When I should be practicing the craft of writing, I but meditate upon the act, dream of taking action, contemplate creation -- all without words. Inside my mind, I get lost in the ethereal region of pre-thought, a realm of dreamland where my feelings of consolation and desolation fight it out for dominion. I see this in the Tao symbol, yin and yang flowing in ever differing proportion. The Tao shows a transcendent river of life, a wellspring of existence, pure energy rushing in torrents of inexplicable and apparently chaotic rhythm within my psychic riverbanks, yet in total harmony with the cosmic forces of creation which have flowed unchecked since the beginning. And when was the beginning? To me at age 42, the prime of my life, I clearly see this all began well before me and exists outside of me, as though I have nothing to do with it. At the same time, I am at the center of it all, unremovable from its flow, in some mystical fashion, it was all made for me alone. Yet I know I am not here alone, there are others, each at the center of their own universes, they who dwell with me in mine and I in theirs. I see my parents, their parents, their parent's parents, so on and so on, extending in unbroken chain through the unfathomable lengths of the past back to the origins of life on this planet. And even before that, through the absurdly large notions of geologic time, to the coalescence of cosmic dust into the hot wet ball of Gaia, Mother Earth herself. Back further to the instant of ignition of the holy fire of our own sun. Ponder, our sunstar is but one of countless stars in this galaxy. This galaxy we call home is but one in countless millions of galaxies in the expanse of space. The universe whose density is so spread thin there is more void than form, empty, distant, far reaching. I project my mind to the edge of this dispersion of matter, the outer frontier of reality, the edge of existence, the event horizon of creation. In that realm, over the outside edge, is where I live. Over that edge is where I am when I reach as far inside the microcosm of my consciousness as will permits. When I look out at all the stars in creation, sometimes I wonder if, in fact, I am merely gazing at the inner walls of my own cranial cavity with my inner and outer life melting together in a Mobius band of existence out at the lip of creation's horizon. Out there on the horizon, on the edge, I long to be on my own ship of exploration, perhaps sailing over the edge of the world as I know it. What will I find over that edge? Will I find God there? Or is it as the early global cartographers wrote in the margins along the edges of their maps of their known world, "Beware! Here there be dragons."

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