A person living an artistic existence refuses to surrender to the winds of time, continues singing and dancing into the teeth of the harshest storm, and marvels in all of the delightful treasures of simply being.

An author’s operating charter is to unearth embedded symbols that reflect complementary and inconsistent relationships of our collective assemblage, combine harmonizing and contradictory conceptions that motivate us, and delve larger truths out of variable and erratic elements of human nature.

We each engage in artistic conversations with the external environment. Rather than merely surrendering to forces that surround us, our inspired action of responding with heart and mind composes our final configuration.

In the forest canopied with the leafy niche of daily events, a benevolent listener reverberates in the canonical poetry of the ages humming irrepressible visceral contradictions. A squall of tears of bereavement pierces the elegiac sea of a silent night. The red-rimmed eye of sunrise greets us with a torrent of rage spilling over from frontlines of an examined life’s vital quarrels. The flute of life ushers in a welcoming breeze of reassuring resonance.

Destroying the prior emaciated doppelgänger image that I held of myself is merely the first step of creating a revised personal identity. Can I accomplish the dissolution of my disembodied self and determinedly recreate a mutable sense of personal identity out of the scalded remnants of a psyche inferno?

The projected vision in the mind’s eye of a person’s conceptual self represents a self-edited photocomposition. Our conceived self consists of an admixture of facts gleaned from the residue of yesteryear’s reality imposed over a bed of surreal images.

Writing is an admixture of exposition, introspection, observation, deliberation, rumination, reflection, clarification, meditation, and expression. Perhaps no other activity offers a thoughtful person with as precise a means to inspect and marshal together their fragmented thoughts than writing.

Our genetic map makes us human. Our physical and emotional genomes establish the baseline for us to operate. When we strike out in the world, we seek out vivid encounters with other people and nature that speak loudest to ourselves. What we make of our brilliant experiences modulates who we become. The way we think, feel, and express emotions enables us to personalize our experiences.

The laws that govern the universe also reveal it. Likewise, the way that we think unmasks us.