A form exercise I can live with, finally ! I think I will break out the old "Latin Made Easy" text books and start learning a new language - or, a very OLD one !

It's not a very good picture and I could have trimmed it some - but that is a picture of me at 28 years of age. That's the back yard of this house before we tore down the old fence and cleaned up the messy blackberries (what a job - it took 2 decades and they still grow back if we allow them to!) ... I think I was about 120 - maybe even less. Leon and I had just bought our first home and yep, that is my idea of a clever pose. No jokes, please!


I am keeping my sense of humor - sometime in the near future I will find out if I fell into diabetes or missed that horror. I suspect - because I am mostly feeling good, even great - and I am taking off the offending weight efficiently that I may have spared myself  the worse blow to my well-being, debilitating diabetes.   I wish, now, I had started losing when I said I was going to - about 2 years ago, I had finished the cycles of menopause and my body was balancing out, accustoming itself to Middle Age.
I knew a long time that I was overweight, obese to use the medical term - I kept saying I needed to lose but I also knew it was a hard, difficult path. I'd lose a few pounds, then gain it back. It isn't easy and anyone who tries to - has tried to - will tell you that it's one of the harder challenges of 21 st. century life. I send my affection and compassion to anyone who is struggling just as I am. BUT, Lets just do it - for ourselves, for our beloved friends & family and for our future. Most of us - those who struggle as I am doing and for the reasons I am l losing weight - are in the second half of life - I am 56 - but it doesn't have to be a bad time - this next cycle of this life can be glorious, a fine 25 -30 years which cumulates in an honorable end. We are skilled, intelligent human beings with an immense amount of experience behind us - we can give our lives meaning if we but try. That is what I am trying to do. Just be the best Kathleen Mary H. that I can be; develop the best virtues I can, be a good, loving Christian, a good friend and a good wife - give my life meaning and texture so people notice me while I am alive and miss me a little when I am gone... Be creative, curious, self-educated ... and never, never asleep.

As Christ says :Stay awake, you don't know when I will pop up and surprise you !

I would say, and this may puzzle some of you that I may be only another pearl on a long strand of pearls but I want to be a good pearl, not an embarrassment. Another way to say the same exact thing: I want to leave my soul in good shape for the next ego, so he or she doesn't have to clean up my errors and mistakes. How we treat our bodies during life is an important part of maturing as souls. Mistreating or abusing our bodies is as great a sin as mistreating or abusing the bodies of others.

Its not death that terrifies me - that will come, may it come quickly as a blow comes, sudden and without a great deal of pain : what terrifies me are years upon years of suffering, self denial and struggle - a loss of meaning and hope- illness that makes me nothing but an animal, an animal without dignity, at that. I cannot lose my dignity - that is the real killer of the self. I am not an animal, I am an immortal soul that is a fire that burns fire-hot though it never consumes itself. My faith - my gnosticism - informs all I do. I don't believe : I KNOW. The truest part of me is immortal and never dies. The problem is the mortal part : the desires, lusts & pleasures that the body demands as its due. My will is stronger than it. I promise it what it wants but with moderation and in good time - and I keep reminding it that it can't go back to being that young lady in the garden posing for her beloved husband - but I can be a middle-age lady that is mostly healthy and just as thin posing for her beloved husband for a new picture.

The problem with the body is that it is like an animal or a child. Too much discipline and you become a cruel ascetic towards it, a task-master who beats it raw, too little and you allow it to become a self-indulgent & obese, and ultimately, sick creature - a very bad and indulgent parent towards it  - I feel like I am riding a wild horse that I keep trying to tame. It wants to do what it should not do. I want to be kind to it but not indulgent. Merciful, but not to a fault. I am losing weight because I love myself and my body. This discipline is an act of kindness.

Humor : I asked Leon if losing weight means I lose years. He laughed and said he didn't think it worked that way.

What scares me is the time after the diet. I will get down to the weight I am supposed to be about September next year. But I have never quite mastered the after-diet or maintained diet period. I would gain, lose, gain, lose - the peri-menopause gain was just the worse, but, not the first. But how to you maintain weight when it doesn't come naturally to either you or your body? I am studying and reading about it and will continue to do so. I suspect it is going to be as much a struggle as the diet, itself, was. I have no idea how many calories my body really needs per day. I hate math - but its absolutely necessary - why - because the math is working. Calories per day, Basel rate per day ... its all the way things really work.
A final note : I know that to some speaking of me/body and me/soul can be a little jarring but it is basic to how I, as a Gnostic, think. For a Gnostic the body is not the True Self, the Soul is the True Self. The body is the vehicle - the car of the soul.

