A Scattering of Seeds

About the Book

Graduate students, patients, colleagues, friends and family have urged me to glean, present, and preserve my teaching stories and reflections from my office files and from the files located in the back of my mind. These gleanings were published in 2011. Scattering Seeds follows gleanings with additional teaching stories and reflections. A seed is a story, a yarn. Each seed is not intended to make points. No! Each story is the point. Columbine flowers issue from pods situated at the end of the flower stems. When the flowering fades, there remain many seeds in each pod. As each pod dries and breaks up, seeds scatter in the breeze. Each columbine plant scatters forth many, many seeds. Of these many, only the rare seed manages a proper burial, thence the regeneration of a new columbine the next spring. David R. Loy writes in his book, The World is Made of Stories [Wisdom Publications]: “If the world is made of stories, stories are not just stories. They teach us what is real, what is valuable, and what is possible. Without stories there is no way to engage with the world because there is no world, and no one to engage with it because there is no self.” I recall the first time I listened to a Hassidic story. The story line twisted and turned, was interrupted time and again by what seemed to me to be jarring leaps. I tried ever so hard to keep track of every element of the “yarn.” My reasoning mind went “tilt.” Witnessing my confusion, an ancient wise man instructed me to let go of trying to command an understanding of the story. He advised me to place myself in the hands of the story, simply take it in, to employ an expression my godfather used to say: to surrender the nerve center of consent to what you are experiencing. Deep understanding may follow effortlessly.—Peter Baldwin, PhD

About the Author

Dr. Peter Baldwin is a psychologist and founding partner of University Associates in Psychology formerly of Keene and Gilmanton, New Hampshire. His clients have included preteens, teenagers, adults, and families, as well as domestic and combat trauma victims. He is certified as an Approved Consultant in Clinical Hypnosis by the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. His training and teaching have focused on the practice of Gestalt therapy and the use of hypnosis as a resource in the practice of psychotherapy. Before moving to New Hampshire in 1973, Dr. Baldwin held appointments at Tufts University and the University of Chicago. Since 1976, he has served as an adjunct professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology at Antioch University, New England. His education includes degrees from Middlebury College, Boston University School of Theology, and Boston University Graduate School. His primary mentors have included Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman; Viktor Frankl, MD; Abraham Maslow, PhD; and Milton Erickson, MD. Dr. Baldwin served two terms as president of the New Hampshire Psychological Association and has been a member of the American Psychological Association and the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association. Peter lives with his wife, Carolyn, in their family farm in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. His three children and their families live in the farm or nearby. The farm includes horses, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, bees, dogs, and cats. "My graduate students, colleagues, friends and family urged me in my late seventies to Glean, present, and preserve my teaching stories and reflections from my office files and from the files located in the back of my mind. These gleanings date over the course of fifty years." Scattering Seeds follows gleanings with additional teaching stories and reflections. A seed is a story, a yarn. Each seed is not intended to make points. Each story is the point.