Category: Non-Fiction

Recognizing and responding to beauty is more about its appeal to a higher, spiritual nature which is innate, and perhaps our saving grace–as we are mostly brutes.

Yellow frangipani flowers and purple bougainvillea are my companions every morning. I walk through the garden and touch their petals. Soft, silky and fragile. They caress my palms and fill my body with some strange tenderness.

Early morning on the mountain after a rain: A whiff of pines and, maybe, skunk.  Baby hawks squabbling on the ridge. Ice-cold mountain water sucked from a stained Camelbak bought sometime in the 90s. The sticky surprise of cobwebs on my face, woven overnight along the trail. 

I never know what the hour will be when I emerge out of the deep recesses of my mind and return to the ‘real’ world.  Sometimes only an hour has passed and I have composed a thousand words; other times I emerge to find myself in the mid-afternoon with three or four thousand words on the page. 

Cliff, so tall, had to bend low to open the limo door. And out stepped Cary Grant! Tanned, silver-haired, older than his movies, more solid-looking; yet unmistakably Cary Grant. And, attentive. To me!