painting painting painting sunflowers
I’m in a relatively new relationship, and it’s had me feeling happy for many months in a row. I’ve been in a few relationships before, and I know by now that this feeling is both wonderful and transient. The euphoria of the first few months isn’t going to last for years on end. So the […]
I’ve been reading a recent novel by Margaret Drabble, The Pure Gold Baby, which I didn’t find by searching for novels about mental illness, though I have been reading rather a lot of those, since I want to see what else has been written besides the books I have been writing. I was reading Drabble, […]
I was really happy today, because I found links to a story that I’ve been searching for for quite a while. I thought I knew where I had read it originally, and I had looked through that text with no luck, and then I had searched on the internet using key terms, but still no […]
It really frustrated me to read that the mass shooting in Texas has been written off quickly by some in our government as a mental health issue. I’ve thought about this a lot in the last day, and I suppose that someone who is abusive to their own family may well have issues that stem […]
I’m going today to have lunch with a group of friends who have connections to the department where I work; most of them used to work there with me. This is the first time that we’re getting together since one of them, let’s call her Ann, finished nursing her ex-husband through pancreatic cancer. We had […]
I’m just back from a few days on the East Coast where I feel like I was posing as someone who knew what they were doing at a large committee meeting. I reassured myself in advance that I didn’t have to do very much besides listen intently, but even that can be really hard in […]
I first heard a long time ago that it’s good for us to laugh. Laughter does not always come easily to me; I think that’s why I love my sons so much. They are two people who can make me laugh when nothing seems funny. Perhaps because we’ve been so close for so long, we […]
I’ve been thinking all day about Vincent Van Gogh and his brother, Theo. Vincent painted such beautiful pictures, and I love his repetitions, the sequences of paintings where he painted the same subject or something like the same subject again and again. Was he experimenting with different techniques? Trying to make the painting better? Making […]
I know that I’m supposed to be writing more upbeat material here; I’m looking around at what people are posting, and even when it’s about mental illness, it’s still pretty perky. But the tone that’s wanting to find voice through my fingertips right now, after a few hurricanes and a bunch of wildfires near my […]
I’ve been going to an unprogrammed Quaker meeting for more than twenty years now. I like sitting in the silence in a group of others, waiting. Many Quakers are as Christian now as when Quakerism was formed in the seventeenth century in England, but out here on the west coast of the United States, things […]
Elisabeth Levien 