Okay, I opened the fortune cookie. It said, "True love is like a ghost, it's seldom seen".

Cool...how true...yet how false. For many of us have felt true love, known every breath and soul of it. Problem is, more often than not, it's one-sided so it is not unseen, just elusive...never tangible...never within one's grasp. How cliché to say it's ghostlike, for those who feel it, see it, like a psychic who sees the future and feels the past, only one person is privy to the vision, while others remain ignorant of it. A vision of truth...vision, truth, feelings too many only deny. So to those in denial, true love is the unseen ghost...yet real to those whose minds are open to accept it.

People talk of creativity being the spawn of pain, depression, drug and/or alcohol induced. Fortunately (though perfect people, the self-deniers, will not believe), but fortunately God loves we creatures of pain, vision, total and complete imperfection, for He would not let us so create from our suffering if he did not.

Though culture and society see us as outcasts, freaks, tainted, tormented, mercurial, tragic, non-peers...we stand above them in our angst and scream out to history that God saw us as special and meant for our suffering and pain, our rejection of convention, to allow us to walk (not ON water) but to tread, wading deeply in, letting our feet get wet and therefore experience. Perhaps someday, we misfits will evolve with web-like feet.

God's true love lets sorrow be our inspiration, for Christ died for us, as well as the righteous, moral conformists. We have been termed eccentric, aesthetic, esoteric, insane, drug abusers and addicts, drunks, perverse, recalcitrant, demonic, spawns of Satan, unreasonable, threats to society, amoral and even at times genius (but usually after our deaths).

We are the famous, the infamous, the known and unknown, the intense, the frightened, the artistic, the creative, the talented and talentless, the fools, the street walkers, the homeless, the wealthy, the poor, the worthless, the visionaries, the brave, the heroic, the cowards, the starving nothingness artists and writers...the nonconformists who march to a different drummer no matter how hard we try to conform and fit in...we are the dreamers. We're here to think for ourselves, believe in miracles, live life to the fullest with every broken heart and broken dream a promise of something more to live for. We're not content to sit on the sidelines and watch the world pass us by.

We think rules are meant to be broken, so we make our own as we go along and end up breaking those. We'd hurt ourselves before hurting someone else. We'd walk through fire for those we love...even for those we do not. We sing songs of unfairness and injustice. We abhor rudeness, snobbery and unkindness. We fight for lost, ignoble causes, volunteer and give though we might have little. We throw caution to the wind and take chances, embrace change. We are the bloody bleeding hearts...the empaths. We respect other's rights, religion, race. We are the sin eaters.

Friends and peers lecture us on our own self-destruction and want to save us from ourselves...but, somehow, like children left with a certain naiveté, we choose to stay as we are for we know what all the others don't...and it's that we feel, so strongly and intensely we could never give that up and those feelings...whether elation, love, guilt, sadness, longing, pain, empathy...are more important to us than all the money and material things on earth. And we are capable, unlike so many, to entrench ourselves in our feelings and see true love.

Like a child with special needs who is one of God's angels on earth, we stay with the pattern and flow life has given us. We allow ourselves to love, to feel, to be used, to be cared for, to be kicked to the curb...and we revel in every second of it because we inevitably know God loves us. We ask forgiveness of our sins and are aware that few realize...even angels can have red hair.