There’s lots of ways to measure a relationship’s value. One way is time. How much time does your partner, spouse or particular friend want to be around you?

If it’s just enough time for bare necessities like sharing space with you, well, you might suspect something’s missing.

And you’d be right.

Beyond just the minimum, if we don’t share time to eat, love and play, we’re not only missing out, we might be losing what we’ve got. Or what you had.

Are we finding intimate time to enjoy one another beyond the basics?

Intimacy is more than just physical sex; it’s about mind, emotions and spirit too. For some couples, time spent seeking closeness and being close is a good marker for just how intimate you are.

Do you create opportunities to spend time with one another? Or do you create time avoiding one another?

ABCs of Being Intimate

1. Attend to the relationship: see them emotionally, sexually, physically, romantically and psychologically.

Attend to them as a whole person, “When she has an big ‘owie’ at work or at the dentist, she knows I am there for her,” says Bill F., a computer software engineer.

“I may not do anything but listen to her, but she knows eventually I will just get where she’s at.” And that can be make all the difference in the world.

2. Be empathic: the German word Einfühlung (“feeling into”) was not coined into English until the 20th century, but it’s an old concept.

It’s feeling for, not feeling sorry for your partner. Imagine what your partner is feeling and notice what that’s like.

Hint: use your eyes, ears, and gut to describe what you’re noticing, “It looks like you are upset. It sounds like you’re upset. It feels like you’re upset.”

C. Care and show how you care:

Brenda, an audiologist, states, “Jack turned around this morning and came back to the house just to take out the garbage because he knew I wasn’t feel well–I love it when he shows me how much he cares.”

Relationships thrive on intimacy and die on alienation.

Here are the XYZ’s of alienation.

1. Talking about your eX can sap your intimacy.

Unless you are bringing up the eX to specifically reassure your current partner, it most often is off-putting. Can it.

Your partner doesn’t want to hear comparisons, or concerns, or stories about who you use to be with–especially if you keep harping on what didn’t work or what’s wrong with them now. X-it off the shared topics list.

2. WhY ask why? The why questions usually sound judgmental.

It puts up a wall. Asking someone why often implies there’s a right and wrong answer and your partner needs to satisfy your criteria or give the correct response.

Or what? You will critique?

Or convince and cajole for another response?

Of course you want to know why about all kinds of things. Coming from curiosity and wondering why is functional intimacy.

But instead of asking the whY question, ask open-ended ones: who, what, when, how or where?

3. Zoning out, or giving the glassy-eyed avoidance, or even actually zzz-ing out in sleep may signal your avoidance, boredom, alienation or even a physical health issue.

If excessive sleepiness is making you unavailable (not tonight dear, I’m too sleepy) it is likely covering up another issue. Rule out if it’s health-related.

If it’s not health-related, check out if it is a cover for your response to the same-old, same-old. Zoning out is often the opposite of being present in the relationship.

There you have it: the A’s to Z’s of intimacy and alienation. Get closer. Share. Get comfortable seeing and being seen by another person. It expands you and your world.

TVs are on so much (Televisions use to be CRTs, Cathode Ray Tubes, now any digital device screen can be this kind of distraction) people may have them on as background until the kids fall asleep.

In many homes, TVs are a constant drone-tone in the background. Sometimes it gets spiked with canned laughter or interrupted with raucous commercials, but in many children’s lives the TV  can be droning ON.

Turning Off the Box

Lots of people leave it on or turn it off just before dozing off. Others wake up to a TV. As a culture, even in subcultures here and abroad, TVs are going night and day. They’re on everywhere, all the time.

For many families, the TV is the extra household member. It’s the one who is frequently noisy, occasionally entertaining, but always on. Sometimes turned down, but rarely off.

TV-world sees itself as your child’s friend. It keeps its viewer’s flattery-battery charged all the time. It tells what to want. Tells what to eat, what to wear, what to BE. TV wants to be the music of children’s soul. It wants to tell children what they need to hear all the time. It even promises to provide companionship, family and yes, even love.

Think about this though: what’s the cost of the viewing? Is there really free TV?  Among many things, does TV merely keep at bay a dark truth about our culture, a particularly telling truth about us and our children: TV’s are a light in the darkness. Are we afraid of the dark? Maybe. But as a culture, we often think TV helps keep us company.

