This blog is far from a satisfactory expression of my personal experience as a human being. I had thought about erasing it from the timeline of human history as a preemptive act, exercising a desire to have a final, controlling say in how history erases its memory of my presence here.

I have decided to let it stand. History will soon enough have its way. The words here will sink beneath cycles of renewal and decay and modernity and obsolescence as sure as the mammoths sank beneath the surface of the La Brea tar pits. As it is, so let it be.

I seem to have said some things well. It also seems that I have used a great deal of complex language to express very simple ideas. This is understandable to me, knowing how I have operated in this life. It is also a bit embarrassing.

I have crafted a few artful lines of prose and poetic expressions here which please me. There is wisdom gained from experience here as well, yet often it is embedded in large fields of ore which only the most stubborn miner would quarry and refine for the value there.

I find there is much good advice for the living. I also find that I no longer include myself in that group. This odd condition creates a different personal perspective about what I have written, yet in no way compromises the quality or value of the few true things I have expressed here about being alive. There is good information here about how to live. There is much here for a thoughtful person to reflect upon. I am glad of that.

I suspect I am the only person who consciously visits these pages these days. I am like an old man sitting in a chair on the porch of a small-town general store, revisiting memories that are only his own. But what memories they are!

I have encountered, here and there, the sudden appearance of Lenore in graceful moments of reflection. Her grace, her love, her intelligence. They are, for me, threads of purest gold in the fabric of this narrative. Her heart is in my heart, and her mind in mine: it is the part which turns my perspective of the mundane holy.

Here I behold the vivacious, realized being we became when the spirit of wu-wei and the elements of yin and yang bloomed in our lives and the result created the singular, complete, whole creature called Bob and Lenore.

These days I visit theses pages and in so doing I revisit that creature I once was, and now am not. The days have thinned and the leaves fallen, and snow is in the air. Yet there is something in me which prays the essence of who we were and what we became together remains in the potential of humanity forever, and outlives the sun.