Don’t turn your head.
Keep looking at the bandaged place.
This is where the light enters you.
This quote is attributed to Rumi.
His words give me hope:
I like to think they might even be true.
Tag: reading
Other people’s words again
A word in your ear about the Brontes …
Lena has brought Wuthering Heights with her. It’s one of her favorites; she’s read it six times. Aviva borrowed it from her once but found Heathcliff repellent, Catherine incomprehensible. The characters gnashed their teeth, shrieked, struck their heads on hard objects until they bled. Everyone sneered and was agitated. Aviva doesn’t understand what Lena finds so compelling.
“It’s the way Heathcliff can’t think about anything but her,” says Lena. “The way he would rather be damned to hell — and they really believed in hell back then — than be separated from her.”
“I wouldn’t want him to think about me even for a minute,” says Aviva. “Him and those dogs? Please.”from ‘The Virgins’
by Pamela Erens.
I’ve never been a fan of the Brontes. (Jane and Rochester? Please.)
It appears I’m in good company!
Other people’s words
Emetophobia has governed my life, with a fluctuating intensity of tyranny, for some thirty-five years. Nothing — not the thousands of psychotherapy appointments I’ve sat through, not the dozens of medications I’ve taken, not the hypnosis I underwent when I was eighteen, not the stomach viruses I’ve contracted and withstood without vomiting — has succeeded in stamping it out …
From ‘My age of anxiety’
by Scott Stossel
Sometimes, no cure exists for our ills.
We learn — slowly, painfully — to co-exist with them:
We learn to strive for grace.
♦
Note: Click on the following link if you want to know more about emetophobia. And for a review of the book I’ve quoted from, and more insight into anxiety as well as emetophobia, see Sally Satel’s article from The Millions.
twenty-one words 