Why I walk

Between time on the road, in the forest, and on snowshoe, I walk between 600 and 1000 miles a year.  I started to walk as a way to add some activity to my life and to make sure the terriers in my life did not drive my wife insane.  I have found in walking, however, unexpected benefit and unexpected joy.  I continue to walk for a whole other set of reasons than I started.

The sapien who moves at an automobile's pace sees almost nothing.  The cyclists can manage little more.  Not only does the scenery pass too quickly, the mind must remain occupied, at least partly, on keeping the car on the road or the bicycle in its lane.  Driving and cycling are about reacting to the world as it speeds toward you.  Walking allows a person to actually analyse and start to understand what they see.

When we walk, devoid of distractions, we have the freedom to think.  Walking allows me to consider if my life is moving in the direction I would choose.  Walking gives me the opportunity to explore new parts of my geography and see old geographies in new ways.

While walking through a landscape you get the opportunity to see how the world works.  I get the opportunity to flush grouse and understand their habitat.  I wander into areas less traveled and understand how our urban, suburban, and rural infrastructures work, how it is maintained, and where it is failing.  I find bones, plants escaped from domestication, birds outside their normal range.  

I've found stolen copper dumped in the woods.  I've met some nice game wardens and local police.  I've witnessed drug deals and police officers acting, unnecessarily aggressive.  If you want to see the world, you need to get out in it.  If you want to understand it, you need to look at it slowly.

We evolved to walk and to see the world at a walker's pace.  

Socrates was a walking man, so were Nietzsche, Rousseau, and Kant.  Hippocrates recommended it as the best form of exercise.  Only the domestication of the horse made any other pace possible and even that was limited to short bursts. Those who rode on horseback as they traveled the American West, viewed that land at the pace of a fast walk.

The automobile has only been around for the last five human generations.  It is a wonderful way to get from point A to point B.  It is wholly inadequate way to see what lies between.

Walking allows you to make fewer assumptions, to set aside the cartoonish  world inside your brain and be confronted by how it is in textured detail.  The hard working half-crippled mother walking from the bus so early in the morning and the realization that more goes on in this neighborhood than the crime which makes the news.  The moment in the woods you wish you had a gun.  The ATV damage done to public land, the overheard gossip between jogging med school students, the difference in light rail stations based upon the socio-economic neighborhoods they are located.

There is an element of escape in the regular walk.  Any healthy dog would love to be your companion.  A well trained dog is a joy to have along.

It is a difficult hobby to criticize.  If I were at the bar or bowling alley every day at noon, the bride would be right to complain.  Perhaps she'd also be right to complain about how much time I spend in field and forest, but she also sees how it has improved my own mental health.

The truth is, she's usually pretty happy to get me out of the house.  I might be a more likeable person when physically tired by a walk but I am also less weary of life in the world.  Its all good, I like her more after I've walked a good 5 to 8 miles too.
  
I walk for the same reason a diabetic eats whole grains or the constipated man his oatmeal, I have developed the chronic illness of the speed and power available in the Anthropocene and am seeking the relief of a more humane pace and a more human way of looking at the world.  My physical health has improved but more than my physical health has improved.

Found: pigeon raising was still a thing?  Thanks to the internet, I was able to inform the owner of the final disposition of his bird.

Found: a field of lupine, food source for the endangered Karner Blue butterfly.

Found: one man's littering is another man's artful image.

Found: sometimes we walk to bring joy to others and other times we bring sustenance home.

Found: campus art.

Found: beautiful death eaters.

Found: let's see what's down there!

Found: a den.

Found: how city life is possible.

DB Cooper Day

Today is my birthday but the celebration is postponed until tomorrow.  It started as a compromise but it became something a little more serious.

My bride likes to celebrate birthdays and for the first twelve years of marriage she was content to make sure that I celebrated her's, and then the children's.  No harm there, all good fun.

As the kids got a little older, it wasn't enough to celebrate four birthdays however, she tried to rope me into the whole ordeal.  It was important for the kids, she thought, to learn to give through marking my birthday.

I don't want my birthday celebrated and I have to ask you, dear reader, to trust me when I say that it is not because I have a fear of growing older or having my life slip away unawares.  It just don't like arbitrary celebrations.

Today is the anniversary of my birth and, though I am an adult, there is cake a presents.  For what?  To commemorate the fact that I have not died yet?  What if I'd spent the last year lying in bed, eating Oreo cookies, and pleasuring myself?  Would we still celebrate that?

