Promoting the Worthy

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GREAT human being!
GREAT photographer!

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Brandon Sawaya

Aphorism #294

In any dispute,
there are numerous unhealthy and destructive causes
for people to automatically assume their own blamelessness
or rightness.
For the world to become a better place,
we all need to gain an intentional, sincere and systematic
distrust
of our own habits of blind self-affirmation.

Foo is Not Aborted

Foo Lear was not aborted. He survived the passage from salty sea to civilization. Many years later, no longer a leathery newborn, Foo would feel a yellow irony in the fact that two prominant biblical figures are on the record as wishing they had been abortions while political crazies on both sides were missing all the best points to be made about the issue. Many years after his eruption into our world, Foo would freely paraphrase the two prominant biblical figures thus:

Blow up the day on which I was born ... it didn’t halt the opening of my mother's womb ... Why couldn’t I have just died at birth?... Why did those knees open up for me, and why those breasts, so that I was bound to feed off of them? I could have just lain down and stayed still forever... like the dead fetuses they toss into dumpsters, I would simply not exist; not exist, just like those fetuses that never saw the light of day. (Job 3:3-16)

[Expletive deleted] the day I was born! [Expletive deleted] the man who brought the news to my father - "It’s a boy!" ... let that man be conquered like a city that was just asking for it ... because he did’nt abort me. My mother would have been a nice, warm grave! (Jeremiah 20:14-17)

Foo conjured his opinions in support of neither side of the debate. He always thought that each side deserved the other, and really gave the other all its justification for existence. The important thing to Foo - why he would eventually offer up with amazement his biblical paraphrases - was that Foo had, in fact, been born; and even way back in the olden days, to be born was the first miracle, whether it was wanted or not. (Foo eventually got to celebrate one of his pre-existence memories in which partially formed spirits of aborted fetuses got to have a special room in Heaven where they could read bible verses like Job’s and Jeremiah’s and high-five each other at their first big lucky break.)

Copyright © 2004 Donald L. McIntyre All Rights Reserved
Reprinted from http://angussavant.blogspot.com/

Failure Through Excellence

Failure Through Excellence:
Sixteen Reasons to Make Failure Your Goal

1. Because until you attain success, the goal of success is a temptation to discontentment.

2. Because you will be disillusioned when you discover that your success, which appeared majestic from below, is just one more dot on the map of infinity.

3. Because when success is the end you have in mind, everything else becomes a means to that end, so that all talk of love and goodness is just empty rhetoric.

4. Because human nature can not pursue success without turning it into a kind of self-important rivalry.

5. Because when you are successful at something, anyone who desires success in that same something will seek to destroy something.

6. Because success is not even possible. There is always - always - another horizon, another objective, something else to prove.

7. Because every human excellence is forged within the struggle itself, not in attaining the goal.

8. Because there is nothing more fickle than human praise, and nothing more silly than self-congratulation.

9. Because if success is your goal, you will ignore the dozens of better reasons to do your best.

10. Because the goals you choose for yourself are just arbitrary notions in a sea of shifting possibilities.

11. Because your truest calling can never be truly defined my words and ideas related to the concept of success.

12. Because if your goal is sufficiently noble, you can not possibly reach it.

13. Because the path to any worthy goal is paved with innumerable failures.

14. Because contentment in being average, or slightly below average, allows at least the possibility of relaxed gratitude for the good that is already present.

15. Because every true, great success is acheived by pursuing something other than success.

16. Because of everything I have not stated here that is explained by Tennessee Williams in his essay, "The Catastrophe of Success."

Status Report

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Kathy is currently in Las Vegas at a conference. She’s attending various seminars aimed at providing continuing education to critical care nurses. Since her hospital is paying for it, she has to attend most of the sessions. No chance for a “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” sort of experience, unless she’s willing to lose sleep, which is not her style.

In a little while, we’ll be traveling to Southern Cal to attend the wedding of one of the sons of our best friends. It will be a special time. The groom was once a student of mine. He’s a very special fellow. Now a Navy Seal, he is one of the classiest persons you’d ever want to know, and his bride-to-be is pretty special too. The whole thing inspired me to write a wedding song of sorts for the occasion.

