I’m not a believer but I like the idea of wishing the presence of a god with others. It’s not so much a blessing as a wish for company. If God is with you, he’s with you for all of it. It’s like having a friend, perhaps, or a dog.

Given the moodiness of the Judeo-Christian God, it’s also a bit like having a volatile Santa Claus ever at your elbow – always determining whether you are naughty or nice. So it can be either a friend or a monitor, depending on your perception of God.

What an interesting moment to develop a sense of exceptionalism! Or perhaps she’s not claiming exceptional prayer – perhaps she’s not saying I’m the praying one – the one really praying to God – maybe she’s claiming a community – a sense of belonging to all Christian souls.

It doesn’t QUITE feel like that – it feels like a special request almost. But…there is a way that grief opens up new channels in a person. When I have been in mourning, I have felt unique even though I know myself not to be the least bit unique in losing someone. But death narrows focus, makes us feel as if it were a thing that never happened to anyone else before. That’s one of its magic powers, this creation of a feeling of exceptionalism.

Yeah, I’m gonna guess Polonius is gonna need that mercy.
1) He died without any kind of reckoning that generally these situations require
2) He died spying
3) As a high official close to one (or more) kings, it is not unlikely that he was party to a whole lot of dirty dealings. He could, for example, have just sent Hamlet to his (presumed) death in England. He could have been involved in the regicide of the first king. He’s definitely involved in a whole lot of spying

What else he did, we can’t know – but I’m guessing our man Polonius was never an angel.

I would like to punctuate this a little more. I feel like “we, cast away, moan“ – might go a long way toward making this make sense. Without it, it feels like the moans are being cast away, which feels a little bit dismissive of some moans in response to someone’s death. If we are cast away, because someone’s departed on the ship of death, it makes a whole lot more sense that we would moan, as we watch that ship with our loved one on it, disappear over the horizon.

I wonder what would happen if the story Snow White was about a man whose beard was white as snow, rather than a young nubile woman whose skin was white as snow. I mean – Snow White, as we know it, is problematic for a whole lot of reasons – and I’m not generally a fan of taking women’s stories away from them…however – In this case…

What if this man with his snow white beard was called Snow White and he was the fairest in the land? What if all the princesses and maybe even the princes came from far and wide to admire him? What if his jealous step-father sent him into the woods to be murdered by a huntswoman? What if he were rescued by a group of lady dwarves who brought him in to cook and clean for him? What if he fell asleep from one bite of a poisoned apple and the dwarves put him in a glass coffin, just to admire him? And then he was kissed awake by a handsome prince or gorgeous princess? I don’t know. I’m curious what a world would be like if this was a story we told instead of the other one.

Written in the past.
It will be clear when very quickly.
*
We’re not even a week into the Orange Man’s presidency and it is not only just as bad as we expected but possibly worse in that we didn’t expect it to happen THIS quickly. We’re already at STEP 2 of the establishment of fascism. We sailed through two steps in five days.

I saw a video wherein some guy spoke of the comparison of two kings speech from Hamlet – the “look on this picture” one. He replaced “husband” with leader and showed pictures of Obama and Trump. And the loss gets more and more poignant. He will never return. Not as our president. He will return as a private citizen but he never will come again as our leader. It’s hard to swallow.