Epiphany

By Bill Pearse on January 12, 2026 • ( 0 )

The best light of day is on the seams of it, at the start and end. You don’t need to be a stoner to understand this but it helps. The stoner has a crude love of the sensuous, best realized by tasting Cool Ranch Doritos or listening to Pink Floyd. Stoners tap into a fabric unseen by most, a cosmic veil that reminds us we are all swimming in the same celestial pool, that most of life’s mysteries can’t be explained or understood, but getting high can clarify things. This is how humans discovered you can harvest psychoactive secretions from a toad’s glands by drying and smoking them, or synchronize The Wizard of Oz with The Dark Side of the Moon by playing the two simultaneously, revealing bizarre alignments between the film and album. Just start on the third roar of the MGM lion.

It was probably my imagination but already it seemed like we were getting more light. We were now going in the opposite direction with the sun, the aperture opening a bit more each day. The most subtle changes came when it was cloudy at dawn or dusk, a slow fade, the light deep indigo blue. For all the madness of our times we still had the sky, that canvas for dream making. You could lose yourself in the long view far away and redirect your attention, let go of what’s holding you.

How could it be the years moved faster as I got older? 2025 was the fastest, it seemed like no time at all I was visiting my mom in Germany, last January. Frosty walks through the vineyards, farmers with their pneumatic pruners, the sound of the tractor choke in the morning fog. That feeling of persistent cold, of never really warming up. It took me days to figure out how the heat worked in my bedroom and I had to sleep with a plug-in heating pad tied around my trunk. Will never take central heating for granted again.

I moved too fast through life and regretted all I squandered. Sometimes I could feel it all draining away, an overwhelming sense of loss. I was too attached. There was a strange grace in the idea we’d all one day disappear but I found little comfort in that. There would be no memory of any of this. Now was the time.

I stroked the insides of my eating bowl with the fork tines for the music it made. Like the cat pawing the glass on the bookshelf case, it made a sound like a dry squeegee on a shower pane. I slurped the semi-warm pasta marinara broth before my morning hike, carb-loading. The color of the broth was a rust-orange from the acidity of the tomatoes and made a cool pattern like rust lichen spray painted on canyon walls, nature’s graffiti.

I’d never heard of the Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz connection but wanted to tell my oldest daughter about it. Passing down these bits of urban legend, this errata. Now that I don’t get high anymore it’s less intriguing I said to her. The two seemed to fit.

This month was the anniversary of me quitting weed four years ago. I loved being out on the trail, going up Tiger Mountain, surrounded by other people exercising, taking care of themselves. I’d lost my map but knew the trails well enough. There was this side of the mountain I could connect for a loop through a stretch called Anschell’s Allee, named after a longtime park service employee, and a long wooden bridge dedicated to a hiker who’d died young. They had a memorial to him on either side of the bridge, a color copy of a letter wrapped in plastic and tacked to a sign that read,

Dear Murat, Winter is coming!! And then spring. We will be back to see you again soon. Love, Mom and Baba

The font was italicized and bolded, decorative. There was a picture of the young Murat standing by a hillside dotted with snow-covered scree but with the light and the plastic covering you couldn’t make out his features and I didn’t want to. His likeness mattered less now than the idea of him, Murat. A plaque listed the dates he was alive, born 10 years after me, died in 2013. Just 33. They kept a small brush at the base of his memorial to sweep the dirt off the plaque.

Despite all my daily yoga routines I was no more evolved and that was made clear by how angry I got driving in stop and go traffic to take my family for fast food after the dance competition Saturday. After we’d gotten through it (20 minutes to travel two miles and spend $40) I sat behind the wheel brooding, chewing the hair on my lip, with my oldest daughter beside me, soon to return to college. She’d be 21 the next time I saw her, almost spring. A good song came on the stereo and we listened to the lyrics: Scenes from an Italian Restaurant. I think her sandwich was cold by the time we got home.

With the yoga and meditation my dreams are now getting clearer: this week one where I was bleeding out through my arms, but when I woke they were cold and numb because I’d gone to bed with my hair wet and left my arms uncovered. But it was also a relapse dream, the blood maybe wine, triggered by a book I’d read before bed. The other dream featured a former girlfriend looking me squarely in the face, her features so clear, her eyes burning into mine. What did it all mean? I’d broken her heart, there was nothing more to say. As I sat kneeling and breathing I thought, the longer I sit tuned out like this, the more I feel I am in bliss.