https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/opinion/patient-therapist-and-personal-boundaries.html
Please print this letter so that when my patients Google me they will see that their psychiatrist and psychoanalyst has been published in The New York Times.
Are fish happy dancing through the waves?
Darting through the pearls and crystal caves?
Singing as they wander with their mates
No anxious thoughts of money nor of fate.
Through the salty water on they glide
Happy with the temperature and tide.
I wish that I could swim beneath the sea
No painful joints nor mental agony.
I liked the teal green seas we saw at Hythe
Coming down the Saxon Cliffs we sighed.
The burning cornfields sent their red smoke high.
I wish we were together in the car
Driving down to Kent, it’s not so far
Saturday was shopping then a walk Epping,Ongar,Finchingfield by car
Reading book reviews and chewing stalks
Buttercups and meadows,Henry Moore
Driving back from Chelmsford, cornfields flamed
Smoke and fire and earth, the sun dismayed
Farmers working hard, a harvest, grain
The sky through mist a cobalt blue displayed
Standon with its fords and wandering cows
Little rivers,Essex, flowing down
The Stort joins with the Lea,a gurglimg sound
Water for the Thames and mossy ground
The earth feels like my body sacrificed
The artist’s canvas stretched ,a matricide
The fields in flames, the stubble set alight
The earth herself was burning in our sight
The ancient lands of Essex still grew grain
As hares ran into hedgerows fearing pain
The empty road, the smoke, the land on fire
The ashes left a newer crop would sire
The land to Epping vast and flat was bright
Yet covered in its smoke there was no light
Our little human world is but a skin
Destruction easy with a word or bomb
Dependent on the government, those liars
Weak as watered gruel, they must be fired
Caught inside the symbols of the Earth
From destruction comes a brave new birth
Autumn time in Essex where we drove
When farmers burned the stubble of the corn
The earth itself was fiery like young love
The smokey air rose like a cloud new born
The Kentish landlocked cliffs are wide and steep
The farmers grow their grain on land beneath
And there too we have seen the holy fire
The flames and smoke arrest me with desire
The earth and soil, the harvest we find there
Give me joy both full of wheat or bare
Why did burning stubble make me glow?
These images affect the heart’s deep core
Now fires are banned., they damage our pure air
And I did not like the murder of the hare
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/480750/
Note: the author says it’s better for us to believe in free will.
For centuries, philosophers and theologians have almost unanimously held that civilization as we know it depends on a widespread belief in free will—and that losing this belief could be calamitous. Our codes of ethics, for example, assume that we can freely choose between right and wrong. In the Christian tradition, this is known as “moral liberty”—the capacity to discern and pursue the good, instead of merely being compelled by appetites and desires.
How my heart sings 