A walk with some thoughts
It was my intention to come back immediately from my walk around Corte Madera Creek and write down what I beheld and the thoughts and feelings that the walk stirred within. But as life will have it, I was interrupted. A quick stop to the grocery store to buy some eggs and milk and then the phone was ringing and it was my brother Mike calling to talk to me about a visit he had to the doctor’s with my dad and brother Larry to discuss my dad’s torn rotator cuff. Our discussion leads us down the road of the tipping point in our parent’s life, a tipping point of their current fragile existence. Any day, any time the crisis that waits in the bushes to make its appearance will present itself, dark and horrible.
So I think about death and dying much of the time these days, not in a morbid way but certainly in a different way than I did while in my thirties-if I ever foolishly thought that somehow I would be exempt, it’s very clear that all was a complete and utter delusion.
When I was in the delivery room waiting for my daughter to be born I remember the thought that popped in my mind “well there’s no turning back.” It was clear that at the stage I was in, there was no time to change my mind. I think that approaching death is the same thing, but it really starts from the moment we are born, there’s no turning back.
And so the walk around the creek where I was lucky to see a great blue heron, egrets, tiny chickadees and notice that it was becoming the end of summer became more precious. The beauty and the inevitable end starkly side by side.