“Ever since college, I have had only one goal: to become minister of education and change the system in Afghanistan […]. I have worked so hard to reach this goal. Every night before going to sleep, I imagined myself in a ministry chair as secretary of education, but now I find myself imprisoned in the corner of a room.” With “tears in (her) eyes” a psychology student from Kabul University recalls August 15, 2021, the day her “palace of dreams” was shattered.
Our Afghan friends are singing to us from far away, with a fearful trill. America promised our support and, at the end, abandoned them. It was sheer treachery. Yet I hope we might find ways to be true friends, that in this time, not of joy but of sorrow, ten thousand and more might gather round.
Angyvir Padilla lives and works in Brussels. In her practice, she invites us to take a closer look at the places we inhabit. By examining how we embody memory, she proposes that, in the journey between immanence and transcendence, the traces of our past seep into a persistent present. The environments Angyvir creates alter our perception of reality. As our presence enters into the dialogue, the sense of otherness we encounter reveals the essence of her work. Master with distinction, Fine Arts department, Luca School of Arts, Brussels (BE), 2018, Master with distinction, Sculpture department, ENSAV La Cambre, Brussels (BE), 2015, Bachelor, Art in the public space, ARBA, Brussels (BE), 2012, among other distinctions.
It’s been more than a year in semi-lockdown, and I have to push myself to leave the hole I’ve been working and sleeping out of—the hole that is my bedroom, a kind of symbol of my libido, somehow both empty and bottomless. I know there is sun outside; I know it to be lovely, just as I know the woodcocks and catbirds are chirping; and if I close my eyes and open the windows, I can almost pretend I’m on a deck by the ocean, still alone.
Six faces stared through cyberspace as our writing workshop began. In all the groups I’ve led lately, as part of an initiative aimed at helping health care workers and first responders find their way through grief, some stories linger in my mind. This time, an ER doctor spoke first.
[Nature] has her [sic] own particularly effective method of restricting us. She destroys us—coldly, cruelly, relentlessly, as it seems to us, and possibly through the very things that occasioned our satisfaction…
Elegy and Observation is an environmental requiem. Drawing on ancient and modern texts, the piece leaps and lurches among perspectives from intimate to global, tender to catastrophic. So too, our perceived relationship to the natural world is constantly shifting, from the poet’s tension between fear and delight, to scientific observation, biblical prediction of catastrophe, the unassailable truth of species extinction, and the poetry of those who have experienced natural disaster.
In Susan Kassouf’s essay “A New Thing Under the Sun” (ROOM 6.21), she writes of her dismay in finding that there would be no mention of the more-than-human environment during her psychoanalytic training. I want to expand Kassouf’s premise about the importance…
My awareness of the climate crisis started like tiny raindrops in a pond, splashes of recognition each time I read a news article about the catastrophic consequences of our warming world…
Early in the pandemic, I realized that what I needed was an instruction book that would tell me how to survive. I pictured it, a guide tailored to my personal needs, the first section titled How to be a Psychotherapist During a Pandemic and the second, How to Have a Homeless Brother During a Pandemic, and the last one, How to Not Give Up.
