Axe Wood Quotes

Sometimes life gets in your way. it gets all up in your damn way. But it doesn't get all up in your damn way because it wants you to just give up and let it take control. Life doesn't get all up in your damn way because it just wants you to hand it all over and be carried along. Life wants you to fight it Learn how to make it your own. it wants you to grab and axe and hack through the wood. It wants you to get a sledgehammer and break through concrete. It wants you to grab a torch and burn through the metal and steel until you can reach through and grab it. Life wants you to grab all the organized, the alphabetized, the chronological, the sequenced. It wants you to mix it all together, stir it up, blend it.

The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them.

Violence harms the one who does it as much as the one who receives it. You could cut down a tree with an axe. The axe does violence to the tree, and escapes unharmed. Is that how you see it? Wood is soft compared to steel, but the sharp steel is dulled as it chops, and the sap of the tree will rust and pit it. The mighty axe does violence to the helpless tree, and is harmed by it. So it is with men, though the harm is in the spirit.

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.

He roared at me furiously for ten minutes after he finally managed to put out the sulky and determined fire, calling me a witless muttonheaded spawn of pig farmers-"My father's a wood-cutter," I said- "adOf axe-swinging lummocks!" he snarled.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good God, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Time is the echo of an axe Within a wood.

Axes bit wood into pieces and hammers nailed it back together. Humans could never accept the world as it was and live in it. They were always breaking it and living amongst the shattered pieces.

I met a girl in a U-Haul. A beautiful girl And I fell for her. I fell hard. Unfortunately, sometimes life gets in the way. Life definitely got in my way. It got all up in my damn way, Life blocked the door with a stack of wooden 2x4's nailed together and attached to a fifteen inch concrete wall behind a row of solid steel bars, bolted to a titanium frame that no matter how hard I shoved against it- It wouldn't budge. Sometimes life doesn't budge. It just gets all up in your damn way. It blocked my plans, my dreams, my desires, my wishes, my wants, my needs. It blocked out that beautiful girl That I fell so hard for. Life tries to tell you what's best for you What should be most important to you What should come in first Or second Or third. I tried so hard to keep it all organized, alphabetized, stacked in chronological order, everything in its perfect space, its perfect place. I thought that's what life wanted me to do. This is what life needed for me to do. Right? Keep it all in sequence? Sometimes, life gets in your way. It gets all up in your damn way. But it doesn't get all up in your damn way because it wants you to just give up and let it take control. Life doesn't get all up in your damn way because it just wants you to hand it all over and be carried along. Life wants you to fight it. It wants you to grab an axe and hack through the wood. It wants you to get a sledgehammer and break through the concrete. It wants you to grab a torch and burn through the metal and steel until you can reach through and grab it. Life wants you to grab all the organized, the alphabetized, the chronological, the sequenced. It wants you to mix it all together, stir it up, blend it. Life doesn't want you to let it tell you that your little brother should be the only thing that comes first. Life doesn't want you to let it tell you that your career and your education should be the only thing that comes in second. And life definitely doesn't want me To just let it tell me that the girl I met, The beautiful, strong, amazing, resilient girl That I fell so hard for Should only come in third. Life knows. Life is trying to tell me That the girl I love, The girl I fell So hard for? There's room for her in first. I'm putting her first.

L'union libre [Freedom of Love]" My wife with the hair of a wood fire With the thoughts of heat lightning With the waist of an hourglass With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes With the tongue of an unbelievable stone My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof And of steam on the panes My wife with shoulders of champagne And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice My wife with wrists of matches My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts With fingers of mown hay My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut And of Midsummer Night Of privet and of an angelfish nest With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill My wife with legs of flares With the movements of clockwork and despair My wife with calves of eldertree pith My wife with feet of initials With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking My wife with a neck of unpearled barley My wife with a throat of the valley of gold Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent With breasts of night My wife with breasts of a marine molehill My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days With the belly of a gigantic claw My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically With a back of quicksilver With a back of light With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking My wife with hips of a skiff With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers And of shafts of white peacock plumes Of an insensible pendulum My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos My wife with buttocks of swans' backs My wife with buttocks of spring With the sex of an iris My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat My wife with a sex of mirror My wife with eyes full of tears With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle My wife with savanna eyes My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

Whirrun ignored ‘em. ‘Then, when I’ve got two cut,’ and he dropped a pale slab of cheese on one slice then slapped the other on top like he was catching a fly, ‘I trap the cheese between then, and there you have it!’ ‘Bread and cheese.’ Yon weighed the half-loaf in one hand and the cheese in the other. ‘Just the same as I’ve got.’ And he bit off the cheese and tossed it to Scorry. Whirrun sighed. ‘Have none of you no vision?’ He held up his masterpiece to such light as there was, which was almost none. ‘This is no more bread and cheese than a fine axe is wood and iron, or a live person is meat and har.’ ‘What is it, then?’ asked Drfod, rocking back from his wet wood and tossing the flint aside in disgust. ‘A whole new thing. A forging of the humble part of bread and cheese into a greater whole. I call it … a cheese-trap.’ Whirrun took a dainty nibble from one corner. ‘Oh, yes, my friends. This tastes like … progress…

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.

I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

It's a Buddhist concept. Nonduality. It's about oneness, about how things that seem to be separate are really connected to one another. There are no separations...This is not just a piece of wood. This is also the clouds that brought the rain that watered the tree, and the birds that nested in it and the squirrels that fed on its nuts. It is also the food my grandparents fed me that made me strong enough to cut the tree, and it's the steel in the axe I used. And it's how you know your fox, which allowed you to carve him yesterday. And it's the story you will tell your children when you give this to them. All these things are separate but also one, inseparable. Do you see?

I thought I heard an axe chop in the woods It broke the dream; and woke up dreaming on a train. It must have been a thousand years ago In some old mountain sawmill of Japan. A horde of excess poets and unwed girls And I that night prowled Tokyo like a bear Tracking the human future Of intelligence and despair.

I have now gone through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees. Here they lie; and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow.

I knew a man who, in the age of chain-saws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.

The three weapons to use against axe cuts are: (a) sense enough not to get cut, (b) a good working knowledge of how to apply a tourniquet, if the worst occurs, and (c) a philosophical attitude.

He caught the first man in the back of the knee before they even knew he was there, and the heavy axehead split flesh and bone like rotten wood. Logs that bleed, Tyrion thought inanely as the second man came for him. Tyrion ducked under his sword, lashed out with the axe, the man reeled backward... and Catelyn Stark stepped up behind him and opened his throat. The horseman remembered an urgent engagement elsewhere and galloped off suddenly.

There now remain only a few books, which they call books of the lesser prophets; and as I have already shown that the greater are impostors, it would be cowardice to disturb the repose of the little ones. Let them sleep, then, in the arms of their nurses, the priests, and both be forgotten together. I have now gone through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees. Here they lie; and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow.

The signs, newspapers, magazines are no longer random symbols. They're full of significance: doors, eyes, hands, men, meat, water, hearts, dagger-axes, earth, rain, trees, suns and moons, wood, fire, power, gold, and short-tail birds.

I want to see the Parthenon by moonlight.' I had my way. They floodlight it now, to great advantage I am told, but it was not so then, and since it was late in the year there were few tourists. My companions were all intelligent men, including my own husband, and they had the sense to stay mute. I suppose, being a woman, I confuse beauty with sentiment, but, as I looked on the Parthenon for the first time in my life, I found myself crying. It had never happened to me before. Your sunset weepers I despise. It was not full moon, or anywhere near it. The half circle put me in mind of the labrys, the Cretan double axe, and the pillars were the most ghostly in consequence. What a shock for the modern aesthete, I thought when my crying was done, if he could see the ruddy glow of colour, the painted eyes, the garish lips, the orange-reds and blues that were there once, and Athene herself a giantess on her pedestal touched by the rising sun. Even in those distant times the exigencies of a state religion had brought their own traffic, the buying and selling of doves, of trinkets: to find himself, a man had to go to the woods, to the hills. "Come on," said Stephen. "It's beautiful and stark, if you like, but so is St. Pancras station at 4 A.M. It depends on your association of ideas." We crammed into Burns's small car, and went back to our hotel. ("The Chamois")

But there will come a time, soon enough, when even that ancient wood will fall to the axe, to grant man his grazing land, his settlements, his towers and walls. He thinks, in his ignorance, to tame the very earth, to force the very ocean to his will. And so he will lay waste the body of the mother who gave him birth; and will not know what he does. The old ways will be forgotten, Fainne, no matter what we do. A new age begins; an age of darkness in which those who walk the earth are cut off from the very things which give them life.

I hear a bird sing or a dog bark or the sound of an axe on wood - and I feel a sense of stability, I feel that I am important, that I am continuous and integral.

Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house

Can a split quill write fair script? Can a blunt axe cut wood for the fire? Can a cripple please a lady?

there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.

In the leaping light, as the fresh wood blazed up, Frodo saw many grey shapes spring over the ring of stones. More and more followed. Through the throat of one huge leader Aragorn passed his sword with a thrust; with a great sweep Boromir hewed the head off another. Beside them Gimli stood with his stout legs apart, wielding his dwarf-axe. The bow of Legolas was singing.

On a small square, wood is being cut for the city school. Cords of healthy, crisp timber are piled high and melt slowly, one log after another, under the saws and axes of workmen. Ah, timber, trustworthy, honest, true matter of reality, bright and completely decent, the embodiment of the decency and prose of life! However deep you look into its core, you cannot find anything that is not apparent on its evenly smiling surface, shining with that warm, assured glow of its fibrous pulp woven in a likeness of the human body. In each fresh section of a cut log a new face og the human body. In each fresh section of a cut log a new face appears, always smiling and golden. Oh, the strange complexion of timber, warm eithout exaltation, completely sound, fragrant, and pleasant!

When Godric banished Fairweather and Tune, they all three bled for it, and part of Godric snaked off too, nevermore to come again. And it's Godric's flesh that Ailred's cough cleaves to like an axe. And when brave Mouse went down off Wales, he bore to the bottom the cut of Godric's sharp farewell. And when Gillian vanished in a Dover wood, she took with her all but the husk of Godric's joy.

I dare say you could,' snorted Gimli. ' You are a Wood-elf, anyway, though Elves of any kind are strange folk. Yet you comfort me. Where you go, I will go. But keep your bow ready to hand, and I will keep my axe loose in my belt. Not for use on trees.' he added hastily, looking up at the tree under which they stood. ' I do not wish to meet that old man at unawares without an argument ready to hand, that is all. Let us go!

Gimli Glóin’s son, have you your axe ready?’ ‘Nay, lord,’ said Gimli, ‘but I can speedily fetch it, if there be need.’ ‘You shall judge,’ said Éomer. ‘For there are certain rash words concerning the Lady in the Golden Wood that lie still between us. And now I have seen her with my eyes.’ ‘Well, lord,’ said Gimli, ‘and what say you now?’ ‘Alas!’ said Éomer. ‘I will not say that she is the fairest lady that lives.’ ‘Then I must go for my axe,’ said Gimli.

Wood is soft compared to steel, but the sharp steel is dulled as it chops, and the sap of the tree will rust and pit it. The mighty axe does violence to the helpless tree, and is harmed by it. So it is with men, though the harm is in the spirit.

The castle was as silent as some pole-axed monster. Inert, breathless, spread-eagled. It was a night that seemed to prove by the consolidation of its darkness and its silence the hopelessness of any further dawn. There was no such thing as dawn. It was an invention of the night's or of the old-wives of the night - a fable, immemorially old - recounted century after century in the eternal darkness; retold and retold to the gnomic children in the tunnels and the caves of Gormenghast - a tale of another world where such things happened, where stones and bricks and ivy stems and iron could be seen as well as touched and smelt, could be lit and coloured, and where at certain times a radiance shone like honey from the east and the blackness was scaled away, and this thing they called dawn arose above the woods as though the fable had materialized, the legend come to life. It was a night with a bull's mouth. But the mouth was bound and gagged. It was a night with enormous eyes, but they were hooded.

Then the Man threw his two boots and his little stone axe (that makes three) at the Cat, and the Cat ran out of the Cave and the Dog chased him up a tree; and from that day to this, Best Beloved, three proper Men out of five will always throw things at a Cat whenever they meet him, and all proper Dogs will chase him up a tree. But the Cat keeps his side of the bargain too. He will kill mice and he will be kind to Babies when he is in the house, just as long as they do not pull his tail too hard. But when he has done that, and between times, and when the moon gets up and night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him. Then he goes out to the Wet Wild Woods or up the Wet Wild Trees or on the Wet Wild Roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.

Nothing in the world compared to the liquid thrill of piloting a craft through three axes of movement, feeling the vertical, the lateral, and the longitudinal as divergent possibilities curving away from him through air that was tactile and elastic and textured with a warp and woof.

Viva fui in silvis sum dura occisa securi dum vixi tacui mortua dulce cano” is inscribed on the fingerboard of a 16th-century viola da gamba made by Kaspar Tieffenbrucker. It translates, “I was alive in the woods; I was cut down by the cruel axe. While I lived I was silent; In death I sweetly sing.

At childhood’s end, the houses petered out into playing fields, the factory, allotments kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men, the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan, till you came at last to the edge of the woods. It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf. He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw, red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth! In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink, my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry. The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods, away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake, my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night, breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem. I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf? Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws and went in search of a living bird – white dove – which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth. One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said, licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books. Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood. But then I was young – and it took ten years in the woods to tell that a mushroom stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out, season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones. I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up. Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone. Little Red-Cap

You dreamed like all mothers do. Until he began to speak aloud, Your boy, calling for justice in the market place, Demanding integrity and fair play in the courts and halls of business. Declaring the Realm of God Imminent, Manifest . . . Jesus leapt into the swelling crowds like an axe into wood, Uncompromising and unrelenting in his passionate call for peace and justice. Jesus, your boy, causing havoc in public, critiquing and condemning the status quo, breaking rule after rule . . . And with every speech, with every act of defiance, with every call to liberation, with every amazing deed, Your dreams of peace and liberation, Your dreams of a secure old age, Your dreams of grandchildren— Evaporated.

Why then I do but dream on sovereignty, Like one that stands upon a promontory And spies a far-off shore where he would tread, Wishing his foot were equal with his eye, And chides the sea that sunders him from thence, Saying, he'll lade it dry to have his way: So do I wish the crown, being so far off, And so I chide the means that keeps me from it, And so, I say, I'll cut the causes off, Flattering me with impossibilities, My eye's too quick, my hear o'erweens too much, Unless my hand and strength could equal them. Well, say there is no kingdom then for Richard; What other pleasure can the world afford? I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap, And deck my body in gay ornaments, And witch sweet ladies with my words and looks. O miserable thought! and more unlikely Than to accomplish twenty golden crowns! Why, love forswore me in my mother's womb; And for I should not deal in her soft laws, She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe, To shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub, To make an envious mountain on my back, Where sits deformity to mock my body; To shape my legs of an unequal size, To disproportion me in every part, Like to a chaos, or an unlick'd bear-whelp That carries no impression like the dam. And am I then a man to be belov'd? O monstrous fault, to harbor such a thought! Then since this earth affords no joy to me But to command, to check, to o'erbear such As are of better person than myself, I'll make my heaven to dream upon the crown, And whiles I live, t' account this world but hell, Until my misshap'd trunk that bears this head Be round impaled with a glorious crown. And yet I know not how to get the crown, For many lives stand between me and home; And I - like one lost in a thorny wood, That rents the thorns, and is rent with the thorns, Seeking a way, and straying from the way, Not knowing how to find the open air, But toiling desperately to find it out - Torment myself to catch the English crown; And from that torment I will free myself, Or hew my way out with a bloody axe. Why, I can smile, and murther whiles I smile, And cry "Content" to that which grieves my heart, And wet my cheeks with artificial tears, And frame my face to all occasions. I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall, I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk, I'll play the orator as well as Nestor, Deceive more slily than Ulysses could, And like a Simon, take another Troy. I can add colors to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, And set the murtherous Machevil to school. Can I do this, and cannot get a crown? Tut, were it farther off, I'll pluck it down.

The thorn wood is a path you walk alone, boy king." "But it's a very arduous path," Nikolai said. "Who will carry my snacks?" Juris shook his head and turned to Zoya, who had already hung her axes on the wall. "You waste your time with trifles." "My country's future is not a trifle." "King and country are not the same." Zoya unrolled her sleeves, fastening the buttons at the wrist. "Close enough.

As I told you, I’m not the settlement midwife. I’ve not birthed one baby.” “But you are an herbalist.” “I suppose I am. The woods and Ma Horn have been my teachers since I was a girl.” She looked away from him, embarrassed. Here she was, considering him a quack, and he was unraveling her own lack of expertise fast as a spool of thread. “I’m finding the settlers here a superstitious lot. I dinna doubt you are much the same.” She sat up straighter. “What do you mean?” “Axes under the bed tae cut the pain of childbirth. Garlic charms and spells. Boiling beaver tails tae cure snakebite. No’ tae mention the misuse of useful herbs.” Her own face clouded. “I do none of those things.” He looked doubtful. “Prove it.” “How do you expect me to do that?” His steely eyes held a challenge. “Work alongside me.

