Like a Fish Out of Water

image: billcursingerphoto.com

 

Beaches close fairly regularly here in Hawaii while tiger sharks measuring up to fifteen feet cruise on through. When waters are murky, best forego the swim. Plenty else to do. My own shark sightings have invariably occurred at this, my favorite beach – though not today. Feeling the ocean tells me it’s safe to swim, but first I bide my time, warming my fully clothed body in the brilliant sunshine while visitors from colder climes run around in bikinis. Mauna Kea is about as protected a bay as you’ll find on the Big Island, and due to restricted public access (best arrive early to secure a parking spot), never crowded. Beginning of the week on a windy day and it’s mostly tourists – young families with grandparents in tow. A lithe towhead of a girl about eight picks every beach morning glory blossom in sight. She’s making a lei, and raises her hands to me the Observer in proud demonstration. I haven’t the heart to tell her that her blossoms will all be wilted within the hour. Everybody looks happy, and why not? The beauty of the place is staggering.

 

 

Offshore winds pick up out of nowhere like tramps in the night. Hawaii’s seasonal shifts are not at all like New England’s – where a nighttime chill in the fall air will by morning produce a palette of colors as far from off-the-rack as bouillabaisse is to Campbell’s soup. Changing seasons here are far less dramatic – one must watch the ocean, be aware of the tides, the color and clarity of seawater; direction of wind. Here on the north shore, one is less inclined to sleep with windows open in order to ward off ill health. Degrees of dampness vary tremendously, and the night air can leave one with cricks in the neck and shoulders during colder months.

Today the ocean is a turquoise jewel, a sparkling crystal of invitation. Fins and mask in hand, I wade in. The first wave fails to render me breathless – a sure sign that winter has passed for good, if fledging cardinals and mejiro birds fail to jog the memory. The ocean never lies. Stroking out into deep water, the bay once shared with scattered others becomes mine alone, and I soon discover why. An offshore wind whooshes into my ears on a turn, and I subsequently notice a subtle underwater silt cloud while reflexively surfacing to check my mask for fog. Experience has shown me I am still safe, but I won’t swim back across the length of the bay today. Calmly I complete my single lap, end to end, tucking into the coral reef for a peek only to discover it has created its own little torrid environment. I quickly turn, roll onto my back and kick my way back to shore, lungs inspiring the bright cloudless atmosphere above. It takes awhile, but I don’t panic the way I did when first caught unaware in similar conditions. Fear burns up energy reserves, and fighting the sea is never wise.

Still and all, I’ve had my day – nothing trumps the freedom this elicits, save free-falling into azure sky before a parachute opens. And this is only conjecture on my part, for I’ve never been skydiving. Nor will I regret, at life’s end, never having done so. I recall years ago when moving from Hawaii to New Mexico, mourning the imminent loss of Big Blue. My dear friend Linda had lived in both places and gently remarked, “Yes, but in New Mexico, the ocean is the sky.” At 8500 ft. elevation, this indeed proved to be true. Still I’d rather be swimming. Or sailing on, gazing at or floating in water. Maybe it’s an ancient memory of gills, or perhaps it’s because the body is over sixty percent water, much of which is saline. Like the fish out of water that I am, something always compels me to return to the sea.

 

image: Robert Deyber

Dreaming Down a Quiet Mind

Whiskered carp are churning in a too-small bowl – one light and girdled gold; the other charcoal-dark and unremarkable. Steam now rises from the vessel as if boiling – and I know, as dreamers do, that it’s not from the contrast of chill in the crisp blue surrounding air. Bamboo around the perimeter creaks, swaying in time to rubicund lips rhythmically breaking surface tension – mumbling, as it were, nothing I can understand.

A small-framed man, collar bones protruding from veined lily-flesh, strides purposefully forward, net in hand. He seines the dark fish with barely a struggle. The white carp remains, circling. Circling.

Existential angst expresses itself in sleeplessness. No particular reason and hundreds of them. The wind howls and the ocean rocks the tug and barge, listing on their sides in this dark early morning crossing. The sky invites me to ponder limitlessness while the earth beneath assures me I’m still present to the grace of this life. Yet I spend hours each day casting about in my mind for answers to imponderables.

