Ricardo F. Morín Triangulation IV 22″ x 30″ Charcoal, sanguine, white-out and Sumi Ink on paper 2008
Ricardo F. Morín
March 13, 2026
Oakland Park, Florida
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The place of writing rarely coincides with a desk. Often the work unfolds during a car ride while my husband drives, on the way to a medical appointment or in the middle of an ordinary errand. It may also happen on a train or on an airplane. Movement creates an unexpected space for concentration. Sentences appear in transit: during a journey, while walking, or even while standing during a brief pause in the day. Thought seems to fall into step with motion.
Sentences move naturally from one language to another. A text may be revised or edited in English, Spanish, and Italian almost simultaneously, as if physical movement also released the movement of thought. The journey creates a kind of mental territory where words find their rhythm.
Sometimes writing rises from an even more interior place. It is not unusual to wake in the middle of the night because, while sleeping, an idea or a solution has taken shape with clarity. One simply rises and writes, as if thought had continued its quiet work during sleep.
The familiar image of the writer, however, is still that of someone seated at a desk beneath a lamp, surrounded by carefully arranged papers. It is a comforting, almost ceremonial image. Yet the history of literature suggests something quite different.
Marcel Proust wrote much of In Search of Lost Time lying in bed in a room lined with cork to keep out noise. Something similar occurred with Truman Capote, who described himself as a completely horizontal author and wrote while lying down with pencil and paper resting on his knees. Other writers found their rhythm in movement. Edith Wharton developed her texts while walking and dictating them, and Ernest Hemingway preferred to write standing at an improvised lectern.
These examples recall something simple: writing does not depend on a single ritual or a particular piece of furniture. Each writer discovers a personal balance between silence, movement, attention, and memory. The traditional desk is only one possibility among many.
Perhaps for that reason literature has often been born in unexpected places. In a bed, on a moving train, in a quiet room, or in the middle of a journey. Imagination rarely waits for perfect conditions. It appears where it can and gradually turns any corner into a place of work.
In time one understands that the desk is not the true place of writing. The place is attention. Wherever it appears, any setting may become part of that inner geography where words finally find their form.
He considers whether the biography and the career essay can cohabit sequentially within the same corpus.
They can. The sequence already contains its own direction. The career essay first: closer to the present tense of perception, moving by suspension, withholding biography deliberately. The reader encounters the intelligence before the circumstances surrounding it. The biography afterward. What had remained withheld becomes visible then: the cities, the illnesses, the rooms, the years of interruption and displacement.
Read in that order, the two texts produce something neither fully achieves alone. One reveals how a person sees. The other reveals what that person passed through while seeing it. The distance between them does not fracture the corpus. It creates proportion.
He considers whether three registers can coexist within the same body of work.
A corpus restricted to one register may already have accepted its own limits. Multiple registers practiced simultaneously suggest something else: not instability of method, but continuity of attention moving through different materials. The register changes according to what the material permits or resists. The underlying attention remains recognizable.
Across them, something is repeatedly brought near the edge of conclusion without fully entering it. Not because conclusion is feared, but because certain recognitions become less accurate once sealed too quickly. The distribution changes from text to text. The pressure of examination does not.
The difficulty is less internal than external. Readers and institutions prefer writers who can be situated immediately. A stable category simplifies reception. The corpus resists that instinct without opposing it directly. Some readers may find the variation generative. Others may experience uncertainty before it. That uncertainty may not be a defect in reception. It may be an accurate reflection of the work itself.
He considers publication outside of WordPress.
He does not intend to seek publication through commercial structures. WordPress has held the work for eighteen years. That continuity has been sufficient. The responsibility, if there is one, would consist only in maintaining a parallel digital corpus capable of surviving technical disappearance should the platform eventually fail. Perhaps a university library at some later point. Perhaps not.
No publishing houses. No agents. Few editors he would trust enough to permit entrance into the interior movement of the prose.
He considers how long WordPress itself may last.
WordPress.com is operated by a private company. Eighteen years of continuity is reassuring but not decisive. Many structures that once appeared permanent disappeared without ceremony. Libraries persist differently because preservation forms part of their institutional obligation rather than their market survival.
Yet the archive does not feel urgent. There may still be another fifteen years of work not yet written. The corpus at that point would be larger, more complete, more internally connected than it is now. Premature administration of a living practice can quietly interfere with the practice itself.
What matters at present is simpler than preservation. The work continues. The corpus develops. The next sentence remains unwritten.
He considers whether he should simply let the chips fall where they may.
The work exists. It accumulates gradually. What survives and what disappears has never belonged entirely to the author. Most of what human beings created vanished long ago: paintings, manuscripts, cities, names. What remains is shaped partly by quality, partly by accident, partly by whether another person cared enough to carry something forward beyond its own moment.
There may be a form of integrity in recognizing that limit without bitterness. A prose that refuses premature closure, a corpus resistant to category, a writer uninterested in agents, publishers, or literary positioning: all of these movements arise from related recognitions. The same attention that hesitates before sealing a conclusion in a sentence may hesitate before sealing one about permanence itself.
He considers whether it is worth anticipating the future condition of the corpus.
Probably not.
The work understood this long before the prose articulated it directly. The understanding did not arrive as philosophy. It emerged gradually through repetition: paintings delayed, illnesses prolonged, rooms abandoned, plans interrupted, canvases resting against walls for weeks while nothing visible advanced and yet something continued silently underneath perception itself.
