Pity is just another form of abuse.

Zoos are becoming facsimiles – or perhaps caricatures – of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.

I’m not a shill for the Democratic Party.

My tattoo is that I don’t have a tattoo.

A lighthouse... speaks to the guiding nature of hope. By equal turns, it illuminates and darkens, so the way forward can be chosen in the light, and trusted in the darkness.

I have times when I’m off-balance. I have times when I slur my words. I have times when I walk into walls. I have times when I can’t remember somebody’s name.

The way life runs through everything, even the tiniest elements of nature – that makes me humble. It’s the same humility that causes people at a certain time every day to get on their knees and put their foreheads on the ground in honor of something or someone.

To be brutally honest, for much of that time, I was the only person in the world with Parkinson’s. Of course, I mean that in the abstract. I had become acutely aware of people around me who appears to have the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, but as long as they didn’t identify with me, I was in no rush to identify with them. My situation allowed, if not complete denial, at least a thick padding of insulation.

I can say, “I don’t have anything I regret!” But I can also say, “I can go forward in my life the way it is and I don’t think I’ll accrue any future regrets.”

My notion of spirituality was different than it is now, but even if I’d been the most fundamentalist of believers, I would have assumed that God had better things to do than arbitrarily smite me with shaking palsy.