The music was slightly different to each person even when they thought they were playing the same tune.

Sometimes I’d meet someone with a similar soul feel to me and say or think, you have my same music.

Some people’s music of beingness resonates wonderfully or is very complimentary.

My account of my husband’s music of beingness upon meeting him is in Everyday Heaven. I wrote about what it was like for my body to be so struck by such a compatible music.

I think its a cross between musical and kinesthetic thought in someone relatively meaning blind, meaning deaf and face blind, if that helps.

I have a painting on my website (sold though) called Music of Beingness.

It was the music of beingness that helped me to SEE people when my eyes couldn’t register.

Its is something in my body rather than my eyes.
I saw the best translation once when a string plucked on one guitar set off resonance in another.

Donna Williams
http://www.donnawilliams.net

As an autie who lacked most capacity to process or hold a simultaneous sense of self and other, I found the ‘appear’ language quite ‘cluttering’ and non-sensical. In my perception, why would people overlay their own natural music of beingness? I came to grasp that in my 30s when I finally held enough simultaneous sense of self and other (for 45 mins) to consciously realise, woah, so THATS why they do that. But otherwise, I felt all my life we weren’t really seeing each other, because people had cluttered this natural first expression.

That’s why you feel it captures souls, because it strips away the overlay, yet, beneath it is a far greater richness, naturalness and fullness of selfhood.

As for gifts, I’m a Taoist (that shows in my art too). All gifts are deficits and vice versa. My ARTism is the result of many challenges but ARTism itself can so consume that one forgets to eat, wash, drink, pee, because being one with the art process is very comforting.

Art and Taoism go together because through my art I’m also expressing the sacred nature of balance. In my paintings there are always opposites. Great power and subtlety, together, the dynamic and the still, great aloneness yet foundness in the one place.

I was ill about every 6 weeks most of my life, because of primary immune deficiencies (spent my first 26 years on fairly regular antibiotics) and that both led to damaging detachment from body and inability to identify with it, but also this has given me great appreciation of how hard won it is to re-own one’s body and how lucky a living person is to have one and to see people beyond their bodies to the personhood expressed in any part of it. Similarly, things like Tourette’s tics challenged me to know self from impulse control disorders, yet this gave me greater insight into all people and how they struggle to know self from compulsion, for example. And rapid cycling bipolar stuff took me to the edge, exhausted me, scared me, took me to manic bliss and extreme rage and terror most people will never know, but also taught me to value my life in whatever snapshots I could and that one can let a condition direct one’s life or seize the reigns, tame the horse. The meaning deafness has ironically given me great passion to be clear in my communication. The meaning blindness has taught me that the words or mental ideas we have of things associated with their sight, does not define the whole of any experience. A microwave oven could be a TV, a doll’s house roof could be a musical instrument. A piece of string can be a toy.

I’m looking forward to sending your paintings today. The post office has nice people and I love the whole post box world. The red box connects up the world you know. Yet most people barely notice this ‘Tardis’. Things, objects with no legs or eyes or hands to control their journey, go into it and travel in time and space. This is such an awesome thing.

Donna Williams *)

That’s very interesting Donna..

I saw (your art)the group of people gathered round a birthday cake.. Their faces blank..
But the emotion and feeling that image conveyed…
I was certainly taken by it..
And would have purchased it if it had not already been sold.
That is what is so fascinating about your works…. You can convey so much even without facial features and expressions!. It’s a feeling.. hard to explain.

Certainly a rare gift, I think.

all I know is I love to play with color and form and movement. I paint like a sculptor (but I am also a sculptor) so you’ll see from your works they are highly textural. For me painting isn’t visual, its physical, and about movement (you can see that).

I’m face blind and still relatively meaning deaf and relatively visually agnosic (I know the meaning of visual things by movement and placement rather than vision), so this is why I learned to map movement very acutely and this is why the characters in the pictures seem ‘alive’.

I don’t find the meaning blindness too much of an issue as it created quite a strength in mapping pattern.

