Nativity: A Poem for Christmas

 [Note: At St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church in Lodi, for the fourth Sunday of Advent, we were asked to create a nativity scene (also known as a creche).  My nativity scene came out as a poem, drawing on experiences we had 10 years ago when we made pilgrimage to the Holy Land.] 

Nativity, native, natal, nature, natural, nascence.

There is so much to this story we simply do not know.

We know at least that there was a birth.

 

1. Journey

 

Teen-aged girl and thoughtful craftsman,

Holy couple, travelling by foot

Through poky province of Roman Empire.

 

Raised in country honey-combed

With limestone grottos, cave dwellers

From small town in hill country of Galilee.

 

Walked ninety miles until they reached Bethlehem,

Fifteen thousand paces per day

(About distance from Lodi to Santa Cruz).

 

Bethlehem, that’s where they ended up:

Ancient, fertile place of bread,

Home of ancestors, back to David and beyond.

 

2 Manger

 

As a destination, Bethlehem has its disadvantages.

No vacancies: Instead, they are stuck with the animals,

Staying in cave behind house.

 

We don’t know how the labor went,

But when baby came they improvised,

Like new parents must do:

 

Manger, feeding trough for farm animals.

Clean enough: Off the damp cave floor

Away from rodents and rot.

 

3 Star

 

We don’t know how long they stayed there underground

Or where they were when the star found them,

I like to imagine: supernova out of Andromeda.

 

Luke says local sheep herders, working nightshift,

Keeping their flocks safe, saw it first, heard angelsong,

Came down from hills to learn what it announced.

 

Music of cosmos in their ears, astronomers,

Ancient and modern, still search for it.

They give gifts they have, still seek its meaning.

 

                             -Robert Elliott, Lodi, December 2025

Mary's Cave, Nazareth

 

Oświęcim

[New political poem, from my visit to Oświęcim/Auschwitz in June. The parallels between early-stage Nazi concentration camps in Poland and what is happening in American right now are eerie and disturbing. Oświęcim is pronounced something like Ósh-vye(n)-shim, with an initial long O and a nasal „e”; transliterated into German as Auschwitz. ]

 

1.  Entry

 

Shh – all those „sh” sounds –

You are on holy ground,

But transformed into something wholly evil.

 

The guide says, take off your headphones

(You’ve only just put them on),

So you can hear the litany of the names

Of those who died in this place.

 

You’re familiar with many of these:

Jewish names, recognizably, the family names

Of friends and scholars you’ve learned from:

Strauss, Novak, Fisher, Goldstein.

 

Auschwitz is not the true or original name

Of this place, but is instead the German version

Of the Polish original,

Seemingly impossible to pronounce,

But: Slow… it… down: Ósh- vye(n)’- shim,

Now say it again, twice:

Ósh-vye(n)’-shim, Oświęcim.

The town was named centuries ago,

Possibly meaning, “sanctified place”.

 

Eventually, the Polish army built a base here:

Solid military buildings, built to last.

When Poland fell it became

The first of three concentration camps:

Followed by Birkenau and Monowitz,

All part of the nightmare Auschwitz system.

 

 

2. Descent

 

This human hell was manufactured by people

Not so different from you or me;

No external, metaphysical demons need apply.

 

Overseen by watch towers

And double rows of barbed wire,

You learn it now:

How the Nazis graduated step by step

Through successive rings of hell:

 

It started in the usual way:

The construction of enmities,

The consolidation of unearned power.

 

The concentration and internment

Of the designated scapegoats,

Immigrants, dreamers, asylum seekers:

We ourselves in America have previously gone this far,

Putting our Japanese-American neighbors

In the internment camps of World War Two.

 

Ideology following practice,

Do you see how easy it was, step by step?

They decided rebels, Jews and Roma people

Were subhuman, not meriting empathy or humanity.

 

When they found this insufficient

They progressed to death by firing squad

Beginning with the Polish elite,

But this was too messy, too slow, too personal:

It traumatized the soldiers.

 

After that, the SS began to dream large,

Imagining powerful possibilities for killing.

They practiced murder, seeking perfection,

A final solution, a seamless system,

A human machine of brutal efficiency

And petty profit.

 

At this point, an insight came to them:

The insecticide already used to kill

Lice and like vermin, could also be used

To kill human vermin: Just Increase the dose!