They love me.  I get it.  Can't we all just shut off the lights when we leave the house or close your bedroom door so the rescue terrier isn't tempted to turn your stuffed animal into his chew toy?

Add Facebook to the mix and I have maybe hundreds of people, prompted by algorithm to wish me a happy born day.  People I have not seen in twenty-five years or more wishing me a happy birthday.  Yes, their intentions are innocent.  They are, each and every one of them, more generous human beings than I.

There is no problem, really, but I have as much right to my curmudgeonly ways as everyone else has to their thoughtless traditions.  I merely need to remind myself, "There is no why" and move on.

When the wife and children have conspired together, one is compelled.  How does one react when faced with a meaningless exercise when participation is outside of one's own control?  Fill it with meaning.

Consequently, part of my annual "spiritual" practice has been the celebration of D.B. Cooper Day.

For those of you too young or too preoccupied to remember, DB Cooper was/is a criminal.  There is no legal excuse for his actions but, speaking of morals, his error was much smaller.  We he did he accomplished with a degree of excellence that few humans can ever hope to attain in their own vocations.  Despite his crime, this is what makes him worthy of reflection every November 24th.

The brief version from Wikipedia:

D. B. Cooper is a media epithet popularly used to refer to an unidentified man who hijacked a Boeing 727 aircraft in the airspace between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, on November 24, 1971, extorted$200,000 in ransom (equivalent to $1,170,000 in 2015), and parachuted to an uncertain fate. Despite an extensive manhunt and an ongoing FBI investigation, the perpetrator has never been located or positively identified. The case remains the only unsolved air piracy in American aviation history.^[1][2][3]

The suspect purchased his airline ticket using the alias Dan Cooper, but because of a ^[1][4] The discovery of a small cache of ransom bills in 1980 triggered renewed interest but ultimately only deepened the mystery, and the great majority of the ransom remains unrecovered.

news media miscommunication he became known in popular lore as "D. B. Cooper". Hundreds of leads have been pursued in the ensuing years, but no conclusive evidence has ever surfaced regarding Cooper's true identity or whereabouts. Numerous theories of widely varying plausibility have been proposed by experts, reporters, and amateur enthusiasts.

While FBI investigators have stated from the beginning that Cooper probably did not survive his risky jump,^[5] the agency maintains an active case file—which has grown to more than 60 volumes^[6]—and continues to solicit creative ideas and new leads from the public. "Maybe a hydrologist can use the latest technology to trace the $5,800 in ransom money found in 1980 to where Cooper landed upstream," suggested Special Agent Larry Carr, leader of the investigation team since 2006. "Or maybe someone just remembers that odd uncle."^[5]

As for me, I hope we never see Ol' D.B. Cooper again.

Here are the important parts.

• No one was ever put at risk except Cooper himself.  There was no real bomb.  He did not hit or abuse anyone.  He did what he felt he needed to do, and he was a gentleman about it.
• He kept his mouth shut.  Maybe this is because he died in the jump, but I am inclined to think he lived at least a bit longer.  As coach said about sportsmanship, "Win like it happens everyday."
• He was excellent.  His plan shows creativity and originality.  He was fit.  He was smart.  He did what he knew with professionalism and style.  He stuck it to the man without hurting a soul.

Could we all do what we believe needs to be done with such intelligence, daring, and, yes, virtue?  We should all try to be as excellent as Mr. D.B. Cooper.

Does it matter that his excellence was demonstrated through the breaking of the law?  Through stealing money from an airliner?  Through transgressing the property rights of Northwest Orient Airlines?

Not to me.  If you think you can become a better human being without transgressing some social norms, I'd wonder if you've put much critical thought into what it means to be an excellent human being and the limits of culture and civilization.  An excellent racehorse is not like every other race horse.  An excellent hunter is not like every other hunter.  An excellent homo sapiens is not just like every other homo sapiens.  Just don't put anyone else at risk in the process.

So on the 24th of every year, ,my family celebrates D.B. Cooper Day.  The month before the 24th of November is spent reflection upon what disciplines I might undertake in the next twelve months that would make me a more excellent human being, and only rarely things that I want to accomplish by those disciplines.  Embracing disciplines are within my grasp.  Knowing what will come out of them is not.  I write the goals down in a notebook, and tell no one.

