LOCK IT OR LOSE IT - If found return to:

In the last three weeks I think I've navigated a caked mud flat. That is to say an dawn to dusk routine of compressed but boring thoughts... mirages of break on the horizon. A voyage with some lush oases, albeit, but still long, hard and mindless. I think I have traveled out of this place, finally. Things are stirring, and for the first time in what seems like forever I've been able to SEE again, quite literally. My eye has come back to me - the first breath of the ocean at my lips - was looking at the snow layered gently on the Lathrop flower bed's bare earth. I stopped in my tracks right there on the sidewalk and just breathed in.

I am a predicter of omens that all too often are simply natural variation. Our 60º day here in Madison coinciding with a beautiful happening in my own life - turned out to be the bearer of great cold as our weather plunged to a ghastly 7º. I guess I just need to stop tying things together that do not necessarily belong together. Good things happen to me, and I should love them for what they are - not try to explain them through means of superstition. Bad things, too, happen, and I should find no scapegoat for my troubles. Times ebb and flow - the good and bad mix and swirl and in my mind, they happen because of events prior, yes, but who am I to tie completely unrelated events into (seemingly) logical explainations?

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As of late I have been especially appreciating the notions of tribes of people. Not so much the ethnic factors, but more commonly the simple community that exists among truly tribal people. I also have always been fond of creating useful things from nature and the art and tools that people fashion from the raw stock of this earth. I have decided to take up beadlooming and would particularly like to fire and color my own clay beads to make an intricate headband or sash. I have experimented with patterns - calling the lines of "beads" into attention in Photoshop like little marbles or planets or miniscule grains of sand. So we'll see what happens.

Please, let me introduce you to one Mr. Leohold of 128 S. Wennick Rd., Orchard Park, NY 14127-2237.