Life. The great opportunity and gift to experience God's creation and all that it has to offer - the joy, love, suffering and pain. This collection of short stories and poems is representative of many of my life's experiences, and I continue to be optimistic and hopeful that there are many more to come. We all share the universal experience of the biological clock moving forward, carrying us along with or without our consent, so, we should make the very best of the journey while we can.The poems, sometimes raw and unvarnished, are both fictional and "real," meaning that the concept or theme of the poem is based on true events in my life. The writing, both for the love and pain they harness during each written exposition, was an outlet for my emotional psyche - a way to document the extreme beauty of my relationships with other people and conversely, a volcanic channel for the emotional lava that spewed forth when the pain was to great to keep inside.There were times when I sat down at the keyboard and began to write and had no idea what I had written until "it" was over, and then I began to reread what had sprung forth from the keyboard. The writing of the words, the therapeutic exorcism of writing down my pain, always did its job of walking me off the ledge - a ledge I am very familiar with.The short stories, in sharp contrast to the poems, are about relationships, both to nature and people. Most of them are fictional, but they all have their roots in real life. Through the characters and the setting, a picture and theme will emerge that is charged with emotion, and in many ways, reflective of the emotions that we all have from time to time but really don't know what they are and how they should be expressed. Life has taught me that the emotional landscape of our life is messy and shallow where you think it should be deep and deep where you think it is shallow. It's like motoring a boat on a lake with a mirror smooth surface. As the sky is reflected on the water's polished surface, you can't see below and have no idea if the water is deep or if it's "skinny," so, you motor slowly lest you run aground.
