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An Interview With Stephanie Matthews-Simonton

Most of the personality patterns associated with cancer are formulated during the first five or six years of life. That’s when children experience the lack of enough unconditional acceptance from one or both parents, feel responsible for that, feel there must be something wrong and bad about themselves.

Sunbeams

“I can’t believe that,” said Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said, in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Sunbeams

Using another as a means of satisfaction and security is not love. Love is never security; love is a state in which there is no desire to be secure; it is a state of vulnerability.

J. Krishnamurti

No Enemies, Except Ourselves

Book Review

Women conspire to be manipulated and used while simultaneously controlling others in subtle but equally manipulative ways, and neither behavior is necessary, to be who we are.

Iowa Diary

I often feel, in this mixture of silence, isolation, ignorance and pettiness, that if I were struck by a virus, I wouldn’t fight it; I’d give up and implode and disappear. Dangerous signals, those. Not that I will put any effort into taking my life — I feel in large measure that it’s already taken. So I have to leave this place, and fight to get it back.

Cartoon By Steven Fisher

The cartoon from the selection is available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

The Real Work

Poetry effects change by fiddling with the archetypes and getting at people’s dreams about a century before it actually effects historical change. A poet would be, in terms of the ecology of symbols, noting the main structural connections and seeing which parts of the symbol are no longer useful or applicable, though everyone is giving them credence.

Back From The Dead And Goofy As Ever

Book Review

Characters in the novels of Anne Tyler are imprisoned by people, places, things, by the whole fabric of their past lives, but they dream — some of them — of escaping. Their means of escape is through other people. They envision in the other a life more like the one they want to lead, and their decisions to change are sudden.

Editor’s Note

Sunbeams

When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.

Pablo Picasso