Something’s shifted in the last month. The seasons, of course, as they always do in Vancouver. The days are growing even longer, and there are not quite so many rainy days. You start seeing a procession of flowers. First snowdrops under the trees, then crocuses. The first optimistic buds on the tips of bare branches. Ducks and geese begin to pair up, noisily. The park is like a marketplace, full

There’s a moment on any journey when you stop for a minute, and look back, and wonder why you chose this route. I’ve felt this at various times in my Counselling Psychology program, but never so acutely as now. In part, it’s perhaps the time of year we’ve reached. We had a week of sunshine, and then the winter rain has returned, seemingly heavier than ever. The days are growing

In the last month we’ve entered a quintessential Pacific North West winter. Rain that never seems to end, slate grey skies, gouts of leaf mould clogging the drains, and shallow ponds appearing throughout the West End where gardens used to be. On Nelson Street, outside our apartment, the soil in the flower beds has dissolved into a slurry that flows downhill across the sidewalk. The tiny gnomes and fairy doors

There’s a paradox in blogging about counselling. The heart of what I do must always remain hidden. I can write endlessly about those moments before I enter session. Those moments when I’m on UBC campus before I go into Clinic. The wind is cold on my face.  I walk to the top of the Rose Garden, under the tall flagpole with the Maple Leaf flag, look out over Burrard Inlet, and the

In the last month I’ve been seeing clients for the first time, in the supervised practicum that my UBC program calls Clinic. COVID restrictions mean that the counselling itself is via Zoom, with clients joining us from their own homes. Our small team of students and supervises assembles at UBC’s Neville Scarfe Building each Thursday morning. We mask up, enter through automatic doors controlled from the front desk, and run

We’re well into Fall now, with the last peaches and the first apples at the markets. In the West End and out on English Bay, rain, wind, and then sudden sunlight. Fallen leaves, beginning to drift into piles. I’m back in my UBC classes. In Clinic, the class in which we work with clients for the first time, we are still making preparations because of COVID-19 disruptions. We meet as

As I write this post, I’m now entering the second year of my program. Things are unimaginably different from when I started. My class in Career Counselling will be online. What is called Clinic at UBC, a practice-based course where we counsel real clients for the first time, will meet at UBC, but our clients will be online, too. COVID-19 rates in British Columbia are still ticking up, after staying

In my counselling course, I’m one of the oldest students. One or two of my classmates have similarly grey hair, and I always thought before COVID intervened that we should have coffee and find out who actually was the oldest. Most of the time age vanishes, and then suddenly, out of the blue, returns. I was chatting to a classmate via Zoom a week ago about her parents, and slowly

Every few months, on a whim, I Google myself. There are a few other Philip Holdens who join me on the first page of my search results: the writer of hunting books from New Zealand, the managerial expert, the spirit medium who has been unmasked as a charlatan. But I’m always also present: I am not so very difficult to find. There was a time when most of the first

I’m making a briefer blog post this month than usual, partly because I’m in the last two weeks of a very intensive summer class, and also because I’m aware that what I should write about – something about Vancouver and Singapore, systemic racism and racial privilege, and Singapore, brought up by the recent worldwide protests after George Floyd’s death, and the perceptible uptick in anti-Asian racism here — still remains