IN our Prayers, Thoughts Come!

2011 South Africa

This is my family. The family that is trying to be resilient. On this pic we had no worries, we were all well.

I am trying my best to keep us from unraveling, but it is difficult. At times I don't know what to do... my husband their father is battling all the complications from the stroke. None of us are used to navigating life without Reggie being in the center imparting his wisdom.

What we are experiencing we could have never prepared for. Each day I rise I look for the good, the light in the dim situation. I try to make sense of everything.

I can't run away. This is my reality." - Gervel Jones-Sampson 

... You can't.

I have been following the story of a man and his wife, Gervel Jones-Sampson, for a little while, as the husband struggles with a major health crisis. His wife is telling the story and her telling is told different because she is wife and mother caring for her heart as she cares for the body and heart of her husband wrestling within his mortality, their children in the struggles of being adult children, the next generation. There is a condition, a unique awareness Creatress placed within wives to be Sacred women. It is evidenced in the way wives love their men in hard situations. Assembled with respect for the changing terrain of loving her husband this type of wife understands the complexity of love. Encircled by the challenge to loving a husband is the glyph, the Tree of Life.

Losing my parents over the slow pace of the years between first Mommy and then Daddy leaving this life in pain, lent eyes to me I did not have, and a storytelling I didn't have the capacity for previously. 

I told Gervel these words:

"I pain thinking of your family story this present date. There are similarities to my family story. As encouragement, the changes each day brings, in retrospect, may reveal core relationships between events from the family's distant past and recent past that prepared the family unit for this trail. It is an odd comfort how our lives prepare us, and distance us at the same time. Either view links us to our ancestral lines bridging us to the long ago, and the long away. It is why we live and we live deep in the engagement that brought us here.

None of us (my brothers and sister) fathomed how we were made ready for our parent's illnesses. It began when they began caring for us as babes, and children. We paid attention and learned how to care for them. Mirrors. The mirrors before us and them reflected the light playing with the shadows playing along the paths of our living. . .

My prayers and appreciation for your bewilderment, your love for each other and the bonds being strengthened linking with all Life pulling your family together!"

Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

January 18, 2018

IN the Depths WE Know.

I am therefore we are.

Embracing one's self becomes an art after the arduous task of arising from the lowest esteem childhood should not have given an individual. The country we live in boasts of its potential to take life with its many weapons and tactics of war with no simplification. There is war, and rumors of more war behind the stamina a warmonger has in a competition with lust a whoremonger has crawling within his or her body. The lack of beauty in a desire is the loss of soul given up, not for adoption, but abandoned by basic misunderstanding of what is basic to life: how to love, and why we love.

God may have made us, but we choose to believe in whatever myth comforts our angst the further we stray from the fundamental elements of truth, and Creation, as was made by what is beyond who we can possibly associate as God. It is our belief in God that stifles us. It is discovering the balance within the Goddess that comes with the Goddess that releases us from the pendulum of trading places with the knowledge of Ma'at's feather, not to judge, but receive the touch of what whispers to us constantly, "I am Life! I am Life! Mother without Father is imbalance leaving a craving for that balance and a return to what works for the I AM."

It is in us all.

Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories
Jan. 12, 2017

Lemuel, my first born son, kissing Mommy in her last months before her death.

THe Fight!

Lucky Devil Pin Ups

Rachelle Razor's photo-shoot at Space City Comic Con

with 6 Sided Productions was a total success!!

The fight for identity, the fight for recognition and the fight for survival are fights for life because deep inside of us all is the belief, the knowing there is more. What was left in the Garden of Eden for the Hebrew people may not be the same that was left for other peoples in the mysteries of their progenitor's creation stories. What is universal is all of ours, but what specifically was left for us: an inheritance, a missing piece in a puzzle, or charged for us to do as an action to liberate an ideal, an identity, a soul, a silent revelation of direct penetration into the variables of the Unknown is our gift to Life, as we know it and may come to know it, if we live this life given to us deeply.

We all live in Mystery, of dark and light. Our fear of the dark keeps us from the light.

Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories
Jan. 15, 2017 

Remember?

looking through the blinds.

A truth, a universal truth Obama once said: "Change never comes without a fight."

The friction of death against life keeps life agitated and vibrant until the end of life and we die. The transformative abilities of the Vulture demonstrate on a daily basis how this works. In the end is a beginning birth told us to not remember. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories [Feb. 13, 2017]

weasel riding back of a European green woodpecker by birder Jason Ward