I usually prefer to walk or hike alone to have an undistracted opportunity to think until thought is no longer helpful. These periods of meditative-silenced cognition bring my most peaceful moments, absent the standard lunatic ravings that bounce around my…
Tribe
Most of us spend our lives in a small circle of friends and family, echoing back familiar reactions to what we perceive to be objective reality. But the cruelty of a chaotic world occurs so quickly that even a formally…
Attachment
We leave this place of interactive existence more naked than upon our arrival—when born, we are graced with the body’s solid mystery, while our departure heralds not just the relinquishing of all material possessions but potentially all of material reality.…
Stuck
Spending more time stuck physically and psychologically with each passing day is a defining attribute of Parkinson’s disease. The disease physically incapacitates, freezing the afflicted in place, unable to move or speak, making it feel impossible to breathe. Parkinson’s has…
Heartless distraction
On a recent morning walk, I wandered past a yard sign decorated in the liberating style of a child inscribed with the challenge to “Live Happy.” For decades, my automatic reply to the innocence of this unearned optimism would have…
Enduring depths
Reduce thought to perfection’s frictionless moment, gliding through blissful presence with the confidence of unknowing. Drift past life’s inevitable certainty, beyond sense or senses, exulting in wonder at the brilliant and enduring depths of the soul.
Skirting finality
Recently, while hiking, I spied a stout seal languishing in a narrow stretch of water separating a small island from the trail where I stood. The seal lolled about leisurely in the shallows, gently rolling, pirouetting without concern for its…
Purgatory’s jewel
We are lured to the water in tacit tribute to an unseeable unity, both in periods of inspired stillness and foreboding ferocity, with terrible waves woven together in frightful patterns undetected by sense or sentience. One afternoon, my wife and…
Tyrannical anxiety
Over Christmas, my wife and I visited family in San Francisco, staying at the same beachfront hotel we had on a previous trip south eight years prior. The season, age, and my Parkinson’s progression separated the two hotel stays, factors…
Final Odyssey
It’s been over ten years since last venturing out during New Year’s Eve, what I used to consider amateur night. That’s what a lifetime of hard drinking will do to you—soften criticism of those who managed to interject a modicum…