Over eighteen months ago we hatched the idea of Grounded Magazine. Since then we’ve moved into a new house, in a new city, welcomed a sweet baby boy into our family and learned a lot about all of those things as well as the world of online publishing. Each have presented their fair share of joys and challenges. From the beginning Grounded has been published on the changing of the season.

For many years, I’ve intended to set down advice for my children. Not practical tips, but Profound Wisdom. Until now, I’ve failed to write a single word. This was mostly for fear that, once I sat down to compose these lines, I’d find I had nothing original to say. There was also the dread of being mocked for self-importance. Who am I to tell anyone else how to live? It’s not as if I’ve done such a stellar job of it.

Stories, they seem like such simple things: stories found in books, tales told from memory, or those etched in our collective culture. There are stories with heroes and heroines, about good and evil, and stories of real people: people from our families long ago. The words of stories are like a canyon’s rivers: read or told often enough, they can change the internal landscape of our minds and hearts. They are the headwaters that came before us that shape us as we make our own way downstream.