The Unclad Soul

I will not be another flower, picked for my beauty and left to die. I will be wild, difficult to find, and impossible to forget. ~ Erin Van Vuren Poet/Author The Netflix series, “Gypsy,” which debuted in June of this year stars Naomi Watts as Jean Holloway, a middle-aged Manhattan psychotherapist whose life is slowly unraveling. She is married to her successful attorney husband, Michael (Billy Crudup), and she has her own flourishing therapy practice with established patients. Jean and Michael have a young daughter, Dolly, who is starting to show signs of sexual identity issues. She likes to dress like a boy and is thrilled when her mother cuts off her beautiful blonde hair in order to play Peter Pan in the school play. Outwardly all seems placidly fine with this little family, though some of Jean’s friends are critical of Dolly’s burgeoning identity choices, and, are clearly insensitive and catty about it. Jean struggles to fit into the crowd of country cl...

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom: absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken."  ~ Anaïs Nin, Author and memoirist born to Cuban parents in France

“We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may not ever need to go there.”  ~ Edward Abbey, Environmentalist/Author

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yelp over the roofs of the world.”  ~ Walt Whitman, American Poet