Alchemy

US Geological Survey

The main challenge that I struggled with in creating my new website was to find images that reflected something of the work that I do. I tried a number of approaches including painting and drawing, taking photographs and looking through endless collections of stock images. I wanted to avoid the typical nature scenes that are - understandably - so common on counsellors’ websites. While the natural world creates a sense of calm and relaxation, it can also be a cheap way to evoke helpful and hopeful feelings in a potential client. Perhaps, at a time when human beings are so apparently intent on destroying the natural world, I wanted to avoid sentimentality.

Then I came across a number of images that completely arrested my attention. I couldn’t tell what I was looking at: a microscopic photograph of an eye; a Chinese painting; a landscape? They also reminded me of some striking album covers by artists that I enjoy, Alt-J and Bonobo. All of the images that caught my attention carried the same label, USGS, which I took at first to be the name of a photographer. USGS, as I soon discovered, stands for the US Geological Survey, and these are satellite pictures of our planet.

The fractal quality of these images suggest to me that the universe repeats itself at different scales, with the same archetypal forms repeating in micro and macro size. ‘As above, so below’, according to the ancient saying. This speaks of the way in which themes in our lives are found to repeat in cycles, whether in a momentary exchange in the street, or over years, or lifetimes.

These are also images of transformation, as natural processes of erosion, weathering and the cycles of rock, water, sun and air create together beautifully complex and ever-changing forms. Therapy is also a transformational process, as I imagine it, in which the hard forms of habit, trauma and past life events are subtly and at times miraculously changed, ‘into something rich and strange’.

Perhaps the other word I want to use is alchemy. This ancient art is a metaphor, in its attempt to transform base metals into gold, for the psychological transformations that can and do take place within the human psyche.