I used to think boundaries meant choosing between his needs and mine. This morning, I finished my sentence, helped my dad with an upside-down wrist brace, pointed him toward the chandelier, and discovered something quieter: I can love him without leaving myself.

I wanted to go. It was such a simple desire. My son could take care of himself. My father couldn’t. So I didn’t choose according to what I wanted. I chose according to who needed me. And then the dream put my father on a plane I couldn’t board.

I have discovered a strange little meditation: coffee, a notebook, and Alfred North Whitehead before the rest of the house wakes. Somewhere between “the many” and “the one,” I began to see how an experience ends—and how my analysis of it can become an entirely new experience. Perhaps peace isn’t always found by emptying the mind. Sometimes it comes from giving the mind something vast enough to inhabit.

There is a particular loneliness in caring for someone who can no longer understand what caring for them requires. This morning, instead of trying to make my father understand, I made him toast.

This morning I woke before everyone else. The house was completely still. Hot coffee. My journal. Silence. It felt like freedom. Then my dad woke up. As dementia slowly reshapes his world, I’ve realized something I never expected: peace can become a stranger—not only to the person who is suffering, but to the one sitting beside them. This is the lesson caregiving is teaching me.

Today I walked with my dad. He spent most of the walk looking at the ground. I spent most of mine looking at the sky. A cardinal landed on a trash can as though it were the most natural perch in the world. Clouds drifted across the sun, changing nothing except the light. Yet every passing shadow transformed the trees. It felt as though the world was trying on different ways of being seen. By the end of the day, only one word remained. Paradise.

What if the world you experience is shaped by your deepest beliefs? Explore how perception, attention, consciousness, and unconscious assumptions create the reality we live inside.

There is a quiet kind of loneliness that doesn’t announce itself. It simply asks you to keep showing up. To take another walk. To listen again. To make another cup of coffee. To write one more page. Somewhere inside that ordinary devotion, something unexpected begins to bloom.

There will be diagnoses. There will be grief. There will be endings we didn’t choose. And yet… life remains astonishing.

There is somethingg that still knows.

Maybe this isn’t about losing my freedom. Maybe it’s about learning that I can care deeply for someone and still belong to myself.

The painting is almost finished. My dad is asleep. The moon is full. And a word carved into wood decades ago is still teaching me what matters.

The mind recedes inward. Memories loosen. Orientation shifts. And yet beneath all of it, the essence of the person remains. So much of this season has become an invitation to love beyond personality, beyond coherence, beyond the need to fix what cannot be fixed

Watching someone lose their place in reality isn’t loud. It’s quiet—and you find yourself holding it for both of you.

The more my dad fades into himself, the more I crave the location of time and space-something that holds when everything else begins to shif

They are the ones who have known me my whole life. They know the history. They know the chapters. And somehow, they still love me.

No fires to put out. Then it hit—a wave of relief. Nostalgic. I noticed a softening as I gave myself permission to be ok.

It was one of those mornings when the moon is still hanging in the sky while the sun is just beginning to wake up.

Outside, the world was covered in a thick fog. All of our little buildings softened into outlines. The yard looked less like a property and

When I ask if he is hungry, he does not check his body. He asks, “What time is it?” Then he walks to the notebook.

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I don’t feel like writing. I just want to go sit with the painting and let her speak, because I don’t know what I feel or think.

I repeated it again a few minutes later, not because he asked but because I knew the reassurance wouldn’t stay. Relief has a shorter memory

He steadies when I arrive. Somewhere along the way, gravity changed direction between us.

Original Oil on Canvas 16x20

He asks again. I answer again, patiently, as if he hadn’t just asked me — as if we hadn’t worked on the car all morning.

I called him. He was already awake, his mind working at it the way he used to work through numbers. He kept circling the same question, as i

The hallway to his living room always feels long, but that morning it felt longer. The house was quiet in a way that didn’t feel like absenc

I know Roscoe — I’ll get the collar. Bathroom… I think it’s in here. Yep. Looks like it’s here.

He looked at the clock. The clock disagreed with the notebook. The room disagreed with his memory.

I realized I had been quietly apologizing for being alive and creative at the same time.

When I walked in, there were rows of lobster cracking tools already lined along the counter.

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My dad was always the one who had it all figured out.

I think there is an intimacy in expression — a way pieces of us land on the canvas or through pen onto paper -

The intimacy ends. The painting becomes something I can look at instead of something I’m inside of. And I’m suddenly back in myself again — back in story, comparison, evaluation.

I couldn’t tell you what day it was, but I can tell you I couldn’t move. I couldn’t leave the bed as much as I wanted to. A kidney stone held me captive.

I don’t always remember to water the plants or feed the fish or turn the light off when I leave the room — but lately he has been forgetting time.

I remember carrying that backpack in case I was stranded and now I carry it so he won’t be.

I don't know how to love without disappearing, but i'm starting to wonder if the anger is the part of me that still remembers how to play.

The never- ending slice of pizza nod my head and stay

It was in my coffee so I drank it -and the pen started avoiding it. so I let it.

I don’t remember anything about that meal because there wasn’t one. I recently decided to listen to my body. It made a lot of sense — how we were designed to go through feast and famine — to eat and starve, kill an animal and eat again — I’d been slowing down on sugar and decided to take the leap and try only meat and a 36 hour fast. Quite a leap from the vegetarian tendencies I’d had my entire life. What I came to realize was how food was way more to me than sustenance. Ther

I pause the story and nothing tells me who I am.

there is a lump in my throat, my heart and a weight that flattens my spirit. On the hippity hop- waiting until dark. pillows to the window like stones in a river- dont make the floor board creek-but get to the window so you can watch for him.

Describing the underpainting of my latest piece.

I don't want to disapear anymore On a couch in the thunderstorm alone, bewildered, confused the deer frozen dust in the tail lights. Helpless. Be. Good. so they don't leave. Don't speak. so they stay kind. In the back studio. when the dragon broke through the veneer and rage wanted me like a dog devouring his toy. Freedom slipped into the night like a ghost without a candle. me-there- holding the echoes of who I once was. I hide in the underbrush of logic and reason. Its a ho

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