 Welcome to another show of Celebrate Life. My name is Gary D. Carlos and I'll be your host. Celebrate to really do exactly what the title of the program says. We are going to celebrate the lives of Vermonters and some people from outside Vermont for all of you to benefit from. One thing I've learned after, you know, over the years reading obituaries is that, gosh, many times I leave saying, I wish I had gotten to know this person. They had such a rich, vibrant life. And so this program is devoted to all of us that are still enjoying life and doing great things in life, a chance to stop and celebrate people's lives as they move through their own. If per chance in the future you'd like to be on this show, please write me at celebratelife0747 at gmail.com and I'd be more than happy to put you on the schedule. Also, if you have questions for one of our interviewees, please send me an email at the same address and I'll be glad to forward that on and I'm sure they would be more than happy to respond to you. So today I'm honored to have as our guest, Gwendolyn Evans. Hi, Gwendolyn. Hi, Gary. Good morning. Good morning. How are you? I'm good. So Gwendolyn and I just for purposes of being transparent, I've known Gwendolyn for a number of years. I love getting to know her and be her friend and doing various things in the community with her. Gwendolyn is a deep spiritual thinker and guide for many people. She loves her ethnic background and heritage, loves to travel. She's an advocate for those who are blind. Gwendolyn herself, amongst all these things, happens to be blind herself. She's a wonderful artist and she's a determined, persistent person from what I've gotten to know her. So Gwendolyn, let's start. That's another way of saying I'm very stubborn. We'll take that in a good way. Yes, I think so. You've made the world a better place for a lot of us and we so much appreciate that. Thank you. So how did you become the woman that you are today, Gwendolyn? What foundational things in your life have happened to make you who you are? Well, I guess I would say obviously there's a lot that goes on in one's childhood that forms or informs how you turn out, but a lot of times it can go one way or the other. For me, I had a number of events in my childhood that were pretty tragic and traumatic, one of which being diagnosed with glaucoma at four months old, losing my mother to breast cancer when I was five and then consequently growing up with around a family of fairly traumatized people who used and abused alcohol. So those are all things that I had to work with and work around as I got older. I developed a faith of some sort. I was a very devout Catholic for a while, but really that faith sort of started before I became Catholic and has lasted well beyond leaving the Catholic Church. A number of things growing up with a disability and then going out into the world really makes you have to think, am I going to rise to the occasion and figure out who I am and what I want to be or am I going to be told what I'm to be and who I am. So I obviously did not choose to lay down and let somebody else tell me anything. That's for sure. So when that part of you that had to determine what am I, how am I going to handle this fate in life, lost your mom at an early age, losing your sight at an early age, having not a very solid foundation of support even around you. I mean, these are, you're right, any one of these things is enough to throw someone totally off and yet you persisted. Where did that come from? Well, I do think it is, I think that our laugh about stubbornness is true. I mean, I do believe that we have within us the spark to be ignited and to move into the kind of being that we want to be in this life. And also for me, I mean, I don't, there are a lot of things that happened that have helped me evolve and I kind of go, wow, wow, I really feel guided at times. I really feel like there was a higher power working with me on my behalf. And I did, I think I just was wired and I gravitated towards people mostly outside of my family who were supportive, who did cheer me on. And we need that, we absolutely need that. One of the most instrumental people early on was my maternal grandmother who made me feel safe, made me feel loved and welcome. And I just, I wish I could tell her now how much that meant to me and how it saved my sanity to have that. Yep. Yep. So she was definitely an anchor in that. Yes. Yes. You know, Carly Young talks about the collective unconsciousness that we are generations past combined for us. And then we move that forward. You have any sense of your family's history beyond your present family? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So my father was born in Wales, which is part of the UK. And I'm very connected to that side of my family in terms of the energy there. I've been, I was able just about five or six years ago to connect with a cousin over there, two cousins actually. And their father was my father's first cousin. I've been to Wales several times. I really, I really think that knowing some of your past and where you came from, and if you have the opportunity to go to the area where you came from, it does something for you. It really expands your mind. And I got very tuned into just how much it takes people to get up and leave their family and their country of origin and come to this country. My grandfather brought his wife and twin children over in the 20s. And he did that because the area in Wales that he was from was economically seriously depressed. And then yet, you know, he came here and the family continued. So, and that was, you know, recent history. My maternal side comes from the Mayflower, believe it or not. Oh, my goodness. I know. And there's probably some, you know, some history around that. And I think about what's going on in the world now and kind of what we started, good things were started and not so good things were started. And I'm just recently, you know, in