Coming Salons and Events
- Balthazar –Volume II of the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell One night Salon Intensive 18.01.15
- Ulysses 20 week study of James Joyce’s masterpiece starts 20th January Tuesday afternoons one space remaining
- Ulysses 20 week study of James Joyce’s masterpiece starts 20th January Wednesday evenings one space remaining
- Ulysses Sailing into the Mind with the British Psychoanalytic Association 23rd January 7-9:30
- Wide Sargasso Sea One meeting Salon Intensive January 29th
- The Guermantes Way Volume III of Proust’s masterpiece; weekly meetings Wednesday afternoons starting first week of February
- The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot in collaboration with the Society of Analytical Psychology; three meetings starting 9th of March
It’s January..the rain comes and there is the weight of starting the year afresh when my primal self is suggesting naps–moving deep inside and just hunkering down for a bit while the horrors of the greater world explode in through the news…but then a Salon conversation kicks in and we are exploring the nature of perception, the reflective nature of love, the perception of the Other, the realm of the murky interior. These discussions and readings generate hope and possibility: the craft of these great and diverse voices colours daily life and helps me to absorb the traumas of living. I hope this works for you–and I hope to see you in the pages…
A poem for New Years and birthdays:
New Year’s Day
by Billy Collins
Everyone has two birthdays
according to the English essayist Charles Lamb,
the day you were born and New Year’s Day—
a droll observation to mull over
as I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen
that is being transformed by the morning light
into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.
“No one ever regarded the First of January
with indifference,” writes Lamb,
for unlike Groundhog Day or the feast of the Annunciation,
New Year’s marks nothing but the pure passage of time,
I realized, as I lowered a tin diving bell
of tea leaves into a little ocean of roiling water.
I like to regard my own birthday
as the joyous anniversary of my existence,
probably because I was, and remain
to this day in late December, an only child.
And as an only child—
a tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child
in a bright, colorful room—
I would welcome an extra birthday,
one more opportunity to stop what we are doing
for a moment and celebrate my presence here on earth.
And would it not also be a small consolation
to us all for having to face a death-day, too,
an X drawn through a number
in a square on some kitchen calendar of the future,
the day when each of us is thrown off the train of time
by a burly, heartless conductor
as it roars through the months and years,
party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes
billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.
