Dr. David Alter

And I said to him, I'm not sure I'm going to cure anything.

I'm not sure I'm going to do anything other than help you recognize what you're going through.

You're not going through a lump.

And he stopped.

The tears dried up and we had a conversation about loss.

But it was a conversation that was grounded in interpersonal connection.

I wasn't losing my spouse.

My spouse didn't, thank goodness, have cancer.

It was his experience.

And yet there was this layering on of the sense of having that individual experience in a social context.

So when you look at some of the Buddhist sutras, right, loving kindness meditations and what you may say in these meditative practices, if your practice goes beyond breathing or emptying your mind into a focus on a particular prayer or sutra, you recognize how reconnecting, rejoining they are.

There's a deep wisdom there.

It's terrifying to be alone in this world.

And sometimes we are.

So can we at least layer on a layer of connection?

for us as we go about life um something that we've always had but now we realize that you can connect with it somehow i would say it connects us with the original normal okay okay so you you mentioned when you were introducing me that i've gotten into photography and videography i don't take i'll take a portrait here and there but my photography is typically nature photography

I go on these adventures out into nature and I'll take photographs of what's out there.

What I mean by the original normal is that I was motivated to take my camera into the wilderness because when I am in sync with the wilderness, I'm in sync with the fact that we co-evolved with that wilderness.

We didn't just land on this planet.

We co-evolved on this planet.