Russian John Redux

Russian John Redux

I made it up there again last week and for a short while shared the small pool with only the dragonflies. There were two tiny azure-blue ones buzzing around a bit, and I wondered if they were the offspring of the ones I had seen so romantically-clinched together earlier this season.

Suddenly, a small family (of people) showed up, and I invited them to join in with the dragonflies and myself. And after the young gleeful children started splashing around in an exhilarating manner, the brilliantly-blue dragonflies scurried off into the sky, or somewhere around the corner.

We also witnessed two reddish-orange dragonflies buzzing around there, which were larger and not as easily frightened off by the frenzy. One of the boys called them horseflies, and when his father tried to correct him, I thought that there was actually an element of truth to what the child had spoken, as they did resemble horseflies.

There is no sign for where the spring is, but once you find it you can remember it forever. One of the parents pointed out that the mile-marker which corresponds to where his hot spring book directed him was missing, but I do believe it’s near 147 and encourage folks to use dead-reckoning by opening the car window to sniff it out from there.

Banholzer defends himself over criticism of recent school prayer column.

As a frequent contributor of letters of public interest, whenever I attempt to bring something important into community awareness or start drafting a possible suggestion to help us all, in the back of my mind I’ll imagine what my harshest critic might say.

Recently I was pleased to be assigned by your gifted editor Autumn Agar the ‘pro’ point / counterpoint subject of school prayer. Right from the get-go I could see it was a tough subject and was stuck on it for a few days, until after mulling it over the midnight ethanol; when I decided to take an unconventional approach, and with the recent discovery of the God-Particle at CERN laboratories in mind, focused on examining the deep mystery of prayer and how it might actually work.

After doing so, it felt as though the article flowed better. Had I had chosen some of those bland age-old arguments about school prayer we’ve heard about so much before, my column would have been unentertaining. Meanwhile, my harshest critic said, that I ignored the question entirely, “preferring to expound on a crackpot theory of prayer that belongs with pixie dust and ruby slippers.”

To defend myself; if my harshest critic would take time to reexamine the latter part of my plainspoken letter, where I led up to the real meat of broad-minded spiritual studies; he will see that I did not ignore the issue at all. And for the record, in this valley there really are many forms of good magic to be had, if you choose not to ignore it. To start better embracing those nicer aspects of spiritualism, I suggest that folks merely make better efforts to spend more time in our great outdoors, where waterfalls, wildflowers and mountains can help heal and inspire us to become better people, which is another thing that I pray for our fine school leaders to encourage.

Original article here: http://magicvalley.com/news/opinion/point-counterpoint-should-idaho-allow-prayer-in-schools/article_b33e1e93-7d8f-51c1-97a2-fbd4a73d204d.html