Our Purpose

 Our Purpose

By Bobby Neal Winters

What are we here for?

That’s an old question.  There are those who say we have no purpose.  We are here as worm food.  I would say they lack imagination.

The author of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis had a different idea.  He lays out the construction of the Cosmos. God made a place; got that place organized; put life in it; then God made Man to rule the whole thing.

The first chapter flows into the second chapter, but we start getting another story at verse four of chapter 2.  Some would say that it’s a completely disconnected creation story, but others might note that the folks who edited the Bible together were very, very smart and not only knew that but wanted us to see the two accounts together but in close proximity to each other.  The account in the second chapter has details missing from that of chapter one to the creation of Adam and Eve, man and woman.

We also see God giving Adam a tour of the place. Adam gets introduced to all the animals and gets to name them.  He is also given an order not to eat from a particular tree.  That sets a boundary and makes us look back at what it might mean “to rule.”

Man is not to be a despot; Man is accountable to God.  One might say “to rule” might be interpreted in modern parlance to be closer to meaning “to manage.”

Man is in charge, but Man is accountable.

And just to be sure there isn’t any misunderstanding, “Man” here is being used to mean “the species homo sapiens sapiens.” (Yes, that double sapiens belongs there.)

We are here to take care of Life.  The Way of Life is to be our purpose.

Adam was introduced by God to every animal.  This is still happening as the biologists delve into every nook and cranny of the planet and keep discovering new species and giving them names.

As of this writing, Life is still something of a mystery.  There are some who have quite boldly said that Life is just complicated chemistry.  To this I would reply two things: “You don’t know that” and “Just?”

The first reply is dangerous.  While on one hand, scientists have never created artificial life in the lab, they might’ve done that last night and it just hasn’t made the news yet. Some would call it a “God of the Gaps” argument. So yes, that reply could have a timestamp on it.

The second reply, though it is only one word, I’ll stand by. Life is wonderous.  Life goes on around us.  Bacteria can make other bacteria by splitting in two.  A woman’s body can make a baby out of dill pickles and ice cream.  Life is in every nook and cranny of this wonderful globe of ours and exists in places that are fearful to us.  

“Just” complicated chemistry. Bah! It is wondrous chemistry.

We are managers of Life.  We are to take care of Life.  God has trusted other of His children to us and we are to take care of them.

It is not a Boon; it is a Responsibility. 

In the current spectrum, there are those who would say we should delve into the world’s resources; get all we can; can all we can; sit on the lid; and poison the rest.

There are also those who say, homo sapiens sapiens is the problem, not the solution, and that we should work to eliminate ourselves in short order.  They are out there and they’ve made more headway than you might think.

I don’t aim to change the minds of the folks at either of those extremes. While each would deny any connection with the others, both are followers of the Way of Death.

For the rest, let me suggest another Way:  The Way of Life.

“Man,” the human race, homo sapiens sapiens, is still becoming what it will be.  We are still waking up in our surroundings.  We are still naming the animals and plants and every living thing. We are still figuring it all out.

Let us figure it out in a way that values the world around us, values beauty, values living things. 

Values Life.

Thinking about the big picture of Life, the Universe, and Everything is really hard.  The Universe goes out for at least 13 billion light years as far as we know.

That’s a bit too far for me.

I have to start at Me.  To manage Life, I must first manage myself. I must be mindful of my actions as that becomes possible. 

You can swirl into a black hole here if you aren’t careful. The fact is that some animals can’t eat without other animals dying.  But, as you see in the account in Genesis, Man is given explicit permission to eat plants.  After the Flood, Noah is given permission to eat animals too.  (There is a Biblical argument for vegetarianism sitting right there, but I am going to let it go.  It is a hard teaching.)

Before I swirl into that black hole, I will simply leave you with a question: What does it mean to value Life?  How do we pursue our purpose?

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

Summer is over

 Summer is over

By Bobby Neal Winters

During the second week of August, the thought came to my mind: You are not happy; you are in fact becoming depressed; something is the matter. One of my favorite passages of scripture began rolling around in my head, “The Harvest is over, summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

One wouldn’t have far to look for possible causes.  We’ve had one of the hottest, driest summers we’ve had in a long, long time. Even if you grew up in southern Oklahoma where summers like this one weren’t all that unusual, this sort of thing can get under your skin after a while.

From another angle, I’ve had minor issues with my health.  I discovered that I had a hernia and had the surgery to repair it.  Right on the heels of that, my wife and I got COVID.

And the two events above combined to knock us out of any recreational travel.  As much as I love this town, sometimes you just have to run to the literal fleshpots of Kansas City and have a little barbecue.

Whatever the cause, I was feeling grumpy. I was feeling very ill-used that school was about to start and I’d not been able to “sharpen the saw” over the summer.  Visions of disaster during the coming semester were beginning to loom before me.

Then something happened: The faculty came back.

We have a professional development day at PSU. It is organized by our Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology. They provide a framework, and the faculty and staff of the university provide the talks.

