Deep within our sense of completeness or incompleteness lies a drive so fundamental that it extends us beyond our worst fears and toward our greatest hope. The hope that we may be important. That which needs us may frighten us away. Or, it may provide an opportunity to prove that we are immeasurable givers.

This piece is perfect. Plain and simply, perfect. A 40 year-old woman has given-up waiting for a man and found a baby girl in need of her love. Crossing socially drawn lines to extend her reach, an adoptive mother becomes one more woman to shape destiny and the fate of inter-racial dialogue.

While it is natural to be alarmist about things that are foreign to us, I'd like to shed some light on what may have motivated our two protagonists to enter a virtual life. They temporarily abandoned what we'd like to think of as "real" life for one reason, job dissatisfaction, which is a form of identity loss. I would argue the distinction is not about what is real, but what is flesh life and not flesh life; ALL life lived is real.

When we define ourselves by what we do for money, we lose a self-concept very quickly. As a result, these two got lost in a world that allowed them some control over who and what they wanted to be. Eventually they emerged from a purely imagined existence into a goal-oriented existence. First, however, they had to play out the fantasy of what to do next before actually doing it. As the story's end reveals, we are capable of weaning ourselves off of the fantasy life, yet others become addicted to it as they don't really like who they are and fantasy allows a detachment from the self. Our protagonists learned a good lesson by engaging in a comparative study: What is “me”? and What is NOT “me”?

The comparative experiment, when done consciously, will tell us the right way and wrong way to conduct life, as well as who we are and who we are not. Just like religious fanaticism, drug addiction, workaholism or any other form of unilateral obsession in our life, we do not discover the power to live until we find the power to create who we are. That power to create must be in our own hands or we’ve given it over to someone or something else. This is what is frightening, not the entertainment of a game. All life lived as a game, with regard for the self and the other players, is a life without suffering.

This piece leaves a yearning and aching in my heart for something intangible like a moonbeam on a clear night. It's something you can't hold onto but stare into so intensely that it becomes part of your being. Though born and raised in Kansas City, I'm now in densely populated New York and long for free range. Vast wide-open spaces are hard to come by, except in the mind of lucid imagination. When rules for living get too strict, one feels restricted and cowboy poetry allows a loosening of the reins. This is not a story of real life as one lives it, but of our lives when we look back to see what made us. In moments when we abandon foresight for hindsight we find elegance and mystery is in our journey.

THANK GOD for Rupa Marya. Give me this piece, a walnut tree and lemonade, then leave me to rest among the weary.

So often people have forgotten that freedom is a joy of rarity; a jewel created by heat and emmense pressure. Everyday we are pulled into a system that keeps us from running our own system. Aleo's storefront is a portal to the imagination, which is the engine that drives what we will of life ever-giving. This will allows us to reject the mass of hearding dogs around us who say, "You can't say that!". Well yes I can, because I live in the land of the free and the brave.

Like Aleo's plastic Uncle Sam that holds a plastic flag, this country may get weathered but even mother nature cannot destroy her value for independence and self-hood. Keep it waving, Uncle Sam, I am here to wave back. And smiling.

Though I don't understand why its given a sad spin as the end could be hopeful instead of life threatening, the piece is a gentle reminder that we are stewards of life.

The gentleness with which we treat the creatures that share this earth is proportionate to understanding our own nature. That we project ourselves into these beings, is a good way to know who we are and how we have evolved alongside them; but in a seperate branch in the eco-evolutionary window of time.

Dolphins are amazing social animals and I am thrilled to be a part of any experience their human companions may share.