Author: Jill

Anger’s Gift

“Virtue grows from the graves of our sins.” Matthew D. Eayre Darkness, demons, sins, regrets. Anger. I believe it was in Othello where Shakespeare says, “… as men in rage strike those that wish them best.” This year, I’ve been accused of being an “angry person,” because I’m like Mark Twain. “When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.” Except I skip the “count four” part. I wrote once before on an aspect of anger I discovered along the way. http://openwound.com/child-of-anger/ A lot of times, anger is lamented as being an unfavorable emotion. I do deal with the Othello aspect, yet I...

Requiem

  “The presence of pain is not the absence of love.”  William Paul Young Trying to comfort someone in the face of a great loss, I could only cry with her. Wanting to speak kindly as I left I could only say, “Just keep crying.” You know why? Because there is nothing else that can be done. He can’t be brought back. The house will never be the same again. The home will never be the same. The bed will never be the same. All the thousands of details of sharing her life with her spouse… Gone. The love he...

Integrity

God, I hate it when I fuck up. I am a reformed perfectionist and have spent much soul-searching time to accept my threads of good and bad qualities. Yet, I still feel like Jane Eyre when I bollix it up. “Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt? May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine.  May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you...