Clever grace

When I was nine, the family hit the road after work one Friday, searching for a place to park our VW to enjoy the outdoors. Almost all coastal Greece is beautiful, making finding a campsite in 1971 easy.

After helping my father raise the tent, I walked along the craggy shore until finding a perch to sit quietly for the sunset. Gazing into the Aegean with unfocused attention, I stared at the rugged rock wall that descended into eventual darkness.

There was something about one outcropping in particular that held my attention. Five minutes of visual fixation found reward when the rock began to move.

Stunned and unable to register what was happening, I watched the rock deliberately unfold with the clever grace of intelligence, gradually differentiating rough tentacles thorny and colorful in texture until the label “octopus” registered in my mind.

The creature, tired of disguise, ambled with fluid acumen into the depths, tentacles miraculously transmuting into willowy feet. I kept sight of the shifting shape as it blended to nothingness in the lower visibility of depth.

The octopus survives by varying its form in both shape and color. I doubt many people could handle this fast a personal metamorphosis in themselves.

Change, impermanence, is inevitable and is neither good nor bad; it is how we react to a transforming world that affects us by creating judgment’s dualistic framework. Editing a written work is a small example of a commonly understood positive in change, at least when it applies to my writing. Reactions to Parkinson’s disease generally reflect an interpretation of bad.

PD has taught me many things, some still not understood cognitively, but one conclusion approaching certainty is to accept change as it happens. I consider PD a “good” thing when life’s confusion of meaning demands labeling.

Is this the remedy, the cure to illusory ailment, wrapped and hidden carefully in the comfort of unity, the soothing salve of vibrant energy, to surrender?

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