The past is a portent cautioning repetition of folly; the future remains a mystery like a bright package that can never be opened with a child’s eager hands. The present itself is a gift which unfolds of its own accord moment to moment; the only means by which happiness can be discovered is in the acceptance of this truth. Still, something hums, snaps and pops in the background: six decades of mental conditioning scramble to survive the cull. Patiently I seek to unravel the spool with my breathing, losing track of the thread piling up around me as I lay awake trying not to disturb my sleeping husband.

I don’t worry much about the dark fish that’s been harvested. Some concepts in life must be sacrificed in order that others might flourish.

The mind fastens instead on the survivor, still swimming steadily – calmly even – in hot water. If these creatures represent aspects of me (it’s my dream, after all), who places them there, save myself? A crisis of consciousness, churning about as I pull the pins on my past. What once kept me propped upright no longer proves sustainable, and I collapse in surrender under the weight of that knowing. Theories and locution from other lips exhaust me, for as the playwright to my own life I recognize the futility of unperformed script. Still, it is a means to slide the keys, ever so furtively, under the door to the cell of a solitary confinement. Moving beyond subsistence thinking – that knee-jerk reaction when tiny blips in the radar flit across the screen of this brief temporal existence – proves expansive. Setting it firmly in place however, requires a kind of vigilance that spills any lingering daytime anxiety over into nocturnal reverie.

Still, the color of the remaining fish gives me hope.

 

Enter the Dream

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Albert Einstein

“The Dream of the Prisoner” (1836) - Moritz Ludwig von Schwind

 

Ancient societies placed great emphasis on dreams, and no major decisions were made without first consulting them. Contrast that with many modern cultural paradigms.

In the film The Neverending Story, a little boy whose mother has recently died is repeatedly told by his father to get his head out of the clouds and put his feet on the ground. Many of us have heard the same thing while growing up. Then we internalize that voice as if it were our own.

This movie’s theme is based on a book the boy finds when he ducks into a small bookshop, in order to avoid three tormenting classmates. The bookstore owner warns Sebastian away from the tome, saying it will involve the boy more than he would want. Sebastian does indeed become part of the story, journeying through a vanishing world called Fantasia. His struggle between doing what his father requires of him and doing what he dreams is a struggle many of us can identify with. We’ve all been conditioned to follow rules imposed by others. Learning to find our way out of this jungle of confusion is the journey we take when we decide to follow the dictates of the creative source deep within.

Fantasia is the realm created by human imagination, not so different from the one in which we live. What we believe, individually as well as collectively, becomes our experience of the world. When we lose the ability to dream, our creative expression is greatly diminished. This industrial age demands, to some extent, that we file in line and shuffle off to work to keep the consumer machine oiled and running. It’s easy to forget there are choices. When things appear stalemated, however – when we feel stuck and hopeless – we can turn back to the dream. Initially it might take time to get the imagination primed and running. But the world is bound to be enriched through our courage to contemplate.

Inspiration requires reflection, hence the ability to dream at night while sleeping. It is in such incubative spaces that it encourages us to try something different or new. During reflection, intuition opens up. Along this stream of awareness, we are carried into a place of immense possibility. Daring to dream gives us permission to invite magic back into our lives.

The death of imagination is a terrible thing. It is the destruction of Fantasia, a world rich with images, creation and food for the senses. To reactivate participation in this magical world, one only has to begin anew. The potential to create afresh exists within each one of us.

Dare to dream, and watch your world transform through the creative power that is within you!

 

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

~ Albert Einstein 

HUNGRY GHOSTS

We were never meant to be completely fulfilled; we were meant to taste it, to long for it, and to grow toward it. The secret to living life as it was meant to be is to befriend our yearning instead of avoiding it, to live into our longing rather than trying to resolve it, to enter the spaciousness of our emptiness instead of trying to fill it up. 

~ Gerald May

image: timothyssketchpad.blogspot.com

 

I can’t get hungry ghosts out of my mind. People who, despite all they have, want more; have an insatiable desire or craving. We live in times where it seems we are being invited to participate in global community. A gathering of kindred spirits. A better understanding that our family is the human family, and that when one suffers, we all suffer. We may be overdue to level the playing field. Americans have guarded and defended and provisionally enjoyed the lion’s share long enough. The global shakedown of ’08 has shown us, more than at any other time in memory, how and from what humility is born. Not a concept any longer, it becomes real the moment we recognize the nature of the lives of most of the planet’s inhabitants. We have consumed and gobbled up more than our share of the world’s resources – and still, we are left wanting more.  A nation of Hungry Ghosts -  entities with huge bellies and necks as narrow as pins. Consequently we collectively remain in a state of constant craving; unable to gulp down enough to fill that cavernous space within.

