The Restory Retreat Centre

  Existential Health Inhabit existence; Create Meaning; Assuming Authorship The Conversation Elements From The Conversation Creative Piece This week's creative piece, a painting, is actually more about the painter than the painting itself. In this quiet, introspective man, one can see 3 characteristics of existential health. L.S. Lowry, the British painter who painted "Going to the Mill" in 1925, looked his reality, the industrial city of Manchester, squarely in the eye. While others viewed the industrial cities of the time as ugly and crude, Lowry saw the beauty, the loneliness and the humanity in it. He did not paint an artificial, elevated world; he painted the point of contact with reality. Returning to last week's subject: To rest meaningfully requires that we, like Lowry, stop waiting for an "ideal" or "perfect" world to come to a standstill in front of us. It requires that we look the reality of our daily lives with its mills, its smoke and...

Image by Igor Morski                                        I recently finished reading the book The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn. With its ingenious use of old black and white suspense movies as a backdrop, and applying the main character, child psychologist Anna Fox’s agoraphobia that restricts her to the space of her apartment to full effect, I was not disappointed. I had the psychological thriller I was looking for at this stage.  It is well written and reflects a sense of fine observation by the author. A sentence like,  “I zoom in on his feet: oxblood oxfords, slick with polish, collecting the autumn sunlight, kicking it off with each step”  within the first few pages testifies to that and got me hooked.  But it’s not the book as such that I want to talk about, however good it may be. A.J. Finn is the pseudonym of American author ...