What are you doing here?
      There are a couple of dozen of you, I can tell that from the analytics on my website. I don’t know who most of you are, but every month this page gets that many hits.
       Anyway, I know what I’m doing here. I’m trying to figure things out. Writing helps me do that.
      Here in this blog I connect things, make sense of this time in my life and what happened in the forty years leading up to it. I put hours into each blog. I really want it to flow easily for you so the reading doesn’t get in the way of the feeling. But most of all I want you to make some sense from it too, have you to reflect on things you’ve experienced.
      Most of my time I write in stories. I watch with my mind’s eye to see what happens to my characters. I listen with my mind’s ear to hear what they have to say. However, it’s only when I step back and take a second look that I realize what those stories are really about. So, for this month’s blog, I’m going to write about that.
      Consider this scenario. A very conservative, religious older couple adopts a parrot who has been taught to swear in both official languages by the sailors down at the marina. It’s a great place to start a short story. But that’s not all the story is about. It is also about grace and about the hardest of hearts being able to soften and grow. It’s a very funny story, folk who’ve read it tell me they chuckled all the way through. Even I can’t read it aloud without breaking into laughter. (I’ll send it to you if you send me an email asking for it… more about that at the end of the blog).
      Or another. An old piano tuner contends with the impact that the rooms the pianos reside in and the people who play them has on the wellness of the piano. Harshness in conversations taking place in the piano’s presence deposits bitterness on the strings. But the real story is about healing and finding solace in the most unlikely of relationships.
      And again, yet another story premise. A boy raised with the notion that he can be anything he wants to be in life finds that life is not about achievement and success but is about something entirely different. He learns this from, of all things, a dog.
      Reflecting on these short stories I identify themes of companionship, healing, breaking the oppression of conventionality, finding peace in connecting to well-meaning others. These themes sneak their way in beneath the turns of plot and the depictions of character. They are visitors from my subconscious, not deliberately included but naturally cropping up in the lives of my characters.
      In the forty years of my work as a psychotherapist it was those very things that brought wellness and eased suffering for my clients. 
      I’m more explicit about these themes in my blogs. Perhaps that’s why the couple of dozen of you keep coming back. I want my writing, blogs and fiction, to offer a respite from the noxious elements of the cultural context around us. Ours is a culture far too saturated with entitlement, greed, and intolerance.
      Here in Canada, much of our cultural context is imported from the behemoth of our southern neighbour: American news commentary floods us with a tsunami of outrage; dramatic entertainment depicts murderous or abusive acts; slickly produced horror, lust, and greed are served up to distract us from the mundane of our lives; humour too often demeans another person; competition is glorified over creating or cooperating. All this media is propelled by the engine of capitalism. Advertisements necessitate possessions and convince us that somehow we all have the right to our consumptions. It’s no wonder that on the American networks we also see so many advertisements for mental health drugs.
      This daily media diet consumes us. It can stop us seeing what can break through in tiny little moments, things like grace and gratitude and generosity of both spirit and resources, that which can humanize human nature.
      So, that’s what I write about.
      I’ve just finished a re-write of a major novel. It’s about emotional healing, healing taking place in spite of adverse circumstances, healing brought into being by a loving community around the central character. It’s the novel that is closest to my heart because of courage and a relentless drive toward wellness that comes from within for the main character.
      Did I mention it’s the novel closest to my heart? Well, I was wrong. It’s almost the closest. There is another. This other novel, completed and currently being edited, is a collection of short stories. Each of the stories revolves around a single character: some from his childhood, others depicting his befuddled senior years. Some of them are pretty funny. All of them are poignant. This novel is my spiritual memoir set in the lives of fictional characters doing totally fictional things. But it is about me, especially the religious aspect of my childhood. And it is about human kindness and caring and being salvaged and being loved.
      There’s no sensationalism in these novels and short stories. There is no outrage … well, maybe just a little in the form of irony. I’m sure that some of these stories will make you cry (they still do for me) and some will make you laugh out loud and most will make you think your way deeper into the human condition as wonderful as it can be.
      And maybe that is what you hope for in my monthly blog, in this smooth five minute read that plays away at the edge of your mind and wiggles into the softness of your heart.
      And just maybe you might have a hankering to read one of those short stories too (or a pre-publication version of the novels). If so, send me an email at wilton@twiltondale.ca.