My dear Readers,

I am going to formalize what you may have already noticed - I am taking a vacation from blogging. I have a lot of things I need to focus on, and sadly, blogging has not made the list.

I will be back from time to time, or not.

much love to you,
kt

Doogie's Obituary

here.

I'm back

I got back last week, but -WOW- it has been busy!

- back to work
- moved to a new house (!)
- family tragedy

I am grateful for a wonderful extended family that is such a great example to me of faith and trust in the Lord. I am grateful for the promise of the resurrection made possible through Jesus Christ. It gives hope where otherwise there would be none. I am grateful for temples where families can be sealed together forever - so that death need not part.

Much love to you all, I'll be posting again soon.

Greetings from Vienna

Hello, my lovelies.

Turns out I missed my flight to Norway. I won't go into the tears and frustration, but instead will tell you I salvaged my weekend by flying to Vienna to visit the family of my dear friends Becca and Benj. It's been glorious weather and I still got to visit continental Europe for the first time. {Can I also tell you that Saturday night was the first night I slept in a bed since Tuesday? Fantastic...}

As for visiting my friends Inki and Robert, I will be in Norway May 17th next year ... I'm committed!

love to you all,
kt

Hello Tommy!

I'd like to introduce you all to my newest nephew:

- Born 10:25 pm Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
- 7lbs 9 oz

It seemed probable a week ago that Nephew #2 would arrive before my trip, but today I acknowledged that I would probably not meet my nephew until after I returned.

I was wrong!

When I got out of the temple tonight, I had a voice message that Laura had gone into labor. I was able to go directly to the hospital and meet Tommy just 10 minutes after he was born :)

He looks a lot like Brady - he is beautiful! I got to cuddle him while Laura ate and both of them are very healthy and doing "more than perfect" (says the Nurse).

I'm so grateful I got to be there with my sister (and brother-in-law and mother) and to welcome little Tommy here. I know Brady will love him and be a great older brother. I love nephews !!!

Photo #2: Laura (mom) with baby Tommy

Photos #3 & #4: Baby Tommy just received eye ointment and is being cuddled by Brock (dad)

Gone Fishing

Dearest Friends,

My backpack arrived today and so I am leaving for 2 weeks on vacation. I am going to Europe* and the exotic Midwest**.

I love you, I'll miss you and my iPhone, but it's time I go exploring...

xoxo
kt

*London, Bergen & Oxford
**St. Louis & Chicago

To the mothers in my life,

Grandma,
When I am with you, I am home. Being with you fills my heart with a deep warmth and sense of security - and gives me a vision of who I am beyond age and circumstance. I think that must be what heaven is like.

Mom,
I love your guileless wit, your tender heart, and your rich gifts with language. You are beautiful, patient, and wise. The lessons you have taught me of equality and compassion still resonate in my head; you have never talked "down" to me, nor have you ever taught me that I am "above" anyone else. Thank you for loving me no more and no less than your other children.

Laura,
Motherhood has crowned you with a beauty, grace, and serenity I hope to have someday. Your son is a testament to your sweet nature and disciplined character. "By their fruits ye shall know them," indeed. The love I have for your son, which is often expressed on this blog, is only an appendage of my love for you.

love
kt

Laura as a Baby

Adorable, no? Just thought you should all see where my nephew gets his dimples and smiling eyes... xoxo

Quote of the Day

Be silly, be honest, be kind.
R. W. Emerson

Happy Birthday, Brady!

oh, how I love him...
{sigh}

A House of God

Organize yourselves; prepare every needful thing; and establish a
house, even a house of prayer, a house of fasting, a house of faith, a
house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God;

Doctrine & Covenants 88:119

Should* I ever express, with a sigh, my love for the Temple while in the presence of my father, he would surely reply (without a pause, and without variation), "you know, kt, Jesus Christ is the pattern for our lives, and the temple is the pattern for our homes."

One of my father's most effective parenting methods has been consistent, strategic communication** and his practice in this case does not vary. And so I have thought about the principles behind how the temple is managed and decorated - with the aim of executing those strategies effectively, albeit differently, in my own home.

