I went camping over the weekend.  I had not stayed outside in a tent since my backpacking trip last summer, so I appreciated the opportunity to get out again.  The autumn colors had must peaked, so the forest looked particularly full of color.  On the other hand, because the colors had already reached their peak, the land was beginning to show signs of its winter decline, the time when every last leaf falls off the trees and every deciduous tree is barren and gone, pale skeletons against the stark and unforgiving brumal landscape.
     Yet skeletons are necessary.  Without a skeleton, we would not be.  We need its structure, need its form.  Even in a creature that does not have a skeleton as we understand it to be, a form exists.  There is a structure, a framework, a place:  a starting point.
     So it goes with existence.  The autumn colors seem so brilliant because they appear after the euphoric green of summer, which in turn surfaces following the nascent exuberance of spring, which in turn comes to us after the barrenness of the winter.  In every instance, however, form and place prevail.  Things appear in context, in a time, in a space which, at one time, began.
     Here and elsewhere, be it material or ethereal, natural or supernatural, nothing happens without something else happening--or simply "being"--first.