stars and lights and powdered sugar

 

i'm feeling very festive and cozy these days. looking forward to sharing glögg, cookies and games with some friends this weekend.

recently i read the book stoner (name of main character, not about about an mj smoker) by john williams. stoner's responses to events/people in his life are frustrating, but the often sad story is beautifully succinctly written. somehow this excerpt, and thinking about willingness in particular, helped me in my seemingly never ending (or my gradual and recurring) letting go:

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being in which, if one were lucky, one might find access. In his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a greatly familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.