being outside

This morning was sunny and chilly. Snow has now fallen on the entire height of the mountains, not just the tops. With the sky being that light, chilly blue and the mountains now being light, dusty grey, you need to do a double-take to determine exactly where the horizon lies. It's very pretty.

I took a walk over lunch, and I re-discovered two things. First of all, I remembered that I really like creative park sculpture. I'm talking about sculpture that takes up a large amount of park space and invites the public to sit, look, interact and ponder. I found a little triangle of land between three roads where someone had installed a number of large, rough, rectangular stones in various horizontal and upright patterns. Almost every one of these stones had some version of a circular hole or hollow in it. I sat, looked, interacted and pondered.

Also, I re-rediscovered this particular kind of white berry. When I was a child in Berlin, we had these berry bushes near our driveway. I hadn't seen them for about 12 years when I first rediscovered them here in Vancouver while taking a walk with Aaron. They instantly triggered this urge in me to pick them, throw them on the ground and step on them. I didn't know why, I just knew that that's what you do with that particular berry. And sure enough, once I stepped on them I rediscovered the delightful popping noise they make! So today, I once again saw these berries and remembered the strange way that memory can work. And I popped some, of course.

kenyan proverb

Treat the earth well.

It was not given to you from your parents,

it was loaned to you by your children.

multi-dimensional Jesus

In last week's adult study (aka Sunday School), we were talking about the resurrection. At one point somebody was emphasizing that Jesus did physically resurrect at Easter with a new physical body and that when we are resurrected we will also have new bodies. They'll be even better than our current ones because they won't get sick and die. Anyway, the question came up about how Jesus could have appeared and disappeared, especially entering rooms with all the doors locked, if he had such a physical body.

And then it struck me: Jesus' new body could move in more dimensions than the common three. You only need one extra dimension (and it doesn't have to be "time") for it all to make sense. Mathematicians and physicists generally accept the probability that our universe contains many extra dimensions, so this isn't even a wacky "out there" idea.

Imagine that the entire world is 2-dimensional like a flat piece of paper. And on this paper you draw a blueprint of a house, and you draw little stick people Christians into a room with all the doors locked. If that sheet of paper is all they know, and they can't comprehend how to look "up" at you because all they know is how to look forwards/backwards and left/right, then the appearance of your fingertip in their locked room (if you poke the paper) will seem like a miraculous appearance!

I'm really hoping this means that our resurrected bodies will have the ability to move through multiple dimensions...maybe we can evade illness bacteria and such by simply sidestepping them via another dimension. Why should we be locked up in a mere three-dimensional universe when there is infinitely more of it to discover?