When I'm at my desk writing, I tend to lean on these words of Franz Kafka: "Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." And then, for good measure, I ask myself over and over again a question that was gifted me by the late Peter Gomes, former Pastor & Preacher of Harvard Chapel: "What's your point?" Well, as best I can put it, my point(s) is (are) this: love, critical thinking, keeping an open mind, creativity, generosity, sacrifice, forgiveness, reconciliation, curiosity, - these things are all life giving, but they do take a generous amount of courage and grit to develop. Whereas, - fear, hate, anger, mediocrity, prejudice, insecurity, and vengeance, take very little effort for one to embrace any of them as one's identity, but, in turn, they will indeed suck the life out of you in a heartbeat, while extinguishing any real possibility of experiencing any real authentic portions of joy. In short, love is hard, real hard sometimes, and it does take a substantial amount of discipline and sacrifice to live out. On the other hand, fear, and all of its children and grandchildren, offer axioms that are pretty much given out as freebees from their lineup of Soulful Vampires, -identities such as vanity, pride, and self absorption. And then there's this: The weak will always be prey for fear's voracious appetite, and the weak will always seek physical power and dominance, for without it, they are exposed as being naked and helpless. But the strong, they will almost always seek the soulful power of peace found in durable rich relationships, rather than in ones of dominance. The weak are destroyers. The strong are builders. The weak build walls. The strong build bridges. Well anyway, these are my basics, and that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it!