28-10-2021: Day 140
The sun was streaming through the windows of the Tom Foolery coffee shop. A steady stream of footsloggers passing outside, destinations unknown. I was sipping on a flat white, thinking in mountain metaphors, waxing lyrically about the road ahead. The metaphors came, not in black and white, but in the colours of Tibetan prayer flags, stretched across the lower glacial expanses of Peak 15, or Everest. I was aiming high, for the rooftop of the world, where the oxygen thins, and the heights and views are dizzying.
Watching the pedestrian traffic float like driftwood up and down the high street, I was thinking about the climb ahead, of breaking through glass ceilings, ascending to unexplored summits where few voice hearers had ventured before.
And sipping down the coffee dregs, staring at my glassy reflection in the window, I chewed down on the raw bones of the metaphor, and contemplated how I must climb and unify the human elements of heart, mind, and soul to reach this unknown destination.
29-10-2021: Day 141
Friday night is no longer the essential mix, no longer the heady cocktail of clubs and choice Cuban rums, no longer the chemical charge of the strobe lighting brigade. There is a new club in town, and it’s called Friday night swimming club – and it’s the preserve, domain, and hangout of my teenage offspring. And they are dragged kicking and screaming, down to the pool side of the chlorinated waters.
On this night, I was sitting in the spectator gallery seats gazing across the mesmerising glassy lines of young swimmers cutting through the water. The thought occurred I had been treading water for years, and in the complex holistic needs of my bairns, I was a four-foot man in six-foot conversations. Sometimes my mind just can’t engage with the youthful banter, and it feels like my beautifully broken brain is playing tricks on me. Either way, it’s a playful reminder to keep my head out of the water.
31-10-2021: Day 143
The Halloween storm was raging, a gale blowing round the backyard, tossing over bins, buckets, and brushes like the magical scenes in ‘Fantasia’. As the rain lashed down on the patio in a micro morning typhoon, I was thinking how the scenes mirrored the spirit storm of my mind. I could almost reach out and touch the hem of the veil, growing thinner by the minute, with the witching hour fast approaching on the clock face.
It all felt like a natural mystic vibe blowing in the gale. Of two world colliding. This physical world, and the spirit world behind the veil – tickling, teasing, and triggering us mere mortals from behind the curtain of the afterlife.
Or maybe it’s all an illusion of the mind, a trick or treat of the neural networks and synapses, firing away with random supernatural buffoonery, as we celebrate the dark half of the year with the children who still believe in the Halloween bogeymen.