When I arrived at the east end of the first floor of Grubbs Hall where we were to pick up our schedules and saw my fellow teachers and members of university staff, it was like a trickle of electricity began to flow into my body.  Somewhere up in my brain, there was the sound of sparks flying and a voice that shouted: It’s alive.

I almost just wrote the sentence: “We human beings have a disease.” And that might be true, but I am not quite prepared to defend it. Let me roll it back and restart: “Those of us who live in the West have a disease.”

That disease is individuality.

And the word disease might be too strong. I am still thinking about that, but I thought I would toss it out there to give you the idea of the direction of my thinking. I will calibrate the magnitude in time.

In any case, we in the United States, Western Europe, and those within our sphere of influence labor under the misunderstanding, “Everybody ought to take care of himself.” And, “What I do is my business.”

Like all of the very best lies, these are partial truths.  They are part of a tightly woven tapestry that when you start pulling the threads out it all comes apart.

So it would be truer to say, “Everybody ought to take care of himself as much as possible, but we all need help from time to time and we need to take care of each other too.”  

And, “What I do is my business, but it ceases to be my business when it starts affecting others adversely.  Indeed, that can even happen when it starts hurting me because there are people who love me and count on me.”

As a Christian, I would say, “We are all brothers.” Some might not like the gender of that sentence.  “We are all family,” might work better. Pick the one of these that pleases you best.  Maybe I should just go with, “We are all God’s children.”  

The scientists would say, “We are a social animal.”  It’s simpler but very clinical. It lacks poetry.

Regardless, we need each other.

There is the common saying, “We are born alone and we die alone.”  Well, the first clause of that sentence is just an out and out lie. I don’t care who you are, your mother was there when you were born, and if you didn’t have quite a bit of attention for the first few years of your life, you wouldn’t be here.

Born alone, my saggy backside.

The dying alone bit is largely up to you. It can happen.

But dying alone isn’t being by yourself.  When Jean’s mother passedaway, the chaplain told us that sometimes people waited until they were physically by themselves to die.  It was something they prefered to do in private.  This was the way with Jean’s mom. Jean was with her to the wee hours; she seemed stable; so Jean came home. No sooner had she laid down than the phone call came from the hospital.

Dying alone is dying without anyone who cares about your passing.  To get a picture of what that looks like, read the Ghost of Christmas Future section of “A Christmas Carol.” 

So, yeah, this summer was like getting an ice cream cone slapped out of my hand.  The summer is over; the harvest is ended;  we are not saved.

But my siblings in arms are back at the university. We are all strapped back into the harness and working at the best job in the whole world: teaching.  

We bring each other energy; we bring each other life.

It’s going to be alright.

It is.

Really.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

 Wood glue and Metaphors

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am a teacher at base.  I’ve woven some interesting activities around this: woodworking, for example.

Before I started woodworking late last year, I never dreamed what a big part glue would play.

Sure, I knew the wood had to be held together somehow, but I thought nails or screws.  I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

For one thing, I’ve used precious few nails. In fact, if your definition of nail is too narrow, I haven’t used any.  I’ve used “pins.”  These pins aren’t exactly like the one’s used to hold pieces of cloth together.  

I bought myself a Ryobi pin nailer which shoots slender pieces of metal into wood (or you hand if you aren’t careful).  The metal of the pin (or brad) is about as thick as a thick staple.  

It turns out that for what I am doing, glue is foundational.

Now, as I said above, I have used pins.  I have also used more screws in the last six months than I had in the previous almost six decades of life.  However, the pins and the screws are pretty much there to keep the wood in place until the glue dries.

Here I would like to observe that I hadn’t worked much with glue since kindergarten or maybe first grade in art projects.  Now I find myself learning something that some use to earn a living.  Let us not poo-poo the commercial value of the arts, eh?

Another thing I have learned--first by hearing it in YouTube videos and then by seeing it with my own eyes--glue is stronger than wood. 

As I am a math teacher at base, and, as such, have the psychological need to make things overly precise, let me amplify that last point.  Wood consists of cellulose fibers that are held together by a natural substance called lignin.  Modern wood glue is stronger than lignin.  To see this, you can glue a couple of boards together properly and then break them apart.  When you do this, the wood will break before the glue does.

I’ve made myself a work table.  I made each leg by putting a pair of two-by-fours into an ell-shape; that is to say, the cross-section is an ell. I put my glue on the “two-inch” lateral side of one piece and laid it against the “four-inch” lateral side of the other.  Then I nailed them together with pins.  If it had been the pins alone, I would’ve been able to pull the pieces apart with my hands, but I clamped them and let them dry.  Now they are holding up a work table.

Wood-glue: It is great stuff.

I see my woodworking as being another creative outlet that runs parallel to my writing.  I have observed in this space before that I find them similar.  Each requires putting pieces together.  You work with each piece and you then put the pieces together.

My wife actually taught me that I needed to put pieces together.  She accomplished this in her own gentle way by saying, “I think you have a rough transition here.”  

So I needed something to hold it together.

