A winter's day

Connections.

What blip is all about. I started on this site almost three years ago (after encouragement from tsuken) thinking that it was an entirely personal challenge to get a photo a day, with my own added curl of it being a photo taken on my daily run. Very quickly, I discovered other people in many places around the world, whose photos and words struck a chord with me (and me with them, perhaps); connection.

What my job is more often than not, and today very much so. Sorting out the normal connections people make in their thoughts and talk from the ones where something is altering the connections, sometimes in ways that leave them in severe distress. Almost 20 years ago when I had to write a dissertation on a topic of my own choice in professional ethics, I thought about, read about and then wrote about what it may mean to be a psychiatrist. Simplified to the nth degree, it seemed to me that our task is to assist those lost in the subrational parts of the psyche to restore the connections with their rational self.

"Loose connections" is a term we use to signify one form of what is called disorder of thought form. I have very loose connections at times. It makes me very good at cryptic crosswords. It also results in me seeing this photo, noting the trees without leaves and thinking it shows winter, whereupon the following lyrics entered my brain.

A winter's day
In a deep and dark December;

I am alone,
Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I've built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
It's laughter and it's loving I disdain.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

Don't talk of love,
But I've heard the words before;
It's sleeping in my memory.
I won't disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

And a rock feels no pain;
And an island never cries.

Paul Simon's poetry has at times been sublime. This has always appealed.

And then another connection.

Simon and Feiffer, both found a way to show to the world what some people have to struggle with; one in music and one with laughter. I use other ways. I hope they are as effective as I imagine these to have been.