 

So they put down the rebellious local Poles,

And moved on to Jews and Roma people.

The Slavs, seen as slightly less subhuman,

Were in the interim to be saved to do the work,

But eventually would be sterilized into extinction.

 

For hours you walk among and through

The silent buildings and imagine the prisoners,

Some crowded immediately into the single

Gas chamber, cleverly designed to use

Body heat to free the poison gas.

 

Others had their deaths delayed a month

Or two or six, worked and eventually

Starved to death or died from typhus

(One fifth died every month);

Who can say if they were lucky or unlucky?

 

You see the rooms of abandoned suitcases:

Twenty-five kilos each allowed;

To concentrate the plunder;

A heart-breaking collection of artificial limbs;

Dishes and children’s toys; a room of eye glasses.

 

But most ghastly is the vast store of women’s hair,

Seven tons, ready to be woven into textiles.

 

Finally, you learn that even with all

This diabolic cleverness, the process failed:

It took too long to incinerate the dead,

Too slow to implement the Final Solution.

 

And so: they decreed an even larger place

Of death: Auschwitz 2 aka Birkenau,

Meaning the place of white birches,

Although no trees, or flowers

Or even grass, existed there, only bare earth.

 

Instead of Oświęcim’s 20 barracks,

At Birkenau they built 174

And would have built more

If the war had gone on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. The Choice is Ours

 

On a cloudy summer’s afternoon, you see

The remaining gas chamber and crematorium.

Collapsing in on itself, in the process

Of becoming an ancient ruin, global warming

And climate change acting here as executioner.

 

Maybe you wish you could forget

What you’ve seen here this afternoon;

You might sleep better if you did.

 

You fear you might forget what you’ve seen

Here in your mind’s eye

Augmented by empathy and imagination.

You fear your own forgetfulness and denial

Could blind you to the possibility

Of this happening again,

Could blind you to the fact

That it is happening again,

In Gaza and the West Bank,

And in America to trans people

And undocumented workers

And other enemies and critics of the regime.

 

Maybe not yet with firing squad or gas chamber,

But already with starvation, deprivation, terror.

 

Remember: When the people got off the train

And were sorted, casually, with flick of a wrist,

All were sentenced to die:

Some immediately in the gas chambers,

But the rest to be killed just as dead by

Starvation, overwork, deprivation and terror.

The fact that some survived of spite of all that,

Was not part of the plan,

But just a mischance of history.

 

So: Whenever we (and I do mean we)

See ourselves locked in Darwinian competition

With others who differ from us,

Even in tiny ways, real or invented;

Whenever we throw out empathy and compassion

For those who differ from us and make us uncomfortable;

Whenever we dehumanize those we fear or distrust:

 

All these times, places, and ways put us

On the road from Oświęcim, a sanctified place

Of white birchtrees and rushing waters,

To Auschwitz, a bleak place, where human ashes

Are in the air we breathe, in the water we drink,

And beneath our feet in the ground where we stand.

 

 

But we don’t have to take those steps,

We don’t have to walk that road,

To human hell.

Are we wise enough to learn from what

Happened here in Auschwitz?

Is there a road back to Oświęcim,

To the white birches and the Vistula’s rushing waters,

To the sanctity of all human lives?

 

This is the choice in front of us.

But it starts with remembering what happened here.

Let us choose wisely.

 

                        -June-Aug 202

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

The Process of Becoming an EFT Therapist in Action: Brief Book Launch Talk

Summary: I wrote this brief talk for the launch event for the Greek translation of my book, Emotion-Focused Counselling in Action, co-authored with Les Greenberg and published by Sage in 2021. It was translated by Agathi Lakioti and Christina Michael and published this month in Athens by Topos Publications.  In this presentation I first describe how I became an EFT therapist before there was any such thing as EFT, including its appeal to me and my personal journey in the development of EFT while developing as a therapist at the same time. Then, I briefly turn to my recent interest in how people learn EFT and what I have learned about how we can do a better job helping people learn it. Throughout, I hope share my excitement about EFT and its importance as an key psychotherapy in the 21 century. For more information, go to: https://www.eft.cy/greek-translation-of-the-emotion-focused-counselling-in-action/

 

Ultimately, I became an EFT therapist because of my deep curiosity about other people’s experience, a curiosity stimulated by my father’s emotional guardedness, my loneliness and insecure attachment style, and my youthful desire to write fiction.  In addition, my Mother and Grandmother were avid followers of Jungian psychology, and so psychology was a key interest in my family’s home when I was growing up.  When I was 17, at the suggestion of my creative writing teacher, I read Karen Horney’s Our Inner Conflicts (1945) and had what can only be described as a conversion experience: I decided I wanted to be a psychotherapist, so I could understand and help people.

