Got me a new computer…watch this space

The inconvenience of wings.

I’m awake in the thin hours again. I dreamt that I was flying through a furious storm with a choir of wounded Angels. So I lie here, thoughts drifting through my mind like falling feathers, some dark and threatening, others mere wisps, barely formed. The dark ones cast a pall over me- leaving tight, anxious […]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

And now? Now that the crushing tide of work has abated briefly, just long enough to take small sips of life again. Now friend, what do you find? Being still floods me with a gentle anxiety, a deep sense of being alone in a vast universe, yet intricately, inexplicably connected to others through gossamer threads […]

Striving towards Life

Today’s selection — from When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. In May 2013, at 36, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic lung cancer. At first, Paul prepared for death, then, he and his wife Lucy decided to have a child. ” Flush in the face of mortality, many decisions became compressed, urgent […]

Who Rescues the Rescuer?

Being a rescuer of others in emotional distress is a popular gig. As children, many of us learnt that fulfilling this role afforded us a modicum of immunity within our often volatile family ecosystems. Being the emotional support of a sick, depressed mother, or alcoholic personality disordered father may have brought a degree of proximity […]

A Loving Equation

It’s been a tough couple of months. Love and I have had some fierce skirmishes. I’ve retreated from the field, confused, battered. Now is time to examine my strategy, courageously, honestly. “Love is the hospital for our old wounds”- Hollis wrote. Love changes us, as it works on our painful personal histories (loss, abandonment, betrayal, […]

On feeling depressed…

We’re not talking about the extreme, most paralysing, regions of despair – where external medical help is vital. Our target is rather the times when we feel – as indicated by Henry David Thoreau’s phrase – mired in moods of ‘quiet desperation’: a large, grey hinterland in which beneath an outward surface of endurance, we […]