Here I am...

Sitting at my keyboard, trying to ignore the sound of the lawnmower next door, thinking about what to write for the first blog on this website of mine. Never having written a blog post before I googled the topic to see what clues and ideas I might pick up first. After looking at a lot of buzzwords and impossibly high expectations about what blogs are meant to achieve (apparently they have to be professional yet casual, full of information but not too much information so it looks like you’re giving it away for free…) I decided there were two options in front of me: Pay someone to write blogs for me, or to just jump right in and bash out on the keyboard whatever comes to mind.

I chose the cheaper option.

Rather than write about counselling, or psychology, or therapeutic models, I’ll begin with water. I was born in a mining town where water was precious, scarce and not to be wasted. Before I was old enough to understand this, my family moved to Adelaide where the Sun would set each day over the bluest of blue ocean vistas, often in a flaring burst of yellow and orange, decorated with pink clouds and echoing cries of seagulls. Water became a part of my life, just as it’s a part of all our lives. Maybe we could go as far to say that water connects us, with at least half of our bodies made up of water and if we were to look for what connects us instead of dividing us, water would make a good starting point.

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Waves were a big part of my early life in Adelaide, as we lived close enough to the sea for me to hear the sound of the waves on the shore from my bed on warm Summer nights with the bedroom window open. On a still night the water sounded so close and in a strange way the silence in between the waves seemed louder and carried more weight than the waves themselves. So I grew up with a lot of water making its presence known to me, often in a calming, soothing way. If water had a language, I wonder what those waves would have been saying to that young child, born in the outback of sand and stone, then shifted to the water and waves of the coast. What would those waves have wanted to say to his heart?