Hello friends and visitors, I hope you and yours are well!

when DA put out that notice of our cap on the amount of members we could Watch, it prompted me to dig into my 'manage friends' folder. I thought when I first joined DA it was just a nice thing to do, watch everyone's page I visited! I had so many people who I didn't even know I was watching, and didn't have some of my dearest friends on my Watch list. So I have been changing this slowly. I have also gone out and met some terrific new artists and friends, I am overwhelmed at the kindness there is here on DA. I ignore those I can that are not.

I was thinking that I might put something on my page like I've been seeing on some of yours-a very nice button that lets us know that each favorite and comment is noted and appreciated but it is difficult to thank each and every person for the favorite. Some days I end of not doing anything as I am so overwhelmed with what I have to do!! Human nature is funny that way!

When I was a little girl, I was extremely shy. I was very lucky to have both my maternal and paternal grandparents living and spent a lot of time with them. Both of my Grandmother's grew roses. I'd listen to them explain to me the nature of roses and their wisdom was incredible. They also gave me a place for my very adult like contemplation and study! I had a small library in either of my grandparent's houses in the small town on the Ohio River I was born. I was so curious as to everything around me. Like most of us, my childhood was not idyllic. In retrospect, I have come to understand and accept this for why and for what end one can intellectually do this.

My curiosity at such a young age was best satisfied when I was left alone to my own devices, and when I emerged from my 'library' I was absorbed into my Grandparent's loving hands who would discuss the topics I had put so much energy into meditating. They always gave me the liberty of understanding through the physical and mental faculties. Not just visual or cerebral, but both. I would often write-sometimes typing up to five hundred pages of who knows what! I love them forever, and know surely I'd not have stood a chance in this world without the sanity and reason they allowed me to discover.

I am the oldest child of two -I have a younger brother who was born with the congenital defect known as "Spina Bifida". He is three years younger then me. He is still alive and lives with my Mom. I had two step sisters at one time, and I have two half-brothers and sisters. My family is not close to me. My mom and dad are both diagnosed Narcissists. It is rare in nature but it happens. Mom has been married and divorced 8 times. My Dad now 5 times I think. I have not spoken with any of these people in so many years I've lost track. They have asked me not to. I carry no love for them, nor do I carry hate for them. In fact I am left without the burdens if that makes sense!

I have moved around all my life. I've seen the inside of so many homes it is absurd! In all these places I see people in pain. It's rare to enter a home where there are enlightened human beings. It does exist, but again, it is rare. Over the time I've been here on DA, I've talked to so many of you and listened and read your stories, and am amazed to find so many people just like myself out here who are all doing the best we can or well, we'd be doing better. The devastation of the home life is all over the world. I can only speak for America, because I've seen both sides of this country. Poverty brings hopelessness that brings depravity of the human character that manifests itself in ways so bizarre, each story being one worse then the other. But what is the excuse for those who have wealth? I've lived among the very wealthy as well as the very poor. The wealthy have just the same events happening in their lives such as rampant mental illness, violence, drug and alcohol addiction, infidelity, abuse of children and of the elderly and all those in between equal to that of other economic and social classes.

Certainly I'm not having an original thought here but I am able to feel that I stand behind my own opinion. Few do that I see. We've handed down truth and the omission of truth for so long that currently there is little truth left and lot's of dogma. In conclusion, the moral of this impromptu journal is that money and the lack of money really are the roots of evil.

But that is just the moral of it, I'm still pondering the ethics of it! Courage, honesty, virtues, all just words unless one has the strength of their character to act upon what they stand against and the humility to correct what they've done wrong -hypocrisy? Yes. We're all guilty sometime, even me! Love you all, sorry to waste your time if you read this as you probably all ready knew this!