I’m writing this with a pained abdomen, my self-inflicted misfortune the result of late-night indulgence involving sticky sweet potato chips and an egg-and-hashbrown-packed steamed bun married to potent chili sauce.
Ouch. It shouldn’t be this way. It’s definitely NOT often this way.
I generally try to keep my health in order. I don’t go out of my way to do this; avoiding too much food, too little sleep, and dehydration is all within reasonable discipline and capacity. Added to this is my attuned disposition to walking, which I do in the park located near my house whenever the opportunity arises.
I first became tied to the idea of parks twelve years ago, when I was twenty-six-years old. I lived next to a magical one then, the narrative of which included stray cats, wispy afternoon lunches, and a quirky family of ducks.
I would walk around this small park often, mostly at night when shadows came out to play. You see, before the age of twenty-six I couldn’t contemplate walking in a park at any time of day, so real were the mortal dangers of doing so where I’d lived previously.
Over the course of those walks and the years that followed, I came to find that parks are screens for portals, which I still describe parks as synonymously. In a safe, city-bound environment, being able to walk among people in lush natural settings is a gateway to the subconscious, which if accessed allows a person a hyperspace route to the imagination that can potentially offer a more balanced reality than the general daily version.
I’ve been walking in parks ever since and, sans all ideas of arrogance and/or intellectual frivolity, encounter visions relatively often. These visions do not materialize literally: ghosts, hallucinations, etc., but do so as concrete concepts whose details flow automatically from their conception. If this is in any way difficult to believe, read my first novel, And The Birds Do Sing. Not only was the storyline conceived in a park but the book also pays homage to them, such is the effect these natural spaces have come to play in my life
It’s no coincidence that my writing career has coincided with my forays into park life. Only upon (as an adult) experientially realizing that deeper reality levels exist have I amassed the requisite confidence to air my ideas in written form, and having done so have broken down innumerable barriers of self that have subsequently shown me how beautifully nuanced terrestrial existence can be and feel.
Parks – both mental and physical health-wise – are bastions of truth amid the conflicting, confusing narratives of modern life. They are a bridge between our child and adult selves; portals offering fluid access to and from differing elements of known and unknown cognition. And if you can avoid junk food fiestas before stepping into them and surrendering to their inherent lessons, you’re on a road to improved self-awareness.