Breast Milk Quotes

Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts! Unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top full Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood, Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry "Hold, hold!

Some legends say that Hera's breast milk sprayed across the sky and created the Milky Way. I don't know. That seems like a whole lot of solar systems from just one squirt

My mother’s dress bears the stains of her life: blueberries, blood, bleach, and breast milk; She cradles in her arms a lifetime of love and sorrow; Its brilliance nearly blinds me.

you want to keep the blood and the milk hidden as if the womb and breast never fed you

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, you look like a world, lying in surrender. My rough peasant's body digs in you and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth. I was lone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me, and nigh swamped me with its crushing invasion. To survive myself I forged you like a weapon, like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling. But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you. Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk. Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence! Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad! Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace. My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road! Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.

Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother’s foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they’ve sampled while in the womb and while breastfeeding.

It’s my turn to feed him,” Gray says without looking up. “So bottled breast milk it is. He hates it. I know, little dude,” he says to the baby. “I love Mommy’s boobs too, but she needs to sleep.” From the far room, a muffled groan rings out. “Mother guilt has killed my sleep,” says Ivy’s disembodied voice. “And don’t discuss my boobs with my son, Cupcake.

Me, Polly Garter, under the washing line, giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby. Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies. And where's their fathers live, my love? Over the hills and far away. You're looking up at me now. I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature. You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me. Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?

The moon was full. It looked like a breast engorged with milk because of all the babies crying in the night.

…often women aren’t allowed to be characters in history, they have to be stereotypes. Cleopatra was a poet and a philosopher, she was incredibly good at maths; she wasn’t that much of a looker. But when we think of her, we think: big breasted seductress bathing in milk. Often, even when women have made their mark and they are remembered by history, we are offered a fantasy version of their lives.

imagine the desert mothers, with hair tangled tighter than their theology and breasts that flowed milk and mystic wisdom. they knew how to draw the singing sigils in the sand, how to dig rough and bitten fingers into desiccated dirt for water to wet the lips of their young. women of hips and heft, who learned how to burn beneath the wild and searing sun, who made loud love against the star-flecked threat of night, who knew that strength is not always a matter of muscle. imagine your ancestresses, the prophetesses of the arid lands, before these starched traditions and pews too hard to pray from, who bled true ritual and birthed their own fierce souls at creation's crowning --

It seems as if every month brings another study showing that breast milk is what Ponce de León should have been searching for.

Whatever did they feed you to make you grow so large? (Nora) A great deal of breast milk. (Ewan) You take great delight in shocking people, don’t you? (Nora)

Out of the woman's great brown breast the milk gushed forth for the child, milk as white as snow, and when the child suckled at the one breast it flowed like a fountain from the other, ans she let it flow. There was more than enough for the child, greedy though he was, life enough for many children, and she let it flow out carelessly, conscious of her abundance. There was always more. Sometimes she lifted her breast and let it flow out upon the ground to save her clothing, and it sank into the earth and made a soft, dark, rich spot in the field. The child fat and good-natured and ate of the inexhaustible life his mother gave him.

The Greek religion explained that diffuse band of light in the night sky as the milk of Hera, squirted from her breast across the heavens, a legend that is the origin of the phrase Westerners still use—the Milky Way.

Breast milk is big business." My mother uses my sarcasm as a springboard for her insanity. "We should consider opening a shop that caters to that market. We can call it 'The Milk Bar' or 'Mother's Milk'." ...Ethan slaps his hand on the counter. "We can have ice cream made from that shit." He nods into my mother, stony faces, as if he didn't just let an expletive fly.

When we trust the makers of baby formula more than we do our own ability to nourish our babies, we lose a chance to claim an aspect of our power as women. Thinking that baby formula is as good as breast milk is believing that thirty years of technology is superior to three million years of nature's evolution. Countless women have regained trust in their bodies through nursing their children, even if they weren't sure at first that they could do it. It is an act of female power, and I think of it as feminism in its purest form.

From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper, dream of her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samson syrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass'd and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.

Breastfeeding is a beautiful thing, one of the most beautiful things that exist in nature. Think about how a woman can literally feed her baby with her body! In my eyes, this is a certain form of beauty, of divinity! To know that my body can not only form and bring another human being into the world, but that I can actually feed babies with my own milk from my own breasts— that puts me in a state of awe each time I think about it. It is an honour to be a woman.

The Manchus drank tea with a lot of milk. In her case, the milk came from the breasts of a nurse. Cixi had been taking human milk since her prolonged illness in the early 1880s, on the recommendation of a renowned doctor. Several wet nurses were employed, and took turns to squeeze milk into a bowl for her. The nurses brought their sucking babies with them, and the woman who served her the longest stayed on in the palace, her son being given education and an office job.