The meaning deafness got me down a lot for a long time but now I’m not ashamed to sign or use representational objects (I used to only do this with my father and more recently with Chris and try and hide it with everyone else) I feel happier. I spend almost all my time arting (I’m like a monk when I’m ARTing, its like the art uses me to create itself) but you can see through my art and music that I’m VERY connected to people, even though I’m so solitary.

I used to wish people could see see past everything to people’s patterns, movements and systems, then they would see the person inside no matter what. I was told this skill to see the person inside is ’seeing ghosts’ and considering the German word for ghost is ‘geist’ which means ’soul’, maybe I do see geists perhaps because I can’t hold onto faces.

When I was 3 I couldn’t ever find my mother in the supermarket because I only knew her by the color clothing of that day. By age 5 I had learned to hear the music of people’s movements and voice patterns.

Donna *)

Donna’s art is unbelievable..
The moment I laid eyes on her paintings I was hooked.

So much so, that today I purchased 6 pieces of her exquisite art!.

I only wish I could have afforded to buy more.
.
She has a deep soul connection!

And I don’t think that I have EVER connected with works of art such as hers before ,in such a manner.
A picture paints a thousand words!

Certainly is true with Donna’s paintings!

Adrenaline is another addiction, and one gets no conscious choice in the progressive physical addiction to rage or anxiety.

in the end one finds its sources everywhere, a big 5 ring circus and no exit sign.

perhaps some folks have a problem with the part of the brain that manages addiction, maybe some folks haven’t got an off switch up there.

I have worked SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO hard on addiction to my own chemistry highs. It’s been the Zen Buddhists balancing act.

a very spiritual journey indeed.

… Donna Williams
http://www.donnawilliams.net

We need to stop labeling severe mood disorders as regression or ’severe’ autism and say what they are – severe mood disorders exacerbating the severity of one’s autism – and address these one a variety of levels. Social change isn’t the whole deal for everyone. In my case a neurotoxin – quinolinic acid – had been set off by bacteria and undigested proteins crossing the blood brain barrier (shown to me in test results and explained by the immune specialist) and it was robbing neurotransmitters and messing with brain chemistry. That requires more than social change.

The answers and the treatments will differ from person to person.

.. Donna Williams
http://www.donnawilliams.net

There’s a lot in the culturalist movement who are anti medication or feel antidepressants are used to manage societies mistreatment of auties and that antipsychotics are not appropriate to autism, but I was self injurious since 2 years old and my co-morbid stuff is now found in kids from 18 mths and around 30% of kids with autism, so I’m hardly the ‘odd case’ these days.

What’s more, when the co-morbid stuff got managed the life long immune deficiencies disappeared for the first time without expensive immune boosters I’d been on for years. The health issues were likely gonna kill me fairly young, so the immune specialist thought, so if taking the massive burden off got me healthy, so be it.

But, sure, there’s a world of difference between someone with my stuff and someone with Temple’s (I was biting, punching and slapping myself all my life and struggling with extreme self directed rage episodes and life threatening behaviours – walking in front of cars ambivalent if they would hit me). Medication can save some people’s lives and it has certainly held some families together. I often think many culturalists have no idea how hard it is to watch an autie self injure year after year. I would tear my nails down my face and punch myself in the face and stomach. I had never seen other kids do this till I was an autism consultant and it was so horrible to watch. But when one lacks any simultaneous processing of self and other, its so hard to fathom that when doing it.

And many culturalists think this is because the kid is upset etc but for me it would happen when I was too happy, too sad, too excited, too shy… even when having any uncomfortable thought or feeling. In the end it was a hair trigger and an addiction, so very hard to turn around. My brain had an answer to everything – bash myself. And if I hated my own addiction there was self hypnosis… what a choice. Celebrate that? Nuh. Lots of autism stuff may be just fine or adaptable, but some is just a tiresome, claustrophobic loop. But most auties aren’t in that loop and now its managed and low key in me. But I can’t conveniently forget it and say all was rosy in the garden.

Some auties who’ve had things like rapid cycling bipolar all their lives may not even know this is what it is, they’re just seen as having severe autism, especially if they additionally don’t have functional speech.

… Donna Williams
http://www.donnawilliams.net