Good Morning Digital Neighbors! This post is going out to all of my places of refuge here at Locals. To you fine souls at Rubin Report where it all started, a place free of censorship and thoughtful engagement and disagreement is so need in our decaying culture, to the clowns and characters at Phetasy where I found so much laughter and variety, to you lovely Bigots over at Triggernometry who make me appreciate perspectives from another point of view with your interviews and the laughs during the RAW sessions and finally the assorted souls that that found their way to Padre's from these parent communities. Thank you all.

Gratitude on my mind - a dear friend at Rubin Report @SEPTUAGENARIAN is in critical condition and would like to leave this world behind. My unexpected friendship with her in the last two years is on my mind so I thought some quotes about friendship would be in order. Sept tried to scare me off, she couldn't ever imagine knowing and relating to a priest as someone who could be a potential friend. Life is full of surprises.

I am a great lover of the Divine and a great lover of humanity. I can't say that I love the whole lot of humanity, collectively we seem to be mob waiting to happen, a clash a egos that often implodes. But one soul at a time, I love that encounter. One person engaging with another, the opening of the story of one's life, those moments give me such hope for what God designed or evolution pushed out of the mud.

Yeah, there are plenty of screwballs in humanity, God knows (And He does) I have done my fair share of adding to the mess, but there is so much good to be discovered as well. Not everyone is healthy, some of us are so ill personally from family history, our own poor choices and various addictions that purported to be friends all they while they enslaved us. Some of those souls take extra time to find the gold, to wipe away the muck that life has piled upon their lap. You have to want to find the gold, and the temptation to remain a victim is powerful in a culture that exalts victimhood over the pursuit of happiness. Happiness is not guaranteed, just the freedom to pursue it according to one's best judgement. Well enough rambling, on to some quotes. To the friends I have discovered here, thank you. To the friends I have yet to meet, I can't wait to be surprised. Peace.

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

A friend is one of the nicest things you can have and one of the best things you can be. - Winnie The Pooh

There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met. - William Butler Yeats

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend. - Robert Louis Stevenson

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends? - Abraham Lincoln