earth and all stars

Early coffee outside on 7H porch, perfectly clear sky emblazoned with stars. Light from downtown Panama City to the east and PCB Thomas Drive to the west degrades the view looking up at/for the rest of our Milky Way galaxy, but it's pretty much straight overhead and I'm not into leaning out to look up anyway. 63°F 74%, wind SE 3 mph. Pleasant morning to be outside so enjoy while it's possible, because winters it's too chilly until next spring 2023.

What I enjoy at ground level from 7H porch is the curved lights of Tyndall Bridge. And the Tyndall beacon. Shrimp boats if there are any, but none recently.

Sunrise 6:19, sunset 4:46, reducing sunlight to about ten hours a day until December 21 or so, when Earth will start tilting the other way until next June.

Nature, the Universe, is a sheer marvel. Why can't we Earthlings see, perceive, realize, comprehend, understand, and make the most of, that we're here on lease, renters for a while in Time and space, rise above the greedy, selfish, reptilian in us, to love, appreciate and enjoy life instead of killing each other in all the ways we've contrived to do. Nothing is ours, including property, including life itself, it's all grace, grant, lend-lease. But we think we're so important, we've not evolved beyond anthill mentality. From a theological point of view, we are not in the divine image; or if we are, it's an anthropomorphic divinity of human construct, not Whoever or Whatever said yə·hî and it was so.

5:58 and Monday is showing up. 30% chance of rain tomorrow, we may drive over to Apalach for Linda's quick shopping spree, or we may not, depends on how the sky looks. And also God Willing. We may go Thursday. At this age, though, God has to be willing. Or as my Pentecostal Holiness preacher friend in Apalachicola years ago used to put it, "... and Jesus tarries."

In that Christian dialectic, "Jesus tarries" until personally for each of us, "Jesus don't tarry" and comes for us. I remember when a priest friend died suddenly back in the mid-1980s, I phoned his wife and she told me the physician had come out of the ER and said, "Margaret, Jesus came and took Betts Home." For each of us, life gets to the point in Time that when all is said and done, that's what it was all about anyway.

There's my view from my living room chair here in 7H, looking past the Christmas cactus across the Bay toward The Pass as Monday's morning sun shines on the window frame.

Worry, about friends anxious about coming days. A dozen years ago I was at the halfway point in my "two to five months" to live prognosis before we flew to Cleveland for my open heart surgery, and I've been thinking back, remembering. I wasn't afraid, Linda may have been, but I wasn't the least bit afraid. There were only two things I could do about my prognosis: either wander round popping nitrostat as I waited for Jesus; or take a chance on surgery. Local heart specialists said I'd die on their operating table. When we got to Cleveland and met with my surgeon he said the two to five months was "right on" but that he did this all the Time and my case was everyday for them. I've thought about this overnight and remembered his words when I asked him, that my chances with his surgery were "97%". That end of November and looking toward Christmas 2010, my exercise consisted of taking a nitrostat, walking down the concrete path toward My Laughing Place, pausing halfway for another nitrostat to relax the searing angina pain, enjoying standing under the storm-ravaged cedar tree that was MLP. Then across the street and back toward the house, pausing for another nitrostat.

We've since moved from The Old Place to 7H. MLP is no longer there, as Category 5 Hurricane Michael took down the old cedar tree. But I'm still here, and a dozen years later I'm doing well. So will my most dear friends do well. I'm counting on faith, prayer, y'VAH, medical supercompetence, and their own good judgment.

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Distraught about the unsolvable fact of Earthlings warring among ourselves in a virtually infinite Universe, as though we are the World. Putin is, as our then Secretary of Defense observed about his own boss at the time, an alphabet moron. As all brutal dictators, he's self-centered, self-certain, a Narcissist. A characteristic of Narcissism is, convinced of one's own genius, the inability to conceive of oneself as wrong on anything, and the need to blame others, find someone to blame for everything that goes wrong. I worked with an Episcopal priest like that once. As Manstein uttered on leaving an encounter with Hitler, "My God, what an idiot."

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This morning, flat Bay, little water traffic, Magnolia Beach and Bay Point buildings and trees reflecting in the Bay surface. Turkey sandwich for breakfast. Life is Good.

RSF&PTL

top image: sunset last evening, StAndrewsBay and the Moon