There’s always something strange on my commute, but this Mother’s Day stood out like the sorest of thumbs.

On the ride home, I passed a man walking along the sidewalk, casually gripping a machete. He looked menacing enough that, for a second, I wondered if I was hallucinating.

Later, my wife told me I should have called the police. She was probably right. But at that moment, I was too stunned to do anything but keep driving.

Another part of me brushed it off as just another oddity in the background noise of my increasingly strange daily life.

I’m unsure if that says more about my own detachment from reality or the slow unraveling of American society.

Maybe both.

**

They say you end up with ashes if you fight fire with fire. But they also say silence in the face of injustice is complicity.

So which is it?

Do we meet injustice with force, risking escalation and ruin? Or do we stay still, hoping morality speaks louder than rage?

The more time passes, the more I believe Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi’s path was the right one: resistance without violence, strength through peace, change without bloodshed.

**

I dream of dissolution, not as annihilation but as a sacred unraveling.

A prayer so pure that it melts the boundaries of my body, dissolving me into the radiant current of God’s own energy.

Sometimes, in stillness while praying or in meditation, I glimpse it.

A wave of divine love moves through me, not as a thought or necessarily an image, but as a presence. And for a moment, I am nothing but light returning to its source.

**

Occasionally, the strangeness of being alive crashes over me. I look down at my hands and wonder: What is this awareness I carry, this flickering consciousness tethered to flesh?

It feels like an out-of-body experience, the kind that comes from too much philosophy and too much over-thinking. And to be clear: this isn’t a psychedelic-drug-fueled experience. I’ve been sober since 2011.

The questions persist for me: What are we doing here? Is this brief life just a passage, a threshold we cross, where death isn’t the end, but the beginning of something else?

And then the moment eventually passes, and I make myself something to eat or have another cup of coffee.