The pergaminos colgantes already contained that movement. So did Paradise. So did the long periods of stillness in Valencia. The recognition that anticipation easily becomes a form of inward noise did not arise from theory. It arose from observing how quickly projection interferes with attention.
To apply a different standard to the corpus itself, worrying over survival, categorization, institutional placement, would introduce an inconsistency the work has spent decades attempting to reduce.
The present moment contains the next essay. That is sufficiently difficult. Everything beyond it risks becoming administration of what does not yet exist.
He considers whether to share the corpus formally with an institution.
Perhaps not at all.
That possibility no longer produces anxiety. It follows naturally from the other refusals already present throughout the work: refusal of fixed category, refusal of literary positioning, refusal of premature conclusion, refusal of treating visibility as proof of value.
The archive may survive. Or disappear. Neither alters the necessity of the work while it is being written.
He considers ownership.
He never took much pride in possession. The loft in Tribeca was relinquished. The taller in Venezuela was relinquished. Professional identities were relinquished more than once. Each release altered perception afterward. Something became visible that possession itself had partially obscured.
A corpus may not differ greatly from that condition.
The essays exist. What happens to them afterward cannot entirely belong to him any more than the changing light across suspended canvases belonged to anyone who happened to stand before them. The work was never constructed as property. The pergaminos were not made as objects to dominate space. They emerged from stillness temporarily and returned to it afterward.
Complete relinquishment may not signify indifference. It may be the final extension of the same attention from which the work emerged.
He arrives somewhere that does not require a name.
Not grief exactly. Not resignation.
Tears of loss look backward toward what can no longer be recovered. Tears of acceptance belong to a different condition entirely: recognition without resistance, clarity without demand for alteration, awareness without the impulse to negotiate with reality so that it conforms to preference.
The work approached that same place gradually through many forms and many years: the stillness after noise, the empty canvas before the first mark, the pergamino hanging without frame or enclosure, the intervals where nothing appeared resolved and yet nothing required immediate resolution either.
Perhaps the work was never attempting permanence at all. Perhaps it was attempting something closer to lived energy moving through form for a brief interval before returning to stillness again.
Ricardo Morin The Seventh Watch (Template Series, 5th panel) Watercolor over paper 22” x 30” 2005
Introductory Note
Ricardo Morin is a writer and researcher of the history of thought as a dynamic and evolving practice—a student of unspoken gestures, a language stronger than words, especially when interlocutors no longer listen to each other. Drawing on reflections on the cycles of life and a personal experience approaching the last, he invites readers to consider how quiet vigilance and tenderness can shape a meaningful existence. The Seventh Watch emerges from decades of living attentively, offering a humble testament to dignity through perseverance and care.
71 Years
I’ve lived seventy-one years. That alone still surprises me—not because I ever expected an early end, but because each year has asked more of me than the last. There was no dramatic fall, no single crisis to point to. Just a slow, constant shaping—of the body, of temperament, of the will.
Illness didn’t come in childhood. It arrived later, in my early twenties, during a snowbound winter in Buffalo. I was just beginning to live on my own, full of ambition and unfinished dreams. The diagnosis was mononucleosis—but it wasn’t the name that mattered. It was the way it interrupted momentum, slowed my pace, and revealed something deeper: the lifelong task of learning to live within my own limits.
That was the beginning—not of a medical history, but of a different kind of vigilance. Not directed outward, but inward. A quiet realization took root: that survival, if it was to be meaningful, required not just endurance, but restraint. A way of protecting myself from myself. That discipline wasn’t harsh—it became a kind of devotion. Not to self-denial, but to finding the clarity of a peaceful mind. To living with more care than urgency.
I don’t see illness as noble, but I do see in it a mirror—not for the pain, but for the truth it reflects. What can be tended, what must be relinquished, what deserves attention. I don’t claim wisdom from illness, but I recognize what it’s taught me to let go of: illusion, pride, and the frantic chase after things that do not last—such as the accumulation of wealth or power.
I’ve come to think of it simply as endurance—the kind illness teaches when you stop resisting and begin listening. There’s an ethical arc in this awareness—not born of dogma or belief, but shaped by experience. It bends not toward triumph, but toward tenderness.
This isn’t a story of pathology. It’s a story of attention—of refining the self without hardening it. Of discovering that maturity means knowing when to persist and when to pause. That the quiet act of sustaining one’s life—daily, attentively—is its own form of courage.
I never set out to write a testament. But seventy-one years in, I see the outlines more clearly. And in that, there is dignity.
Yet, dignity is not a reward. It arrives without announcement, without ceremony. It builds slowly—through the daily rituals of rising, of choosing what to carry and what to set down. It does not shield one from sorrow, nor make suffering easier to bear. But it gives the days a certain weight.
I’ve come to cherish that weight—not as a burden, but as proof. Proof that I’ve lived through each season not untouched, but intact. And that, even now, the task is not to escape life’s demands, but to meet them with steadiness.
What I’ve learned isn’t mine alone. Anyone who lives long enough will be asked to reckon with time—not as a thief, but as a sculptor. Illness, especially, teaches us how little control we truly have—yet how much presence we’re still capable of. It humbles and joins us. Not in sameness, but in mutual recognition.
