Author: Susan Holliday

A Strange Country

Psychotherapist Susan Holliday discovers an intricate world of imaginal possibility (a strange country) in an overlooked detail of a familiar landscape. Turning away from global events for a moment reminds us that change often starts with something small.

2,060 words: estimated reading time = 8 minutes

It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time, or the traveller who enters a strange country.1

– Bill Brandt, photographer (Camera in London)

I wake before dawn to the sound of a robin’s song piercing the morning chill. It takes me less than an hour to dress and make my way to the wrought iron gates which mark the entrance to Richmond Park. A heavy dew rests on the still shadowed grass, seeming almost to hover above it like an overnight spell. All around, the bracken is rusting into its autumn glory. I make my way up a gentle slope through a stand of birch, beech and oak trees to reach the crest of the park. Here the sun has just tipped over the horizon and cast every leaf, blade and branch into fine gold. A huddle of deer nuzzle the grass, making the most of the quiet before the weekend cyclists arrive. I must have walked in this park a thousand times and still it takes my breath away.

The park is always a ‘strange country’ to me, a correlation of ever-changing elements, light, season and subjectivity. At first I just see what I have seen before, but with every step my preconceptions fall to the floor. Unclad, my eyes begin to see beyond recognition. What I’ve come to realise, over many encounters with the park, is that as my perception deepens, it moves from the general and the big, to the particular and the small. On this occasion it shifts from the broadbrush palette of grass, tree and sky, to the particular curve of a branch; the tritone beech leaves rustling their blessings over the waking park; and the oceanic wave structure of ageing bark.

Walking for days at a time, nature writer Nan Shepherd notices how her perception deepens gradually, so:

The eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it has already seen.
So the ear, the other senses.2

This strikes me as a beautiful description of how we come to see more keenly. The word ‘gradual’ refers to something coming into fullness over time (from Latin gradus, meaning ‘step’). Gradually, we see what we ‘didn’t see before’. We begin to see ‘in a new way’.

So it is only on my way back down the slope, as I re-enter the shadows, that I notice the dazzling spiders’ webs which jewel the bracken. They were there all along. I passed them on my way up. I just didn’t have eyes keen enough to see them. Crouching down now, to take a closer look, I see a lattice of tiny pearls, strung together with impossible intricacy. To me, their beauty stems in part from their near perfection (the essential word here being ‘near’). Each little rectangle of negative space is uneven, each one an incomparable structure, building through repetition into something greater than the sum of its parts. These lines have not been measured or calculated. They have been drawn through countless micro movements of the spider’s body.

A strange country. Showing: Jewelled spider's web. Photograph by Susan Holliday 2025
Jewelled spider’s web. Photograph: Susan Holliday © 2025

A strange country: the  gift of intricate hinterlands

Each web is a ‘strange country’ all by itself. The longer I look, the more I feel drawn into this other world. I imagine any one of these webs would be fine enough to grace a noblewoman’s robes in a Tudor court. I find myself wondering what it might be like to shrink down in size, to place my feet on its little ladders, or to hold one of the pearls in my hand. Children quite naturally see this way. The most unremarkable detail becomes an opening onto an intricate hinterland. Through their imagination and the suspension of preconception, these details become enormous. We have only to think of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, or the wardrobe in C.S Lewis’ Narnia adventures to remember the power of this portal vision.

And this brings me to the heart of the matter. For as adults we tend to regard the ‘small’ as lesser, as marginal and of little consequence. This has never been more so than at a time when everything is valued according to quantity and scale. The small can so easily be dismissed as a mere trifle, rather than valued as a coherent whole with its own integrity and particularity.

Indigenous peoples, artists, philosophers and mystics have long held a different view, in which every speck of the whole reveals universal patterns and principles. Fourteenth-century mystic, Julian of Norwich, encapsulated the essential paradox of the ‘great little thing’ in one of her revelations:

He showed me a little thing the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and I thought, ‘What can this be?’

 And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’.3

Four hundred years later, William Blake encouraged us to “see a world in a grain of sand”.4 Romantic fancy, some might say. In defence of the small, I could stray into the ways in which quantum mechanics and fractal geometry are opening up our contemporary understanding of the complexity and correspondence of micro and macro dimensions of our world; the profound influence of the minute. But I want to stay with my own experience, to say something about why I believe we need to turn our attention away from the titanic battles, the larger-than-life characters, the numbers, trends and averages, and lean towards the small, the slight and the fleeting.