This past couple of years I have worked with my own Hungry Ghost energy. I’m not a person who craves so much as I am a person who shares. But food has always been my weakness – I love cooking and love eating good, wholesome food. I love it so much in fact that I have a hard time stopping before I’m filled to the brim. And so I’ve been cleaning up my act; getting my body in shape. As I approach sixty, I want the best quality of life possible. If I have an excess of flesh, that indicates to me that my system is overloaded; toxic. Time then, to listen deeply to the fragile house of my spirit and get on board with its agenda rather than simply that of my desire. The body has its own profound sagacity, if I can but attune to it.

What I have learned has turned my life around. But it’s not something I can share. It’s not because I’m stingy or want to write a best seller. Instead I’ve discovered at this stage of life that each body is unique, just like our personalities. What works for me may not work for others. There is no one-size-fits-all, though the barrage of diet books and advertisements that glut the media would have us believe otherwise. Instead I have discovered profound soundness in the somewhat complex system of Traditional Chinese Medicine. I remember a Chinese doctor saying to me that many Asians suffer from deprivation, but that Americans generally suffer from conditions of excess. At that time, maybe five or six years ago, I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around what he was saying. I guess I wasn’t ready to hear it.

Americans seem always in motion, trying to fill each minute of each day with something, anything – to avoid the longing and emptiness Gerald May speaks of. I realize that, with all good intentions, we Westerners try and quell our existential emptiness with things; with food; with substances. We even try and cure disease by adding more: vitamins, minerals, supplements of all kinds – when what would be kinder to the body – what might well eliminate many of our ills and diseases – is likely less of everything we are conditioned to want most. The plus is, we can have more of the stuff that really matters. Less food, more exercise. Less television and computer time, more reading and human interaction. Less talking, more listening. Less action, more reflection. Less taking and more giving. Less craving, more quality of life. And in that, dear readers, you are invited to discover a wellspring of wisdom.

 

KIDNAPPED

I was young and naïve. And just felt so bad for her, confined to that small house and yard in the city. I thought of my own persistent yearning for open spaces and prolonged physical activity. Fresh air and sunshine. Deep breathing. Denied these essentials and my sweat smelled sour like an old woman’s – body turning in that acrid report like a doomed thesis. She would be better off, I thought, with at least a brief respite from incarceration. Too young to possess much of a will, she was easily encouraged into the back seat of my car as we headed out of the maze of asphalt toward the banks of the river, three hundred miles distant.

Along the way, the poor thing whined and cried. She messed the back seat twice. I could restrict her, but not control her actions. After all, someone had to focus on the road ahead. I popped in an eight track, John Fogarty growling rolling on the river … as we undulated along that two-lane highway out of Desert Center. Far from soothing her, the music seemed to increase her agitation. Trepidation gnashed its shiny teeth in bursts too short to linger; there was no turning back. She’ll feel better, I thought, once we get there; set up camp. Maybe she just gets car sick.

Early summer air was already thick with gnats and the earthy scent of rushes and sand along the river bank. I wheeled in as far as I could, dirt road turning to sand. Alone at last, I popped the trunk, set my captive free to stretch her legs, and commenced to clear the site. After several pit stops to swamp out her quarters, it proved too late to lurch into the quiet, swirling tide and strike out for a swim in the arc of afternoon sunlight. Realistically I couldn’t abandon my charge, yet I craved that crossing in a visceral way: dive out, stroke long and strong to the opposite bank. Crawl onto land a quarter mile down. Walk half a mile back. Swim across again, arriving at point of origin: lungs heaving, legs wobbling, utterly content.

Sweet bird of youth, the innocent rarely know of what they are guilty until life unfolds, revealing their folly. It wasn’t illegal, after all – though I should have known, even then, that my brother’s Irish setter was bonded to her owner. No matter that the breed is meant to roam the open fields of the countryside, she was content enough to mark his stride.

Over the past forty-plus years, I’ve raised many dogs of many sorts. And I’ve learned, much as any human can, what comforts them; what distresses. Susie, wherever you are, you know I’m sorry.

I took her home without ever finishing staking the tent.