2015, a woman got lost in a frosty forest in New Zealand and survived a couple of days by drinking her own breast milk.

Baby grows, breast milk, pregnancy yoga: suburban, normie, boring. Ketamine, harnesses, being in a polycule: vanguard of the revolution.

A young woman was sitting on a bench by her house, breastfeeding. We tested her breast milk and it was radioactive. The Madonna of Chernobyl.

Two chemicals called actin and myosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles in insect wings to contract and relax. Thus, insects learned to fly. When one of those paired molecules are absent, wings will grow but they cannot flap and are therefore useless. Today, the same two proteins are responsible for the beating of the human heart, and when one is absent, the person’s heartbeat is inefficient and weak, ultimately leading to heart failure. Again, science marvels at the way molecules adapt over millions of years, but isn’t there a deeper intent? In our hearts, we feel the impulse to fly, to break free of boundaries. Isn’t that the same impulse nature expressed when insects began to take flight? The prolactin that generates milk in a mother’s breast is unchanged from the prolactin that sends salmon upstream to breed, enabling them to cross from saltwater to fresh.

What most tormented him was not so much how she'd been left in the coal shed or the stance of the Mother Superior; the worst was how the girl had been handled while he was present and how he'd allowed that and had not asked about her baby - the one thing she had asked him to do - and how he had taken the money and left her there at the table with nothing before her and the breast milk leaking under the little cardigan and staining her blouse, and how he'd gone on, like a hypocrite, to Mass.

The mint from your breath, the milk from your breast, the best of your mind, now in its worst state of condition. From the womb to the tomb, as a mild flower, you break your petals upon blossom, and seize death openly. Leaving your fragrance to spin and dance, one last time before being blown away.

Woman, I would have been your child, to drink the milk of your breasts as from a well, to see and feel you at my side and have you in your gold laughter and your crystal voice. To feel you in my veins like God in the rivers and adore you in the sorrowful bones of dust and lime, to watch you passing painlessly by to emerge in the stanza-cleansed of all evil. How I would love you woman, how I would love you, love you as no one ever did! Die and still love you more. And still love you more and more.

Your species," M-Bot said in my ear, "has a diet roughly similar to a human one - though with more nuts and less meat. Also, no milk" "Seriously?" I whispered, moving with Morriumur toward the vegetable line. I waved at my chest. "Alanik has breasts. What are they for? Decoration?" "No milk from other creatures, I should say," M-Bot said. Your species finds it extremely gross. As do I by the way. Do you even stop to think how many strange liquids you organics squirt from your orifices?" "No stranger than the ideas that squirt from your orifice sometimes, M-Bot".

Somebody betrayed us... The Germans learned the location of our partisan troop. They surrounded the forest from all sides. We were hiding in the deep woods, hiding in the swamps where the torturers did not go [...] A radio operator was with us. She gave birth recently. The baby was hungry... Wanting the breast... But the mother is starving, she has no milk, and the baby is crying. The Germans are nearby... With dogs... If the dogs hear the baby, we're all dead. All of us - thirty people... Do you understand? We make a decision... Nobody dares to tell her the commader's order, but the mother guesses it herself. She puts the bundle with the baby into the water and holds it there for a long time... The baby does not cry... Not a sound... And we cannot lift our eyes. We cannot look at the mother or at each other

There is also the ceaseless outpouring of books on toilet training, separating one sibling's fist from another sibling's eye socket, expressing breast milk while reading a legal brief, helping preschoolers to "own" their feelings, getting Joshua to do his homework, and raising teenage boys so they become Sensitive New Age Guys instead of rooftop snipers or Chippendale dancers. Over eight hundred books on motherhood were published between 1970 and 2000; only twenty-seven of these came out between 1970 and 1980, so the real avalanch happened in the past twenty years. We've learned about the perils of "the hurried child" and "hyperparenting," in which we schedule our kids with so many enriching activities that they make the secretary of state look like a couch spud. But the unhurried child probably plays too much Nintendo and is out in the garage building pipe bombs, so you can't underschedule them either. Then there's the Martha Stewartization of America, in which we are meant to sculpt the carrots we put in our kids' lunches into the shape of peonies and build funhouses for them in the backyard; this has raised the bar to even more ridiculous levels than during the June Cleaver era.

Thou askest me to take things seriously? After what thou didst last night? When thou needest to kill a man and instead did what you did? You were supposed to kill one, not make one! When we have just seen the sky full of airplanes of a quantity to kill us back to our grandfathers and forward to all unborn grandsons including all cats, goats and bedbugs. Airplanes making a noise to curdle the milk in your mother's breasts as they pass over darkening the sky and roaring like lions and you ask me to take things seriously. I take them too seriously already.