the circumstances we're living in now, I have caused to reflect on where we, as human beings have kind of come from and how we might have screwed up, how we might think about going forward differently. Yeah. I mean, I think that one thing is on both sides of my family came from people who felt oppressed or repressed in some way. Probably were the Welsh certainly were various incendiary religious people. But then we come to a new country and we turn around and do exactly what was done to us. So we have to work. Yeah. So on the one hand, they were courageous enough to say, I'm out of here. I don't want to live my life being oppressed. Right. And yet you take all that oppression with you into the new country. Yeah. And and not much changes in a sense. Right. Turn around and take the land and kill the natives and yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So one big part of your life is your spirituality. And and you have worked it so much in your life that you actually are a spiritual guide for others. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about that. You know, it's interesting. I, as I said, I followed a sort of a traditional Catholic path for a while. And then for a while, I was agnostic. And then I really never, I don't think spirit has ever left my life. My awareness of it has changed. And my awareness of energy as it is. And I use energy as everything. Energy isn't everything. It's in, you know, solid objects. It's in every living being on this planet. And and there's more that connects us that divides us. And, you know, I think that I just am wired to share my experience and my strength and hope with people. I went to college and I sort of had my Catholic background there. And I sort of left it there. I kind of, you know, because I evolved, I got educated about all of these things. I minored in religious studies. But then I said, Oh, there's, there's a lot more in the world than this. So always exploring. And at some point in my 30s, you know, I kind of got involved with the Unitarians, which are a great group of people, another huge expansion in my awareness. And I think that's when I began to see that I might have something to share with people. I started doing workshops on the uses of adversity. And I don't want to say that I'm an expert in adversity, because everybody has adversity, but you have to know that you can learn from it. And so that's where I started doing this. And I just, I just continue to grow. That's really important to be both internally and externally, that we look into our lives and we look inward and really have a relationship with yourself. That's, to me, that's critical. From your relationship with yourself, all relationships in your life evolve. And I didn't get that when I was young. I wasn't taught that it's okay to love myself. I had to learn that through the various things that I was exploring in, in religion and spirituality, and also in therapy and work to get over my trauma. But that relationship with oneself is the crux of everything. Well, how has your loss of sight informed your life? How has it shaped who you are today? Well, let's see. There's different different ways to answer that. I certainly do not want to be defined as a person with a disability or a person who is blind, but I happen to be blind. And I, the general public would tend to label me as blind, disabled, and many other misconceptions. And that would be the defining terminology. I reject that. And I'm, I get very tired of the response of not having just a general reception of being able to see a person for a person, not the disability or the appearance that they present, you know? That, that, so that's, that's a part that it will, that issue in my life will never go away. I will always have to advocate for myself or something. And, and yet I also believe it's a, it's a rich experience to have this difference in my life to say, I'm kind of glad I can't see what's going on right now. I don't want to judge things based on what I'm seeing or not seeing. And I feel like the rest of the world does make a lot of judgments based on quote-unquote visual appearance or objects. So it's a make-or-back, you know? Yeah. You know, I've met people from the outside would say has a profound disability. And in asking them if they had the opportunity to not have that disability, would they choose that? And almost every one of them says, I wouldn't trade my life for anything. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Yeah. And the terminology of profound disability, well, anything in life can be profound. And it all depends on how the individual defines it, not how the person is receiving the appearance finds it. Exactly. So you're also a profound artist, I might say. And tell me about that part of your life because that's, that's been there for you for a long time as well. Yes. And that's been a profound part of my, my growth and my spiritual, my inner spiritual work because both my parents were artists. My mother was a very creative person. She was, she had been a painter. She cooked amazing things. She, she was an amazing knitter and crafter and did all kinds of things. And my father was a watercolor artist. And he, professionally, he was an architect. Somebody was always drawing. But in my childhood, it just, it just didn't appear to them or to anyone like art would ever be an option for me. You know, there's all this stuff about that they used to tell children about coloring inside the lines and doing it this way and that way. And so it just wasn't a thing. And yet, I do believe there's probably some genetics involved spirit began to really move me. And I started having, I took some workshops in body image and things like that, where I was introduced to working with polymer clay and that opened up a whole new avenue for me. I was not expecting. I have done a little bit of crafting, never thought about that being a creative pursuit. But when I started working in polymer clay, it, it