There is a sign above the door in the shape of a door key, on it the words KEYS CUT. There’ll be a high smell of creosote, oil, paraffin, lawn treatment stuff. There’ll be brushheads with handles, brushheads without handles, handles by themselves, for sale. What else? Rakes, spades, forks, a garden roller, a wall of stepladders, a tin bath full of bags of compost. Calor gas bottles, saucepans, frying pans, mopheads, charcoal, folding stools made of wood, a plastic bucket of plungers, stacked packs of sandpaper, sacks of sand in a wheelbarrow, metal doormats, axes, hammers, a camping stove or two, hessian carpet mats, stuff for curtains, stuff for curtain rails, stuff for screwing curtain rails to walls and pelmets, pliers, screwdrivers, bulbs, lamps, pails, pegs, laundry baskets. Saws, of all sizes. EVERYTHING FOR THE HOME.

In three days, as the King had said, Éomer of Rohan came riding to the City, and with him came an éored of the fairest knights of the Mark. He was welcomed; and when they sat all at table in Merethrond, the Great Hall of Feasts, he beheld the beauty of the ladies that he saw and was filled with great wonder. And before he went to his rest he sent for Gimli the Dwarf, and he said to him: ‘Gimli Glóin’s son, have you your axe ready?’ ‘Nay, lord,’ said Gimli, ‘but I can speedily fetch it, if there be need.’ ‘You shall judge,’ said Éomer. ‘For there are certain rash words concerning the Lady in the Golden Wood that lie still between us. And now I have seen her with my eyes.’ ‘Well, lord,’ said Gimli, ‘and what say you now?’ ‘Alas!’ said Éomer. ‘I will not say that she is the fairest lady that lives.’ ‘Then I must go for my axe,’ said Gimli. ‘But first I will plead this excuse,’ said Éomer. ‘Had I seen her in other company, I would have said all that you could wish. But now I will put Queen Arwen Evenstar first, and I am ready to do battle on my own part with any who deny me. Shall I call for my sword?’ Then Gimli bowed low. ‘Nay, you are excused for my part, lord,’ he said. ‘You have chosen the Evening; but my love is given to the Morning. And my heart forebodes that soon it will pass away for ever.

One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good Lord, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the village blacksmith to “jump” it; but I jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true. A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous years I had often gone prospecting over some bare hillside, where a pitch pine wood had formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty or forty years old, at least, will still be sound at the core, though the sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into the earth.

Because this is my land. I can feel it, tremendous, still primeval, looming, musing downward upon the tent, the camp—this whole puny evanescent clutter of human sojourn which after our two weeks will vanish, and in another week will be completely healed, traceless in this unmarked solitude. It is mine, though I have never owned a foot of it, and never will. I have never wanted to, not even after I saw that it is doomed, not even after I began to watch it retreat year by year before the onslaught of axe and saw and log-lines and then dynamite and plow. Because there was never any one for me to acquire and possess it from because it had belonged to no one man. It belonged to all; we had only to use it well, humbly, and with pride.

From the woods that surrounded the burgh came a mass of men. Some rode, others ran. All carried weapons, mainly axes or spears. A few wore mail shirts and cloaks, but most just leather aketons. Among them were a handful of men clad in the short tunics favoured by Highlanders. These men were bare from thigh to foot, an alarming sight to Ormesby, who had only heard rumour of these wild men of the north. As they came, they roared a multitude of battle cries. Ormesby caught one name in the din, issuing from a group of mailed riders who followed a burly man on a finely caparisoned horse. ‘For Douglas!’ they howled. ‘For Douglas!’ Below, the townsfolk were scattering. The English soldiers had formed a tight knot outside the hall, blades drawn, but even as Ormesby watched, the forlorn group of beggars he had seen threw off their ragged skins and furs, revealing thickly muscled warriors. They fell upon the soldiers with savage cries, daggers thrusting. Footsteps sounded on the hall stairs. The door burst open and two soldiers appeared. ‘We must go, sir!’ The clerks and officials were already hastening across the chamber. Donald was running with them. Ormesby remained rooted. ‘Who are they?’ he demanded, his voice high as he turned back to the window, seeing the horde rushing into the town. His eyes fixed on a giant of a man running, almost loping in the front lines. Taller than all those around him, agile in the stride, he wore a simple dark blue tunic and wide-brimmed kettle hat. The other men seemed to be running in unruly formation around him. But it was the blade in the man’s hands that Ormesby’s eyes were drawn to. He had never seen such a sword, so broad and long the giant had to grasp it in both hands as he came. Another name now became audible in the roar of the mob. ‘Wallace! Wallace!

Golden Rule #17 Don’t mine stone with your bare hands. Long, long ago, there was a noob named Steven. He harvested wood with his bare hands because he thought using tools was a waste of resources. Why reduce tool durability? Why bother crafting axes at all? Steven’s hands had no durability, as far as he knew. Even if it took him longer to chop down trees this way, he could save materials. He could punch and punch all day and never waste any crafting tools. Steven was the kind of guy who, after loaning his best friend a wooden sword six months earlier, would ask for exactly one stick and two oak planks to be returned. Once, Steven and two friends bought a cake together. The cake cost six emeralds and was cut into six slices. That meant each person had to pay two emeralds. However, one of Steven’s cake slices was slightly smaller than the rest, so he argued that he should have to pay only 1.75 emeralds instead.

He stood hesitating in the gateway. To go into the street, to go a walk for appearance’ sake was revolting; to Crime and Punishment 139 of 967 go back to his room, even more revolting. ‘And what a chance I have lost for ever!’ he muttered, standing aimlessly in the gateway, just opposite the porter’s little dark room, which was also open. Suddenly he started. From the porter’s room, two paces away from him, something shining under the bench to the right caught his eye…. He looked about him—nobody. He approached the room on tiptoe, went down two steps into it and in a faint voice called the porter. ‘Yes, not at home! Somewhere near though, in the yard, for the door is wide open.’ He dashed to the axe (it was an axe) and pulled it out from under the bench, where it lay between two chunks of wood; at once, before going out, he made it fast in the noose, he thrust both hands into his pockets and went out of the room; no one had noticed him! ‘When reason fails, the devil helps!’ he thought with a strange grin. This chance raised his spirits extraordinarily.

They say that if you feel you don’t have fifteen minutes to meditate each day, then you need to do an hour. I’m sure it would do me no harm at all, but I’ve never been much of a man for sitting cross-legged, focusing on my breath. Instead, I prefer to whittle. Whittling is a form of practical meditation, which pre-dates the Buddhist and Hindu civilisations. It’s as simple as it gets. To make a tablespoon you take a branch – I prefer green birch, but holly, beech, maple and cherry can work well. Avoid softwoods. Saw it to length, axe it in half, draw out the shape of the spoon you’re aiming for, and start whittling it away with a small carving knife. Your knife, along with your sense of awareness, needs to be sharp. Drift away in your thoughts, worries or daydreams for one moment and, if you’re lucky, you’ll shave off a sliver of wood that may take you twenty minutes to correct; in the final stages you may not be able to correct it at all. If you’re unlucky, you may shave off a sliver of flesh from your finger that may take a week or two to correct itself. Nothing focuses the mind better than blood, or the thought of showing the woman you love an ugly, impractical spoon.

He knew, without knowing how it had happened, that he lay on the floor, in the dusty space before the altar which he and Elisha had cleaned; and knew that above him burned the yellow light which he had himself perched on. Dust was in his nostrils, sharp and terrible, and the feet of the saints, shaking the floor beneath him, raised small clouds of dust that filmed his mouth. He heard their cries, so far, so high above him - he could never rise that far. He was like a rock, a dead man's body, a dying bird, fallen from an awful height; something that had no power of itself, any more, to turn. And something moved in John's body which was not John. He was invaded, set at naught, possessed. This power had stuck John, in the head or in the heart, and, in a moment, wholly, filling him with an anguish that he could not endure, that even now he could not believe, had opened him up; had cracked him open, as wood beneath the axe cracks down the middle, as rocks break up; had ripped him and felled him in a moment, so that John had not felt the wound, but only the agony; had not felt the fall, but only the fear; and lay here, now, helpless, screaming, at the very bottom of darkness.

