John Muir

The world, we are told, was made especially for man -- a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? -John Muir, naturalist and explorer (1838-1914)

It does seem egocentric, doesn’t it, but that’s what we think of ourselves, and our religion reinforces it. Our Christian and Jewish, and perhaps Muslim, stories say that it’s so, the world was made for us humans. In the seven-day creation story God makes humans last and in the image of God as the finishing touch on creation. In the older creation story, Genesis 2, God makes us first, forms us himself from mud and spit, breathes his own Holy Spirit into us as the breath of life, and puts us in charge. We think a lot of ourselves, don’t we, that even our religious stories rank us second only to the Creator, the vicars of God.

In the Wordsmith email each morning, the Thought for Today may be more interesting than the word for the day, and this from John Muir was so. It may be a while before I work hereditament into conversation or pulpit, but the John Muir quotation reminded me.

For my sophomore and junior year at Florida, my room was on the fourth floor of a section in Fletcher Hall, probably pulled down and replaced with a student parking lot long ago, God forbid. There were four rooms opening onto the landing on that top floor, and one bathroom with toilets and showers. Each room had a sitting room and a sleeping room, bedroom. The bedroom had a washbasin and two beds. Our room was on the corner, with windows on two sides.

My roommate those two years was Gene Smith, son of Henry Smith who had Smith’s ladies shop at the corner of Grace Avenue and 5th Street here. Gene, who later owned Smith’s ladies shop in Fort Walton Beach and I think was mayor there for a while, was active in Sigma Chi and also in the local Army Reserve unit, going to drill one night a week to build up pay longevity for when he was commissioned from ROTC after graduation. He was Army-oriented because his stepfather was career Army and the family had spent some years in Germany. Gene may even have gone to high school in Germany, not sure.

In another of the rooms there on the top floor with us was a boy named John Muir, who was astonished that I’d never heard of his ancestor John Muir, the Scottish-born American naturalist, preservationist and author. John was tall and thin, crewcut sandy hair, and he was in the group of us who went to the gym to work out for an hour three evenings a week.

Timeframe, 1954-56. My interest those years, besides worrying about whether Linda at her college in Virginia might be finding a new boyfriend, was not my fraternity. In retrospect, my interest in the fraternity was getting a fancy pin, opal and ruby encrusted, so I could pin Linda; she may still have it. I didn't care at all for my business administration courses after I changed my major from pre-theology, and my sole extracurricular interest was making money working as a supervisor with the university’s Food Service Division, graduating and getting on with life. Mama used to say I was born thirty years old, always serious.

Maybe so.

Actually, this started out to be about John Muir. God bless him, he gave me some thoughts and memories sixty years on.

Muir is right, we are a speck on a speck. If we have a divine purpose, perhaps it's to explore the cosmos, down to the atom and within, and out into the galaxies and beyond.