I read Alicia von Stamwitz’s interview with Parker Palmer [“If Only We Would Listen,” November 2012] during the last weeks of the 2012 presidential race. It was perfect timing for Palmer’s uplifting message about communicating despite disagreements.
Parker Palmer’s three depressions could be reframed as periods of deep awareness, not as a disease. Psychologist James Hillman reinterpreted depression as a place where insight can occur. Hillman writes, “Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. . . . Depression lets you live down at the bottom. And to live down at the bottom means giving up the Christian thing about resurrection and coming out of it; ‘light at the end of the tunnel.’ No light fantasy; and then the depression at once becomes less dark. No hope, no despair. That message of hope only makes hopelessness darker. It’s the greatest instigator of the pharmaceutical industry ever!”
Prescription drugs for depression only mask symptoms that well up from deeply rooted primal patterns and archetypes. We should embrace depression without becoming it.
Give me a reason why you published Gillian Kendall’s “Easily Led” [November 2012]. Give me a reason for not canceling my subscription. Her essay is well written but trite, narcissistic, and vapid. The sex scenes are not the problem. The problem is simply the emptiness of it, eight pages of beautifully written nothingness — like the rainbow that reveals itself in the skin of a dead mackerel or a puddle of motor oil. If this is where The Sun is heading, then count me out.
What bothers me the most about Gillian Kendall’s “Easily Led” is that men like Nelson, who refuse to be monogamous, seem to have a special power over women. Many times I’ve wondered how these women can endure, much less enjoy, playing second fiddle to another.
It bothers me not only because I definitely do not have that power but also because, the few times I have had the opportunity to be unfaithful, I have denied myself the quick and easy pleasure because it doesn’t sit well with my conscience. The reward for my choice never comes, however. I write this alone in my house in the woods. Why am I perpetually single while less-ethical men seem to find love so easily and so frequently?
I love a good love story, and Gillian Kendall’s “Easily Led” is among the best I’ve read. That it’s a true story rather than fiction makes it even better. It reminds us that a love some would consider wrong can be even more right than the socially acceptable kind. Renegade love can feed our soul and transform our deepest self.
Gillian Kendall’s compassion, intellect, and brutal honesty give hope to those of us over fifty who also wish someday to reach our “wise old crone” stage of femininity. Her essay “Easily Led” delivered a double whammy: the knowledge that most of us spend our lives trying to re-create our first great love; and that, even thirty-five years and thirty pounds later, we are still capable of the miraculous psychosis known as “the real thing.”
The Sun is a great magazine. I read each issue cover to cover and am, for a few hours, taken away from this prison. You’ve taught me a lot. I just wish I had found you sooner. Seven years ago, if I’d had one quarter of the wisdom I’ve received from your magazine, I doubt I’d be in here today. There I was, learning about life the hard way, when all the lessons I needed were in your pages.
Never stop printing.
I’m not renewing my subscription. Though I love the personal writing, I hate the politics. I want to hear intensely personal individual truths, but I don’t want to be subjected to Sy Safransky’s — or anyone else’s — social, political, or economic views. It’s polarizing and poisoning. One of the rules of good writing is show, don’t tell. When The Sun shows, it’s moving. When it tells, it’s tiresome.
The Sun is brilliant. It brings compassion into my heart. Mostly I enjoy that the content is not sugarcoated.
As a recovering alcoholic who has lived with major depression all of her life, I feel less alone when I read The Sun. Each essay, photograph, story, or poem makes me feel more alive and connected to every other living thing.