Gwen Williams > Recent Status Updates

Being estranged from someone you loved, turned out to be a grief that came in waves. Loss was loss was loss.

England Whistler is cold, her bedroom was still daisies, but there was a grouping unmistakable sense of being needed in Katie‘s household that gave life and warmed even the bleakest days. She only had a purpose now, but a sense of mattering, a feeling pulling together all the discord elements in that strong minded, family, and making something unified of them.

Grandmothers are kind of easier for grandchildren to know. Aren’t they?

It’s the awful man, he said, who makes the women look so wonderful.

I am aware in a way I wasn’t before. I’m aware of my capacity – no, let’s be honest, my propensity – for being hopeless and dismal empathetic, and it not only makes living with me. No fun for either of you or the boys, but it isn’t much fun to be me, either.

We are under control, promise, and what can’t be cured must be endured, as my Pearcy old granny used to say.

I don’t like murder and Daisy and I only sometimes like you and daddy. In fact, she said I liked you much more when you weren’t here. I really missed you.

Then the same reflection struck her about her father, lying there in the hospital in Rhonda. She opened her eyes and set up. Oh God, she thought suppose he is frightened too.

Octavia butler
The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities is an act of hope.

Grieving the reality of being manipulated to believe we are not enough, divine, or valuable outside of our accomplishments and bank account is a central part of our rest work.

Hallelujah covers-k.d. lang Bon Jovi, Fall Out Boy, Espen Lind Alexandra Burke, Il Devo

Uncommon ground an evening with Jeff Buckley in 2007

King David – Beth Sheba
Hallelujah Talerico
OK

Nirvana Penneyroyal tea

Billy Joel Light as a Breeze

Loudain Wainwright Memphis skyline

Live Overcome

Song Anthem: there is a crack in everything/ that’s how the light gets in

The word wife comes from the Proto – Indo – European Welp. Welp means to turn, twist, or warp. In an alternative etymology, the word wife comes from Proto – etc.
Ghwibh means pudenda. Or shame.

Grief is pain internalized, abscess of the soul. Anger is pain as energy, sudden explosion.

Pregnant ladies, the original Trojan horses

The Noble Field, the same strong feelings as the rest of us; the difference is how they choose to act.
Somehow, despite your politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage.

If Lotto had been paying attention to Natalie, he would’ve understood that there would be talk later, the old friend network sparked by what she say she’d seen between the two men was a scribble disappearing on the dark path, then the blank page of snow.

Hot milk of a world, with its skin of morning fog in the window. Lunch on the porch, and a plated basket, vegetable soup and focaccia and good cheddar and celery and carrot sticks and an apple and cookie.

Already the heat she felt for her husband was half diverted into her son.
A relief to find her own beauty there. Her husband‘s family were not a lovely people descendants of every kind. Oneiroi makes me laugh. Erasmus was the man who said in the land of the blind. The one I’d man is King.

But sometimes when you see a young woman with her mother, you could see what the old novelist were talking about. You can see that what was beauty in the one will soon lose its charm and that it’s heading in the wrong direction, so to speak. Or in some cases, there’s a quality that remains constant. And that’s your true beauty.

Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

The opposite of loneliness is not being with more people. It is courage. The courage for less not more? The courage to be your own companion, to stomach living on your own for a while, alone?

Bell Hooks says it like this “we all belong for loving community. It enhances life‘s joy. But many of us see community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary central to the art of loving. When we cannot be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.
We need distance, carefully created, for real community.

Dr Judith Louis Herman gives us a reason why this happens: it is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing.

What I had been trying to offer a victim of abuse,… I kept running up against the limitations of forgiveness and nuance and reconciliation. Or at least their false versions. They were placed by something else – not a solution, but the whole picture.

When you have a kid, eventually what you have as an adult, the majority of its existence will be as an adult.

Do you have help?

That part of you got no light at all

It was more that I didn’t need anything and you kept giving.

Those are the three elements of the care structure: facticity, fallenness, existentiality

The third element of Heidegger‘s care structure is existential reality, which is the opposite of fallenness, the default state. It is your pure authenticity. You choose yourself, as opposed to just being. You live towards your deepest possibility for existence.

Our own most possibility for existence. We rarely achieve this, says Heidegger, because of our fallenness. We fall away from our own possibility in every moment of conformity or obedience or concession or tiredness.

It’s easy to identify after the fact what could’ve been done to prevent so much damage, which trees might have been preventatively felt. Much harder to know, when things are creaking exuberantly in the wind, which one is about to come crashing through the rafters.