Seeing things - A short story

 His watch beeped at him and told him he was stressed.  "Would you like to do a breathing exercise?" It asked.

"No" he thought.  "I would not."  The plane was close to arrival and the seatbelt light was on.  He needed to pee. His foot hurt and one side of his thumb ached for no reason at all. He did not look at the thing standing by the lavatory. 

No one else could see it, he assumed.  It was one of the things he didn't talk about.  Like the emails he should have answered that lay pulsing in his inbox, nagging at his guts and blinking behind a list of other undone things. Like his feelings about god or his father's death. You just didn't tell strangers you saw faeries on an airplane.  

Some of them looked like regular people. They sat in their seats and queued up with everyone else.  But there was something off about them.  Once he had sat across from one and was sure that everyone else saw that she had carried a large basket of earth complete with turf and wildflowers growing out of it.  It fit in the bin, but dribbled dirt and sweet pollen down the aisle.  She was pretty.  He couldn't look at her without staring so instead he looked ahead and imagined she was a college student in a hoodie and not an elven cloak. 

Today it looked like a furry tree was growing out of the back of the plane.  The flight attendants nudged the cart through the leaves and absently brushed the moss.  It moved out of the way when someone needed to use the lavatory.  

He needed to pee. 

But he sat and tried not to notice that the tree seemed to get closer.  Maybe it was going to sit in first class when we landed or it would squeeze through the pilots door and look out of the front windows looking for home, its leaves touching the pilot's shoulders and the controls.

A bird flew down the aisle and he lost sight of the tree.  It smelled like wet earth and soft wood.  He imagined pushing into a log to see what was inside.  How had it gotten on the plane? How did it move? Why no one else could see it was a question he stopped asking.  When you see trolls hiding as a rock along the road and faeries dancing on the sidewalk, the answer is easy. . . You're crazy.  

It was a manageable insanity, he told himself.  Once he talked to an online therapist about it.  It went about like you imagine. 

He set up the appointment after he tried to talk to the young man with hair like a house sparrow.  the youth was surprised he had been spotted and shyly chatted with him on the trail as they walked together.  the faerie had offered him a drink from his canteen as they rested together by the water.  It tasted like elderberry and burned a little like it was distilled mead.  His memory is a bit fuzzy after that.  There might have been dancing.  He could remember playing the fiddle while someone played a drum and pipes.  The song nagged at him when he was on the edge of sleep but couldn't remember how it went when he was all the way awake. 

He missed work the next day and woke up in his apartment, lying in a pile of leaves, in clothes that he didn't remember owning. 

He was nervous logging into the therapy session.  The woman that was on the screen wrote in a notebook he couldn't see. She seemed tired.  They started with the basics - name, age, what he did for a living, some of the kinds of therapy she was comfortable with, how she ran the sessions.  Then the real questions.

"Why did you set up this meeting." She asked

He shrugged and paused to find the words.  She assured him that this was "a judgement free zone," that whatever he said to her would be kept in secret, unless it was something that she was "legally obligated by law to disclose, if you have harmed yourself or others or plan to."

She waited.

He hoped she would talk again.  She waited.  It was not her first time with patients that were reticent to say what was wrong.  It was best to wait. 

He sighed and looked away from the screen.  Oddly this meant he looked directly at the camera by mistake.   She stared in his eyes while he tried to look away. "I see things." He finally said

"Like what?" she asked after another long pause.  Tapping her pen. 

He paused again and then without a breath jumped directly into his story at the end instead of the beginning. 

"There is a pile of oak and beech leaves in the corner of my kitchen." He said. " They are still green as if a wind blew them off of the trees or someone picked them off of the branches. The oak leaves have a dusty fuzz on them that rubs off.  Underneath they are shiny.  The beech leaves are veiny and stiff.  I don't recognize the species."

She blinked and waited, Assuming that there is more. 

"When I woke up the leaves covered my face and I didn't get up at first because I was afraid I had been buried alive."

"Why did you think that?" She asked.

"I didn't remember getting into a pile of leaves and waking felt like this was still a dream that could turn to a nightmare." He described the music and that he couldn't remember everything.  

"Tell me what you can"

"I never dance." He said.  I don't remember how.  I am not sure that I ever learned and it isn't something that we did when I was a kid." 

"Was this the dream?" she asked. 

"Maybe, but when I dared sit up the leaves fell off and I was alone in my apartment.  They are still there." He pointed behind him.  "Can you see them?"

She couldn't.  The angle was bad so he turned his laptop and pointed to the corner where the leaves touched the cabinets and the kitchen table.  It was a big pile. He said.  She still couldn't see them. 

"I didn't think so" He said.  She asked him why he wasn't more surprised.  He shrugged again.  "I see things." He said again as if that was an answer.  She wrote in her notebook. 

He waited. 

She asked to hear more.  He tried to explain.  They only had an hour and he was frustrated.  He wasted 20 minutes on what seemed like procrastination now that they had only 15 minutes left and he seemed unable to explain why ordinary things sometimes shifted and walked away or why some people seemed to leak magic in their wake like they were part in this world and part in another where it was perfectly normal to have antlers or be invisible. The more he talked the faster the time flew.  She wrote and didn't interrupt. He didn't make much sense.  He didn't tell her about the elven youth and his flowery drink or his lost time. 

She wanted to meet again.  Next week.  As soon as possible.  Recommended an appointment with a psychologist for a prescription.  He was embarrassed remembering because he closed the screen and never came back. 

Did it get worse after that? He didn't think so, but avoiding thinking about officially being diagnosed as schizophrenic broke a wall inside maybe. 

It seemed like the magic was pushing into his life everywhere he went. When they landed everyone shuffled out of the plane past the tree.  The leaves touched the shoulders of the flight attendants as they said goodbye over and over again. 

When it was his turn he absent-mindedly reached over and picked an acorn and handed it to the flight attendant. She thanked him and then shivered as a wind rustled the leaves behind her.  She furrowed her brow and pulled a leaf out of her hair as she wished him "good day". 

He smiled, turned and walked away on the jet bridge, humming a tune that felt light and new. 

Tanzania and Kenya

 

Spoiled dog

 

Chapter 1. Awake

 He awoke to alarms and bright lights that made no sense. For a moment the astronaut remembered the edges of a dream where the stars were so bright and cold. He felt the warmth of a woman's hand brush his face and felt sad to leave her behind for the claustrophobic and overwhelming present. A memory of music threatened to pull him back into the dark, but he swam towards the discordant and insistent call of the alarms that started to make some sense. He was awake and something was very wrong.

The computer was supposed to wake him slowly feeding him the drugs to wake his mind, nutrients and stimulants for his body, and then information he needed to get out of his sleepcoffin ready to take over his mission. He had trained half his life for this planned moment when he would climb out and see a hopefully habitable, but alien planet with his own eyes.  The computer would have seen it for years as he travelled and built an approach and mission plan.  The astronaut would then review the plan, adjust as needed, report back to earth and get to work.  That was the plan. That is what he had rehearsed till it was second nature. 

The alarms were wrong.  The dreams were wrong.  He was confused and weak.  Blinking was hard. Staying awake was a fight. The lights . . faded . . . and came back like a nightmare.  

