At my now-disaster moneypit cottage in S Ontario, I have a tree by the dock. Big, multi-trunked basswood. A storm survivor, what remains. It's a bird and animal haven. I have always had ideas for an image of that tree, multi-layered (in graphic and mind-sense), the winter nude and the summer dressed, with little windows like an Advent calendar, to open and see the animal life in a giant plant. Haven't worked out the details, I may never, but I can imagine it. It helps me breathe.

Yes, welcome to a new spring day.

That is a very nice image......I will happily carry that around in my head.
All of our children are talented in one way or another and I love to see the good work that they can do. It serves as my calm in this storm.
Wishing you peace and calm during your journey to the city. There and back again.

^{thought you might relate... mine from a few years ago:}

it's a long way home
slipping into the amnotic fluid of dream there.
floating past dark gardens suddenly lit
by retinal color bursts and fireworks

passing old growth forests of memory
with standing shadows looming like sequoias shimmering
in primal winds of pure unfiltered thought

it's a social network,
our collective unconscious -
something unowned

it's not understanding.
or knowing. or revelatory.
it's just the unfurling of self
into looseness,
into lust
into wavelengths of joy

in this dreaming.
in this sleeping.

for someone so young to be so connected . . . wow.

Here's something on cities, and therapy, that you might appreciate, from Theodore Roszak:

I've talked with some fledgling eco-psychologists who have developed very strong reservations about the possibility of treating problems of neurosis within an urban framework. That is, what if the city is itself shot through with a kind of madness? And I'm talking about something that's so apparent in the pace and tempo of our daily life, that I think it's almost taken for granted, that we are living a kind of crazy life. All we have to do is be caught on the freeway in a traffic jam, to recognize the madness of the way we've constructed the world around us. The amount of waste and the amount of stress and the amount of tension that we inflict upon ourselves. There's something crazy about that.

Now my problem is, and this is what I observe in my book, The Voice of the Earth, that when we say we are crazy, with what we're doing in this urban environment, this quite simply has no professional meaning. Because psychiatrists who are themselves products of an urban culture, and practice within an urban context, are often not prepared to call into question a context that they themselves are tied to. But the madness of cities is an important consideration in eco-psychology. And cities are becoming the only way of life left in the modern world. There's very little that's outside of the city. And if the city is a crazy context in which people live, then that would also be a crazy context in which to carry on psychotherapy.

The combination of your daughter's ethereal drawing and your musings have brought a great peace and tranquility to my mind at the beginning of this day. Thank you. Gerrit!

And I work at my own spiritual practice as presented by the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. The founder died in 1999, but that was just the meaty bits. He left lots of books but even better lots of video. He was fond of saying we need people if we are to grow as the essential skills are patience and loving others. As he would put it here in California "how can you forgive a redwood?".

But I do love your image. He uses very similar imagery.

Five years ago a massive pine tree had to be cut down in the middle of the parking lot where I live. Actually, I had to strongarm the landlord to get it cut down as it was a hazard - I paid to get an arborists report that explained the situation - and now they had been advised they were on the hook for any damage or injury. It was shedding pine cones and limbs with abandon, filled with beetles and sprouting orange fungal bodies from the dead limbs. So sad to see it go.

18 months ago I planted a redwood tree next to the stump. It is a concrete jungle here. The tree was home to squirrels, birds and all manner of life and visible far and wide. The new tree is about 12 feet tall now, and growing like a bastard. I get great pleasure as I watch it pop new growth.

I still need to take a chainsaw to the old stump and carve a bench out of it.

I am a very meat space kind of person. This is where all the juicy stuff happens.

A beautiful drawing of the Tree of Life and two separate references to the collective unconscious on the same (scrolling) page! That's a new record for me. Thank you, thank you. Maybe someday words like "archetype" and "noosphere" and "synchronicity" will appear! Or a discussion of the chakras with Trump (at the groin, of course), then Clinton at the seat of power, then Obama(?) at the heart, and Bernie at the throat speaking truth to millions. O, happy day!

Her drawing. Wow.