They say ‘the devil is in the detail’, but maybe the sacred is there too. I don’t mean this in any religious sense, but in the context of everyday experience. We live in an age of distraction and consumption fuelled by fear of boredom and emptiness. As a psychotherapist, this word ‘boredom’ has intrigued me for years. It comes up a lot, either in the sense that life has become ‘boring’, or that a person fears they will be perceived as ‘boring’. It seems to me that ‘boring’ is the state we arrive at when we believe there is ‘nothing much to see here’, or perhaps ‘nothing new’. Boring is the ‘same-old-same-old’. It feasts on abstractions and averages, on preconceptions and generalisations.

‘Boring’ signals I have lost faith that within me, or in front of me, there could be more than meets the eye. More to be discovered. More strangeness. Perhaps I believe that I’ve seen all there is to be seen, or I’ve seen it all before. So I stop looking, or I start looking elsewhere. This is a bit like looking down from an airplane window on an outstretched continent, and believing it to be boring, simply because at this height (and at this speed) I can’t see the incomparable particularity, the infinitely varied and ever-changing detail of its topography. At close quarters, what I thought was entirely self-evident reveals itself to be a ‘strange country’, full of surprises and unplumbed depths. 

Showing: Bark detail. Photograph by Susan Holliday, 2025
Bark detail. Photograph: Susan Holliday © 2025

Each of us contains an inner landscape. A place, like the park, we may have visited many times. Perhaps we think we have seen it all. Until one day, if we are really paying attention, we notice a slight shift, a little anomaly, an overlooked detail ‘for the first time’. Virginia Woolf suggests these glimpses are “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”.5 How often we overlook or dismiss these curious intimations. Un-midwifed by our beholding, the inkling moment is stillborn. Yet the moment we start to notice the details of our experience, life no longer seems so boring, so barren.

Just imagine how this simple practice of attending to little daily miracles could change our relationship to each other and to the whole. When every detail (like the jewelled spider’s web) opens a door onto a world of imagination and possibility, life feels rich and vital. Perhaps then we would no longer need to consume our way out of emptiness.

Finding my niche

We differentiate ourselves through our particularity. It is through paying attention to the subtle qualities and slight nuances of character that we start to appreciate we are not just a number, a statistic or a type. Each of us is one of a kind. There is only one of us in all time.

In his 2021 book, The Journey of Soul Initiation, Bill Plotkin articulates the principle that each of us occupies a distinct ‘ecological niche’:

Soul, for me, is an ecological concept, not a psychological one nor a spiritual or religious one. Specifically, by Soul I mean a person or thing’s unique ecological niche in the Earth community.6

Hauled into the trawler nets of socio-economic grouping, diagnostic typologies, or target markets, it can feel increasingly challenging to distinguish our authentic singularity, the significance of our particular ecological niche.

Could it be that the current polarisation of society into crude groupings of ideology and identity originates in a deep wound, which is the experience of not mattering in our smallness. If everything around me reinforces the narrative that what I imagine, feel, think and long for is of little importance ‘in the grand scheme of things’; if what I choose to do with my life doesn’t really matter ‘in the end’, then I will find my sense of mattering through identifying with something larger. Through this amalgamation, I lose sight of the details which define my singular significance.

The tragedy is that this obscuring of the little things which make me uniquely ‘me’ robs the wider whole of my particular contribution. Collectively, this self-effacement quickens the degeneration of the planet.

If I am to find my unique ecological niche in the Earth community, I will need to give some time to wandering about the inner ‘park’ of my life, until my eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it has already seen. Sensing my responsibility to my own particularity, I no longer look to ‘kill time’ (with distraction and consumption), but to realise my life ‘through time’ in all its richness and distinction.

Perhaps the Earth can teach us

Absorbed in the intricacy of the little spider’s web, my eye flickers between the lines and the spaces between them, the negative shapes. I start thinking how the whole structure of the web depends on these little spaces. I begin to breathe more deeply, as though taking in this airy structure as a blueprint for my own existence. Like most of us, my life is pretty crammed, packed with activity, crowded with ideas, obligations and intentions. Loaded with stuff. Drawn into the ‘strange country’ of the little web, I begin to sense what it might be like to live a more spacious life.   

It occurs to me then, perhaps the Earth can teach us. Perhaps the small, the slight and the fleeting, in all their intimate beauty and particular significance, can show us other ways of living. To heed this minute and infinite intelligence, we may need to create little gaps in our lives, tiny spaces. Change starts with something very small. A deep breath, perhaps.

Walking on down the slope, I feel a little lighter.

Susan’s references

  1. Bill Brandt, Camera in London (Focal, 1948)
  2. Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (Canongate Books, 2011)
  3. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Classics, 1998)
  4. William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, A Choice of Blake’s Verse (Faber and Faber, 1970)
  5. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (The Hogarth Press, 1927)
  6. Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation (New World Library, 2021)

Find more

Susan Holliday is a psychotherapist and photographer and you can find more of her writing at her website.  

