Issue № 116
Being enough
Ten years of claiming space, improving boundaries, tightening the screws on the imagineering mind — and still there are more things to do than can possibly ever be finished. The issue arrives, somewhat terrified, at the only alternative left: there’s no need to change anything. The current situation isn’t a problem to solve. It might be possible to simply be comfortable with the way things are.
Issue № 112
The balance
The river doesn’t doubt — it’s sure to get where it’s going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else. That image floats through an issue honestly reckoning with the difference between a pendulum that swings back and an arc that simply moves forward. The helper archetype burns out. The well, it turns out, doesn’t run dry from drawing too quickly. Bradbury was right: the trick is to tip ourselves over.
Issue № 66
Moving scenery
Every process has a magic middle step that resists being subdivided — and that tension, when you get it just right, is where the magic actually happens. The issue turns on the Japanese shokunin ethic of honor in the work itself, regardless of recognition, and arrives at a quietly subversive question: what if, rather than doing what we must before what we wish, we simply flipped the order?
Issue № 24
I probably need to work on this
Treating yourself as if you were someone you care about turns out to be genuinely difficult. The Rescuer in the Karpman Drama Triangle believes he’s outgrown his old habit of rushing in to fix everything — and then chuckles nervously. And quite often there is absolutely nothing we can do to help, but every once in a great while there’s something small, and that’s the one to do.