It is fashionable these days to describe the world deductively, starting with a big theory of materialistic determinism, hypothesizing a multiverse with an infinite number of universes and an infinite amount of time, in which everything that can exist does exist and deducing that the universe is purposeless, godless, meaningless and indifferent to human life. Everything is an accident.

But this theory of everything is a theory of nothing.

I prefer to begin by being grounded in actual human experience, and using inductive reasoning to look for ideas and meanings.

This book is made up of poems and vignettes each of which is based on a chunk of real human experience. Distilled over a period of fifty years, the intent and method is to use these vignettes to point to possible realities based on patterns and intimations discerned. By doing so, one can stare into the chaos and see that something is struggling to be born.

Perhaps it is important to struggle, to not just give in to fate and circumstances, to exercise will power. We should think, discern, plan, set goals, adopt values and priorities, and work to achieve along these lines.

So this little book is meant as a unified whole, as an attempt to trace a thread of meaning through a patchwork of tattered cloth, to carve a cathedral out of the raw stuff of existence, to mold life into a work of art.

By doing so, we may glimpse the good, the true and the beautiful.