​For those who believe
the time has come again
when the best
and the worst
comes out in all of us.

​Life begins and ends 
with each breath.
The world dies
and is reborn
with each heart beat.
Each moment is a gift
that we try not to waste.

​We wish for what we know that we cannot have
we pray for that which we know will not come true
but we do all of this anyway
knowing that we will be stronger for it.
Even then
in the midst of all of this
the only thing that we can do,
is to keep on dreaming.

​To much
to little
to big
to small
to long
to short
to loud
to quiet
to much
or not enough
there always
seems
to be an extreme.

​Full time
with all that we really need to be.
Pleasing ourselves
when the rest of the world thinks that we are crazy.
Still looking for something more to understand
to look forward to.
To give ourselves fully to
to become what it is that we cannot see
but know is out there somewhere
when the rest of the world thinks that we need to just give up
and get on with the rest of our lives.

​Can we look at out lives 
and say
is this what our mother had 
planned for us?

Can we look at our lives
and say
is this what we had planned
for ourselves?

​“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning, but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.” 

― Edna St. Vincent Millay

​Good Sunday morning everyone,

I pray that you all had a good week, and that you all will be having a blessed Lord’s Day. This is the one day of the week that I hope that there will be some peace, but there is nothing to say for sure, that it is all going to be this way.

We are living in some very dangerous times, not that living in the world has not already been a very dangerous place, but it just seems to be getting worse every day, and there is nothing that we are going to be able to do about it all, other then to pray about the whole thing, or that prayer should be where it is that we should be starting.

We all know people that will agree, and we all know people that will disagree, but it is just the way that the world is going these days. What the world needs now, is not love, because if love was all that we needed, then the world would be a lot better place.

What the world needs is a good dose of revival and repents, but that is another story for another time.

So it goes. Press on regardless.

Faithfully Yours,

Lee

​“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” 

― Alice Munro, Selected Stories, 1968-1994

​Good morning everyone,

Sometimes I wonder, how many things in our lives that we really have any control over, and how many things just are, and there is nothing that we are going to be able to do to change all of the things that have happened, and that will happen during the course of our lives. 

Still, there are just so many things that I simply do not understand about life, and the way that the world is going these days. Maybe it has always been this way. With the world being the way that it is with technology and that events around the world being reported almost instantaneously, that it seems that it is no wonder that the world is going to hell in a bucket.

Who can say for sure?

So it goes. Press on regardless.

Faithfully Yours,

Lee  

​I have often thought about giving up this writing life,
and just excepting what it is
that the fates have to offer me.
But the whole idea of that
makes me feel sad,
and that just excepting what it is
that the fates have to offer me
is just another way of giving up
and I am not ready to give up.
I have gotten to strong
but there are times when I still get tired.
Knowing that all of this
is just preparing me for something better
I just don’t know what it is yet.

​Out of the woods and into the clearing.
Knowing all to well
that at the end of the day
we have to sleep where we are at.

​If not now
when
if not love
then what
if not hope
then what
if not gratitude
then what
we all have choices
it is just a question of
are we making the right ones.

​There are times,
when things just need to be the way that they are.
Walking into the light.
Reaching into the ether
wishing upon a star
if that was all that I needed to do
then I would be in a lot better place then where
I am now.
I simply don’t think that it works that way.

​In the end, 
the only thing that I can do,
other then to just live,
is to just write.
Write what I can
when I can
and hope that there will be
some one who will read all of this
and understand what it is that I am 
trying to say
and then explain it to me.

​I keep trying to tell myself,
smile
it could always be worse
but it hurts when I smile
and that is always be worse.

​Good morning everyone,

there are to many things that I know that I can get done,
it is just a matter of getting them done, 
or more exactly,
finding the time to get it all done.
The time that I need to be finding
always seems to be just out of reach
and there is just never enough
hours in the day.
It is to bad really
there is just so much that I need to say.

​“A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.” 

― Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson and Other Tales

​Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.” 

― Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning

​At first blush.
The thought of life can be beautiful.
Wonderful.
A place that we wanted to be.

Then,
as we got older,
the world started to show its true colors.
That the world as we once knew it,
or thought that we knew it,
seems to be slipping away,
into something that we no longer recognize,
or care to live in,
but what other choice do we have.

Well we all have choices,
it is just a question of whether or not
we make the right ones.

​Good morning everyone,

It is all good.
It is all better.
It is all the best.
When we reach the best that we can do,
then the struggle is over,
and there is nothing left to work toward.
What a shame.

Sometimes,
success might not be all that it si cracked
up to be.

​The days come and the days go and it seems that there is nothing more that  can be done,
    for me at least,
    other then to keep on writing.

The truth of the matter is,
there are still to many other things that I need to be doing.
Places that I need to be,
and hope that I need to make come true.
Otherwise it is all good,
and is getting better all of the time.

​The last time that I felt this way,
the way that one feels
when you know that something is going to go wrong,
I found out that I was wrong,
that something did not go wrong,
it just did not turn out the way that I thought that it would.

​Those who live in glass houses 
should never throw stones,
but I have known people
who have amassed a pile of rocks
and are not afraid to us them.

​The best that I can hope for right now is,
that one of these days,
all of the things that I have ever hoped for
prayed for
worked toward
will finally come true
and that I can finally live the life
that I was meant to live.