'A painted ship upon a painted ocean' is one of those lines of poetry that has stuck in my head from school days. Fragments of poems, stories, words and phrases, my own and others, are continually floating through and around in the soup of my mind. I've learned to treasure those times when there's deep silence and stillness and no mental chatter between me and the world. A few weeks ago, I spent a morning at Newcastle Beach enraptured by the magnificence of clouds and ocean merging into skycolours that seemed to praise and honour the day with their beauty. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we're so blessed by days such as this that we lose ourselves for brief, bright moments when our conscious minds become silent and we're left with eyes wide open and mouth agape at the splendour of our world. In Coleridge's poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a sailor shoots with his cross-bow the albatross that has lead his ship out of an ice flow in the Antarctic. Nature spirits punish his transgression by becalming the ship in unchartered waters near the Equator. 'Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.' The mariner is punished by the crew and forced to wear the albatross around his neck. The image has become part of our English language and to have an 'albatross around one's neck' is a phrase referring to a heavy burden of guilt that becomes an obstacle to success. As an art therapist, I've worked with people who've been attempting to wrest their lives back from serious addictions to drugs and/or alcohol. Many have spent most of their lives in addiction, often as a result of trauma in childhood or in later life. Most have to work hard to rise above the shame of their addiction and most unwittingly wear an albatross around their necks because of the damage they've inflicted upon themselves and others. Working with the arts is a way to transcend-even if only for brief moments-the shame and guilt that almost inevitably comes with addiction. Photography, in particular, has the capacity to freeze moments in time, to bring us out of ourselves and into the world. It has the language which reflects our return to emotional and mental health after a long and difficult journey where we may feel cursed by the Gods-we regain perspective, we refocus, we're able to see the bigger picture and we put ourselves back into the picture of our lives. Art is forgiving in that it bestows its healing gifts on all of us, without judgement. Art enables many people to become unstuck from patterns of self-destructiveness or self-loathing and regain their place in their own lives and in the world. It enables people to come home to themselves-as did the Ancient Mariner eventually come in sight of his homeland where he told his tale as a cautionary one to others lest they befall the same fate as he. I've worked with people who rediscover the pride they once had in themselves as human beings by becoming involved in an art form that enables them to become still and silent inside, to stop reliving the tortures of the past, of the wrongs done to and by them. They become more solid from the inside out, establishing a new sense of identity, one often built on the ruins and ashes of the past like a phoenix rising out of the devastation of their lives