Last night I had a dream. I was walking around the premises of the boarding school I went to when I was ten. I could see the dull linoleum floors and the fluorescent light hallways. There I would feel more alone than I have ever felt before.

Through a strange quirk of the system the school would retain students for an extra year before they went to high school. It was my first encounter with dysfunctional hierarchy. Only when I got older did I begin to understand that unless you show a young boy he is strong with guidance he keeps acting tough out of fear that he isn’t.

All of my work has been to get that young boy out of there. But now I’ve change my mine and me and the boy has decided not to run but to overcome it with wildness.

If you would like to understand your own darkness ask yourself how you have hurt people in the past. If you want to understand trauma look for where you feel helpless, frozen and isolated.

Out here nature is teaching me innocence and by extension I feel my capacity for intimacy returning.

In the end in this tree with solitude what I find is compassion for all the creatures of that place and gratitude for that time for the archetypal breaking out of which all restoration must come. Is that not where we all stand right now?

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