One of my favorite columns is Oprah Winfrey’s monthly musings aptly called “What I Know For Sure.” She’s always got a kernellete or two of wisdom to impart to the attentive masses. I find it fasciating that as people advance in years, they seemingly are sure of more because I, for one, am resolute about less. While I’ve got some hard-earned wisdom in my arsenal, what I know about my life’s dreams and how to fulfill them is not on the ascension. This is complicated by the fact that the things I seek are moving at a pace slightly slower than a mule dragging a canal boat, while the dangerous-to-the-touch issues I’ve buried deep within my psyche are emerging with aplomb. It’s got me wondering, is life a disproportionate cosmic joke? And, how do the laws of religion and nature govern what it is the we receive in bounty or drought? How hard should we try to make our dreams reality? Does it really matter?

Historians say that Gaius Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon into Rome, his “casting of the die” as he so famously called it, not only changed the course of the Republic, it transformed the face of civilization as we know it. How can we have that kind of courage and employ it? Why are we so afraid to cast the die? A recent trip to the Eternal City got me to thinking about these issues and the wisdom of the ancients. When you see an 1800 year-old column before you, your perspective on your existence is immediately and forever transformed. I am still making sense of the resulting changes in me and determining what it is “I know for sure.” There are three things of which I am most positive…the beauty of a Senatorial robe cast in stone, the lick-your-lips goodness of gelato and the romance that can be had in the night-time shadows of the Trajanian ruins. The rest is TBD:pigtails:

Long Live the Republic (Or is it the Empire?),
TLRG