 

However, my road to EFT had many sources, as well as several twists and turns.  As an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the late 1960’s I was exposed to a wide range of humanistic approaches to psychology, studying with Bert Kaplan, Frank Barron, and most importantly, Ted Sarbin.  I read Norman O. Brown (who was also at Santa Cruz), Søren Kierkegaard, William James, Arthur Koestler, Joseph Campbell, and Jerome Frank.  I wrote a senior thesis on metaphors for death and rebirth in radical personal change processes.

 

My interest in humanistic-experiential approaches to psychotherapy was further fed during my graduate studies at UCLA, where I received training in Client-Centered therapy from Jerry Goodman, a student of Carl Rogers.  Goodman also encouraged my interest in therapy process research, and I began a career-long exploration of clients’ experiences during therapy sessions.  At the same time, during my graduate training I was also studied and practiced systemic and contemporary psychodynamic approaches.

 

Then, in 1977, I heard Laura Rice and Les Greenberg present their work on Evocative Unfolding and Two Chair work at a conference at a conference.  It was an electrifying experience.  I immediately began incorporating experiential tasks into my work as a therapist, later adding Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing method, along with Empty Chair work.  Thus, by the time I completed my Ph.D., I was an eclectic therapist who conceptualized clients in psychodynamic terms and preferred a combination of psychodynamic interpretation and experiential tasks.  During my early years at the University of Toledo, in the US state of Ohio, I also continued studying client in-session experiences and began developing qualitative research methods to represent these more sensitively.

 

In 1985, while on a sabbatical year in England, I was giving a conference workshop on qualitative therapy research when a psychodynamically-oriented audience member confronted me with a contradiction:  He noted that in therapy I interpreted my clients, but in my research I attempted to stay as close as possible to the client’s reported experience.  Why didn’t I interpret my client’s data psychodynamically?  The very thought scandalized me, and this intervention had the opposite effect to that intended by the questioner:  I realized that understanding the client’s internal experiences was a more fundamental value for me than the thrill of coming up with clever interpretations for my clients.  I felt that I would be effective as a therapist (and researcher) if I were more deeply and consistently grounded in a particular therapeutic tradition and theoretical approach that centered itself in the client’s immediate, lived experience.

 

Upon on my return from England in 1985, I began working with Laura Rice and Les Greenberg to develop the marker-guided integration of Client-Centered and Gestalt treatments that eventually became Emotion-Focused Therapy.  First, however, Laura Rice helped me cure myself of my habit of interpreting my clients: She pointed out that no matter how clever my interpretations were, the insights developed by my clients were never quite what I had hypothesized; instead, my clients’ eventual self-understandings always made more sense and fit their idiosyncratic experiences better than what I had originally offered.  Why not get out of my clients’ way and let them go ahead and develop their own self-understandings?

 

My previous work with the Unfolding and Two Chair work tasks had been self-taught; I now began a series of regular visits to Toronto to receive proper supervision and training on these kinds of work, as well as to develop the EFT model with Laura and Les.  As we developed it, I took it back to Toledo to apply in the Toledo Experiential Therapy of Depression Project, the first study of EFT with a clinically-distressed client population. Although I still had much to learn, for the first time in my practice as a therapist, I felt grounded and like myself. EFT’s mix of empathy, active work, and creative practice, fit me perfectly.  Les, Laura and I decided to write a book about the therapy model that was emerging, published in 1993 as Facilitating Emotional Change.  At first, I felt very much like a junior partner, sometimes mediating between Laura’s more conservative Client-Centered approach and Les’s more radical Gestalt approach.  They had the theory and the experience, but I was doing the depression study, had spent a long time doing research on client’s in-session experiences, and was good at organizing and clarifying ideas.  Thus, as we progressed, I began to make contributions to the structure of the therapy, developing the treatment principles, formulating the array of therapist responses, bringing in Focusing as a therapeutic task, and applying a standard six-step structure for all EFT tasks. The book was completed during a sabbatical year at York University in 1992-93, during which I worked intensively with Laura and Les, and went through their therapist training process. 

