From Fixation to Freedom - the Enneagram of Liberation

Does your partner want to go out on Friday nights when you prefer to curl up at home with a movie?

Does your neat-freak boyfriend always want to clean up your cluttered office?

Does your wife want to plan trips six months in advance while you're a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of person?

The truth is, opposites attract. People who are different from each other in fundamental ways often catch each other's attention. We are attracted to the very qualities we wish we had ourselves. A shy person looks for a mate who is outgoing and gregarious to provide a social circle, and the outgoing person may need to be with someone who won't compete with him for attention. It seems like the perfect match—that is, until those very differences that originally attracted us start to drive us crazy.

But these differences don't have to drive couples apart. Renee Baron, a marriage and family therapist with more than twenty-five years of experience, uses the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator™ to provide a practical program for learning to appreciate our differences, rather than fight over them. The MBTI™ is the most widely used personality indicator in the world. By discovering your innate personality preferences and those of your partner, you can stop having the same fights over and over again and start appreciating the gifts each of you offers to the relationship.

"There is much to digest and absorb here, principles and practices, history, symbolism, and poetic expression. This work requires only the caution that, as in much that is written about the Enneagram, we are dealing with subjective internal experience rather than objective external measurement. This is a book on experience of, rather than knowledge about. Come to it with a willingness to use the principles of optimal learning, be receptive and grounded in order to open your heart and mind with curiosity, and have the expectation of benefit. Then you will indeed benefit greatly from this fundamental, deep and penetrating work on the Enneagram and the Dao."

Pamela Porter’s poems celebrate a world awaiting discover. She opens this new collection with a poem entitles “An Offering” in which she brings to the ceremony “poems / for every season — of dreams born, / burning, broken” and, in particular, one that “begins like a perilous grace” to develop as “naked and tender and wanting.” Throughout, one hears and sees images that connect both the poet and reader to other dimensions. Always for Porter, there is the moment tentatively coming into being where the mundane is transformed into something totally unexpected and otherworldly. The image can be one that develops from the natural world as in “Branches, Early Spring,” where she sees how “the trees’ red sap set the sky on fire.” Another poem based in nature is “Naming” in which “small birds life into the sky / holding in their beaks / the words we don’t need to say.” Throughout, Porter’s poems celebrate moments when we experience “the beginning of the world again.”

“Porter’s poems are direct, clear, narrative in intent, yet embedded with dazzling imagery that brings scenes fully alive.” — Canadian Bookseller

The Toronto Star called him a legendary figure in Canadian writing, and indeed George Fetherling has been prolific in many genres: poetry, history, travel narrative, memoir, and cultural studies. Plans Deranged by Time is a representative selection from many of the twelve poetry collections he has published since the late 1960s. Like his novels and other fiction, many of these poems are anchored in a sense of place—often a very urban one. Filled with aphorism and sharp observation, the poems are spare of line and metaphor; they display a kind of elegant realism: loading docks, back doors of restaurants, doughnut shops with karate schools upstairs.

In the introduction, A.F. Moritz places Fetherling in the modern picaresque tradition in the aftermath of Eliot and Pound, highlighting his characteristic speaker as an itinerant cosmopolitan outsider, a kind of flâneur, impoverished and keenly observant, writing from a position of “communion-in-isolation.” He contrasts Fetherling’s contemplative intellectualism with that of the public intellectual and highlights this outsider’s fellow-feeling, making the poems indirectly political.