We Rise Together. On virtue, goals and other such static concepts.

We rise together.

And what are we?  Me, standing here as insistent as a toothache, your brother, the other shoe in the trashcan.  Brought together by court ordered visitation, we are two legs pumping, achieving tandem through some candid form of natural Fibonacci sequence.  But where are we going?

"I want everybody to succeed."  -Deon Sanders

"Lord-willing, and if the creeks don't rise." -Milton Bradshaw

Consider it. What if I reached the magical land of success and fulfillment and you weren't there?  Well, maybe it'd give me time to pour some wine and fluff a pillow.  What if I were looking up from the bottom of my well, watching you across the interminable?

We could spend an untold wealth of time and processing power in the pursuit of a definition of success.  People have different goals, and if that infinity wasn't large enough a grouping of ideas, then we have the means and methods of attainment, which is an even larger infinity.

Virtue is a noun, and the previously Puritanical moralist America would define virtue as either end-point righteousness, the goal, or perhaps the mean, such little temperances and self-denials that we think make us closer to the deity.

Ancient philosophy defines virtue as the means and dictums that achieve the goal.

The goal is the Chief Good, and that in itself can mean so many things to so many people, where Puritancal America gave it to a "cabin in glory land", the achievement of a place in heaven in the afterlife.  I do note that some petition for a dream home in this life, but it was said the savior had went forward to glory to prepare a place.

I heard that the victory of virtue is joy.

I heard that exercising creative impulses is joy.

I heard that joy is the pursuit, and not the destination.

Is joy an end?  Or is it just an emotion, a perception, internally of the end-point?  The "point b" on the ray of the life, that ever-elusive destination somewhere between all the government forests, that Xanadu or Silverado, in the acid western that is Chesterfield County.

The chief good-the entire point of the thing-is said to be "self-evident", like in the Preamble("we hold these truths to be self-evident"), instantly recognizable, something very human, very common to all in the thoroughfare.

For the Apostle Paul, sin is the opposite of virtue and one of his practical arguments for the avoidance of sin, is that sin is "inconvenient".

At King Biscuit Flour, there is that old diesel THUNK-THUNK-THUNK-ing, the blooming and blossoming, of the corn blossoms, et al, the apparatus churning that corn into the precious stuff: grits.  The pine trees assaulting with something like cumin or curry; the fish opening their gaping mouths for worms from heaven to all in to them, propitiously, and virtue, the common signal horn peppering us in the stately halls of purpose, intent: our families, our homes, our legacies, as we discontinue various grievances and indulgences and strive, reach for the more ecumenical, evangelical, and the more conducive of joy, hope, and peace.