Presence Without Possession:
A 62nd Year Interview with Lisa C. Williams
interviewed by Patrice Gaines
Twenty years ago, ESSENCE magazine featured a conversation with Lisa C. Williams. Two years ago, BEHOLD Magazine marked her sixtieth birthday with a deeper reflection on legacy.
Now, at sixty-two, the questions have changed. They are less about what happened, less about what was built, and more about how a life is lived.
Living on Portugal’s Silver Coast, Williams writes from the life she lives.
Presence Without Possession gathers essays on land, water, memory, ancestry, attention, listening, discernment, and daily practice.
What follows is not a chronology.
It is a testimony to living.
1. The title of your Substack is Presence Without Possession. What does that phrase mean to you?
For much of my life, I believed responsibility meant holding things together: the work, the people, the outcomes, the future.
Over time, I learned a different truth.
I can lead without possession.
I can serve without carrying what is not mine.
I can remain fully present to a person, a moment, or a season without trying to own it, direct it, or preserve it beyond its natural life.
Presence Without Possession is not detachment.
It is not avoidance.
It is participation without captivity, relationship without control, and learning to loosen my grip on what was never mine to keep.
2. You often describe yourself as a Walker, Witness, and Wonderer. Why those three words?
Because they describe the way I move through the world.
I walk, not simply as exercise, but as a practice of attention.
I witness inwardly and outwardly, allowing my inward witness to discipline my outward one.
And I wonder.
Not wander.
Wonder.
I remain curious about people, history, landscape, contradiction, beauty, grief, and the ordinary moments that most often pass unnoticed.
Wonder keeps me teachable.
It keeps me in relationship with mystery.
It reminds me that understanding is not the only way to encounter the world.
3. The Camino appears throughout your recent writing. What did the walk give you?
Very little.
And that is precisely why it mattered.
The Camino did not give me wisdom.
It did not heal me.
It did not transform me into someone new.
What it offered was the opportunity to continue.
One step.
Then another.
Not arriving.
Continuing.
The Camino did not create that understanding.
It embodied it.
4. Many readers know you through your advocacy work. Do you still see yourself primarily as an activist?
No.
Though I honor that chapter of my life deeply.
Advocacy was an expression of my values. It was never the entirety of who I am.
Today, I am less interested in being known for what I accomplished and more interested in how I inhabit my days.
The work mattered. The lives mattered. The outcomes mattered. But beneath all of it was a more enduring question:
How does one live truthfully?
That question remains.
5. Your work returns often to attention, presence, truth, and increasingly, listening. What has listening taught you about becoming yourself?
Listening helped me save myself.
Very early in life, I discovered that not every voice speaking to me deserved to become my own.
People will name you according to their fears, expectations, limitations, or misunderstandings.
Those voices can be loud.
They can be persistent. But they are not necessarily true.
Listening became the way I discerned what belonged to me and what did not.
Long before I had language for philosophy, I was practicing that discipline.
I learned to trust what I knew before I could explain it, and to answer to what was true rather than to what was spoken.
Looking back, I understand that listening was never simply something I did.
It became the way I lived.
It helped me save myself.
6. Your writing often returns to the word “attention.” Why?
Because attention is a form of reverence.
What we attend to shapes what we notice.
What we notice shapes how we live.
And what we worship.
Most beauty goes unseen because we are elsewhere.
Most wisdom arrives quietly and requires stillness to hear it.
Attention is how I participate in that revelation.
7. Themes of truth appear to inform much of your writing. What does truth mean to you?
Truth requires reflection. And that reflection begins with the only life I can honestly govern: my own.
That requires humility. My understanding is always shaped by what I know, what I have lived, and what I have yet to learn.
So I listen carefully—to myself, to others, and to what is unfolding around me.
Over time, I have learned to trust what reveals itself in the quiet, in the dark, and under duress.
Truth rarely needs to announce itself. It endures.
8. What standard do you use when writing?
I do not measure a sentence by whether it is beautiful, persuasive, or likely to be well received.
I measure it by whether I can stand behind it with my whole weight.
The discipline is simple.
Did I live this?
Do I know this?
