Love Threads can be a painful book because it is about a hurtful relationship, but more important, it is a clear call to love and to love even when there is difficulty. A clear call to love spiritually and in body. It is essentially a transcendent calling, an ecstatic one—and a genuine journey of love.
These are poems whose obscurity win their way graciously with resonances that wistfully suggest sweetness and light without identifying many specifics or concrete manifestations of the sacred other. These poems make up invocations that appeal through the plausible and very humane nexus of dream, or vision, and longing. Continual hope for something solid that never appears or makes itself known in features that are not quite enough to satisfy a strong undercurrent of almost ambiguous desire. The poet makes clear his romantic trajectory in the early poems. It is not long before most readers will know where they are, as long as we are amenable to some real ambiguities of image and style. The title, “Beta” of the opening poem, seems to denote, as in physics, a variable, the speaker’s other coruscating from the first words of the book.
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The secrets of the ultimate temple of old Israel, radical, personal renewing in this world, a glass house, another garden, even a revisiting of Tao—the windup poems of this collection pull toward a general summation of spirit. . . . The world is as it has been in the rest of the book, but it is rather left behind—caught up in greater concerns. In some sense, these more expansive spiritual realms are also higher than the dear but desperate strife of the journey of the troubled relationship itself. They are the Alpha from which the entire journey begins. And where it ends.
Alan Naslund, author of Silk Weather
One of Thomas Ramey Watson's prominent forebears on his mother's side was Jacques LaRamee. A number of places in the upper Rocky Mountain West bear his name to this day. Laramie, Wyoming is best known.
Jacques was a renowned and influential explorer and fur-trapper. Because he was just, honest, and treated others, including the often-despised native Americans, well, he was held in high esteem. One winter, the story goes, the native Americans were starving, so they killed one of Ramee's cattle. He told his workers not to take action against them--they were hungry. Jacques shared with fellow free-trappers his theory that the world was wide and there was room enough for all. He had the courage to live his convictions and followed the beat of his own heart, not what was imposed on him from outside.
One of Ramee's progeny, psychotherapist, life coach, writer, and professor, Thomas Ramey Watson believes that journeying in various realms--of the mind, the physical world, and the soul--is central to enjoying a good life. The insights gleaned from becoming aware of the intersecting planes of existence lead us to fuller and more deeply lived lives.
Thomas Ramey Watson, Ph.D., is an affiliate faculty member of Regis University's College of Professional Studies in Denver, Colorado. He has served as the Episcopal chaplain (lay) for the Auraria Campus in Denver and taught English for the University of Colorado at Denver. He has trained as a psychotherapist and was named a Research Fellow at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University, a position he did not take, choosing to do postdoctoral work at Cambridge University instead.
He is the author of many scholarly writings, including an acclaimed book on Milton, Perversions, Originals, and Redemptions in Paradise Lost. His popular book about his Afghan hound and his counseling, Baltho, The Dog Who Owned a Man, is now available. His novel, Reading the Signs: A Paranormal Love Story will be published soon.
Dr. Watson is available for speaking engagements, teaching assignments, counseling, and coaching. He can be reached at trw@thomasrameywatson.com.