Susan’s book Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart was published by Matador in 2021. You can read James Murray-White‘s review for ClimateCultures, Seeing Nature’s Wonders in the Human Heart.

Susan Holliday

Susan Holliday

A psychotherapist and writer committed to the rewilding of human nature, exploring the correlation between despoiling our natural world and the desolation of the human spirit ...
Read More

A Nature More Resilient

Responding to our Environmental Keywords post on ‘Resilience’, psychotherapist Susan Holliday uses a story from her book Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart to seek a more resilient nature, finding signs that collective stresses need not overwhelm us.

1,870 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes

Ralph tells me he has come to therapy to learn how to be more resilient. His broad frame perches awkwardly, as though the softness of the chair threatens to emasculate him. Arms heavy with a calligraphy of tattoos — serpents, skulls, a bird of prey — every inch of his body communicates toughness. Only his eyes give him away. His look is haunted, as though a ghost stalks through the inner chambers of his being.

The record company Ralph works for operates in a competitive market. Its staff are rewarded for high-octane performance and long hours. Like his colleagues, Ralph works hard and plays hard. In recent months his sleep has been disturbed by night terrors, which can no longer be assuaged through drinking. He feels he has reached a breaking point. Ralph blames himself for not being tougher. This brings us to the heart of the matter, for Ralph is always trying to be tougher. The only alternative he can see to being tough is to give in to being weak.

“What might it look like to be more resilient?” I ask. Perplexed by the question, Ralph replies “I’d be able to take the heat, like everyone else.” I feel him bristle with irritation. He wants solutions from me, not daft questions. “How do you take the heat at the moment?” I persist. Looking me straight in the eye he replies, “I just keep going. I try harder.”

Taking the heat

Ralph is like a moon unable to turn away from the sun. It simply hasn’t occurred to him that there might be a natural limit to the amount of heat he can take. Competition in the marketplace keeps getting hotter. Everyone is stressed. They just have to deal with it. Resilience in this relentlessly ratcheted environment begins to fail. Under the skin, beneath the protective totems of toughness, Ralph is beginning to crack. His intimate anguish unfolds out of sight. The face he presents to the world is indestructible.

Ralph’s tattoos intrigue me. What might these sentinels be guarding, I wonder. What treasure might warrant this level of protection? We begin by exploring the qualities of his shield — tough, hard, impenetrable, deflecting, protecting. Then, looking for the concealed aspect, I suggest we reverse the tattoo qualities (like a negative in the darkroom). Together we begin to discern the inverse faces of his toughness — soft, tender, yielding, revealing, allowing. Risking everything, I ask Ralph if there might be something he secretly wishes to reveal, something he longs to allow, something he might want to feel. His face flushes. He looks away.

Ralph does not show up for his next session. Nor the one after that. I fear I have lost him. To my surprise, he returns the following week carrying a battered old shoe box covered in faded stickers. Opening the lid Ralph shows me a roughly packaged pile of cassette tapes. A secret hoard of songs, written and recorded when he was just fifteen. This is the first time he has opened the box in twenty years.

Ralph recalls the morning he woke to find his father missing from the breakfast table. A neatly written note explained that he had left them to be with a woman he had met the year before at a conference in Germany. Ralph’s mother said his father was ‘a lousy piece of shit’ and they were better off without him. He would get over it. In the months that followed she soldiered on, modelling a kind of stoic fortitude. Bewildered and bereft, Ralph found himself being the ‘man around the house’, looking out for his mother and three sisters. He had to be strong, for all their sakes.

In the concealed safety of his bedroom the tender adolescent survived — for a while. Wrapped around his guitar he wrote songs about anger and fear, about love and loss. Music stopped him dying inside. No one listened. Hollowed out with forbidden grief for his father, Ralph’s emotional world remained hidden. Shameful evidence of his ‘weakness’. Increasingly he found himself in trouble at school. He got into fights and began taking drugs. They helped block out his vulnerability, his yearning, his grief. In the years since then he has walked through life as a shadow artist, toughing it out organising gigs and record deals for musicians with half his raw talent.

Ralph asks me if I would like to hear one of his songs. He has brought an old cassette player. Slowly, tentatively, he presses the red button to ‘play’. A rough and tender voice pierces the space between us. It is shot through with the raw edge of adolescent loss. Ralph observes me intently. He sees that I’m moved. He knows then that something about his expression of vulnerability is good.

Listening to these songs together in the weeks that follow, Ralph and I begin to discern that sensitivity (not weakness) is the hidden aspect which lies on the other side of his armoured strength. In time he is able to acknowledge that he has never stopped loving his father. He misses him every day. Connected once more to the vulnerability of his heart, he is surprised to discover that love is a power. It stirs in him now with a force that feels unbreakable.

