that love. You can get on your knees and pray. You can start to feel an inkling of how much He loves you. Your love for Him, too, will start to grow. And however many times we fail to reach out, He's there right next to us ready for whenever we begin again to expand our learning of that love, which is infinite and eternal—that is, neverending in both magnitude and time. How cool is that? Man.
       Truly, I do love this gospel. I don't have all the answers I need, I don't understand everything I want to, I get hung up on discrepancies sometimes, but in the end it just boils down to love—and that the gospel brings in abundance when we work for it. That's a promise from God, not just me.
       Love, Grace

couple o' weeks

mads retreat

football against bountiful

wow. I am so artsy and sensitive according to this picture that I took of my shoes lost in negative space.

my life is on repeat...

       It's been bizarre for me to feel, this summer, that I'm just experiencing parallel universe versions of last year's blog posts—though Past Me and Current Me are somewhat different people, they have pretty much the same activities.
(Current Me likes to think that she knows a fair bit more than Past Me does. But in all honesty, one of the things that Current Me has learned is that I am really just learning the same lessons over and over again. All the iterations of myself that I've observed seem to have the same thick head.)

 Once upon a time I bought a cat shirt and a Led Zeppelin shirt.

 Then, I sent a picture to Sofie and she sent me a picture of HERSELF WEARING THE EXACT SAME SHIRT. IT MADE MY LIFE.

Then we lived happily ever after as best friends. The end!

Park City retreat (with the youth council)

 Silly Jish. We love you.

BEKAH YOU BABE!!! OW OW!!!!

       School starts in two days. Every conversation turns to the AP English assignment, or the madrigals retreat, and how woefully unprepared we are for each respectively. I haven't even STARTED the AP english assignment, and I'm not even the only one. Procrastination is real, folks, and it is rampant. Technically, we've stood as seniors since last year's class graduated—but it is now, in the face of school's beginning, that our true identity as procrastinating, senioritis-ridden dirtbags shows true. 

       Just kidding. We're suffering from only the common cold of senioritis viruses. It's in third term that the Senioritis Plague™ hits. But, as The Jenk-Dawg would have said in AP calc last year, it is our responsibility to "choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong by not taking the excuse of senioritis. At university you can't have senioritis."

       

       Writing this has actually boosted my enthusiasm for the school year to start. I've been a bit melancholy toward school because of those who've graduated and helped make my years SO fun. Thinking about class without them is a little sad. But there are still so many wonderful and fun people, I know this year will be a blast, and I can't wait now:)

       I interrupt with these pictures because we just barely took them. Jens, I love you so much, and I'll miss having you around, but you're just gonna be fantastic at Utah State.
       Time to go rehearse with the madrigals. wish us luck.

live to laugh.

[disclaimer: this letter is a joke for my own entertainment, so please do not think I am some sort of ANGRY WARRIOR who is REALLY WORKED UP about injustice against animal sock lovers. Also, I'm pretty sure ALL of my friends have told me that I'm unhealthily obsessed with animal socks.
Also I have to explain how I came to love animal socks. This last year at Christmas, Sound Ideas did a secret sister type gift exchange, and Audrey had me, and she got me some socks with lemurs on them. That's a sort of funny, fun gift, so I really enjoyed them. And so did everybody else. And when you're wearing something awesome like lemur socks, you just HAVE to show them off, so they got kind of well-known among my classmates. I would wear my lemur socks whenever I had a test, or when I needed an extra boost of motivation to live life, etc. Anyway, the point is that they became something of a dialogue among my friends. Because they're AWESOME, obviously.
So I've got lemur socks from Audrey, and I bought sock monkey socks on the choir trip to San Francisco, and this week I was at Station Park with friends and I bought fox socks.
okay, moving on: open letter, meant to be ironic, sorry if I'm not as funny to you as I am to myself. the blog's for my benefit, not yours.]

       An open letter to the guy who said I have an unhealthy obsession with animal socks:

       You are right. You are absolutely right. 
       You're dead wrong.
       Well, actually, it's both. You are, according to the dictionary, right that I may have a mild obsession with animal socks (obsession: a state in which someone thinks about something or someone constantly or frequently especially in a way that is not normal. So, yep—taken at its most literal definition, I have a minimal obsession with animal socks, since I think about them slightly more frequently than is normal.) but I think this is the opposite of unhealthy. In fact, may I dare suggest the opposite? That really, I am better off for the amusement I derive from animal socks? 

       The answer is yes. We have to take the amusement we can get in life. We have to learn to amuse ourselves by doing pointless, harmless things and enjoying them. 
[This is something I learned from my father, who changes the names of all the piano songs from things like "Etude" to things like "Evil Mysterious Killer Evil Music Box Song." And, sometimes he tells me that "amusing yourself is an important life skill." I think he first said that because Ethan and I were finishing our AP calculus end-of-year project, which happened to be Judson's face floating in the void of space with a box of chicken nuggets.]

       And so if I have a better day when I wear socks with charming creatures on them, I'm really the one better off here. Hating my animal socks is like hating pokemon go, according to the internet: "They are having TOO MUCH FUN with something MEANINGLESS somebody STOP THIS MADNESS!!!!" 
       Besides, I don't even waste a ton of time on animal socks the way some people (*cough* also me) do on pokemon go. It takes like ten seconds to put on socks. And then for the whole rest of the day I get to think about my socks and tell people about my socks. They love it. I'm just doing the world a service by providing my friends with something to laugh at. —Oh, did I say laugh at? I meant with—my friends are laughing with me and my lemur socks, of course.

       In conclusion, I like my lemur socks. 
       (because they became a reminder for me to seize life and enjoy it.)

Love, Grace :)

summer in summary (a tiny fraction)

I had the BEST summer job.

 (different job but still great)

best job pt 2

NUGGS (also Ethan one of my best friends)

 youth council fourth of July thing

Jack and Gabe are really cute.

best job pt 3

Jack and I are really cute.

 best job pts 4 and 5

babysitting is fun

 throwback to the choir trip....

 Bear Lake wow!!! I love Mikell so much!!!

Oh man. My feelings on this picture and what it represents could be a blog post. I'll say this: I love my friends so dearly, and have been missing them very much. But I am very proud of them for choosing to go on missions and immerse themselves in serving the Lord. They are a huge part of what made my junior year so fun, and their presence will be sorely missed this next school year. I'm so grateful to have had them and their examples in my lives for the last four years. I guess being a year ahead in the math has a benefit after all.

different job but still great pt 2

throwback to Gabe last summer...... (fun fact: as I type this, he's saying incessantly "Grace. I need ta go to bed. Grace, I need ta go to bed. I need ta go to bed. Grace. I need ta go to bed. Oh Grace, that's Gabe! That's Gabe's layyow [yellow] shirt! Grace, I need ta go to bed! Grace. I need ta go to bed.")

 babysitting is fun pt 2

the socks....

This is today. Jack and Jens and Gabe are REALLY cute.

(Gabe is now in the other room lying on his bed shouting, "Grace, binky for Gabe, gray blankey for Gabe!" over and over, the way he was telling me, "Grace. I need ta go to bed."