HOWDYING THE UNIVERSAL CREATIVE IMPULSE

Normally I greet people with a howdy. I grew up howdying back on the farm in Kentucky, gave it up when I noticed college classmates smiling when I said it, but years later took it up again when I realized that my hard-staring, slow-to-smile face and large size intimidates people. When you greet someone with a big howdy you instantly label yourself as a witless buffoon, but at least people from the beginning intuit that you're not out to mess with them, and things go easier all around.

Now let me tell you how howdying relates to this Newsletter, the Winter Solstice coming up this Tuesday, December 21st, and the Universal Creative Impulse out of which we all blossom.

The Universe began with a Big Bang and continues to expand, its rate of expansion accelerating even still. It's clear that the Universal Creative Impulse (the Creator) urgently desires presence and evolution toward ever greater sophistication..

The history of Life on Earth confirms this insight, for as soon as Earth was cool enough for it to happen, life arose, and then it also lustily evolved. Evolution of Life on Earth further shows direction -- from simple to complex, and from species incapable of thought, to us.

Seeing all this, this question arises:

If the Creator appears to be impatient with Her creating and evolving, and here on Earth the human brain appears to be a crowning achievement of Her evolutionary efforts, what's that brain supposed to be used for?

I'm thinking that the highest calling of the human brain must be this: To observe -- to study -- what's around us, until we genuinely begin appreciating the Creation's incredible complexity, beauty, and mystery.

We're the Creator's nerve endings.

Well, if there's one day of the year when we of the Northern Hemisphere should find it appropriate to reflect on the majesty of the Creation, it's the Winter Solstice, when Earth's annual cycle starts all over again -- when days end their six months of getting shorter each day and begin another six months of growing longer each day.

Thus today's Newsletter, being the last before the Winter Solstice, is dedicated to my formally and publicly stating before the Creator that I'm exquisitely agog at all She's done and is doing.

Moreover, I cast my greeting as a howdy to emphasize that, though I recognize my own meanness here cocooned within so many layers of unfulfilled human potentials, I am well meaning with my greetings. I don't mean to be pretentious by greeting the Big #1. Pretentious people don't howdy...

And because I sense that the Creator is better pleased with good, lusty bawls than timid, candle-holding and incense-fogging religious dithering, more than a simple "Howdy" on this eve of the Winter Solstice I herewith issue to the hallowed presence all around me, clear out to eternity, this good ol' Minnie Pearl...

"How-DEEEEEEEEE!"