Outside Woman Blues

If you lose your money – great God, don’t you lose your mind …

Today I hear Eric Clapton’s voice echoing through my mind in a brand-new way. Since I have decided to be happy – all joking aside – the pall of the ‘08 crisis begins lifting from my innermost being where it has been knotted up in places I didn’t even realize. Our house is on the market, and I’m more than okay with relocating to a smaller dwelling. It’s just that I’ve allowed the pressure of monthly obligations to wring me out like a pair of sweat-soaked socks, ignoring just how fetid and dry I’ve become. At the same time, I remain thirsty for the juice of human goodness and decency – and for once, I feel as though I’m receiving more than I’m giving out. A wellspring of gratitude percolates beneath the surface like a bright clutch of shimmering fish waiting for the tide to sweep them into deeper, bluer waters.

Like manna on desert sands, happiness beckons. And it’s no mirage. Joy is at least as palpable as fear, and given the choice, I am determined to discover how imbuing that feeling will play out. For years I have been highly suspicious of perennially sunny folk, especially while detecting strain around their eyes and in the purse of their mouths; knowing that what they say and how they act (and often react) doesn’t really seem to match. Thus I surmise that somehow they are trying to fool the world. (When and how is it my business to disabuse them of their theories? Haven’t I advised clients in the past to fake it ‘til they make it?

Now I am saying to hell with it – might as well give ‘er a try, myself – a sort of experiment in lightheartedness. Because the alternative is not attractive and I’m tired of feeling low and flat like a mechanic’s dolly wheeled beneath every damn thing, examining its underbelly for flaws. To what purpose and end I have executed this little exercise for some years now, I cannot immediately render, nor is there apparent or plausible justification. I only know that it’s time for a change, and I am ready to embrace it.

The Dawning of the Day

It always seems premature somehow to arise before day has broken. Before that glorious ball of fire that lights and warms the earth sees fit to rise, there is surely beauty in the pre-dawn. A sacred silence before resort workers hit the highway – bound for the altered worlds that irrigation and obscene amounts of money create like worlds contained within themselves.

Missing the daybreak, I am content in conserving my contemplative energy for the sun’s navel as he lowers himself onto his bed of horizon each evening. Whether melting into the sea or flashing green like a strobe, theatrics reign here on the north shore of Hawaii island. Old Lā always bows out in superb style, night after night. Sometimes low clouds obscure his passage, but rays that bleed through streaks and puffs of pink, grey and black slice through these obscurations as if their source is tilting his head back and laughing. Zeus in his chariot pulled by four black horses, necks arched, nostrils flaring, thunders through his sky. He is not daunted, and liquid joy seeps out, around and through.

Sunsets have always drawn me into their palette, as saturated colors in a painting are wont to do. Watercolors belong to the dawn – those muted, diluted rosy hues streaked with a wet brush onto pebbled canvas. Living in Maine for thirty-two years, I caught sunrise over the first mountaintop to glimpse the light of day in the eastern United States – Cadillac – but once. It was a cloudy morning, and though fog proves lovely as it spills over Maine’s coastal islands like water over the backs of porcupines, it further muted morning’s hues as if a painter had swished her brushes one time too many in the same glass of water.

image: Sue Ann Hodges

Instead my days climaxed in a sun setting over the hills surrounding Goose Pond; eyes dancing with summer damselflies flittering about on gossamer wings, tickling shoulders as we pulled oars through dark water. While beavers settled into lodges after a long day’s work, tails slapping, osprey nestled into the tallest treetops. The buzz of cicadas joined bullfrogs in a nightly serenade that waned with the flair of Venus emerging into darkening skies, gathering less brilliant companions to her flanks until they congregated like bees populating a hive, turning out the sweetest product imaginable.

image: msnbc.msn.com

Stars are the reward for ushering day into night. Last December I witnessed a full lunar eclipse – stepping out, at intervals, into the wee morning hours to photograph and gape, dumbstruck, at what early humans surely considered a portent. It was magnificent enough that I would repeat the ritual without hesitation. But until then, I’m content to sleep until daylight restores my vision and breaks over the land.

No Escape?

It’s almost unbelievable, the degree to which I become my own undoer. Life has brought me more magic than many, yet these days all seems static as a windless day. Perhaps it is the times we are living in or maybe it’s my own personal evolution. Either way, the past couple of years have presented more than a modicum of confusion and revolving doors.