He had trained for this kind of contingency plan of course.  Days of simulations for what to do if he had to wake suddenly and make quick decisions or repairs.  Many simulations had no winning solution, no way that he could fix the problem, but they all required him to start by deciding to fight through the fogginess of artificial sleep, disconnect himself from the machines, and choose to act, to do what he could, even if it was impossible and all he could do was try to send a message home.  Communication was a success, even if death was inevitable. 

So he decided to act. Step one in his emergency checklist complete.  Next figure out what kind of mess he was in so he could build the next steps to check off.

Finally writing the book I wish I could find

How do you find a book that isn’t lost, but half forgotten? I remember reading it. I swear I found it in the Boise Library where they had a shelf of popular books on the first floor near the check out desks. I can see the cover in my mind. It had an old computer terminal with letters in green and an old computer terminal font. In my memory, it said “Press enter. . .” But that can’t be the title, or else I could have found it. I don’t remember the author’s name. I don’t remember the character’s names.

My memory is not trustworthy though. I recently retold a story from that time to a friend that I remembered about his father losing his job and not telling anyone in the family. In my memory he went to the park or the library while he was looking for work, while spending down his savings and pretending that all was well. He was caught in the lie in my retelling of the story and the loss of their savings precipitated their move to Denver. My friend laughed and said that sounds like something his father would do, but that didn’t remember anything like that happening to them. Which of us is remembering wrong? I am assuming me. My own memory is full of holes and stories that have taken on a life independent of the truth.

The internet seems to have all of the information you could ever want. Wikipedia is a better encyclopedia than the World Book Encyclopedia that my mom bought from a travelling salesman. With Google I can find which restaurant has banh mi near Pikes Place Market and Amazon will send me the cord I have lost to charge my headphones in a day. But, I can’t find the book. I wrote about it once on my blog. I asked Reddit and Twitter and Facebook. No one seems to remember it like I do. Maybe in some forgotten database there is my library history from 1992 with the true title and author hidden in the list of sci fi books that I checked out. Maybe I just read it while I procrastinated doing my homework or waited for the bus? I don’t remember having the book at home or other places. Just there in the library.

I think of the book and its story at the most random times. There are moments that seem as real as my own memories, embedded in the times I have tried to find the book or debated making up my own. I remember the book being good enough that I would think other people would have read and remembered it.

The story is a fantastical one, not a profound book or a great one. If one day this finds its way to the original author, don’t take my description as criticism, only that it wasn’t something inspirational or intending to be the great American novel. It was just a fun story. It assumes the reader accepts the sci fi and fantastical elements of the story without too much of a skeptical eye.

It had an astronaut that comes back from a long and lonely trip to find Earth empty and abandoned. The people appear to have disappeared in an instance but without obvious violence. There are no bodies, just a mystery. He walks through the empty cities to find a broadcasted radio signal. The source of the signal is a library or an office. Inside the power is on, the transmitter on repeat with a simple message - Press Enter. The computer screen is waiting for someone to push the button.

Nothing happens when he pushes the button, except the story within the book. It is a flashback to the beginnings of the story to the protagonist - a young boy that has bad dreams. He dreams of a beautiful woman floating in space outside a broken colony ship. The stars are bright and too close to be real. Space feels cold and she talks to him in his dreams. He writes about his dreams on a 1990’s imagined version of an internet message board and obsesses about her being cold and alone in space. His obsession starts to interfere with his life and all he talks about is his beautiful girl floating alive in vacuum of space.

His worried mother seeks treatment for his obsession as it becomes a mental illness. The treatment is an experimental drug that was used to help soldiers with PTSD forget and recover. He seems to forget and goes back to his normal life, but he is wounded and sad.

This starts him on a path that ends with him becoming the reason why the Earth is empty and the astronaut is reading this story with us. The astronaut has a choice and a job to do that requires him to believe and act on the fantastical story to bring everyone back. It is a New Agey magic mixed with sci fi elements.

I remember moments from this story with great detail, but large chunks are missing. I would love to read this book again. Maybe I would be disappointed, that it required too much suspension of disbelief or that the characters weren’t likable. Maybe the story has leaps of logic or tedious bits that I skimmed over. But, since I can’t find it and I have the framework of the plot in my mind still after 30 years, I plan to write what I remember of the book instead of randomly searching Google for it.

Is this fan fiction? Kind of, but a fan fiction for a story that only I remember. A book for a fan base of one - me. It is more of a retelling I guess.

Is this plagiarism? I hope not. I doubt it could be proven to be since I don’t have the book in front of me and if I did I wouldn’t be trying to write it myself. The names and details are all my own. The arc of the story might not even match the book, if it exists. It is the best that I can do to write the book that I think I might have read on a day at the library when my friend’s father probably wasn’t there pretending to go to work at a job that he didn’t have because that memory doesn’t check out. It didn’t happen and since I can’t trust my life to be real, I guess that means that maybe this book is one that I invented all by myself.

If as I write or if this is published and you are reading this thinking - this sounds awfully familiar and you know the book - please send me the actual author and title. If you are the author, my apologies for butchering your book as I remember it. I hope you see this as the praise I mean it to be.

2025 in Five Hot Takes

The algorithms that drive traffic on the internet love a hot take so here are five hot takes to sum up 2025. 

1. Maybe veterinarians should be in charge of our healthcare system. 

In February, our dog pulled out of her collar when I was taking her for a quick walk at night and ran directly in front of a car.  I heard two thumps and loud yelp.  When I ran to find her, she was bleeding profusely from her mouth, head, and her front leg hung at a bad angle.  She wasn't moving at all.  The poor woman that hit her was frantically trying to convince me the dog was going to be fine.  Spoiler alert, she was.  I feel bad but I was rude and told her that I couldn't deal with her and the dog and that I needed her to go away so I could get the dog off the road and to the vet. 

I called Leila, while my neighbor comforted the woman, and we loaded the dog onto a sled and took her to the emergency vet clinic.  I crouched in the back and tried to keep Holly - that's the dog's name, still while we drove in case she had a back injury.  I was really scared that this was the end of the puppy.  At end of the summer we took in this dog from Emily and Celia. They found her abandoned as a very small puppy in a Hy-Vee parking lot.  She was an adorable puppy with a ton of energy - but full of worms.  She was way too much dog for their already crowded apartment and busy lives.  This dog quickly decided that I was her person and we have spent hours every day walking off some of that puppy energy.  

The emergency vet clinic for the very reasonable price of $5000 performed two surgeries - one minor one to drain blood from her lungs and abdomen and another to reattach soft tissue of the side of her face back to her skull, multiple x-rays, three overnights in the clinic, anesthesia for setting her broken collar bone and the surgeries,  follow up visits, all of her prescription pain meds, antibiotics, and tranquilizers to keep her calm while she healed, and some free dog food. 

What would the cost have been if a human being in the US had gone to the emergency room for two surgeries, four days in the hospital, medicine, and follow up visits?  If you didn't have insurance? Don't even think about how much that would be.  

The dog has made a full recovery and drags me around the neighborhood multiple times a day. She loves chasing squirrels, deer, and leaves blowing in the wind.  She hasn't learned her lesson though and still wants to chase cars - especially my neighbor's purple pick-up truck, landscaping trucks and trailers, the mailman, and all delivery vans.  

