capacities, uncertainty and striving, that compelled my superimposing on my colleagues with certainty other persons' and other professions' views. Actually, my certainty about the conundrums: man, family, community come only in particulars and only in fits and starts, and my certainty is at once a truth and a nontruth. I see my aim as ever striving toward certainty while constantly wrestling with the discomfort of uncertainty. EACH NURSE: A _NOETIC LOCUS_[2] Each nurse is a "knowing place." It feels as if my greatest talents, as a human nurse person, awaited my acceptance that came through as I related to the existentialist thinking of persons like Martin Buber, Teilhard de Chardin, Frederick Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Hermann Hesse, Wilfrid Desan, and Norman Cousins. Now when I think of the phenomena--man, family, community--Theresa G. Muller, nurse educator and clinician, who quoted Hersey from his novel, _A Single Pebble_, comes to mind.[3] He said, "I approached the river as a dry scientific problem; I found it instead an avenue along which human beings moved whom I had not the insight, even though I had the vocabulary, to understand." I consider my greatest gifts as a human being nurse my ability to relate to other man, to wonder, search, and imagine about my experience, and to create out of what I come to know. My ever developing internalized community of world thinkers dynamically interrelated with my conscious awareness of my experienced nursing realm allows my appreciation of my human gifts and the ever enrichment of myself as a "knowing place." NURSE: EXPERIENCE INTERNALIZED Nursing experience taught me that each man, each family, each community was at once alike and different. Hesse, an existential novelist, in _Steppenwolf_, {40} describes each man who has become in family and community as like an onion with hundreds of integuments or a texture with many threads.[4] Then man's differences would be in the quality of his integuments and their development or in his threads in their preponderance. Contemplating the struggles in community regarding mutual understanding, I expanded Hesse's conception of man and found my vision of community to be a salad tossing or a patchwork quilt tumble drying. Valuing the complexity of this conception of man and therefore of community I find myself smiling at the naivety of the earlier more static frames of order I superimposed on these phenomena. These oversimplifications maintained the shade through which I viewed my world. The shade was: others are knowing places, they are responsible; therefore if I quote authority from outside of myself, I can speak with certainty about what I know and believe and no one can attack me. And yet, my unique knowledge was not given and so my defense, my clutching at security foiled my human need for conceptualization of and expression of my own nurse vision of reality. This defeated the development by me of nursing theory.