About LLAW

“The Ol’ Recluse”

With the aid and comfort  of Sophia’s wisdom and compassion, I live by just one simple credo, best described by William Ernest Henley in his powerful 1875 poem “Invictus“. . .

Most folks call me Lloyd. Some may use my name with an adjective in front–sometimes friendly, other times not. Lloyd Albert Williams is my pen name, or pseudonym. My given names are actual (sometimes reversed depending on my writing material), but my pseudo-surname is taken from the maternal side of my family for a combination of reasons, some a bit personal.

In my original life–the one before retirement–I was a corporate manager and executive, primarily in the mining industry with a stint in defense contracting and technical software development management, including several years in Information Technology and other nerdy cyber enterprises, including publishing. It so happened that both of those careers taught or forced me to be a pretty fair technical writer, composing such exciting volumes as management and administrative and other technical control systems, investment prospectuses, manuals for accounting, human resources, computer software and sophisticated professional website development, et cetera, leading me, in my later years, to a great head-in-the-clouds dream-like urge to write something fun, or at least enjoyable, and more artistically satisfying  and mentally rewarding; and now, after most of a decade of work I have eight novels in various stages of production, six of them complete in story, but still in the process of editing. Also, in my spare time I have become a lefty political supporter as well as an environmental and animal rights advocate, and a women’s rights libber.

My primary mission here on earth, as I imagine it in gnostic language, is to help Sophia, our Lost Goddess, achieve Her ultimate goal of creating an idealistic sanctuary for all flora and fauna, including us humans, right here on Gaia’s fertile earth. I call the place ‘Felicity’. I don’t expect to bask in such a nirvana this time around myself, but I expect my children and their children and their kids–and so on–to eventually reside there, and all of yours, too.

I’m about 6′ 2″ in my cowboy boots, grizzled and gray, and hover around 200 pounds. I was born on November 23, 1941, the son of a game warden and a horse-loving ranch girl in wonderful Wyoming, where I spent almost all of the first forty years of this life. I have also lived for extensive years in Idaho, Montana, and the last thirty in Nevada, enjoying some of the most strikingly rugged and beautiful, almost pristine, country on earth throughout the mountainous western United States.

I’ve seen and experienced a colorful spectrum of life on this planet that’s spiraled all the way up like a soaring eagle, with many elegant swoops and swoons, to the top of the rarefied air and then, with mixed metaphors, swirled and looped like a windless kite all the way back to the parched and polluted ground, fortunately catching the breath of a  breeze just before the lethal crash, then suddenly ascending against gravity and the wind part way back up again. But to soar all the way back to those dizzying heights of yore, I know I have to somehow break the kite string that tethers me in order to once again fly like an eagle. I think I know how to do that.

I’ve been a husband and I’m a father; I’ve been an administrator, a manager, a corporate executive, a company president and board chairman–all that with large multi-national corporations to small start-up companies; I’ve been an inquisitive student, an athlete, a hunter, fisherman, and a sportsman, a soldier on a mission and a revolutionary on a higher mission. I’ve been something of an accidental libertine, a loner, even a recluse, and I’m a deist-style agnostic with gnosticism in my spirit; I’ve been  homeless  and I’ve been a prisoner. I’ve been financially well-off, living in a four-thousand square foot home on several acres, and I’ve been dirt-poor, living in a tent alongside a crystal clear Montana river. But I’ve always been a romantic, a dreamer, and a rebel (without a cause, some have said).

All my life, since I was just a boy, I’ve been a day-dreamer (as my mother termed it) on wild but positive trails pointing the way to high hopes as an independently free spirit who has listened more to the rhythmic beat of my heart’s innate intuition through all these decades of practical learning experiences, rather than to capitulate to others’ theoretical, conspiratorial, or hypothetical outside influences. But at the same time there have been those persuasive gifts of knowledge from honorable and respected elders, peers and colleagues, and I have accepted and adopted most all of that. Over the years I’ve accepted and embraced all the results, both the bad with the good, blessing me with an esoteric knowledge of life and a bit of an understanding of its purpose; yet I still yearn to learn more. My soul reaches out for something new, like an unfinished assignment, job or project that I’m not yet aware of, don’t yet have, don’t yet see, but so desperately need in my life, and my time is running short, but I know whatever it is, it’s there waiting for me, and one day I will find it and pursue it with gusto. Some of the illnesses of old age have already descended upon me, including heart failure at one point and now cancer, both wars that I won, and I fully intend to continue to fight these battles, wherever they come from, so long as my mind remains sound and my constitution hardened in my old age.

I’m as honest as the next man–probably moreso than most. But I promise (to myself, at least, and to you if you’re a reader or just a friend or family member) that the stuff here on this Blog and in my longer writings have and will always come from my still unsatisfied wisdom of mind, my unquenchable heart, and my unconquerable soul. My profound thoughts and words and questions will be as direct and honest as I can muster up if for nothing more than my love of Sophy’s Way–the ultimate feminine way. Honesty and integrity is not the way of the Patriarchy.

A high degree of integrity and empathetic compassion is all-important to a strong sense of values, and to a woman’s natural probity of love, compassion, and empathy, which are parts, but not all, of what makes the female of our species superior to the male. It’s been put this way in a typically western laconic voice, but an amusing and profound way:

“I don’t have enough respect for men,” she said. “I’ve found very few men who are honest, and you ain’t one of the few.”

“I’m about half-honest,” Augustus said.

“That’s right,” she said.

~ from the novel “Lonesome Dove”
by Larry McMurtry, 1985
(1986 Pulitzer Prize Award winner for fiction)

I have an urge, a desire, a drive and a dream to match, with one of my own, McMurtry’s great literary epic accomplishment, a wide-sweeping essay on the frailties of human nature, a winding gut-wrenching tale on the  ways and wiles of mankind’s psyche. Don’t let the old west time and the setting influence you for today’s world is no better now than then. Everyone owes it to themselves to objectively read this outstanding American novel.

And, by the way, I sign off on everything I write with this “signature” just to let you know it’s me who wrote it. ~llaw