For many of us, we’ve been afraid of ourselves our whole life. It’s natural enough. Or if not TV, there’s lots of other electronic distractions: don’t just sit there and worry, do something. Turn on the Box, grab a joystick, download a distraction, play this digi-game.

Children and adolescents, especially when feeling sad and depressed, and especially when given the chance, will stay up half the night. Mostly they stay up watching TV; although, many will stay up all night online, emailing, playing music or testing their skill levels with digital and ‘net games.

Nowadays these distractions are the electronic baby sitter to the extreme.

TV starts playing its role in early childhood. Most parents succumb. What mothers/fathers have never turned on a TV while holding an infant?

What family has never plopped the kids in front of the TV to eat or wait or be entertained so the parent can “just do this one thing?” It cuts across geopolitical boundaries, race, ethnicity and class.

TV as Babysitter

The TV, and its electronic distractions (i-Pop media), promise to keep kids from feeling shunned (“Hey, when you’re on the bus, just ignore the bullies and listen to your i-Pod.”).

Even functional and healthy children have occasional fears of abandonment at reoccurring points in their lives. Multiple assurances and frequent soothing behavior on the part of parents and caregivers help alleviate this universal fear, but nobody can allay it all. Though TV promises it can.

TV promises to show you something, just after the commercial break, that will intrigue you or entertain you, and TV usually delivers. At least when TV says it will be right back after this commercial message, it IS. What parent always, with utter conviction and assurance, say that? There’s a comforting assurance of the timing of TV. Shows usually come on when they say they will, not like the other people who don’t always do what they say.

Dr. Nancy Maynard, a pediatrician at the Great Falls Clinic in Great Falls, Montana, suggests limiting TV. In a story from US News and World Report http://health.usnews.com/usnews/health/healthday/080225/tv-could-be-disrupting-your-kids-sleep.htm she says:

“I do tell parents it is good to limit the amount of TV during the day to less than two hours of screen time, including TV, computer, video games,” she said.

“And don’t use TV as a go-to-sleep aid,” Maynard advised. That holds true even for high schoolers, she added.

Maynard said she understood why the parents of younger children might be tempted to park their kids in front of the TV right before bedtime. “It gets them to stay in one place. But it’s not [helping them in] making changes the brain needs to make to the transition to sleep. And it may make it worse. The visual stimulation amps them up.”

“I think of it as going to the state fair,” Maynard tells parents when advising them not to let their children watch TV before bed. “You are on the midway, with all the lights and the noise. Walking away from that, I don’t know how many people are relaxed.”

Any adult or caregiver assurances of, “There, there, now, it’s all right…” goes a long way to help depressed teens and sad children get to sleep. Touch and soothing words help adolescent depression or childhood anxiety by helping kids be assured that fears of abandonment won’t be realized. It’s still not enough. Especially it’s not enough when compared to how much TV promises..

Most of us have abandonment experiences if not outright separation trauma issues. Many of us still do.*** You wanted to be a part of a group, a team, and ensemble, but were somehow excluded. Most people have some experience of this process of real or imagined shunning.

Sleeping Too Much

Hypersomnia is sleeping too much. And it’s mildly contagious. Kids won’t call each other up or wake each other up if they are aware of their friends’ sleeping pattern: “No use in calling him yet. It’s too early. He’s probably still asleep.

From not only a social perspective but also from a functional perspective, sleeping too much is a way to avoid interactions. It’s a time-honored and wide-spread coping device. It’s the ultimate in wishful thinking. In this maladaptive approach, merely wake up a little later might cause things to change.

Depressed teens are particularly vulnerable to trying to sleep away sadness. It’s true, teens do need extra sleep. Adolescents are already needing extra sleep to grow their brains. What’s an extra hour or two or three of sleep? Especially since I stayed up so late last night watching TV? Lots.

Adolescent depression does not necessarily begin at the first electronic phase in the life. Even though childhood melancholia and preoccupation with a fantasy world of electronics may predict the onset of adolescent depression in a young person, the first experiences of sadness come unexpectedly. Often what challenges kids with stout character and a functional sense of self is an existential crisis. It’s a passing situation. It can be a real or contrived crisis that touches on some story they have made up about themselves–an infinite story about who they are.

