Ethan and Ehlana:
Happy 20th Birthday, Jillian!
Happy 6th Birthday, David Burroughs!
Our day hasn’t been birthday-party-fun, but we’ve had a good day that included extra outdoor time at school; another play and biking afternoon with our friends; and an evening at the lab or archives with Mom while Dad stayed home and worked in the office. The details aren’t really important from any of those adventures; and Ehlana wants me to write an update for our lab and archives work.
While the Covid pandemic – or endemic – continues to get all of the news attention around the world; Ehlana is only keeping up with new research news; and is focusing on her cancer cure research. Ehlana’s work is going slowly with very small successes, and while that can get frustrating; patience is a necessity for research and archives work. The details for Ehlana’s work can be found elsewhere in the archives; so we’ll just offer a few comments here about current events here at home and elsewhere. The top news about cancer research is likely the recent reports of new early-detection methods. Ehlana and Dillon are looking into those reports, since finding the cancers earlier might offer better opportunities for cures before irreparable damage has been done. We can already do better than the best tests using our Magi healing talents, but doing that kind of check on everyone in the world would be impossible. Uncle Adam can’t even do that with everyone here at home – though he can ‘take a look’ at any of his high-risk patients. That’s getting a bit off-track to what Ehlana wanted to comment about tonight. We don’t have any breakthroughs to announce, but progress is being made; and she has hope of succeeding sooner instead of later.
Before we move on to an archives update; we also want to mention that the pandemic affects other areas of medical research as massive resources have been diverted to dealing with that crisis. We don’t diminish the need to do that, but nobody can calculate the unintended costs that we could all be paying because other work hasn’t happened at all. While more than five million people have died due to Covid so far, as an example, compare that to the nearly ten million cancer-related deaths for last year alone; and that might give you an idea of where we’re taking that thought. The financial cost of the pandemic will certainly run into trillions of dollars – possibly tens of trillions; and all of that expense has only gotten us to a temporary fix; since the vaccines are not cures and are proving to have time-limited effectiveness. Other costs of things that might have been if not for the pandemic will never be calculated. We collectively made those choices to deal with the pandemic; and haven’t even considered putting that kind of effort into fixing any of the other problems we have in the world – whether that’s finding cures for diseases, ending hunger, dealing with climate and pollution, or any of the other major problems around the world. Maybe fixing everything isn’t possible, but while we work toward the Ascension of the Light; we’re going to do what we can to solve a few of those problems along the way! ;^)
Moving along, my archives work is boring compared to Ehlana’s drive to cure all diseases and develop better crops to feed the world, but I have fun, and it will take decades just to get all of our historical knowledge better-organized. While we don’t write about that work in this journal very often, a fair bit of progress has been made during the pandemic – particularly thanks to Grandma Eleanor, Grandpa Grant, and some of the volunteers that have been putting time in at the archives while not being able to travel for the family business and charities. Now that they can get out and around the world again now, that will change, but we’re also in pretty good shape right now; and don’t have a backlog of work that has been high-priority – like saving books and documents that were deteriorating and needed to be restored or copied and replaced. I won’t go into the details for that work either, but will mention that part of my work right now is prioritizing finding information that might help with the lab research projects and dealing with regular requests for historical information about Magi talents that are all related to training Magi kids or for adult Magi that want to expand their knowledge and develop their Magi abilities. The second part of that work for me is exciting, since we love seeing our fellow Magi reaching their potential; and we’re also starting to have a lot of interest in developing new uses for our Magi talents – or imagining completely new talents! Some people would probably find that idea to be funny, but when you think about it; even the most-elemental Magi talents began with someone figuring out that they had those abilities and then learning to apply them for practical uses. We’re not booking any Magi-powered trips to the stars, but it would be awesome if someone else could figure out how to do that!
That idea is a bit of a stretch, but it isn’t really the ‘what’ we learn to do with our talents that matters as much as the fact that we’re collectively better for trying to use our talents and explore new possibilities.
I think that we’ve rambled on enough for this report, and we are getting tired now after another long, fun, and busy day; so we’ll wrap this up and get some sleep now.
Until next time... this is Ethan and Ehlana Proctor; live from the hidden home of the Magi of the Light – and May the Magi Force be with you!
