So it begins. Kierkegaard said that how it ends is often determined by how you begin. A beginning should talk about beginnings, I think. What does it mean to begin? What does it mean to start, get going, make that first step? What's in a beginning? To begin... that sounds as easy as getting up in the morning; but I have had days where getting up was a battle; often, now, I win and raise my head from the pillow and my tortured dreams and set my feet on the ground. Often, this is in haste, to get to work on time. Sometimes, this process is slow and deliberative, hearing the Siren song of sleep and dreams. Yet, I start, most times.

In the past, it has not always been so. There have been days that I simply refused to leave the land of dreams, what William Blake call the land of Beulah, wishing to languish in the arms of slumber and those female forms that come in various disguises to woo me and seduce me into taking dreams for reality and reality for a dream.

What has changed? Has anything changed? Much in my life has changed. And it makes a difference in how I seize the day. My children, my loves, my commitments to others at various jobs. And so I am consumed in the ways and means of the daily windmill. I am no Quixote... at least I have no Sancho Panza to guide me into the jaws of battle.

Seriously, or not so seriously, how you begin often determines how you will end. Bad beginnings make bad endings, it's said. I leap into the arms of the day, into the abyss of the digital wasteland, with hope and trembling, hoping that words do not fail, that the Spirit will fill me with fire and love.

Risk is everything. So I risk this beginning in the hopes of clarifying for you, my solitary reader, my own uncertainty. For if it is certainty you seek, a check to take to the bank, seek elsewhere. There are many vendors' tables in the temple, they can change your check for the required sacrifice.