3 Fundamentals

 Three things have always been essential to my happiness: 

• Intellectual engagement 
• Creative pleasures 
• Spiritual depth

But for a long time they have been subordinated to struggle and grief. I realized this morning that I now have healed sufficiently to be able to truly center them in my life again -- but it's going to take conscious effort. I have a decade's worth of pain-driven avoidance and numbing habits to release and replace.... and as I write this I realize I need to do so gently and with gratitude for the purposes they served. They were my attempts at self-care during a time I often didn't even care about living.

More later....

Billy Connolly Prepares for Death

This is a very moving excerpt from a longer BBC video. Scottish comedian and actor Billy Connolly (who I enjoyed in such varied movies as "Mrs. Brown," "Muppet Treasure Island" and "Boondocks Saints") is 75 years old and has Parkinsons. He says that he can feel himself "slipping away." 

My father had Parkinsons for more than a decade before his death, and it was very painful to watch him slowly lose his ability to do so many of the things he loved. Like Connolly, he faced it without self-pity, although he didn't have the mystical attitude that Connolly shares here.

www.watoday.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/my-life-it-s-slipping-away-billy-connolly-says-he-is-near-the-end-20190103-p50ped.html


His accent, his wild hair, and his soulful eyes remind me of another Scottish artist, one who passed away far too young. . . .