Loss of Self, Loss of Father, Loss of Soul.

I don't understand the last part of the sentence: "... paid for with the currency of the heart." Perhaps because I keep thinking about my father's last months with this condition of the soul!

I was watching Daddy's soul during this dreadful period as he died with Alzheimer's, and it haunts me to this day what I saw, and with what I perceived and learned. One thing was clear eventually: Daddy's soul suffered. There was a vacuity none of us want to fully embrace because it is a terror with no thought process. It has its own scent, its own movement and time; it suspends over an uncertain substance. . .

Maybe I do understand your claim: Alzheimer's' is a disease of the brain that is paid for with the currency of the heart." ~ Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories (first born of Herbert and Constance B. Woods) 8/29/18 

Daddy dancing at his grandson, Lemuel's second wedding December 4, 2010. 

Our Granddaughter

Erin Elaine fed by her great great grandmother. 

"I wonder aloud about how important it is for generations to connect when grandparents hold the family's newborns. One is coming from the place the oldest is getting ready to go to. It is an old and equal exchange. It is a necessity. The holding of one is the being held by another and in that embrace is the future, the past in the present moment speaking to eternity, the temporal and the magical parts of Life we can only express through touch and knowing!" - Gregory E. Woods,(Dawn Wolf) Keeper of Stories September 11, 2014 

Erin-Elaine with her Grandmother, Talia's mother July 26, 2014. 

Talia's mother is special and powerful in the way she carried Talia from birth to this moment when the privilege of holding her daughter's first born creates the circle started by her ancients with not an end to the possibilities of concentric circles developing around this embrace that holds more of the Life mysteries that keeps hope and possibilities accessible to the joy of being alive, being a mother, being a daughter and a wife to my son, Lemuel." - Gregory E. Woods, July 26, 2014 

Erin Elaine and her great grandfather, my father. 

This Touch of Death.

"Alzheimer's gave my father an indescribably torment as he died... I am for now changed, altered into someone, yet undefined." - Gregory

Gregory E. Woods, ceremonial leader, at beginning of the ceremonial approach to manhood teaching hosted by Shanelle Gayden on March 12, 2016

Daddy with great-granddaughter, Erinn Elaine Woods, my granddaughter... 

After Daddy's Death.

I don't know about normalcy. Nothing returns to normal if it was in some kind of relationship with our fathers. I lost my father in March. A lot of what makes a son a man comes from and is within his father. What that means is different for each son and each father's death is different for each son. The similarities start with the loss and the fact that the shield you carry as a son is forever altered with the absence of your father alive.

It is an adjustment I watched my own father make when I was 19 years old. I didn't fully grasp it until standing beside my father's death bed with my siblings and from on high the weight of Daddy's essence ascended upon me, and my sister handed me Daddy's wedding ring. As the first born, obligations and the Unknown became part of the shields fashioned from what was learned and gleaned from Daddy's covering, his elegance and power and the legacy of shields he carried as a man with a wife.

These are my words in pain, release and revelation. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories {9/15/16} 

Things my Parent's embodied and taught!

A Lady by definition, A Man by Development. 

In the folds of what it means to be a lady is the acceptance of being free as a way of being. A lady is a development from girl to woman, and woman to lady. It is an art; and it is an intangible substance one cannot touch, but be touched by nuance and substance. A lady can play with this substance fully understanding the role has responsibilities and is awe inspiring because it is a state of being crudeness has no access to...

I should stop here. My mother taught these things in her movements and the way she danced with the essential elements I just described! - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 8/7/18 

Janice Payne at the Hilton Alexandria Mark Center, August 2018!!

Impossibly good looking dark skinned women are often intellectually and spiritually engaged in processes of development. It is daunting for men not so inclined merely wanting to get laid! When I was young my father's influences worked to my advantage. I wasn't a player. I built relationships, indifferent to getting laid. My father taught me when I was a teenager the integrity it takes to be a man and this was an early teaching he gave his first born. It is an untaught skill set boys do not get for selfish reasons. What those selfish reasons are and how selfishness has become a component of adulthood clustering in the corners of sound humanity is at the center of women's angst in their lifetimes! Selfishness, in a violent social climate, adds to the danger of citizenship in the States sharpening the point of rape.


Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories
August 10, 2018

LOOKS BACK!

actors Ray Milland and Jean Arthur in the film, Easy Living, 1937.

My father was 5 years old when the movie, Easy Living, came out in 1937, the Depression was in full swing, and Daddy's father was one of the few who owned his land, and his house. During the Depression that was a significant reality. Strategically, it provided a basis for the assurance that one's family could live through so hard a time! For those like Granddaddy, who cared for those around him he became a centered and central force that created the feel of being held in a community of poor folks. It was during one of the heights of the violence of big city crime bosses, Jim Crow's reign of terror, and a time Colored folks, in the South, were purposely being forced to accept no more than a 4th grade education. That decade was struggle and accomplishment, survival and denial...

