“All that’s left of the challenge is love…”

Today the writing feels too precious, too Hundred Acre Wood. Yesterday it felt frantic, almost silly.

I am mulling over humor, intelligence, and courage. I think of my Humanitites Professor, freshman year of college. As we trekked through Kant with alarming alacrity, he paused. “We talk about these things, these thoughts, now, because you will probably spend the rest of your life talking about movies and your jobs and your family. This may be it, folks.”

I didn’t want that. I wanted to float in lofty worlds of oaky bars and lively dinners and coffee houses and friends’ futons and libraries and makeshift classrooms. Worlds of ideas. Worlds of verbal battlefields, altars, lovers’ blankets, waterfalls, and chessboards.

That world stays largely in my head, often in my real-life, rarely in my writing.

There are days when the “fun” (“funny”?) writing is my commentary on the Art of Being Human. Many days, it’s just a sad little mirror on how small life can easily get if we aren’t vigilant.

So I draft. I draft in pencil and purple ink. I share my rough-and-tumble thoughts. Unready. Terraforming.

One foot in the World of Ideas, the other in the lower case version.

And I draft.

“All that’s left of the challenge is love…”