You are a human being. You were born in a crater under the stars which is coliseum and arena and amphitheater. It is a bowl filled with fog and shadows, good and evil, ignorance and stupidity, sophistication and intelligence.

It is your lot to learn how to navigate the ground here.

It is your privilege to create yourself here.

It is both your curse and blessing to be assaulted and cajoled by sometimes random and sometimes organized experiences of beauty and baseness here.

Fog is pierced by a lighthouse. Shadows are revealed by a lantern. If you choose, light becomes a tool which drills a hole through murk.

Yet can you wring even one atom of light out of an ocean of fog and shadow?

Where then from whence does such light come?

It has come here with you. Here it will either smother or flare. Be careful. Pay attention. There are many shadows and much fog in this place. Ask yourself: “When Diogenes searched the dark land for a single true person, did he ever realize that his lantern revealed one? Did he finally see that it could be the person who held the lantern? Or was he doomed, along with his light, to be forever consumed by shadows?”

Take your light often to the rim of this crater, and let it be replenished by the sun and moon and stars. Return then, and feed it to love and all that is good, and use it to illuminate the shadows wherein selfishness and evil lie.