People like to talk about knowing who you are. Since the sixties, there has been a lot of discussion of "finding yourself." People go to long retreats, eating nothing but gruel or granola, learn to find some inner peace, talk to the animals, whatever, but never truly seem to learn just who they are. We spend millions of dollars a year in some etherial search to find who we are and why we are here. And in the long run, most of us are left unsatisfied. We return to our wives, our children, our cars, our jobs and our mortgages. We are left with an uncanny sense that we are missing something. A sense that we aren't doing exactly what it is that we are supposed to be doing. A sense that we aren't fulfilling our destinies. And a sense of sadness at the loss.

It doesn't have to be that way, but it is. I ask why it is that the small girl, who, upon seeing the art of Salvador Dali, would be so inspired that she would study and devote her life to art, eventually starting a new movement that revolutionalizes the art world, would live in the backwoods of Georgia, where the only art she ever sees is the craftworks of her mother and grandmother before her. Would she feel a sense of loss? Would there always be a thought in the back of her head, needling and poking at her, saying, "You could be more than this?" Would she somehow rise out of the mire of her upbringing to fulfil her destiny and walk tall and proud as the leading artist of her age, in a world that is both glutted and starved for art? Or would she simply marry, become a housewife, and raise her children so that she could someday see a piece done by Dali, printed on the back of a postcard that her granddaughter sent her from college, to just sit there and stare at that postcard for hours, all the while wondering about what could have been?

I am forced to wonder at the boy, with a destiny to create the most beautiful music that the world has ever heard, stuck in a life where the only instrument he will ever hold would be the shovel of the ditchdigger. Or the great composer of neo-classical pieces, raised in an environment of both kinds of music--Country and Western. How do the vestiges of the past flow through the modern into the future, when the past is so easily set aside in the name of progress? We live in a world today, where craftsmanship is only implied when a money-back guarantee is slapped on the face of things. We live in a world where money and information have become synonymous. We live in a world, that sad to say, has forgotten more than it has learned.

We live under a boon and a curse, where we have the ability to share so much knowledge, yet guard it most fiercely. Where the highest of high is trampled under the feet of the newest of the new. The girl of whom I wrote, could, in this world of bits and bytes, be exposed to the beauty of the arts through a computer and a telephone line, yet be overwhelmed by the twin evils of the ever prudish eye of Big Brother, or the ever present temptations of Decadent Desire. I mean, after all, who has time to really live, when you don't know if you're breaking some sort of asinine censorship law, or if you're forced to navigate through a web of pornography and idiocy, in order to get to the gems within? It takes time to cover your back. It takes time to cut through that web.

What makes us what we are? Are we born into it? Is it environment? Is it both? Or is it neither? Do we have some sort of intrinsic knowledge of our self? How do you gauge the potential of a child, especially when that child has the potential to be something that world has never seen before? How do you gauge potential when that potential is for something that is all but forgotten in our modern age?

When I was much younger, my mother bought a copy of the Hobbit for me to read. I don't remember when exactly, but I think that it was after I'd actually seen the cartoon of The Hobbit on television. Regardless, I seem to recall it being when I was in my early teens, so thats the time that Im going to place it at. Its not really all that important when I read the book, as its more important that I read the book.

There was a name in the book, the name of a hero who loosed the arrow that killed the dragon that was the primary villain of the book. That name was Bard. Something about that name resonated with me, as I absolutely fell in love with it. Later on, when I first got my hands on a copy of the Dungeons and Dragons Beginner Set, I came up with a character which I would never play, but would remember for the rest of my life. Bard Knoll. This of course leads into another aspect of my later life as far as synchronicity goes, but I'd rather focus on the one.