Hamlet once remarked about the "unweeded garden that grows to seed" in reference to the state of Denmark, and he had good reason for thinking it so. Gardens are often ripe material for creating metaphors from and today I was musing on how the mind might be similarly described. The garden of the mind, which is never the same garden incidentally, is often afflicted by weeds, which if untended, consume it. In this metaphor, the weeds are the unhealthy thinking habits that we all have, comprising negative thinking, cognitive dissonances and the like. Two different people can make a heaven or a hell from the exact situation, depending on their way of thinking about it. Hamlet again, "For there is neither good nor bad; but thinking makes it so."

This got me cogitating about how easy it is to drop practices that are inherently good for rational thinking, such as CBT. When I stop regularly checking in and doing exercises such as ABCD grids, then I lapse quickly into the same irrational patterns. This is dangerous because our emotions are enmeshed with our thoughts, and our health and behaviour is often predicated upon both. So I will start again, finding and removing the same weeds I seized and burned last time. Like blackberry or privet, they just keep coming back.

Speaking of gardens, the Blue Mountains is one huge garden, albeit of the wild and largely unspoilt variety. Ann and I did a walk on the cliff-top track at Blackheath on Sunday. She hadn't seen the Grose Valley escarpments yet, so we started out at Evan's Lookout and made our way to within a short distance of Govett's Leap. She was tired, it was a hot day and there were phone conversations to be had!