bent my perception and we need to bend our perceptions because there are a lot of people out there who say they don't create a bone in their body. Well, all human beings need creativity and have creativity. It is profoundly necessary to tap into that and to understand that the way that we perceive creativity has a lot to do with what we think we can do and what we think we can't do. I never thought that I would pick up a paintbrush and yet I just kind of, it wouldn't leave me alone. It was one thing to work with clay. That, that made sense. And eventually, you know, people were giving me amazing feedback and I started having dreams about painting and, and I had friends at the time show up and say, oh, you, you need to try this. You know, never in my childhood would I have heard that sort of thing. So when I began, I really understood that creativity was so much more than doing a good job, quote unquote, at what you're creating. You know, it is a process that allows us to find pieces of ourselves that we really like and enjoy, and that help us open up to a deeper part of ourselves. And if we don't have that in some level, I mean, it could be anything. Sometimes I'm working in clay, sometimes I'm working in paint, sometimes I'm writing, sometimes I'm cooking. Yeah, right. Exactly. It's, it's not about the stuff you choose to do. It's about the process that you want to engage in. How you approach the activity, other than the activity itself. Yeah. You mentioned writing. Tell me, do you do writing? I do write, yes. I write every day. I have a personal practice that's very critical to me, which is I get up in the morning and I make my cup of Welsh brew tea. It's very important to drink tea all my life. I make a cup of tea and I sit down with my little computer and I spend a good amount of time journaling and that morphs into prayer and meditation. And it might go back to journaling, but I spend at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half each day doing that. That helps me connect inside myself. It's the inner dialogue going. Yeah. And then you have done a lot of writing during COVID. The art situation has been really challenging and feeling, you know, like a lot of us, we're all kind of turned upside down. So I'm really doing writing. I began a Patreon page called Gwendolyn's Cauldron and I'm really sharing, I was saying to my wife last night on the phone, I feel like it's my ministry. I'm sharing my thoughts, my heart, my prayers, some of it with creativity, some of it with regard to art, but a lot of it is from my spiritual background and what I'm seeing and feeling in the world right now. That's wonderful. So every day is a creative adventure for you in different forms. I try. Yeah. Some days are better than others, as you know. Now you have a gentleman named Yardley over there. I do. And you've had various seeing eye dogs, I guess for lack of a better term over the years. What have those dogs meant for you? Yeah. Yardley is my third dog and it's from Guiding Eyes, which is in New York. You know, I was going through a divorce when I got my first dog who was a lovely, sweet, yellow lab named Pilar. And she was kind of a spiritual guide for me through a tough time. And she was with me for 11 years before she passed. Of course, it's always hard to see our loved ones pass, no matter what suit they wear, whether they're four legs or two. And then I had another yellow lab named Parker, who I still think today he was my soulmate. He was just an amazing creature and stayed with me for a long time. And now I have this other being named Yardley and he's a wonderful companion. He's a good guy. Yeah. Having another presence in the house is very important. Having a guide dog, having that very well trained dog. It's a wonderful experience. Yeah. So are there things in life that you have yet to do that you would love to do that are on your dance card? Yes, of course. Tell me about those. Oh my gosh. Well, there are still places that I'd like to travel to. You know, when we really are able to say it's okay to travel now, I know people are traveling, but it just doesn't feel feel like the right time to do that. But there are places, there are places. And I'd like to see more of this country. So I need traveling companions for that. I'd like to explore Canada a little more. I'd like to go back to Europe. Yeah. So there's travel. And I really would like to create a living space for the next phase of my life where I'm not beholden to associations or organizations. And I can create, I jokingly say a commune, but what I'm looking for is I want to create a living situation with people that I love and who love me and we create small community together. So I'm looking at that as a sort of project over the next several years. I'm always wanting to learn. I'm always wanting to tend to my own inner growth and be of service, be of help to others based on the things that I've learned and that things that I can share. I continually work on that with myself. When I think of the community that you want, I was thinking of co-housing where people come together and share space and develop community. Something like that. I'm on a smaller scale. Right. How did you get to Vermont? Oh, well, when I was a teenager, that was at the height of my full-on Catholicism. So when I started exploring colleges, I only looked at small Catholic colleges. And I remember I had a little bit of vision left. I came from New Hampshire. We came up here to see several small Catholic colleges. One was Trinity College in Burlington, which unfortunately has been gone for a couple decades now, but I was there. And it was a really important experience. I kind of fell in love with Vermont, and it's a little interesting. I remember the day we came up. As I said, I had still had a little vision. It was a day in November. It was a gray day. It was foggy. We came up Route 7 into Burlington. And here's this gorgeous campus with brick buildings and ivy and