2. Open office plans are a mistake

I had this rather posh corner office on the fourth floor since I moved to St Louis in 2016.  It had a white board, a small table for meetings, and large windows.  I used to write ideas and plans on all of the windows and the white board.  I had shelves of books and a place for my stuff.  

Because my office was assigned to a lab it escaped the open office master plan.  The rest of the offices were remade into huddle rooms and cubicles with no assigned seating.  They put in open areas with couches, long tables, foosball, and ping pong tables. During covid most people were required to work from home, but I didn't love that so I got permission to keep coming to the office.  I started drinking coffee that year and would hang out with the lab workers during my coffee breaks and ate lunch in the cafeteria with money from the Moderna vaccine trials.  I rode my bike to work almost every day and kept my bike in my office.  All the security and building management people knew me by name. It really felt like my home away from home. 

In April, the "back to the office" committee decided that I needed to move out to a different, smaller office, with no windows since they had given up on the open office plan and my team was assigned space in a different building. My new office had no desk, no shelves, or space for my things.  It did have a broken flat-screen TV on the wall next to a large table, six green chairs, and a white board since it had been converted from an office to a huddle room and now was being converted back to an office.  I moved my boxes of books and personal items along the back wall, stashed some of the green chairs in an empty office, and perched my computer on the table. 

The open office experiment has been a complete failure. The office buildings are still mostly empty.  Majority of employees liked working from home and spend most of their days in meetings on Teams/Zoom/etc. anyway and so driving to the office to work in a bland cubicle and shared huddle rooms seemed like a waste of time.  My work was mostly with teams around the world so I didn't need to come in either, but I used to like to.  Work spent significant money remodeling to the open office plan and now doing it all back again. 

Moral of the story - if you want people to come to the office you have to make it a place actual humans want to work.  Open office plans mostly aren't designed for that.  They are ugly and inconvenient and people like/need to have their own space.  

3. Money spent on my daughter's wedding was worth every penny

In July, my oldest daughter Lee and Celia got married.  I had saved money from one of my bonuses in an investment account to pay for the wedding venue, food, and Celia's mom paid for drinks and some other expenses.  Our neighbor was the wedding photographer.  The location was the Stone House - a dedicated wedding venue in St. Charles near us.  It was such an ideal set up - with beautiful facilities for getting ready, an outdoor ceremony, dinner, and dancing.  The owners of the location did so much work to make it a great experience helping with planning, coordination of the ceremony, decoration, set up, clean-up, music, and more.  

My liver doctor in Iowa had deadly pancreatic cancer.  He was a bit like the character from House - caustic wit and and abrasive personality. Most of my appointments he pulled along with him an IV bag connected to a port in his stomach. He told me that he was treating himself with an experimental cancer treatment so that he could make it to his daughter's wedding.  He proudly shared pictures of himself walking her down the aisle and dancing with her at the wedding at our last appointment.  

I didn't understand at the time why this was such a important milestone for him until I walked Lee down the aisle for her to marry Celia and danced with them after the wedding.  What a proud moment.  Leila and I had a very humble wedding and we didn't spend an exorbitant amount on the wedding for Lee and Celia but I get why that was so important for him now.  These moments need to be celebrated.  I may not be Mormon any longer, but there is a holiness that comes from such happy beginnings and I am proud we were able to make it a beautiful and fun time for everyone that could come. 

4. European's have the right idea about summer vacation 

The last few years I have been taking my vacation all at once in the summer.  One year we all went to Europe.  After the wedding I took a couple of weeks off of work and Leila and I went on a sailing cruise in Maine on the windjammer - "Angelique".  The boat is a large sailing boat that sails from Camden, Maine.  Leila found them online after watching some videos on Youtube.  

We flew into Boston, stayed overnight near the airport, and then caught a bus to Camden.  The first day we checked in and dropped our stuff in our small but comfortable cabin, met the crew, and then wandered the town and ate dinner at a restaurant near the water. There are rooms for around 30 passengers.  Our cruise wasn't full.  Many of the other passengers had been before on the same boat. We slept on the boat and helped set sail in the morning.  

Each day we had coffee and breakfast early and then helped put up the sails.  The route changed depending on the tides and weather.  We stopped each night at a protected bay and usually had some time to hike or sightsee at each location.  One night the crew purchased a pile of lobsters from a lobster boat and steamed them in seaweed over a fire on the beach.  I have so many beautiful photographs of the coast of Maine. It was quiet and restful. The captain and crew were great fun.  Food was amazing.  At night we would play music together in the small cabin and then sit on the deck looking at the stars and talking. 

 I highly recommend booking a vacation with them. 

When I got back to work after almost 4 weeks of vacation, everyone commented on how rested and relaxed I was.  I felt so much better.  I had been stressed and frustrated with work. I am not sure it matters where to go or what you do, but the luxury of taking a big block of time is something we should all get.  In EU and in NZ/Australia this is expected.  In the US, such vacation time is rare.  I think it has made me a better employee and a happier person than slogging through the year with no breaks. 

5. The future is Africa

I shared this photo over Instagram and internally at Bayer to leadership and HR when I decided to change jobs in November. It shows the contradiction, optimism and opportunity that I felt when I was in Africa. I have been to Africa three or four times over the last few years visiting Nigeria, Kenya, and Botswana.  I took this photo of a small pride of lions after they caught a zebra just off the road in the wildlife reserve close to Nairobi, Kenya.  Our guide parked the truck just feet from them while they ate and the sun set on the city behind them. Nairobi was so different than I had imagined. The city feels vibrant and growing. The tourism business helps to keep some space for the wild parts of Africa so close to the huge and modern city.  

In June there was an opening at Gates foundation to be a program officer on the Ag development team and I decided to apply.  It took a few months for interviews and a month or two to get an offer, but I decided to leave my job at Bayer and move to the Gates Foundation in late November.  I had worked with them - reviewing grants and as a consultant for some of their plant breeding projects that they funded over the last 5 years and have been fascinated with the projects they have funded since I started in plant breeding.  

The inception of my career started when I was a Mormon missionary in Nicaragua.  I have always liked plants and biology but wasn't sure what to do with that.  I was on a bus one day near the end of my mission and talking to the man next to me about rice farming.  He was lamenting that the rice he wanted to eat was not profitable for him to grow in Nicaragua.  Instead they imported long grain rice from the United States or Columbia and exported a short grain rice that yielded well in Nicaragua to the US.  He wondered how you could make the grain he wanted grow well where he farmed. When I returned home and took a genetics class I realized that this was actually possible and was excited to find out this was an actual job - plant breeding and genetics became my major and set me on the career path I am still on. 

When I was in graduate school, Norman Borlaug was still faculty at Texas A&M University.  He gave these rambling seminars where he told stories about his life - in Mexico developing green revolution varieties of wheat and rice, in Africa about farm to market roads and the importance of fertilizer and soil health, in India developing mechanization and tractors for small farms and global policy and agriculture development.  They say you shouldn't meet your heroes, but Norman Borlaug lived up to the myth that has grown around him.  I wanted to be like him and be part of the next green revolution.   

