"Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new." Ursula Le Guin
Last September I went back to Cambridge for a reunion ... the first time I'd ever been back to school or university for such a thing. It was an experiment in "emotional archaeology" and I wrote a series of blog posts about it. At one stage I experimented with a dialogue between the 22 year old and the current 62 year old versions of me. In the post "Going back for a university reunion: self-esteem, hallucinogens, wonder & the transpersonal", I wrote "I changed subject too from philosophy to medicine (in 1970).
In the words of Mary Oliver's beautiful poem "The summer day":
Earlier this year I used Google Analytics to identify the most read pages on this website and I wrote the post "Update on website traffic: the ten most popular blog posts". I then wondered - "What are my own personal favourites?" and I quickly realised that the posts that I've written that have had the most impact on me and my practice as a therapist are nearly always made up of sequences of blog posts rather than just individual items. I said that glancing back over the last year or so, themes that stood out included mindfulness, therapist feedback, self-control, conflict, embodied cognition and positive psychology. Going further back still there are the posts about interpersonal groupwork, relationships, therapeutic writing, walking in nature, compassion, exercise, healthy lifestyle, attachment and goal setting.
Yesterday, Catero and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary with a ceilidh. This is Auld Lang Syne at the end of the party. I'm the loudmouth (on one glass of wine), with dear Catero on my left (to the right in the picture). Laura, precious stepdaughter, is three places to my left and Kieran, precious son, only half shown four places to my right. Celebration and gratitude ... and very relevant to this month's blog post themes of relationships and social networks.
