partsofspeaking

Not having a sense of smell can be life-threatening and embarassing, but in one respect it is helping me.  I am caring for my mother just about full-time now and have to clean out a lot of human waste.  It isn't pleasant but I can't smell it, so it doesn't bother me.  I imagine others would have more trouble with that. I will be entering the third week of this phase on Tuesday.  We are finding a rhythm, and I am praying not to let her deserved attitude of apathy get me down.  I learned how to cook soft-boiled eggs yesterday, something I would never eat myself (nor fried--runny yolks are just disgusting). She ate two this morning, which is a breakthrough--she hasn't eaten nearly that much in a while.  I am keeping up with housework but her house needs deep cleaning and I can't do that.  She was a good housekeeper before this stage of the cancer but like all of us has a lot of clutter I want to throw out but do  not have the right to do so.

As I write this, I am one week into a new phase of my life, one that might last two months, six months--or longer.  To make a long story short, my mother fell last Tuesday, spent two nights in the hospital, and came home to hospice care, and me here pretty much 24/7.  Thankfully I have a son and husband to sit with her when I have to leave, and my brother has been visiting.  Today he leaves, though, and it's pretty much me except for going to my night class on Mondays and going two nights away for the doctoral study.  So, I won't have much time for writing blogs or anything else, because I will be trying to keep up with classes and write a dissertation while she rests, which is most of the time.  So I may not come back to blogging for a long, long time.  There are 1190 posts here over the last seven years, so if you want to read my thoughts, just go into the archives over to the left.  Some of it is good, some is silly, some is random.   Take care.

Driving home from seeing my mother today after church, I listened, as I normally do, to the NPR program To the Best of Our Knowledge.  The speaker at the end of my drive was Karen Armstrong, a writer about religious belief (that's vague, isn't it?) I don't know her credentials, but here is the interview . I found her thesis interesting, that is, that the major religions started at about the same time and were all based on a response to the violence of that historical time that asked the follower to stop being egocentric and have a non-self orientation to life.  I think it would be a good starting point for apologetics, and having not read her whole book, I can't really comment, so this response is based on only what she said. First, Judaism is based on a different understanding of God, not the self.  That different understanding may have changed the understanding of self, but it wasn't the start.  I also don't know that that period was any more violent than