I have not quite known what to make of this new turn in my life. Perhaps it’s the result of a second Saturn return – that pivotal change in the astrological purview arriving thrice in a long lifetime – life, death, and, perhaps, the pursuit of happiness, all bound into one bouncing ball of confusion. Profound transformation on a massive scale.

The first return brought me my first girl baby – a little stranger I least expected – who changed my life utterly; absolutely, positively. This time around the wheel seems to be gestating something else inside as baffling as the first, though I am yet mystified as to what that might be. Perhaps it’s restitching the fabric of my very being; something to do with my own birth into heretofore unknown realms of possibility. All I know is that a human pregnancy seemed a lot easier, though it is said that subsequent Saturn returns spaced at twenty-eight year intervals in a human life are themselves somehow simpler. Then again due to congealing life patterns, that might not entirely hold true.

Perhaps with all the global change occurring at the same time, much is thrown into confusion. What used to transpire with the snap of my will no longer rivets about in lightning-quick fashion. It’s like I’m wading thigh-deep in honey which is itself in the process of crystallizing. And it slows me down right into the present. Residing in that place of unknowing – remaining as peaceful as possible while wrapped in the precarious here and now as if swaddled in some divine straightjacket – is settling me into my skin in a brand-new way. Just when I think I have mastered serenity – when I’m smug in the knowing of my own mind – I discover its unsettled places; its childish demands that life dance to my own tune. Clearly this is a time to embolden the wisdom and magic of the universe – and I’m open to it – if kicking and spitting just a little.

Houdini escaping from straightjacket

Haven’t Got Time for the Pain

I have got to wrap my mind around this thing called happiness. The Tibetans say that every human being wants first to be happy. I find this oddly strange. For doesn’t that desire arise simply in comparison to the option of suffering?

It’s not that I don’t feel like I’m happy, but it has never taken up residence in the forefront of my consciousness until recently. Before that, service to others lorded large, crowding most anything else out of the frame. It emerged with motherhood and ripened in my practice as a medical intuitive. But even prior to those times when I was young and care-free, was I happy? Was I, in fact, ever happy?

Casting back after I left the house of my parents and was on my own, I discovered a serious girl, save when she cut loose by partying. Somehow substances provided an excuse to lighten up, but I always felt horrible the next morning. As if I had trespassed onto some forbidden ground. A territory others could freely tread, but not me. You think I would have learned, but I suspect few of us do until we’ve had a few years and heartaches under our belts. Happiness was, after all, just a word.

Why now is my attention thus riveted? We run a guest house, among other endeavors. Last night I was speaking with a return guest who has lodged with us a few times in the past. Someone for whom we have quite naturally acquired fondness. If she’s fifty, I’d be surprised. We were talking about the stress we’ve all been under since the economic collapse, and she casually mentioned that she’s pulled all her money out of her retirement accounts, taken six months off work (as my mind reels with images of her as a derelict older woman living on a pittance somewhere) – and, oh. By the way. She’s dying. Of congestive heart failure. You could have heard my jaw hitting the floor. No recourse but a transplant at this point, and she’s decided not to go with that. Personally, I’m in accord. The heart is, after all, a place of our own feelings, not somebody else’s. And ever since Christian Barnard transplanted a baboon heart into a human being back in the ‘sixties, the whole idea of having another’s ticker beating in my chest has made my skin crawl.

Suddenly and profoundly, certain themes snapped into focus, while others that once held sway blurred into the background. Insignificant.

I believe myself to be optimistic, conveniently declassifying disruptive ripples of pessimism into cynicism. Again, distinctions are rapidly dissolving as never before. And I realize I need to be happy. I want to be happy. Perhaps the Dalai Lama is right, though I wasn’t aware of the significance of inner sunshine on my horizon until now. And isn’t now all we actually possess, moment to moment? We can’t hold onto the past, cannot accurately predict the future. All we can capture in our two vulnerable human hands lies in this very moment.

I think of Carly Simon singing in that large clear voice of hers, Suffering was the only thing made me feel I was alive. Thought that’s just how much it costs to survive in this world … Was that me? Is that really what I believed, up until recently? And now, at fifty-eight years of age, can I allow myself to feel something cleaner and more precious; less tongue-in-cheek – and still deem it authentic? And if not now – when time seems more fleeting and far less certain than in the bold days of my youth – When?