I stand so abruptly that Leiza startles. “If Violet wants to find me, I’ll be outside chopping wood,” I tell her, causing her to choke back a sound that suspiciously resembles a smothered laugh. When I eye her, she’s the picture of seriousness, nodding once again. “Of course, Alpha,” she says so graciously. Tearing my shirt over my head, I toss it to the ground. Leiza’s phone rings, and she puts it aside. “A vampire is calling me. That can’t be good,” she says as she meets my eyes, almost asking for permission to answer Shera’s call. “They’re trying to reach me. Not you. They can kiss my ass. I need a minute to deal with this.” “I thought you were tired and going to get some sleep,” Leiza states, and then swallows down whatever else is on the tip of her tongue. “I’m no longer tired,” I point out dryly. Another nod from Leiza, and I walk out shirtless to go chop some fucking wood for the fireplace Violet rarely ever uses. There’s an axe wedged into one of the piles of wood near the chopping block, making this simpler than expected, so I get to work. Before I can even make one small pile, Damien is wheeling into the driveway, barely putting the brake on, before he hops out. His eyes narrow on me, and then his brow furrows. It’s when his lips start to twitch that I bristle, feeling a little too transparent. “Didn’t realize you’d gotten this pathetic, mongrel,” he drawls. “And here I thought our calls were being ignored so you could have Violet to yourself.” “I’m holding an axe,” I warn him. “Not a Van Helsing axe,” he volleys with a growing grin. The side door swings open for Violet as she walks out, eyeing me first from my spot near the sidewalk by the street, and then Damien next. “What’re you doing shirtless?” she asks, looking back over at me. “It’s like ten degrees out here. People are going to think that’s weird.” Damien restrains a smile. “You were almost out of wood,” I tell her, gesturing to the…fucking full wood chamber on the side of her house. I couldn’t squeeze another piece in there if I wanted to. Violet glances from it, to me, to Damien, and then to the wood again. “Tiara keeps it filled, and we hardly use it, since the heat is on…” She lets her words trail off, clearly confused. Damien outright grins. “Just what are you doing, exactly?” Damien muses. Tossing the axe to the ground, I glare over at him. “Why are you here?

Victor said, ‘I’m going to take this axe and I’m going to hack off one of your hands. The blade is dull and I couldn’t find a whetstone so it might take a couple of blows to do the job, so you’ll need to be patient. The pain and the fear will be like nothing you’ve ever experienced, but the horror of watching the stump where your wrist used to be spray blood everywhere is going to be like nothing you can even imagine. At that point you won’t be worried by what your employers might do to you. You’ll bleed to death in about two minutes. Which is why I’m telling you now: don’t forget the stove. When I sever your hand, you’re going to be free of that post. It’s only 20 feet to that stove, but it’s going to feel like a mile. Focus on it now, because you’re going to be in shock. When you cauterise the wound against the cast iron, you’re probably going to pass out, but I’ll wake you up again. If your heart stops, I’ll use the epinephrine you brought to bring you back. If you don’t talk to me then, if you don’t give what I want to know about your employers, I’ll take your other hand. After that, I’ll start improvising. Are you ready?’ Niven’s gaze flicked between the axe and Victor’s eyes. ‘You… you can’t be serious.’ Victor raised the axe.

Before she could think of what to say, he grasped the axe and turned toward her, his face a mass of angles in the lanternlight. "Step back." This was a man who expected to be heeded. He did not wait to see if she followed his direction before he lifted the axe high above his head. She pressed herself into the corner of the dark room as he attacked the furniture with a vengeance, her surprise making her unable to resist watching him. He was built beautifully. Like a glorious Roman statue, all strong, lean muscles outlined by the crisp linen of his shirtsleeves when he lifted the tool overhead, his hands sliding purposefully along the haft, fingers grasping tightly as he brought the steel blade down into the age-old oak with a mighty thwack, sending a splinter of oak flying across the kitchen, landing atop the long-unused stove. He splayed one long-fingered hand flat on the table, gripping the axe once more to work the blade out of the wood. He turned his head as he stood back, making sure she was out of the way of any potential projectiles- a movement she could not help but find comforting- before confronting the furniture and taking his next swing with a mighty heave. The blade sliced into the oak, but the table held. He shook his head and yanked the axe out once more, this time aiming for one of the remaining table legs. Thwack! Penelope's eyes went wide as the lanternlight caught the way his wool trousers wrapped tightly around his massive thighs. She should not notice... should not be paying attention to such obvious... maleness. But she'd never seen legs like his. Thwack! Never imagined they could be so... compelling. Thwack! Could not help it. Thwack!

A man fell in love with a tree. It was as simple as that. He went into the forest to cut wood and he found a tree and he knew then that he loved it. He forgot about his axe. It fell from his hand and he knew it not. He forgot about the village that he had come from, forgot the path along which he had come, forgot even the brave ringing voices of his fellows, which sounded even then in the broad wood as they called his name, seeking after him. He sat down there before the tree and he made a place for himself and soon no one passing there could even see that he was lying between the roots. It was for him as though a blade of grass had turned to reveal a map of broad longing and direction and over it he could pass—and did. He and his love then sought what they would with nothing asked of anyone. Asking no permission, they devised all manner of delights and found in each other everything that the world lacked. You are as bright as a coin. You are as tall as a grove. You are as swift as a thought. And so well did they hide themselves in their love that grass grew over their hearts and all their loud songs became indecipherable ribbons of air. But then one day, the man awoke. He found himself again in front of a tree, but it was one he had never seen before. He had never seen the forest either--and the clothes he wore were worn almost to shreds. Where have I been, he asked himself, and stumbled out of the woods to where others waited at a string of houses. But, they could tell him no tidings of himself. Where have I been, he wondered. With whom, in my loveliest dreams, have I so endlessly been speaking? But as he thought it fell away, and he was poorer then than anyone. Raise yourself up, the others called to him. Rase yourself up, you fool. Ah, he said, so this is how fools are made. For I did never know.

When technologies are in-between human users and natural prompters, we may qualify them as first-order (Figure 13). Listing first-order technologies is simple. The ones mentioned earlier all qualify. More can easily be added, such as the plough, the wheel, or the umbrella. The axe is probably the first and oldest kind of first-order technology. Nowadays, a wood-splitting axe is still a first-order technology between you, the user, and the wood, the prompter. A saddle is between you and a horse.

I take great pride in not being that girl in the horror movies who knows a serial killer is axing people out in the woods and so decides that a nature walk is a brilliant idea. I’m the lock-myself-in-the-basement-with-a-shotgun-and-some-napalm sort of woman.

By force-marching his exhausted men through the unknown, rain-swept wilderness of the German-infested Teutoburg Forest, this guy had just made a brain-explodingly boneheaded mistake so amazing in its incompetence that it makes the Roman consuls at Cannae look like a conjoined triplet made out of Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, and that dude from Total Recall who had the baby coming out of his stomach. In terms of career moves, marching three legions into the Teutoberg was the Classical Age equivalent of coauthoring an academic paper with the Unabomber or asking Charles Manson to write you a letter of recommendation for law school. Unsurprisingly, this came back to bite him in the ass. We don’t know exactly how many Germans were hiding in the woods, watching the column of imperial invaders trudge past. The Germans didn’t bother to write anything down more detailed than “killed sum d00ds 2day lulz,” and the only Romans who managed to run screaming out of this forest alive were the ones who knew better than to sit there and try to count how many GWAR fans were currently trying to brutally dismember them with axes. Let’s just say it was probably a crapload, and that when these long-haired death metal freaks unleashed a bloodcurdling shout and started charging through the forest like a bunch of gigantic mutant Ewok-Wookies ambushing the Imperial Stormtroopers on the Forest Moon of Endor it wasn’t exactly the sort of hilarious laugh riot you might see in an animated GIF involving unicorns, rainbows, and cartoon kitties with Pop-Tarts where their bodies are supposed to be. Bellowing like madmen, these balls-out, frothing-at-the-mouth, beer-swilling sausage fiends went Leeroy Jenkins toward the enemy, blitzkrieging out of the woods from every side seemingly at the same time, their ferociousness magnified not only by their savage blood rage, but by the fact that some of the dudes had taken to painting their entire bodies black with mud to help them hide in the dark forest like how Schwarzenegger hid from the Predator’s infrared vision. It was so damned terrifying that it took every ounce of Roman discipline to not simply spontaneously combust into blood vapor on the spot.

In three days, as the King had said, Éomer of Rohan came riding to the City, and with him came an éored of the fairest knights of the Mark. He was welcomed; and when they sat all at table in Merethrond, the Great Hall of Feasts, he beheld the beauty of the ladies that he saw and was filled with great wonder. And before he went to his rest he sent for Gimli the Dwarf, and he said to him: “Gimli Glóin’s son, have you your axe ready?” “Nay, lord,” said Gimli,”but I can speedily fetch it, if there be need.” “You shall judge,” said Éomer. “For there are certain rash words concerning the Lady in the Golden Wood that lie still between us. And now I have seen her with my eyes.” “Well, lord,” said Gimli, “and what say you now?” “Alas!” said Éomer. “I will not say that she is the fairest lady that lives.” “Then I must go for my axe,” said Gimli. “But first I will plead this excuse,” said Éomer. “had I seen her in other company, I would have said all that you could wish. But now I will put Queen Arwen Evenstar first, and I am ready to do battle on my own part with any who deny me. Shall I call for my sword?” Then Gimli bowed low. “Nay, you are excused for my part, lord,” he said. “You have chosen the Evening; but my love is given to the Morning. and my heart forebodes that soon it will pass away for ever.