The purpose of keeping my goals a secret is because it avoids the tenancy to seek praise for good intentions.  Don't praise me for committing to loose fifty pounds, but you might notice that I do not use the elevator on even numbered months, eat a simpler diet, and maybe have lost thirty.

Don't praise me for taking an aggressive stance toward improving my own mental health, but a careful observer might notice that I seem happier and more relaxed since I started journaling through Epictetus' Discourses or Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.

Being honest, no one watches a man in his mid-forties that closely so most of the goals take place in blissful secrecy.  I've yet to decide a hard rule about sharing the discipline successess or failures after the year has passed.  Perhaps with friend who knows me well enough?  I've got one or two of those.

Yes, and the wife makes a cake for D.B. Cooper Day and this year it will have 42 candles on it.  The children will "Happy Birthday" (though soon maybe we can replace that with the DB Cooper song below... maybe I should learn the chords) but at least the celebration comes with some reflection and expectations for the months to come.  If one is going to bother being alive another year, might as well make good use of that year.

Natural Forces

Homo sapiens is as much a product of nature as the whitetail and the wolf.  Each of us is a natural force.

To the extent there is such a thing as human exceptionalism, it lies in the fact that human excellence is not a matter of genetics but rather it is fostered.  We're not born with it, we make movements towards it.  We can gain wisdom.  We can become courageous.  We can learn temperance.  We can become practiced in justice.

I've know some people born with two strikes against them who went on to be models of human excellence.

We each have the power to live according to human nature, we all have the potential to be excellent sapiens.

If change is called for,

• put down the Coors Lite,
• turn off the television,
• stop praying to be changed,
• bid your former life goodbye.

/sermon

Home is where my hunt is,

"Natural Forces"

I rode across the great high plain
Under the scorchin' sun and thru the drivin' rain
An' when I set my sights on the mountains high
I bid my former life goodbye.

An' so thank you ma'am, I must decline
For it's on my steed I will rely
An' I've learned to need the open sky
I'm subject to the natural forces
Home is where my horse is.

We loaded up in Buffalo
Took 90 South down to Ohio
On 80 West I'm Frisco-bound
An' when I get there I'll turn back around

An' so thank you ma'am, I must decline
For it's on these eighteen wheels I ride
An' I'm underneath the western sky
I'm subject to the natural forces
Home is where my horse is.

And ev'ry year they come to town
An' then drag em on right in the round
And Mr Bradley calls the score
And the cowboy there who tried for more

So thank you ma'am, I must decline
For it's on my three-year-old I ride
An' I've spin an' run an' stopped an' slide [?]
I'm subject to the natural forces
Home is where my horse is.

[Instrumental]

The Cherokee an' the Chickasaw
Creek Seminole an' the old Choctaw
"We volunteered to move!" they say
"And we'll understand, come Judgement Day".

An' so thank you ma'am, I must decline
For it's on this trail of tears I ride
An' I'm under Oklahoma skies
Sometimes at night I hear their voices
Home is where my horse is.

Now as I sit here safe at home
With a cold Coors Lite an' the TV on
All the sacrifice and the death and woe
Lord I pray that I'm worth fighting for

An' so thank you ma'am, I must decline
For it's on my RPG I ride
Till Earth an' hell are satisfied
I'm subject to the natural forces
Sometimes at night I hear their voices
Home is where my horse is.
Home is where my horse is.

Need?

Life is Hard

And that is what makes it worth doing.

Whether you are sharpened or dulled by the grit just depends upon your angle of approach.

Shooters, Hunters, and Moral Sentiments

An earnest young man called me earlier in the season to help with a track.

Hunting on family land twenty minutes from my house, he was in the midst of that awkward transition from gun hunter to bow hunter.

His bow was a newer compound, tricked out with stabilizer and sights; his arrows, quiver, and clothes were all top of the line.  He had more than enough gadgets to be successful at his current level of development.

I want him to be successful.  More than that, however, I hope he continues to develop and become ever less a gadget empowered harvester of meat and more and more a hunter.

Traditional bow hunting is like throwing a baseball.  It takes time.  Would we call him a ball player if he needed sights and a range-finder to throw out a runner on second?  It is experience which teaches the hunter to say, "I don't know how far away it is, but when something is that far away, I shoot like this" or "I should not take that shot."