Endurance, I’ve found, is not passive. It’s not about waiting for pain to pass. It is active, quiet, often unseen. It means choosing how to live when choice feels narrow. It means tending to life not with haste, but with attention.
There is no finish line to this work. Just the quiet act of continuing.
So I continue—not because I must, but because life, even in its reduced dimensions, still offers room for meaning. Some days that meaning is faint. Other days it is simply the act of rising, or writing a letter, or remembering the snow. But it is there. And as long as it is, I remain.
For him, inspiration didn’t strike—it settled. It arrived not with answers, but with permission to begin.
There was no ritual. No dramatic turning point. Only the canvas, the scent of oil, the shifting light across the floor. One day folding into the next, until the work became its own weather—sometimes clear, sometimes stormy, but always present.
He believed in attention, not mastery.
What moved him wasn’t how the painting was achieved at any given moment, but when deconstructed he had to reclaim it, not out of skill, but out of necessity—when the hand moved before thought, and something more honest than intention began to lead. And when it happened, it asked everything of him.
Any one watching—anyone but him—would have seen very little. A trace. A pause. A slight adjustment. But inside, something in him was listening—not to himself, but to the world, the material, the echo of a form not yet known.
He didn’t make work to be remembered, though he carried each piece like a child of his. He made it to stay alive. And when he encountered a finished painting years later, it stirred him physically. It wasn’t nostalgia. It was the smell of pigment, the sound of bristles, the grief of something nearly realized—lost, then found again.
Some days, the work moved with a kind of ease. Other days, it refused. He learned not to chase either.
He always began without knowing what he was after. A shade. A flicker of transparency. Astroke that unsettled the surface. Often the brush would stop midair, suspended while he waited for the next move to reveal itself. Sometimes nothing came. Those pieces sat untouched for weeks—a quiet unease in the corner of the room.
He lived alongside their silence.
The studio was never clean, but always ordered. Rags folded. Jars fogged with old turpentine. Walls bearing soft outlines of past canvases. The mess wasn’t careless. It was lived-in—not careless, just lived-in. Notes of Goethe’s pyramidal harmony hung besides mineral samples, sketches, color wheels, torn letters from art dealers. Not for revelation—but for proximity.
Not every piece held. Some failed completely. Others, losing urgency layer by layer, failed gradually, He kept those too—not as records, but as reminders. Where the hand had gone quiet. Where the work had ceased to ask. Yet they became platforms—spaces for later returns, for deeper entry.
His days had no fixed schedule, though a rhythm formed over the years—a long devotion, interrupted, resumed, endured.
Now, he arrived late morning from the City. The studio held the faint scent of wax and turpentine, laced with something older—dust, fabric, memory. He opened a window if weather allowed. Not for light but for air. For movement. For the slow turning of the fans like breath.
He made tea. Sometimes he played Bach, or a pianist, whose fingers pressed deeper into the keys than others. Other mornings: National Public Radio. A poet, a scientist, someone trying to say the impossible in ordinary words. He liked the trying more than the saying.
He painted standing—rarely seated. Some days he moved constantly between easel, sink, and mixing table. Other days he barely moved at all. Just watched.
Lunch was simple. Bread. Fruit. A little cheese. Sometimes eggs, lentils, soup across several days. He didn’t eat out much—not out principle, but because it broke the thread.
If tired, he would lie on the couch at the back wall. Twenty, thirty minutes. No more. And when he woke, the light had shifted again—slanted, softened, more forgiving. The canvas looked changed. As if it had waited for his absence.
Late afternoons were often the best. A second wind, free of pressure. There was a looseness in the air, born from knowing no one would knock or call. He spoke to the work then—not aloud, but inwardly. This tint? Too warm. This stroke? Too sure. Let it break. Let it breathe. Let it speak without saying.
Sometimes the medium resisted. A brush faltered. A gesture collapsed. He didn’t fight. He gave it space. If he stayed patient, it found its rhythm again.
Not everything reached completion. Some works remained open—not abandoned, simply finished enough. Others came suddenly, like music that plays without lifting the fingers.
By evening, he cleaned his tools. Never rushed. He wiped the palette. Rinsed the jars. Hung the rags to dry. It was a kind of thanks. Not to the painting. To the day.
Then lights out. Door closed. Nothing declared. Nothing completed. Yet something always moved forward.
Grief, too, remained. It lived in the room like dust—settled in corners, clinging to stretchers still bare, woven into old white sheets.
His sister’s illness came slowly, then all at once—while Adagio in G Minor played low across the studio. He painted through it. Not to escape, but because stopping would have undone him. In the silence between strokes, he could feel her breath weakening. Sometimes he imagined she could see the work from wherever she was. That each finished piece carried a word he hadn’t dared to say aloud. She would have understood. She always had.
Later, when his former lover died—alone, unexpectedly, in Berlin—he stopped painting altogether. The studio felt still in a way he couldn’t enter. Even the canvas turned away from him. When he returned, it was with a muted palette. Dry. Indifferent. The first brush stroke broke in two. He left it. And continued.
Desire, too, had quieted. Not vanished. Just softened. In youth it had been urgent, irrepressible. Now it hovered—an echo that came and went. He didn’t shame it or perform it. He lived beside it, the way one lives beside a field once burned, now slowly greening.