it's foggy. It felt very sort of English-Gothic-y sort of thing. And it just made me fall in love with it. And I really fell in love with Burlington area. I haven't left. I'm glad you haven't. Yeah, me too. Me too. Anything that we haven't touched on that you would like to talk about? I do a lot, as you said, I do a lot of deep thinking. And since COVID started, I, like many of us, kind of went through a personal shutdown. So many things have changed and shifted. Relationships are changing. The way we do business is changing. People are changing all the time. And we can so easily slip into helplessness, right? And helplessness. And I really, the one thing that I'm reconnected with so strongly is prayer. Prayer is, to me, a form of energy healing. I mean, I am an energy healer. I'm certified in Reiki. I'm certified to do crystal healing and all these out there sort of things, which I continue to do, but not in the same way. But I know that our thoughts and what comes out of our hearts and what comes out of our mouths and throats, it's all energy. And I'm really, yeah, I'm really relying on redirecting the sense of hopelessness and helplessness that I feel regularly, like many of us do, I'm trying to redirect it into the prayers, the energy work, the revisioning of what I'm seeing and experiencing and what I'm hearing on the news. Because I'm worried about our country. I'm worried about our world. But I think the thing that I'm most worried about is how easy it is for us to stay in the negative thoughts and stay in just the negative perceptions of things and what's wrong. We can always talk about what's wrong in the world. And we can always point fingers at who's doing this and who's doing that or what they're not doing. But that's not what we need to do. Right? It's not what we need to do. We need to rework our thoughts, rework our feelings to reframe how we are in the world. I really feel very strongly because that's not going to show up in the news media. That shows up in our relationship with ourselves and each other. And I hear about the violence that's going on in our world, the shootings and the tragedies of kids with guns and all of that. And yeah, it's really easy to go there. But I'm really determined to re-vision that in myself and be able to create a vision of hope in some way. I read a lot of fantasy books and people chuckle at me about this, but we need imagination right now. We need imagination to create the world we want to live in instead of accepting what is. That is a crucial part and that's why we need our creative forces within us to come up and take this on. You have such a, your insight into the human condition is very sharp and very deep. Have you ever thought about being a therapist, Wendlin? I thought about it, but honestly, you know, it's, it's, I hesitate to say this, but I find that line of work a little limited. How so? Well, payment, first of all, you know, insurance, not insurance. Do it, do it this way, do it that way. Sign up with a practice, do your own practice. Oh, God, no. I'd rather be loose and free with what I do. What I do isn't therapy. I, one of the best things that I've done for myself, and I think for my, my work in the world is I began studying and trying to practice nonviolent communication as put forth by Dr. Rosenberg in his book, nonviolent communication, a language for life. And it, it really, it bent my perception of my relationship with myself by getting me in touch with the language that I use for, and myself talk. And that's what I try to help people with is to bend their perceptions. I'm not a therapist. I'm an intuitive. I support people if they want to go to therapy and say, Yeah, absolutely. Because there's a lot I can't do for you. And therapy has been helpful for me for sure. But this being an intuitive guide, I've just always been able to tune into people's energy and what's going on around them in combination with what they're saying. And I don't know where that came from. And I think one of my earliest memories about that, that's sort of connected in with it is I had a dream just, just before my mother died. And mind you, I was only five years old, but I've never forgotten this dream. And in that dream, she came to me and was saying goodbye to me. And I had no idea what was going on. I just, I was in the hospital. I've always remembered that dream. I believe in that power. And, you know, and I'm blessed that I've been able to help other people connect with loved ones who've gone on or connect with that sense of connection that's still there, but not in the physical world. So, you know, I have to take care of my relationship with myself so that I can keep clear and open and able to allow this work to happen. So I'm not in charge of it. I'm just a facilitator. Any, you shared a lot of wisdom already. Do you have any other pieces of wisdom that you'd like to share with the audience that have helped you in your life? We all need to play more. And I think the older we get, the harder that seems to be in terms of figuring out what is to play. It can be very serious with ourselves, right? Yeah, yeah. So I'm still working on that. And my play is very much connected to being with friends and loved ones, not just with art. I've actually found it harder to play by myself just because of the sort of the enforced isolation of COVID. It's harder. So, you know, we need to, oh, God, we need to connect. We so need to turn towards each other and connect. Stop judging each other. Well, Gondolin, thank you for your time today and thank you for who you are. You're an amazing person. And it's an honor to spend this time with you like this. Thank you, Gary. And thank you for doing this show. It's just, it's a wonderful concept. It's a precious idea. And I hope that I hope it'll continue. It's very radical. Well, give it a try for sure. Thank you. Thank you. Well, you have a good day. And thank you all for watching and special time with Gondolin Evans. Thank you.