A Seagull Named Papa is a gentle but powerful exploration of those aspects of our experience that invite and sometimes challenge us to develop such qualities as courage, compassion, tolerance, humility, patience, defiance and perseverance. Using compelling illustrations from traditional tales, classic literature, scripture, psychology, film, history and his own personal and professional life, Barry Robinson relies on the ancient wisdom of storytelling in a manner, not unlike the shanachie of his Irish ancestors. You will be invited to laugh, cry and wonder at the profoundly moving experiences of a violent ex-convict who is healed by a simple invitation, an eight-year-old girl with freckles trying to recover from school-yard name-calling, a bullying supervisor stopped in his tracks, an eighty-seven-year-old woman who never got to say goodbye to her long-lost papa, and married therapists fortuitously visited by a clown.Drawing from many years of experience in caring for others, Barry invites you to explore your own journey toward wholeness and dignity. At the heart of this book is the author’s belief that we are “visited” by our “essential self” throughout our lives. The person we were meant to be, who was there in the very beginning, an essence that calls us to be who we really are. “If we take the risk of growing down, we may just find, indeed – I believe that we will ultimately find – that there are forces in the universe, both above us and beneath us that mean us well…beneath the very heart of things…there is a grace that means to make wonders of us in the end.”