I graduated and took a job with Ag Alumni - a small non-profit foundation and hybrid seed company that was part of Purdue University, breeding popcorn mostly for South America and then joined Monsanto.  At Monsanto I worked on improvements to plant breeding methods in the discovery teams for the last 16 years.  As part of that job I was able to work on external collaborations including the institutes where Norman Borlaug worked - CIMMYT, IITA, IRRI, etc.  I have always wanted to go back to the kind of projects that idealistic graduate student me dreamed of working on.  

On paper I had stepped away from the type of job I imagined at the beginning of my career.  Monsanto and Bayer let me reinvent myself multiple times and write my own job description as I changed roles and projects, but it was a large corporate seed company. I haven't been back to develop the rice hybrids that the farmer in Nicaragua wanted. 

This is a slide that Bayer HR used to explain their new paradigm for career development.  Bayer has continued to evolve the structure and teams with "Dynamic Shared Ownership." There are a bunch of interviews from the Bayer CEO and leadership touting this as the future org innovation that will make it great again.  Ask me off-line and I will tell you my full opinion about this org change. It makes the traditional career path increasingly difficult with fewer leadership roles and layers.  It reinforced to me that maybe I needed to make a change in my career. It was a hard decision because I loved the projects I worked on at Bayer, the people on my teams, and the collaborations I was able to set up, but it felt like time to step away from my more linear traditional career to a Non-linear "squiggly" career. My mentors and leadership at Bayer were supportive of the change. I decided to take the offer. 

So in late November I packed up my office and flew to Seattle for onboarding in my new role as a program officer at Gates Foundation.  My job there will be to set up projects to help deploy gene editing as a breeding and improvement tool and to enable development of improved hybrids for Africa and Asia. So far it looks like it will be a great job.  More travel than I really would like, but will work from home most of the time.  

This I hope is a chance to build on both the optimism and inspiration of the beginning of my career and the technical, leadership and project management skills that I developed at Monsanto/Bayer to make a big impact on the world.  It also is a chance to help build the future that I think shows in the picture of those lions at sunset.  Africa is huge with so many diverse countries, people, languages, environments - big problems and potential.  I have felt each time that I have been there that it is up to that challenge.  It is where the future growth will be if it is given a fair chance. 

Stay tuned for more details in 2026.  

Moments that changed my career path

Recently at Bayer there has been a lot of discussion about a "squiggly" career path vs a career ladder. When I graduated from high school - now 30 years ago in 1995, my original plan wasn't plant breeding. I didn't even know this was a job. I imagined becoming a violinist or maybe teaching biology or chemistry. What opened doors and made my career possible has been a mix of luck and coincidence, failure, change, hard work, and people that looked out for me.

1. My last violin lesson freshman year - 1996. I had started the y
   ear in the top symphony but no matter how hard I practiced I seemed to get worse and worse. My teacher used to have these intense two hour lessons and I felt broken. My last lesson I brought a quartet I had written and we played it together and told him I was quitting because I felt broken. My teacher agreed and told me that all was going according to plan and now I could start to relearn all of my bad habits that were all broken. I could move with him to New York. I declined and gave up any pretensions of being a violinist because I stayed broken. Instead, I left on a Mormon mission to Nicaragua.
2. Bus ride in Nicaragua - 1998, Near the end of my two years in Nicaragua, I was riding on the bus back to Managua and talking to a rice farmer that was sitting next to me. He explained how he wished he could grow a different kind of rice because what was profitable and successful for him was a short grain rice that he exported to the US and not the kind of rice he liked to eat. When I took a genetics class and realized people do things like that. At the time I was working on the grounds crew and with the snow coming I was going to have to shovel snow at 4 AM and was looking for an alternative. My genetics teacher - Polly Yoho, was a graduate student and she helped me get a job in the lab genotyping tomatoes and making interspecific crosses to find virus resistance genes and I joined the new plant breeding major.
3. Birth of first child - 2000. I planned on going to Purdue for grad school, but when my oldest daughter was born and my wife wasn't quite finished at BYU, I needed to stay longer. My wife convinced me to apply for funding from the Benson Institute and Drs Jellen and Stevens helped design a project working on quinoa instead of tomatoes. This funding paid for my fellowship but also to send me to Bolivia to make my mapping populations and work in the field. I also taught part of a genetics class. The prof - Alejandro Bonifacio, ran trials around the Altiplano and I used to ride on the back of his motorcycle to field days to demo the new varieties. After harvesting and showing the results to the local farmers he would play the charango and we would eat with the village.

More to come:

1. Poster session at Plant and Animal Genome Conference- 2002
2. Likelihood - A.W.F Edwards and The Analysis of Messy Data- 2004
3. High speed video of popcorn popping - 2008
4. Reorg right after I started at Monsanto - 2009
5. Early corn trials and visit to Canada 2014
6. Nigeria IITA cowpea advancement - 2019
7. Cotton design team 2023

Thoughts for an old friend

 My father died almost 10 years ago.  When he passed away I had contact with him for like 5 years and only sporadically by phone and once or twice a year when my work gave me the opportunity to travel to Hawaii as part of a rapid cycle corn breeding in person.  I am grateful for those visits because otherwise I wouldn't have seen him before he died. When I wrote about his death 10 years ago my feelings were a little raw. I didn't know how to process the complexity of what I felt when he died. This has shifted or softened or changed over time.  I have more nostalgia and fond memories of him now than I think comes through in his obituary that I wrote then.

When he died, his friends had a service for him in Hawaii that I did not attend. My father had converted at some point to the Baha'i religion.  He never mentioned this to me in any of our conversations, but his friend Bill from the Baha'i had helped set him up with an apartment and got him on disability so he wasn't homeless. I had a couple of quite frustrating and emotionally draining conversations with Bill leading up to the funeral because I wasn't following the Bahai traditions for burial. Bill was trying to convince me to follow Baha'i practices and bury my father in Hawaii. I did not have the money to pay for a plot in Honolulu. Total cost for a burial plot and casket in Honolulu that complied with Bahai rules would have been almost 100K and I had no instructions from my father on how to handle his funeral. So I had him cremated and the ashes sent back to me. My mom and brothers found a small plot in Nampa. We had a family graveside service where we buried the ashes in a small wooden box. And I didn't know what to do with his personal effects that were piled in a terrible mess left after his death in his apartment that the police told me they would arrange with the landlord to take care of it because it was a biohazard and there was nothing of any value inside. He had no money or will or physical things worth salvaging so none of us went to Hawaii. Bill sent me tapes from the Baha'i service but I couldn't make it all the way through them because I was angry and heartbroken that the person they eulogized was a stranger to me.   

I had one emotional wound that I kept circling back to.  It still is a sore point that I haven't quite forgiven or forgotten. In my last conversation with Bill, he said to me - "It sounds like you feel like your father abandoned you." 

I paused for a long time and told Bill, "He did. I didn't see him for more than 20 years." 

Bill couldn't believe this.  He said my father talked about us kids all the time - I asked him if he talked about his grandchildren. Bill said he didn't know that he had any.  He didn't even know my children's names. My father didn't ever ask about them or much about the details of my life after we finally did get back in touch.  He did tell my sister he was proud of everyone for all of their education and professional achievements but thought I just pollinated corn for some seed company - not the worst description of my job, but I was a heck of an expensive corn pollinator. 

