There is no option to becoming. We are. You are, I am. This mutual experience of ourselves being with and among each other is what living, becoming, is all about. There is a temptation to embellish, exaggerate, augment, even skew our understanding of this simple fact, the fact that we are real, in real time. Our sensibilities, our ability to recognize, interpret, quantify and qualify the nature of our life experiences as well as the selective choices we make in defining the reality of those experiences is precise, but cannot be uniformly definitive. Why do our individual perceptions of the world we inhabit often usurp the reality of the world we experience? Because we become who and what we are by individual interpretation, and the chore of being ourselves is aligning the diversity of each human experience within the nature of the experience of being human.

Since the world, the earth, IS, and “is what it is”, we, as residents of it, determine to a great degree the very nature of our experience of living here, on earth. PES, is my effort to understand that essence, the essence of living, here.

Who am I? Why do I think I have any right to express my opinion? What are my credentials? Why should anyone take anything written in this book without a grain of doubt, salting the taste of my words? There was and maybe still is a saying used when the issue of credence, honesty, relevance, is questioned. “Take it with a grain of salt”. I would hope that my words and thoughts are taken in exactly that way. Jesus mentioned salt, (Matthew 5:13, Mark 9:50, and Luke 14.34), when he admonished his disciples, (and those of us who seek the guidance of His understanding), to realize that we are the “salt of the earth”. I have lived an ordinary life, with just a few accomplishments worthy of note. I have been and still am trying to maintain the salt that is undoubtedly the essence of living. The greatest commandment? That is the salt, and we are that salt when we love one another. I have come to know many people who, like myself, are deemed unworthy of love, for one reason or another. It is difficult to “season” the flavor of our angry, disgruntled, politicized, finger pointing, in many ways rudderless society. Love, as a concept, does not occupy the hearts and minds sometimes, and it has rarely found a lasting home historically in any past society. So I am one who hears, in the words of Jesus, a promise that there will be a Kingdom of love established on the earth, and it will be filled with people who love each other. That is a fact that I think we ought never “take with a grain of salt”.