Specific social skills become important in addressing the vulnerability experienced by sleep-deprived kids, especially abused, neglected or abandoned kids who are also depressed. For those children and adolescents, sleeping too much can be a fulfilling an avoidance outcome: if I don’t want to be around myself, why should you want to be around me either? Let me reject you before you even have a chance to reject me. And all I have to do to reject you is make you think I need more sleep or am not going to interact with you because “I’m too sleepy.”

Kids Need Sleep to Survive

Hypersomnia is not just sleepy all the time. It can be a cloaking device, a defensive mechanism. It often masks depression, especially in adolescence. It can be a particularly effective smoke-screen if depression is paired with academic deficiencies and social skill deficits.

Skills such as accepting criticism or asking for help or reporting whereabouts are often incompatible with sleeping all day. Even so, the fear of abandonment, and the fear of not fitting in, will factor prominently in the consideration of any child’s motive to remain in bed too long, or a depressed adolescent’s staying in bed until late in the afternoon.

Paradoxically, in this Won’t Go to Bed, Won’t Get Up world, many depressed kids, especially depressed younger children, resist going to bed in the first place.

Often just getting a depressed or anxious child even into the bed is a tour-de-force. They’re scared.

Younger children fear going to bed for many reasons. A child comes to fear real or imagined events, the most extreme of which is the possibility of another shunning expulsion: “If I close my eyes, turn off the senses, and shut out the world, when I wake up, will the world have abandoned me?” Or they fear going to bed, and turning it off, because of real or imagined events in their world, what they’ve seen on TV, what they heard in a ghost story, or even what they imagine is under the bed, might come to life while their eyes are closed.

What’s under the bed is also under the conscious mind. It’s unconscious.

Most kids welcome the relief of going to bed and going to sleep. Many do not. Children and adolescents with depression or anxiety often fight going to sleep.

 Getting Enough Rest

Turning off the world (and the TV) is embracing the unconscious. Helping kids calmly being on purpose about how the world does not go away, but learning how to deal with the world through sufficient rest in vital to growth. Many sad or anxious kids just want continuity around the transition time of going to bed. They long for rituals, ceremony and same-ness.

Kids want to have some assurance that if they close their eyes, turn off the world, and withdraw from their friends and families, they’ll be OK. That you, whoever YOU are, will still be there. They want to know: when I wake up will the world will be the same as when I shut their eyes and shut they world out?

Individual needs are different, but all kids need to sleep.

Tips on Helping Kids Get to Sleep

The National Institutes of Health, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/patientinstructions/000355.htm offers these suggestions:

• Set a regular time for bed each night and stick to it.
• Establish a relaxing bedtime routine, such as giving your child a warm bath or reading him or her a story.
• Make after-dinner playtime a relaxing time. Too much activity close to bedtime can keep children awake.
• Avoid feeding children big meals close to bedtime.
• Avoid giving children anything with caffeine less than six hours before bedtime.
• Set the bedroom temperature so that it’s comfortable — not too warm and not too cold.
• Make sure the bedroom is dark. If necessary, use a small nightlight.
• Keep the noise level low.

That’s where variation on a check-back on a transitioning from wake-to-sleep child come in: it’s merely a different form of reporting your whereabouts. You ask your kid to do this already (“Let me know if you’re going back to your room (or outside or in another part of the house) to play.” Now it’s your chance to model the behavior of checking back and reporting where you are–you’re checking on the almost asleep child.

By checking back during bedtime transitions a parent or caregiver can convey continuity and security to the depressed child or anxious adolescent. You can touch-and-go as they transition from the conscious to the unconscious-world of sleep.

Assure them that you will leave the light off but the door open. That you will be back momentarily. That you will be there and you may just touch them, or kiss them, or merely walk in and out of the room. But you will be there. It’s about BEING present with a depressed child or adolescent. Being with them means you’re not judging, or shaming, or praising. It’s silent. It’s merely walking in and out of the room. It’s merely being with the kid while you touch and go. The frequency will vary. And you tell them that.

Self Soothing: for the time when you’re not in the room, you tell the kid to tell him/her- self: I will wait for the return. I will breathe. I know you will return and BE there for me. And you must remember to breathe too. Engage in the behavior you expect the depressed teen or anxious kid to engage in. Show them.

