Ariadnes Thread counselling

I have I think read most if not all of Annie Dillard’s books or so I thought.   I recently discovered that she had written a couple of poetry books.   I was re-reading possibly the most famous of her books Pilgrim at Tinker Creek published in 1997, a book that again I think my mother gave me. It has been compared to Henry Thoreau’s book Waldon although for my own taste Pilgrim is the better book. Both though are slow reads for me. I can only take so much at one go. It’s not so much the detail but the depth of the writing. I should at this stage out myself as a highly dyslexic person who reads very well but probably at a third of the speed of most people, so what I mean by slow read’ is picking it up reading and then reading again and then sitting often stunned by what I have just read. Sometimes it’s just sometime later that I think back to it and Kaprow! I am catapulted back into the enormity of it. Dillard writes of such everyday experiences but draws out the extraordinary c...

Defences   I have been pondering the issue of defences, in part because I spend a good deal of my time walking along the new sea wall where I live. I chanced to be heading down to the sea at low tide and walked under the sea wall.   Some years ago, I was privileged to go on pilgrimage to visit the living stones in Israel and the Occupied West Bank. The Israeli government had made the decision to build a security wall around the West Bank and more particularly surrounding the town of Bethlehem.   The security wall is a mammoth project of steel and concrete, on the Palestinian side it is blank (the Palestinian people have painted mural on it in places.) but on the Israeli side it is textured.   The sea wall is so similar that I was taken back there. I thought ‘But there are no watch towers’ which is true but looking up saw the new lift housing on the station platform. Sure, it has no guard room on top but it’s there, just the same. I am of course lucky because I have t...