Circa:  Thirteen and a half billion years ago, our indifferent universe banged a mighty spread and continues to expand at quantum speed.  Planet Earth was formed four and a half billion years ago.  It took the crust one billion years to cool enough for life to begin.  Single life cells appeared three and a half billion years ago.  Organisms appeared five hundred and seventy million years ago. And last to appear, a meager quarter-of-a-million years ago, was Humankind.
      Circa:  Sumerian cuneiform writings, the earliest known, emerged 5500 years ago.  Hammurabi set his laws in stone 4000 years ago and, soon after, the Egyptian Book of the Dead was collated from religious documents of the 18^th dynasty.  Culled from their oral traditions, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were first inscribed 2800 years ago, followed by the Pentateuch of the Torah 200 years later.  Before Homo sapiens wrote, nature penned her chronicles with fossils, the silent, venerable hieroglyphics of our planet.  History came to life only when it was written.  As an ephemeral millisecond tossed into a thirteen-and-a-half-billion-year universe, how insignificant, how lost, how miniscule would we be without our writings?
      Why do you write, inquires our ever-swelling universe, when no one else but you can read?  When you, endangered Homo sapiens, will soon become extinct, your unconcerned universe will make atoms of your books, electrons of your cyberspaces, and forever mute your megalomaniac cries.  Abandon your prized alphabets then and learn to live in peace before you self-destruct.  Writing has enthralled you, fantasized your minds with heavenly after-worlds, euphemized your delusions into holy beliefs, and sundered you into inimical planetary tribes.
      Without letters how can a pencil titillate the stars, or thinking fingers stroke the sky, or soaring spirits taunt infinity?  How can we explore our minds, revive our heritage, dream, believe, worship, pray, make belief, pretend, and think without the written word?  We are what we write for to write one must feel, and to feel one must live, and to live one must discover and doubt.
      But then, why write a play when one cannot best Sophocles, a poem, when one cannot top Homer or a novel, when one cannot outdo Cervantes.  Why bother say anything when no idea under the sun is new and all that can be said has been already said many a time before?
      We write because we are in love with language; we covet it, hold it close to our breasts, savor its warm, naked Logos throbbing with offerings, and its Eros, fecund with pleasures.  We write because we like to wing expressions and release them into the seasons of knowing that they may pollinate the open minds in the human garden.  We write because we like to explore our spiritual dimensions and collect our scattered identities, because we love our quiet solitudes, because we cherish the rhythmic music of our hearts, and because we resist death by leaving indelible marks on the sleepless eyes of memory.
      We write because we love to hover in the skies of imagination with albatross wings, because we wish to reorganize our chaotic world, because we aim to redefine justice, because we want to entertain, explain, complain, inflame, seduce, share, be heard, and because we like to array our beliefs in regal garbs and our thoughts in skimpy miniskirts.
      But above all, we write for joy because in writing lurk both giving and receiving.  No one has ever written who has not first received, and having humbly received, has gladly given.
      There is more love and truth in writing than in thinking or speaking.  Our thoughts may delude us, our words may belie us, but our writings are the windows of our souls through which we view the world and through which we are forever viewed.
      Do we write to be read, to be published, to be famed—or do we write because we need to, because we want to, and because we have to?  Would we not rather recite our writings to a select few than have numerous others read us in silence?  Is not writing another form of shared love?  Are not writings our artistic renditions, our letters of gratitude to God for having constituted us with the divine gift to create something out of nothing, our passions to transform chaotic thoughts into orderly beauty, and our desires to release our best feelings that they may dance to life long after our own music has ceased?
      We ask who are we, what are we, where are we, and what will become of us?  We ask, we reflect, we fear, we prevail, we write, and then we die.  To write is to be brave—brave enough to skywalk, to suffer the fires of freedom, to insist on joy, to overcome one’s autism, and to emerge from the abyss of the unsaid, from the caverns of the unwritten, from the bunkers of silence into the tempests of expression where lightning is a welcome light, revered rather than feared.
      We write to sail beyond our small Cartesian world into mammoth worlds inhabited by giant dreams.  We write because we need each other to circumvent nature’s cruel cunning and life’s stunning storms.  We write to trout up time’s twirling torrents and surf down her tall waterfalls.  We write to declare our ethos, to share our pathos, and to flaunt our egos.  We write to bellow at the blaring sun:
      “Cogito ergo sum,” I think therefore I am.
      “Amo ergo sum,” I love therefore I am.
      “Scribo ergo sum,” I write therefore I am.