Practice going-to-sleep rituals earlier in the day. Before dinner or a preferred outing, at a neutral time (when neither the kid nor the day’s schedule is making demands), practice behaviors associated with the go-to-sleep ritual: “OK, let’s pretend it’s bedtime. Pretend I just told you to go upstairs and get ready for bed. Now, what would you do next?” Rehearse it. End on a good note, when you’ve got an approximation of what you want to have happen and reinforce (shape the behavior) the approximation with praise, descriptions and reinforcers.

Functional alternatives include modeling and encouraging reading. Older teens with depression find reading a way to induce a sleep state. Especially useful with sad children is chanting some sacred sound or saying or repeating a bedtime lullaby. Modeling and engaging in the chant or saying it aloud helps, i.e., the parent/caregiver says aloud a positive aphorism: “Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite” is a playful example. Or the “Twinkle, twinkle, little star…” to the more complex but easily accomplished pairing breath with affirmations: “I am” on
inspiration, “Relaxed” on expiration: “Randi, say to yourself ‘I am’ when you breathe in, and say ‘relaxed’ when you breathe out.”

If you already meditate, or know relaxation techniques, it is easier to teach a depressed or anxious child how to relax. Learning about taming the breath to experience a peaceful way of being is a learned behavior. Younger children feeling anxious respond to repetive reading of books, repetitions of nursery rhymes and declarations of possible positive outcomes including, “sending a happy thought.”

Even early development cynicism can be healthy. If there’s a need to question by kids, that shows growth is present. Plato asserted that the unexamined life was not worth living. It’s not just the case with philosophers, but with depressed adolescents and anxious kids too, especially when they are learning how to go to sleep.

What happens, however, when we adults and caregivers need to be unconscious? When we need to withdraw and recharge ourselves by allowing our body, mind and spirit time to rejuveniate? We learn to relax. Kids need to learn that too. Not just kids on TV, or kids trying to sleep but distracted by the box.

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Darden Bynum, LCSW

Light and shadow in the office of Darden Bynum

People say they like the change in seasons. They like cool crisp air, the change of color in the foliage, the harvest, and the lengthening shadows.

Ah yes, the shadows of fall. Longer shadows this time of year remind us that we live on a bi-polar planet: the earth’s northern latitudes are spinning away from the sun, at the same time the south spins toward.

SAD or Glad?

After growing up in better-weather sunny South Africa, and moving to the NE United States, psychiatrist Norman E. Rosenthal noticed a marked change in his own fall mood and behavior.  As the days got longer he felt worse. He began to hypothesize what has been known culturally for a long time about  fall and winter blues: the long shadows of short days can cause people to experience Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

Rosenthal went on to write three books on the topic of SAD; Seasonal Affective Disorders and Phototherapy (1989), Seasons of the Mind: Why You Get the Winter Blues and What You Can Do About It (1989) and Winter Blues (2005).

Out of Rosenthal’s and others’ research, is now widely acknowledged that fall/ winter depression does have marked medical basis, involving significant changes in mood. Paradoxically, it can happen the other way too. Light-deprived people still sing the song by The Who, “Sometimes I wonder what I’ma gonna do, there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.” Yes, people do feel the blues in the spring or summer too, maybe experiencing full-blown SAD symptoms. But it’s the fall that usually gets attention.

These changes are now linked to the exposure to light, as well as a deficiency in vitamin D, hence the vitamin’s addition to milk. Generally, in the fall and winter we may want to hibernate, add extra insultation (fat), and grow more fir. In short, we want to act like the animal that we are–which may be natural but is not always adaptive to our world.

 Celebrate

The animal in us seeks comfort and warmth to counteract the polar pull away from the sun in the fall. Our cultural celebrations, in place long before modern social science and the widespread diagnosis of SAD, helps us find light and hope in the dark. We run from our shadows to high holy Jewish, Christian and pagan holidays. Most of these involve lights, candles, fresh greens (Christmas trees and mistletoe) and wrapped presents. Or in the in North America, the fall feast of family and fellowship, Thanksgiving.

