The Restory Retreat Centre

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 ...

Photograph by Brian Sano Somehow, amidst the filling out of forms and checking my to-do-list, I left my wallet behind in the post office yesterday, after registering a letter. By the time I realised it and rushed back, it was gone. Along with bank cards and my driver’s license. Back home we discovered that the second pair of trousers that we had bought for my dad, with all the outer tags corresponding with the tags of the pair he tried on in the store, is in actual fact two sizes smaller. The health of Matilda’s father is a matter of great concern to us. We were reminded yesterday that on different levels he struggles to cope with life’s challenges.   Buried among all of this and despite the frustrations, I believe there is harvest and material that can contribute to my growth. But the moving from believing to applying – there’s the rub. I return to an old theme that I touched on previously in This is it and God disguised . How to read our lives. How t...

     Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything—only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories.      Stories are embedded with instructions which guide us about the complexities of life. Excerpt from Women who run with the wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Est é s      Even as a little girl, I knew that some stories worked, while other stories tried, but didn’t. Stories that had an obvious lesson to them, like Pinnochio, caused me to feel only guilt.      But stories that leapt off the page and tickled me pink with descriptions of animal antics and beautiful places stayed with me like good friends and somewhere deep inside, they set to work at bringing me to   a higher understanding of things.      I read ferociously all through my growing years. Books exposed me   to things my m...