Contamination Observations: The Long Snapping Sheik of the Mountains
There are certain people who seem impossible to imagine becoming fragile.
Not emotionally.
Not spiritually.
Not structurally.
People built like retaining walls.
Roadside guardians.
The ones you unconsciously assume will always remain standing somewhere behind the visible architecture of your life holding things together quietly while everyone else wanders through instability pretending the map still functions. The one telling you “Responsibility!….. It’s a kick!”
Gregory Gunter has always been one of those people.
If you grew up anywhere near the North Shore continuity fields long enough, eventually you encountered the Gunter brothers.
Greg was Sheik.
Billy was Turbo.
Linwood was Spine Tingler (aka Dinky).
Little brother Nat was Supernat.
Depending on which subjective reality system you occupied at the time, they existed simultaneously as:
athletes,
poets,
musicians,
protectors,
comedians,
agents of both chaos and continuity simultaneously
brothers,
storytellers,
working-class philosophers,
parking lot comedians,
late-night continuity stabilizers,
and occasionally what appeared to be escaped mythological entities temporarily wearing human form.
GO GREG! GO KNICKS! FUCK CANCER!
Greg himself has always seemed slightly larger than ordinary consensus proportions allowed.
6'3".
300 pounds.
Built like a brick wall somebody, likely Tiki and Kaye, taught compassion.
A Division II football standout at LIU Post.
A long snapper for the New York Jets.
An athlete operating inside systems obsessed with collision, impact, discipline, repetition, violence, loyalty, ritual, and pain.
Football itself exists as a strange ritualized reality distortion field where enormous human beings launch themselves repeatedly into one another while entire civilizations gather around glowing rectangles to witness controlled homoerotic impermanence in tight pants unfold in real time beneath stadium lights.
And Greg understood those systems deeply.
But like many people whose external structures appear immovable, his actual continuity always existed somewhere else too.
Because beings never inhabit only one reality.
That may be the central misunderstanding of modern life.
The athlete exists.
The father exists.
The husband exists.
The frightened reality exists.
The childlike mischievious trickster exists.
The generous reality exists.
The exhausted reality exists.
The poet exists.
The child exists.
The 4 PBJs and 24oz glass of milk exists.
The wandering observer exists.
The every minute we live is another minute of our life gone reality exists.
The laughing reality exists.
All simultaneously.
Consensus reality simply prefers pretending otherwise because layered truths make institutional systems uncomfortable. It’s easy.
But Nikki’s World has always functioned differently.
Here, realities overlap openly.
And Greg always carried multiple realities well.
The giant athlete reality.
The friend-who-shows-up reality.
The guy who helps people move heavy objects, like ½ kegs, without complaint reality.
The guy who cares, has a good word, helps when he can reality.
The guy who quietly carries other people’s suffering without announcing it reality.
Those realities leave residue. Fragments. Artifacts.
And eventually you realize the people who seem strongest are often spending enormous unseen energy stabilizing other beings while neglecting the maintenance of their own continuity systems entirely.
Now the primary reality Greg inhabits is called Multiple Myeloma.
A strange phrase.
Cold.
Clinical.
Institutional.
Cancer gives no fucks.
Human systems love naming suffering in ways that feel emotionally sterile.
But lived reality never feels sterile from inside the body carrying it.
Inside subjective reality:
it becomes fatigue,
fear,
uncertainty,
financial pressure,
fragility,
hospital lighting,
waiting rooms,
medication schedules,
quiet terror at 3:12am,
finally the comfort of trips to a bathroom you can actually fit yourself in
banana splits made by a beloved cousin who has always been there
the deeply destabilizing realization that even the strongest structures eventually reveal their impermanence. The revelation that chaos and the unforeseen is inherent to any and all realities.
Vajrayana teachings speak often about impermanence not as punishment, but as fundamental architecture. Simply a universal characteristic of all realities.
Everything changes.
Everything drifts.
Everything transforms.
Everything leaves.
Everything arrives.
Every structure eventually reveals movement hidden beneath apparent stability.
If it can arise, it can dissolve.
If you cherish something NOW is the time to acknowledge that thing
Most systems appear stable right up until the moment they aren’t.
And yet compassion remains possible inside all of it.
Sometimes especially inside all of it.
Greg’s friend, partner and wife Amy appears to understand this intuitively.
From all available observations she has become one of the quiet continuity anchors helping stabilize the wandering realities surrounding illness, treatment, uncertainty, exhaustion, and emotional weather systems that most outsiders never fully witness.
The caregiver reality is its own hidden universe. Deeply meaningful.
Often invisible.
Often exhausting.
Always sacred.
And somewhere out in Colorado — beneath different skies than the North Shore skies, the Sea Cliff sunsets that originally shaped these continuity systems — Greg continues navigating this altered reality alongside Amy, Joe, Jacob, Ginny, Kathy family, friends, memory, fear, absurdity, medicine, impermanence, Knicks basketball, and whatever strange emotional support frequencies might possibly be transmitted through a white flat brim Knicks Stealie hat sent westward from another unstable observation point inside a chaotic confluence of realities that is Nikki’s World.
GO KNICKS!
Seriously.
Please.
This timeline in this reality could use this one.
And humor matters.
Humor always mattered. Never minimize laughter, never leave the absurd unacknowledged…. sometimes absurdity and its recognition is all we are left with. Embrace it, inhale it, breathe it deeply into your soul…. absurdity and chaos humble us.
People outside difficult realities often misunderstand this.
But humor is one of the oldest surviving continuity stabilization systems humans possess.
Not denial.
Not avoidance.
Humor functions more like spiritual pressure release valves preventing the psyche from collapsing inward beneath unbearable weight.
The wandering bodhisattvas understood this too.
Compassion without humor eventually calcifies into sorrow.
Humor without compassion eventually becomes cruelty.
The middle path remains alive somewhere between the two.
Greg has always seemed to understand that instinctively too.
Large enough to protect.
Soft enough to care.
Funny enough to survive.
That combination is rarer than most people realize, maybe he’s needed his bigness to accomodate all that he is.
And now the wandering reverses direction slightly.
The helper needs help.
The stabilizer requires stabilization.
The big man in the mountains carries weight too heavy for one continuity system alone.
Which is why this observation exists.
Not as sorrow.
Not as tragedy.
But as acknowledgment.
Recognition.
As witness.
As continuity.
As reminder that no being traverses unstable reality entirely alone no matter how convincing the illusion of separateness becomes. Nondual. We are all interconnected and ultimately interdependent.
With intent. We wander but with intent. Searching. Acknowledging our unknowing.
If you feel called to support Greg, Amy, Joe, and Jacob as they navigate this reality field together, their GoFundMe continuity portal remains active here:
There are no accidents.
Reality is alive, unstable, interconnected, chaotic and impossible to fully contain.
May all beings benefit.
~Nikki
