Books and blog by Peter M. Hunt

Reveling in translation to the material world, new life bridges love’s eternal unity, transiting from darkness to light in the purity of innocence, enraptured in life’s simple joy of wonder.

Opening eyes wide to morning’s natural glow, rejoicing in life’s simple awe, new life remains unaware of joy’s fleeting nature, grace’s inevitable sacrifice to the future through the maturation of crippling manhood.

And what of me, a 15 year old temperament fettered irreducibly by a 60 year old appearance and a 90 year old’s physical incapacity?

Content as observer, grateful to be alive, to witness the intense beautification of novel family, eyes weeping ecstatic tears of love’s eternal messenger, towering glimpses of blessings beyond ordinary ken remind me with the searing power of the present why it is that I continue to choose life.

All seen in the fleeting purity of a baby’s eyes. Welcome to this world, baby Enzo.

I am grateful for many things, and topping the list is my relationship with my mother, cultivated primarily through lengthy telephone conversations.

During earlier times, our conversations centered on mundane and ultimately unimportant everyday details. Now, with my health challenges but one of many family struggles vying for her attention, our phone conversations have evolved with a richness of unexpected holiness.

I do not use the word “holy” lightly. I can think of no more appropriate approbation to characterize this mutually honored exchange. We talk only of vital life topics that make current events in this world seem hopelessly quaint, dull even. And we laugh at everything.

These are not maudlin discussions of death’s circling proximity. My mother, who is 88, has cancer and a robustly authentic sense of humor. She also walks three to four miles daily, finishes the NY Times crossword puzzle every day, and lives by herself in a house with a second-floor bedroom on the East Coast, far away from where we can render assistance, especially as travel becomes more problematic for me.

What is our shared response to this predicament? We joke about the other copping out by dying first. And we laugh, not the fear-tinged bravado of a false, void-filling chatter, but with the beautiful conundrum of the intrinsic humor of accepted circumstance. I always feel better after speaking with her, not due to concrete advice or singular insight, but because of the sacred sharing of unspoken secrets of the soul.

As life becomes more difficult for each of us, as trials painfully pure in grace join our ever-growing mountain of personal disarray, our humor grows more pointed, our topics more gorgeously esoteric in genuine blessing.

She is a brave companion in comedy. I am incredibly fortunate to have mom share life’s final secrets with me, even from 3,000 miles away—well, especially from 3,000 miles away. Heh, heh…

Hidden until the final moment by the morning sun, a hummingbird appeared out of nowhere two feet from my face, hovering effortlessly in place. Standing eye to eye, the Hummingbird emanated intelligence, a knowing. Two sentient orbs of lighted grace stared at me in wonder as if to say:

“I am he, and he is me.”

Time vanished in the warm glow of eternal blessing. The Hummingbird flew off, trailing with it a presence of what is.

It’s been nearly two weeks since my wife flew to Charleston to help my son recover from shoulder surgery, a length of time that as a prospect was both frightening and invigorating, with the unfolding reality living up to expectations in either case.

Free-floating anxiety is a typical Parkinson’s symptom, manifesting as a barely controllable panic attack whenever on a medication downswing. Time slows, creating desperately long minutes of foggy indecision where even the mildest noise hurts. Reality mercilessly taunts and baits me in a sadistic merry-go-round as the right side of my body begins to shut down. Feeling intensely vulnerable and nearly frozen in place, I am helpless to influence outcome.

A conscious surrender to life’s inevitabilities is the only viable mitigation while waiting for the medication to kick in. If walking the dogs or engaged in some other, ordinarily innocuous daily ritual, nothing short of pure grit has any chance of fighting through the black cloud of despair, of making it home.

Practicing uncomfortable situations head-on normalizes fear and discomfort until they become another controllable sensation deflated of mystery. It is all a game, a vast, beyond-human-understanding system of contrived decisions and outcomes, a sport with real pain and struggle.

When my wife called to see if I would be okay if she extended her visit from one to two weeks, I immediately said yes despite a pang of apprehension. The associated challenge would be a welcome morale boost, but only if I won. Considering the prospect, I started to smile.

Fair enough. My grin broadened as I remembered how much I enjoyed games as a child. Let’s play.

It has never been more challenging or painful in my almost ten years of practicing hot yoga to complete a session. During this period, my capabilities have come and gone in direct correlation to taking breaks from the practice due to various surgeries. Currently, I’m experiencing a new type of reversion, a steady slide of capability that has me able to do a bit less each week, regardless of effort or discipline.

It would resonate in today’s world of misguided incentives to believe this to be discouraging. We tend to equate success with a linear path toward any number of ego-inflating goals, and therein lies one of yoga’s masterful strengths.

Yoga is not about competing with classmates or even yourself. Its beauty lies in attempting perfection with the understanding that perfection is unattainable. How close one comes to perfection becomes a meaningless remnant as breathing is closely coordinated with balance, strength, and resilience, causing our thinking process to surrender to a stall. The soul flourishes under such conditions.