There are lots of ways of doing this.  My favorite way is metaphor.  To my way of looking at things, metaphors are to writing as glue is to woodworking: they are stronger than the wood itself.

Often when we write, we do so to present what we perceive as a truth.  One way to do it is to use an extended metaphor which seems to be parallel to the truth we are trying to convey. Those who disagree with us can criticize our writing and tear it apart.

In cases such as this, often the metaphor will stand, but the rest of our writing will break.

For example, there might be some who would argue that writing is not like woodworking at all and give good, convincing reasons for it, thereby breaking this essay.  However, woodworking/wood glue are still good metaphors.

As with woodworking, there are some who are better at writing than others.  Some writers are better at using metaphors; some woodworkers are better at applying glue.

There is something to know.

When writers use metaphors, we are reaching out into the real world, the world of common shared experience.  We want something concrete that the reader can understand, so that they can use it as a guide to understanding what we are trying to actually tell them.

In a case like today, I thought I needed to do a little exposition on wood glue.  As I didn’t know anything about it before late last year, I thought many of my readers might not either.

This has the value that even if something breaks the essay, at least you’ve learned something.  And that’s what it’s all about for me in the end.

I am a teacher at base, after all.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

Long, Hot, Dry Summer and the Great Brown Spot

 Long, Hot, Dry Summer and the Great Brown Spot

By Bobby Neal Winters

Yesterday I mowed for the first time since mid-June. 

If you follow this space, you know I’ve had kind of an interesting summer. I had surgery to repair a hernia just after the 4th of July.  A little over two weeks later, I came down with COVID.

While either of those events could’ve affected my mowing schedule, neither of them actually did.  As those of you who work under the auspices of NALM (the National Association of Lawn Mowers) and seek to improve themselves and improve the world one lawn at a time, the weather this summer has been the overriding concern.

It simply stopped raining at some point.

Those of you who are absolute sticklers for the literal truth will note that there has been some scattered rain.

Well, yeah, there has.  Scattered be the key modifier there.  I remember one morning I got up to walk and experienced an 8-inch rain.  Eight-inch in the sense that the drops were falling 8 inches apart. 

The lack of rain affects mowing in two ways.  The first of these is that the grass simply doesn’t grow.  It gets to a certain point and says, “No, I am done.”

But there is also the dust.  The lack of rain causes dust;  Mowing stirs up the dust; and if you mow, you are walking around in a cloud of dust like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown. I once caught pneumonia from doing that when I was a teenager.

Yesterday, I caught things just right.  We had received just enough rain to settle the dust.  The backyard had begun to look a little scraggly. 

For those of you who are not familiar with the word “scraggly,” it is used by my people in the following way.  There comes a time in a young man’s life when he begins to shave.  At a certain point, he says to himself that he will try to grow a beard so he stops shaving.  The result of this is a beard described by the adjective “scraggly.” 

Just as the cure for a scraggly beard is to shave it, the cure to a scraggly lawn is to mow it.  The light, dust-settling rain we received gave me the window I needed.

Having been almost two months since I’d mowed, I was tuned into the whole experience.  I was attentive to even the most minute detail.  I gained some insights.

During normal times, my lawn suffers from--among other things--being shaded by a lot of trees.  The shade keeps the grass from getting all of the sunlight the rest of the grass gets. During times when we are actually getting rain, this is a bad thing, but when we have had weeks upon weeks of hot, dry, sunny weather, something else happens.

The shade has protected the grass beneath it.  It reduced the evaporation of what little moisture there was in the soil.

This was made clear to me when it came time to mow around the “Great Brown Spot.”

You have probably heard of the “Great Red Spot” on Jupiter.  It is a storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere that has been going on for hundreds of years.  Our astronomers have been observing it since almost the time of Galileo and wondered what it was for a long, long time. 

If there are astronomers on Jupiter who are looking our way, they have no doubt seen the “Great Brown Spot” in my backyard and are wondering what causes it.

The “Great Brown Spot” is the part of my lawn that gets the most direct sunlight.  In the spring, it is very healthy because of this.  It is not so much of an advantage in the midst of a hot, dry summer.

(As a side note, I got to thinking about what the astronomers on Jupiter would be like.  In science fiction, it has been speculated that the inhabitants of gas giants like Jupiter would have to be like dirigibles or blimps.  That is to say, they would be giant bags of gas.  This would make them ideal candidates for a life of politics or maybe even positions at the university, but I digress.)

In contrast to this, there are parts of the backyard that are positively verdant. I noticed that this required a combination of factors: 1) As noted earlier, shade; 2) being near the water spouts of the gutters from the house; 3) being near one of the flower beds that my wife waters.

Indeed, there is one spot that almost caused my mower to drown out.  We have a little inflatable pool for our grandsons to use.  It is filled with a garden hose which leaks.  The place where the hose leaks may be the nicest square-foot of lawn in town.

If it doesn’t rain, I won’t have to mow again this year, but quite frankly, I felt like a better human being once the job was done.  Maybe we should work in prayers for rain whenever we have the Lord’s attention.

Just sayin’.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )