The albatross is among the most capable creatures on earth. It can fly for years without landing. It navigates open ocean through storm and calm alike, covering distances that would exhaust almost any other living thing. It does not fight the wind — it reads it, rides it, uses it. Its wingspan can reach eleven feet. It mates for life. It is, in the most literal sense, built for the long journey.
It is also, in Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, one of the most haunting symbols in English literature. The mariner shoots the albatross — a creature the crew had considered good fortune — and what follows is devastation: becalmed waters, death, isolation, and the weight of the dead bird hung around his neck as both punishment and reminder.
To wear the albatross is to carry something you cannot put down. A loss. A choice. A grief that doesn't have a clean ending. Most people who find their way to therapy are carrying something exactly like that.
But the poem doesn't end in despair. The mariner finds his way through — not by escaping what happened, but by learning to see differently. By blessing what he once overlooked. By telling the story. That movement — from burden to meaning, from isolation to connection — is, in many ways, the shape of therapeutic work.
What strikes me most about albatrosses — the actual birds, not the symbol — is that they are not born into their full capacity. Young albatrosses spend years learning to fly. They practice on cliffs, crash, try again. The wingspan that eventually carries them across thousands of miles of open ocean is not given; it is developed through exposure to difficulty.
They are built by the very conditions that seem like they should break them. The wind that batters them is the same wind that sustains them. They learn, over years, to stop fighting what cannot be controlled and to find the dynamic tension that makes long flight possible.
I find that this maps onto human experience with remarkable precision. The things that form us are rarely comfortable. The losses, the failures, the seasons of uncertainty — these are not obstacles to becoming who we are meant to be. In many cases, they are the mechanism of it.
This is not a case for suffering. It is a case for not wasting it. For finding, in the company of a trusted guide, what the difficulty has to teach — and what kind of person it is asking you to become.
I am Jonathon Fancher, a Licensed Professional Counselor in the state of Kansas. I have spent many years sitting with people in the storms of life — in the grief that doesn't resolve cleanly, in the confusion of identity development, in the marriages that need more than good intentions, in the adolescent years that feel like trying to fly before you know how.
I chose the albatross not as a symbol of triumph, but as a symbol of the whole arc. The burden and the grace. The storm and the soaring. What I have come to believe — through my own life and through the privilege of witnessing others' — is that healing rarely looks like the absence of difficulty, but rather a different relationship to it.
My work is grounded in Existential Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Narrative Therapy, and Internal Family Systems. These are not techniques I apply to people — they are languages I use to help people understand themselves. The goal is never symptom management alone. The goal is formation: becoming more fully, more honestly, more freely yourself.
I work with adolescents, adults, couples, and families. I offer sessions in person and via telehealth. When the situation calls for it, I work outdoors — because sometimes the walls of an office are not where the real conversation wants to happen.
If you have found your way here, you are likely enduring something. I am not here to fix it for you. I am here to sit with you through it — and to hold hope on your behalf until you are ready to hold it yourself.
These are not aspirational words. They are a description of the process. Strength to face what is real. Endurance to stay in it. Formation as the outcome — not a fixed destination, but an ongoing becoming.