Order and Cleanliness
One of my resolutions this year is to have "a place for everything and everything in its place" - and working toward this has been incredibly satisfying. Moving twice in the last 9 months has given me ample opportunity to purge my possessions. Even my car is tidy in this moment.# Truly, I've exceeded my expectations for myself.## The final frontier is my small bookshelf and coming up with a system to manage my bills / personal papers.

Holiness
Let me hang the proverbial WIP sign on this one. After hearing secondhand about a wonderful address on worthy music, I have been trying to purge my iTunes and DVD collections. This is really challenging for me. Not because I have anything 'black,' but of course I have lots of 'gray' (I will reserve my preferred 'grey' spelling for good greys. like shoes.). Do certain songs by the Beatles and Michael Jackson get grandfathered in? What about movies with fast cars and fast women (or ballerina dancers for that matter..) ? It's a difficulty, and I'm working through it.

Appearance
I have strong convictions about the relationship between the spirit and body. If the temple is a metaphor for our bodies and a pattern for our homes, then the appearance of our homes must also be significant. I don't mean tidiness/cleanliness, but the actual decoration.

But surely my apartment does not need to be decorated exactly like a temple, right? (right??) Firstly, I've seen quite the variation in temple decor. Secondly, I like lots of bright colors and whilst some temples have quite a bit of color, I find it is more subdued than I would like in my own home. Thirdly, as the function of a home varies from a temple, so (I presume) the execution of these principles may.

And so, let's keep this high level. Here are the patterns I've noted thus far:

• Motifs are simple, primarily organic, but often geometric.
• Artwork is not exclusively "religious," but may depict nature, or family life (emphasizing local history /culture).
• White and gold are used extensively. Other commonly used colors include green, purple, and pink (again, colors often found in nature).
• Lots of wood, stone, glass, mirrors, chandeliers.
• An impression of light, simplicity, and open space.

I love the idea of strategically decorating my home using similar principles. I may use this as my "best" in the good better best spectrum. While I could end up collecting quite a bit of pop art (I love movies, pop culture, etc.), what would that emphasize and romanticize to my {future} children? What would I find myself thinking about when I am home in my leisure time? If the artwork reflects the beautiful world God has created, the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, and the joy of family, I can see that supporting the strategy for keeping an eye single to the glory of God and raising children to do so as well. I think that the more I model my home's decor after the temple, the more the temple will seem "like home" to me and my {future} family. The temple may be more soft, more sober, more subtle; but I would love for it to seem familiar - perhaps even an extension - of home.

* hypothetically speaking, I mean.
** remind me to give further evidence of this later...
# I consider my car to be an extension of my home. Indeed, I consider my personal email inbox and my work cubicle to be extensions as well.
## did I mention they were low?

Hooray for May!

I have to say that even MY love for poems has been satiated by National Poetry Month and I greet the month of May with relief. It will take something truly splendid to bring another poem anytime soon (You have my permission to take that as a challenge. However, if I were you, I'd save it for August's Haiku Challenge). Who knew that 30 poems would exhaust my supply and test my resourcefulness? Surely, I did not.

Anyway, it's now May. And May is all about...

Mums!

So check these out:

Scary
Sad
Sweet
and
Real





ps. I sometimes wonder what kind of mum I will be. Here's my guess:

• bossy
• charming
• preachy
• entertaining
• exacting
• affectionate
• always right

Covenants: Source of Power

{I wrote this for my ward's May 2009 newsletter}

Last August, my cousin, 30, and his wife, 27, were in perfect health and beauty, but within the course of an afternoon, a private plane crash left them both severely burned – even in critical condition. Our family was filled with great pain and anxiety by the thought of the physical, mental, and emotional burdens they would now carry.

During this time, I found that the covenants made in the temple increased in significance and tenderness. As I attended regularly and performed each ordinance, I thought of how each promise I received had also been made to my cousins. The promise of the resurrection became more dear, physical blessings more tender.

In the past 9 months, our family has witnessed many miracles of healing. Most marvelous of all: seeing my cousin and his wife greet and bear these burdens with the endurance of faith. Their strength is a gift from God, given through the temple covenants they have made and kept.

