Author: gozzter
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A Pilgrim’s Process
What is it about a pilgrimage that is so appealing? What makes you want to go, and then, having seen it, having felt it, what makes you want to come back, again and again? Or, perhaps even more mysterious, what makes it sacred? I ask myself this question each year at the end of my…
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Of unpathed waters, and undreamed shores
Borders, boundaries, limits -everywhere I turn there are constraints. Of course some are more penetrable than others: doors can be opened, ladders can be climbed, people can be persuaded. Here and there, are immutable, but perhaps only because neither have actual boundaries -just mental ones: clouds that shift like the horizon as you move… Still,…
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Alone and palely loitering?
Although it seems a lifetime away, I sometimes try to cast my mind back to the thoughts that used to occupy me when I was young; when the world was still magical, and potentially infinite, things were different -or so they seem to me now, as I peer through the shower of my falling leaves.…
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It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves
I’m embarrassed to admit that with truly difficult either/or decisions, I still find myself defaulting to a coin toss. It allows me the luxury of accepting or rejecting the result. To me, that seems fair and impartial; it’s hard to attribute an agenda to the coin. And unlike even well-meaning advice from friends, it neither…
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Is Old Age worth it?
I realize that at my time of life, I should be grateful that I still exist; that there’s a me rather than simply a him -a memory registered however tenuously in those friends who are still able to remember things. Of course, I hasten to add that I am grateful that, so far at any…
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Seek not for whom the bell tolls
Do you ever put something away for safe-keeping, only to find it has changed in the interval since you last looked? Retirement can be like that: hanging a once comfortable identity in a closet somewhere, and discovering it no longer fits when you try it on for old times’ sake. Not only that, but the…
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On seeing a friend after his stroke
At first,He was the man I knew,And thenHe wasn’t-Some of him didn’tWork;He didn’t even lookThe same.I don’t mindThat –We all wear our yearsLike old clothes:The rips and stainsAre diariesOf our lives.But usually,Something shinesInside the smiles,The labels stillAre legible,And,Even smudged,There is a linkThat we can read,A pinThat fastens usTogether.And yet hisHas come undone,Unpinned.I cannot find himIn…
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Etched upon the Horizon
Now that I am retired, I am sometimes overwhelmed by the amount of time I have to myself. Unlike the time brimming over with things, and filled to the top with purpose to which I had grown accustomed, what greets me each morning in my autumnal years is as empty as a refrigerator on shopping…
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To be, or not…
Perhaps it’s my increasingly autumnal years, but lately I’ve begun to wonder about what extinction really means. Not so much my own, you understand -although that will happen soon enough- but ours. All of us… Extinction has certainly happened before of course. I mean, the Neanderthals went extinct, the Dodos went extinct, the wooly mammoths…
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