depressed

“Hi hon. How was golf?”
“I was lousy, as always.”
“But how did it feel?”
“It was fabulous being out in this gorgeous weather.”

Sound like a familiar conversation?

We often allow feelings of hopelessness to become our predominant emotion.

Good morning. This is April 12, 2023. Montgomery Frazier, The Image Guru.

And today I just want to talk about, in an aging population, we have to be our own health advocates for ourselves and for the people we love.

Did you ever go outside and feel that all the birds were singing?

Every single one. So many different songs. That there was a kind of happiness in the air. An exuberance at this moment. As if anything was possible.

Strange, isn’t it - the thought “As if anything was possible?” Most of us rarely think of this.

Suppose, just for a moment that it really is true – that it can be true - that anything is possible right now, just because I tune into and play with “anything is possible.”

What would you do? Really, what would you do?

It’s amazing to see the kind of plaything a child loves and craves. For example, a big empty cardboard box. A little snip here and there and presto, a small house, or a store, or a spaceship.

Their imagination is so intense and vast and immediate – that it can go way beyond the “stuff” in front of them, and “grow” their own little world.

There is something about winter which I really love.

It feels sleepy, resting, in a sense meditating.

It seems to give an upspoken permission to just relax – to have some time for yourself.

All the colors are muted - grays and washed-out browns. And the trees are laid bare, to show a visual essence language written by their shapes, their intricate and poetic lines, all outlined with lacy fine twigs around the edges. At sunset, they glow orange.

The sun is hazy, diffuse behind a gray sky – you may even think it’s the moon.

I love this memory.
Artwork by Bruce Zboray www.bruce-zboray.artistwebsites.com


The children were small, our boy 5 and our girl 8. We went to Newport, Rhode Island for a day. The highlight of the trip was the Cliff Walk.

It’s a stone pathway in back of the mansions about a mile long.

Artwork by Bruce Zboray www.bruce-zboray.artistwebsites.com


I am drawn to thin books. Books you can read in one or two sittings. With pictures or a fancy border – like an ancient manuscript – decorated. And a hard cover with cloth, where you can feel the weave.

Others may enjoy epic novels of a thousand pages – not I. Maybe it’s me wanting to “know” the whole book at once – no need of bookmarks for me.

Whenever I paint something: the walls of a room, a piece of furniture, an oil painting – I really look forward to seeing it again when it is dry. It’s like God, time, something unseen needs to intervene to finish it.

It’s not done until it’s really all done.

The same with gluing something together – next day, all those pieces are one whole thing again. The same with waiting for the scrapbook page to dry or waiting for pottery to bake.

Now, some people would rather wait for some muffins to bake far more than some pottery to bake. I understand this well.

There’s something about a very old photograph that really draws me in. Perhaps it’s the black and white monochrome world that looks oddly “at a distance” – as if that’s the best that could be done at that time – almost like a dream.

I like to see how people are dressed and I try to sense how it felt to be in that place at that time. Did the air feel different?

It was the end of fall, and we put out a pumpkin on the front steps for the squirrels to enjoy.

A large chubby squirrel came up and started eating it. He was not shy, or perhaps he was too awestruck by such a wonderful feast appearing for him out of the blue.

In any case, we slowly opened the front door so only the storm door, a full pane of glass, stood between us and him. We were one foot away as he continued to chew his way thru the pumpkin – to the point at which he was able to sit inside it and eat all around himself.