The pain and extreme discomfort—the room is heated, often more than 100 degrees—makes me question how much longer my repertoire of responses to Parkinson’s implacable pressure will include hot yoga. It is this discomfort, in my opinion, that lies at the core of hot yoga’s effectiveness in keeping me active.

The human body responds to physical stress through adaptation and acclimatization, reacting to extremes with a similarly disproportionate positive reaction if attitude allows. Both conscious and unconscious thought play essential roles, stimulating the body so that normal capability in certain specific areas, such as dexterity, returns to me for a limited time.

Other practices achieve the same end, notably Tai Chi and Qigong. I strongly recommend any life practices of this type to everyone, whether healthy or not. My personal thanks to Carol and all the life-changing Chrysalis Oak Harbor hot yoga instructors.

Lately, it has been difficult for me to get through the day. A mild summer cold and insomnia have made overcoming Parkinson’s constant nag to inaction increasingly impossible to ignore. Condemned to boredom’s nightmare, often unable to muster the energy to stand, I ward off apathetic languor as it vies for supremacy with callous free-floating anxiety.

Patience is Parkinson’s strongest suit: relentless, dull-tipped incursions methodically eat away at my stamina. Given Parkinson’s timeframe for success—measured in decades—it would appear inevitable that the disease will eventually win, a conclusion I’ve endured as an essential premise for the past 17 years.

My singular refusal to allow that day to be today is all that has kept the game in play. So, what is it that keeps this baleful diversion going? My competitive nature certainly is part of it; I’ve never enjoyed losing, even after fully accepting that winning is not an option. Death itself does not scare me inordinately, but I do grow concerned about the inevitable hardships encountered enroute to fulfilling mortality’s contract.

There is one thing that inspires me, however: a fascination with the curious power that twists and turns the lives of family members and how it might influence their travels. I could care less about popular notions of success: whether my children achieve wealth, status, or fame gratifies me only at the margins. That they are generally happy, reflective, and kind fits my definition of success far better.

When my father was weeks away from passing on, his last piece of advice to me was always to stay curious. It has taken me years to understand, but I finally appreciate why: in the end, curiosity might be all that remains as animation quits our still form.

Unconditional love’s elegant beauty slices through life’s clutter, revealing the hidden edge of sacred meaning and conceding the barest glimpse of grace without relinquishing a tight grip on neverland’s illusory realities.

To love unconditionally is to best a universal fear, to banish love’s nebulous shadow permanently and irrevocably. Surrendering to life’s quizzical dream completely, welcoming the welling up of the natural glow of playful happiness, dismisses love’s darker side, ejecting the fear-mongering dualism running rampant throughout the multiplicity of man’s institutional expression.

Ego’s stranglehold on the reigns of the psyche demands blood payment to eke out even the barest of truths, to allow it to bask in fading light. Discovering love’s secret key bears the cost of enduring arduous self-reflection in the blackened harmony of melancholy’s anthem.

With unconditional love comes the joy of permanent absolution, a price well worth paying.

Helpless, without recourse, the rug pulled out from beneath-your-feet sensation of abandoned vulnerability, of impending doom on all fronts: it sits heavy within me. Bored and tired, achy with life pains that refuse to dissipate, my regular habits for coaxing a soft landing to the day’s futility hang dead within me. It feels like I’ve got nothing; I am an empty shell of oblivion.

My thinking mind, wearing life’s duality around my neck like a collar, has no temporary solution, no respite to offer. I bounce from one empty diversion to another, making no progress, finding no exit from the invisible mousetrap.

Enough.

Life is a hopeless struggle to the rhythm of silent music. I surrender completely and utterly. I listen to music. I go outside for a slow walk around the yard. I force a smile, and it helps. I repeat those words heard in deafening silence so long ago: it’s all okay, because it really is.

My smile broadens. It still really is.

Having just finished a week of nonstop activity, I welcome the solitude of a day without commitments. It is a dizzying reminder that I have grown over the decades; seedlings of ebullient wisdom nestle deeply in my humble dwelling of being.

Lately, I enjoy writing in the afternoons while listening to loud, hard-driving music. These rhythms overwhelm me with undiluted veracity as I struggle with a staggering fear, the shadow side of accepting “what is,” until creation flows through me, pounding to the music’s beat, arousing a twisted union with soul in an oblique detour as I surrender to creation’s bliss.

It feels strange, out of place, to acknowledge Parkinson’s flowing from cause to effect and back again. The universe’s circuitous route to insight vies for supremacy with the blackened precipice lining the road’s edge.

Harnessing imagination’s practical application of creation frees the soul to touch upon the cryptic circumstance of unconditional love playing with everyday silliness; rendering the carefree source of all suffering—stifling knowledge—into a vindication of the child’s game.

In its simplest form, this is why we are here, in this moment, at this place: to play with a child’s abandon and a sage’s wisdom, secure in the knowledge that loving-kindness awaits.