Alone.
Yet, not.
Large families.
There are 33 people on the wall. Kids, kids-of-heart, grandkids, Janet, myself.
There’s always something going on in a big family. Someone’s always around, nearby, or on the way.
Continue reading Clear SkiesMy mind turns, twists, moves and churns. Earthquakes of urgent thoughts turn into raging thought tsunamis.
It’s not what isn ‘t. It’s what is.
What’s isn’t, isn’t talked about. What is, is.
Raging waters flow uphill, gather speed, then dribble down the mind’s mountainside spilling into the deepest depths, depths that do not surrender the issues of thought, whether forgotten or taught, surrendered or caught, given or bought.
Words sound large, but quiet speaks loud. Its silence heals. The healing rest, the energizing of silence slips away in our loud, boisterous, information-based system of living. Yet the need to be still and hear the leaves rustle remains, even when it’s pushed aside.
As I sit and peck on my iPad, the wind is beginning to blow, and the rain just started playing pitter pat on the windows. Hurricane Laura makes landfall tonight.
We’re 3 1/2 hours drive from the beach, but hurricanes are non-discriminatory storms, especially the wind. We’re lucky though. We’re west of the hurricane’s eye, the less destructive side.
Even so, trees will come down. Electricity will flicker, then fail.
Tomorrow afternoon the rain will wane, the wind will pucker out, and everyone will get on with things. Continue reading Hurricane Rest
Last Friday I took my wife Janet out on the town! A five-course dinner date! I know! Right!?
But we live in the oldest town in Texas, and there’s not a great deal of five star restaurants in Nacogdoches, Texas. So we created our own “fine dining” experience in a mobile, drive around way.
I wrote down twenty restaurants and fast food joints up and down our hometown main drag. Each place was cut to its own little strip, and I put them all in a styrofoam cup that had all 5 courses scribbled on the outside. Janet blindly reached in the cup and pulled the first slip for the first course.
It was Subway. Janet objected. She said Subway had the most expensive drinks in town, so she wanted to go somewhere else. Eventually, she acquiesced, and we ordered one large half and half tea, two straws.
The second course was Bottle Cap Alley for appetizers. A quarter mile drive and we were there, but they didn’t have many choices. Basically, we settled for fried onion rings. Besides, the next course was vegetables, so we could get something healthy then.
The third course drawn, however, was another fast food place, Taco Bueno! My five-course meal deal idea was falling apart.
We had to be creative, but guacamole with fried chips was as close as we could get to vegetables.
The fourth draw for the main course drew a groan from both of us, and then the laughter. Dominos Pizza!
While they made the extra thin crust vegetable pizza, we munched on the chips, guacamole and onion rings. After that, the pizza tasted like saltine crackers with onions and tomato sauce on it.
There’s a bloated, clog up your arteries with grease feeling that was kicking in, but we were committed to a 5 course meal…
Dessert! Should’ve started there! A quick draw from the cup and it was Whataburger, the Texas standard for fast food burgers. It was a no brainer choice!
But ice cream and milkshakes don’t mix with lactose intolerance, and the scrumptious home style cinnamon rolls were 580 calories a piece! We settled on apple pies that were only 200 calories each. Did I mention they were fried?
It was fun though, and totally random! We’ll do it again, but not tonight.
Tonight Janet will be in the hospital.
We’re in Houston. At this very moment, Janet is in surgery to remove cancer from a kidney. She was diagnosed three weeks ago.
I’m scribbling to redirect my emotions, blind my thoughts, dull the heightened awareness that the future has changed.
How much, and to what extent it’s changed, we won’t know until the pathology report comes in next week.
If all goes well, this will be a one and done surgery.
If it goes really, really well, next Friday we’ll be celebrating the 15% chance that the cancer is benign.
That’ll be worth a five course meal for sure! 
Sometimes, like today, my mind turns without mercy, like a racing heartbeat when you sit still, or a mighty rushing wind on a cloudless, sunny day.
Twisting, turning, churning within, earthquakes of never ending thoughts, thoughts about everything, turn into tsunamis. Raging waters flow uphill, gather speed on the way to the mountain top, then dribble down the backside of the mind’s mountain.
The depths don’t surrender the issues of thought. Those things taught, bought or caught by the mind don’t go away. They dawdle, swirling in and out of consciousness, but always there.It’s not what isn’t. It’s what is. Continue reading INFJ Ramblings
Sometimes I just sit in my home “office” staring at my wall of collected musical instruments. I don’t play any of them. I just like them.
It seems nostalgic, yet, real. 
It started with a casual garage sale purchase, but now I want a mural of music making contraptions. Granted, most are non-functioning wall hangers, but when I stare at them, I wonder, imagining the sound of each instrument as deaf music flows to hearing ears.
Whether a solo, or a symphony of organized noise produced by metal, wood and strings, sometimes I hear it. Continue reading Hear the Music
She was out of place at the convenience store Subway. I saw her sit down at a tall bar stool table inside.
She wasn’t eating, but had a small Styrofoam cup of coffee that she wasn’t drinking.
Her silver blue hair was perfect, in every way, and she was wearing her Sunday best dress complete with a little pearl necklace and old fashioned black, block heel dress shoes.
She was tall and slender, and her glasses seemed to be part of her face, like they’d been there for years. Continue reading Déjà Vu
The callousness of day-to-day activities seem to dwarf moments in life that make it real, alive and special.
If life were an onion, the outer shell is work, chores and all the necessary tasks of living. The outer, crusty shell of the onion can easily overwhelm the core and inner layers where the best and most treasured memories, events and times are held.
Peel life back layer by layer, day by day, and most days aren’t really appreciated, truly experienced, or even remembered, at least by me. It’s an observation, not a condemnation.
Nature itself seems to place our mind on auto pilot to mindlessly glide through the events of the day. Continue reading Taste an Apple
The road is icy and what little moonlight there is hides behind deep, dark clouds and ominous sky. It’s midnight, and although the temperature is below freezing, the harsh, rushing north wind makes it seem colder by the minute.
The wipers swipe the windshield, back and forth, back and forth. Part rain, part snow, part sleet strikes the glass as if it were an all out assault. The heater blows on high, and even with a coat, gloves and extra socks, nothing keeps up with the bone chilling cold outside.
Like an impending doom, the cold surrounds the body and car trying to overtake both driver and machine to remove all heat, and movement, from both. Continue reading Down The Road
A couple of weeks ago on a road up Mt. Ranier in Washington state, our group stopped at a roadside area. We explored and found a waterfall that draws you in like a bee to nectar.
Nature’s charm began to mesmerize me from mind to the deepest part of the soul.
No thoughts. No worries. No concerns.
Roaring water sang a magical tune that dropped its spell over the heart. Rushing water crashing on rocks below washed the present away to expose a taste of eternity.
For two minutes in a public place I was hypnotized in a private world for what seemed two hours. No one was around, but people were everywhere. Continue reading A Peace in a Piece of Water
RabBits 