Grief didn’t interrupt the work. It deepened it. Not in theme—but in texture. Some of those paintings seemed familiar to others. But he knew what they held—the weight of holding steady while coming apart inside.
Even now, some colors recalled a bedside. A winter walk. The sound of someone no longer breathing. A flat grey. A blue once brilliant, now tempered between longing and restraint.
He wondered sometimes about that tension.
But when he painted, stillness returned.
Seventeen years ago, when chemotherapy ended, the days grew quieter.
There was no triumph. Just a slow return to rhythm—different now. The body had changed. So had the mind. He couldn’t paint for hours without fatigue. The gestures once fluid were heavier, more tentative.
He didn’t resist it.
The studio remained, but the center of gravity shifted. Where once he reached for a brush, now he reached for a pen. At first, just notes. Fragments. A way to hold the day together. Then came sentences. Paragraphs. Not about himself, not directly. About time. Memory. Presence. Writing became a solace. A way to shape what the body could no longer carry. A place to move, still, with care.
It wasn’t the end of painting. Just a pause. A migration. Writing required its own attention, its own patience. And he recognized in that a familiar devotion.
Sometimes, the canvas still called. It would rest untouched for weeks. Then one day, without announcement, he would begin again.
The two practices lived side by side. Some days the brush. Some days the page. No hierarchy. No regret. Only the quiet persistence of a life still unfolding.
There is no final piece. No last word.
He understands now: a life is not made of things finished, but of gestures continued—marks made in good faith, even when no one is watching. A sentence begun. A color mixed. A canvas turned to the wall—not in shame, but because it had said enough.
He no longer asks what comes next. That question no longer troubles him.
If anything remains, it will not be the name, or the archive, or even the objects themselves. It will be the integrity of attention—the way he returned, again and again, to meet the moment as it was.
Not to make something lasting. But to live, briefly, in truth.
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Ricardo F Morin Tortolero
Bala Cynwyd, Pa., June 14, 2025
Editor:Billy Bussell Thompson
Author’s Note
This piece, like much of what I’ve made in recent years, exists because of those who have sustained me.
To David Lowenberger—whose love and steadfastness give my life its rhythm. Without him, continuity itself would falter.
To José Luis Montero, my first art teacher, whose presence early on became a compass I’ve never stopped following.
To my parents, whose quiet influence shaped my regard for form, devotion, and care.
And always, to my friend and editor, Billy Bussell Thompson, whose voice lives quietly in mine.
Writing, silence, and the art of understanding in stillness
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Ricardo Morín Triangulation 4 22″ x 30″ Graphite on paper 2006
To my sister Bonnie
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Ricardo F. Morín
June 2025
Oakland Park, Florida
Author’s Note
This reflection was originally drafted before The Ethics of Perception, Part I, yet it belongs to the same inquiry into attention, understanding, and ethical relation.
There are moments when the truest form of intimacy is silence. At other times, it’s the quiet labor of reaching for the right word—however incomplete—that brings us closer. Expression, in this light, is not just a vehicle for communication, but an act of care.
To speak, to withhold, to write, to listen—each choice carries a particular weight. Intimacy lives in these gestures: not in grand declarations, but in the ethics of how we reveal ourselves—and how we receive what another dares to offer. What follows is not a theory, but a reflection on how intimacy appears in expression—and in its absence.
I. Prelude: in the pause between words
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when something becomes intimate. It isn’t always a touch, or a glance, or even a confession. Sometimes, it’s just a pause—a shared pause—between one word and the next, when both people sense that something true is either about to be said or has just been said, without quite naming it.
Once, sitting face to face, I watched someone I cared for stare silently out the window. I said nothing either. There was no gesture, no disclosure, no clarifying words. And yet the silence didn’t feel empty—it felt full. In that stillness, something passed between us—not a message, not even an understanding, but a kind of permission:
To exist without explanation. To be present without having to perform.
That moment stayed with me not because it was dramatic, but because it was unplanned. I hadn’t expected it, and I couldn’t have recreated it. I only knew, afterward, that I had been in the presence of something rare: an intimacy that asked nothing more than to be.
And yet, not all intimacy is born in silence or in someone else’s presence. Some comes later, through writing—in that long interval between feeling and saying. Some is only possible thanks to the quiet distance that makes reflection possible.
II. What we mean when we say “intimate”
The word intimacy often evokes physical closeness: the realm of touch, proximity, lovers, secrets shared in the dark. But what if intimacy were less about closeness than about permission? The permission to be undefended. To move slowly. To be unclear—and still be trusted.
To be intimate with someone is not merely to be known, but to be seen— seen without the pressure to explain yourself quickly or justify what you feel. It’s an opening, and it’s also a risk: the risk of being misunderstood, and the deeper risk of being understood too well.
Some forms of intimacy unfold face to face. Others require distance. Some happen through dialogue. Others need a single voice, speaking on one’s own in a quiet room.
That’s where writing begins— not as performance, but as a long conversation, uninterrupted.
III. The varieties of intimacy
Intimacy shifts with context, with time, with the shape of the self we bring to another. It is not one thing— not just closeness, or tenderness, or vulnerability— but a set of ways we allow ourselves to be known, and sometimes, to know another.
