Blog
I have this free-roaming renaissance mind that fancies itself a sort of public intellectual with hourly practices at keeping the other three parts of my self – spirit, heart, and body – in balance with it. Like Fred Russell Wallace (he of the Other Darwin), I have a mind “too fractal with ideas to stay within the bounds of any one discipline and a humanistic spirit too concerned with the social side of life to remain confined purely to science” (from The Marginalian by Maria Popova – a kind of kindred spirit). That said, several things greatly influence my perspective on the world: my education in anthropology and archaeology; my experience with trauma – both personal and clinical; my practice as a writer; and my firm belief that the Earth is where all ultimate – what? Truth? Healing? Beauty? – lies. So this is my little platform to explore things.
Blog #4 – N Scott Momaday and the Return of the Muse
Tidbits from the PBS American Masters profile of Momaday, who died recently: "I believe firmly in blood memory." And "I write for the thing that is trying to be born." I have a novel about my great-aunt May and my grandmother's generation that roots itself on the old...
BLOG POST #3
So here is a picture of two women I don’t know very well, but I do know. The woman running the sled is someone I used to teach with twenty-odd years ago, and the woman in front of her was part of a book club I attended for a while in...
BLOG POST #2
Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, refers to the role of inscription [i.e., writing] in helping a person fundamentally separate from traumatic context: “The way inscription on a tombstone allows leaving the dead – and the trauma leading to the death – because...
BLOG POST #1
Today I riff on this: “The word ‘therapist’ has an ancient Greek root in the word ‘therapon’ (Davoine and Gaudilliere, 2004, p.153), the second-in-combat, the one who attends to the burial of the warrior.” – M. Gerard Fromm Traveling Through Time: How Trauma Plays out...