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Sunbeams

To rise into love you must descend into your wounds.

Robert Bly

Sunbeams

Hell is made up of yearnings. The wicked don’t roast on beds of nails; they sit on comfortable chairs and are tortured with yearnings.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Sunbeams

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.

Andre Dubus

What The Shadow Knows

An Interview With John Sanford

The Jungian definition of the shadow was put well by Edward C. Whitmont, a New York analyst, who said that the shadow is “everything that has been rejected during the development of the personality because it did not fit into the ego ideal.” If you were raised a Christian with the ego ideal of being loving, morally upright, kind, and generous, then you’d have to repress any qualities you found in yourself that were antithetical to the ideal: anger, selfishness, crazy sexual fantasies, and so on. All these qualities that you split off would become the secondary personality called the shadow. And if that secondary personality became sufficiently isolated, you would become what’s known as a multiple personality.

May 1990

From My Notebook

The day with its big arms around me, whispering in my ear.

On Seeing A Sex Surrogate

Pounding the keys with my mouth stick, I wrote in my journal as quickly as I could about my experience, then switched off the computer and tried to nap. But I couldn’t. I was too happy. For the first time, I felt glad to be a man.

January 1990

Letter By Letter

Words become sentences in spite of themselves, as moments become a life.

Tales Of Lord Shantih

Once the Lord Shantih was asked to write down his teachings. He took a sheet of paper and covered one side with ink until it was a solid black. The other side he left clean.

Sunbeams

From infancy I was surrounded by music. . . . To hear my father play the piano was an ecstasy for me. When I was two or three, I would sit on the floor beside him as he played, and I would press my head against the piano in order to absorb the sound more completely. . . . When I was eleven years old, I heard the cello played for the first time. . . . When the first composition ended, I told my father, “Father, that is the most wonderful instrument I have ever heard. That is what I want to play.”

Pablo Casals, Joys and Sorrows

Living In Lotus

Ever since the therapist said, “Rebecca, if only you’d let go once in a while, relax, flow, you’d be a lot happier,” I’d been trying to write in the lotus position.