Intellect, perched smugly secure behind convention’s walls, fragments the soul into scattered pieces, rendering it weak with contrived conflict. We are taught to be one of many, unique in conformity’s perceived choices. Black and white, right and wrong; the options…
Humility’s legacy
Man’s basest instinct, fueled by ego and pride, goads us in a legacy of “more” as money, power, and fame greedily measure out our spiraling descent. Insecurity is humanity’s collective theme; humility our lonely virtue. The conflict with self never…
The riddle of the Sphinx
When asked, “What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three in the evening?” Oedipus correctly answers, “Man.” The mythological Sphinx’s riddle illustrates the physical progress of Man through life in…
The void
Always threatening, bringing the jagged cliff of despair to the highest grassy meadow, the void hangs like a vulture over carrion. Existential emptiness without meaning, the void is an absence, a lacking, a primal and essential hunger gone unfulfilled. The…
Water
Water floods life with stark alternatives: hope or despair, passion or malaise, thirst or drowning, all as we choose. The same fluttering drop fills the seas while emptying the skies, pushing imagination to explore, pulling it to dare. Clouds pan…
On report
It’s been one and a half years since the batteries implanted in my chest were turned on, and new electrical pulses began firing in both sides of my brain, ameliorating the worst of my Parkinson’s physical symptoms. It has been…
Goodbye, USS Ranger
Having served for ten years active duty, including combat, in the United States Navy did not make me eligible for a pension or stipend of any sort. It did not allow for tax free shopping privileges at the on-base Commissary…
To the graduating class
What defines success? A better question, in my opinion, is “who” defines success? For most of us, the simple answer is “someone else,” someone else defines our goals and ambitions. Call it peer pressure or societal expectations or a parent…
The “all of us”
Two days ago, I had four medical appointments at Swedish Hospital, the location of my Deep Brain Stimulation surgery in Seattle last November. It was beyond strange to return after two months of no visits, and I found myself fighting…
A new day
The progression of Parkinson’s is similar to the concept of “boiling a frog”: life’s natural coping mechanism—time—tends to mask the true weight of the illness from the afflicted. Now imagine if the emotional distortion of time did not exist; what…