 

After that, I continued regular visits to Toronto to learn and share new developments.  Every time I went, I learned something new.  Having finished the depression study, my students and I developed and did research on a EFT for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Problems that my therapists had learning EFT for that study led me to examine the training process to see what worked and how it could be improved.  These learnings were incorporated into my book Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy.

 

In 2006, I moved to the Scotland, where I taught person-centered counselling/psychotherapy for more than 15 years. Working in this setting helped me deepen my interest in empathy and relational processes. With colleagues, I developed an adaptation of EFT for working with social anxiety, a complex client presentation that helped me further develop my EFT skills and thinking.

 

Up to this point, almost all my work as a trainer had been in the context of training small numbers of graduate students in clinical psychology. However, once relocated in Scotland, I discovered that there was a great deal of interest in EFT on the part of practicing person-centered counsellor/psychotherapists. At that point I began offering regular EFT training workshops, building in part of the training curricula that Les Greenberg had been developing. In addition, the strongly intellectual, didactic training methods favored by clinical psychologists were not a good fit for UK-based counsellors and counselling psychologists, who learned better using more experiential methods. Theory and didactic presentation were still important but needed to be slimmed down, focused and very clear. Fortunately, I enjoy a good challenge, and I had fun developing and constantly adapting training materials, including lectures and exercises.

 

One thing that has clearly emerged from my work as an EFT trainer is a sense of what is required of folks in order to learn EFT.  In the book I call this the “pre-flight checklist”; here is a very abbreviated, bullet-point version of it:

(1) Understand and draw on EFC emotion theory.

(2) Adopt a person-centred but process-guiding relational stance.

(3) Develop an active, exploratory way of responding to clients, characterized by friendly curiosity.

(4) Learn to pick up on client markers in order to offer clients opportunities for productive therapeutic work.

(5) Realise that the therapy is not about you; instead, focus on your clients’ personal agency.

(6) Build up your personal resilience and courage for touching into and staying with your own and others’ intense and painful emotions.

 

Today, I continue to learn from my clients (who have always been my main teachers of therapy), and from my students and supervisees.  The things I enjoy most about EFT are the opportunities it provides for getting inside another human being’s experience; the combination of relational and task-focused elements; and the excitement of helping to develop something new.  The difficulties I still occasionally run into as a EFT therapist are feeling that it’s up to me to make something happen; getting caught up in clients’ hopelessness; dealing with clients who have great difficulty accessing their internal experience; and my tendency to at first make things too complicated. These things constantly drive me to try to make EFT clearer and easier to understand while still honoring the complexity and richness of people’s experiences. I also believe that learning and practicing EFT is and should be exciting and fun.

 

I have tried to put all the things into this book, and to communicate them to readers.  I hope that you will experience this excitement and fun in reading it.

 

 

 

Fifty Years: An Anniversary Poem

 Entry for 19 August 2023:

(Diane & Robert fiftieth wedding anniversary, with notes for our grandkids)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. A Story of Us and How We Got Together

 

You

Me:

50 years

Watergate to Ukraine

Green youth to gray age

 

You

Me:

Grand Forks

Palo Alto

 

Both born in the very midst of a turbulent century

In the shadow of two great and horrid wars

Grandchildren of the Great Depression.

 

First-born to bright, educated, caring

But quite young parents

Themselves youngest, or almost youngest, children,

Dads still studying, arcane lore.

Moms doing odd bits of work and raising us

Your mom as short as my mom was tall

All of us learning as we went.

 

You

Me:

Pleasanton

Lodi

 

Raised in small, flat California towns

In the process of becoming suburbs

In the buttoned-down 1950’s.

 

Children of privilege

That we did not even recognize at the time:

WEIRD WASPs.

(Note: By WASPs we don’t mean the stinging insects

but White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant;

and WEIRD stands for Western, Educated,

Industrialized, Rich, Democratic.)

 

You

Me:

Santa Cruz

Los Angeles

 

Wearing the privilege of oldest children,

Used to responsibility for others

But ambivalent about our power,

Proud but burdened.

 

Glad to escape to university

As soon as we could

We happily exchanged

The small uptight inland places

For a counter-cultural beach town

That we were almost too square for.

