Good morning, Netizens...

This morning's AP picture is another in the series of sand sculptures that I have found, in this case a sculpting contest held in Russia. I admit a perverse fascination with sand sculptors, as I truly believe this to be an incredible art form. Will this and other beautiful works of sand sculpting art in weeks or months be just another stretch of sand by the sea? Will I someday, unknowing, step upon what was once an abstract art work in passing? Other sculptures, paintings, drawings may last for generations, even eons, but sand sculptures may pass in a windstorm, it seems.

This abstract beauty is somewhat like the colorless, haunting, tiny finch that sings outside the doorway of the Virtual Ballroom each morning. In the vast scheme of the universe, he perches on the fence, yet always remaining out of view. Weighing less than a pound, an entire block of cityscape rings with sound when he opens his tiny beak and dispenses his complex sixteen or eighteen-part melodious song. Then as suddenly as he has arrived just after the dawn, he is gone on the wing to some unknown destination until tomorrow.

Like the finch and the sand sculptor, we each come to the Virtual Espresso Bar each morning bearing our unique gifts of beauty and meaning. Some may say this cannot be true, that they have no such gifts that would delight and amaze others, but I disagree. There are wonderful singers, obsessed writers, madcap humorists, rambling poets and pedantic philosophers in us all, just waiting to be discovered. I have to believe that all anyone needs is to open their hands and hearts and it will be yours. Yet in the rapid-fire pace most of us live, we often as not forget the greatest, most-powerful gift that any have seen, that being of the love for one another and this Universe in which we live. If we lose sight of that, we are doomed to perish empty, unseen and unremembered.

The barrista of the Virtual Espresso Bar sidles down my way briefly, speculatively looking at my empty cup.

“I think I'll have another cup of today's blend, morning songbird,” I say, and thus, with a light heart and a hidden song still ringing most gently in my ear, I'll be prepared for whatever is yet to come.

This is not your ordinary Wild Card. Rather, this Wild Card, when it lands on the scarred espresso bar before you asks you tentatively, what is the most-beautiful gift you bring to the Community bar this morning?

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