If the answer is no, it does not belong in the work.
The experiences, reflections, and inquiries in Presence Without Possession and across all my work are my own.
At my writing table, I sometimes use AI as an editorial sounding board. It can question language and test the structure, but it cannot supply the experience, reflection, or inquiry from which I write.
I am the writer.
The authority does not reside in a tool, an editor, a critic, or an audience.
It resides in the witness.
The person who was there.
The person who knows.
When I write, I am that person.
9. Your work often returns to ancestors, history, and inheritance. Why?
Because none of us arrive here alone.
Every life is shaped by countless lives preceding it. Some remembered. Many forgotten.
I am interested in inheritance because it asks different questions.
What was carried forward?
What deserves to be carried forward?
What patterns should be interrupted?
What systems should be disrupted?
History is not something behind us.
It is something moving through us.
How we choose to receive it, continue it, interrupt its patterns, or disrupt its systems becomes part of the inheritance we leave to others.
10. What have you learned about letting go?
That letting go is often misunderstood.
Some people imagine release as forgetting, dismissing, or pretending something no longer matters.
I have found that it is none of those things.
I have learned to open my hand.
To outcomes.
To memories.
To people.
To identities.
To versions of myself that have already completed their work.
The love may remain.
The grief may remain.
The lesson may remain.
The memory may remain.
What leaves is possession.
What remains is relationship.
And presence.
11. Your recent work feels quieter than some of your earlier writing. Was that intentional?
No.
It emerged naturally.
I have less interest in declaration and more interest in observation.
Less interest in argument and more interest in recognition.
I am no longer trying to persuade a reader toward a conclusion.
I am inviting them into an encounter.
Over time, I have learned to trust what does not need to be explained.
Not all truth requires a witness for it to be true.
12. If there is one lesson the road has taught you, what is it?
Continue.
Not heroically.
Not dramatically.
Simply continue.
Most days do not ask for greatness.
They ask us to become acquainted.
With ourselves.
With one another.
With the life already before us.
And then…
Take the next step.
Most of life unfolds there.
Not in arrival.
In continuation.
13. What do you hope readers carry with them after spending time with Presence Without Possession?
Not my conclusions. Their own.
I hope the work creates a listening room—enough quiet for readers to hear themselves, become more acquainted with who they are, notice what they have been carrying, and recognize what is theirs to continue and what is not.
If the work offers anything, may it be companionship rather than answers.
My responsibility is to write as faithfully as I know how. What unfolds after that no longer belongs to me.
14. At this stage of your life, what are you still learning?
To become more deeply acquainted with the life that is here.
And to meet it with grace and gratitude.
15. What, for you, is the true measure of a book?
Not my words.
Not my name.
I hope what remains is the invitation.
To listen.
To become more acquainted with ourselves and with one another.
To continue what is ours.
To leave what is not.
If these pages create even a small measure of that, they have already done their work.
The rest belongs to life.
16. As you look ahead, what do you hope remains?
I hope we don’t look so far ahead that we miss the day we have been gifted.
Life is not waiting for us somewhere in the distance.
It is here.
This day.
This conversation.
This walk.
This meal.
This sunrise.
This person.
If we learn to inhabit what is already here, I believe we discover that much of what we have been searching for has been walking beside us all along.
17. Over the years, your birthday has become less about receiving gifts than offering one. What are you celebrating?
For many years, my birthday has been less about celebrating my arrival than acknowledging the gift of being here.
Birth gives us a beginning.
Life asks something more.
Over time, I found myself less interested in marking another year than in honoring the ordinary days that have filled the years between.
Those days have shaped me far more than the date on my birth certificate ever could.
Offering something to others each year became my quiet way of giving thanks for the life I have been entrusted to inhabit.
This year, I would like that gift to be these words.
Here
Two certificates frame my life.
One records my arrival.
The other will record my departure.
I did not choose either day.
For years, I measured life by milestones.
Over time, a truer measure took hold.
How I met the ordinary.
How I carried disappointment, and welcomed joy as it came.
How I cared for this body, and kept company with myself and others.
Every morning, I wake within an invitation.
To inhabit this day.