Even before those there’s Halloween to chase your blues away. All hallow’s eve a long standing pagan event involving bonfires and dancing, rewards the embrace of our shadow self. Samhain, a pre-Christian medieval Gaelic/Irish festival marking the end of the growing season, says goodbye to the end of the “lighter half” of the year and hello to the beginning of the “darker half.” Elsewhere, known as the Day of the Dead, Halloween trick or treaters dress up in shadow costumes and are rewarded with candy or mock horror from bystanders. Making fun of our shadows, even if only once a year, helps check the dark side.

Psychotherapist Carl G Jung cited the archetype of the shadow in his book Psychology and Religion: ”Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

Each of us individually and collectively, as a couple, family, group and culture carries a shadow too. What was Peter Pan looking for in the Darlington household? His shadow of course. Once finding it, Peter Pan could integrate himself and step more readily into the light, fighting pirates, rescuing princesses and resisting growing up.

Economic Shadow and Light

Our world-wide economy is resisting growing up too. And yet this is yet another cycle of the darker side, especially during the fall. Given how much trust and belief surrounds the economies of our times, it’s no wonder that in 2002 the Federal Reserve Branch in Atlanta commissioned a study on the SAD impact on stock performances entitled, “Winter Blues: A SAD Stock Market Cycle.” The citations alone are worth a look when we fear that an economic collapse, or at least a downturn, is upon us.

http://www.frbatlanta.org/filelegacydocs/wp0213.pdf

According to the Fed study, light and shadow definitely impact markets. And what is the worst month for stock performances? September, when the change in light and the lengthening of shadows begins being noticable–except in the southern hemispheres stock markets. In South America, South Africa and Australia, it is March that is the worst for stock performances, that’s when it gets noticed down-under. It’s a bi-polar world we are talking about, and humans are being human no matter what the latitude.

Meanwhile investors want to know: how is my stock doing? This month the answer is,not so great but it will start to improve in October, maybe after a slight dip.

Or another marker, in another up and down numbers arena is, is my grade posted yet? After a month in academic setting, especially if it’s late September, first grade reports are coming in and any novelty of school may begin to wear thin. The halcyon carefree days of ripe summer vacation are gone, yet there is much to be done.

Scared of my own shadow?

Better to beware of my shadow and how it moves in my light than to dismiss and ignore it. What to do instead?

Know your limits and know your moods. Process them with someone who cares about you. Who listens to you. And who sees you emotionally, psychologically.

Light therapy using lamps that mimic sunlight can help. So too can just plain old florescent light if you can put up with how unflattering it is–plants don’t seem to mind. You can grow too if you give yourself 15 to 30 minutes of light therapy a day. Better yet, get out and walk during daylight hours. Walking restores balance especially during the late hours of the daylight, even if overcast or rainy. Get out there and catch a few rays. Walk out, enjoy the light and the shadow and savor all of fall.

Going for a walk? Start by going out the door. Even though you can walk in-doors, mostly a walk means out-of-doors, right? On a trail or a path?

Next decisions: decide about walking on a driveway or a street. Take a bus or a train? How do you get on The Way of a walk? The answer colors the rest of your walking experience.

Once walking, how you walk and where you walk says something about your intention; it also reveals how you brain is working.

Walking on a trail or path isn’t just a walk in the park, but it can be, especially if you are wandering. Especially if you are wandering with the right amount of calories in your brain, without too much exertion–not too stressed nor too fast and not too slow. Wandering has its own pace. Wandering in the desert is different from wandering in the mall.

Conquerors and wanderers

On CameronAT, son and  current thru-hiker Cameron Reed Bynum, points to his experience of people on the Appalachian Trail as “wanderers” vs. “conquerors.” According to his on the trail blog, the conquerors are hard-driven to complete a goal, counting and chalking up miles or times on a quest to finish some existing goal. Wanderers measure too. But they are on a different pace and purpose altogether, even though they care about accomplishing something too.

The something could be a trail-section, a specified time or the whole trail. Wanderers amble with more of a desultory agenda. Wanderers may have a specific goal, but they go about it quite differently; between the two, wanderers like to amble-stroll, conquerors make their walk more of a forced-march.

A walk in the park may sound better to you than either of those, especially if less than a trail and more of path.

What’s the difference? Trail or path means one thing in a park, another in the wilderness. Or something totally different when rambling in the woods (see previous posts on LT/AT).

First about walking, then more about the difference between trail or a path.

Lots of people say walking is good for you. Is it?

