Good morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Wednesday ADD Irregulars, WSN Curators and Curmudgeons.
A bit of a reprint from 2022. I had written this with thoughts of Sept on my mind and they return with my gratitude for Fred and this community. An edited reprint of sorts of all of you Irregular and Curmudgeons.

Gratitude on my mind

A dear friend at Rubin Report @SEPTUAGENARIAN is in critical condition and would like to leave this world behind. My unexpected friendship with her in the last two years is on my mind so I thought some quotes about friendship would be in order. Sept tried to scare me off, she couldn't ever imagine knowing and relating to a priest as someone who could be a potential friend. Life is full of surprises.

I am a great lover of the Divine and a great lover of humanity. I can't say that I love the whole lot of humanity, collectively we seem to be mob waiting to happen, a clash of egos that often implodes. But one soul at a time, I love that encounter. One person engaging with another, the opening of the story of one's life, those moments give me such hope for what God designed or evolution pushed out of the mud.

Yeah, there are plenty of screwballs in humanity, God knows (And He does) I have done my fair share of adding to the mess, but there is so much good to be discovered as well. Not everyone is healthy, some of us are so ill personally from family history, our own poor choices and various addictions that purported to be friends all they while they enslaved us. Some of those souls take extra time to find the gold, to wipe away the muck that life has piled upon their lap. You have to want to find the gold, or the temptation to remain a victim is powerful in a culture that exalts victimhood over the pursuit of happiness. Happiness is not guaranteed, just the freedom to pursue it according to one's best judgement. Well enough rambling, on to some quotes. To the friends I have discovered here, thank you. To the friends I have yet to meet, I can't wait to be surprised. Peace.

Thank you, Fred, and the ADD Irregulars for being something I look forward to every morning without any expectation, just a hopeful opportunity to chat with friends, laugh at life, appreciate the blessings and commiserate on the mess of so many things without surrendering to the doom. Sure, there are plenty of black pills, but amidst them are reasons to hope, and treasures to be found and shared. Thank you all.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

A friend is one of the nicest things you can have and one of the best things you can be. - Winnie The Pooh

There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met. - William Butler Yeats

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend. - Robert Louis Stevenson

Meramec Springs State Park. - photo by Rufus Harmon