II. P R O b L O G U E

"It's a rule of life that we can, and should, learn from everyone. There are solemn and serious things we can learn from quacks and crooks, there are philosophies taught us by fools, there are lessons in faithfulness and justice brought to us by chance and by those we chance to meet. Everything is in everything."

- Fernando Pessoa
(as Bernardo Soares)
The Book of Disquiet
Text 357

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Here's a little story: In a park specked by thousands of mangrove islands, a park ranger was lecturing about an example of nature's cycle. Holding aloft a tiny seedling, he said, This is a mangrove seed, In time this seed will give birth to a mangrove tree, And in time, the mangrove trees will give birth to a mangrove island, Each of those islands you see now was, in the beginning, like this one tiny seedling.

Some parallelisms resonate louder than others. Like my parallel cycle. As I started doing the blog-rounds in the Internet, I possessed a seed of curiosity. When I signed those bloggers' guestbooks, my seed, albeit slowly, gave birth to a tree of friendship. Communication is a great fertilizer of friendships; in time, the tree of friendship gave birth to an island. This blog is my island, sharing the warm waters with thousands of other blog islands.

I am new to the blogging game. Computers had never been my forte and the spirit of technology brings a whiff of diziness in my head, in my soul, but I endure. A little knowledge learned makes one better than before and so I try to keep up with the slowest of the Net Joneses. Sure enough, my patience pays off, my friend Belle's patience pays off, and this blog is my pay dirt, never hopefully my paycheck. I am now ready to offer my most unrefined thoughts, my most unprepared language, and so please bear with me. This is a mission and I wish I could fulfill positively. In this regard, I will set up my standards, create some rules of thumb, conjure the essence of this blog, disport the soliloquy of my self, expose the contriteness of my heart. If you care, spring in. Share and bleed.