Hi guys ~ been a while I know………but……….even the gravest of illnesses will EVER keep me down.  Which is precisely what I would like to discuss today.  See the two children on their bicycles above?  Of course you do!  But do you remember what it was like to BE one of them.  I do, and fortunately, I still have that childlike quality.  I can’t tell you how many time s I’ve heard , “Tony, aren’t you ever going to grow up?” in my lifetime.  Well, it used to bother me but now, most of my friends tell me it’s what they love about me.  Go figure?!  Well, so many times I’ve been speaking with a person who didn’t really didn’t know me well and I would hear things like ~ “You mean you just packed a bag and left for Mexico without any plans?” or “You mean you just got off of the plane at Rekjavic and decided to stay a few months in Iceland even though you were heading to New York?” ~ Well, YES!! ~ is the answer to both of those questions.  It’s how I’ve lived my entire life.  I’ve never been afraid in this world.  I suppose it was because I had an unusual set of skills and unusual set of parents.  My mother is white. blonde hair and greenish eyes, my father is black and Cherokee Indian.  So, for me, as I looked around at everyone else’s parents as a child I suppose I always knew that there was no reason to stick to the status quo because, after all, my parents were rebels if you consider they were a bi-racial couple in 1950’s America.  More on that story another time.  But as I grew older and searched for meaning in this world I knew one thing, and one thing only.  That I was not like most other people here in this country aside from my siblings of course.  What I didn’t know was that there were others like me I just didn’t have any contact with them.  In school I didn’t have to try very hard to get good grades so I was focusing on extra curricular activities.  I was a professional magician by the time I was 15.  I was soaking up opera, ballet, and symphonies at ages 16 and 17 because I worked at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C..  When I was 19 I learned how to plat the acoustic guitar.  Now, during ALL of those years I was writing, poetry mostly.  I used to sit in the Presidential Box at the Concert Hall in the John F. Kennedy Center and write poetry while I listened to the National Symphony Orchestra rehearse.  I wrote my first poem in first grade where I won the school contest for Thanksgiving poems and the Principal put my poem up on his office wall.  It was one of the best feelings I have ever had as  a child and so I guess it was a defining moment for me because I haven’t stopped writing poetry since.  A person doesn’t write poetry for money or fame, I think most poets write because we are somewhat arrogant really, or maybe selfish is a better word ~ hell, I don’t know I’m just a writer, a real writer writing what I see and know from a place that is singularly my own with no thought of fame or glory because poets NEVER make money, unless they win the Pulitzer or something.  I just recently finished my 800th poem on Cosmofunnel.com ~ a creativity site for painters, short story writers, and poets ~ and that’s just the last 18 months of my writing poetry.  I imagine I have written somewhere around 5 or 6 thousand poems in my life ~ mostly left for waitresses on napkins in outdoor cafe’s the world over or for girlfriends and lovers ~ many, many, for my mother (one of my hero’s) and of course I’ve written 171 songs with lyrics.  But what truly set me free was my guitar,  Because when you can play the acoustic guitar AND you have a bunch of original songs ~ you NEVER have to worry about money, no matter where you are in the world.  Music is a universal language so when I found myself penniless in Iceland, all I had to do was play some pubs for cash.  What I found was that the FREEDOM that it affords you, in my case anyway, was the freedom to pursue to pursue my beliefs concerning God and all things Metaphysical in this world.  I have always known that I was drawn to religious pursuits and anything that could show me the truth behind the façade presented to the world concerning these pursuits.  It’s why studied Magic as a child ~ I’ve always wanted to know how things worked and in my case ~ HOW to unveil the truth about God.  As I grew older it occurred to me that the most logical path was through Metaphysics and the knowledge of exactly how this world worked.  So I have I learned Physics, Cosmology, Astrobiology, biology, Quantum Theory, and just about anything I could get my hands on that could lead to some understanding of what happens to us after this lifetime and ANYTHING that having to do with the inexplicable.  I have done these things by teaching myself through books and to a great extent by traveling this planet to the most powerful sites, from Teohtihuacan and the Mayan ruins to our south to having mushroom ceremonies with the Yaqui indian elders in the mountains of Oaxaca in Central Mexico, every single state in America, Stonehenge, Caverns all over the globe with ancient writings, to the most recent discoveries of the modern world in Turkey and Syria either through my travels or the travels others.  I have spent my entire life trying to develop my belief system to a point where there is undeniable proof that God is not just a Santa Claus or some Myth perpetuated by the money or power hungry men and women of this planet.  When you have a guitar and you can play it, money and power become irrelevant, and my search has remained unimpeded for 36 years.  When I first got sick 5 years ago and I became housebound by no choice of my own I needed still, a means of expressing myself and continuing my search ~ my brother sent me a computer, which I had always snubbed, I discovered the internet and NOTHING has been the same since.  I found that I had tucked away in my bags from travels around the world, some 37 notebooks filled with notes and poems, and songs, and a ton of impressions of some of the worlds most beffudling places and things.  What I discovered running through them ALL was a Love of Metaphysics.  In my songs, poetry, short stories, drawings, experiences with sensory deprivation chambers, meditation experiences and instruction, out of body experiences and a plethora of mind boggling accomplishments and experiences that I NEVER considered anything but irresponsible.  Because that is what everyone had been telling I had become and so I had come to believe it myself until I got sick and began reading my own story.  What I came to realize so far, is this.  It was my freedom of spirit that drove me to seek out the Shaman in Mexico, to sit for hours motionless in Transcendental Meditations promise to escape the body, to scour the globe in search of what was already in me to find.  It was in my child like innocence that my search for meaning in this crazy world, that FREEDOM OF SPIRIT  and faith in God has brought me this far with the knowledge that I now have a purpose in this reality.  That I have something specific in mind to do with my life, something I have never had before………guess I’m finally growing up!…………I am Dartanion2 ……….and that’s the way I see it…………cheers………..tony xo