Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Love is the only force that allows us to hold one another close beyond the grave. That is why knowing how to love each other is also a way of knowing how to die. When the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning declares in her sonnet "I shall but love thee better after death," she attests to the importance of memory and communion with our dead.”

“Toward the end of her brilliant career, Kübler-Ross was convinced that there really is no death, only a leaving of the body to take another form. Like those who believe in an afterlife, resurrection, or reincarnation, death becomes, then, not an end, but a new beginning. These insights, however enlightening, do not change the fact that in death we surrender our embodied life on earth.”

“When we lose someone we love, we can grieve without shame. Given that commitment is an important aspect of love, we who love know we must sustain ties in life and death. Our mourning, our letting ourselves grieve over the loss of loved ones is an expression of our commitment, a form of communication and communion.”

“Love knows no shame. To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.”

“Sometimes it amazes me to know intuitively that the grieving are all around us yet we do not see any overt signs of their anguished spirits. We are taught to feel shame about grief that lingers. Like a stain on our clothes, it marks us as flawed, imperfect. To cling to grief, to desire its expression, is to be out of sync with modern life, where the hip do not get bogged down in mourning.”

“Just as we are often unable to speak about our need to love and be loved because we fear our words would be interpreted as signs of weakness or failure, so are we rarely able to share our thoughts about death and dying. No wonder then that we are collectively unable to confront the significance of grief.”

“Often, when we would put off for tomorrow the things that could be done today, she would remind us that "life is not promised." This was her way of urging us to live life to the fullest-to live so that we would be without regret. I am continually surprised when friends, and strangers, act as though any talk of death is a sign of pessimism or morbidity. Death is among us.”

“Even though, on the average, we have longer life spans, death surrounds us now more than ever, as so many life-threatening diseases take the lives of loved ones, friends, and acquaintances, many of whom are young in years. This strong presence of dying often cannot penetrate our cultural denial that death is always among us, and people still refuse to let an awareness of death guide them.”

“There is no one among us who is a stranger to death. Our first home in the womb is also a grave where we await the coming of life. Our first experience of living is a moment of resurrection, a movement out of the shadows and into the light. When we watch a child physically coming out of the womb we know we are in the presence of the miraculous.”

“When we love every day we do not need the eminent threat of sure death to be true to ourselves.”

“Our collective fear of death is a dis-ease of the heart. Love is the only cure. Many people approach death with despair because they realize they have not lived their lives as they wanted to. They never found their "true selves" or they never found the love their hearts longed to know. Sometimes, facing death they offer themselves the love they did not offer for most of their lives. They give themselves acceptance”

“Many of us come to love life only when faced with life-threatening illness. Certainly, facing the possibility of my own death gave me the courage to confront the lack of love in my life. Much contemporary visionary work on death and dying has highlighted learning how to love. Loving makes it possible for us to change our worship of death to a celebration of life.”

“White supremacy has taught him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior. Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action.”

“Even though we are more likely to be hurt by someone we know than a stranger, our fear is directed toward the unknown and the unfamiliar. That fear brings with it intense paranoia and a constant obsession with safety. The growing number of gated communities in our nation is but one example of the obsession with safety. With guards at the gate, individuals still have bars and elaborate internal security systems.”

“For the most part, patriarchal perspectives have shaped religious teaching and practice. Recently, there has been a turning away from these teachings toward a creation-grounded spirituality that is life-affirming. Fox calls this "the via positiva": "Without this solid grounding in creation's powers we become bored, violent people.”

“Living in a state of lovelessness we feel we might as well be dead; everything within us is silent and still. We are unmoved. "Soul murder" is the term psychoanalysts use to describe this state of living death. It echoes the biblical declaration that "anyone who does not know love is still in death." Cultures of domination court death. Hence the ongoing fascination with violence...”

“You have to trust that every friendship has no end, that a communion of saints exists among all those, living and dead, who have truly loved God and one another. You know from experience how real this is. Those you have loved deeply and who have died live on in you, not just as memories but as real presences. HENRI NOUWEN”

“Thomas Merton writes: "We discover our true selves in love." Many of us are not ready to accept and embrace our true selves, particularly when living with integrity alienates us from our familiar worlds. Often, when we undergo a process of self-recovery, for a time we may find ourselves more alone. ”

“Wounded hearts turn away from love because they do not want to do the work of healing necessary to sustain and nurture love. Many men... turn away from true love and choose relationships in which they can be emotionally withholding when they feel like it but still receive love from someone else. Ultimately, they choose power over love. To know and keep true love we have to be willing to surrender the will to power.”

“Most of us have not been raised in homes where we have seen two deeply loving grown folks talking together... how can any of us communicate with men who have been told all their lives that they should not express what they feel. Men who want to love and do not know how must first come to voice, must learn to let their hearts speak—and then to speak truth. Choosing to be fully honest, to reveal ourselves, is risky.”

“The heartbeat of true love is the willingness to reflect on one's actions, and to process and communicate this reflection with the loved one. As Welwood puts it: "Two beings who have a soul connection want to engage in a full, free-ranging dialogue and commune with each other as deeply as possible." Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.”

“Who among us has not learned the hard way that we cannot change someone, mold them and make them into the ideal beloved we might want them to be. Yet when we commit to true love, we are committed to being changed, to being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully self-actualized. This commitment to change is chosen. It happens by mutual agreement.”

“Butterworth writes: "True love is a peculiar kind of insight through which we see the wholeness which the person is at the same time totally accepting the level on which he now expresses himself—without any delusion that the potential is a present reality. True love accepts the person who now is without qualifications, but with a sincere and unwavering commitment to help him to achieve his goals of self-unfoldment"”

“individuals feel... when... hearts are broken—that it was a case of mistaken identity, that the loved one is a stranger. They saw what they wanted to see rather than what was really there. True love is a different story. When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other's core identity... such a relationship is frightening precisely because we feel there is no place to hide. We are known.”

“Capitalist states... promote a specific type of reproduction — one that creates a stable, disciplined labour force where people have an affective investment in work and in preserving the current organisation of society, even when they are partially excluded from it. ...The state disciplines supposedly bad reproductive subjects through welfare policies, lack of access to reproductive services, and incarceration.”

“The purpose of capitalist reproduction, then, is to ensure not only the physical survival of the workers but also a disciplined workforce. It is not only the number of workers that is at stake but the availability and manageability of the labour force, as well as the discipline of reproductive workers.”

“While they are partially excluded from waged labour, the state tries to prevent these groups from inventing ways of surviving fully outside of capitalist circuits of production and reproduction.”

“The state has often had a role in controlling the reproduction of these groups, simultaneously trying to reduce the cost of their reproduction through limiting access to welfare and ensuring that they are still reliant on capitalist regimes of work by criminalising and stigmatising non-wage-based forms of life.”

“...Melissa Wright shows how entire groups of people are produced as temporary and disposable resources in terms that also make individual workers vulnerable to violence and death. These groups can be employed and laid off as needed in the short-term expansion and contraction of the labour market, and they are produced as cheap labour power whose reproduction costs capital next to nothing.”