The OGT Daily #24 Transitions

So bridges...I can't get enough clearly and in truth I cross one or two almost daily. In art therapy we use an old assessment called Door, Bridge, Volcano. It's hard to trace its origins. A Google search will lead you to obscure sites that have been deleted or this one post by a student at NYU which describes it:

https://www.numerade.com/notes/directory/school/1851/courses/543334/files/4286124

A more academic search will lead you to the Bridge Drawing Assessment (Hays & Lyons, 1981) and so the bridge has been for decades used as a symbol to interpret transitions in life. From my origins (and now current life) in Rhode Island, I moved to another island connected with bridges: Manhattan, its outer boroughs, and northern suburbs along the magnificent Hudson River.  (If I have a second true home it is along the Hudson River in the storied Hudson River valley of the Hudson River painting school, but that is for another day.)

Brooklyn Bridge and downtown Manhattan

No less than 21 bridges and tunnels connect the island of Manhattan to the world outside of it: the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Williamsburg, George Washington, Triborough, and of course the lesser known but all important to north bound travelers the Willis and Third Avenue bridges to the Bronx, and so many more.

Williamsburg Bridge

Once a film editor, who crossed under the East River from Brooklyn on the Westside Inter-borough Rapid Transit (IRT), the first subway in NYC, via the Clark and Joralemon Street Tunnels (completed in 1908), to work in the film studios of Hell's Kitchen and the Upper West Side - 

NYC's first subway line

I eventually hung up my editing gloves and splicing tape, to tend to a little one who needed feeding and walks over the Brooklyn Bridge.  

Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian walk where I strolled with my first child.

That little one had a sibling who required their own bedroom and space and not long after I found myself crossing the Henry Hudson bridge to reach Manhattan from the northern country of Westchester County. 

All of these expanses, beautiful markers of my transition from young graduate to adult to mother, and then searching for new ways to exist and have meaning in the world. They expanded before me in the form of roads and trains facilitated by the many bridges of life.

As little ones grew older and I needed a new focus, I became an art therapist, an educator and a writer and eventually a somatic therapist who combines arts based therapies with body based therapies. This work is enormously satisfying because it really works! It has transformed me and my body and done the same for many clients.  What's more it has expanded my journeys via plane and the internet across the country as well as into the wider world.  

The irony is that my home base is back in my original land of bridges - a true privilege I know - and I cross over the Sachuest River bridge almost daily to and from the grocery store on my way to my new home which is an old RI farm house with a few walls and flower garden.  I am truly grateful for these many transitions.

What are you grateful for today?

Sachuest River at night