Peter M. Hunt's Blog, page 7
July 26, 2022
Unspoken secrets of the soul
I am grateful for many things, and topping the list is my relationship with my mother, cultivated primarily through lengthy telephone conversations.
During earlier times, our conversations centered on mundane and ultimately unimportant everyday details. Now, with my health challenges but one of many family struggles vying for her attention, our phone conversations have evolved with a richness of unexpected holiness.
I do not use the word “holy” lightly. I can think of no more appropriate a...
July 24, 2022
Hummingbird
Hidden until the final moment by the morning sun, a hummingbird appeared out of nowhere two feet from my face, hovering effortlessly in place. Standing eye to eye, the Hummingbird emanated intelligence, a knowing. Two sentient orbs of lighted grace stared at me in wonder as if to say:
“I am he, and he is me.”
Time vanished in the warm glow of eternal blessing. The Hummingbird flew off, trailing with it a presence of what is.
The post Hummingbird appeared first on Books and blog by Peter M....
July 16, 2022
Let’s play
It’s been nearly two weeks since my wife flew to Charleston to help my son recover from shoulder surgery, a length of time that, as a prospect was both frightening and invigorating, with the unfolding reality living up to expectations in either case.
Free-floating anxiety is a typical Parkinson’s symptom, manifesting as a barely controllable panic attack whenever on a medication downswing. Time slows, creating desperately long minutes of foggy indecision where even the mildest noise hurts. Re...
July 9, 2022
Yoga’s graceful surrender
It has never been more challenging or painful in my almost ten years of practicing hot yoga to complete a session. During this period, my capabilities have come and gone in direct correlation to taking breaks from the practice due to various surgeries. Currently, I’m experiencing a new type of reversion, a steady slide of capability that has me able to do a bit less each week, regardless of effort or discipline.
It would resonate in today’s world of misguided incentives to believe this to be ...
July 5, 2022
A curious power
Lately, it has been difficult for me to get through the day. A mild summer cold and insomnia have made overcoming Parkinson’s constant nag to inaction increasingly impossible to ignore. Condemned to boredom’s nightmare, often unable to muster the energy to stand, I ward off apathetic languor as it vies for supremacy with callous free-floating anxiety.
Patience is Parkinson’s strongest suit: relentless, dull-tipped incursions methodically eat away at my stamina. Given Parkinson’s timeframe for...
June 29, 2022
Melancholy’s dark anthem
Unconditional love’s elegant beauty slices through life’s clutter, revealing the hidden edge of sacred meaning and conceding the barest glimpse of grace without relinquishing a tight grip on neverland’s illusory realities.
To love unconditionally is to best a universal fear, to banish love’s nebulous shadow permanently and irrevocably. Surrendering to life’s quizzical dream completely, welcoming the welling up of the natural glow of playful happiness, dismisses love’s darker side, ejecting th...
June 23, 2022
Why the smile?
Helpless, without recourse, the rug pulled out from beneath-your-feet sensation of abandoned vulnerability, of impending doom on all fronts: it sits heavy within me. Bored and tired, achy with life pains that refuse to dissipate, my regular habits for coaxing a soft landing to the day’s futility hang dead within me. It feels like I’ve got nothing; I am an empty shell of oblivion.
My thinking mind, wearing life’s duality around my neck like a collar, has no temporary solution, no respite to of...
June 17, 2022
Creation
Having just finished a week of nonstop activity, I welcome the solitude of a day without commitments. It is a dizzying reminder that I have grown over the decades; seedlings of ebullient wisdom nestle deeply in my humble dwelling of being.
Lately, I enjoy writing in the afternoons while listening to loud, hard-driving music. These rhythms overwhelm me with undiluted veracity as I struggle with a staggering fear, the shadow side of accepting “what is,” until creation flows through me, pounding...
June 1, 2022
Life is hard
Life is hard, and it does not get easier as we age. With an incurable, progressive disease like Parkinson’s there are bound to be moments with little or nothing to look forward to, which begs the question, why continue?
I remember when I began asking that question in 2014, more as a hypothetical as I was mostly happy at the time. It was just before my deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery, on the steep precipice of decline nine years after my Parkinson’s diagnosis. But the real possibility of ...
May 26, 2022
A friend of the strangest sort
Astros, Peloponnesus Peninsula, Greece, 1976.
Gently kicking face down on the surface, I breathe deeply from the plastic snorkel with disciplined practice while following the shadowy school of giant fish on the bottom. The water is clear, but the ninety-foot depth hosts a confusing array of thermoclines. These sharp drops in water temperature create subtle obscurations to visibility, wavy zones of disparate water densities.
My 14-year-old mind tries to process a plan for the impending free...
