One of the activities I engage in everyday when possible is a walk along the Tomebamba River near my home in Cuenca, Ecuador. During this walking meditation my mind wonders along with that of the river. I love the sound of water. When the river is high, it blocks out the sounds of the city and my mind transcends to other worlds while my feet remain firmly in contact with the cobblestoned path. This path for a little while becomes a Yellow Brick Road into my own thoughts and life.

Inspiration

It is winter here in Cuenca, Ecuador but even at 8500 feet elevation the winter is not much different from the summer except for cooler evenings and not as much sun light during the day. The weather is always perfectly consistent no matter what season. Each moment is inspiration for the next, the sun, the clouds, the rain, but our mind tricks us into believing and seeing everything as a continuous flow rather than segmented images.

As a child growing up at the start of the tv era, I watched almost every episode of Walt Disney. I enjoyed going behind the scenes with Uncle Walt and seeing how he made cartoons. In those days each frame of film was drawn and painted by hand then pieced together into the roll of film. He demonstrated this by taking a stack of still prints and quickly flipping through them, making the characters appear to be moving. Each page was the inspiration for the next. I was fascinated with this event at the time but never thought about it again until today while walking along the Rio Tomebamba.

With my epilepsy, often when a seizure is triggered things begin to happen too fast. (Epileptic seizures are the result of excessive and abnormal neuronal activity in the cortex of the brain.*)The film, life, speeds up and becomes too fast to comprehend. I pass out. I am learning to slow things down so that I do not always pass out, and when I am able to slow things down, it feels like Uncle Walt flipping through those cartoon pages in slow motion. I see the subtle differences in each still frame leading to the positioning of the character in the next. Today, I saw life that way. Each frame, each moment as an inspiration for the next. I just have to slow things down in my mind and not permit the excessive neuronal activity to flip through my life so quickly.

Easier said than done.

Random thoughts and experiences while I walk and live to The Roll of the Tomebamba. 

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