I rarely come here on Saturdays. A shooting, a particular event, therefore, where one comes to my city to pick up some exchanges and capture a little of the light of the place, brings me there that day. I open the door and I understand, moved, that I will live on this occasion something like a “unique moment”, a goodbye that will remain engraved in me like all the goodbyes of my life.
This place, I know it by heart. I have been there thousands of times over the last fifteen years of my life. But this morning, when I cross the small entrance, I see it as one looks at something or someone who is about to leave. And then, it seems to me that I look better at what is being seen. Time densifies, the gaze becomes more loving, more concerned with every detail, more aware of the whole story, of all the stories, I should say, that have unfolded here.
Here, there is first of all something that seizes us by the calm, the softness, some would say “the soul”, which transforms the sections of wall into sorts of soft containers, as if they were already beginning to rock our moods, as soon as you enter them, without enclosing them, like that famous “good enough mother”. I remember experiencing this exact feeling the first time I visited the place, on my birthday, in a symphony of synchronicities that all seemed to drop me there, at the beginning of a new adventure, exactly “in the right place, at the right time”. I had said to my lover: “It is there. That’s all. I know it. »
The lover, who later became a husband, discovered at the same time my somewhat irrational way of making the big decisions of my life. In the morning, we were going to sign a lease somewhere else, and then no, “I didn’t feel it”. My intuition would not betray us, since it is indeed “there” that we settled down, professionally speaking, to welcome the psychological suffering that would come to rest on our respective couches.
(Yes, the husband is a psychiatrist too, benevolent thought to our poor children.)
During all the years that followed, day after day, hundreds of people entered this same small entrance hall, out of breath, a little lost, or still happy to find a place in which, at least I hope, they would know how to be received, seen, heard, contained, supported, and, I dare say, loved, too. “It’s a labor of love!” one of my supervisors had already launched at me, in an almost revolutionary tone, claiming what, indeed, is increasingly eclipsed by the overwhelming techno-scientific language of our time.
Today, I look at the divan in the entrance hall, with its Freudian allure. It seems to me as worn as it is proud, carrying on its fabric the density of all that has come to fall on it all these years; broken children, tired parents, couples on the verge of a nervous breakdown, teenagers flayed alive, mothers in mourning, all of them, so beautiful and beautiful, so genuinely vulnerable, powerful, human.
I see them again, and I would still dare to say, at the risk of appearing even more irrational: I feel them too, still. Each of them has left a trace in me which remains alive, which has transformed my outlook on the world and on the beings who inhabit it. I am filled with such gratitude.
Look at a couch, and cry. It’s my Saturday morning that begins. Not crying before a shoot seems indicated to me, but we are not always ready to act according to what is indicated.
We are going to leave this place blessed with its soft light to install our clinicians in an elsewhere which carries another energy, another story and which, I hope, will be able to be just as loving for those who come to settle there.
But in June which is the in-between, as for all those who move in July, there are this time of tears of nostalgia, rituals of farewell to the walls, to the woodwork, to the stained glass windows, to the neighborhood.
I don’t know what it is for you, but for me, times of passage, moments of changeover and transformations tend to come in clusters: like a flurry of renewal that often leaves me imagining that time is contracts, to bring about what is not quite there yet. The time of mourning and births, or even the kairos, this particular time which, among the Greeks, referred to a different form of temporality bursting into our chronos, seems to me to be particularly invited into my reality, in such a way that I wanted to make it the theme of the month here with you.
Perhaps you are putting away pieces of your own lives in boxes, or even in the middle of shopping for that prom dress or that costume to dress the one who will end a big stage in his or her young life. June and its end of cycle, its end-of-year shows, its annual reports and its Meritas galas, is therefore a time of contraction, where lots of little deaths will take place, just before births. Between the two, there is the time of suspension, that of wandering, that where, perhaps, before the fulgurance of the beginnings and the new, there is to sit down with our history.