I thought I would lighten up some and talk about something more amusing than thoughtful. I have been a Science Fiction fan since oh... 1962 - 1963. We were passing through the Chicago train station and had to wait several hours to board the next train. I was terribly restless, as any preteen might be when there is a lot of time to do absolutely nothing and my mom encouraged me to go a local store to buy something to read. Hence, I discovered Science Fiction. I had been prepared for the genre by comic books. I remember this first novel very well because I still own it. It was "Battle for the Stars" by Edmund Hamilton and is still a very readable book though nearly 45 years have pasted. I was 'hooked' as they say, today. The novel is set in the far future. There is a starship captain, his alien wife (she's from Vega.), a cat and the fate of the earth that hangs on a mammoth space battle. What fun! And, yes, the cat becomes a pet of the alien lady.
Over the years my favorite novels have been the well written - and not so well written - novels of the golden age of Science Fiction and if you don't know about the classic novels :Edmund Hamilton, Robert Heinlein, Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, E.E. Smith, John Taine (a.k.a. Eric Temple Bell), Andre Norton & Joseph Campbell are some of the names you might want to look up. I suggest you do some real investigating - there is a lot to read which will give you many hours of pleasure, some of which will remind you of Star Trek and Star Wars, This is a Wikopedia article & is a pretty good intro.
There are some great authors who lived earlier and therefore their works are not necessarily from the 'Golden Age' : H.G.Wells, Hugo Gernsback, H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne & Edgar Rice Burroughs (the father of Tarzan, a collection of 23 novels that had science fiction and fantasy elements.) , are examples of this earlier group. H.G. Wells is the best known - "The Invisible Man", "the War of the Worlds", "The Time Machine" ares still very popular and have been made into movies, some better than others & are always in Print. H.Rider Haggard is less known but a great deal of fun at his best, "She", is the only one of his works that is well known by modern readers. Verne is sometimes called the Grandfather of Science Fiction and his works are true classics. I suggest "Mysterious Island", a personal favorite. Of course, "20000 leagues under the Sea" should be read first. I can't say for sure that I have read anything by Hugo Gernsback though his work may be found in some modern collections. There are many collections of science fiction short stories. I suggest the library to explore them. A Britannica article concerning the history of Sci-Fi.

It is quite intellectual but will give you a worthy hint of the general history. There is, of course, a lot that I am missing. Shelley's Frankenstein being an example of early science fiction that few people realize is true science fiction even though it is also a fine horror novel.
What are my favorites ? I love Eric Temple Bell's "Time Stream" and return to it every few years to reread, once Again. His "Purple Sapphire" and "The Greatest Adventure" are also fine novels or perhaps, novellas. He was a mathematician and philosopher. A short biographical article including a list of his novels.
I found his name in an unusual place this week; a history of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, it seems he was there at the time and had invested in the local telephone company. In "The Time Stream" his time travelers spend some of their time in San Francisco just before the earthquake. I would add, also, that some of his work is rather dated but that said, I will stand by my affection of his works.
I hope if you haven't ever read these great classics you will know how to find them & the will to explore them. Some of them are slightly dated, after all, we know how we got to the moon, we know you can't breathe on the moon, we know we used rockets and not a gun to go there.

I think what I love about science fiction is that it enlarges my imagination. 31 years ago when my husband came home one day and announced that computers were becoming accessible to the hobbyist, my first comment was that 'yes, of course, but in the future!' (as in the next century!) and I mentioned Ray Bradbury's great short story, "There will come soft rains." and Issac Asimov's "Caves of Steel" as examples of what I expected for the future, and of course, Hal 9000, the nasty computer of the movie, "2001".
He said, no, it was NOW and he described a near future in which computers would be home based machines for the hobbyist and I was hooked, hooked forever, I would add. I saw my first S-100 bus at a local computer store. It was running a primitive hangman program. Oh, my excitement! A real computer. We didn't have a lot of money at the time and had to find a job that actually paid us so our first home computer was delayed a few years. By 1978-79 we had moved here, were making a decent living, and, at last, bought our first home computer - an Apple 2, before we bought, I would mention, our House ! (So you can sense our priorities at the time.) I could not resist the entire adventure of the computer age but they were not really very accessible to me for awhile, I was terrified of breaking IT. The word 'format' tormented me for a decade before we bought the our first Amiga, the first computer that seemed user friendly.

I love the Microsoft Windows interface, which has given me a feeling of freedom and confidence I do not think I could have ever had with the first computers.
As I said, Science fiction opens the mind up for possibilities and potential of the future, encouraging both innovation and adventure. Many of my best female friends are not friendly with their computers. They may use them but have no real passion for the machines. I think if they had read some Sci- Fi, when young, they would have been as thrilled as I was when the computer age fell upon us!