 

Looking back, it’s striking

We could have shared so much:

But it’s no surprise we immediately

During orientation week

Recognized each other as fellow refugees.

 

And then remained friends for years

As we grew, experimented,

had other crushes and connections,

Began to learn who we were,

And eventually, in a time of transition,

found our way back to each other.

 

And thence to the big city and marriage

Full of the usual sorts of contradictions

Shy extraverts

Traditionally heterosexual

But androgenous, tolerant and curious

Sheltered from major loss and trauma

But acquainted with sorrow and failure.

 

Optimistic pessimists (or is it the other way round?)

Blending acceptance and pickiness,

Stubbornness and flexibility.

We like a good laugh but do not suffer fools gladly;

We do not insist on our way

But do not like at all to be pushed around.

 

We did not imagine that our shared background

And rampant contradictions would turn out to be

Just what we needed for a fifty-year journey together.

2. Fifty Years Passes

 Like the time-lapse photos

our granddaughter Mizuki took

Of her flight here from Seattle,

Or a magical version

of our living room gliding love seat

which our grandson Yuki immediately takes to

Rocking it vigorously as he tries

to reach the land of his imagination,

We now play back the past fifty years

Since our wedding:

They flash by in our minds,

Rocking us repeatedly back

To places and people

Both remembered and (until now) forgotten.

 

Days, years; beginnings, endings;

A rhythm of repetition

And each moment unique:

Toledo, Sheffield,

Toledo, Leuven,

Toledo, Toronto,

Toledo, Melbourne,

Toledo, (sons to Cleveland),

Glasgow.

Pleasanton.

 

Over these many years,

The elder generations pass:

The last remaining grandparents, then parents,

Aunts, uncles, teachers,

Friends timely and untimely lost,

Until we are the elders,

And our passing, still unknown

Is nevertheless not that far away.

 

In the meantime, we’ve been looking

Through old photos of us

Excavating the layers of the years:

We wonder at our younger selves,

When was this?

Who were those people?

Were they really us?

 

Yet we know the answer:

Yes, they are all still in there

Mizuki’s time lapse

Of flickering faces and places

This crowd of us

Wildly varying hairstyles

Strange, but not strangers to us,

In all these different places

Exotic and mundane

With all these different people

Who we have loved

And who have loved us.

            *          *          *

Yuki’s commandeered our rocking sofa;

It’s now a time machine

Swinging us creakily through the years.

“Don’t swing too hard!”

We tell him repeatedly

For we fear It will break us

And our old-but-young-at-hearts hearts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 (Link to Mizuki's airplane timelapse movie)

 

3. The Secret of a Long Marriage

 

It appears that being married for 50 years or more

Is unusual enough these days

That people want to know what our secret is.

 

The fact is, we don’t know

And fear to look too closely

As if that might jinx the whole thing

Like the poor centipede trying to figure

How it walks and falling

Into a ditch instead.

 

Nevertheless, friends have pressed us

With questions and pet theories:

One said the secret was “Inertia”;

Another, “Failure of Imagination.”

To these I’m inclined to add

“Insecure Attachment” and “Stubbornness”.

 

But I think all of these miss the point:

We know that close relationships

Are inherently unstable

And difficult to maintain.

 

Stability is either an illusion,

A skewed family system (psychobabble

for one person having too much power),

Or the result of hard work.

 

As in the universe itself

Entropy is the law.

 

We learned this in the tenth year of our marriage

When I had survived my tenure vote

(Following years of severe workaholism),

When our first child was two

(Sorry, kids and grandkids,

But having kids

Is a huge stressor for couples),

Only to face the abyss between us.

 

A year of couples therapy helped us through this

And from that experience

We took two essential things:

One: A microwave oven, which lasted 34 years

(we gave up on it, before it gave up on us);

Two: Not taking ourselves too seriously,

Which is timeless.

 

The fact is, we are both very aware of the other’s

annoying habits, limitations and emotional allergies,

Which we constantly try to correct

Even though we know perfectly well

that this is impossible

And would make the other

A perfect person,

who we wouldn’t even recognize

… And might even feel inferior to.

 

And we know all too well

that even though other people

Might see us as caring,

thoughtful, good-hearted and so on,

We can each at times

“In our present imperfection”

act like jerks toward the other,

Especially when stressed, ill or emotionally injured.

