Peter M. Hunt's Blog, page 3

The surreal thing

It is surreal to consider that it was just one year ago I started my Parkinson’s comeback. Much has changed in the past 12 months as my Parkinson’s “progressed,” a word ordinarily reserved for a positive characterization.

Although my symptoms have indeed worsened, my mitigation efforts have added significantly more “time of useful consciousness,” as we used to say in the Navy. The last year has been progressively more difficult, but who said that easier is better?

The last year was busy. B...

Twighlight

12/25/2023 Christmas

Like most people, my wife and I have spent much of our 32-year marriage too busy to notice time slip away. One clear morning, we woke up as sixty-year-olds, with used-to-be kids living much as we had when we were young, leaving us to wonder what the hell happened.

I used to think the phrase “our time” was a hackneyed attempt to climb on society’s prescribed bandwagon just before twilight. Yet, as Parkinson’s progresses, the time spent with my wife is absent petty bicke...

The next hill

December 4, 2023

When I go hiking or just a walk around the neighborhood, I rarely think about traversing the hill at the end. There is nothing to gain by ruminating about how it will be painful and prolonged. Instead, I think about my next few steps, breathing vitality into everything surrounding me.

Living in the present is a much-discussed concept that travels deep into the soul. I only began to realize this as my Parkinson’s symptoms started to accelerate nine years after deep brain st...

Defining love

November 12, 2023

Children are born with intact awareness and understanding of love’s miracle of simplicity. It is only society’s enculturation that needlessly complicates a comprehension of perhaps life’s most fundamental truth—just as essential to evolving beyond western culture’s spiritual stasis, the royal lie of scarcity, is a common marker of awareness that “I am nobody,” not to be confused with reducing the statement to society’s lowest level of introspection, “I am a nobody.”

In re...

Roll out

October 20, 2023

Why roll a book out at a restaurant? Why not a bookstore, or library, or any place where there was not an existential threat of BBQ sauce saturation?

Those who know me are deeply aware of my penchant for doing things unconventionally. After today, however, I see clear reason for the venue’s propriety. Tomorrow’s Book signing will be the third (or is it the fourth?) at the BBQ Joint, each more successful than the last. Some of life’s most interesting conversations have occu...

Rainbow

October 16, 2023

I first saw this rainbow on my way home from the boat. What struck me as curious was the apparent grace with which it altered its fundamental radiant message. First seeing it framing a wooded area, the notion of a relaxed description, such as “the nature of nature” was perfect for that moment. Once the final 90 degree turn of the dock was made, the rainbow had changed its position and its aura, adopting a far lighter tone as the rainbow’s two ends draped either side of the ma...

Life changing

October 12, 2017

Six short years ago, Greg and I were partaking in some “shark repellent,” the night before we departed on a plane to make the 18-hour boat ride to Guadeloupe Island, Mexico to cage dive with Great White sharks.

Twelve years out from a life-changing young onset Parkinson’s diagnosis, I viewed this as probably the final organized adventure of my life. Turns out, I was correct.

I enjoyed the Great White trip immensely, despite coming home with few photos actually taken by ...

Life’s eternal bargain

My first indication of a visiting vessel was the coffee-grinder-like sound of a bow thruster. My passengers—a former Recon Marine father and his 37-year-old son—helped  the newcomers tie up, and before long, the steady beat of conversation drifted through my boat’s open window. I joined my friends outside. Our neighbors, a mother, father, and 28-year-old daughter, carried an effortless air of kindness as the conversation deepened.

We explained to our three guests, none of whom were veterans, ...

A misplaced power

May 11, 2023

Leaving the grocery store today, I saw a homeless man standing on the corner, holding a cardboard sign stating he was a Vietnam veteran. Pulling up to the stop sign, several well-established narratives, conditioned in my mind after years of exposure, passed through my consciousness, allowing me to recognize them for what they were. The man passed the first authenticity test: he looked about the right age.

The most established societally sanctioned mental story led off in my br...

Bluewater

April 27, 2023

The sea has been my life’s central line of consistency, a colorful ally in my stumble through day-to-day existence. From my lifelong hobby, scuba diving, to my first real job as a Navy A-6 Intruder aircraft carrier pilot, to where I choose to live in the present, the ocean’s influence on my life has been nothing short of prodigious.

Growing up in Greece, I basked in the revelation of the unknown, mesmerized by the ocean’s enigmatic obscurity. I spent hundreds of hours spearf...