I’ve now been back at work for a month. My confidence and experience are accumulating, imperceptibly until I look back and take stock and realize how far I’ve come.  I’m now in conversation with eight people in the individual counselling section of my practicum, all of them very different from each other, and I increasingly feel that when I encounter something new, I have a repertoire of possible ways of working

Solstice has passed, and with it the last full moon of 2021. With COVID 19 cases in BC rising sharply, we went back and forth about travelling during the break, and finally decided to continue with our plans. We first took the ferry to Victoria, BC’s capital and second city in terms of size. Victoria’s never quite appealed to me, although I keep coming back and trying to like the

In November in Vancouver we started to learn a new vocabulary for types of weather. First there was a bomb cyclone, followed by a tornado that took down several of the old trees on UBC’s University Boulevard. A couple of weeks later, an atmospheric river flowed in from the Pacific and up over the Fraser Valley, the long, narrow stretch of farmland that extends east from Vancouver until it’s choked

I’m now two months into my practicum, with seven individual clients, and an upcoming Family of Origin group that I’ll be facilitating starting in less than a week. Vancouver’s mother of all Pacific Northwest Falls continues. On Barclay Street and the Main Mall at UBC the trees are now mostly bare of leaves. In previous years leaves would gather in piles, rustling as they were blown over and over by

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

The weather has been noticeably cooler in the last two weeks, with occasional rain. Summer hasn’t quite come to an end, but there are very clear hints of what is in store: the last peaches and first apples in the markets, a hint of red and brown in the leaves of trees that you try to tell yourself is a result of the heat stress of those burning days of

It’s the beginning of August now, and the long summer break I’ve had from classes is coming to an end. We took a week’s break in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, the territory of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth first nations. We stayed in Ucluelet, which still preserves the feeling of a working town, with its fish processing plant and trollers at the docks. Tofino, the

In the past few days we’ve had a heatwave, with temperatures going up to the mid thirties, hotter than it often is in Singapore. Our apartment, despite the lack of air conditioning and ceiling fan, is still relatively cool. At night we sleep with the window open, and with a huge black Honeywell floor fan rasping away. I sleep fairly well, but on the first night of the heatwave, I

I often begin my posts with a reflection on the natural world. Even after three years, the passing of the seasons is still new to me: it’s something that I associate with childhood and young adulthood, but which faded from my life in Florida and in the south of Taiwan and then vanished during those twenty-five years in Singapore. This cycle always seems to return as a ready metaphor for

We’ve reached the beginning of May. The weather’s warmer, and leaves have arrived on the trees: on the cherry trees first, green and brown ovals nestling in among pink blossoms just ready to fall, then on the horse chestnuts, tiny little tents of green that grow bigger, and unclench, like opening hands. The linden tree outside our balcony is always slower to turn green: as I write the leaves are unfolding, but are not much bigger than the size