Walk Toward, Run Away

In his book, Your Brain at Work, David Rock points out that human beings like to walk toward something. We wander toward something interesting or attractive, but we run away from something unpleasant or scary. We are much more overtly responsive to a threat than we are  drawn toward enticing emotions. Imagine the way you amble up to a a coffee kiosk or how you stroll into feelings like lust or curiosity. That’s way different than you ducking away from a loud noise. Away responses are fight/flight, toward responses are subtle and alluring.

Either could be good for your survival. Running away from a lightning storm into a shelter makes as much survival sense as walking toward a popsicle stand if you’re feeling heat exhaustion.

Hiking can feel like a walk in the park, or it can feel like a workout, or worse, hiking can feel like real work. For many conquering hikers, hiking is a job. When you first walked after an illness or accident, even slow walking can feel like hard work. Or at least like a major chore.

Walking creates system balance, in your system and systems around you. Try walking at a faster pace from the wanderers at a fair or a museum. They’ll wonder what you hurry is? The walking system around you reacts to how you are proceeding. This pace governance of a system particularly effects you when labels the walk-ways trail or path.

Definitions

From wiki-speak: A trail (also track, byway) is a path with a rough beaten or dirt/stone surface used for travel. Trails may be for use only by walkers and in some places are the main access route to remote settlements. Some trails can also be used for hiking, cycling, or cross-country skiing and less often for moving cattle herds and other livestock.

Whereas from the same source a path can be a trail, such as in a  hiking trail, footpath, or bridle path or it can also mean, a Course (navigation), the intended path of a vehicle over the surface of the Earth, or a Sidewalk running along the edge of a road, in some varieties of English or a Bicycle path or way.

Taking these definitions broadly, I like experiencing a path as a way. Lot of people refer to their work or their hobby or their mission as following their own path. That can mean having you own way, or wishing our paths would cross, meaning I want to see you again, or even a path of a storm, a path of destruction or a path of spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is definitely following your own path; although it may be a well-worn one.

A distinction worth a difference

So back to trail or path? You often want to get get some place on a trail. Trails lead to destinations. Trails are fine and can lead to paths.

On a path, there could be many things at play, especially if the path is a way, like The Tao is The Way.

“Find your own path you must, ” says Master Yoda in Star Wars.

You can wander on a trail or a path, but there seems to be more latitude on a path. A path gives permission to move and learn and experience. A trail is marked. It’s going.

A path that has made a difference for many walkers is Self Realization Fellowship. Many of the followers of Paramahansa Yogananda describe the legacy of his world-wide teachings on meditation and service to others as a Path. It’s more of a spiritual path. Even one of his previous disciplines who wrote a variation of  The Autobiography of a Yogi entitled his work The Path.

Whether your life leads you on a trail or a path, in the words of the AT hikers: “Hike your own hike.” Walking is the important thing. Some time the conqueror inside you insists that you get it done. Other times the wanderer in you allows you to follow your nose, leading you down a primrose path. Either way, let it lead you onward and upward, on a path of your own realization about where you are walking.

Trail Magic is what happens when experiencing something good hiking on the trail. Not just something good, but out-of-the-blue good.

When hikers on Vermont’s Long Trail (LT) and Appalachian Trail (AT) walk up on a sixpack of premium beverages left conspicuously in a cold mountain stream, that’s Trail Magic. Crossing the path of a friend you saw 273 miles earlier on the Canadian border is too.

Trail Magic happens when a kind of pixie dust pleasantly settles around a hiking event. An unqualified good thing.

Everyone’s path is different. I never got too far just on Trail Magic alone–you can’t really depend on it. I didn’t get far period. I’m more of a hiking/camping dilettante–a sissy outdoorsman. Camping last week on the LT/AT, yes, I did find some Trail Magic, and heard others speak of it too and know more is to be found:  http://www.appalachiantrail.org/about-the-trail

For myself, there was magic when I came upon an unmarked and unreported (to me anyway) miniature Stonehenge.  Poof, from out of nowhere waist-to-headhigh monuments appear. Obviously arranged by humans, the fifty paces-wide clearing stands 200 yards off the AT in Massachusetts, at the top of the Pine Cobble Trail. Had I not wandered I would have not found it: piled-up stone cairns and great hunks of extruded rock seemed like an art exhibit. Bright-white stones are most auspiciously arranged in a way similar to the post and lentil markers of the English plains. Stumbling upon someone’s attempt to re-size a sculpture of geo-icons makes you wonder. Were they under the influence of moonlight or something stranger? Ghostly, erie, cemetaries-in-waiting. Unpopulated but ready for its own troupe to populate.