Rick (the father of Lauren - Blake’s wife: We LOVE everyone in that whole family!) and I got to see Trent’s band perform at a very cool club in Tacoma. A great night! Three members: lead guitar/lead singer/main songwriter, bass player, and Trent on the drums. They are really VERY good, and I am so proud of how good Trent is on the drums. He is phenomenal. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is. . . that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living." (Yes, Eugene Peterson wrote a book whose title comes from this quote. Friedrich Nietzsche and Eugene Peterson: strange bedfellows!)

We are breathlessly awaiting Blake’s return from Iraq. Sometime this summer. Iraq is bad enough, and getting worse again, but I am so glad that he’s not in Afghanistan. These things are so complex and stupid and evil. Personally, I want Blake out of the military as soon as possible, not because being in the military isn’t an inherently noble thing, but because… (Never mind. The last thing any of us needs is another political tirade.)

Who knows what the future holds – for any of us, in any context? It continually amazes me what a thin, fragile, unstable foundation our earthly lives rest upon. Even more amazing is how much confidence people put in it. Voltaire was sooo right: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
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An Appropriate Time

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In Chapter 3 of the Book of Ecclesiastes, we are told that there is an appropriate time for everything. "There is a time for every purpose under heaven."

Why does that matter? Why did Pete Seeger waste such a great melody on such inane lyrics? I think I know.

Here is an example: Human beings need to be constantly reminded that there is a proper, appropriate season for giving birth, and that there is an equally proper, equally appropriate season for dying. Why do we need to be constantly reminded of this? Because if we are left to ourselves, we only will believe that birthing seasons are appropriate, and dying seasons will always be associated with fear, or someone who has put us in a rage.

If we are not reminded that there is a time to tear down or weep or mourn, we will tend to delude ourselves into thinking that, in a fair and just world, a right world, a God created world, there is only time to build up, laugh and dance.

There is, there must be, there will not stop being, times for war, hate, tearing apart, throwing away, giving up, and the like. Women generally and soft males, liberals and grumblers need to hear this, believe it, and accept it. There is, there must be, there will not stop being, times for peace, love, sewing together, keeping close, searching for the lost. Men generally and the women who want to rise to the top in traditionally male environments, conservatives and cynics need to hear this, believe it, and accept it.

Whoever I am, whatever I love and hate, I will tend to be a person who plants, and who will therefore be pained by the appropriate season of uprooting. Or vice versa.

Or I tend to shun embracing, and will therefore be pained by the appropriate season of embracing. Or vice versa.

Talkers (the "outgoing") or non-talkers (the "shy"); keepers ("pack rats") or those who throw away; stone gatherers or stone throwers - if we will not recognize that we are naturally one or the other kind of person, and find the courage to challenge ourselves that the other kind is not only bearable but good and right in it's time, it is another way of perpetuating the Grand Human Problem.

There is a time to show compassion and a time to judge.
There is a time to be liberal and a time to be conservative.
There is a time to persevere or be stubborn and a time to yield or give up.
There is a time to let your ideals rule the day and a time to let financial considerations make the decision.

And here's the final irony: most of us change back and forth like this anyway. Few of us are so loving that we don't hate someone. Few of us are so tight fisted with our money that we don't spring for certain luxuries. Few of us are so hard hearted that we can't cry in a situation that calls for it.

It's a matter of one's preferred identity coupled with conscious habits. Stubborn people like to think of themselves as merely persevering, and habitually ignore whatever makes them feel a sense of futility. Arrogant people like to think of themselves as merely confident, and habitually ignore whatever makes them feel small. Frightened people like to think of themselves as merely unassuming, and habitually ignore whatever stirs an impulse of bold action.

There is a time to run away in fear of something that we can't bear. But this moment is a time to show courage and admit an uncomfortable truth.

[2004, 2010]

My Three

Don and Nature Love Each Other