Peter M. Hunt's Blog, page 20
November 24, 2017
Being lost
How hard we work to stay distracted, desperately shielded from the smallest honest glimpse; surrounded by idols and walls and carefully contrived paths to nowhere; setting up the game to rules born of obscure fancy.
Until that rare person pierces the image, deflating the world to simplicity, without intention or motive or purpose, with only a kind word or warm look. Straddling the mirage’s complexity and vision’s loving nothingness is a hard place to live.
But it is the life we have; lost in...
October 30, 2017
Walking the dog
Two and a half years ago, I was walking the family English Golden Retriever through our rural neighborhood. It had only been a couple of months since my Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) surgery, and I was having difficulty relaxing and reaching a rhythm as my pooch pulled, then abruptly stopped to sniff, jerking the leash painfully against the still tender battery implants in my chest.
I was frustrated. Unable to exercise except for these walks, becoming stir crazy in my house and the inner worki...
October 27, 2017
Imagination’s key
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 dazzle in simplicity, enticing hungry exploration forward to nowhere, like an airplane soaring west until it arrives where it started.
Words like position and legacy decry and diminish, while only the absence of argument can hint...
October 23, 2017
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 ends, battling quiet mantras that ring hollow and weak, sabotaged by the competitive urges that seek to derail our chugging climb.
Life’s desperate loneliness casts its broad shadow—invisibility; not mattering; existing without being. Ego homes in...
October 5, 2017
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 a linear fashion: as a baby, Man walks on all fours; as an adult on two feet; and when elderly with three appendages through the use of a cane.
As I pack two folding canes, not used in almost three years, into my backpack, it strikes me that our trek thro...
August 4, 2017
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 vacuum leaves nothing but the horror of being, yet not-being; of knowing the I that once was, but is now nowhere. Without love, all ceases.
Victoriously simple in honesty and trust, love’s white shadow overwhelms the void with the warmth of...
October 20, 2016
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 across the bright half-moon, thin, then thick, exposing seconds of clarity before blackening in a threatening mass. The clouds grow with our curiosity until finally bursting. The rainy deluge beckons for the warmth of another’s arms.
The river’s turb...
June 2, 2016
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 both as I had hoped and feared: the sense of transcendental self-awareness has largely dissolved into memory while my mobility and physical comfort are much improved.
Was it a deal with the devil? Not really, I’m not convinced that the gains and losses are inextricably...
August 13, 2015
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 for groceries or the Navy Exchange for sundry goods. It did not provide for medical or dental benefits. It did not even permit access to the Naval Air Station to show my son the few buildings still standing where I used to work.
All that remained to show for a decade of se...
June 8, 2015
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 or role model saying “Go to college, get a job, join the military,” we all get steered in life’s journey to some degree.
Many people, maybe most people, never take control of their own lives. Instead, they allow outside influences to control them. Sometimes...
