09/23/22

Tonight I’m sitting on my porch watching Natasha hunt lizards to no avail. The likelihood that she will catch one is so small, and yet she persists unaware. Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” blares out of the front door, rounding out this scene of a bucolic island evening on the edge of autumn. Outdoors and indoors are now indistinguishable as the freshly fall air tempers the otherwise usual evening humidity. The cicadas hum along with the night in an all-too-familiar suburban rhythm.

Natasha is now a yard dog through and through. Watching her patrol her territory can enrapture me for hours. That I can sit here on this porch for so long as the weather and my constitution allow is a great testament to the power I have discovered in staying in one place. Specifically this place – a microcosm of life on earth in an infinite number of permutations every day. But I digress.

And so it seems that in constructing a daily routine to manage my chronic pain without pharmaceuticals, I have inadvertently managed to fix up a bunch of the rest of my life. Living opioid-free these few years has required a level of self-assessment and self-honesty that I have rarely, if ever, attained. That I can still stand up at all is a testament to the something that haunts me on my most existential days. And yet, like Natasha The Lizard Hunter, I persist.

Namaste.