Out of the night and into the blue

People whose paths you cross on the AT/LT constitute a distinct and rich subculture. Most hikers can confirm or match the described variety of people colorfully written about in Bill Bryson’s classic, A walk in the woods : rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

The trail and its feeders form an above-ground, foot-railroad. These networks, running more than 2100 miles along the eastern range of mountains within the United States, attract a variety of hobos and adventurers. Each are asking and sharing information with many they are meeting or hiking with. They stop and chat up about where they’ve been and where they are going and how far they gone. It’s a predictable litany.

Walking in the woods, mostly alone during the early day-light hours, the isolated nature of hiking is naturally introspective. Later, our social nature comes to fore in the late afternoon and evening. If during the daytime people spend it hiking alone, at night the basic survival of small groups adds variety (old saw: What are the 4B’s of the AT? Blisters, bears, bugs, and boredom).

The boredom of enduring the trail individually all day changes in the twilight zone. Trail people seek a solacing social path at night. In turn, that socializing can feel magical or decidedly un-magical, depending. Everybody wanting creature comforts at bedtime often mean one thing: strange bedfellows in a screen-less shelter filled with mice and bugs.

Wilderness shelters: who or what goes there?

Coming together at campsites or the usually three sided wilderness shelter-shacks fosters its own experience. Circling up around a campfire (“hikers tv”) creates its own counter-culture matrix; often, it’s filled with young, old, rich and rich poor. Well, more of the older rich and the younger poor, since those are who have both the time or inclination to hike and camp long distances.

After sharing much of the same terrain and weather conditions during the day, they connect at night. If nothing else, the sense of community protects from that which goes bump in that night. As long as there’s floorspace, they give and get. It’s a resilient cohesion. In shelters there are log books, where those before have left notes and shared information in scrawling their their own foot-paced escapes or escapades in utopia.

In telling a part of this strange magic of this community with friend and creative, Scott Buchmann http://barelycreative.com/, he remarked about the similar freedom and solace-seeking Danish community, Christiania http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v57JVVD6-ag. This inside-Copenhagen counter-culture community has its own magic; although, it’s more of a blue-smoke variety than the out-of-the-blue good found along the LT and AT. But it’s there too: people walking and living their own path.

Still, only by wandering and seeking a path, will you stumble upon that out-of-the-blue Trail Magic.

Bill Bryson: “When you’re on the AT, the forest is your universe, infinte and entire. It is all you experience day after day. Eventually it is about all you can imagine. You are aware, of course, that somewhere over the horizon there are mighty cities, busy factories, crowded freeways, but here in this part of the country, where woods drape the landscape for as far as the eye can see, the forest rules.”

As any surfer knows, anticipating, catching and riding a wave brings pleasure, pain, relief and more–usually more of what’s unexpected.

This time, for a newly minted website, more is better, and more is expected. To announce a new website feels mostly more like pleasure. It’s more relief than pain; although they all mix together in the white water afterward. Whew, it’s not done, it’s just reforming. Jumbled up feelings combine in the surf-salty soup of completion. What’s anticipated doesn’t happen because problems unexpectedly ebb back into the ocean of experiences.

What does this have to do with a new website? It can be much the same in the self-published business of creating words on a web or a printed page. Waves of feelings and words appear.

This new website look and new information brings a fresh presentation to both the Darden Bynum Psychotherapy site and to your sight, dear reader.

Like a wipeout, the anticipation felt far worse than the real thing; afterwards it brings its own dunked wash-out relief. So this site is really for your surfing pleasure.

Please surf around. Check it out, and check back in. Your feedback and service are vitally important to this practice. Our relationship is important too, along with how surfable the site is.

Try out both the site and the information as catching a new set of crisp, clean-up waves for you to ride; clean-up sets sweeps everything off the break. Clean-up sets recalibrate and create calm, a pause, even on an active beachbreak.

Enjoy. Paddle back out. Ride a wave back in. And tell me about it.

Darden Bynum