Even with gadgets bow hunting is less precise than gun hunting.  And while our weapons, expertly used, are more lethal and less disturbing to the animal made dead, few of us are experts.  In the hands of a student, and I count myself a student, our weapons are less lethal than the gunpowder alternative.

Using his .22 my son gave me three chances to hit the dot once,
with a bow I could probably have hit the jug twice.

Thanks to hydrostatic shock, gun shot deer rarely survive even an imperfect shot from a hunter using an appropriate cartridge.  A hit yet unrecovered deer feels like a moral failure to the gun hunter, but moral sentiments honed as a gun-hunter do not always apply to the very different act of bow hunting.

It is the experience of bow hunting over gun hunting which teach the young man to recognize how many deer survive the imperfect shot.

  They can live just fine with one collapsed lung, especially if that lung is hit high, decreasing the amount of bleeding the deer experiences.

Deer might still be seen participating in the rut after an arrow passes through the dead zone of a high back shot (above the lungs/below the vertebrae).

Nearly every week I meet a hunter with a story of finding a broadhead inside a deer they kill or scar tissue on the pelt.

An imperfect release, wind, or a branch can throw off a bow shot.  The deer has more of an opportunity to move, even jumping or crouching at the sound of the bowstring.  This is what challenges us to know our prey better, to hone our craft.  This is what forces modern man to move from participating in the shooting sport, which is modern gun hunting, to become a hunter in tune with his prey.

The bow hunter does not have a dispensation to be reckless but must recognize and accept more things are outside of her control.  It means the individual is progressing from harvester of meat to hunter.  When you are a hunter, the prey often escape.  We serve the herd not because we intend to take the weakest and least fit but because the strongest and most fit escape our grasp.

If your interpretation is wrong, your moral sentiment will be flawed.

Far from a Cartesian when it comes to animal welfare, I am not so much of a narrow-minded ape as to think that animals experience pain in the same fashion as homo sapiens. Descartes was wrong, but he was not an idiot.  He merely misinterpreted certain observations of non-human animals.  Who isn't guilty of that mistake?

I have cleaned maggots out of the wounds of apparently calm bovine.  I have burned the horn buds of goats and watched them playfully skip away seconds later.  I have watched bow shot deer walk away with barely a flinch.If you have not been surprised at how different animals experience pain, I suspect you've not spent too much time around animals.

Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments wrote,

Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blame-worthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame.

Bow hunting is a moral act and should be done in which a wise bow hunter would recognize as "lovely."

But like any virtue it is gained through time, experience, and failure.  We must first recognize what we do not know, cling tightly to what remains, then maybe we begin to recognize "the lovely," and finally to cultivate it within the self.  

Animals feel physical and emotional pain and we should seek to avoid inflicting it unnecessarily.  The bow hunter, once he has learned to recognize the avoid the irresponsible shot, need not feel guilty about the unrecovered deer.  It probably survived.  It suffered, but not in the fashion or to the degree we're inclined to think.

I regularly hear hunters say, "I respect the deer too much to let it go to waste."  That is a good start, but there is no waste.  If it did not survive, than it fed coyote, fox, raccoon, and any number of species of bird, including the proud bald eagle. There is no waste.  All flesh eats flesh.  We hunt because we are part of the biome, part of the ecological system, so are those coyotes.

We show it respect by what is in our control: making every effort to recover the deer we pursued.

An interview with the author

If we did not fail, we would not recognize the need to develop the resources to improve our character: to become more patient, more courageous, more wise.  Without falling short of our expectations we would not recognize the need to spend more time with our equipment; we would not recognize the need to practice the simple act of standing up in your stand, the mental toughness of waiting to begin a track, the courage to limit your hunting practice so that it is more challenging for you and improving the odds for your prey.

There is no fault in being human.  If hunters were always successful, we'd have destroyed the planet long ago.  I'm no longer a pastor but my contribution as a tracker often feels pastoral.  I meet people whose conscience, by my own flawed understanding, are just a little malformed.  I try to point them in a direction compatible with the human experience of a hunter, which is the experience of an imperfect, earthbound predator.

Working as a tracker has further challenged my ability to accept the things outside of my control (a blog post to come later), but more important than the unexpected challenges has been the unexpected joys.  I have learned from wiser and more experienced hunters, I have been a small part of the education of others.  