The leaves, they run like mice, while birds peck at the ground. The wood has rotted in its bin. The grim axe has come round

Interesting evidence of the essential link between Yahweh and copper metallurgy is provided by the story of the first 'encounter' between Moses and Yahweh on Mt Horeb, near the 'burning bush' (Exod. 3), where it is related that Moses is involved in the mission to deliver the sons of Israel from Egyptian tyranny. It is also stressed that Moses had to perform a 'prodigy' in order to demonstrate that he acts in the name of Yahweh (Exod. 4.5). This prodigy is depicted as the reversible transformation of a matteh into a nahash (Exod. 4.2-5). The term matteh is generally understood as designating a wood-made staff, but this meaning is probably secondary. From Isa. 10.15 and Ezek. 19.13-14 it appears that a matteh was formerly a copper scepter hung up on a wooden staff.&sup32; The term nahash is generally translated as 'serpent'. However, the closeness existing in Hebrew between nahash ('serpent') and nehoshet ('copper') suggests that nahash may also designate copper.&sup33; Accordingly, the prodigy performed 'in the name of Yahweh' becomes the transformation of a copper artifact (matteh, the scepter) into melted copper (nahash, the serpent). It is interesting to notice that such a 'prodigy' (occuring not so far from the camp of Jethro the Kenite) happens after Moses threw his matteh on a hot source, the 'burning bush', which may be a poetic evocation of live charcoal. If the reversible matteh-nahash conversion is considered in the book of Exodus as a specific sign of Yahweh, this implies that this deity was intimately associated with copper melting, at least in the period prior to the Israelite Alliance. (pp. 395-396) from 'Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy?', JSOT 33.4 (2009): 387-404 [32]: The term matteh is explicitly used to designate the wooden staff in Exod. 17.16-23. But the initial meaning is revealed in Isa. 10.15, when it is asked, 'Shall the axe vaunt itself over the one who wields it, or the saw magnify itself against the one who handles it? As if a rod should raise the one who lifts it up, or as of a staff should lift the one who is not wood!' It a matteh cannot be hung up without a wooden staff, it is clear that it is not the wooden staff itself but something that is fitted with it. Furthermore, in his lamentation about the destruction of Israel, Ezekiel mentions the fact that the staff supporting the matteh will burn and will provoke a qeyna (Ezek. 19.13-14), a term designating the smelting of copper (and by extension its melting). This strongly suggests that the matteh is a copper-scepter. In some cases, traces of wood have been found in the inner space of the scepter, confirming that such items were probably borne upon wooden staffs. [33]: The term nahash is also used to designate copper in languages closely related to Hebrew (Ugaritic, Aramaic, Arabic). In the book of Chronicles, the term nahash is used once to designate copper: Ir Nahash was a town founded by a descendant of Celoub (Caleb), a clan of metalworkers (1 Chron 4.11-12), so that it designates the town where copper was smelted or worked.

Interesting evidence of the essential link between Yahweh and copper metallurgy is provided by the story of the first 'encounter' between Moses and Yahweh on Mt Horeb, near the 'burning bush' (Exod. 3), where it is related that Moses is involved in the mission to deliver the sons of Israel from Egyptian tyranny. It is also stressed that Moses had to perform a 'prodigy' in order to demonstrate that he acts in the name of Yahweh (Exod. 4.5). This prodigy is depicted as the reversible transformation of a matteh into a nahash (Exod. 4.2-5). The term matteh is generally understood as designating a wood-made staff, but this meaning is probably secondary. From Isa. 10.15 and Ezek. 19.13-14 it appears that a matteh was formerly a copper scepter hung up on a wooden staff.&sup32 The term nahash is generally translated as 'serpent'. However, the closeness existing in Hebrew between nahash ('serpent') and nehoshet ('copper') suggests that nahash may also designate copper.&sup33 Accordingly, the prodigy performed 'in the name of Yahweh' becomes the transformation of a copper artifact (matteh, the scepter) into melted copper (nahash, the serpent). It is interesting to notice that such a 'prodigy' (occuring not so far from the camp of Jethro the Kenite) happens after Moses threw his matteh on a hot source, the 'burning bush', which may be a poetic evocation of live charcoal. If the reversible matteh-nahash conversion is considered in the book of Exodus as a specific sign of Yahweh, this implies that this deity was intimately associated with copper melting, at least in the period prior to the Israelite Alliance. (pp. 395-396) from 'Yahweh, the Canaanite God of Metallurgy?', JSOT 33.4 (2009): 387-404 [32]: The term matteh is explicitly used to designate the wooden staff in Exod. 17.16-23. But the initial meaning is revealed in Isa. 10.15, when it is asked, 'Shall the axe vaunt itself over the one who wields it, or the saw magnify itself against the one who handles it? As if a rod should raise the one who lifts it up, or as of a staff should lift the one who is not wood!' It a matteh cannot be hung up without a wooden staff, it is clear that it is not the wooden staff itself but something that is fitted with it. Furthermore, in his lamentation about the destruction of Israel, Ezekiel mentions the fact that the staff supporting the matteh will burn and will provoke a qeyna (Ezek. 19.13-14), a term designating the smelting of copper (and by extension its melting). This strongly suggests that the matteh is a copper-scepter. In some cases, traces of wood have been found in the inner space of the scepter, confirming that such items were probably borne upon wooden staffs. [33]: The term nahash is also used to designate copper in languages closely related to Hebrew (Ugaritic, Aramaic, Arabic). In the book of Chronicles, the term nahash is used once to designate copper: Ir Nahash was a town founded by a descendant of Celoub (Caleb), a clan of metalworkers (1 Chron 4.11-12), so that it designates the town where copper was smelted or worked.

after Stephen Dunn" If you are sleeping when the axe buries itself in the stump outside your home, wake and walk softly through your halls. Walk softly through this house that is like your heart, built in the solace of these woods from things you claimed as your own. Touch everything. Touch it roughly, and think of the heartbeats of the trees giving their lives, each swaying wood grain a skipped beat of gasping titans beneath your hands, your careful eyes, your gentle push, the settling of these quiet things. But your hands are not in this house. Your heart is not in this house. Your love is not in this house. This house was not built from tall, certain things, but from the surest things you could find: roots, nests, not clocks but the parts hidden behind their faces, reminders of belief in always moving forward. One morning you will wake in this home that is like your heart to find that the axe, the certain and the strong, has buried itself in the wet stump outside, you will touch everything roughly, this house will sound no longer like your heart but your heart will sound like this house, built tall from imagined things, high ceilings, echoes, stopped clock pieces, empty nests, gasping roots. Your heart will feel like this house. You will burn it to the ground.

In the daylight that followed my arrival, the pale grey Trappe resembled not so much an abbey as a hospital, an asylum or a reformatory. It dwindled off into farm buildings, and came to an end in the fields where thousands of turnips led their secret lives and reared into the air their little frostbitten banners. Among the furrows an image mouldered on its pedestal; and, under a sky of clouded steel, the rooks cawed and wheeled and settled. Across the December landscape, flat and waterlogged with its clumps of drizzling coppice and barren-looking pasture-land, ran a rutted path which disappeared beneath an avenue of elm-trees. Willows, blurred and colourless as the detail of an aquatint, receded in the mist; and, here and there, the pallor of the woods was interrupted by funereal clumps of pine. Isolated monks, all of them hooded and clogged, at work in the fields, ploughing or chopping wood, dotted this sodden panorama and the report of their falling axes reached the ear long seconds after the visual impact. Others were driving slow herds of cattle to graze.

An inventory of the items in the kitchen of Richard Toky, a member of the prosperous Grocers’ Company, in 1391 gives some idea of fourteenth-century kitchen equipment. It included: for food preparation – two mortars and two pestles, two meat-hooks, two pairs of tongs, two axes and two hatchets, four ‘tables’ [abacuses: calculators], a ‘dressing-knife’, a skimmer, two ladles, and a kneading tub for cooking – three brass pots, two little pans, two frying pans, one chafing pan [used over a charcoal fire for small, delicate dishes], two kettles, four copper pans, three iron spits and a rack, two grid-irons for grilling, two tripods, a grate, a bellows, and some wood and coal for laundry – a water-tankard [the kind of big hod used to deliver water to the household by the tankard-bearer], two washing tubs and a barrel.

I’ll take watch.” “Sleep, I’ll do it.” I stood. “So he can cut my throat?” She huffed, pulling the idols of her sister and her father from inside her vest. “You’re a fool if you think I’m going to sleep this close to a Riki.” She turned and stalked off into the dark, leaving us. Fiske worked at the fire as if he hadn’t heard her, his face lit up. “She doesn’t trust you.” I handed him another piece of wood. “None of them will.” Behind us, in the darkness, I could hear the faint sound of Mýra’s prayers. He sat against the tree, taking the axe from his back so he could lean into it. “Do you trust me?” His face was hard. Unreadable, like always. “Yes.” His eyes lifted to meet mine and they looked into me. The way they had in Hylli.

