Anu in the Morning

Anu Garg’s word.a.day website may be my favorite daily email. Many of the words he introduces, I never heard or saw, and this week he’s come up with some doozies. Today, for example, “sooterkin.” In fact the only word I’ve known this week is poppycock, and it’s origin, like b.s., is perfect for helping reign in the sometime foul mouth of which I am not at all proud but rather greatly ashamed.

Often even better than the words is Garg’s Thought for Today, which always is the last thing on the post; this morning, 

"A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

Think for yourself and question authority. -Timothy Leary, psychologist and writer (22 Oct 1920-1996)" 

With my healthy, or perhaps unhealthy, and certainly sometimes unfortunate over the years, deep contempt for authority, this may be Anu’s top best Thought. It’s where I am in life, where I always have been so far as I recall. This attitude, which in me derives from my growing up years, where I’m not going this morning to the place only my brother and sister would understand, did not always serve me best during my Navy time, but it holds anyway to this day and somewhat forms my being and informs my worldview. So when I read, and now hold dear, Steve Job’s famous advice to that graduating class, 

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition"

I felt vindicated and somehow saved, rescued, from being alone like Jeremiah sinking in the mud of Malchiah’s cistern: there are respectable and other intelligent beings down here with me. The thought encourages me when I stumble, for example, over words of the Nicene Creed about which I know the political, not to say inspired, and often cruel, viscious and violent history. 

Also freeing is that oft quoted here proverb from the lintel over the library door at Virginia Seminary, “Seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will.” It means that in my church, where we like to say "you don’t have to check your brain at the door," there are no questions that cannot be asked and explored and I don’t have to agree with whatever two millennia ago was developing as orthodox and permissible. It also blesses once again my personal slogan, “Just because he said it, that don’t make it so. And just because you believe it, even believe it fervently, with every fibre of your being, and even willing to die or kill for it, that don’t make it so neither.” 

The vulgate somehow underscoring the defiance. And thank you very much, Anu Garg.

Welcome, happy morning.

The sunrises and sunsets and clouds and sky and sea from this porch just keep getting more amazing and more and more brilliant; but I can't stand out here all day taking pictures.

Thos+