Rapid Adaptation

Human pressures have left no ecosystem untouched.  Catastrophists look at the trends and assume they will continue unchecked.  Of course nothing continues unchecked, except maybe black holes and even they are influenced by one another.

One scientists (momentary) inability to repeat his own experiment in coral bleaching serves as an example,

Rosenberg had come to a different conclusion. He’d noticed clumps of rod-shaped bacteria amassed at the borders of bleached regions of corals, suggesting infection. If he first treated the seawater with antibiotics, killing the resident bacteria, and then raised the temperature on corals in tanks, the corals never bleached. Heat alone didn’t drive disease, it seemed. Bacteria somehow contributed. 

He isolated one bacterium called Vibrio shiloi—a distant relative of cholera—that prompted coral disease. It was an opportunist: harmless at normal temperatures, but pathogenic when conditions grew warmer.In 1996, he published his findings in Nature. But now, a decade later, he and his graduate students tried to replicate the experiment, and failed—twice. The vibrio bacterium no longer seemed to cause disease.“The coral had become resistant,” Rosenberg told me. “This was a blow.” 

He began brainstorming possible explanations. Humans and other vertebrates have adaptive immune systems. With exposure to pathogens, our immune systems can learn and remember. When we encounter a pathogen we’ve seen before, we can repel it before it harms us. That’s the principle underlying vaccines. But corals lack an adaptive immune system. They couldn’t gain immunity from prior exposure the same way.

It turns out that just as a disease can move through a population like wildfire, so can a probiotic answer to that infection.  Moreover,the same human cargo ships that transport infections across vast oceans can't also transport probiotic responses to that infection.

Yep, invasive species can be your friend.

Creatures can adapt to changes in their environment not only through the multi-generational result of selection according to our genetic fitness to the environment but in the relatively short amount of time our symbiotic microbes.

Extinction and Evolution

Some researchers make a strong argument that the American microbiom has changed since the 1980's and is one of the forces driving the current obesity epidemic.  Right now it must remain at the level of hypothesis, you could fill hard drives with what we do not know about the microbes living within our digestive tracts.  I can only hope some future oriented surgeon at a research hospital is storing samples for future analysis of change over time.

Life is adaptive.  Yes, mass extinction is a pragmatic concern to those of us who want to see our species succeed over time, but extinction is not the only story at work.  Evolution is the yang to its yin.  From every mass extinction comes a new diversity.  Concern over the loss of the most present equilibrium is, at worst, a pragmatic concern, the equilibrium of the most recent past was good to our species.

Even our attempts to "think globally" are anthropocentric to the core.

But the earth doesn't care if our species succeeds over time.  The universe doesn't care and, ultimately, extinction is unavoidable.  By all means, examine your life and live a life of virtue, but virtue is a good part temperance.  In this case that means not thinking too highly of either yourself or our species.  Even if we make the planet inhabitable for homo sapiens, it has been before and it will be again.

You, the species, even the existence of any form of life on this globe is "only for now."

Last Thoughts on an Untamed Man

This month my family buried my grandfather.  I was honored with the task of giving the eulogy.

New York Times columnists David Brooks has written recently about the distinction between "resume virtues" and "eulogy virtues."  Resume virtues being those things that you do in order to become a member of the coastal elite.  Eulogy virtues being, well, those things recognized as virtuous across time and space.

I can agree with him that it is time to give more attention to eulogy virtues over the resume but I question the premise that an impressive curriculum vitae can be considered "virtuous" in any meaningful sense of the term.

At best resumes are a way to communicate your skills for a job.  Among the aspirational classes, however, they have become a way to demonstrate that you are willing to sacrifice a balanced life, to sell out a sense of self to conform to the management fad de jour, to ignore the existence of the eulogy virtues, for the sake of looking good on paper.

Maybe you would have volunteered for that reading program regardless, but your willingness to try to cash in on it leaves me skeptical.  It's not a virtue if you try to get paid for it.

They're not "resume virtues" it is called constructing a personal brand and I call it a vice.  "Know Thyself" the ancient Greeks counseled.  If you spend your life conforming yourself to someone else's expectations in return for money, acceptance or any other thing you're asking for sorrow.  It makes no substantive difference if the expectations your submitting to emerge from a boyfriend, your mother, or the human resources department at Goldman Sachs.

It is slavery without the whip.  It is the slavery of a civilization which substitutes conformity of outlook with ability, where the letters after one's name is valued above the character imbued in the person.  Resume virtues is just a euphemism for trading the birthright of being born free for a little porridge.