There’s the intimacy of the body— perhaps the most visible and least understood. It belongs to touch, proximity, the instinctive draw toward another’s presence. But this form can deceive: physical closeness without emotional resonance is common— and easily faked. Yet when body and emotion align, there’s a wordless attunement: a hand resting on a shoulder for just the right amount of time; a breath falling into rhythm without intention.
Then there’s emotional intimacy: the slow courage to say what one feels— not just when it’s beautiful or convenient, but when it’s awkward, incomplete, or raw. This kind of intimacy isn’t given—it’s earned. It may take years, or a single night. Trust lives here—or breaks.
There’s also intellectual intimacy: what arises in conversation when ideas flow without anyone guarding their ground. It’s rare. Most social spaces reward speed, the need to shine, or the safety of politeness. But sometimes, with someone equally curious, thought expands in the presence of the other— not in agreement, but in response. There’s nothing to prove— only the pleasure of discovery. That’s intellectual intimacy. It creates a different kind of closeness— not of feeling, but of perception.
Stranger still is narrative intimacy— the kind that forms not between two people in the same room, but between the one who writes and the one who reads, separated by silence and time. It isn’t immediate— but it isn’t less real. A voice emerges from the page and seems to speak directly to you, as if it knew the contours of your mind. You feel understood—without being seen. You may never meet the person who wrote those words, but something in you shifts. You are no longer alone.
These are not rigid categories. They overlap, interrupt, evoke one another. One may deepen another. Physical presence can create emotional safety. Intellectual closeness can open into unexpected tenderness. And still, each has its own rhythm, its own grammar— and its own risks.
In that complexity, intimacy ceases to be a condition. It becomes a practice: something we learn, lose, revise, and sometimes write when no other form is possible.
IV. Writing as intimacy with oneself (and with another)
Writing, too, is a kind of intimacy— not only with others, but with oneself. Especially when it’s honest— when what’s written is not just clever or correct, but true. That kind of writing doesn’t flatter. It doesn’t argue. It reveals.
We write to bring something forth— not just for an audience, but to hear ourselves think, to see what we didn’t yet know we felt. In writing, we become witnesses to our own consciousness— both its lucidity and its evasions.
We follow a sentence not only for its logic, but for the feeling it carries. And when that feeling falters, we know we’ve lost the thread.
So we begin again, and again— trying not just to explain, but to say something that feels just.
In that sense, writing is an ethical act. It demands attention. It requires patience. It invites us to inhabit our own experience with precision— even when that experience is fragmented or unresolved.
And if we are lucky— if we are honest— something in that effort will reach someone else. Not to impress. Not to convince. But to accompany.
V. When intimacy fails or is refused
Sometimes you reach out—carefully, sincerely—and receive silence, indifference, or a response so misaligned it makes you feel naïve for having tried. Other times, the failure is subtler: a conversation that scatters just as something real begins to take shape—or a listener who hears your words, but not your meaning.
Those moments stay with us. Not because they’re dramatic, but because they remind us how precarious intimacy can be. It can’t be forced—just as humility can’t. Both require a quiet letting go—a willingness to offer something without knowing how it will be received. We can prepare the ground, make the gesture, risk the truth—but the rest depends on the other: their timing, their capacity, their willingness to meet us there.
There’s also the experience of being misunderstood—not just in fact, but in essence. You try to say something that matters, and the other person responds to what they think you said—or to a version of you that never was. It’s a blow— that mismatch between what you tried to share and what actually landed. The desire for intimacy becomes exposure without connection—a wound instead of a bridge.
Sometimes we avoid intimacy not because we don’t want it, but because we fear what it might cost. We’ve been made to feel clumsy—for caring too much, or for being too visible. Or we’ve shared something intimate, only to have it treated lightly—or analyzed without feeling. After that, we grow cautious. We speak less—or in fragments—or not at all.
It’s in the wake of such rejections—large or small—that writing ceases to be mere expression. It becomes repair. Writing allows us to recover what was lost in the moment— to name what never reached its destination, to finish the thought no one waited for, to say it again—this time without interruption, without assumptions, without fear.
And while writing cannot undo the failure of a shared moment, it can offer something else: coherence. A record. A form of truth that endures—even if it wasn’t heard.
In this way, writing becomes a quiet act of insistence—not against the world, but on behalf of the self. It’s a way of saying: What I tried to share still matters—even if it wasn’t received.
VI. The gesture that remains
In the end, intimacy is not a state but a gesture— repeated again and again— toward understanding, toward presence, toward a shared sense that may arrive… or may not.
Sometimes that gesture is a word spoken at the right moment. Sometimes it’s a silence held just long enough for the other to speak. And sometimes it’s the act of writing—solitary, patient, unfinished— offered not to a crowd, but to a single imagined reader who, one day, might need what you are now trying to say.
Writing, at its core, is a form of listening. Not only to others, but to the self that doesn’t rush, doesn’t perform, doesn’t need to persuade.
To the self that waits— that wants to be known not by what it manages to say in quick response, but by what it keeps trying to say with care.
That’s why I return to the page: not because it guarantees connection, but because it keeps the door open. Because in a world that demands speed, certainty, and charm, writing makes room for something slower and more faithful: the long, unfinished gesture of trying to reach someone— perhaps even oneself— with something resonant.
