OREGON TAYLOR FIELDS

  How to best use your time in retirement is a much talked about and discussed topic. The concept of time changes over the years. When you worked your time wasn’t yours. To be successful you spent it accomplishing tasks and goals. When you were able to vacation, it always seemed to short. You strived to “stretch time,” enjoying the brief calmness and time to reflect. The feeling lingered, but soon disappeared when you returned to work. If your fortunate enough to retire, all the time that lays ahead is yours. You now are truly free. With that though, can also come occasional aimlessness. You don’t have to fill it by running from A to B like in work days. If you don’t find the right perspective on this, the result can leave you feeling depressed and lost. This is doubly true because you recognize that time does not go on forever. Your only given so much. Indeed, even the chance to have retirement time is being threatened by economic constraints. Experts on retirement advise a st...

  Growing older comes with it the increased potential of a hospital stay. Trust me I know. My experience over the last three years and 4 hospital experiences have taught me valuable lessons. Some personal and some practical. Some Personal thoughts:  Hospitals take away a certain amount of personal control. You find yourself with lots of time to think about your life. It’s easy to feel vulnerable. You’re not going to live forever. You look out the window and cars are going in every direction. Each with a life inside. You realize the world will go on after you and learn overtime to feel that’s OK.  You find yourself making resolutions about how you want to live the rest of your life. You tell yourself you will apply them, but often don’t after leaving. It’s always important to keep those goals around, even write them down and work toward them. The hospital staff is your adopted family. You need to treat them that way. Your loved ones are a treasure. Always important to ...

  In these times, it's tough to find the real beat of what is going on. Even on a short drive yesterday, there were more questions than answers. The sea of apartment forests, the overweight people at the sub shop, the press of cars going from shopping plaza to the next plaza. The silent overhang of war, economy and life as we have know it. Something seems like it has to give. Are we living in the last of the best of times? Things are so much different now. So many more people, such high cost of just making it, reduced horizons of work future, AI, the outside threats of terrorism and war, the press of keeping up. I am not sure there is an offramp to all this. A time out to regroup. We may all be heading toward a cliff edge just beyond our view. A view that has been curtained over with plastic debt. 

  Darkness of late night filled the studio casting shadows on finished paintings leaned against the wall and empty paint tubes scattered on the floor. Eric sat up in bed, watching Jane dress, “you don’t have to leave you know.” Jane turned, “New York tomorrow my dear, I have to get ready.”  Eric continued to watch her dress, he never tired of the view. They first met three years ago. She a writer and him a painter. They lived in apartment buildings next to each other, would sometimes dine together, talk art, share a drink and always it seemed ending in embraces of lust. Still, neither seemed to have found the steps to the next level of relationship. Even the lust had faded, buffed by the years. He didn’t know the why of this place they were at. Sometimes he admitted to himself envy over the degree of her success. How she wrote from her soul and being always grasping the latest in cultural ways. The magazines couldn’t get enough of her words. It wasn’t that he had not found suc...