Return to Los Angeles & Pasadena :: Winter Garden Healing Arts
In this newsletter:
Preamble
New Pasadena and Silverlake locations
Words by René Char
I'm sending you all spring greetings from my new home in Pasadena. Many of you I've not seen since I relocated to Oakland two years ago. The winds that carried me up there have brought me back again, and I hope to stay for a long time. It feels like a strange time to be returning, especially to Pasadena. My partner and I signed a lease here mere hours before the Eaton Fire sparked a few miles away in Altadena—the Santa Ana winds already whipping up at fearsome speeds I've never seen in Los Angeles. Like everyone, I watched the recent fires with horror. So many homes lost and lives thrown into uncertainty, the toxic air and ash that have no doubt affected and will continue to affect literally everyone in Los Angeles county, are almost too much to bear. My heart goes out to everyone displaced by these tragedies, and to everyone who couldn't leave and has had to endure.
Meanwhile, the new presidency has brought even more terror and uncertainty, especially for trans, immigrant, and racialized communities. We need each other more than ever. I hope you all are reaching out to your neighbors and loved ones, building relationships of trust and solidarity, and standing up for each other any way you can.
My life for the past couple months has been a maelstrom of moving-related chaos, made worse by a pernicious tendonitis that has only recently started to subside. Only in the last couple weeks have I felt able to breathe again, to enjoy sleep or an unscheduled day. Amid all the uncertainty, it feels really good to have a stable home again, and to reconnect with old friends. I hope to reconnect with you, too!
New Pasadena and Silverlake locations
I have the good fortune of finding space in two beautiful buildings, in two beloved parts of town, and am now ready to accept appointments. Pasadena is now my main location, but I will be sharing space on a more limited basis with an old colleague in the heart of Silverlake, not far from my previous office. These spaces are both quite special, and I hope you will come visit. The Silverlake engagement is likely transitional, so please come in while I have access to this wonderful space, if that location is convenient for you.
Along with the change in location, my area of service for home visits is necessarily shifting Northeast. I'm sorry to say that this makes travel to the Westside somewhat prohibitive, but I am always willing to provide a quote if you would like to arrange a visit outside my normal range. Please check my new area of service map and pricing. You may notice a number of other minor tweaks to my site. If anything looks amiss, please let me know!
I'm sure many of you have found a supportive routine with new practitioners, and if that's so, I'm happy for you! Feel free to reach out just to say hello. I am always in search of other therapists to connect with, and any connections or recommendations are always welcome. As always, your referrals are also incredibly helpful. Feel free to forward this newsletter and encourage your friends and family to subscribe.
I took this photo a couple months ago outside Groveland, CA, at the western edge of Yosemite National Park. The area is badly scarred by the 2013 Rim Fire, but new life is abundant amid the burnt remains. This photo has me holding a bit of wood char I picked up on one of my walks. Cycles of dormancy and renewal are central to how I think about my practice, and why I named it Winter Garden Healing Arts.
Words by René Char
I return perpetually to the work of René Char, surrealist poet and a guerrilla leader of the French resistance under Nazi occupation. His writing is thorny, oblique, lucid, deceptively concise. It is unlike any other. The selections below are from Hypnos, Char's furtive, fragmented, and at times lightly fictionalized diary of life in the underground. These are from the 2014 Mark Hutchinson translation.
187.
Action, which has meaning for the living, only has value for the dead, is only complete in the minds of those who inherit and question it.
193.
So unreceptive has our sleep become that even the briefest of dreams cannot come galloping through to refresh it. The prospect of dying is submerged beneath an inundation of the absolute so all-engulfing that the mere thought of it is enough to lose any desire for the life we cry out for and implore. Once again, we must love one another well, must breathe more deeply than the executioner's lungs.
218.
In your conscious body, the reality of the imagination is a few minutes fast. This gap, which can never be bridged, forms a gulf that is alien to the acts of this world. It's never a straightforward darkness, however redolent of warm summer nights, the religious afterlife, incorruptible childhood.
219.
All of a sudden, you remember you have a face. The features which shape that face weren't always racked with grief. Drawn to its varied landscape, creatures gifted with kindness would appear. Nor was it only castaways who succumbed, exhausted, to its spell. The loneliness of lovers could breathe freely there. Look. Your mirror has turned into a fire. Little by little, you remember your age (which had been struck from the calendar), that surplus of existence which, by working at it, you will turn into a bridge. Step back inside the mirror. Arid it may be but at least its fruitfulness has not run dry.
35.
You will be part of the fruit's savour.
[I place this one last because I find it to be the most tender and reassuring. I feel more held by this line than by anything else I've read recently. The idea that one might exist in pure relationality, in fleeting experience that is profoundly personal, but inherently exceeds individual subjectivity. The idea that relation and identification transcend not only species but taxonomy itself. It's also a queer, atheist sort of destiny, and it's quite humble. The ambiguity of subject and object is delightfully unresolved: Will I savour the fruit, or the fruit me—or both?
The obvious answer is Yes.]
With care,
Wilson