Should the fact that we cut down trees using axe handles made of wood be called irony or woody?

The first thing you should make is a tool to help you get more wood. This would be an Axe. An Axe can also be used as a weapon, so it’s the perfect first thing to make. This is the crafting recipe and it needs to be made in your Crafting Bench:   Once you have made your Axe, go find more trees and see how easier it is to chop them down now! Next, with some of the new wood you’ve collected, we need to make a Pickaxe. This will help us with two things: 1) Getting cobblestone to improve our tools and 2), helping us build a shelter for our first night!

Should’ve stayed a carpenter,” he whispered. But the sword had been the easier choice. To work wood you need all manner of tools–chisels and saws, axes great and small, nails and hammers, awls and planes. To be a killer you just need two. A blade and the will.

All implements of war or industry known to the early Hawaiians were made either of wood, stone, or bone, as the islands are destitute of metals; but with these rude helps they laid up hewn-stone walls, felled trees, made canoes and barges, manufactured cloths and cordage, fashioned weapons, constructed dwellings and temples, roads and fish-ponds, and tilled the soil. They had axes, adzes and hammers of stone, spades of wood, knives of flint and ivory, needles of thorn and bone, and spears and daggers of hardened wood. They wove mats for sails and other purposes, and from the inner bark of the paper mulberry-tree beat out a fine, thin cloth called kapa, which they ornamented with colors and figures.

Inscribed on the fingerboard of a viola da gamba by Kaspar Tieffenbrucker: "Viva fui in silvis sum dura occisa securi dum vixi tacui mortua dulce cano." (I was alive in the woods; I was cut down by the cruel axe. While I lived I was silent; In death I sweetly sing.)

To call a man "a complete failure" tallied both the economics of capitalism and the economics of selfhood; that is, the external and internal transactions that reckon how we see ourselves and how others see us. Soon a man would be nothing more nor less than his occupation. Thoreau ground this axe in an 1854 lecture called "Getting a Living," which he mailed off to the Atlantic Monthly-under the punning title "Life without Principle"-two months before his death. He complained that people called him "a loafer" for taking daily walks in the woods. Yet were he to spend the day as a timber speculator, denuding the landscape, he would be "esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen."22

When things don’t work, don’t question the Things - Question the Implementation; an axe can cut the wood if stroked with the blade facing the wood, if used in a reverse manner it might break or damage the wood, but was that our intention to achieve and should the axe be questioned?

As the battle began Ivo Taillefer, the minstrel knight who had claimed the right to make the first attack, advanced up the hill on horseback, throwing his lance and sword into the air and catching them before the English army. He then charged deep into the English ranks, and was slain. The cavalry charges of William’s mail-clad knights, cumbersome in manœuvre, beat in vain upon the dense, ordered masses of the English. Neither the arrow hail nor the assaults of the horsemen could prevail against them. William’s left wing of cavalry was thrown into disorder, and retreated rapidly down the hill. On this the troops on Harold’s right, who were mainly the local “fyrd”, broke their ranks in eager pursuit. William, in the centre, turned his disciplined squadrons upon them and cut them to pieces. The Normans then re-formed their ranks and began a second series of charges upon the English masses, subjecting them in the intervals to severe archery. It has often been remarked that this part of the action resembles the afternoon at Waterloo, when Ney’s cavalry exhausted themselves upon the British squares, torn by artillery in the intervals. In both cases the tortured infantry stood unbroken. Never, it was said, had the Norman knights met foot-soldiers of this stubbornness. They were utterly unable to break through the shield-walls, and they suffered serious losses from deft blows of the axe-men, or from javelins, or clubs hurled from the ranks behind. But the arrow showers took a cruel toll. So closely, it was said, were the English wedged that the wounded could not be removed, and the dead scarcely found room in which to sink upon the ground. The autumn afternoon was far spent before any result had been achieved, and it was then that William adopted the time-honoured ruse of a feigned retreat. He had seen how readily Harold’s right had quitted their positions in pursuit after the first repulse of the Normans. He now organised a sham retreat in apparent disorder, while keeping a powerful force in his own hands. The house-carls around Harold preserved their discipline and kept their ranks, but the sense of relief to the less trained forces after these hours of combat was such that seeing their enemy in flight proved irresistible. They surged forward on the impulse of victory, and when half-way down the hill were savagely slaughtered by William’s horsemen. There remained, as the dusk grew, only the valiant bodyguard who fought round the King and his standard. His brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine, had already been killed. William now directed his archers to shoot high into the air, so that the arrows would fall behind the shield-wall, and one of these pierced Harold in the right eye, inflicting a mortal wound. He fell at the foot of the royal standard, unconquerable except by death, which does not count in honour. The hard-fought battle was now decided. The last formed body of troops was broken, though by no means overwhelmed. They withdrew into the woods behind, and William, who had fought in the foremost ranks and had three horses killed under him, could claim the victory. Nevertheless the pursuit was heavily checked. There is a sudden deep ditch on the reverse slope of the hill of Hastings, into which large numbers of Norman horsemen fell, and in which they were butchered by the infuriated English lurking in the wood. The dead king’s naked body, wrapped only in a robe of purple, was hidden among the rocks of the bay. His mother in vain offered the weight of the body in gold for permission to bury him in holy ground. The Norman Duke’s answer was that Harold would be more fittingly laid upon the Saxon shore which he had given his life to defend. The body was later transferred to Waltham Abbey, which he had founded. Although here the English once again accepted conquest and bowed in a new destiny, yet ever must the name of Harold be honoured in the Island for which he and his famous house-carls fought indomitably to the end.

The effort involved in splitting the wood will be amply repaid by the warmth that it brings to the house. However, at the point that the axe becomes heavy and my arms get sore, the idea of the warmth goes cold.

An axe, wood to split, and a determination to keep warm is enough to keep any fire burning.

You could cut down a tree with your axe,” Raen said. “The axe does violence to the tree, and escapes unharmed. Is that how you see it? Wood is soft compared to steel, but the sharp steel is dulled as it chops, and the sap of the tree will rust and pit it. The mighty axe does violence to the helpless tree, and is harmed by it. So it is with men, though the harm is in the spirit.

Then, UltimateSword5 told me a story of Skeleton Steve approaching him on his lonely, little island where he'd spent months barely surviving on mushroom soup in the middle of a vast, underground lake. He told me about a valiant and devoted skeleton swordsman, Skonathan, who'd been following me around. I remembered Ulti mentioning the name before. As he finished his food, he told me about when I found him trapped deep underground near the Sleeping City, a place that I'd apparently built back when I was a monstrous thing called 'the Skeleton King' before I transformed into what I was today. I'd convinced him to escape the depths together. Ulti told me about dodging malfunctioning iron golems in the streets of the huge, silent city, and searching its storage building for wood. We really needed wood to make pick axes in order to get back to the surface. The lack of wood down at the bottom of the world was crippling. Then, he told me about him, Skonathan, and me all running around in terrifying darkness, trapping Glitch mobs with cobblestone because we had no other way to fight them. The Glitch mobs were very scary creatures that attacked everything they saw. They couldn't be killed except by overwhelming damage; enough to drop them in a single blow. Whenever the Glitch mobs were injured, they replicated, and became one injured, one not. Ulti told me about a Glitch creeper almost blowing us all up. It blew one of Skonathan's arms clean off! He also told me about a crazy battle in the streets of the Sleeping City where we pitted the Glitch against the golems, then barely contained a massive Glitch outbreak. Then, we found a way out of the city through a tunnel that Ulti had remembered from back when he and his Minecraftian friends had found the Sleeping City the first time. Ulti told me about us journeying through long tunnels,

