Beginning...

 I remember how my mom used to make jam-jelly from raspberries. She would boil hundreds (I was a child, it sure looked like thousands!) of raspberries in big saucepans. Then, the red hot glistening goodness was poured into a white triangle shaped bag suspended under a chair put onto the table. A range of empty jars waiting patiently, and one by one, under the dripping bag they would go. It seemed to take forever, and so much raspberry was lost; all the seeds, bits of leaf.

Ok, writing feels like this!

So much information and different 'voices', or rather, there are different ways to express each point. I could use academic language, or dive directly into metaphor rich description! 

I think the warning is on the table in front of me. The book is Continuing Bonds. A colleague warned me, she hasn't been able to read it. But I didn't think it would defeat me, I like heavy books, I love heavy subjects. And as I began reading, I understood the problem. The book is written in academic language, and despite the subject being so human, something about academic language manages to eradicate life and vitality!

I don't know, seeds and leaves might be important?

Metaphorically, everything that happened - with a few exceptions - is in this blog. I spent yesterday looking for underlying structures; the structure of what happened, and the structure of how to best write it.

But one memory keeps coming to the surface. There is no date on this one. It exists out of time. It felt like a synchronicity of the worst sort.

I walked out of the therapy room and into the street. Traffic had stopped, people were standing still. A young man lay in the road, blood. Some people were helping him. One person looked like she wanted to talk to me I walked past her, my eyes fixed on my car further up the road. But I'd seen the young man. And my mind had said, probable fracture base of skull, because I used to work in casualty, and had trained at the Accident hospital. Because I'd made a rapid assessment of his face, his posture and imagined how the curb had impacted on his skull. 

And I was in playback.

I wanted to turn around and knock on the therapist's door. I couldn't. I needed to tell him how this agony of panic feels. I couldn't. I felt terrible for walking past the girl in shock, need in her eyes. But I was splintering inside - because this is what had happened to my son.

He was lucky though, a fractured eye socket, pelvis, shattered arm and collar bone. The curb hit his face, not the back of his head, he recovered.

And this memory, now. I don't know why? Something about how much I had trusted in therapy to be a safe place, and found it to be otherwise?

Definitely seeds and leaves.