The Most Important Things

I didn’t get everything done that was on my list for yesterday. But I think I got the most important things done. I love spending time with my best friend. It doesn’t happen nearly often enough, as far as we are concerned. It was definitely easier when we were in the same ward and saw each other several times a week because we were ferrying kids to and from activities.

And I have to say, I enjoy walking through a museum much better when I am with her, than I do when I’m with the thundering herd, AKA my dinner group buddies. I don’t want to follow a tour guide. I barely tolerate those canned bits of information on the jobbies you can hang around your neck. I want to read the sign that accompanies each work of art, and I want to think for myself, and I want to discuss it with somebody who loves art as passionately as I do. Particularly when they know more about it than I do. And I want to go at my own pace. Fortunately, her pace and mine are compatible, so it was a great outing.

The J.M.W. Turner exhibition, running through the 18th at the Dallas Museum of Art, is huge. Almost too big for me to enjoy. I did skip the room with the time-line and contemporary history. Each room was painted a different color; I don’t remember a single one that was Boring Museum Grey. And I like his earlier stuff better than his later work. While I love the colors that the Impressionists used, I am much more fond of the Old Masters. I want trees that look like trees, and women who look like women, and rich, saturated colors. If I want nondescript color mooshes, I will sit down with my brushes and my tubes and moosh them myself.

[Oh yeah, that’s a bad side effect from having gone to Main Street Arts Festival two weeks ago and the DMA today; I want to pull my watercolor supplies out of storage and make messes. I so do not have time for this!]

The one that moved me most deeply, was The Tenth Plague of Egypt; this is the best image that I was able to find online. In the foreground you see two women grieving over a child, and sitting behind them a woman[?] with her head in her hands, and another dead child. For me it captured what those mothers must have felt when they realized that their stubborn Pharaoh was not a god who could save them.

I also liked Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, though I had to ask my friend for the story behind it. I did not remember that Polyphemus was the Cyclops, nor that his father was Poseidon. I managed to skate out of reading most of The Iliad and The Odyssey, back in high school. [Poor Penelope, having to weave an additional 20 years because her idiot husband taunted the son of a Greek god.]

One of the last paintings in the exhibition was an impressionistic work that I liked, The Angel Standing in the Sun. It reminded me of some of Minerva Teichert’s work.

Stake conference last night and this morning was interesting, as usual. Our stake president is very loving, very tender-hearted, and steadfast in reminding us that we need to be obedient. More than one ox got gored in his closing remarks today. None of mine, fortunately, were on the menu. [OK, one got bruised a little when he reminded us that mothers are to teach their daughters to cook and sew, etc.; I’ve been too busy over the years, just trying to keep them fed and clothed, to do as much training as I would have liked. And the ones who do cook, are way better at it than I was at their age.] I do appreciate his telling us that the sniping which goes on [occasionally] between the stay-at-home moms and the moms who work outside the home, needs to stop, today.

I will miss him when I am in my new ward and new stake. Thankfully, the stake president in my new stake was the bishop when we lived with our friends for a month and a half, after we left the Hill Country with our tails between our legs. So I already know him, like him, and trust him. And I expect to esteem my new bishop as much as I do my present one.

I have been getting impressions with greater and greater frequency this year. I do not know what this means, other than I am working actively to remove thoughts, ideas, and associations that would interfere with that. I have one long-term friendship that I sense should come to an end; moving will make that easier, while making it harder to maintain those friendships that I do want to keep.

On a happier note, there is a woman in the stake with whom things have been strained for a number of years; she was briefly engaged to a man who was [for a time] my friend, and for whom I was developing feelings. They brought out the worst in each other. She and I exchanged pleasantries at the meetings this weekend, and I think the bitterness between us is past.

It feels as if the Lord is enabling me to tie up all sorts of loose ends in recent weeks. And I have the feeling of moving toward a bright and busy future that holds no opportunity for self-pity or stagnation. LittleBit is making plans for a place of her own; the details are still sketchy, but she has brains, determination, and ambition *plus* her heart is good. I trust that she will make decisions that are safe and well-considered and firmly on the Lord’s side of the line.

This morning, I finished the block for the knit-along afghan we are doing in my Knit Night group. Also made real progress on the second Anastasia. Don’t know if I will have time to block it before Tuesday night, but it was a quick day-and-a-half project, and I liked working with the yarn better than I thought I would. Picture, maybe, tomorrow. Time for me to gather up my laundry and take it over to Firstborn’s. Mostly I would like to stay home and take a nap. So maybe I will get up an hour earlier tomorrow morning and do it at the laundry center here at the apartments.