The Cycle of Creation states that the Water Element nourishes the Wood Element. An example of this is the rain/water that nourishes a tree/wood. The Wood Element nourishes the Fire Element. Think of adding a log/wood to a campfire. The Fire Element nourishes the Earth Element. Visualize the ashes of the fire mixing with the soil/earth. The Earth Element nourishes the Metal Element. Think of how various metals are found with the ground/earth. The Metal Element nourishes the Water Element. Consider the condensation/water on the side of a metal container on a hot day. That completes the cycle of interaction from a creation or nourishing perspective.1 It is depicted in the illustration below. Figure 9-1: Five Element Cycle of Creation. The Cycle of Control, or Destruction, is the counter to the Cycle of Creation. Chinese teachings maintain that there must always be balance within a system for everything to work properly. If all the organs of the body were in a constant state of nourishment the body would be completely out of balance. The Cycle of Control explains how the five elements can control one another, thus creating a balanced healthy organism. The Cycle of Control states that Water Element controls the Fire Element. That is easy enough to understand. Think of pouring water on a fire. The Fire Element controls the Metal Element. Visualize a blacksmith that is using fire to melt metal. The Metal Element controls the Wood Element. Think of a metal axe that is cutting a tree/wood. The Wood Element controls the Earth Element. Think of how the roots of a tree/wood penetrate the soil/earth. The Earth Element controls the Water Element. Think of how the soil/earth dams up a lake/water. That competes this cycle of interaction from a controlling or destructive perspective.2 See Figure 9-2. Figure 9-2: Five Element Cycle of Control. The Chinese grouped the various organs of the body, as they understood them, into the Five Element model. The amazing science of acupuncture, which was developed over the last three thousand years, utilizes that model to treat many forms of sickness and disease. Likewise, the martial artist can use the same model to enhance their combative abilities. The interactions of the Five Element Theory has expanded the combative aspects of the martial arts in the Western world. But, the vast majority of the applications have been focused on the easier understood interactions of the twelve Main Meridians. ORGAN

Line of AuNor, dragon bold Flows to me from days of old, And through years lost in the mist My blood names a famous list. By Air, by Water, by Fire, by Earth In pride I claim a noble birth. From EmLar Gray, a deadly deed By his flame Urlant was freed, Of fearsome hosts of blighters dark And took his reward: a golden ark! My Mother’s sire knew battle well Before him nine-score villages fell. When AuRye Red coursed the sky Elven arrows in vain would fly, He broke the ranks of men at will In glittering mines dwarves he’d kill. Grandsire he is through Father’s blood A river of strength in fullest flood. My egg was one of Irelia’s Clutch Her wisdom passed in mental touch. Mother took up before ever I woke The parent dragon’s heavy yoke; For me, her son, she lost her life Murderous dwarves brought blackened knife. A father I had in the Bronze AuRel Hunter of renown upon wood and fell He gave his clutch through lessons hard A chance at life beyond his guard. Father taught me where, and when, and how To fight or flee, so I sing now. Wistala, sibling, brilliant green Escaped with me the axes keen We hunted as pair, made our kill From stormy raindrops drank our fill When elves and dwarves took after us I told her “Run,” and lost her thus. Bound by ropes; by Hazeleye freed And dolphin-rescued in time of need I hid among men with fishing boats On island thick with blown sea-oats I became a drake and breathed first fire When dolphin-slaughter aroused my ire. I ran with wolves of Blackhard’s pack Killed three hunters on my track The Dragonblade’s men sought my hide But I escaped through a fangèd tide Of canine friends, assembled Thing Then met young Djer, who cut collar-ring. I crossed the steppes with dwarves of trade On the banks of the Vhydic Ironriders slayed Then sought out NooMoahk, dragon black And took my Hieba daughter back To find her kind; then took first flight Saw NooMoahk buried in honor right. When war came to friends I long had known My path was set, my heart was stone I sought the source of dreadful hate And on this Isle I met my fate Found Natasatch in a cavern deep So I had one more promise to keep. To claim this day my life’s sole mate In future years to share my fate A dragon’s troth is this day pledged To she who’ll see me fully fledged. Through this dragon’s life, as dragon-dame shall add your blood to my family’s fame.

IVANOFF. [Alone] I am a worthless, miserable, useless man. Good God! How I loathe myself! How bitterly I hate my voice, my hands, my thoughts, these clothes, each step I take! How ridiculous it is, how disgusting! Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, full of pride and energy and enthusiasm. I worked with these hands here, and my words could move the dullest man to tears. I could weep with sorrow, and grow indignant at the sight of wrong. I could feel the glow of inspiration, and understand the beauty and romance of the silent nights which I used to watch through from evening until dawn, sitting at my worktable, and giving up my soul to dreams. I believed in a bright future then, and looked into it as trustfully as a child looks into its mother's eyes. And now, oh, it is terrible! I am tired and without hope; I spend my days and nights in idleness; I have no control over my feet or brain. My estate is ruined, my woods are falling under the blows of the axe. [He weeps] My neglected land looks up at me as reproachfully as an orphan. I expect nothing, am sorry for nothing; my whole soul trembles at the thought of each new day.

The House of Fantasy is built of stone and wood and furnished in High Medieval. Its people travel by horse and galley, fight with sword and spell and battle-axe, communicate by palantir or raven, and break bread with elves and dragons. The House of Science Fiction is built of duralloy and plastic and furnished in Faux Future. Its people travel by starship and aircar, fight with nukes and tailored germs, communicate by ansible and laser, and break protein bars with aliens. The House of Horror is built of bone and cobwebs and furnished in Ghastly Gothick. Its people travel only by night, fight with anything that will kill messily, communicate in screams and shrieks and gibbers, and sip blood with vampires and werewolves. The Furniture Rule, I call it. Forget the definitions. Furniture Rules.

Around the new mother, three deities mounted guard against the dreaded violence of Silvanus, that 'fierce, terrifying, rough' demon of the woods (Aug., CG, 6, 9, 2): they were Intercidona (for without the blade of the axe one cannot cut trees intercidere); Pilumnus (for without the pestle one cannot make flour), and Deverra (for without the broom one cannot pile up the grain).

Treachery was axe, not a scalpel. It was Hard to make a clean cut.

Their average height was somewhere between two-and-a-half and three feet, which meant that they hardly reached above Ganelon’s kneecap. They were colored a vile, poisonous green, covered with lumps like warts only about the size of doorknobs. Their tremendous breadth of shoulders and thick, massively-thewed arms and barrel chests reminded him of the Indigons he had battled on the Plains of Uth. Bald and hairless, with bullet heads, they had heavy prognathous jaws and long, lipless, gash-like mouths that made them look rather froggy. Froglike, too, were their ugly, goggling eyes which glistened in the moonlight like puddles of spilt ink. They didn’t wear any clothing to speak of, just odd bits, scraps and pieces of iron armor; but they bristled with weapons. Among these were flint-knives, stone axes, clubs roughly carven from petrified wood, and long spears made from slender stony stalactites, with obsidian blades for points. They had no ears, and conversed amongst themselves in clicks, squeaks and hissings. They also had no genitals, just bare tough flesh between their crooked little bowlegs, which terminated in ugly, four-toed feet. They emitted a vile medicinal stench, like iodine. The insides of their mouths were black. And they had fat white tongues, like plump worms.

Esther, I have things I need to tell you. But I’m too wound up right now to do it.” “Where will you go?” she asked, feeling the tears rising once more. “Not far, sweetheart. I’ll never be far.” And with that, he squeezed past her and out the door, leaving Esther alone in the cabin. She took a deep breath and looked around her. In a moment, she heard the unmistakable sound of wood chopping. Glancing out the window confirmed it as Hank stood with an axe next to a pile of downed tree limbs. Doesn’t this man have any other ways to emotionally regulate? But she knew he didn’t. Maybe because nobody had ever shown him how. Maybe because he’d never allowed himself to feel deeply enough to require them.

He watched the villagers at their work and tried to get to know their ways: how they made their stores and divided them for consumption, how they bred their animals and made tools for the field, plows, harrows, rakes, shovels, as well as weapons, tubs, baskets and the like. He watched them making repairs and improving their houses with saws, hammers, and axes, or bringing wood to their homes by the easier method of using sleighs, or satisfying the other necessities of life in their few trades.

You might feel like you can’t afford to take time out from your busy schedule to make yourself better. After all, you might think, everyone is counting on me. This feeling, while natural, is counterproductive. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings warned our Stanford class, “[When I was running Pure Software,] I felt like investing in me was selfish. I thought, ‘I should be working.’ I was invited to join YPO [Young President’s Organization], but I thought, ‘I can’t take a day off.’ I was too busy chopping wood to sharpen the axe. I should have spent more time with other entrepreneurs. I should have done yoga or meditation. I didn’t understand that by making myself better, I was helping the company, even if I was away from work.” Plus, when you model the behavior of taking the time to improve yourself, you help encourage the rest of the company to develop a culture of learning.

Think, ” she added, with a bite, “instead of going on blindly wanting. There is some power deep in your valley, some strangeness beyond mortal magic that draws men in, plants roots in them—and not only men. Whatever thing it is that lives in the Wood, that puts out corruption, it’s come to live there and drink from that power like a cup. It killed the people of the tower, and then it slumbered for a thousand years because no one was fool enough to bother it. Then along we come, with our armies and our axes and our magic, and think that this time we can win.