Recently, my old bishop from my childhood ward/church contacted me with a conference talk and bearing his testimony again about the church and inviting me to come back.  It poked this old wound because this was someone that I desperately looked up to as a father figure, but as I moved away, got married and built a life I lost touch with him. There were three men in that ward that were pillars of support for me when I was a teen - they were mentors and confidants and friends. They took me on campouts, fed me dinner with their families, and helped my family both financially and spiritually and emotionally.  I will always be grateful for them, but when I graduated their job was done and they went on to focus on their own families and new church responsibilities and projects.  I didn't hear from any of them for 20 years. 

Then I wrote about leaving the church and posted it on Facebook.  Suddenly, I was a project again and they reached out to talk to me about my "potential" and how sad they were that I was making this choice, and to send me scriptures and conference talks.  I know intellectually this is Mormon for "I am thinking about you and care about you." but it still smarts in this same kind of way because my old mentor doesn't really know me as a person now or my family.   

DNA Replication Real Time!

2024 - Catalyst: Looking back at 2023 and ahead to the new year.

2023 people and places 

Last year was a year for a lot of change for me personally and professionally and 2024 is looking to be another dynamic year at Bayer and for me. This year, I hope to be a catalyst for helping connect people, ideas, problems and solutions. 

One kind of fun metric for me of my career evolution is to look at the jobs that LinkedIn's algorithm recommends. It is a fun and eclectic mix - VP of Product Design for Facebook, customer sales representative for multiple companies, a quantitative genetics role at a start-up, digital design, and a breeding lead role. Some of the mix-up is that my role titles in 2023 changed from cotton product design - which was leading the cotton breeding team responsible for population improvement, parent and line selection, and genomic prediction, to then Customer Insights Deployment Lead - where I am working on selection indices, breeding product concept definitions, and incorporating customer feedback in how we breed and what we select. 

All those titles are a bit of a word salad and confusing to LinkedIn's algorithm, but there is a connecting thread from my education in cytogenetics, agronomy, plant breeding to my current role. I still continue to be interested in how to test new ideas for how to improve agriculture and breeding. I am grateful that Monsanto and now Bayer has let me do that in new ways throughout my career. 

I am a terrible pessimist by nature. If you ask me if I am a "glass half full" or "glass half empty" kind of person, I am probably a "glass going to be all the empty eventually, and let me tell you how" kind of person. Last year, I had some really unique opportunities for collaboration and travel last year that have given me a lot of optimism and hope that we will be able to meet and solve the looming problems in agriculture and climate change. I was able to visit Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand. Visiting customers, breeders, and scientists in across the globe gives me a lot of hope as I see the brilliant people and solutions that they are working on for some really big and hard problems. 

I want to thank those that have collaborated with me in 2023 and hope to do better at that in 2024. I had some mental health and personal challenges that meant I had to step away from work I was committed to and not doing well with NAPB. I have been the world's slowest writer for some papers that I have been working on with IITA and Roslin scientists. 

In 2024, I want to continue that journey - connecting people, ideas, and solutions to the big global challenges that we face. That is the commitment I want to make for this next year - to be a better catalyst for that purpose. 

Happy 2024 and looking forward to the new year.

2023 - Year in Review

Aleah - Lots of big life changes.  Started an electrician training program at State Technical College and moved into her own apartment in Linn, MO.   She is learning a lot and enjoying living on her own, even if she has to ride her bike around. Linn is not really set up great for pedestrian or bike traffic, but she is loving the independence after graduation.  Next steps - car and driver's license. 

Emily and Celia - From Emily: 

"This year, Celia and I moved into our own apartment with our three cats: Baby, Lolly, and Kevin. This has been an awesome upgrade from having roommates. We have been playing an excessive amount of the RPG Vampire the Masquerade.  we have had campaigns set in 2023 Gig Harbor, WA, 2032 San Francisco, CA, 2023 Athens Greece, and the 1850s San Fran.  Celia has been working on her capstone: a series of poems. Celia has been Battalion commander of ROTC this semester and will graduate in the spring.  Over the summer I was a paraprofessional. This fall, I have been doing my first-year teaching middle school art. It has proved difficult but rewarding. At the beginning of the year, I got knee surgery - an ACL replacement and meniscus repair.  The recovery has been challenging but I am able to walk and lunge, etc. without pain."

Colleen - Sophomore!  Jobs - Lifeguard manager, Lifeguard, Babysitter, Hostess at Paul Manno's Italian Restaurant.  Best memories - bus ride back from Winter Guard.  getting driver's license, end of summer lifeguard party, epic hike around Lake Geneva. Worst moments - Pool backwash flooding incident. Recs Books: Lessons in Chemistry and Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.  Cried so hard.  Music: Lana Del Rey, Hippy Sabotage, Pouya.  Top songs - Forever waiting for you at my window - Pouya.  Work by Charlotte Day Wilson. 

Alex - 9th grade. Highschool attack. Fav memories of 2023 - Cross Country.  Getting the crazy PR of 27 at the best course in the cold and rain.  Sitting outside reading during the summer.  "It was lit" Went to Lake Geneva and running on the lake trail behind all the fancy houses on the edge of the lake. worst of 2023: "Race where expected to do well and read the clock wrong and then realized that it was not that good and everyone else got PRs.  Hate that course for ever and ever." Book recs: Vicious by V.E. Schwab.  The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. Music - Everything thing from Lana Del Ray.  Men I trust. Fiona Apple and Taylor Swift - newer stuff not old Taylor. Movies - Dune, Across the Spiderverse. 

Becca -- Grade - 5th grade. Ms Williams class. Fav memory: NWA tests especially the math tests are the worst because it has 43 questions, and it has a lot of hard questions because it gets harder if you get them right. One of favorite memories - Going to Cub Creek camp for a whole week.  Animals galore, riding horse named Cheyene and new friends. Hoping that school trip to BizTown next week will be the best of the year. Fav summer - No school.  Worst summer - Not having stuff to do. Rec - Percy Jackson - Heroes of Olympus and the Insiders. Owl House. Hello from the Hollowood's, Night vale and Taylor Swift.  Spiderman, Lana Del Ray

Leila - more detail to come.  Leila signed us up for a 18th century ball this year and sewed her dress - it turned out so great. It was such a fun night even if we were late sewing last bits of the costumes.  Leila also has new patterns and quilts this year that doing well - check out: Leila Gardunia Quilt Patterns and sign up for the newsletter to get the latest.  

Brian - Moments I won't forget:

I started taking meds for ADD this year. It was one of the worst moments when Leila and I argued about it. I didn't want to admit how desperately overwhelmed I felt and how much my anxiety was getting in the way of my life. Then that first day when the medicine kicked in and I felt at the same time a little buzzy, but also able to make a to do list, rearrange my calendar and just do those things without feeling like I was drowning.  Hasn't solved my problems but may help me deal with my life. 

Walking with my work colleague and friend in Spain while we argued about some challenging politics and moments at work and the possibility of me changing jobs.  It was lightly raining, and we had these intense conversations over coffee and toasted crusty bread spread with fresh tomato and olive oil. I have been spoiled at work where I have been able to make my own job multiple times and this new job means I get to focus on a mix of economics and genetics. I will miss my cotton team, but after two years they're ready to take on the problems without me. 