And when intimacy happens—on the page or in life— it’s never because we found the perfect words. It’s because someone stayed. Someone listened. Someone let the moment open—without rushing to close it.
That’s what I’m doing now: writing not to end something, but to leave it open— so that something of greater consequence might enter.
There’s a certain kind of person the world seems to admire—sharp-tongued, composed, deliberate. He moves through life as if he’s never doubted the sound of his own voice. His gestures are practiced, his opinions unshakable. It’s a performance of authority, and to many, it’s compelling.
But I’ve never fit that mold. I don’t hold myself like someone bracing for a fight with the world. I don’t presume to master a room. And more and more, I’ve come to believe that what makes a person is not how forcefully he presents himself, but how honestly he shows up.
Vulnerability has never been fashionable. It doesn’t draw applause or dominate the stage. But it’s where I’ve found the most truth. Not in being right, or revered, or untouchable—but in admitting how little I know, how often I’ve failed, and how much of life resists explanation.
We’re taught to act as if we’ve earned our place—through effort, through cleverness, through some innate worth. But I’ve lived long enough to see how much is assumed, how much is favored, how many doors open not because of merit but because of circumstance, appearance, proximity to power. The world flatters performance. It often mistakes loudness for depth, certainty for wisdom.
But beneath all that, we’re fallible—achingly so. We get things wrong. We hurt people. We retreat when we should have stayed, and speak when silence would have been kinder. We tell ourselves stories to survive, not always to understand.
And yet, that fallibility isn’t shameful. It’s not a flaw to be punished—it’s the most human part of us. The mistake is not in being wrong; it’s in pretending we’re not. Intimacy begins where performance ends—when we stop curating ourselves and let others see what is: our confusion, our fear, our imperfect love.
I’ve stopped wanting to impress. I want to be known. I want to know others—not through their accomplishments or their poses, but through the quiet truths they carry. I don’t need anyone to be flawless. I need them to be present, to meet me somewhere beneath the surface.
That, to me, is strength. Not the kind that commands a crowd, but the kind that sits across from others, unguarded, and says, “Me too. I don’t have it either.”
The world may never reward dishonesty with applause. But it will reward it with connection—with moments that feel real, human, and lasting. And in the end, I think that’s the only recognition that ever matters. Not the illusion of certainty or the performance of strength, but the willingness to return, again and again, to the quiet inside us—the one where we are fallible, open, and fully alive.
Silent Diptych by Ricardo Morín Medium: Oil On Linen Size: 18 by 28 by 3/4 inches Year: 2010
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Prologue
Silent Diptych is not an illustration but a resonance—a meditation on silence, not as emptiness, but as a state of receptivity. It is the space where judgment dissolves, where human connection lingers between words, where meaning is felt rather than spoken. In its stillness, it holds what remains unresolved. Some silences are quiet. Others are filled with history.
RFMT
~
*
Our early dinner followed a matinee of “Parade”, a musical steeped in history, in indignity, in the weight of a life taken and a verdict that still hung unresolved. At the table, we spoke of Leo Frank, the Jewish man lynched in Georgia a century ago–pardoned decades later but never absolved.His true killer never pursued.
Three of us were Jewish. They understood, in ways the rest of us could only acknowledge but never quite embody, the particular pain of being made a scapegoat. The others sympathized but could not feel the same alienation—not in the marrow, not in the inherited way history imprints itself on some more than others.
It was a conversation of weight, but not of sorrow. We spoke with the clarity that comes when facts are long settled but their reverberations remain.
Then came the interruption.
The woman at the next table turned to us with a question, her voice cutting easily through our discussion.
“Where are the girls?”
I glanced at my companions, the six of us settled comfortably into the familiarity of one another.
“What girls?” I asked, not unkindly.
She blinked, as if expecting the answer to be self-evident.
“We’re already married to each other,” I said.
She turned away without another word.
There was no need to dwell on it. The moment was familiar. A minor encounter, the sort that barely registered after years of knowing exactly how the world could tilt in response to our presence.
To shift the conversation, I said, “Freud might say that all relationships are attempts to resolve unfinished business with our parents.”
Someone smirked. A fork was set down. A momentary silence, not of discomfort, but of consideration.
“Men with their fathers, women with their mothers,” I continued.
The responses were mixed. Agreement. Deflection. A shift in tone. Some spoke of failing to meet their fathers’ expectations. Some spoke of hatred. Some of detachment. Some of nothing at all.
I mentioned my father. His certainty that we, his children, would not know how to survive without him. He meant economically, of course. His generation had its own understanding of what it meant to endure.
“How many siblings do you have?” someone asked.
“Five,” I said. “Including my younger sister, who just passed away.”A pause.“She was angelic.”“Sixty-nine.”
There was sympathy, warm and immediate. A moment held just long enough.
And then, as if on cue, the conversation shifted—easily, instinctively. To theater. To Tony Awards. To the life and talent of voices long gone but forever recorded.
At the next table, the woman was laughing now, the moment between us already forgotten on her end.
And we, too, were laughing—at something lighter, something that did not ask to be examined too closely.
The moment stayed, unnoticed, but not forgotten.
~
*
Epilogue
Like the painting, the moment lingered—not demanding resolution, but waiting, quietly, to be understood. The weight of history, the subtleties of belonging, the pauses in conversation where truth is felt but not spoken. Silence, in the end, is never empty. It is the space where everything remains.
