Truth

I've been reading The Greater Journey, by David McCullough about Americans who went to Paris in the 19th century to enhance their education and bring back their new knowledge to the United States.  Paris was the cultural and medical center of the world at that time.  For example, medical students, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., James Jackson, Jr. and others who, during their 20's, most of them, went to learn their profession.  But they not only learned their profession, they remarked how much they valued truth.  Others, such as Samuel Morse, whom most of us know first because of his telegraph, went to study and practice painting, writing.  Charles Sumner, who eventually became an anti-slavery legislator, went simply to learn more.  He put his mind to whatever learning he could. 

Truth to me is usually beauty.  The above photo is from the paths of the Joseph Smith Memorial in Sharon, VT during the spring of 2011.  This scene's only human contrivance is the path that leads through it.  The new green of the leaves, the tall, dark tree trunk, the underbrush, the brown, dead leaves that have returned to the forest floor to nourish it.  It's all beautiful! 

Truth to me is learning how the body works and how perfectly it was designed to maintain our lives, repair itself, work and improve the mind, exert physical labor and take in nutrition to keep it healthy.  It knows how to extract what doesn't belong in it or it has ways of letting us know to help it.  Truth is seeing the desert with the sagebrush scattered all over the earth floor, wildflowers here and there to add beauty to is and nutrition to whatever life is there that can use it.

Truth means knowledge and use of knowledge to improve one's mind to assist, to create, to think, to solve problems, to help, to beautify, to appreciate, to improve.  I love truth.  It's vast and overwhelming and exhilarating.  Truth is looking at the sky at night and down a mountain during the day.  Truth is feeling healthy, building--building people up, building necessary structures, learning about our world.  Truth is learning history, sorting things out properly. 

This is a feeble attempt to describe my feelings about truth and what it is.  I understand so very little about the things that interest me most--astronomy, anatomy, history, geology, writing, geography, nature in all of its manifestations, languages, and the list goes on. 

My goal is to pursue it.  My challenge is that I'm very imperfect.  I make lots of mistakes along the way, but I'm trying.