Once upon a time in the other world, I could be heard, from a million miles, through the lushest trees, through the deepest oceans, through the highest mountains, through the core of the Earth.

My voice reverberates as it creates.

I told the tale of life: I sung it, I spoke it, I spun it. Then I watched: I watched and I waited—and my witnessing concretized the tales I told. There was a world anew. I spun it out of the elements, fire, and ice… and story: I tended it through the same. When it grew cold with stagnancy, I heated it with the fire of passion. And when it grew hot with violence, I cooled it with the gentle waters of compassion. Because life only survives in the middle temperatures.

I told stories of fish: first walking from the seas, then leaping into the skies. And some grew legs and others wings. Some chose to look eternally down and others up. I told stories of transformation.

I told stories of releasing what was no longer working. And nurturing what helps life thrive. I told stories of evolution.

I told it stories of love and loss… and how one cannot happen without the other—stories of courage and fear. How courage first embraces, then conquers, discomfort. And how fear, first courts, then becomes, death. I spun this world a yarn of paradox.

Then it wove into a tapestry of story that will one day be cut from this loom. I was bored, you see; I was bored with my home and its walls. I longed for something that would break through them, that would co-create possibilities. I was bored with my eternal spinning. I needed to spin something new: words; worlds.

I used my voice to call lightning, to meld ice into fire, to forge a cosmos anew. I grant that power to you.

What tale will you tell with your life?

Will it be one of fear where you cower in the shadows afraid of the characters you have written in your imagination and cast on your personal stage, forgetting that they are under your direction?

Or will it be one of courage, where you will be frightened and uncomfortable until you learn that peace and victory are in your center.

Will it be one of compliance? Where you do what is asked of you and think that makes you right.

Will it be one of creativity where you test the bounds of the possible and in doing so expand them?

Will it be one of vice where you steal a life and defend it to the end?

Or one of virtue where you bow to your own ignorance and mistakes but need no defense.

Will you whisper in the shadows or sing from the hills?

Will you love with abandon, with caution, or not at all?

How will you feel when you pay the price for that love… or the lack of it?  For all love has a price: life has a price. And love and life are really the same.

I paid a steep price for this story. I watch silently, sweeping up the shards of the broken, holding them in my bleeding hands.  I bear witness to my own creation.

Every heart that breaks is my own. As is every heart that soars.

Every abandoned dream is my own, as is every dream realized.

Every cry of rage, on a bright beautiful day, echoes in my body—as does every cry of joy bursting forth from the dark dismal night.

I too have grown; my courage has paid off—with you: in you. My courage has expanded my dreams and my nightmares. It has broken my heart, and colored my soul. It has seen me sobbing in the night, then bursting forth with the dawn. It has cost me peaceful moments, and productive years. It has opened me to yawning grief and soaring bliss.

You are worth it.