marriage – Page 3 – Anjuelle Floyd

Of Death, Mortality and The Steam of Compassion…

Should Huma Abedin forgive her husband, US Representative Anthony Weiner?

Last Friday, I heard a young woman state that Huma should abort the child she is carrying Weiner.

Should Huma do this I could not condemn her.

I cannot say what a person should are should not do regarding the betrayal a loved one or friend exacts upon him or her.

And yet our ability to move beyond experiences of hurt and emotional injury inflicted by friends, family and even acquaintances whom we hardly know establishes the foundation upon which we will build our healing.

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Excerpt from “Seasons in Purdah–A Novel”

What happens when your best friends are two men and you marry one of them?

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

This is the case for 35-year-old Sahel Ohin.

As a child Sahel, spent the afternoons of spring and summer making mud cakes. Titus brought the water, Carl the dirt from his mother’s flower garden. All three lived on the same street in Oakland, California. After mixing the dirt and water Sahel poured the mud into tin pie pans her mother had discarded. Titus and Carl would then place the pans filled with mud in the sun to dry.

This was their work.

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…the writing life… | “Bollywood, The Hijinks of Thrillers, and Definition…”

2 Comments / ...the writing life..., Musings / Anjuelle Floyd

I am always amazed how much screen time Bollywood movies donate to establishing and clarifying family relations of the film’s protagonist compared to the nil to absent mention of family connections in American movies.

The protagonist of an American made movie can be undergoing the direst and most despairing of circumstances and the screenplay makes no mention of mother, father, sister, or brother. Often very little time or explanation is given to the ex-spouse or ex-significant other, unless she or he is central to the plot.

Where Bollywood movies perhaps overdramatize the gifts and goodness of family, American theater emphasizes the need to break away and discover who one truly is.

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…Married Life-why i write… | “Antonya Nelson, Escapism, and The New Frontier…”

Leave a Comment / ...married life ... / Anjuelle Floyd

During a recent interview for The Writer Magazine, short story writer, Antonya Nelson, also dubbed, “…master of domestic drama…” received the received the statement, “…your work focuses on family-centered problems. Sue Miller has said men used to light out for the territories, but that ‘home’ is the new frontier.”

To the interviewer, Sarah Anne Johnson’s question, “Do you agree?” Nelson responded, “I write about families because that’s what I know. I’m very glad other writers are writing about other things and places, adventures abroad, wars and plagues and science and zombies. But what I know intimately, what I can report on honestly, what I think about endlessly, is the relations among people who are attached to one another helplessly by faithfulness and need, as well as wrestling a contrary urge to be individuals. Family dramas are always positing the self vs. community, private vs. the public, and most importantly, the head vs. the heart.”
–A Gift for the Short Form, by Sarah Anne Johnson, The Writer Magazine, September 2010

Reading this I knew immediately that Antonya Nelson was someone whose work I needed to start reading, not simply and so much from my perspective as a writer, but as a person who loves reading about families working it out, trying to work it out, sometimes, and oftentimes failing to work it out.

I am also a writer, who as a wife of 28 years and mother of 3, ages 11, 18, and 23, continually ponders and explores the nature of the marriage relationship, connections that spin and sprout from this union and how ripples in this union spread to those interactions of family members surrounding them.

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…Married Life–why I write…

Leave a Comment / ...married life ... / Anjuelle Floyd

Loving, Impermanence and The Illusion of Self…

August 1, 2010 by Anjuelle Floyd

I recently read he 20th century Tibetan Buddhist master, Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche’s commentary on Lama Mipham’s The Wheel of Investigation and Meditation That Thoroughly Purifies Mental Activity.

Khyentse Rinpoche writes in the commentary, “Instead of being convinced that there is a self-entity, we realize that self is a mere concept.“

His words immediately drew me in.

A psychotherapist, I am forever pondering notions of self and other, phenomena, as Khyentse Rinpoche urges are but constructions of the mind in it, and our feeble efforts to understand and navigate the world, life and loving.
But there I go again, linking the mind, my thoughts and feelings to me, and who I really am.

Khyentse’s commentary, listed in the Summer 2010 Issue of the Buddhist Review, Tricycle, followed a brief article by Jakob Leschly, wherein Leschly describes his 16-year experience, starting in 1975, of studying with Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche along with many others who were students of the meditation master. Continue Reading »

Posted in Marriage | Tagged marriage, love, self, Tricycle, Buddhist Review, Lama Mipham, Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Jakob Leschly, The Wheel of Investigation and Meditation That Thoroughly Purifies the Mind, meditation, Buddhism, Tibetan master, transitory, life, death, living real, substantive, impermanence, change, ego, other, world | Leave a Comment »

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Loving, Impermanence and The Illusion of Self…

Leave a Comment / ...married life ... / Anjuelle Floyd

Khyentse Rinpoche writes in the commentary, “Instead of being convinced that there is a self-entity, we realize that self is a mere concept.”

His words immediately drew me in.

Loving, Impermanence and The Illusion of Self… Read More »

Of Senior Pictures, Former Eastern Block Countries, and Forgotten Anniversary Cards…

Leave a Comment / ...married life ... / Anjuelle Floyd

The summer has whisked by. One day it was May 31st and our middle was finishing what had been their eleventh grade year–they were a high school junior–and two days later we were listening to a message left by the school photographer stating that senior pictures would be made the following week and leaving the

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