A good day, babysitting for granddaughter. It's getting easy--she's six months old.

Regarding my previous post ("A Poet's Lament"), i just want to make the point that when you write something on the negative side, it does not mean that your entire being is consumed with those feelings. It is a slice of life, an aspect of experience, expressing part of the self, but not the whole self.

Secondly, important to say that thoughts and feelings evolve. Moods come and go. But just about everyone knows this. If someone is stuck in a certain mood or way of perceiving the world, I submit that something may be wrong with that person.

We have all known people who seem to be eternally happy. I sometimes wonder, is this real? We have all known people who are stuck in depression, seemingly cannot see through the darkness to the light. These people need help, in my view. Depression is almost always very treatable, with the right intervention.

Third, a creative person likes to view the world through different lenses. A writer can look inside or outside, and that's okay. In fact, I think it's healthy. Not everything we see in the world is a projection of ourselves, and it is, in my view, one of the most important tasks of the artists to critique external reality, society and culture.

If my poetry seems to be dark one day, and light the next, this is not necessarily a manifestation of Bipolar. It can be, and often is, simply a manifestion of shifting moods, and my desire to perceive the world wearing different lenses.