"I will not be just a tourist in the world of images," proclaimed one of my favorite writers, Anais Nin.  She told us so much about her life and loves in her diaries, displaying with a scientist's precision her heart's revolutions around the earth and the ideas she courageously explored.

Thinking this foggy December morning of Anais Nin and her life, the diaries she published and what she did and did not reveal about her experiences, I remember well receiving at my Laredo home a letter from her. She wrote to anyone who ever sent her a letter, her way of connecting in a personal way with the fans she gathered over the decades of her diaries and their publication. I was a girl of 17 and her letter is with me today, more than forty years later. She wrote of the heart, courage and the creative life. 

This morning the horizon is covered in a soft veil of clouds, an image that Nin might agree represents our experience: the present, our flesh and blood, here and now, infused with our past, with images and memories that stream behind us  like ribbons in the wind. The future is before us, a misty ambition, a dream we march toward, one step at a time, eyes squinting to see more clearly, listening to faint voices that say: 'move on,' and they remind me this morning to not be just a tourist in any of what this world holds, ideas, images, challenges and dreams.