As the leaves begin to fall, my practicum gathers pace. One of the paradoxes as I move to applied work in counselling is that the more I experience, the less I can write about it. In my first meetings with the people I’ll be in conversation with for the next few months, we always review the limits of confidentiality: a substantial threat of harm to self or others, the abuse of vulnerable people, and the remote possibility of a court subpoena of counselling notes. Beyond, that, however, counselling demands absolute confidentiality over what happens in session, and this has always been a given for me in this blog. And there’s now an additional element: you, my reader, may actually be my client, curious about the person who is counselling you. You know that I am still learning, and making this transition in life, just as you are making your own transition. But I feel at the moment that I don’t want to explore this transition directly, but rather, I want to step back a little from my counselling journey , to look around and see what is happening in my life.

It’s sobering to realise that I am approaching the end of my fourth full year in Vancouver now. We first moved into our apartment in September 2018, and so this is the fourth Fall I’ve experienced in the West End, the leaves turning yellow and red a little more quickly this year, baked by the summer heatwave, and heavy rain alternating with bright sunshine. Stanley Park was closed for two weeks to cull a group of coyotes who had become a little too familiar with human beings. It’s just re-opened, and we can walk again under the tall cedars on the Tatlow Trail. On sunny days we can still hike on the North Shore, most recently on Hollyburn Mountain, up past the historic ski lodge, through blueberry bushes now burnt red and gold with fall, and then to the peak, and a panoramic view: Grouse Mountain, and far beyond it, Mount Baker in the US; the Fraser Valley, Vancouver, UBC on Point Grey, the Gulf Islands, and then Sunshine Coast with the Langdale ferry a small white scratch in the water. Look north and you can see the two granite peaks that dominate the North Shore: the Lions, or now, more commonly, the Sisters, framed by pine trees. As we came back, having started early on a Saturday, the trail thickened with hikers and their dogs. I heard different languages on the trail: French, German, Tagalog, Mandarin, and then other languages I did not recognise. At first you cannot make out anything more than high pitched sounds, like the drone of bees, fading and then returning again, stronger each time. Then, as the hikers approach you through the forest, still invisible, their conversation begins to fill out, take a continuous form, a pattern of sounds, pitches, and pauses. If I can’t recognize what’s being said, or even the language itself, it I still try to somehow cling onto its regularities, to guess what family of languages it might belong to, what its speakers, even, might look like. And then the hikers come into view, through the trees or across a meadow. You wait for them, let them pass, if you are on your way down. You hear a snippet of pure language, a fragment from an ongoing conversation. They thank you, and pass. The trickle of human beings on the trail becomes a procession and you’re happy that you got up to the peak early, before the crowds.

For me at the moment, life is a little like those encounters with hikers, speaking a language that I think I may have heard before, but cannot quite identify, let alone understand. I am learning a craft and art as a counsellor, and yet there isn’t that sudden moment of full comprehension and insight, of feeling suddenly being fully immersed in flow, that I’ve experienced in writing, and in teaching. There are moments, snippets, when things seem crystal clear, where everything seems to make sense. And then the complexity of human beings returns: my client goes back into the forest, only to emerge again. I’m still not sure whether greater presence is still to come, or whether counselling is somehow different from writing and teaching, and that this immersion is something that shouldn’t be actively sought. And finally, I wonder if age doesn’t make some sort of difference. On Hollyburn, we used a map that we’d picked up at the trailhead, although we scarcely needed to: the trail was well marked, and well trodden. Yet I found when I looked at the map it took me time to feel centred, to locate myself on it: not long, but  a little longer than it used to do. As if there was some cognitive change. I hesitated, just as I now hesitate a little more with many new things: opening up the QR code that shows I’m vaccinated on my smartphone when entering a restaurant, juggling it in one hand with my Care Card to confirm my ID. Nothing too distressing, just a slow, gentle slippage, a blurring of the world round the edges. And yet, on Hollyburn, in the sunshine, having climbed up to the peak a little more slowly than we used to, you can somehow forget the body and its aches, gaze at that panorama of mountains as you did thirty years ago.

As I ease into a full schedule, and the plans I am making for group work come to fruition, I’ll be looking ahead. I say to friends this feels like a dive, an immersion in another world that I’ve slowly become part of. The days are now shorter than the nights, and will grow shorter for three more months, and then everything will turn again, in an upward motion. I’m not quite sure where I will be then, when I surface. I’m now quite distant from academia, with only one project in the pipeline and the very tiny beginnings of another. There are many possible paths, but also the temptation to be still. In August and September I wrote a short story, and then a shorter non-fiction piece. I felt that something had changed: somehow I found a voice again, after four years in this new country. Although in an odd way they were mostly for me, I nonetheless  sent them out: in a few months news of them will come back to me, on the way up from my dive.