The other two work moments I want to remember really are from trips to Kenya and India.  Sometimes the world feels overwhelming to me: climate change, politics, pollution, wars, all of my other anxieties that I don't dare say out-loud most of the time but fill my brain, but on both trips meeting with African and Indian scientists and farmers I felt a growing sense of optimism and possibility for the future that has been inspiring to me all year.  Both countries are growing and developing in different ways but trying so hard to do the right things for farmers and the environment. 

Travel - Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Spain, US: Lake Geneva, IL, Boise, ID, Tucson, AZ, Illinois farm tours and Farm Progress Show, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, India. 

Recommendations:

Books - Run me to the Earth by Paul Yoon, Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin - always will recommend.  Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. The Strange by Nathan Ballingrood. The Last Cuentista by Levine Querido.

Music - Hillary Hahn - Ysaye recording, Brandi Carlile - all of the artists she produced albums for this year is a great list of new and upcoming singers. Tanya Tucker - Sweet western Sound also made the documentary that is hilarious and heart-warming "The Return of Tanya Tucker", Joni Mitchell at Newport, Brandy Clark, Lucious, and The Secret Sisters

ADHD meds and response to "Search Engine" podcast

 From an email that I sent the "Search Engine" podcast team.  It is a really intriguing series and I am pretty invested as I have struggled this last few years with a lot of anxiety and frustration trying to keep focused.  

https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/whyd-i-take-speed-for-twenty-years

I feel like I should start this email with something like on talk radio where the caller says - "long-time listener, first-time caller." I have been a big fan since the beginnings of Reply All.  It was one of the first podcasts that I listened to every episode of and I have enjoyed the new podcasts you have done since leaving that show.  

This series though I put off listening to.  I wasn't sure what you were going to say, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to hear it. I am 46 and I have a three month old prescription to Vyvanse that I just started taking.  I was officially diagnosed with ADD three years ago after my wife pushing and pushing for me to start seeing a counselor about it basically for 20 years.  I wouldn't have started to take medication at all, but we had a huge fight about it and I ended by conceding and admitting that maybe, maybe that taking something might help me.  

And it has been three months where I keep thinking - "why didn't I do this sooner.  Is this how regular people's brain's work?"  and to my wife's credit she hasn't once said I told you so.  

I don't have the same experience as most people that were given ADHD meds.  I do remember in 2nd grade that my teacher, Ms Murr, made a special rule for me that I had to be touching my desk at all times - and I have this moment frozen in my brain where she is at the front and i am standing with one leg hooked around the leg of my desk and going around in circles while she talked.  She also told us she would put up any artwork we did in the classroom and my neighbor and I that were obsessed with dinosaurs got a roll of butcher paper and drew all the dinosaurs we could find pictures of in the encyclopedia and she put the entire roll up on the wall, cutting out a circle for the clock.  

I was smart, I did great in classes.  I read obsessively everything I could and being a fast reader was my superpower.  My parents were divorced when I was 11 and my mom went back to school to be a math teacher at that time.  I saw that doing well in school was a way I could escape and get the life I wanted.  And I was driven.  I worked so hard that I used to fall asleep doing homework at 1 or 2 in the morning and then deliver papers before school every day through high school.  

I pushed hard through undergrad, masters, PhD and work in a unique RnD job that I kind of made up and Monsanto and then Bayer keeps paying me to do that is everything I wanted.   But things were starting to fray and fall apart.  The ways that I was forcing myself to be productive and focused weren't working anymore as I got into my forties.  Then with Covid, I had crippling anxiety and that made it harder and harder to focus.  Working from home those years made it worse and I desperately tried to cover that up at work, but at home it was increasingly clear to my family that if I was going to survive this I needed an intervention.  It was like a reverse intervention where my wife and kids one on one and in a group basically were like - you need to start taking drugs.  

There were signs before. Most people assume that I have ADD/ADHD - I can hyper-focus and I survived for years by procrastinating and then desperately finishing at the last second. This is a stressful way to live.  I had three seizures in college - which my neurologist attributed basically to lack of sleep and overwork.  I had MRI, EKGs, all of the other tests he could find but I refused to go on any medication because it took all of the focus I had to try and force myself to get to the end of my degrees.  

I was insistent though that I could handle it and I have been for my whole career.  I felt like taking medication was admitting to a weakness that I was overcoming with just hard work.  And I was doing it, but looking back a few months in I realized that I was also doing it with a lot of anxiety and desperation that I didn't need to have.  

My first day on Vyvanse I sat down and wrote out a to do list and then proceeded to do it.  Just like that.  Without any procrastination or anxiety.  It was insane.  I did feel a little buzzy - and at the same time quiet.  Like my brain was silent while I worked and I didn't know what to do with that.  I worry a little because I crave that feeling now even after just three months.  I wake up in the morning and I find myself thinking about it and wanting it.  I dread that I am dependent on this drug and that I am unable to feel like that without it. 

I loved the series.  I appreciate your public introspection and honesty about this.  I don't know what my life would have been like if I had started taking this sooner, but I feel a little sad that I fought it for so long.  Maybe, I would have been happier.  Maybe I wouldn't have had to struggle and fight my own brain to get to where I am now.  Maybe not.  Maybe it would have made me less creative. 

I swore to myself as a teen that I would live without regrets.  But now in middle age, I think that is impossible.  I wish I would reboot my life like a video game sometimes and see what difference it would be if I had taken a different path.  Or like a choose your own adventure book where I could turn back the pages and find another chapter that took me on a different journey.  But, I can't.  For now, I guess I will see what my brain and life is like as I take a low dose of meth every morning. 

Meditations on memory and focus

I don't know if it is a peculiarity of the eye, the brain, or the camera lens but I can never seem to get the focus on the camera to match what I see or remember.  As I flew home from India over Greenland, I looked out of the window and saw a plane that seemed to be just below us - so close I thought.  Contrails erupted from the tips of its engines and I could see clearly the logo of the other airline and dots of the windows reflecting the glacier and fjords below both of us.  But in the photo I took with my phone, the plane is far away and a pixelated blur against the horizon and clouds.  

Was it an illusion of the mind and eye that when I looked out the window it seemed to zoom in or is a fault in my iPhone camera skills to be able to mirror this focus and clarity?

This is probably a testable hypothesis or googleable question, but I like the idea that my brain and eye can make the sunset and the nights sky better IRL than the camera of my phone.  

I want to be able to pull that clarity on my self and my time.  I wish that I could see it better than it is captured by a camera or a word, but the reality is that I cannot and it slips away so fast.  

Even the image that I had so clear of the plane, that seemed so profound, is losing its realness.  Pieces I can remember - the parts I described above.  Those even closer images are zoomed in and crisp, but the rest of the details are just an outline between them and now as I write the memory becomes this. I see the blurry edges like a sketch drawing and the focus sections blown up around.  

Will that fade to be replaced with just words and memory of what it felt like to write this? The ache in my hand, the tired feeling from being up too late, the drying tears of the sad book that I finished before looking down on the plane, my cold from India and my suppressed cough in my throat, the sweat on my sandals and my cracked lips. 

No, that too will fade.  Even as I read these words in the future I will have to imagine this moment.  Maybe then I will remember but each time I try it shifts and changes by the act of remembering

Crop Science Innovation Summit

Looking back at 2022

Becca

4th grade. Finished the Percy Jackson and Heroes of Olympus books and favorite Character is Nico D’Angelo. Trip highlight - being able to go to all the beaches - Scotland, Netherlands, Greece. Ice cream in Greece, Netherlands.

