Working with EMDR and the photographs people bring, enables access to feelings which can then be reprocessed, allowing integration in remarkable ways, creating a new ‘Innerscape’

I dig into the cupboard under the basement stairs where I'd put a box of old

photographs till now - Lee uses them in her therapy work and I'd agreed to bring some to my session. But I'm really wishing I hadn't agreed because the cupboard door is stuck - I can only get it open about a quarter of the way - I've had to shift my tenant's bed, which won't budge another inch, to access the door - and now I'm madly reaching in up to my shoulder, flailing my hand around, hoping I'll be able to get the box out. After Herculean efforts I manage to candlesticks. I suddenly remember I stuck them in with the photos since there was just enough room for them there, and no room for them anywhere else. Hah! so those bloody albums are underneath, I think. I wrestle them out, one at a time, bash the door closed, hoist the bed back into place and dash off to meet Lee.

On the subway I flip through the two books I decided on because they were the lightest. Lots of landscapes from my travels with David; pictures w took in the Appalachians, at Walden Pond,timer shots sad.

In Lee's office we sit on the couch and turn the pages together. She asks me to stop

when an image speaks to me. She tells me I have an eye for composition and I say,

yeah, but I'm hopeless with lighting, I don't know a damn thing about cameras - I - oh -

everything stops I see David standing beside me, his arm around me, smiling. We're

the and so clearly that soap David used - he was the cleanest man I ever knew - ... I can hear the surf at low tide, just a shush and a ripple,my hair away from my face. David's smile is impish, warm; he's indulging me. He thinks people taking photographs of themselves are moment, he says; they're exchanging a moment of living for a piece of paper with their faces laughs and clobbered by grief, sobbing instantly, noisily, stunned at myself for losing control like that, with no warning.

Then, before I know what's happening, twenties, and then one of my beloved grandmother who died when I was eleven. I am awash in dearly, so deeply, could have vanished been holding on to this huge old hope chest of sorrow over them all me from doing things I wanted to do, from opening my heart up wide again, from living a life - a real and reckless, sparkling, impulsive, risk-taking, full-hearted life. I weep inconsolably. It seems to go on forever, this weeping, blow my nose and wipe my face and cry some more and lighter ... with every tear I shed I think I must be losing what I thought I'd have to carry forever. Not that I knew I was carrying it ... I had trudged on, putting my sadness away when everybody I knew got sick of hearing about it. But it was still there, still knotting up my guts, making it more and more difficult to open up to love. To life. To my one, precious life. I hollow myself out with crying until I feel transparent, washed clean, humbled, grounded. I feel real, devoid of hardness, that layer of

to protect yourself from getting hurt again. Yet I don't feel unprotected. Just ...Open. Kind of elastic, where I used to be rubber cement. Something blocked inside has dislodged and a river is flowing in there the snow and ice, but it's running. I can hear it.

Which must mean spring is coming.                 M.E.M. 2007