Karma
In the cherry blossom shade there is no such thing as a stranger Kabayashi Issa.
Good Friday 7th. April 2023
Today feels weighted in significance of the holy. Good Friday, Passover the feast of the unleavened bread and the angel passing over and Ramadan where fasting occurs from dawn to dusk in observance of the Koran. As if that isn’t enough it is also the twenty-fifth anniversary or the Good Friday Agreement, now at risk. […]
ZOOM ZOOM
“A green thought in a green shade”
Laurence Sterne offers me a definition of therapy.
I was having an existential conversation with a ‘patient’/person this morning beckoning them down crossroads, cul de sacs, and non sequiturs until he commented that along with Sterne, ‘We progress as we digress.’ Sterne was referring to Tristram Shandy, but I cannot think of a better definition of the therapeutic process, at least ongoing in […]
Anna Karenina and the genius of Tolstoy
Anna Karenina is blowing my mind away. The second reading is even more inspiring than the first. Tolstoy’s analysis of the human mind, the conflicts of being human, of being in relationship with oneself and another exceeds any psychological theories of Mind and Relationship I have encountered. The suffering terrors and joy of being human.
Missing you Hilary
THIS GIFT WAS AMONGST THE MOST OVERWHELMING MOMENTS IN MY LIFEI still receive my Google Alerts for Hilary and not a day passes without one chiming you back into my memory.
A green thought in a green shade.
Christmastide spent at Castle Cary where it feels a little like Paradise Regained. While Grandmother, Daughter and Grand daughter gather together for an evening meal. There is no Grace only gratitude.
Vivienne Westwood Queen of Punk
Howl: Allen Ginsberg
I don’t quite know why except one of my patients last week was wearing a sweater by Bella Freud with Allen Ginsberg scrawled across the front that his poem, Howl, about the devastation of AIDS crawled into my mind. And the world feels like it is howling and we do not hear. And my husband, […]
An inaccurate Map of our Pain:
From Gabor and Daniel Maté’s new book ‘The Myth of the Normal’Contrary to what I, too, used to believe, a diagnosis like ADHD or depression or bipolar illness explains nothing. No diagnosis ever does. Diagnoses are abstractions, or summaries: sometimes helpful, always incomplete. They are professional shorthand for describing constellations of symptoms a person may […]