I think, Today I shall begin. Yes, I think I will. For there is no other time but the present shimmering squarely in my sights. There is, in fact, no other time at all.

In a Nutshell

I have been blessed to have several caring souls nominate me for various awards or keep me on their Blogrolls over the past year I’ve been part of this fabulous WordPress community. Have a Dream. morristownmemos. Partial View. All Write. So Far From Heaven. Vikram Roy. If I have forgotten you, please forgive me. I want to take the opportunity to offer thanks once again for that recognition and validation, and also to explain my lack of traditional response. Typically I offer posts to address some of the questions these awards ask a writer to share, as answering pat questions somehow doesn’t mesh with my brain chemistry. I’ve never been much for following diagrams or rules for their own sake. I leave that to my husband, a stalwart individual who can read a manual about anything and sort it out. (He once rebuilt a truck transmission this very way, having never had a mechanic’s training.) Thus while I greatly respect and appreciate these qualities in others – for better or for worse, I seem to march to a different drummer.

I’m always searching under rocks and behind walls to discover what lies beyond proscribed reality. Where my husband is solid, patient, enduring – I’m rather like thunder – lightning – fleet. I haven’t the patience the gods gave a flower to open. I am aware, however, that patience is a virtue worth cultivating. Almost everything that has been worth anything to me in this life has demanded I wait for it. Born in June and astrologically ruled by the god Mercury, I have come by my winged feet honestly. Geminis think – all the time: on our feet, on our heads, and no doubt to the utter consternation of many a partner, on our backs. And while I can slow this mind down and even capture the interstices between thoughts in contemplation, I’ve come to appreciate how easily inspiration strikes home. It then becomes about sorting through and sifting out – getting onto the page what first gathers as an amorphous mental jumble. For folks like me, it’s not about forcing or schedules. Instead what seems to work well is attuning to the subtle signs and cues while getting it written down. Harness the thought before it flies on through, over and out. Craft it later.

image: Dexter Bellows - sunset, Mauna Kea beach

As for favorite colors, flowers or times of day, it is now and has always been nature’s ever-changing palette that enthralls. Again in that open-minded, open-ended, spontaneous way, a sunrise will awaken me from slumber to beguile with periwinkle, heliotrope, violet, purple-pink hues. A sunset will blend gold with a fiery melon, rose, cerise and finally indigo. How any of these colors could curry favor over another in my consciousness, I do not know. The magnificent nectar of magnolia blossoms, paklan, stemmadenia – all unremarkably white – any of which sends me straight to heaven.

Mention food or drink and I cannot begin to sort out the delight of the pure and simple: freshly picked and juiced carrot, beet, daikon, ginger. Squeezed Kona orange juice, often blended with that of giant tangelos. Press guava or lilikoi (passionfruit) or Calmonsi lime into half a strawberry papaya and I cannot imagine a soda or cocktail that approaches that kind of glory to the tastebuds. And don’t get me started on the virtues of organic unsulphured California Blenheim apricots. I am also a fair ethnic cook – I love Indian food and preparing it, from cashew or saag chicken to samosas and fried pineapple. A great coconut rice pudding. I love to bake, and making pies is about as easy as walking, for me. Fresh peach pie, tarte au fruite, blueberry, apple, lemon meringue. Throw in a Boston Crème Pie, though that’s not really fair, as it’s a cake with a thick custard in the middle, topped with melted dark Valrona chocolate. And so I might as well toss yeasted breads into the mix, sweet and plain – while longing to try sourdough.

image: Fleur Weymouth - my pulla (Finnish coffee bread)

I love creatures of all kinds, especially dogs and horses, with whom I share a gentle understanding. I love our neighbor Boolcow – his hard shiny nose and the way he sniffs and licks our hands in greeting with his long pointy tongue. And although I think of myself as too serious at times, I delight in small children who, even upon first take, seem to recognize the impish child that lies within me and respond to it favorably – giving me license to cut free a bit and be silly.

noble Boolcow

And finally, I am happiest among those I love who enjoy the things I’ve mentioned, and more. Sunsets. A long hike or a swim in the ocean. A bracing bike ride. A great meal. Quiet company. Gut laughter. Deep conversation. A good film. Touch. The warmth and honesty and undeniable goodness and heart-rendering satisfaction of proximity, one to another. Our time together is always too short. Then again, too much stimulation and I crave time alone. Paradox. Gemini. Me, in a nutshell.