the limping shrink

Seven hundred years ago Hafez of Shiraz wrote a poem that someone reminded me of yesterday.  By the way, please don’t read ‘God’ and flick to the next page. God/divine here is referring to something that is not the God of anyone's childhood religion. It’s a poem, so a more flexible use of the word is allowed, right?  A Divine Invitation You have been invited to meet The Friend. No one can resist a Divine Invitation. That narrows down all our choices to just two: We can come to God dressed for dancing Or be carried on a stretcher to God’s ward. So later, when someone sent me this: ‘ A few of us will be mu-ing our way past midnight at the dojo to celebrate David’s 70th.   You are welcome to join us from 10 ’,   I found myself ready for dancing.   Now you may not know what mu-ing is, but then, neither did I. You may not go out in the evening much, especially in the middle of winter, but then, neither do I. You may never stay out after ten thirty, but then neither d...

  Going to put the   bins out two hours after dark, I grab the nearest scarf to warm my neck.   I made it for my mother, imitating autumn leaves. I love the way the aliveness of them shrinks inside leaving the unnecessary casing empty and dry. My mother has also condensed inside, her liveliness shrunk to precious glimpses. Soon her wonderfully wrinkled case   will fall from the family tree, as leaves all   must. People talk about winter as the time when everything dies back. But I went into the garden this morning, and with the soft heaviness of water in the air I was drawn to the camellia bush. The white petal balls shone like Christmas lights in the early morning. Under my shoes the grass-green grass seeped dew into my footprints. I love camellia flowers for the damp tissue paper texture of their petals. There are even the transparent lines where they have folded, as if they really are made of tissue paper. They are so delicate it’s a miracle they don’t tear. ...

Appropriately enough, the year turns on the darkest day, the 21st of December. So the hope and resolution of January 1st have been ten days in the cooking.   This year the darkest day was on a Wednesday, my usual day to review the progress, or otherwise, of my writing, and to write a ‘could do’ list for the week ahead. So that day I sat quietly with A and the children in the Red Room, warmed by the smokeless fuel fire and the added warmth of belonging that comes from us being together, to review the whole year and make plans for the next. And my diary turned out to be a list of the things that I meant to do but forgot. And the other things that I didn't plan but found myself doing over and over and over. Life is indeed what happens when you’re planning other things. … Happy I woke from a dream that I was talking to a guy I used to know in Florence. It being a dream he was also the blond man with a smile who invited me to his twenty-first birthday party in Hertfordshire after only k...

Current Ideas about Mental Disorders At the moment there are three prongs to our thinking about mental disorders. Social, psychological and medical.  In social model terms we see the predisposing, triggering or maintaining factors of a particular person's mental state as being a function of a person's position in and relationship to society as a whole. Treatments are therefore aimed at improving the social position and opportunities for the person to engage in a more self-reinforcing way with their social milieu, for example by ensuring they have somewhere safe to live, or the benefits they are entitled to. Or in fact changing their social milieu to an easier one for them to negotiate, for example by moving them into residential care. In medical model terms we generally think about mental syndromes as analogous to physical syndromes as being symptomatic expressions of a mis-functioning of the brain and therefore the way we go about treating them is to either attempt to rebalanc...

Original Sin According to my Catholic upbringing, every child is born with original sin that has to be forgiven. That we are not pure and innocent at birth, we are tainted with the sin of Adam. That is why we must be baptised as soon as possible before birth, so that if we die as babies we can go to heaven.  The sin of Adam was of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The infamous apple that cast him and all his descendents out of a heaven of peace and plenty. I have always found this difficult. Both for the obvious reason that babies cannot be anything but innocent. And the more abstract one that if we are doomed from the start then it sets off a whole punishing and self-punishing cycle of judgement and guilt that can never be satisfied and which does nothing to make us a better or happier species .  It is easy to see that clashes of world views and behavioural expectation are the cause of so much of the conflict around and within us. And it is also easy to ...