It was so long ago and far away I have forgotten the very name men called me. The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream, And hunts and wars are like shadows. I recall Only the stillness of that sombre land; The clouds that piled forever on the hills, The dimness of the everlasting woods. Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

A woman’s voice came wailing on the wind. Norman looked up and spotted Sandra high up on an even steeper funnel of snow and ice. She was crying: ‘Your father is dead. What are we going to do?’ One of her shoulders was hanging weirdly. There was a bloody wound on her forehead, matted with hair. Then he saw his dad, still in his seat but slumped awkwardly forward. Norman turned around on the steep slope and inched over towards him, sneakers pathetically trying to hold an edge. He slipped and almost plummeted like a bobsleigh down the mountain. He caught a hold. Then he started crawling back up. It took him thirty minutes to climb 6 m (20 ft). His dad was doubled over. ‘DAD!’ No response. Snow was falling on his father’s curly hair. Above him, Sandra sounded delirious. By the time he was four, Norman had skied every black run at Mammoth. On his first birthday, his dad had him strapped to his back in a canvas papoose and took him surfing. Reckless, perhaps, but it had given the boy an indomitable spirit. Eleven-year-old Norman hugged his dad for the last time then tracked back across the slope to see what he could salvage from the wreckage. There were no ice axes or tools, but he did find a rug. He took it and scrabbled back to Sandra. She couldn’t move. Somehow he got her under the ragged remains of the plane’s wing and they wrapped themselves in the rug and fell into an exhausted sleep. Norman was woken around noon by a helicopter. He leapt up, trying to catch the crew’s attention. They came very, very close but somehow didn’t see him. They were going to have to get off this mountain themselves. A brief lull in the storm gave them a sudden view. The slope continued beneath their feet, sickeningly sheer, for hundreds of feet. Then lower down there were woods and the gully levelled a little before a massive ridgeline rose again. Beyond that lay a flatter meadow of snow and, at the edge of the world, a cabin. Sandra wanted to stay put. She was ranting about waiting for the rescuers. For a moment Norman nearly lay down beside her and drifted off to sleep. The

Aud?” She touched my hand to make me look up. “I’m sorry I got you into all this.” “You didn’t,” I said tiredly. “Dornan did. Or Julia did, by dying. Or maybe I did, by loving her. It’s all connected.” Irony is rarely amusing. “Just one big happy human ecosystem, like the woods, with some trees trying to grow too fast and smother the rest.” “And you’re the axe,” she said. The fire popped. An axe, cold and unlovely. “Is that how you see me?” The old Tammy would have smiled and said, No, of course not! and tried to reassure and soothe my ruffled feathers, but though a fleeting regret showed in her sigh, she nodded. “You can use an axe to bang in nails, but that doesn’t make it a hammer. It’s still an axe. Cutting is still what it’s made for.

The next morning Tatiana was screaming from inside the cabin. Her shrieks carried to Alexander through the pines, over the sound of his ax falling down on the cracking wood. He dropped the axe and ran to the house to find her crouching on top of the high counter. Her legs were drawn up to her neck. “What?” he exclaimed, panting. “Shura, a mouse ran by my feet as I was cooking.” Alexander stared at the eggs on the hearth, at the small pot of bubbling coffee on the Primus stove, at the tomatoes already on their plates, and then at Tatiana, ascended a meter from the floor. His mouth reluctantly, infectiously drew into a wide grin. “What are you”—he was trying to keep from laughing—“what are you doing up there?” “I told you!” she yelled. “A mouse ran by and brushed his”—she shivered—“his tail against my leg. Can you take care of it?” “Yes, but what are you doing up there?” “Getting away from the mouse, of course.” She frowned, looking at him unhappily. “Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to catch it?” Alexander walked to the counter and picked her up. Tatiana grabbed his neck but did not put her feet down. He hugged her, kissed her, kissed her again with enormous affection, and said, “Tatiasha, you goose, mice can climb, you know.” “No they can’t.” “I’ve seen mice climb the pole of the commander’s tent in Finland, trying to get to the piece of food at the very top.” “What was food doing at the top of the tent pole?” “We put it there.” “Why?” “To see if mice could climb.” Tatiana almost laughed. “Well, you’re not getting breakfast, or coffee, or me in this house until that mouse is gone.” After carrying her outside, Alexander went back for the breakfast plates. They ate on the bench, side by side. Alexander turned and stared at her incredulously. “Tania, are you…afraid of mice?” “Yes. Have you killed it?” “And how would you like me to do that? You never told me you were afraid of mice.

The first surviving manuals of European swordsmanship date from the early fourteenth century, so it is impossible to know precisely how William trained and fought with this weapon, but it is clear that he honed his ability to wield his sword both while mounted and on foot. This must have required the daily repetition of practice sword strokes through his teenage years and beyond – so as to develop strength and acquire muscle memory – and regular sparring to refine coordination and agility. By the time he became a knight, Marshal was an effective swordsman, but so far as the History was concerned, his primary gift was not flashy technique, but the brutish physicality that enabled him to deliver crushing blows. With sword in hand, William was, in the words of his biographer, a man who ‘hammered like a blacksmith on iron’. Marshal probably also trained with a number of other mêlée weapons popular with twelfth-century knights, including the dagger, axe, mace and war-hammer, but much of his time would have been devoted to mastering the lance. By construction this was a fairly rudimentary weapon – often simply a ten- to twelve-foot-long straight spar of hewn wood, usually of ash – but it was fiendishly difficult to use from horseback. The lance would be held under the arm (or couched) during a charge, and directing its point towards a target with any accuracy required immense skill. Lances often broke after one or two uses, but a successful strike could cause devastating damage to an opponent. In the course of his career, William would witness the lethal potential of this weapon with his own eyes and he would also be called upon to charge down one of the greatest warriors of the age, Richard the Lionheart, with lance in hand.

God can’t heal your leg?” the boy challenged. “Ben!” The mother snapped out of her stupor. “Sure God can heal my leg--” started the Reverend. “Then why don’t He?” Silence. Only the sounds of the axe. Chock. Chock. Chock. Desire welled up in the Reverend. Fierce, caressing lust. The woodpile. The feel of his own axe handle. Worn from using it every single day. Using it everyday in front of his own house. Chopping. Chopping wood for his fire-- Suddenly a small pop. The mother had hit the child -- flat hand against right ear. The boy’s head rocked. The boy named Ben glanced at his glowering mother. Then he retreated. Crying. “Reverend, I am so sorry. He doesn’t know any better, and we’ve been meaning to get him to church, but we just -- ” “Ma’am,” said the Reverend. He touched his hat. The woman did not say another word. The Reverend’s leg brace squeaked as it touched Samson’s flank, almost as if it laughed and tattled on the preacher’s desire to move on. Which they did.

Elisha the prophet. For when his fellow-prophets were hewing wood for the construction of a tabernacle, and when the iron [head], shaken loose from the axe, had fallen into the Jordan and could not be found by them, upon Elisha’s coming to the place, and learning what had happened, he threw some wood into the water. Then, when he had done this, the iron part of the axe floated up, and they took up from the surface of the water what they had previously lost. By this action the prophet pointed out that the sure word of God, which we had negligently lost by means of a tree, and were not in the way of finding again, we should receive anew by the dispensation of a tree, [viz., the cross of Christ]. For that the word of God is likened to an axe, John the Baptist declares [when he says] in reference to it, “But now also is the axe laid to the root of the trees.” Jeremiah also says to the same purport: “The word of God cleaveth the rock as an axe.” This word, then, what was hidden from us, did the dispensation of the tree make manifest, as I have already remarked. For as we lost it by means of a tree, by means of a tree again was it made manifest to all, showing the height, the length, the breadth, the depth in itself; and, as a certain man among our predecessors observed, “Through the extension of the hands of a divine person, gathering together the two peoples to one God.” For these were two hands, because there were two peoples scattered to the ends of the earth; but there was one head in the middle, as there is but one God, who is above all, and through all, and in us all.

I saw only the village street, which is so familiar to me that I could walk down it blindfolded if I had a stick. A blind man died a few years back. Blind from birth, he could walk down to the village from the hamlet where he lived four kilometers away. The bees he kept gave more honey than any others in the village. And he axed his own wood on a chopping block, without ever cutting his hand. At 11 A.M. it was sunny with a blue sky. The few white clouds were moving fast above the mountains. A north wind. I saw the village street at that moment, as seen from the future. What I was seeing had become the distant past. This transformation was calm, so calm that it resembled a stillness.

This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark And cold to an orchard so young in the bark Reminds me of all that can happen to harm An orchard away at the end of the farm All winter, cut off by a hill from the house. I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse, I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse. (If certain it wouldn't be idle to call I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall And warn them away with a stick for a gun.) I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun. (We made it secure against being, I hope, By setting it out on a northerly slope.) No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm; But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm. "How often already you've had to be told, Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below." I have to be gone for a season or so. My business awhile is with different trees, Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these, And such as is done to their wood with an axe-- Maples and birches and tamaracks. I wish I could promise to lie in the night And think of an orchard's arboreal plight When slowly (and nobody comes with a light) Its heart sinks lower under the sod. But something has to be left to God.