During the last decade of his life, Michael’s health declined steadily, much as his father’s had in the years before him, burdened by a succession of illnesses that gradually narrowed the ordinary horizons of living. Yet he continued to embrace each day with quiet resolve, even as the growing uncertainty of his own body became impossible to ignore. His suffering was never his alone. It was shared by the husband who remained at his side and by those who loved him. His final years revealed a condition that ultimately belongs to every human life.
*
I. The Burden of Awareness
Sometimes suddenly, sometimes almost imperceptibly through the passing years, there comes a moment when mortality ceases to be an abstraction. It is no longer a distant eventuality, safely concealed beneath the routines of ordinary life or softened by the expectation of time still remaining. It becomes immediate, undeniable, and inseparable from the consciousness through which we experience the world.
For some, this awakening begins with the quiet betrayals of the body. A stiffness that no longer disappears with rest, a memory that hesitates before returning, a step taken with unexpected caution, each becomes a subtle reminder that permanence was always an illusion. For others, it begins with loss. The death of a friend, a sibling, a parent, or a spouse quietly reveals that what has happened to another now belongs, inevitably, to oneself.
Such awareness alters the measure of time. The future no longer appears boundless, nor does the past remain merely a record of what has been. Each assumes a different proportion. Without consciously intending it, we begin to measure life less by what has been accomplished than by what still remains possible.
The mind instinctively resists this recognition. It seeks refuge in plans, obligations, familiar routines, and the reassuring continuity of ordinary existence, as though attention itself might postpone what reason already knows. Mortality becomes something acknowledged intellectually while remaining emotionally distant.
This awakening is neither an achievement nor a failure. It is simply one of the conditions of being human. From the moment mortality is no longer imagined but personally recognized, every subsequent experience of decline, suffering, endurance, and acceptance acquires a meaning it could not previously possess.
~
*
II. The Decline: Mind and Body
Decline rarely announces itself through a single decisive event. More often, it advances quietly, measured by changes so gradual that they are first mistaken for passing inconveniences. The body no longer responds with its former certainty. Movements once performed without thought require intention. Strength diminishes, endurance shortens, and the senses begin, almost imperceptibly, to surrender their former clarity.
The mind follows a similar course. Memory hesitates where it once answered effortlessly. Thoughts arrive more slowly or dissolve before reaching completion. Attention becomes increasingly fragile, interrupted by moments of uncertainty that were once unknown. Yet awareness often remains sufficiently intact to perceive these changes with unsettling precision. There is a particular solitude in witnessing the gradual alteration of one’s own faculties while still possessing the clarity to understand what is being lost.
Medicine seeks, rightly, to preserve function, relieve suffering, and extend the years in which life may continue with purpose. Its achievements have transformed the experience of aging and illness beyond what earlier generations could have imagined. Yet no intervention alters the fundamental condition from which every life begins. The body remains finite, and every effort to preserve it ultimately encounters limits beyond which restoration is no longer possible.
The deepest transformation, however, is neither physical nor intellectual. It lies in the gradual recognition that decline is not an interruption of life, but one of its final expressions. What first appeared exceptional slowly reveals itself to be part of the same natural order through which every living being passes.
~
*
III. The Distractions That Delay Acceptance
To recognize mortality is not the same as to accept it. Awareness may arrive suddenly, yet acceptance often remains distant, deferred by the mind’s persistent inclination to continue living as though time were still without measure. We do not turn away because we are incapable of understanding death. We turn away because we remain deeply attached to life.
This attachment reveals itself in countless ways. We make plans, pursue ambitions, strengthen the body, cultivate the mind, and seek new remedies for the illnesses that accompany advancing age. We continue to build, repair, organize, and anticipate tomorrow, not merely because these activities possess value in themselves, but because they reaffirm our place within a future we instinctively presume will continue.
The reluctance to let go arises from more than fear alone. Lives remain unfinished. Promises have yet to be fulfilled, conversations remain incomplete, responsibilities endure, and those we love continue to depend upon us. Even after a long and abundant life, there persists the quiet conviction that something essential still awaits completion. What binds us to life is often less the fear of dying than the unwillingness to leave unfinished what we believe still belongs to our care.
These attachments are neither weaknesses nor illusions to be dismissed. They are expressions of love, responsibility, curiosity, and hope, the very qualities through which life acquires meaning. Yet they also postpone the inward stillness from which acceptance may eventually emerge. Before the end can be received with peace, the mind must gradually relinquish not only its fear of death, but also its expectation that life must always continue.
~
*
IV. The Weight of Suffering and Endurance
Suffering is among the few certainties shared by every sentient being. It is neither rare nor exceptional, but woven into the fabric of existence from its first breath to its last. Yet, for all its universality, suffering remains profoundly individual. No two lives experience it in precisely the same way, nor can its weight be fully measured by those who do not bear it.
Pain assumes many forms. It may arise from illness, injury, or the gradual weakening of the body. It may also emerge from quieter losses, the diminishing of memory, the erosion of independence, the loneliness of watching the world continue without us, or the grief that accompanies every meaningful attachment. Some burdens are visible and readily acknowledged. Others remain concealed, carried in silence and known only to the one who endures them.
