Nature and Nurture.
I’ve just been staying on a Somerset estate which has the largest herd of British White cattle in the world. Yesterday, they came right up to our window, a field full of nursing mothers and their spring born calves. While these cattle are distinguished by their white coats and the fact that they do not […]
MIDSUMMER’S EQUINOX
How to endure the pain of the quickening of the light? I saw the first buds of conkers on the horse chestnut trees in Regent’s Park today and my heart sank. A Day (I’ll Tell You How The Sun Rose) by Emily Dickinson I’ll tell you how the Sun rose – A Ribbon at a […]
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.