Gleanings

About the Book

My graduate students, colleagues, friends, and family members have urged me in my late seventies to gather, present, and preserve my stories and reflections from over the decades. I have gleaned stories and reflections from my office files and from the files located in the back stacks of my mind. The gleanings date over the course of fifty years. We ask one another with words or, if no words are exchanged, by reading another’s manner—what’s the story? We need to know another’s story for various reasons. The question “How are you doing?” is a way of asking “What’s the story?” We need indication as to whether we are going to be on guard or relaxed in another person’s presence. We live our stories. We are our stories. We are our transient story of the moment or the embracing stories that provide each of us our raison d’etre. Our stories may be acceptance of culturally given stories. Our stories may be of our own invention. Our stories may be a weaving together of stories given us and stories we have generated by our own wits. The gleanings are intended to serve as teaching stories. The stories are not intended to make points. Each story is the point. You shall find that they are not, for the most part, hot messages. They are cool messages. They are cool in the sense that they reach below the surface of the reading to the readers’ own stories and, further, the deep stories that are only available intuitively. Nikos Kazantzakis wrote of rock gardens in his book by that title. In his account, there are three levels of meaning presented by a rock garden: there are meanings plainly presented at the surface of the garden, meanings that the gardener and garden visitor can associate with surface phenomena, and deeper meaning evoked and intuitively apprehended. Having been urged to embark upon this project, I realized that the project had to do with gleaning from my external and internal files; Gleanings became the name of the collection. You will find in the table of contents stories and reflections featuring Minding How We Mind, Minding the Mind, Being in Good Hands, What Are We to Believe, Apologies and Forgiveness, Taming the Effect upon Us of Our Past, Realizing Our Dreams for the Future, and Mind/Body Stories of Healing.

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.