I Proudly Present...

No one human has everything, but yet not even the poorest 3rd world child has nothing. Each member of the human race is born with a gift, a unique opportunity to bestow upon the world in our own manner. But where is that gift? Is it placed in our hearts, to uncover when we have found our true selves? Is it in our minds, just waiting to be plucked out amongst all the thoughts and ideas, when the time has come for it to be revealed? And once found, how do we use that gift of ours? These and many more are questions that are often swirling around in the great expanse called the human mind. That gift is not in one certain place, a human's gift is themself, and while the certain romantic may believe that it is placed in our hearts once we have cleared out all the uncertainty and found who we truly are, the only true way one can find their gift is to look at the life lessons they have encountered, and the possible future events that can show them their destiny. Truly, the only answer to finding one's gift is life. We live, we love, we laugh and learn. To find one's gift, one must simply go out in the world and be yourself, but learn from the mistakes one cannot have found their gift without. So the final question might very well be once the gift is found, how do you use it? Quite often when you've found an answer, using the answer comes easily, and finding the answer to this question comes in the same way as the earlier question: simply laugh often, live happily, and love generously.

Just Put One Foot in Front of Your Brother

Have you ever strived to be "better" than your sibling? Tried to achieve greater heights than them, accumulate more positive feedback? We've all seen this at least to some extent in our lives, even if it didn't happen to us directly. "Joey was such an excellent athlete, so we expect our Christopher to be just as wonderful as he was." Sound familiar? Siblings, it seems, constantly try to be one rung higher than the other on the ladder of social status, whether among family or their peers. If the older sibling was the favorite, the younger one wants nothing more than to follow in their sibling's footsteps and be the favorite as well. Hand-me-downs, reputations, and expectations are passed from generation to generation within a family. But when does this hierarchy become a cloning of the same type of person, over and over? How does a child find themself when they try to achieve perfection of another persona altogether? The simple statement could be that they don't, and end up losing themselves in the whole process. They struggle with what their own dreams and goals are, because they simply can't identify the difference between their own and a sibling's. Yet, when have you ever seen two siblings exactly alike? Even twins have very different personalities and styles, once they become of the age when matching jumpsuits and sweaters become more Goodwill than "good taste." To put it into more tangible form, as two snowflakes drift down from the heavens, they seem uniform at first, but at a second glance, they are completely different, with their own crystalized patterns of beauty. So, no matter what we humans might set upon our kin to strive for, the only way to achieve a balance is to find interests and self-sufficiency without having to feed off a sibling like a leech to a rather porous wound.

The Absence

This is a new idea for a story I got one night while laying in bed, and is a small excerpt from the introduction chapter.
Blackbirds chatter and commute across an inky black sky, but there's no storm blowing in today, it's the sky's natural color. A pure white hand reaches out to pick an apple from a tree, but the apple is not green, not red, not even yellow, it is a deep gray. Where has all the color gone? The question is not where all the color has gone, it is rather when the color will come.
Pigmentum Medicus, a rapidly expanding number of people, starting out in a small town called Coloures have banded together to bring this color into their world of black, white and gray. But this isn't the first day of their existence, immidiately wishing to put the color back in; they have lived this way for thousands of years, awaiting the day when color would simply pop into existence.
That, however, did not happen at all. In the tunnels of their small, humble outcropping of buildings, a small bit of government for color formed, calling themselves the Pigmentum Medicus, "The Color Healers." There was no holy calling, no spiritual wonder asking for their contribution to the world, it was simply a cry for something new, and the people decided, together, that they were the ones to put color into this world.