Mosaic

YVR was insane today, utterly, utterly insane. British Bank Holiday tomorrow and North American one next weekend, seemed like everyone was trying to get out of Dodge.

The reading in Church was about Moses and the general slaughter of small children. The Jews do seem to be prone to catching the attention of bad people. The vicar showed us how heroic and clever the women in the story were. The midwives who didn't follow orders to kill the baby boys and who made up some old nonsense about the Hebrews just popping them out so quickly there was hardly any time for them to catch 'em and dispatch 'em. Then Miriam, Moses' sister hiding and watching her brother. The Pharaoh's daughter who saved him, and Miriam's quick thinking in suggesting finding a wet nurse for him - his mother.

Women allowing life.
Midwives easing human life into the world. What a privilege. What a skill.

I couldn't help contrasting this particular round of little Jewish boy killing with the imminent crisis in India and China, where there will be too few women to go round. Different in a way, because it will come to be as a result of individual choice. The selection of boy children over girl, I see as pure misogyny. The killing of the sons of recently birthed women, I also see as partly misogyny. There can be no deeper sorrow than the loss of a child.
And the brutality involved in instructing those who help women bring that life into the world, to then take it is beyond imagining. The actions of a tyrant who doesn't care one jot about women, who thinks they don't matter.

But I was also thinking how long we've been hearing those stories. Who didn't have some big, fabric bound illustrated Bible stories book as a child, with a picture of Moses, little fat three-month-old white baby with light brown hair, lying in a fairly comfie looking wicker basket in the bullrushes, playing with his toes, while a black-haired beauty bathed (fully clothed of course) nearby?

I wondered if you could keep reading Winnie the Pooh, or Wind in the Willows like that, over a lifetime, interpreting and reinterpreting it. Hearing it week in and week out. Studying it at school a minimum of once a week over the 14 years you are there. Would it take on more significance or less?
Possibly Lord of the Rings.
Although I do of course have Pooh Bear in Latin, so that would be useful for the shamanistic side of things.

In the church, one of the ceiling fans rotates in the opposite direction to the others. Or maybe it doesn't. If you take your eyes away and look back, you can optically make it rotate in the same direction as the others, but at an odd angle. It rotates more slowly too. It's the one over the altar. It almost does the slowmo thing.

I know I won't be able to sleep, so I have over-the-counter medicated. Hopefully I'll be awakened at 4 to tell me the lad has arrived. I can never sleep naturally whilst they're in the air.