Recs: Liked Wednesday. Podcast - Hello from the Hallowood.

Aleah

12th Grade -Senior. Got accepted into trade school at Missouri State Tech. Loves her construction tech class at school and interesting economics discussions in AP econ. Likes that she doesn’t have to take German this year.

Favorite trip thing - marketplaces and museums - favorite was the Prague National History Museum. Ice cream in Greece. Recs: Movie rec - Knives out and the Glass Onion. Podcast - Dungeon’s and Daddies

Colleen

9th grade. This year’s highlights: got driver’s permit, quitting swim team, color guard, book club. Really came to love crocs. Best trip memory - walking around in Edinburgh, walking to the beach in Castricum, Netherlands. So much walking. Also Mother India restaurant in Edinburgh. Place - Parthenon. Most disappointing - Big Ben. First Apartment in Greece.

Recs: Books - “Song of Achilles.” Show - “Seven Lives of Lea.” Movie - “Spiderman - into the Spiderverse.” Music - Lana del Rey, Favorite playlist - Nightime Tunes. Labyrinth. Favorite app - pinterest shuffles

Alex

8th Grade. Best thing about this year - Making new friends. Playing DnD with Friends and hanging out at Charlie’s. Best trip memories - pizza place in Edinburgh. Walking around London with the sisters. Most disappointing - Big Ben.

Recs: Book - “Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.” Movie - “Do Revenge”, because it is so silly. Show - The Good Place - rewatched this year. Music - Automatic, Lush.

Emily + Celia

Finished and set up senior capstone show, graduated went on a long trip with the family, got a dog, started subbing everyday in Kirksville school district. Celia and Lee played a lot of ttrpgs, several Magic the Gathering campaigns as well as Vampire the Mascarade.

Celia’s favorite part of the trip was Aegina island and swimming in the pool with the kids, walks everyday, as well as getting to try a bunch of different coffee shops. Emily’s favorite trip memory was exploring the Hermitage in Edinburgh, especially when she was able to adventure on her own - going “goat” and following all the little animal paths and scaling big rocks to find berries.

Recs: Shows - Wednesday on Netflix, Summer Camp Island on HBO. Books: Sapiens by Yuval Harari, Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, and Brain Camp by Kim and Klavan.

Leila

Started substituting a few days a month at the elementary school. Planned and executed a 5 week European vacation with 8 people - we are a full tour group now. New patterns came out this fall. State Fair book and You Can quilt Book published with Amazon Kindle print on demand.

Leila's trip highlights - beach in Netherlands, Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Strawberries in Scotland, Ice cream in Netherlands, fresh juice in Island apartment. Bread/KFC in Czech. Tej in London, morning coffee with Brian in London. Pulling the whole thing off in spite of covid and so many trains, metros, buses, planes, ferries, Ubers, cabs, and rented bikes.

Recs - Books: Listened to a lot on tape. Veronica Speedwell Mysteries.

Brian

Had a good year working with cotton breeding at Bayer with new team members that started this year. I also worked a lot on collaborations with Abacusbio, Roslin, TAMU, and NC State. I struggled to focus and keep on top of my mountain of email and meetings this year and was diagnosed with ADHD, which will not be a surprise to anyone.

I traveled quite a bit this year, in the US to NH, MS, TX, FL, AZ, Africa - Kenya for meetings with CGIAR/IITA and Botswana to visit Amanda Jacobsen and family and to see some rhinos, and our long summer trip to England, Scotland - dual purpose work trip with Roslin Institute and meetings with Abacusbio, Netherlands, and Greece. We had the best of intentions of visiting family over Christmas, but Southwest had a meltdown and our flights were cancelled. I enjoyed reconnecting with people after two years of covid restrictions and hope to visit more friends and family in 2023.

Best thing about our Euro trip - morning walks to coffee shops before the rest of the family woke up. Worst thing - getting covid in Netherlands, although Becca was the very best quarantine buddy ever and made Netherlands my favorite place we visited. Second worst thing was the first apartment in Athens, but escaping to Aegina island was lovely and peaceful.

Recomendations: Books - Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, The Anthropocene Reviewed. Shows - Andor Movie - Everything, everywhere, all at once.

Aleah at 18

 

The missing circle or Where is God

One thing noticeably absent from my last post was a description of how my belief in God and the downstream beliefs about Jesus and Christianity have changed.  What surprised me about the response to my last post was that no one really asked about that either, except for my friend Bro. Dunstan.  (Embarrassingly I misspelled his name in the first version of this posted.  Fixed.)

In general, I have been deconstructing not only my relationship with and understanding of the LDS Church, but also God.  I am not sure I am quite ready to label myself as an atheist, but don't know of a theistic tradition I want to adopt. 

So in the same spirit of my last post, I will try to explain my thoughts around this starting first with four modifications of my original Venn diagram - because everyone loves a Venn diagram!  For simplicity, each of red ellipses represents "God". I also am avoiding parsing Bible or Book of Mormon verses or scripture intentionally in this post.  This is just how my brain has been obsessing about this topic recently. 

LDS doctrine 

What I taught as a missionary and believed as a member is most succinctly summarized in the missionary manuals - Link.  

Basically, God is both our creator and father of our spirits.  Definitely we also believed that God was male - not as much open discussion but loudly whispered beliefs that there was an unnamed female wife/mother as well.  Or multiple heavenly mothers... That we were created/organized as spirits first in a premortal life and then the world was created for us by the gods so that we could be born in a fallen mortal world, get bodies, be tested, and then return to heaven as resurrected, perfect beings eventually to become like God. LDS doctrine usually describe God as having a physical perfect body because he was also at some point in the eternities on a planet like earth, lived life, was resurrected and now promoted to God.  

Christ is a separate being that started as the first spirit created and then born on earth with a mortal mother and God as the physical father.  His role is to mediate between us and God and to overcome death and sin so that we can return to wherever God is.  He also has a physical immortal human-like body after his resurrection.  Post-Talmage Mormon Doctrine links Jesus with Jehovah before his birth and that he was a part of the godhead before and after his life on earth, but is not the same being as God.  

The Holy Ghost is like a third member of the godhead as a separate being of spirit because he hasn't been born yet and exists to influence us for good.  The devil is also a spirit creation of God but rebelled before creation and exists as a spirit to tempt and test the rest of us to do evil. 

In my diagram, I would say this is actually most like the top right diagram - Universe independent of God.  Maybe better said - God independent of the Universe, because God created the universe and It operates following the laws of nature and he/she/it exists outside and beyond those rules.  Humans have free will and operate independent of God.  In Mormon doctrine, He has a human-like physical body and exists somewhere kind of outside the temporal universe or on a planet near a sun called Kolob.  He existed at some prehistory/precreation point on his own world and was part of that creation.  That could be illustrated with a fifth diagram where the red ellipse representing god is part of the world, but would need to have a series of Venn diagrams representing that he progressed from being part of the world to being something more than that and that he was created by some other god.  Maybe an infinite number of Venn diagrams inside of other Venn diagrams and multiple gods.  It's Venn diagrams all the way down.