In his recent conference address, “The Power of Covenants,” Elder Christofferson taught that God is the source of moral and spiritual power:

“The source [of power] is God. Our access to that power is through our covenants with Him. [And] we enter into covenants by priesthood ordinances.”

Elder Christofferson goes on to identify three ways that making and keeping covenants with God “gives us power to smile through hardships, to convert tribulation into triumph, to be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and bring to pass much righteousness.”

1. Gifts and Blessings - Obedience to covenants brings “a continual flow of blessings”.

"And if it so be that the children of men keep the commandments of God he doth nourish them, and strengthen them" (1 Nephi 17:3)

2. Increased Faith - “[Covenants] produce the faith necessary to persevere and to do all things that are expedient in the Lord.”

"It was [faith] that enabled the ancient saints to endure all their afflictions and persecutions, and to take . . . not only the spoiling of their goods, and the wasting of their substance, joyfully, but also to suffer death in its most horrid forms; knowing (not merely believing) that when this earthly house of their tabernacle was dissolved, they had a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. (2 Cor. 5:1)" (Lectures on Faith [1985], 67).

3. The Bestowal of Divine Power – “In all the ordinances, especially those of the temple, we are endowed with power from on high. This power of godliness comes in the person and by the influence of the Holy Ghost.”

With Elder Christofferson, I testify that through sacred covenants we can grow in faith and godliness. I have witnessed the power of covenants in the life of my family and hope to feel their transforming power over the course of my own life, and that all of us “after … temptations, and much tribulation, … shall be converted, and [that Christ] will heal [us].” (D&C 112:13)

Very Like a Whale by Ogden Nash

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and
metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to
go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told
That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of
Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and
thus hinder longevity.
We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were
gleaming in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a
wold on the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy
there are great many things.
But I don't imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple
and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was
actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red
mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof?
Frankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say,
at the very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian
cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he
had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers
to people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of
wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.
That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets,
from Homer to Tennyson;
They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket
after a winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of
snow and I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical
blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.

Child by Carl Sandburg

The young child, Christ, is straight and wise
And asks questions of the old men, questions
Found under running water for all children
And found under shadows thrown on still waters
By tall trees looking downward, old and gnarled.
Found to the eyes of children alone, untold,
Singing a low song in the loneliness.
And the young child, Christ, goes on asking
And the old men answer nothing and only know love
For the young child. Christ, straight and wise.

Different Ways to Pray by Naomi Shihab Nye

There was the method of kneeling,
a fine method, if you lived in a country
where stones were smooth.
The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,
hidden corners where knee fit rock.
Their prayers were weathered rib bones,
small calcium words uttered in sequence,
as if this shedding of syllables could somehow
fuse them to the sky.

There were the men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.

Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white linen
to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.
When they arrived at Mecca
they would circle the holy places,
on foot, many times,
they would bend to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing mystery.

While for certain cousins and grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily,
lugging water from the spring
or balancing the baskets of grapes.
These were the ones present at births,
humming quietly to perspiring mothers.
The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,
forgetting how easily children soil clothes.

There were those who didn’t care about praying.
The young ones. The ones who had been to America.
They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.
      Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones.
They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,
for the twig, the round moon,
to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.

And occasionally there would be one
who did none of this,
the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,
who beat everyone at dominoes,
insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,
and was famous for his laugh

To My Child by Anne Campbell

You are the trip I did not take;
You are the pearls I cannot buy;
You are my blue Italian lake;
You are my piece of foreign sky.

Forgetfulness by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Child Moon by Carl Sandburg

The child's wonder
At the old moon
Comes back nightly.
She points her finger
To the far silent yellow thing
Shining through the branches
Filtering on the leaves a golden sand,
Crying with her little tongue, “See the moon!”
And in her bed fading to sleep
With babblings of the moon on her little mouth.

A child said, What is the grass? by Walt Whitman

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it
is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we
may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe
of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and
from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps,
And here you are the mother's laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and
children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.