My Brother, My Muse

My oldest brother and I play a game sometimes. He'll shoot me an email with some poetry or an obscure passage from an old Chinese mystic. I'll fire something back, and we'll parry on like this for days. My brother suddenly becomes my muse...

See for yourself.

drifting
in
and out of
belief
about
what
Is

possible

two butterflies
dance past
on an invisible
stage
leaving me to
wonder
how
things
got just so

complicated.

J

Comments

St. Valentines Day

I find it odd that we pick a day in February to celebrate the heart, the emotion of Love, the honoring of those we love. What apparently morphed from some racy pagan festivity into a more buttoned down Christian celebration has now become synonymous with the greeting card maker Hallmark. Hmmm. Regardless of this days origins it has been firmly established in the American psyche (not sure about other countries). Forgetting this day for your beloved, your kids, maybe even your pets, is tantamount to being un-loving. A slouch in the Love department. Nobody wants to be that. What about honoring yourself on this day? Congratulating yourself for making it this far on your journey? And along the way how much love was expressed? How open was your heart as you navigated relationships and all the challenges relationships can reveal? On my late afternoon walk with my two dogs back home these were the thoughts running round my head. And checking in with my heart it felt a bit sad....

Cold Turkey Ain’t All Bad

Warning: If you’re young and healthy and never think about getting older and the world is your oyster and you are under 50 don’t read any further. “Going cold turkey”. The connotation is that we are giving something up. Usually for good. Things like heroin, or booze, or Oxy. Things that really aren’t that good for you. My cold turkey moment was bicycles. Wait. Aren’t bikes supposed to be good for you? Yes, absolutely in theory. However, in my case, not so much. Of course, I loved the feeling of riding a bicycle – the rush of the wind, the freedom of motion, the ability to push my limits, and the boost in fitness. All healthy benefits for sure. Except when crashes happen. They will and they do. Typically, it’s some road rash or bloody knees and elbows with dirt applied. In my case it’s been all the usual get offs plus head trauma. It’s the “plus head trauma” that has me hanging up the bike for good. I just can’t seem to keep from bashing my head when I do ...

Waking Up with the What Ifs

Apparently last night I had been dreaming of a life I left behind 11 years ago. Snippets of memory like peering through a gauzy veil, and scenes vaguely reminiscent of my life as a builder in a small coastal town north of Boston. I woke up with the What Ifs. You know how dreams are: like your eyes can’t completely focus, situations that are seemingly disconnected but maybe not, faces you know but can’t place, yet the feeling in the dream is quite real. I was back in Old Town and trying to figure out why the house I was in was unfinished. There was a meeting to be had there, but it was just me. I walked down a cobbled street to what I figured to be the office of the architect and it was a room of all glass and about 10 people seated around a glass table. I tried to get the attention of the man who was the architect on this particular job without disrupting the meeting. He looked like a friend who wasn’t an architect but a realtor and a neighbor. I wondered how he switched care...

Before My Last Breath

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