I'm not much for proselytizing. Nor much, outside my close circle of friends, for expounding upon my spiritual beliefs. I tend to draw the line at random strangers publicly announcing religious beliefs, especially with intent to convert. (We should so make that a tort.) For me, there's a vast (and only rarely blurry) difference between two friends talking about the things that matter over coffee, and some random, unknown person trying to take a few minutes to convince me that their belief system is the right way to go.

There's not much between Huntsville and Birmingham, except somewhere near an hour and a half of scenery that can be compressed into approximately three minutes of equally unexciting viewing:

"Hmm."
"Look. Trees."
"More trees."
"Is there anything else to see?"
"More trees, I think."
"Are we there yet?"
"Given that we left five minutes ago, and it takes nearly an hour and a half to get there, I think that highly unlikely."

It's a pity, really; Alabama seems to be missing some of the out-and-out oddness that is the freeway scenery in Arkansas. Anyone who has driven I-30 has encountered one of the most famous (and enduring) billboards in central Arkansas:

Enormous capital letters, the billboard equivalent of a shout:

"WARNING! PREPARE TO MEET GOD!"

What I know is so much smaller than what I don't know.

She was a teenager when she married. From her pictures, she was never a particularly pretty girl. I know nothing of what her personality was like. I only knew her later, after years and circumstances had had their way with her.

Because of family disagreements and her death during my childhood, I never knew her well. To say that she never got along with my mother would have been a bit of an understatement; the knowledge that they never agreed on much of anything was common, yet unspoken, knowledge—even to me, the youngest—when I was a child.

More often than not, inferences about my life can be drawn from what I do not write about here on domesticat as well as what I do write about. Since beginning this weblog-turned-journal-turned-something-else-entirely a while back, there have been events in my life that I have not written about here.

Each time, the choice to withhold has been a deliberate one, made after much thought. I've come to grips with the fact that my life is, to some small degree, on display here—but that's for another story, another night. Tonight I'm tipping into the wider half of a bottle of Chardonnay, left unfinished from a night that we had friends over, and trying to dredge up a bit of bravery.

I. Perigee

Our ends of the world diverge on Sundays,
whose mornings I spend in blissful sleep
while you, dutiful, arrow-straight, make haste
to wash and clothe and drive. All to keep

the Sabbath. In the winding arch and curve
of your days, this one claims itself parahelion:
the closest to origins; the day to observe,
revere, reflect; resolution.II. Parabola

Two lines, if not drawn in perfect parallel,
deal with the pains of intersection at some point.
They meet, then disengage, and tell

I open up news sites and find myself recoiling over what I see. You can read for yourself, and I rather hope that perhaps you're asking yourself the same questions I am.

I've been most disturbed by what I've seen happening recently in Israel. The sheer pointlessness of the brutality stuns me. The shot of the man leaning out of the police station, grinning, holding his bloodied hands up for the screaming crowd to see… It makes me shake my head. It makes me ashamed to be human, to be counted with these people—on both sides.

Ask yourself questions, and look behind and beyond that snapshot. First, the man—what would it take for you to become so angry, so full of hate, to attack another human being and then wear his blood on your skin like a trophy? Secondly, the crowd—to cheer such an event?