chaotopia

These thoughts come from a conversation with Mike Parker, a qualified Solutions Focused Therapist and originator of Liminal Coaching. In the course of discussing depression and his work we got into what the DMN is about. We are not neuroscientists, but two people whose background is in articulating personal experience and the technologies that we've found useful for navigating the immensity and weirdness of being human. Most of the opinions expressed below are from Mike. If you suffer from depression, you'll be unpleasantly familiar with the experience of depressive rumination, a state where you tell yourself bad things about yourself and the world and can't stop doing so. If you consume neuroscience interpretations, it's not hard to get the impression that there's a level organization in the brain that is responsible for depressive rumination, that you have a villain in your head.  This level of neural organization has been called the Default Mode Network. ...

P D Brown is an accomplished poet, storyteller and runestone-carver, whose recorded stories are available here . His published poetry includes The Hidden Door . This is a collection of retellings of Old Norse tales; many will be familiar to those who love the Eddas, but you've probably never read them in carefully-constructed modern English that echoes the atmosphere of the original poems. As he writes in the blurb: 'These retellings are in part prose, in a style of the spoken voice, for they were first composed to be told from memory to live audiences. The rest is narrative poetry, echoing the original use of verse-craft and "painting with the gift of speech".' Last year he sent me his collection A Crown of Runes . The introduction contains a very brief guide to the three main historical rune rows, and an explanation of the title. The poems in this book follow the Anglo-Saxon futhorc, so they are 33 in number. They are all in sonnet form, which consist...