Jewels from the Dark

Learning to find beauty and benefit from the dark parts of life.

  • Mining the Deep
  • About
  • Something Different

    I decided to do something different for a while. I have been working on a couple stories lately – one a novel and one a short story still in development. Sometimes, it feels like I have these stories burning in my bones and I just need to get them out. But I can only write…

    Gwen B

    September 28, 2025
    Uncategorized
  • To my Gretchen, the best puppy dragon

    My beautiful pup crossed the rainbow bridge today. She was the best pup I could have ever asked for. She was a rescue, but honestly I think she rescued us. She had a billion names. Gretchen. Gretchers. McDudes. Pubble bubbles. Pupper rupps. Puppy dragon. Rubble butts. And more. She had been slowing down and last…

    Gwen B

    September 17, 2025
    Uncategorized
  • Desolation and the Keening of Loss

    Often, I find myself coming back to the heavier, deeper, darker emotions. Sadness, sorrow, melancholy, devastation…loss. I have been wrestling with these a lot lately and today in my Morning Pages1 practice, I processed a bit more about what draws me to these themes. Life has not always been kind, nor has it worked out…

    Gwen B

    April 29, 2025
    Uncategorized
    acceptance, grief, healing, life, loss, mental-health
  • Silence Among the Ruins

    There are times in my life when I crave the second noun form of silence – “absence of sound or noise: stillness.”1 This world is loud and seems to have only gotten louder still in recent years. I find my heart and body and soul aching for silence and stillness, especially as a mom of…

    Gwen B

    January 20, 2025
    Uncategorized
    god, grief, life, loss, poetry, silence, writing
  • Living Loss

    I recently wrote a paper on grief and the idea of “living loss,” where the loss is not in a physical death of a person, but of a persistent, permanent loss of something or someone important. This type of grief can crush a person. Of this, I know full well. The last two months have…

    Gwen B

    December 18, 2024
    Uncategorized
    acceptance, death, grief, living-loss, loss, meaning, mental-health, mourning
  • Who Do You Think You Are?

    I have been mulling over these question lately, with all of the recent changes in my life: Who do I think I am? Who do I want to be? How do I become that person? It is sometimes hard to keep the proper perspective of who I am in the midst of so much pain,…

    Gwen B

    October 22, 2024
    Uncategorized
    acceptance, faith, healing, life, love, mental-health, relationships, writing
  • Rise Again

    Super short post today… This song is on repeat. NEEDTOBREATHE is one of my favorite bands. Deep breath…I’m going to rise again.

    Gwen B

    October 18, 2024
    Uncategorized
  • The Bottom

    “When you think you’ve hit the bottom, and the bottom gives way…” Steven Curtis Chapman I thought I hit the bottom many times in my life and many, many times in the past 5 years. Every time it felt like *that* was all the loss I could hold, I was handed another loss and the…

    Gwen B

    October 16, 2024
    Uncategorized
    acceptance, grief, healing, life, loss, love, mental-health, writing
  • Acceptance

    Before my amputation in 2023, I went away by myself for two weeks to try to catch my breath and take a self-inventory of my life. I found that I was not in a place of acceptance. Not deeply. Sure I had accepted that I was hurt, that my hand did not work, that the…

    Gwen B

    October 13, 2024
    Uncategorized
    acceptance, life, love, mental-health, writing
  • Grief. Sorrow. Anguish.

    Countless times I sat down to write something in the last year. Countless times I got right back up again, unable and unwilling to feel my grief. How does someone even begin to process through so much loss? Especially when the loss is so……and there go any words adequate enough to describe it. Is grief…

    Gwen B

    October 4, 2024
    Uncategorized
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