A more resilient nature

It seems that ‘toughness’ has become the exclusive aspect to which we aspire. We admire ‘nerves of steel’ and ‘rock-hard determination’. We ‘hammer out’ and ‘battle through’ our problems. We spin the promise that through therapy and mindfulness we can withstand the intolerable ratcheting up of societal stresses. This confounding of resilience with a limitless capacity to absorb pressure masks the structural problems behind so much of our suffering. It locates the cause of our distress in failures of individual resilience. Worse still perhaps, in our quest to mask our vulnerability, to override our sensitivity and ultimately to deny the inconvenient truth of human limitation, we stuff ourselves with things. Mountains of things.

This compulsive consumption is costing us the earth.

In her highly influential TED talk ‘The Power of Vulnerability’, Brené Brown challenges the way we understand our relationship to vulnerability, arguing that our sensitivity to feeling lies at the very heart of our ability to survive and to thrive: “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability and authenticity. If we want greater clarity or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”

Author of The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine Aron suggests that heightened sensitivity manifests in a certain proportion of all higher species, because it is essential for the survival, expression and evolution of the whole group. As a community of beings we are in effect all aspects of one indivisible skin, which needs to be both tough enough to protect and sensitive enough to feel.

Showing bleached coral

We can see this intimate correlation between sensitivity and toughness throughout the natural world. Reef-building corals for example survive for millennia in a continual cycle of impact and renewal. The living polyps may only be a few years old, but they rely on an underlying skeleton that can live for thousands of years. These corals can adapt to withstand short periods of elevated seawater temperatures. Sensing the warming waters, they expel the microscopic marine algae that live in their tissues exposing the white exoskeleton beneath and losing their vibrant colours. This coral bleaching is a natural process combining sensitivity and strength. It enables the reef to adapt to summer months when the ocean temperatures are warmer.

In recent years sustained marine heatwaves have led to mass coral bleaching events. The Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest reef system, has already suffered five mass bleaching events since 1998. The events in 2016 and 2017 alone led to the death of 50% of the iconic reef. This unspeakable tragedy points to a condition of nature, concerning which we are increasingly in denial: Nature, including human nature, operates within limits.

Like coral reefs, we too are deformed under excessive stress. The damage begins at the more vulnerable margins, with those of us who are by nature, or through poverty, or by age or youth, more sensitive. But in the end the unbound stresses will affect us all.

Increasingly I see the people who courageously step into the therapy room as equivalents to canaries in the coalmine. Their sensitivity alerts the wider community to psychological toxins and rising temperatures in our collective environment which threaten to overwhelm the balance and limits of resilience in our human ecology as a whole. If we could begin to listen to these more tender voices, rather than medicating them into dumb silence, if we could stop urging people like Ralph to toughen up, we might recover qualities of sensitivity that makes us more resilient as a community.

Could it be that the explosion in mental health problems in people of all ages and backgrounds is not a straightforward failure of individual resilience, but a sign that collective stresses are overwhelming the inherent limits of our shared nature? Ralph’s story reminds us that the waters of our human ecology are overheating. At this point it seems we have two choices. We calcify. Through medication, consumption and addiction we numb the sentient organs of perception that feel. Or we crack, as the colour bleaches out of our lives. The people I worry most about are those who choose to calcify. They are often the ones who head up our corporate organisations and lead our nations. Shorn of their capacity to feel they become a danger to themselves and to others. Increasingly they lead us into war and to the irreparable despoiling of our planet.

A Nature More resilient: showing healthy coral

Of course, there is a third choice. We could hold the reciprocal qualities of strength and sensitivity in equal regard. We could understand that resilience depends on their intimate correlation.

Find out more

Susan Holliday’s book Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart (2021) is published by Matador. You can read fellow ClimateCultures member James Murray-White’s review for us, Seeing Nature’s Wonders in the Human Heart. Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild, says of the book: “A wonderful book. Reminded me of The Examined Life or Love’s Executioner, but with an added ecological perspective I’d been thirsting for.”

Susan mentions Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead (Penguin, 2015). You can view Brené’s TED talk ‘The Power of Vulnerability’ at her website.

Elaine Aron’s book, The Highly Sensitive Person (2017) is published by Harper Collins.

Susan contributed this piece in response to an earlier post in our series on Environmental Keywords, Growing With the Word ‘Resilience’, which offers reflections on that word from participants at a recent workshop at the University of Bristol. Environmental Keywords is part of a short project led by Dr Paul Merchant of the University of Bristol’s Centre for Environmental Humanities.

Susan Holliday

Susan Holliday

A psychotherapist and writer committed to the rewilding of human nature, exploring the correlation between despoiling our natural world and the desolation of the human spirit ...
Read More