It is a little past two in the morning and I am sitting in my bedroom, after the rain storm, sealing and signing envelopes, putting away the last bits of my application for graduate school in the fall, stetching notes in my journal. I have lit the new candle and burnt what remains of the stick of patchouli incense. I want to sit in front of the altar and clear my head before I go back to sleep. I want to get all the muck out so that the good stuff can come in.

Poets and storytellers now have it easier in so many ways than those who went before us but is is also harder now than ever to write mythically with that root to those who came before us and the vital connection to the world as it is now. When Virginia Woolf was young she could turn to Hardy for information and inspiration and her father ran the library begun by Tennyson. The root of writers stretched back and back. A storyteller embellished upon what his grandmother told him and she on hers and hers back to Eve. Stories had the rich dirt of creation upon them.

Today we have distant authors all too often more concerned with their reputation and making money than continuing on in a tradition and passing on that trade. We have authors and not storytellers, writers and not poets and that is not all. We have lost myths and folktales and traded them in for bad religion, mediocre self help books, movies, six o'clock news and television shows. We are drowning in information, but much of it is half information or misinformation. Our ideas are half formed and desires half baked. This age is one full of vague longing and little direction and is a difficult struggle to even approach having an original thought.