Late Night Graveyard Conversations

Some useful things learned with Laura, Tiffany, Matthew, and Aaron tonight/last night:

• Cemetaries at night are beautiful.
  
  
• Order of the Stick is near-universally applicable.
  
  
• The existence of the word "zebroid" has been existentially proven. Sort of.
  
  
• If the ancient philosophers had known about Einstein, they would have envisioned God as hyperspace. Or space bent in on itself. Not a sphere.
  
  
• The honey glaze for ham can be used to penetrate some kinds of biological-weapons-defense materials.
  
  
• If you're stalking a deer, and you step on a twig, you should gobble like a turkey. It will confuse them, and they'll come back to check the thing out.
  
  
• We won't run out of energy, saith Matthew. But another apocalyptic event is very likely. Eventually.
  
  
• Apocalypses are like anti-christs. Even now there are many little ones among us.
  
  
• If your tradition is not to have a tradition, would you have to refuse to have a tradition in order to be traditional?
  
  
• You can see the International Space Station at night if the sky is clear enough.
  
  
• Matthew and Aaron could invent a killer "Biblical RPG":
  
  Player A: "Hey -- my conversion roll failed!"
  Player B: "You must be an Arminian, man. It's not you that does it -- it's the Holy Spirit!"

And finally...

• Envisioning a circling sphere of stars, turning around a fixed earth, gives one type of awe. Envisioning the vastness of space, with blinding motion and movement and scattered stars, gives a wholly other kind.
  
  And because Lewis can express things so much more poetically and articulately than I can:
  
  "Be comforted, small immortals. You are not the voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come. No feet have walked, not shall, on the ice of Glund; no eye looked up from beneath the Ring of Lurga, and Iron-plain in Neruval is chaste and empty. Yet it is not for nothing that the gods walk ceaselessly around the fields of Arbol. Blessed be He!"
  
  "[Even] the Dust itself which is scattered so rare in Heaven, whereof all worlds, and the bodies that are not worlds, are made, is at the center. It waits not till created eyes have seen it or hands handled it, to be in itself a strength and splendor of Maleldil. Only the least part has served, or ever shall, a beast, a man, or a god. But always, and beyond all distances, before they came and after they are gone and where they never come, it is what it is and utters the heart of the Holy One with its own voice. It is farthest from Him of all things, for it has no life, nor sense, nor reason;it is nearest to Him of all things for without intervening soul, as sparks fly out of fire, He utters in each grain of it the unmixed image of His energy. Each grain, it if spoke, would say, I am at the center, for me all things were made. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. Blessed be He!"
  
  (from Perelandra)