"...There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete... As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.

And even while he warned her of these caveats, Dellarobia felt a settling down of her lifelong plague of impatience. He did not claim that God moves in mysterious ways. Instead he seemed to believe, as she did, though they never could have discussed it, that everything else is in motion while God does not move at all. God sits still, perfectly at rest, the silver dollar at the bottom of the well, the question."

BARBARA KINGSOLVER, Flight Behavior

A few weeks ago I took my shiny pile of Barnes and Noble gift cards to - I was just going to say, "to Barnes and Noble," but to what other location would I be taking Barnes and Noble gift cards? The beach? Yes, that's where we went. And it was a great day, we had lots of fun building sandcastles and things until it was their turn to get buried in the sand and I never saw them again. And then I died of a broken heart, and then, you know what, this is why I never get anything done, because [many, many lines met their untimely ends at this site, butdon'tbetoosadaboutitbecauseiftheirpointlessliveshadn'tendedyou'dhavebeensubjectedtothem] - damn it. Now I don't know where to say I was taking the B&N gcs to. (I'm abbreviating things now. It's my new thing, I just decided. My n t, I j d'ed.)

Anyway. I wanted to get a Bible because, as I have murkily alluded to in this space (and in a few midnight establishments, and a couple times during whispered conversations with my cats while hiding from burglars-who-turned-out-not-to-be-burglars-but-I-still-kind-of-think-they-totally-could-have-been-burglars-and-so-the-whole-hiding-thing-was-completely-justified-and-not-at-all-an-overreaction-or-indicative-of-mental-frailty) I've been thinking about God a lot. (Also have been eating cheese sandwiches, which I have always found disgusting, always. Weird.) Or the idea of God, I guess I should say. So I went and picked the pinkest one ('biblical blush') (just kidding, it's 'razzmatazz' or something but that's dumb) off the shelf of fifty million different kinds (chronological? catholics have their own? pop-up!) and read some of it. And I liked some of the Jesus bits, and I loved the old-timey compliments in Solomon's love song thing. Hair like a goat waterfall, indeed. Old-timey compliments are my new new thing, I just decided.

I don't know what I was looking for, except that I couldn't help but think there must be something in there if bajillions of people seem to get so much from it. And I wanted to know what it was.

And I checked the Qur'an out of the library and some books about the Talmud and obviously books about fundamentalist Mormons because obviously. And I have come to zero conclusions, except that I strongly suspect a whole lot of church/templegoers have not actually read any of this. And while I'm tired too of hearing the arguments against these texts, I've heard enough because for me it's like... duh. Whoever wrote these books were alive before science was a real thing. But I haven't worked out a non-offensive articulation of my thoughts on that yet so MOVING ON. I just wanted to know, if there are people whose faith is in the metaphor, what there was in that.

But I still don't know. When it comes down to it, for me, I feel closer to God reading Margaret Atwood than I do in church.

And at night in my kitchen, when I find myself crying for the butterflies, it's comforting to think that I, like them, and like the birds, have my own secret tiny map inside of me, and that there is a part of my consciousness that quietly consults this map while the louder parts of me are doing other things. And my secret tiny map might be leading me to things I don't even know I can do yet.