 

And so from time to time

One or the other of us

Realizes that there’s a problem:

Something’s gotten out of balance between us,

One of us has begun to disengage.

 

This means:

There is an unattended-to injury

That must be addressed,

Painful truths spoken,

New understandings to surprise us,

New accommodations to be forged.

 

The result:

We muddle through,

For better or for worse

Helped by friends and family

Deeply grateful for the time we’ve had together,

Knowing it to be completely mundane

And at the same time completely amazing,

Treasuring the times we’ve had with each other

And the times that remain to us

Knowing that it’s all temporary

And therefore infinitely precious.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. Coda

 

(Note: A Coda is a part

Near the end of something

Where you review

The main points of the whole thing,

so you can finish.)

 

We are two people with many similarities,

And just as many inner contradictions

As most people.

 

We found each other when we were still pretty young,

Thought it would cool to get married,

Then found out how hard it is

To make a life together.

 

If we wanted to stay together

(Which we did),

We had to figure out

How to make our little family

Work over a long time.

 

But we didn’t do this on our own,

Because we had a lot of support

From the people who loved and surrounded us

And who we loved and still love.

 

Eventually, we reached a point where

There is more happiness than pain,

And many shared moments

Of joy and connection,

Built on all

we’ve been given by life.

 

And we know that these moments,

Won by hard work and stubbornness,

These moments will always be

And will always have been.

 

For this we thank you,

Our family, our friends, our community.

 

                                    -Robert Elliott, 18/19 August 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Drawing by Mizuki Elliott, (c) 2023) 

 

 (Link to 50-year slideshow of Diane & Robert, created by Brendan Elliott)

 

(Link to Robert reading this poem) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turning 70: Cum Gratis

                        1

Numbers are nice but words are wonderful

Filling us with wonder ‘til we overflow

As kids, my brother Willy and I

Spent many Lodi summer nights

Sleeping outside in our backyard

Among the stars and almond trees. 

Those were the days before light pollution

Washed out the night sky.

Laying there we looked up into the field of stars

So bright and deep, sometimes it felt

As if we were falling into them.

Now as then, my head was filled

With science fiction dreams:

I wanted to go there, out to the stars.

The closest star, I knew, was Proxima Centauri:

Red dwarf star, a bit more than 4 light years away,

About 40 trillion kilometres.

By now I’ve taken seventy trips

On planet Terra around our local star, 

At more than 100,000 kilometres per hour.

If you do the math (which I did)

That’s almost 66 billion kilometres, a lot.

But still only about a 600th of the distance

to Proxima Centauri.

To get there at this rate, I must accept,

Would take 600 of these lifetimes,

more than 40,000 years,

The amount of time since people first painted caves.

And if I got there, what I’d find, I now know,

Would be one possibly habitable planet,

Hugging its star, tidally locked and shocked

By random stellar flares. 

I now wonder:

Why would I want to go there?

    2

I’ve always felt lucky to have been born

in such a round numbered year as 1950.

But even so, when I was a kid,

in the dangerous ‘50’s and ‘60’s

I certainly didn’t think I’d make it to the age of 70:

If nuclear Armageddon didn’t get us first,

then pollution would. 

Of course, each of these might still get us.

But here we are:

We have somehow muddled through.

In my hypervigilance I’ve consistently

Pessimised our future, sold us short;

I’ve underestimated us, me and my fellow humans:

Our folly is not complete

But balanced at times by wisdom;

So far, it’s not been great,

But it has been enough to keep us going.

I see now, after years of studying anxiety

In myself and my clients:

My vision of darkness and doom

has always been a search for light

                        3

So help me celebrate 70 years, and

The good we’ve done together,

The people we’ve helped:

The children, students, clients, patients.

The light we’ve shined in the darkness,

Dispelling misery, hatred, despair

(And not just ours).

Our drifting apart, our reconnecting,

The times of crisis, injury and recovery,

The connections made,

The love we’ve found, and made, and gave,

The happiness, the good-natured jokes,

The stories told and heard, and told again.

The passing from one generation to the next:

What our parents, and grandparents, gave us,

What we in turn have given

To our children and grandchildren.

And celebrate the space we’ve been given

to be ourselves.

I know we could do better

But we are striving to give this space

To those who follow us.

So let us celebrate these things and more.

Friends, family, universe: Thank you.