When I opened the cupboard this morning to get a plate, I was surprised to find the entire stack of dishes oddly off kilter. How did they get that way--had I been in a hurry putting them away when I emptied the dishwasher? Did I have a playful ghost in the kitchen?--became immediately less important than what occurred to me...Though off center, each plate was unchanged in its strength and purpose, and underneath them all, at the very bottom, was a larger plate bearing the word CELEBRATE.

Searching for inspiration to write is something I do daily. But as most writers know, it doesn’t always show up when we search for it, and instead often comes to us in snippets and seepages or sometimes like a “bat out of the blue” from a place we least expect. I would never have imagined Father’s Day would be the thing to send me racing to the keyboard, but it has.

One of the things I discovered when I discovered I was a writer, was that feeling of standing at the edge of an abyss and knowing that to jump, although it was a terrifying thought, was the only thing to do. The abyss held no answers or guarantees, in fact, it was impossible to see anything down there, no evidence of anything I could be sure of, or of anything I had known before.

APOLOGIES FOR NOT POSTING in awhile, though I'm not sure to whom. It would seem that it's to you, the reader, that I owe the apology. But if a writer is not constantly writing--the writer is hurting himself. It's the thing that smothers us, if we let it. The thing that sits waiting in the corner, or over our shoulder, or under the bed, that waits to earn points in the game of I Am Your Creativity.

It’s Valentine’s Day and I feel I should post something. This comes after hours of contemplating how there’s no value in doing anything strictly out of obligation. That being said, somehow I still feel obligated to post something.