Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Small Wolf with Forest 2000

Earlier this year, I received a request to use Small Wolf with Forest on the cover of a monograph  published by the Bowlby Centre in London, which is "an organisation committed to the development, promotion and practice of an attachment-based and relational approach to psychotherapy".  The monograph is called Terror Within and Without.  ttp://thebowlbycentre.org.uk/  .   It is described as the following:  This monograph of the 15th John Bowlby Memorial Conference brings together papers by leading contributors to the field of attachment and trauma that explore the means by which individuals struggle to cope with exposure to war zones, both large scale conflicts and societal breakdown, and the domestic war zones where adults and children experience violence and sexual abuse.These papers seek to further our understanding of the intergenerational transmission of experiences of trauma, as in the examples of the Holocaust and slavery. In times where talk of terror is everywhere, psychotherapists offer a clinical perspective on terror which may translate to the world at large.

As a child, our youngest daughter Teal had the uncanny ability of being able to exactly duplicate a wild animal.  She would squat on her hind legs, and with jerky motions and twitches of her hands and face,  become the prarie dog that we had seen at the zoo.  She could stay in that position for quite some time, scampering about the house, stopping to groom herself  or look about her in an alert, slightly fearful way.  I was intrigued by Bowlby's use of "Small Wolf with Forest":  taking something that to me was about our dual animal/human natures and  interpreting it in another larger and more complicated context.  Their interpretation is bigger, darker, and fiercer than anything I ever envisioned, and I'm pleased with that.

2 comments:

  1. Great piece of art. I love the human face layered over the wolf. Very cool.

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  2. Hey Holly: that's fantastic that they selected/recognized your image as one that could hold the complexity of their mission. Wow! That's really what one hopes that art can do in the world.

    I have just read thru the last 3 posts: wolf, coyote, crow. We have a Buddhist monk staying with us at the moment who has a particularly vivid relationship with animals: I came down yesterday morning to find him giving a dharma talk to the cat. He says that she has been damaged in some way & is with us so that she can heal spiritually & perhaps return as a human in the next life. Holding up that prism makes me think differently about all my past pets & pets of various friends & about people like the Coyote Lady & really also about you with the potency that the animal world has for you.

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