“…You may not be aware of this, but many Western states, including Utah, Washington and Colorado, have long outlawed individuals from collecting rainwater on their own properties because, according to officials, that rain belongs to someone else…”

“I love seeing friends face-to-face. (Not in gangs, but one or two at a time.) I love Facebook. I love e-mail. I love letters, although it has admittedly been a while since I’ve written one. But I hate the phone. Hate it. Hate. It. ….”

“Those already outraged by the president’s health care legislation now have a new bone of contention — a scarcely noticed tack-on provision to the law that puts gold coin buyers and sellers under closer government scrutiny.”

“…Behind the scenes, it was even worse. The night before Obama announced the administration’s housing plan on Feb. 18 in Arizona, Sperling e-mailed the final documents at 3 a.m. and asked for comments. Five people responded immediately.

Martin Moore-Ede, a former Harvard University professor, calls it the “iron man” syndrome and says the American political workplace is one of the few that still resists a mechanism for ensuring people get rest.

One study conducted for the British Parliament found that “mental fatigue affects cognitive performance, leading to errors of judgement, microsleeps (lasting for seconds or minutes), mood swings and poor motivation.” The effect, it found, is equal to a blood alcohol level of .10 percent — above the legal limit to drive in the United States.

Obama administration officials, and their predecessors, shrug off such warnings, citing the adrenaline rush. They insist that their bodies have grown strangely accustomed to the rhythms of the job. But they acknowledge that the routine in the White House is more grueling than most had anticipated.

The staff is beginning to take a few breaks. One deputy press secretary found time to get away to Hawaii for a few days. Gibbs went to his high school reunion in Alabama, the first weekend away that he can remember.

But, he says, it is not enough.

“You go down to the mess. You have your coffee at five in the afternoon, and it just doesn’t do anything,” Gibbs lamented. “Because you realize you’re so far behind [in sleep] that a jolt — you don’t even feel it.”

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“I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

“Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, ninety-odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

“But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes’ casual chat with her is more precious than all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. He is, as they say, ‘in love’. Now comes a scientist and describes this young man’s experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man’s genes and a recognized biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it.”

– C.S. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed”, The Coventry Evening Telegraph (17 July 1945)
(Courtesy of Roger R. at the Inklings Blog, and Hat-Tip to Beka)

Finding that the current realm and interaction categories left something to be desired when it came to describing emotions, I let things simmer in the old noggin for a while, reading and wondering what to do. After pondering and trying it out for a while, I think I have found a solution based on some old ideas and some more modern additions.

For in order to be embodied, ideas must inhabit the stuff of the world, and it was this very stuff of the world that I was seeking. When it comes to making a world from scratch, what does one make it out of? I was in search of the elemental things: a system of describing embodied and emotional things that is at its root simple, but given free reign can lead to emergent and complex behaviors. I’m not claiming this to be any great discovery of anything, just my own personal means of trying to understand the things around me, probably to be used in a fictional setting if the Lord is willing. I have yet to determine what visual cues I want to use on this website to represent these things, but here they are:

• Light represents the force of Good in the world.
• Animal is the element that represents active life
• Plant is the element that represents passive life
• Fire represents anger, wrath, choler, bile.
• Wind is the embodiment of happiness, sanguinity.
• Water is the stuff of melancholy, sorrow, mourning.
• Stone represents slow, solid, phlegmatic impassiveness.
• …and Vacuum represents the force of Evil in the world.

• “Secured” means that the element is firmly established without a viable contender in the situation in question.
• One element may Foster another, that is encourage it in its essential nature or function.
• One element may Restrain another, or keep it from getting out of control without interfering with it natural inclinations.
• …and one element can Disrupt another element, or interfere with its natural place, function or inclinations to the point that it is at a high risk of being…
• Failed: the state in which an element loses it nature and the specific manifestation of it in question ceases to exist.

[All that said, I don't know if this isn't just a rewording of the "Relating / Checking / Invading" scheme and that one won't supplant the other over time.] I realize this all sounds somewhat medieval or something, but keep in mind that its primary purpose is for systematizing and symbolizing emotions and characteristics of nature that can’t be described in the purely logical terms of the Seven Realms.

These categories will show up mainly in the scriptural explorations of this site for now, because I want to understand how and where they appear in God’s Holy Word before I do much of anything else. Anyway, I just wanted to bring it up, in case you were curious as you watched these posts go by, for whatever strange reason that you’re watching me do all this.