Jamie Huston

As a teenager, my life was peppered with uncertainties and anxieties about the future.   One day during my Sunday School class, my teacher shared a verse of scripture that changed my perspective and brought an infusion of light into my mind and heart. These words have continued to help me in many of life’s situations.

"Her only source of entertainment was books.” Emiliyan Stanev, “The Peach Thief” (a Bulgarian writer I love as much as Nikos Kazantzakis and Ivo Andrić)

Read Roger Scruton.

Last night I saw Yo-Yo Ma perform live at the Peace Center. It was profoundly transcendent. Through the music & stories he shared, he reminded each person there of the awe, wonder & beauty of life. He reminded us how each of us has the choice to be either creative or destructive.

Just found out about recency bias, it's gotta be the best and most interesting kind of bias

April 16, 1991 – TEMPLE OF THE DOG was released, and the next day Nirvana performed SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT for the first time! #Grunge

A little lifesaver from Langston Hughes:

>Plot centers entirely around fighting extreme government taxation and overreach >The Sheriff of Nottingham literally collects taxes from the church poor box >Friar Tuck gets so fed up with the state disrespecting the Church that he physically throws hands with the Sheriff >Casts the Crusades in a positive light >Male protagonist who risks his life for his people >Unapologetically traditional romance with Maid Marian without any modern subversion >Climax is literally a raid to break political prisoners out of a corrupt jail >Story resolves when the rightful, divinely-appointed monarch returns from the Holy Land to crush the corrupt politicians >Ends with a beautiful church wedding and a happily ever after We need to make Kid's stories based again

To those who feel they don’t belong: I’m inspired by the courage of Sister Anglesey, who had left her home and her faith 30 years earlier. She had long known something was missing, but felt overwhelmed to just walk back into church. She eventually mustered the courage to attend a temple open house. As beautiful as the visit was, Tammy later confided, “All I could see was an experience I would never have. No sealing and no [endowment].” Still, prompted by that visit, she dressed for Sunday church, only to park her car and watch others walk into the building. Overcome with anxiety, she simply drove home, changed her clothes, and wept. An inspired bishop sent a note inviting her back to church. I met Tammy on a ministering visit just after her temple endowment. She had been away for 30 years! She spent Sundays sitting alone in a church parking lot. But the Lord brought her home and restored her to His light, love, and joy. Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling all of us home.

The feelings of your heart and the love for our Heavenly Father and for His beloved Son can be so constant that your prayers will ascend always.

Sometimes reading Steinbeck is like getting kicked in the chest

Galahad and the Grail, the new book by @malcolmguite, is a revelation. In every line you can feel his urgency to recover lost modes of being: poetry, chivalry, the great myths & legends, the natural world. He seeks to revive King Arthur for a world in danger of forgetting him.

“Our students come to us from secondary school having read no works of literature in foreign languages and scarcely any works of literature in their own language. The very years, between twelve and eighteen, when they might be reading rapidly, uncritically, rangingly, happily, thoughtlessly, are somehow dissipated without cumulative force. Those who end their education with secondary school have been cheated altogether of their literary inheritance, from the Bible to Robert Lowell. It is no wonder that they do not love what we love; we as a culture have not taught them to. With a reformed curriculum beginning in preschool, all children would know about the Prodigal Son and the Minotaur; they would know the stories presumed by our literature, as children reading Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare or Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales once knew them. We can surely tell them the tales before they can read Shakespeare or Ovid; there are literary forms appropriate to every age, even the youngest. Nothing is more lonely than to go through life uncompanioned by a sense that others have also gone through it, and have left a record of their experience. Every adult needs to be able to think of Job, or Orpheus, or Circe, or Ruth, or Lear, or Jesus, or the Golden Calf, or the Holy Grail, or Antigone in order to refer private experience to some identifying frame or solacing reflection.” —Helen Vendler, “Presidential Address 1980 [MLA]”

There used to be a format that solved this problem called mass market paperback but now everyone wants their romantasy in 15 lb faux leather hardback with rainbow holographic gilt edges

I love being surrounded by books in every room of my apartment. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t read most of them yet. They sit there as little monuments to humanity, stacked capsules of time, the promise of future conversations—friends.

It’s 1989. You are a drunk teenager putting out a cigarette before going to a music club in Chicago. As you enter you hear a new kind of raw music that instantly blows you away. It’s Nirvana. You never heard of them. They are still two years away from their Nevermind breakthrough. It’s a concert of a lifetime. You still tell your kids about it frequently. Unfortunately it wasn’t recorded. Or so you thought. Unbeknown to you a Chicago live music enthusiast, Aadam Jacobs, took his tape recorder to the show and recorded the whole thing (as he has done 10,000 over a quarter century). The tape has been digitally cleaned up and is yours to enjoy online now for free. Make sure to share this with every single member of Gen X you know: archive.org/embed/ajc00795…

At general conference I spoke of our grandson Paxton, who was born with a very rare chromosomal deletion. Paxton lived three treasured years. He could not speak, crawl, walk, or run after his brothers. But little Paxton’s hands reached out to ours and to our Savior with love and affection. I remember the first time Paxton’s father and I gave him a priesthood blessing that, as it says in the scriptures, “the works of God should be made manifest in him.” They were. He brought immense joy to our family. Families with such a precious member know what a privilege it is to be blessed with one with special needs. Associating with Paxton, our whole family gained an increased, deep, and abiding trust in the Lord. Then God reached out and took him home. The words of the psalmist say it all: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). That joy is, as the Savior said, “Because I live, ye shall live also” (John 14:19). I know Paxton’s tender “spirit and [his] body shall be reunited again in … perfect form” (Alma 11:43). By the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, his joy will be in not only a resurrected body but one that is resurrected whole and perfect.

we live on a planet where trees warn each other of danger through underground networks. where octopuses dream. where elephants return to the bones of their dead and stand over them in silence. where bees communicate through dance, showing each other where to fly. where flowers bloom...where crows remember human faces -especially those who were cruel to them - and pass that memory on to their young. where ants build entire cities. where cats purr at a frequency that can help heal bones. where forests, after fires, grow flowers first.