A Day in the Life of Chaos

Living in Portland Oregon makes me think a lot about mental health.  Not just mine but those around me.  You see I work in the heart of downtown Portland and spend my lunch hours walking up and down the Willamette River through a city park.  Traveling through a public park is a lot like visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles.  It is basically a conglomeration of everyone.  For me the saddest part of the experience is viewing the vandalism and destruction left by people that don’t enjoy the park for the reasons it exists as a public gathering point.  Portland has so much to be proud of yet unfortunately there is a small destructive element that that doesn’t share common values. Walking through the park is like walking through a healing wound.  The scab can be ugly but it is a part of us and we can only hope when the wound heals and the scab falls away, what lies beneath will be better than what covered it.  Portland is filled with homeless people.  Their lives and what it does to the

The dusty arid cliffs of Eastern Oregon rise from the land like monuments of the past.  Each crag and crease are skeletons of mountains long vanished.  Small pine trees stick out from the bone dry slopes, each green sliver pressed against the cloudless blue sky seems to cling precariously to life.  Concurrently every tree works to renew life by shedding pine needles adding to a sparse layer of top soil that dusts the rock foundations like hairs on a balding man’s head.  The enormity of the landscape seems to minimize my own presence as my eyes absorb the entirety of the vista stretching from one side of the horizon to the other.  I feel so small. When you are young you want the years to pass, when you are old you want them to stop.  There is something about age that makes you appreciate lost time. Perhaps it is because we know our life is finite and with each passing hour it marches toward a final curtain.  I tend to think of my life in blocks. My son took twenty years to raise, twenty

There are times in life when I feel like society and the social experience is slipping from my grasp.   Like greasy fingers holding a wine glass, I feel like it is sliding from my hands and hurdling to the floor with thunderous crash as a million shards randomly distribute themselves at my feet.   Moments and experiences collide like asteroids and planets.   While the fighter in me should seek to confront life in complicated moments, the monk inside me wants to withdraw to a monastery such that I can spend my days contemplating natural patterns in a stone wall. Mere days after arriving to Portland, Oregon, where the circumstances of life have dictated our new life should be formed, I found a need to plan for the welfare of my child.   This might have been simple had our child been of the two legged variety.   Most certainly a kind coworker might have watched him for a day or two.   Reality however is that these days, our child has four legs, a cold nose and a wagging tail.   While smal