If you're reading this, I'm doing well, but away from a computer. I was so looking forward to the vacation but part of me was going to miss writing for that long. I'll have a small journal and that will have to suffice until I get back.

There are nights I hang out with friends, there are nights I just come home and watch Firefly and drink a cup of hot tea. But there are many nights, when, like a cup too full, holding it's contents through surface tension, I feel the need to pour out something. A good night to paint or write. Anything to free me from a long, hot day that started to shrink around me like a cheap blouse in a hot dryer. Those that love me understand this, and give me time to write, phone silent, but their thoughts not. They know I'll call when I'm ready to come out of my cave.

I don't mind being alone in the evening, and despite loss in the past, I'm one that looks on each day as a gift, each friend as family. For if I've learned anything in this wandering life, despite losses, despite changes that took me hundreds of miles from those I hold dear, despite forty plus years on this planet, I am so extraordinarily thankful for being here, even far away from those I love. Thankful to be just alive.

It's part of what has drawn me to this writing venture, like my paintings that hang around the home, mine, and other artists. Creativity for me, the expression of it, through picture or word, is like my flying. It's a way of celebrating, of showing what it means to be alive, and the most salient feature of existence is the unthinkable odds against it.For every way that there is of being here, there's an infinity of ways of not being here. Historical accidents wipe out whole universes with each movement of the clock. Statistics label us ridiculous. Black holes loom, hungry. Thermodynamics prohibit us. Jihad Terrorists want to kill us, if we're not taken out first by hurricane, flood, tainted food or that offer of a lift home from that stranger at the bar with the eye patch and the hook. Life, by any reasonable measure, is impossible, and my life—just being here right now, here with those of you I've grown so close to—amazingly more so. Dealing with death on a regular basis, sometimes my own mortality brings on the weariness of an unwanted nap, slumbering thoughts of past sorrow and loss. I think of friends old and new, I think of myself - and others who have lost someone precious, it's as if the color seeped out of our blood. Yet we keep drawing in breath after breath, pulling in precious moments of oxygen with the remnants of our happiness, until our blood darkens with strength, slowly filling up some of those empty chambers in our hearts.

The outdoors and the shooting sports, camping, hunting, writing, all the many things that I love, that I share with my friends, are my way of taking breath, they are a way of saying, in the face of all that impossibility, or dangers that lurk in dark streets or dark clouds, just how worth celebrating it is to just be here. If a day goes by without my doing something related to these things, it's as though I've forgotten something as essential as drawing in air, as though I had neglected to get up in the morning,

So tonight I may be miles from a computer, thousands of feet upwind of any electronic gadget, but I will be able to write. For in the light of a fire, I will get out a fresh pad of paper and write the old fashioned way. For that is something that has become an integral part of me. I've seen a lot in my life, blood, senseless violence, and careless tragedy. Sometimes the nature of my work is such I take it home with me. At least, in my writing I can write of the nature of immortality and death, with an emotional mantra that I try not to show at work. Words that free, words that comfort.

Words for me are release, sometimes half hidden, peeking out shyly from under the covers, other times bursting out in a flurry of tumbled sheets, sweat and the glow that finding forgotten life within you can bring. My words may be misspelled, the punctuation bearing all the studied elegance of graffiti, yet they are my words, my truths. They are my memory, not merely selective but tutelary, oracular. They are, in whatever form they find their release on the clean paper, my words, and as reliable as I can be. The specific names and places and fine details of my life are no more significant than my grammar. What is important is simply the pictures the words bring back to me. My life as I can write of it, is what I have to live on. I remember it as a launch into the sky, dancing like a kite in the wind until my hands took over and began to control my destiny. I remember it as the sound of a baby's cry, the whisper of a lover, as a forested night pouring into my head every star ever imagined, as smells; of fresh grass and garlic and pine woodsmoke, and cordite, of black earth and lilacs and love unexpected. I remember it and write of it, as a discarding of weighty troubles, as a leap into unknown air.

Right now, I have a dear friend in my home taking care of Barkley and the Range, and if she looks around at my bookshelves she can see the books I I have recently read, the words that offer me direction or simply a smile, Iain Banks, Ayn Rand, Stephen Ambrose, James Hornfischer, Louis L'Amour, Terry Prachett. How I perceive my life can be glimpsed through the books I read, as if my selection offers a glimpse of my sense of self or a mirror that shows wit and honor and courage occasionally lost, then re found. Convictions of tangible choice that changed how I live and how I see the world. No it's not fame or success, but it's a vast intangible strength we call "soul" that's going to carry me upward, whether the world embraces my words or not.

As I gather my pad and my pen tonight, the smell of rain brushes my face, carried on a wind of a Fall mountain storm that's as unpredictable as the future. I can't change what the coming days will bring to my world, the future is as variable as the breezes that swirl a piece of paper across the top of a mountain. I can only breathe deep in the beauty that stirs with the wind, breathe deep and hold onto this moment, reminding myself that this moment, this breath, is really all we know we have for sure. For in this moment I am so alive, and that is something to savor, with deft brush of pen and soft stroke of longing.