Perhaps you’ve reflected upon the course of your life marveling at the path you have taken?  I cannot describe the person that I’ve become by comparison to who I was as a young adult in my early 20s.  In that day I did my best to be an “enthusiast for Christ.”  Jesus-is-the-answer might have been my tagline, the bumper sticker for my life.

And now?  I resist labeling myself.   Am I a theist or am I a non-theist?  If faith is something felt, an orientation immanent to the soul, I believe as fiercely as ever.  I feel addressed by the ineffably connected presence of everyone and everything in this room.  I am seated at Starbucks at State and 3rd in Geneva.  In fact the old buildings, the homes, in this town and the Fox river in this valley, have to do with me.  This State of Illinois, and Chicago, and truth be told the entirety of the country have to do, contribute to the life that I live…  I may as well mention the countries of Europe, China, India, and Japan.  The histories, the stories I’ve read or listened to have added their quotient of dimension to my present…

Humankind, –our experience is rooted, uncounted generations in extension.  We, I, manifest kind benevolence as warm, as multi-layered and delectable as a cup of Starbucks dark roast coffee.   Or as nightmarish as the exploding Russian 152 mm artillery shell scattering steel splinters above a Ukrainian trench.  Both realities are realizable within me…

Now something that you formerly loved
as a truth or probability
strikes you as an error;
you shed it
and fancy
that this represents
a victory for your reason.

But perhaps this error
was as necessary for you then,
when you were still a different person

–you are always a different person
–as are all your present “truths.”
being a skin, as it were,
that concealed and covered
a great deal that you were not yet permitted to see.

What killed that opinion for you
was your new life and not your reason:
you no longer need it,
and now it collapses
and unreason crawls out of it
into the light like a worm.

When we criticize something,
this is no arbitrary and impersonal event;
it is, at least very often,
evidence of vital energies in us
that are growing and shedding a skin.

We negate and must negate because
something in us wants to live and affirm
–something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet.

–This is said in favor of criticism.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 4, Section 307  by Friedrich Nietzsche

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A tune, an anthem to inspire us ahead into this day !  I offer Nightshift, the 1985 hit by the Commodores.