Suffering, however, is not the same as endurance. Suffering is what life imposes. Endurance is the human response to what has been imposed. It is the quiet capacity to continue despite pain, uncertainty, or loss. It allows ordinary lives to bear extraordinary burdens without surrendering the desire to remain engaged with the world.
The measure of endurance cannot be determined from the outside. What one person carries with apparent ease may overwhelm another. A burden once thought unbearable may gradually become part of daily existence, while a seemingly lesser sorrow may exhaust reserves that have long been silently diminishing. Endurance follows no universal scale, for it reflects not only the magnitude of suffering but also the unique history, temperament, relationships, and inner resources of the individual who bears it.
For this reason, suffering should never be confused with weakness, nor endurance with invulnerability. To endure is not to deny pain, but to continue living in its presence. It is one of the quietest expressions of human dignity, requiring neither recognition nor admiration to possess its full measure.
Every life eventually encounters the limits of endurance, although those limits cannot be predicted or judged by others. They reveal themselves only within the silent experience of the individual who bears them. Before acceptance becomes possible, one must first come to understand not only the reality of suffering, but also the extraordinary capacity to endure it.
~
*
V. The Unseen Threshold
Life does not depart all at once. It recedes quietly at first, almost imperceptibly in its withdrawal. The breath grows shallower, not in gasps but in a gradual easing, as though the body has begun to ask less of the world. Weight diminishes, not only in flesh but also in presence. The self appears to loosen its attachment to the demands that once defined ordinary existence. A once restless mind drifts more freely, its thoughts lingering less upon the past, the future, or even the urgency of the present.
These changes need not be understood as signs of failure or defeat. They often resemble a gradual lessening of effort. The body begins to relinquish tasks it once performed without thought. Rest occupies more of the day than activity. Silence becomes more welcome than conversation. Even the struggle to remain gradually yields to intervals of quiet that seem neither forced nor resisted. The body often appears to recognize this transition before the mind fully understands it.
There also comes a moment of recognition that seldom announces itself dramatically. It is rarely defined by a diagnosis or measured by the calendar. Rather, it emerges through lived experience. Some continue to resist its approach and devote their remaining strength to extending each day. Others seem gradually to accommodate its presence, much as one yields to sleep after a long period of wakefulness.
Within this progression, control itself begins to assume a different meaning. The effort to command every remaining moment often gives way to a willingness to accompany the body’s own course. What earlier appeared to demand resistance may gradually invite release. The conclusion of life comes to resemble not an interruption of its order, but one of its final expressions.
Death remains neither something to be conquered nor something that can be indefinitely postponed. It stands as the final threshold of every life, unseen until it is approached and fully known only by the one who crosses it.
~
*
VI. The Quiet Acceptance
To think of death without fear, to sit with it unguarded and allow it to be what it is, may represent one of the last transformations of consciousness. For much of life the mind recoils from its certainty, surrounding it with distractions, explanations, ambitions, and unfinished obligations. Yet there often comes a time when these gradually lose their urgency, and death no longer appears as an interruption but as the natural conclusion of a life that has followed its own course.
As this change unfolds, fear itself may begin to assume a different character. The body has already entered the work of relinquishment. The mind, more slowly, begins releasing its attachment to unfinished meanings, unresolved questions, and the expectation that one more day might alter what has already become complete. Acceptance does not arise from certainty. It emerges gradually as resistance itself becomes less necessary.
No single course belongs to every life. Some meet mortality with acceptance, others with fear, resistance, or uncertainty. Illness, circumstance, or the limits of consciousness may leave little opportunity for reflection. The experience admits no universal progression. Yet where acceptance gradually emerges, it reveals not a victory over death, but one possible way of inhabiting its certainty.
Stillness differs from resignation. Resignation suggests defeat before an unwanted circumstance. Stillness suggests something quieter, an increasing harmony between the body’s condition and the mind’s understanding of it. The effort to negotiate with what cannot be altered slowly diminishes. What remains is neither triumph nor surrender, but a growing reconciliation with the course life has taken.
From within that reconciliation, life may be seen differently. Its value no longer depends upon its indefinite continuation, but upon having been lived. The quiet that once seemed empty gradually becomes sufficient in itself. Little remains to be defended. Little remains to be explained. What has been given begins to appear complete.
~
*
VII. The Living Memory
No life is lived in solitude, and no journey toward acceptance is completed alone. Along the way we are shaped, guided, and sustained by those whose lives become inseparable from our own. Even after they are gone, their presence continues in memory, affection, and the countless ways they have altered the lives they touched.
Michael’s final years offered such a presence. Those who remained beside him witnessed not only the gradual demands of illness, but also the quiet persistence with which he continued to inhabit each day. His life, no less than his death, reminds us that mortality is never experienced by one person alone. It is shared by families, by companions, and by all who accompany another through the final chapters of life.
Death strips away much that once appeared essential. What remains is often simpler than we had imagined. Affection endures. Gratitude remains. Memory continues its work long after physical presence has departed.
To those who have accompanied us through life, we owe more than remembrance. We owe the recognition that much of who we have become was formed through their companionship, their patience, and their love. Their absence does not erase that gift. It leaves it more clearly visible.
They are no longer present as they once were. Yet what they entrusted to those who loved them continues beyond their lives, carried quietly within the memory and affection of others. In that continuing presence, gratitude finds its most enduring expression.
Observations On Perception 