Experiments

It's been a week of experiments. Caleb had fun demonstrating the baking soda and vinegar reaction as it blew up a balloon. Augustus made a magnifying glass with plastic wrap stretched across the top of a bucket, weighted down in a curve with water. A hole cut in the side of the bucket allowed for objects to be magnified. Elena drew, colored, painted, and sculpted various dinosaurs Caleb also figured out how to give a back-spin to a ping-pong ball scuttling across the floor, causing it to pause in its course and come back to him, or hit an object and bounce back with more energy than it hit with. Virginia learned, after two good-smelling and bad-tasting batches of muffins, that baking soda and baking powder are not interchangeable in recipes. Angela had an appointment with the acupuncturist, in an attempt to see if this can help with her headaches. Edwin made several variations of ground meat jerky, all of which smelled good in the dehydrator and tasted delicious.

Every day presents us with opportunities to experiment. Science experiments satisfy our desire to understand the physical world around us. Cooking experiments may give us a pleasurable experience, or they may be a disappointment. Hopefully they don't cause a tummy ache! Health experiments are more serious. We speak routinely of the fact that a big part of our purpose in coming to mortality was to gain a body. Then what? Another part is to learn to take care of that body, and the Word of Wisdom is only a starting place. A new world opens up to us when we take responsibility for our body - not only for our actions in relation to others, but for the care and maintenance of our own body. We can explore the best foods to nourish ourselves, and not just to please the palate. Rather than accept the aches and pains that seem to accumulate through the years, we can investigate new ways of moving and even of thinking as we begin to catch a glimpse of the relationship between our body, our mind, our spirit, our diet, our thought, our emotions. Of course it's more than we can understand. That's no reason to give up before we begin. We have the ability to learn, line upon line.

It's a unique exploration, because every body is different. We all have different physical weaknesses and susceptibilities, just as we have different spiritual capacities. There's no one-size-fits-all therapy. But it's a great adventure! let me know what you discover about yourself - maybe it will help someone else!