Just returned from a pajama-clad run to my neighborhood Starbucks . . .

and I'm full of philosophical thoughts. Maybe it's because for the first time in days, I have almost a sufficient amount of sleep under my belt, but not quite enough, so it is as if I am in a dreamlike state of awakeness. (What?!?!?)

Anyway, I was thinking as I drove to Starbucks about how much I love taking pictures and how sad I am that I have been too busy at work this month to complete my photoblog entries with the photos from my Christmas trip to Paris. When I take pictures, I try to capture something real in a creative and beautiful and/or different way. There is something about that process that feeds my soul in a way that even the most creative of legal arguments cannot do. I am at my happiest when the creative, observing, interacting and people-loving aspects of me all intersect in taking photographs while exploring a new place, whether it is a different location, neighborhood, state or country.

So, here are a few new photos to tide you (and me) over until I can finish the photoblog entries about my trip:







And on a non-creative, but equally heartfelt note, I saw this Robert F. Kennedy quote on Digby tonight and want to share it with you:

For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. Like it or not, we live in times of danger and uncertainty. But they are also more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history. All of us will ultimately be judged and as the years pass we will surely judge ourselves, on the effort we have contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped that effort.

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.

Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live.