Kyra Moon

I quit Facebook on Thursday. I mean, of course I'll be back, but I had to quit. It had been a week since I could conjure up a good news limerick. I didn't have any clever thoughts or cute quips to share. And even after listening to April's Conference and reading scriptures regularly, I didn't have any spiritual insights to share. So I had started drifting toward politics. As uncomfortable as political discussions can be, I really feel like we need to have them. We need to have them with people we disagree with. We need to learn how to let ideas to compete with each other. But it's not as easy as it sounds! For example, I am pretty non-confrontational online, so when someone disagrees with me I start to panic. My usual form of dialogue is to try to validate what the other person says and then persuade them that I'm right anyway. To quote the Lego Batman movie, I try to use  and But not everyone uses that style of debate. Sometimes people go into a debate not want...

 He walked in while they were sanitizing the library. No one was quite sure how he had gotten in, but he looked so well-dressed and official that they figured he had a key of some kind. One of the librarians was wiping off a cart when she looked up and saw him. "Hey, I remember you! It's Stan, right?" "Close enough," he said, smiling brilliantly. "I just wanted to see how you all are doing. It's been a long time since I was at your library planning meeting ." "Well, things have been pretty crazy here, same as everywhere else," she responded. "We shut down for months. We've had a table and canopy set up since the spring where people can pick up their holds after they call in. We're so happy that the library is open again, and we just hope it can last. What about you? Have you been able to stay busy what with all the libraries being closed?" "Oh, I've stayed plenty busy," the well-dressed man responded. ...

 Last week, I wrote "Most people in the other political party don't want to destroy your life and livelihood." Ever since I wrote that, I've felt a little uncomfortable. The fact is, many people's lives and livelihoods have been adversely affected by policies from the other political party. You can probably point to policies that caused your insurance premiums and deductibles to go up. You can probably point out policies that contributed to a crumbling infrastructure. The other political party has decades of racist leadership that have limited so many opportunities for so many people. They pretend to have family values but prove time and time again that they don't care about actual families. Perhaps the other party has ideals of equality and prosperity, but so far what we see is them keeping the rich wealthy while the rest of us subsist on much less. If the politicians alone weren't bad enough, then there are the people in the other political party! They s...

 Every day feels like a new adventure in figuring out what the truth is. It can be unsettling to read about new studies which contradict what we what we were told a month ago. Were they wrong then? Are they wrong now? Why did a Lancet study use a bad data set? It's actually encouraging for me to see people scrutinize the studies from even top journals. When ideas can compete, the truth can rise to the top. Unfortunately, I think a lot of us choose to keep truth buried because we like our own deceptions better. Sometimes, we might even be right about the facts and still deceived because of our mindset about those facts. Here's a list of seven feelings that make it hard for us to recognize truth. 1. Stubbornness. This one is obvious. Even though you are a smart person, you don't have a monopoly on knowledge. Just sit back and listen a little bit, and see if there's something you were wrong about before! 2. Smugness. If you see a group of people doing or saying something a...

I have had so many thoughts floating around as we've been preparing for your baptism. Can you believe that I had 3 other letters I tried to write besides this one? And this one is 3 letters in one. Some other time we can talk about the other letters. But today we'll talk about these three ideas. I.  Love God I wanted to make today about you. You are, after all, a really great kid. You are bright (oh so exceptionally bright), empathetic, easygoing, and fearless. I still remember the nurse who helped take care of us both after you were born. She asked what I was going to name you, and when I told her, she said, "Good. He is going to be a strong man so he needs a strong name." Maybe she said that about every baby, but it felt prophetic then and true today. So, yes, I wanted your baptism day to be about you. Before coronavirus hit hard I had big dreams of everyone we would invite to help celebrate -- cousins, second cousins, friends from your school, fri...

This morning, I woke up to the news that the Logan Tabernacle would be closed in 2021 for renovation. When I drove past it yesterday I suddenly remembered that if not for the pandemic I would have performed there that very day. But instead, my tabernacle performance would have to be put off til next year. Or, as the article reminded me, in a few years after the renovation is done. When it comes to music, I can take rejection and missed opportunities pretty hard. I feel like life is so crazy with young kids that I have to choose my endeavors very carefully. So once I put effort into something I get pretty emotionally invested in it. At least, that's how I have been. But after reading Big Magic I wonder if I should approach things differently. After all, what's the point in creating and performing if most of it makes me sad? There's already plenty of suffering the world and I don't need to add more suffering by feeling upset about being underappreciated. No, as the poet J...

When I was in high school, I invited friends to go sledding at a nearby hill. We had a great time for an hour or so and then came in for hot cocoa and rolls. One of my friends realized he needed to get home really soon so he ran out to his car, only to discover he no longer had his keys. They were somewhere in the snow. The sun was beginning to set and the snow was beginning to fall. But what could we do except look for the keys? As I walked through my backyard back up to the hill, I prayed, "Please help us find his keys. Please help us find his keys." Then I had a funny thought. "Oh, and it doesn't have to be me who finds them." Up til that moment, I had wanted to be the one to find the keys and be the hero somehow. But when I added that phrase to my prayer, it finally occurred to me was that the keys were found, not that I  was the one to find them. While the rest of the group headed to the hill to hunt, my friend and I veered off to a different section. There...