Dear heart, there is magic in this world.

The cold machination of stochastic processes could not have jazzed the molecules that caused us to meet. As much as I adore the stoicism of the physicists and the angst the existentialists serve for passion, the passing of years has made visible a forest of hands that along with mine have shaped time and space to become my life. None of us is free to plod alone. And though my skull is as thick as the depleted uranium armor on an M1-Abrams, it still got through to me that chance never is.

That everything happens for a reason.

So I'm siding with Einstein. Whatever god of writing brought me to this place did so rolling loaded dice. Perhaps only for this:

Today I was honored by someone to have something I wrote placed on their homenode. Naturally, in a fit of the passionate narcissism all writers have, I scampered over to that page to see what had been done with them. And there they were, in all their punkish beauty, just as I spit them out one morning before the sun rose and they seemed like sleep to me.

But I scrolled down further and found many words about another denizen of these electronic pages. This was someone who so marked those he touched that they could never forget having met him, even if only to have come in contact with the words that were him. And perhaps the relationship was perfect for that: that they only had, and would ever know him by his words--never the sound of his voice of the smell of breakfast on his breath.

Trudging backward through the wonderous flow of ideas that comprise the entity of E2, I came across his nodes. First his home node where I met the most improbable 27-year old cat who managed to peck out his own node every once in a while, and everyone excused his bad grammar and spelling. And then the words of this wondrous being--his last ones first:

"If I do not speak with you again or if not for some time, this is amongst my wishes for you: That you use everything2 to discover and express your own creativity. That you enjoy words and the writing and reading and speaking and listening of them. That you carry this out into enjoyment of all of the other areas of your lives."

And I have not cried for the bulk of my life. Not even when watching callous men inter those I loved behind concrete and tar and six feet of dead earth. Yet, with all my power to control my emotions I couldn't stop the tear that rolled down the side of my face when I read your sensei's words. Still can't.

Oh, how dearly you were loved. Page after page those words scrolled out in their brilliant immortality. For he is what all of us would strive to be from the moment we press our first pencil to a page, absolutely alive in what he wrote. Now I know there was a time the deity walked among you, someone who had attained a command of himself beyond which most of us could imagine and whose traces could soften the hardest life-calloused heart, or lift children to the responsibility of humanhood.

And no recital of Heisenberg or calculation of entropy can make me believe that it isn't the magic of life itself that brought me from one lazy afternoon wasting my heartbeats between pop-under ads, to the grace of this person's words this day. How lucky you were, those of you who knew him. And how lucky I am for having met him today.

The greatest thing about life is that anything we do on this earth is ephemeral. It's bittersweet, joyous, infurating--the source of all our emotion. Perhaps it's our greatest gift that you can only fall in love the first time once. Because, in the history of this universe there will only be one day that I first encountered your sensei's words. And my life is richer for it.

So it is, dear hearts, that I prattle through my senseless missives about sex, love and rotten rock and roll, and I know there must be a reason for it. Bless the forces of chance that brought together this community of writers. Because you know that it could only be through quiet evangelism that one would be introduced to this place that in the manical egoism of its charter claims to be everything. Among you are geniuses and children, students and teachers, warriors and poets, and warrior-poets. All of you together make this wonderful, singular event in time that exists in the same place as any book we have ever loved, in the sacred churches of our imagination. Therein, the beauty of all of it. E2 itself is the writing we seek to create as well as each who contributes here.

For me: I'm coming up on some events. Soon I cross into my 43rd year. While your sensei would laugh at how young that is, to others here it is an age measured in light-years. I feel like my mom, who looks in the mirror at the senior-citizen who stares back and wants to scream, "But it's still me in here." It really is still me. I can't help these gray hairs on my beard. It just happened one morning.

The age thing weighs heavily on how I think about myself, and the things I want to do before I die. The terminus of life seems reasonably tangible now, a part of nearly every day. So I'm thankful to have run into the node that in wisdom of the Pharoes' astronomers declares: Enjoy yourself. This is utmost in importance. Truely, there can be no greater goal in life.

Another event: with these words I pass a threshold. Your odometer on my spewings ticks off one digit and I go from being a '1' to a '2'. This small step represents something for me. That is, sooner or later I have to change my behavior around here from being someone who blurts dreck in masturbatory fits of literary self-aggrandizement, to being someone who contributes. The status you bestow becomes responsibility. Your own sensei worked hard for you. Your editors and programmers sweat to shephard and nurture the etherial protoplasmic blob the community feeds.

It occurs to me that anyone who stays here, eventually has to work here. That's part of the contract, and it makes me feel like the lover too nervous to commit. It's way too easy to post a bunch of WUs in the morning. Much harder to keep the faith. I gotta figure out what to do about that.

So I'm going to prowl around and see if sensei has any magic for me. Some advice for a willing student. I'm sure several years ago he wrote something that will wind up in this year to be for me. I know that -- because when you write from your heart you contribute to the magic of the universe, like each of you contribute to the E2 every day.

Life is good. Enjoy yourself. This is utmost in importance. Whether I'm here or not, I will certainly participate in my own manipulation for the rest of my days.