All righty. I’m back.

What a cool morning! Still tons of fog here, but it doesn’t look nearly as dramatic as it did before the sun came up. Actually, when I got up around 2am to use the bathroom, it looked really spooky outside. I guess mostly because I wasn’t expecting everything in the world outside my windows to have disappeared.

You know, Muskingum County is so intensely spirit-filled, just in general, that a little bit of fog goes a long way. It can turn cool into creepy in a nanosecond. And I’m not just saying this because I’m some sort of lunatic. Muskingum County — and especially Crazeysburg, with its “stopped in time” sort of feel to it — is unlike any place where I’ve ever been.

The ancient burial mounds all over the place have a lot to do with it, I think. The mounds here are sacred grounds to the Latter Day Saints, in fact. They believe Christ had his Second Coming around here, 2000 years ago. And it’s kind of uncanny, some of the terrain documented in the Book of Mormon that you can easily interpret as being all over this region, with all its ancient burial mounds.

And a couple hundred years ago, when the locals dug up some of the burial mounds on farms around here, they discovered the skeletons of giants — 9 to 12 feet tall. They were not Native Americans — meaning, people who migrated here from the general region of Mongolia and became known as “American Indians.” These skeletons predated that. The ancient people are considered Sun Worshipers.  And they were sometimes buried with stone tablets that have ancient Greek and Biblical Hebrew symbols carved on them. So those giants were real old. It does sort of seem they had to have come here by boat, and they just have a number of uncanny similarities with what is documented in the various books within the Book of Mormon. (My in-progress murder mystery, Down to the Meadows of Sleep: The Hurley Falls Mystery, uses all that cool stuff in the plot.)

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Jesus appeared here to the ancient people, as is written. But it does mean that all of it is really, really interesting to ponder.(The Latter Day Saints are really just the coolest people. However, for me, their intense adherence to concepts of “sin” make it entirely unwieldy as a way of understanding life, and they seem even more dedicated to the need for procreation than even the Catholics are — and I think that rigidity comes from an understandable fear born from what happened to Joseph Smith.)

But I digress. And, plus, that’s only my opinion.

I have to say that within my lifetime, I have been all over Ohio, just all over it. And none of it has ever felt the way it feels here in Muskingum County. I’m not opposed to believing Christ appeared here. It seems he appeared all over the place after he died. The definition of “appear” is upon which all of it hinges. You know, even Paul says that Jesus did not go up to the sky as flesh & bone and then reappear in flesh & bone. It was as “spirit.” And certainly the Gnostics had a whole lot to say about the nature of how Christ appears. So that word and how you define it is key.

(And when you’re called to follow Christ, as I was as a 5-year-old girl in Cleveland, it is generally in spirit — for me, it was an aural & spiritual call; not a physical one.)

Anyway. A huge blanket of dense fog settling over Crazeysburg in the middle of the night, makes it all feel just that much more fascinating. My photos with my phone don’t do it justice, of course. (See post below from early this morning.)

Okay, well, I’m happy to report that there’s way more milk still in my fridge this week than there was on Monday of last week, so I’m guessing I’m not drinking nearly as much coffee. And so I guess that is a good thing. And I’m not spending as much time in bed, delaying that getting up & getting started thing. That’s not necessarily a good or a bad thing, just saying that I’ve stopped doing it.

I also wanted to report — if you’ve been reading this blog since early summer — that now that all the intense humidity is gone, I have finally been using that expensive new body creme that I got from the company in France (the company that I buy all of my expensive beauty products from and they do manage to take about 2 decades off my apparent age). Anyway, Kara was after me for ages to try the stuff and see if it worked. It is a creme that “reduces the appearance of cellulite.” (While I wouldn’t say that I struggle with cellulite, my thighs are indeed the cellulite capitol of the world and always have been, throughout all recorded time.)

Anyway, I finally decided to try it and it actually works. I’m not sure how, though. It doesn’t get rid of cellulite, but when you use it, it does indeed reduce the appearance of it.  But if, like, the next day you don’t use it, you still have all the cellulite you’ve ever had. It didn’t go anywhere.

It’s really interesting to ponder and try to figure out how it actually works — and it’s made from plant products. But it’s very expensive so I doubt I will ever actually buy it once these 2 tubes of it are gone.  I’m not usually in a situation where my thighs are the things on me that anyone’s ever really noticing anyway.  I guess you never know what could happen in life, though, so it’s good to know this creme exists. (Although I shudder to think about what would be underway if suddenly my thighs were of intense interest to anyone…)

All righty.

Today is all about the play — well, mostly the play, and a little bit of yoga. So I’m gonna get started here. I hope it’s a great Monday, wherever you are in the world. Thanks for visiting! I leave you with an interesting concept: The Mormons singing the famous Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts.” If you have a minute and a half to spare, it’s worth listening to. It’s undeniably lovely. Okay. I love you guys. See ya!