The movies were important. They held sanity together for thousands bringing together everyone in dark theaters in suspended reality that blocked the depression of the era!- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 4/19/18

Kirk Douglas, Jean Simmons and Tony Curtis behind the scenes in Spartacus (1960).

The movie, Spartacus, was good, and for the times extraordinary! But, the novel? It was the book that turned the country upside down! It was banned in the South! I did not understand that until I read it! The author's mastery interpreting Roman history gave the spiritual and the intellectual basis for the governing business of American life: slavery. It was an extraordinary read! - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 4/19/18

To my next generation

Daniel, my nephew:

"May you one day have the privilege and the joy of playing Black Gospel music!! There is no power unleashed from the spirit of a musician into the mainstream of his ancestral lines back to West Africa forward into the present like the powers of Black Gospel music. White gospel music does not have this power, or the powers of African music in its core. It sends their worship music into a place of mystical musings in the element of air. It dare not root itself into the Earth, our Mother because that deep connection is not part of their soul's vernacular..." - your Uncle Greg 4/2/18

Sports and Beauty.

The best part of sports, for me, became the Sports Illustrated swimwear issue until my wife introduced me to Lingerie Football! Thank God, for alternative things during the football season! And then there are books, and the quiet outdoors during the games on the weekend, and delightfully the quiet outdoors during the Super Bowl, unless the wife takes me to a Super Bowl party at someone's house! Those are fun!

The food, at least with Black folk, is exceptional, and in abundance we have full course meals in big houses with large televisions! Laughter, jive talking, the soft smacking of lips sucking meat off bones, and the soul music coming from a room just off the side. Then the commercials and the biggest relief: one can watch the halftime show! There is no talking heads running off at the mouth endlessly during this time. I love it because during the regular games the most annoying thing is the constant stream of men talking from beginning to end, and worst of all: during the halftime shows.

People, groups, schools hustle all year to perform at these games and do not get in the national spotlight anymore! It's a shame, a damn shame! I can compare it to my childhood watching the games in black and white with Daddy understanding more than I do now about the game. Those halftime shows were something! They stopped fans in the chairs, rose them off their sofas! It was really something before the endless chatter in the same kind of voices took over the spotlight, the cameras and center stage!

Anyway, that's all I got for now! - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 1/26/18

Emily Didonato - SI Swimsuit 2015

Chrissy Teigen's Sports Illustrated swimsuit picture. (2015)

Sports Illustrated model Genevieve Morton in the 2014 swimsuit issue.

Xena, the Warrior Princess (r.) and Gabrielle. Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor.

Lingerie football team players. (2016).

The Old Speak against the trend.

body of Tiffany Joy‎.

"Cool elegant smile speaks subtly to the person receiving the look." 

[The] "cool elegant smile speaks subtly to the person receiving the look." is one of the observations my father took notice of, and commented on during the long years I knew Daddy.

Fathers show their sons what is important to notice about women, and tells the sons, by action, the many things too subtle to number that need attention to in the course of time with women. What young men have always done in pursuit of sex has been to stalk it without nourishing their potency with restraint, for the purpose of being able to better see who they are pursing.

Today's cultural tendency to continually give credence and honor to the 'pimp game' has left in the wake of its prominence hiding in the swamps, the dignity of character that propels men to be better men! Women, content with their whore status in this game, keep the crudeness on the rise against the backdrop of women clamoring for their rights in every sphere of the culture, here in the States! Unable to see the dichotomy of these forces women and men insist upon living their contradictions without challenge; thus choosing to be overwhelmed by the consequences they seek quick fixes for!

Children come out of this cultural milieu unsupported by wisdom, and the protection of understanding their histories and the histories of things! Lacking true insight and taking counsel, not with wise elders, or statesmen of note in their immediate grasp of people encircling their lives; they take counsel from those who don't know: their peers. A lot of stupid decisions are made by these young people. Dumb unproductive discussions without a spiritual base occur leaving them without any basis in a probing understanding of who they are, and where they fit in the world from the perspective of divinity, or at the least; in the ideal of being a person, in the moment.

As I will say again: "Breath allows hope to manifest an actuality!" As long as the human spirit lives in a physical body there is the hope of spiritual evolution! That is how the old and the wise sense things out of the intangible, the unimaginable and hard to manage as reality! May the young rest upon this as they grow to unlearn to learn what they have missed without adults mature and deep enough to make their next generation more than!

This is all judgment and assessment in the aftermath of European conquest, and the undoing of what held the world together! 

Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

August 29, 2017   

Jaye Carrero

.