Tag: Babylonians

Lessons from Gilgamesh

by atozmom, posted in Book Reviews

I’ve been hesitant to give up homeschool and now I think I know the underlying reason–I have and am learning as much or more than my kids in the process.  I get to study what I want to study for once, investigate things and people I want to know about, and spend as much time as I wish.  This is probably one of the greatest benefits of homeschool and one of the strongest reasons to homeschool i.e. letting the child investigate what speaks to their heart and not what speaks to the State’s heart.

I grabbed a kids’ book on Gilgamesh more for me than my kids.  So I’m reading it and the afterward by a Professor Cyrus Gordon from my alma mater, Brandeis University (I wonder if he’s still around since this book is from the 1960’s).  It relates the historical significance/importance of this ancient Mesopotamian tale as it predates the Ancient Greeks and the Bible.  Particularly, it mentions the sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC (previously thought to have been the first known dates of Mesopotamian cuneiform)–the very subject I am reading about in the Bible in Jeremiah, Lamentations, and now Ezekiel.  This is all stuff I never learned in school and so visiting it a second time has been…wondrous.

So, the tale of Gilgamesh is the tale of a man who became experienced and wise in his travels; and learned what all of us must learn in order to be wise (despite having failed in his mission to obtain eternal life):  to make the most of our earthly lives without chasing rainbows that are beyond our grasp.

I agree and disagree with this.  I agree with making the most of your life, but I see nothing wrong with chasing rainbows.  Dreams are what give us life and my writing career is definitely obtainable.  In terms of little kids, that’s all my kids do–is chase rainbows, unicorns, Pegasus, dragons, princesses, princes, castles, and fairy tales.

It breathes life into them and that’s all that matters in this world.

I can still learn right along with my kids while they are in school.  I don’t have to stop learning (and neither do they) as long as I choose not to.  They receive the benefits of being with their peers at a regular school and I can still learn whatever I want whenever I want.

Dwelling On Death

by atozmom, posted in Life

Lately, I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately.  What if my husband died what would I do?  What if one of my dogs died?  What about my grandparents?  This could be attributed to my very somber mood as of late or the fact I just finished reading Lamentations in the Bible which describes the death and destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC by the Babylonians but as I was laying in bed this morning, thinking of death and checking to make sure my dogs were breathing, my writing surfaced again in my mind.  What if my novels are dead?

This I believe is what is driving my thoughts on death–the fact that my writings/novels may be dead and I’m just not prepared to deal with this or let them go.  A book by nature is a living document for every time it is read it comes alive in the mind of the reader or listener.  I want my novels to come alive repeatedly–not die a horrible death on my computer never being read.

Death is something we don’t have control over.  When your time is up, you are called.  Maybe this is what God is trying to teach me about my novels.  I want to have control over their life and death but I can’t really force a publisher to publish it, now can I?  I thought I’ve handed my novels over to God’s will but maybe I haven’t.  Recently, I have let the fact that my career is going no where get to me and maybe I shouldn’t have.  After all, if it was meant to be (it being my novels published or me have a writing career), it will be.  It has been predetermined and all I have to do is act on it.  God already knows.  I just wish I did.  It would definitely make the rejections a lot easier to handle knowing someone else will believe in me.