News flash: New York Times columnist out of touch with the human experience.  I know, I know #DogBitesMan

Early this month my family gathered to bury had a better understanding of virtue.  He never studied the subject.  He didn't know the difference between a Ionic or Doric column or between a Stoic and an Epicurean.

His virtues were not cut and pasted from a book.  They had not been modified by critical theory.

Formed and selected by their time and place through unreflective evolution, they were wild. He did not argue the nature of "the good" but sought to go out and be good.

Wild is not always better, ask him who has tried to eat a wild grape or compared wine made from it compared to its domesticated cousin.  But that untamed man never confused those skills by which he made his living for his sense of virtue, from a critical sense of good and ill from which an artful life is hew.

His faults were that of the wild vine.  Wildness may lack an element of discipline but has its own strength.  Thoreau was right when he observed,

The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

His virtue was wild and it was the source of his strength.  That kind of man may not be advantaged in the present, but he will survive.  When civilization crumbles, it is that kind of untamed women and men who will rebuild it.

Last Thoughts on Daniel Lyndon Winings

1927-2015

A few years ago this family gathered together along with our friends to say goodbye to my cousin Jake.  It was an unexpected loss and soon after arriving I needed a few moments to myself. 

I found a quiet place and sat down in front of an elderly couple and closed my eyes.  A few moments later, in a voice much louder than he intended, the elderly man behind me said, "There he is!  That is Daniel Winings.  I worked with him at the Oliver plant.  Let me tell you, that man could work." 

Family, friends, let me tell you, this man Daniel Lyndon Winings, he could work.  But there was more to the man than just work. 

Raised on a farm when his father was still farming with horses and mules, his mother dried cheese curds on the clothes line, and the only refrigeration was well water, he left that farm and joined the war effort as soon as he was able. 

After preparing for an invasion of the home islands that never came, he was two ships over when the surrender treaty was signed.  He took part in the repatriation of Japanese soldiers from China.  This Westervelt farm boy walked the grounds of Tienanmen Square.

The author and his grandpa in the 20th century.

Let me tell you, Daniel Lyndon Winings knew how to stand up for what he believed in. 

Coming home, he won Grandma Jeans heart and even after they were married continued to woo her with nights out dancing at the Moose Lodge.  Let me tell you, the man Daniel Lyndon Winings knew how to love. 

Even after a Friday night out, if he'd made a commitment to one of his children, he'd be up early the next morning with them.  Daniel Lyndon Winings knew how to keep his word. 

Prior to the 1920's change was slow.  He would have been impressed by the quality but a rich farmer from the Middle Ages would have recognized most of the equipment on Great-Grandpa's farm.  In an age of Ipad's and GPS guided planters, that is not true today. 

Social scientists who study this kind of thing say that half of the technological change our species has experienced since it stepped off the savanna until the present has happened since the 1920's.  It happened in this man's lifetime.  He may have stopped being hip sometime in the Eisenhower administration but let me tell you, this man knew how to change. 

I was fortunate to know the man.  I am honored to me numbered among his descendants.  He had  as many faults as any other human being but let me tell you, 

This man knew how to work.

This man knew courage.

This man knew how to love.

This man knew how to keep his word.

This man knew how to change.

His life was a gift.  His memory is a blessing. 

The philosopher Epictetus in the second century AD wrote, "Never say, 'I have lost it' but rather, 'I have given it back.'" 

We have not lost Daniel Lyndon Winings.  We are giving him back. 

We give his flesh back to this black earth which nourished it.  We give his spirit back to the god who sparked it. 

This man knew how to work,but he left work for us to do.

This man knew courage, and we can face our own challenges with the same.

This man knew love, and we treat our loved ones the same.

We too can keep our word, even when it is difficult.

We too can learn to live in a world that is ever changing.

Yes, this man knew how to work and his legacy is not finished working in us.

Join me in a word of prayer.
Creating god,
This man's flesh came from the earth, 

we return it.

This man's spark sprang from the forging fire of the cosmos, 

we return it.
This man's flesh and spark walked among us and left a legacy; 

that legacy remains with us.   

It is ours.  We honor it.  We cling to it.   

We are strengthened by it.
In that legacy we find the peace to carry on.
Amen.

Grandpa's house is empty now.