Preface.

Dear Horse of a Different Color,

         I met you when I was nine years old and just beginning to feel at (with closed eyes and outstretched fingers) the edge of something bottomless. I thought for a while that it was death, and it turns out it is, but it's also Loss (only to beings, who won't keep being forever) and the internal world. And a permanence that bends in a way that makes it transient. I've never been to Oz; even when I was Toto, I had not yet been where you'd been, and never went. What color are you now? Always Changing can be a color. I think it is; I think Heraclitus and Parmenides will never reconcile, but their dichotomy can be lived for both, for the individual that sees a horse of a different color as Always Changing.

         I wrote you a letter some time ago. I'd say that I wanted to thank you for nurturing my inmost love and need for writing by encouraging me to articulate in earnest the things and phenomena of my daily life, like my jointed purple plastic jump-rope. (Do you remember? I wrote that I had a jump-rope, and you urged me to clarify whether it was purple or plastic. It was, in fact, a string of large, purple plastic penne noodles infused with medium-sized square sparkles, and had wooden handles on either end.) But the letter, which begins with "Hello", doesn't really say that. I'm not sure that's what I wanted to say when I wrote it; I'm not sure what I wanted to say, but I needed to say it. Which is why this letter here is for saying "Thank You." You facilitated many things for me. You gave me Orion's Belt---that ungivable closeness to things that are very far away.

         Life is a lot of things, and I'm living to say what I can in the words that I do for no reason but the one I need. That means everything to me, and can be more or less difficult to live (particularly for one who feels so un-one-way and so in an inconsistent practice of living).

         We are Always Changing. I don't know what to make of value---I make something all the time of various values, but I think in the end I only halfway believe that things and people and words and experiences have value in themselves bythemselves. In the end I believe in Intertrinsic, I believe that everything is an emergent phenomenon. So this collection of writings emerged from my interactions with the world, with myself and my dreams and experiences, with people I met and I knew and I lived for a short time and (never truly) left. It emerged from loss and growth, my interaction with.

         C’est cela,

                  Sola Vie