He can influence and impact the world and humans - but within the laws of nature and free will, subject to the laws that were set up before we were created.  In the Mormon world view that is why we have scriptures, angels, prophets, and the Holy Ghost - all ways that God can influence us in the world without taking away our independence from Him. The LDS church exists because of Him trying to restore the right ways to worship and follow him before the end of the world so that we can have faith, repent, etc to be judged worthy to return to live with Him. That is why they have missionary work, temples, new scriptures, etc. 

To be blunt, I don't believe in this God anymore.  I don't think this is how the world works.  Back to the diagram starting with:

Universe as God

God is not just the creator of the universe and doesn't exist independently.  He/She/It is the universe - a pantheistic interpretation of God.  I am imagining this view of God as a god of nature and forces and kind of incorporeal, but also that we are a part of God in that everything is part of God. In this description of God, God is to the parts of the universe almost like our cells are part of us.  The entirety of creation is part of this organism that is God.  Maybe that is too biological of a metaphor.  In this view if there is an afterlife it is becoming more indistinguishable from this Universal God.  

Do we have free will in this scenario?  Not sure.  Do our cells have free will?  Do red blood cells ever have an existential crisis about their job ferrying oxygen around the body and want to be more? I don't know, but we and other creatures all feel like we do - we think we have free will.  All other life is part of this living universe and is part of God somehow.  Humans are not a separate community from the world - inspiration tends to be in this world view about losing sense of self and belonging to the unifying bigger existence.  

Which religions fit in this category? I think a lot of new Age beliefs approach this.  Also religions where nature itself is god and communing with those forces is how we get closer to God.  In some ways this is an attractive idea - the world can have purpose and meaning, but that meaning is mostly that we are part of this bigger universal thing.  I like that idea.  Not sure I believe it really is true, but I do like it. 

World as God

I think the biggest difference with the last scenario  is that in this view of God - humans are kind of a special creation from the rest of the world.  We have free will and are more independent of God.  Also that the world was created for humans.  Our communities can exist independent of God, but there are interactions where some groups are inspired and led by God and others may not be.   God in this case could be like the Universe as God. Inspiration I think still tends to becoming one with nature.  

Is this a Christian God? Possibly there is a flavor of this somewhere, but it doesn't seem to be to me.   I think you could also capture a lot of nature polytheism into this kind of description of god where each god is a component of the world maybe?  I don't know.  Venn diagrams don't capture all the complexity of world religions I guess. 

I like this even less.  Because it still has a deity that is essentially integral to the nature around us, but we are independent of it?  What would that kind of God want from us?  

Universe Independent of God

This version of God is outside of time and the Universe.  He/She/It most likely created the universe and us.   So many different versions of God could be described this way.  In part I think this also implies that there is one god or set of gods that is universal for the world and all humans.   In a pantheon, those gods interact with each other and individuals, communities, and the world.  You could envision this universal god many different ways and it could have different level of interaction and control of the physical, human, and personal life. 

I think that this is the kind of God most Christian church's really believe in when they think of God - an "Omni" god - omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient that is also perfect, eternal and more than anything Good. There are a lot of variations in beliefs about the specific nature of this god and how that relates to Jesus, Holy Ghost/Spirit - whether trinitarian, binitarian, nontrinitarian, etc. but this god is not part of our world.  It is outside and supreme over the world.  

Like I described above, this to me is the way LDS church sees God, with some caveats.  I think one of the things that is a Mystery about the nature of god is that we talk about God being at the same time personal and impersonal - a judge and a comforter.  Maybe that is why trinitarian or not, the roles of Jesus and the Holy Ghost are important to be able to have a vision of a God that is incomprehensible, yet also something/someone that people feel like they have a close personal relationship to.  I certainly yearned for that and maybe as someone that is a little bit apostate now I have lost really my understanding of how that works.  I don't feel that personal connection now to God.  Did I have it before? At times I felt this strongly, other times I definitely did not.  Like when my son died the Idea of a all powerful personal god was not comforting - it made me angry.  And I didn't see how the vision of this god fit with that grief and loss. 

God of One Community

This is more common than I thought as a Mormon.  I think a lot of the historic gods of a specific culture and people including Judaism and early Christianity fit actually in this category - with the caveat that the same time God's nature may be that God and the community are part of the world or independent of the world.  My illustration is not complex enough to capture that.  Missionary work in this world view is adoption into the community of that God and membership is defined by that belief.  It also can be a pluralistic world view in that different communities could have different Gods that coexist potentially to rule and modify the world.  Exaltation is leveling up that communion with God and leaving the rest of the world behind. 

Even though I think most Christians, and certainly Mormons, would not accept the pluralistic implications or limitations to the scope and role of god that this implies, Christianity and Mormonism have echoes of this in how we talk about membership and conversion  as adoption into the community or family of the church.  Judaism is an ethnoreligion like this and I think the Old Testament and even most of the New Testament show this kind of view of God.  It comes through I think in how LDS leaders and members talk about being part of "Israel" - representing God's community and Gentiles - not god's community.   Patriarchal blessings have echoes of this too where each one declares the member's "lineage" as a tribe in the house of Israel.  It is behind the racism of the past LDS church teachings and leaders as well that excluded black people from being members of this community with varying justifications for why.  I think pairing this view of the community and God together with a patriarchal history and description of god, a strong single leader/prophet, and a doctrine of becoming like that patriarchal-potentially-polygamous God - whammo you get polygamy and misogyny. 

This was a part of my faith crisis.  I began to feel that if God was more than the god of our community that we wouldn't have the messy doctrine and uncomfortable history of the church.  And if we were God's special community that He was not actually doing a good job of leading this community or we were doing a bad job at following.  I worried about leaving this community because it meant rejecting the community - which I didn't want to do, and also it's god.  And maybe that fear was justified because that is part of what still bounces around my head a lot.  

Conclusion

I wrote the last blog post so that people who know me would understand some of the reasons why we decided to leave the church.  There was a real comfort in feeling like I had those answers and I am the first to admit that with this change in my life, I don't have them any longer.  I still study the scriptures, but I don't believe the stories they tell about Jesus, the prophets and the church are a clear message like I once did. I don't really know what God is like anymore.  

 
If there is a god though, I think God is bigger and more than I was taught in the church.  It’s a big universe.  If there is a grand design - a plan that we are all part of, then the LDS church is just one player - and a relatively small one with 16 million/8 billion people - less than 0.2% of the world. This is an old world with life that has been evolving for billions of years. I don't know what is before or after this life, but I think it is myopic to think we are in the end days. One planet in a big solar system.  One solar system in a galaxy with billions of stars. One galaxy in a ginormous universe. It is billions of years old and will keep on spinning for billions more.   It makes me feel small - but small I think in a good way. 
 
If there is an eternal design, inevitably I am a small part of it, but still a part of it.  I was as a member of the church, and I still am.  Like the metaphorical Adam and Eve, I choose to step out of the sheltered garden of the church and into the world.  When I was on my mission, attended BYU, married Leila, and had my family - I felt strongly that was where I needed to be. I feel the same about this decision. I am part of the rest of the 99.8% of the world - that is what I am joining. Intentionally.  I really feel like that is where, if there is a grand design, I am supposed to be. Even if that means losing my faith.