Rambling

Rambling used to mean something else. Forest trails, waterfalls, shimmering lakes.

Hiking wakened my senses, broadened my mind, forced blood-borne oxygen - essence of life - to tissues resisting the crush of lactic acidosis.

Walking gave shape to my person. Who I am. Who I was. It was physical, yes. Demanding, yes. Exhilarating - YES! But spiritual, too. I could never escape awareness of the Creator in those dark brooding sylvan cathedrals. Giant sessile oaks silently affirmed their privileged status as bridges 'twixt nature and super-nature; Earth and Heaven.

Rustlings, cracklings, whisperings. Whifflings, snifflings, snufflings. The unseen creatures of the darkling wood always added imaginative uncertainty to the ethereal mystery of the shadowy dell.

Mountain tops, too. Peering high over clustering clouds. Breathing air suffused with droplets of molten ice. The summit. Organically. Metaphorically. Next stop Halvalla. This was truly living.

These scattered memories tease and please. They are jagged, selective, incomplete. Which ones - which fragments - are genuine? Which manufactured, confabulated? I can no longer be sure.

Because now, in my senility, rambling has a different meaning. The totality of memory is a fractal. Crystalline. Multifaceted. For me - now - unreliable.

Is - was - any of what I clumsily try to embrace as a cognitive anchor sufficiently substantial to be trusted?

Confidence declines. Self doubt burgeons. Early dementia is the neural equivalent of diminishing visual acuity. A mental cataract. Clouding perception. Threatening opacity.

The angst thus engendered relieves its impact by progressive impairment of rational thought.

I know, but will soon be unable to gain succour from this current knowledge, that as mental disintegration proceeds inevitably to ravage my brain, my mind - my identity as a unique structural being will be supplanted by the false utopia of ignorance, insouciance...oblivion.