Tomorrow, 6 years ago, my dear sister, Lynne, passed away from complications of cancer, chemo, heart attack and covid. She fought through all that like a battleship parting the oceans, but at 75---2 years younger than I am now---she succumbed. She was a sister in the deepest sense of the word, an incredible friend, and a mountain of a soul. To call her "the rock of gibraltar" (a common expression in america) is too little. She was the whole continent. My mother was a jazz musician, and brought me to jazz, painting, writing and comedy. My father studied opera and could send his voice to the clouds---whole operas, every note, every word, from memory. I was surrounded by art, theater, music, you name it...but where did my sister fit in? She absorbed all that artistry like a sponge the size of the oceans . She adored it...and, from my earliest memories, she was an indescribable muse, an inspiration, a fountain of understanding...and an endless, endless support. When I started writing---and was doing crazy, avant garde things---she understood every word, and supported every paragraph, every page. I once did a bunch of scenes with Buddha (for a college group); and my characters called him "Bu". ("Hey Bu, how's it hangin'"). I wasn't being disrespectful---just silly. From then on, when Lynne wanted to cheer me up, she'd call and say, "Hey Bu...how's it hangin'...you need to talk?" Even my avant garde music---I mean composing with sounds, real 'avant garde' stuff at the time---she accepted with uncanny ease. I never heard a "that's just weird," or "you've got to be kidding" from her...And when I entered the pro market---selling art, music, writing, whatever---she always boosted me, told me to never give up. She worked in the field, knew its 'brutalities', and always helped me believe in my heart and my soul. In later years, I lost people ...2 dear girlfriends passed on (different decades), several friends, parents, relatives, etc. People sometimes asked: "Does it ever get easier?" No. Never. (It shouldn't.) But when Lynne passed, I felt the earth shifted in a way I couldn't describe. After cleaning out her home (with others) and looking at that place shorn of the huge soul that once lived there, I couldn't be there another minute. So I did what she'd have wanted me to do: I went outside and let nature 'speak' to me. The trees were bursting with oranges and opulent reds, the leaves were lush, the sidwalk was blanketed in leaves who'd decided to lay out a carpet for every human who passed by, the air was filled with that stinging-sweet fragrance that fall adores, and the breezes were like caresses---cool, but with ribbons of warmth: as if summer were sneaking into the air one more day, reminding us that, even in fall, there's warmth hiding inside everything. I thought: Lynne: This is for you. All this beauty and blessing: It's for you. And then I realized: It wasn't just 'for' her, it was her. As if she'd become the canopy of nature itself. Yes, I thought. That's it. That's why I came out here. She was no longer in that apartment: She was here. And I looked everywhere, and thought, thank you, sweet sister... The first image was my drawing of a photo-book she showed me. My first large-scale ink drawing. The second you've seen a million times: It's my avatar. A simple brush in colored pencils.. Why a brush, here? Lynne once said: "You know, I didn't give you Mozart or Poems or Jazz or Paintings: That wasn't my calling. I gave you the brush. I gave you the tools, the belief to work with all those things." ...One day a great soul reached heaven, and an angel said, "he shouldn't have come here!" "The where should he have gone?" said an onlooker. "Oh, much, much higher," said the angel.... Thanks for reading...I wish you lots of inspiration and light... ------------------