Females – sows and cows and hens and women – suffer because of their sex in Western patriarchal cultures, where female bodies are exploited as sex symbols, for reproduction, for breast milk, and/or for reproductive eggs. As such, farmed animals are at the very bottom of the contemporary, Western hierarchy of beings – and this is speceisism.

There are three reasons for breast-feeding: the milk is always at the right temperature; it comes in attractive containers; and the cat can't get it.

Breast milk is like the well that never stops giving.

Dude, if you’re going to patch into the Sons you’re going to have to deal with a lot more scarier things than my breast milk

I am learning how love wells up and causes great pain when it has nowhere to go. Like breast milk, it has to have an outlet; it can only be nourishing if it is directed away from its source.

So I lay her to sleep and wipe off the milk and step into the next room for some innocent filth in the middle of which her scream jolts me up And I transform breast once more between lover and love.

That’s what breasts are for? To make milk for their younglings? And here he had been, stupidly thinking Delora’s breasts existed to be played with by him, considering she’d liked it whenever he touched them.

Water beaded across her shoulders, shining like drops of milk, and her breasts swayed in the currents. It was the kind of vision you never really get over. I couldn’t help it, I wanted to go and lick the milk beads from her shoulders. I opened my mouth. I wanted something. Something, I didn’t know what. Mother, forgive.

Keep an eye out for other things that we moderns might be trying to rid ourselves of without sufficiently understanding their function—not only Chesterton’s organs, but his gods and his breast milk, his cuisine and his play.

Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one’s resources; it belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion. The more one gives, the more one has the give - like milk in the breast.

Human breast milk is high in cholesterol because babies need plenty of it to develop healthy brains and sharp eyesight. In fact, breast milk even contains a special enzyme ensuring that babies absorb as much cholesterol as possible.

She’d thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe. When Wayne fell asleep, his hot cheek against her naked breast, his lips smelling sweetly of the milk from her own body, she felt as if she was the one who had been fed.

The raven himself is hoarse That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Under my battlements. Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood, Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between Th’ effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, your murd’ring ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark To cry, “Hold, hold!

The scale of her belly and breasts was not unlike early fertility goddesses found in Greece around 6000 BC, except they did not wear polka-dot aprons. Did they suffer from hypochondria? Hysteria? Were they bold? Lame? Too full of the milk of human kindness?

Denmark has ever attempted to quantify the value of breastfeeding in its GDP. And it’s no paltry sum: In the U.S., the potential contribution of breast milk has been estimated at an incredible $110 billion a year7–about the size of China’s military budget.8

Feeding (more on this in chapter 8) Breast pump Breast pads Breast cream (Lansinoh) Breast milk containers Twin nursing pillow Boppy Formula Baby bottles (8-oz. wide neck; 16–20 bottles if you’re doing formula exclusively) Dishwasher baskets Bottle brush High chairs Booster seat Food processor or immersion blender Bottle warmer Bottle drying rack Bowls and spoons Baby food storage containers Keepsakes Baby books Thank-you notes/stationery Newspaper from birthday CD player/dock for music Twin photo albums/frames

Velvet Shoes Let us walk in the white snow In a soundless space; With footsteps quiet and slow, At a tranquil pace, Under veils of white lace. I shall go shod in silk, And you in wool, White as a white cow's milk, More beautiful Than the breast of a gull. We shall walk through the still town In a windless peace; We shall step upon white down, Upon silver fleece, Upon softer than these. We shall walk in velvet shoes: Wherever we go Silence will fall like dews On white silence below. We shall walk in the snow.

Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one's resources; it belonds to that natural order of giving that seems to renew iself even in the act of depletion. The more one gives, the more one has to give - like milk in the breast... Even purposeful giving must have some source that refills it. The milk in the breast must be replenished by food taken into the body. If it is [our] function to give, [we] must be replenished too. But how? Every person should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day.

Her child has been taken away from her, Her breasts are overflowing with milk. So she feeds the orphans. Tears are flowing from her eyes. She is happy to help the orphans but there is a pain and guilt that the milk which was for her child is being consumed by others.

[Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this?]" Didn’t Sappho say her guts clutched up like this? Before a face suddenly numinous, her eyes watered, knees melted. Did she lactate again, milk brought down by a girl’s kiss? It’s documented torrents are unloosed by such events as recently produced not the wish, but the need, to consume, in us, one pint of Maalox, one of Kaopectate. My eyes and groin are permanently swollen, I’m alternatingly brilliant and witless —and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in. Although I’d cream my jeans touching your breast, sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest of what I want with you that scares me shitless.

Let me sing the beauty of my Maggie. Legs:--the knees attached to the thighs, knees shiny, thighs like milk. Arms:--the levers of my content, the serpents of my joy. Back:--the sight of that in a strange street of dreams in the middle of Heaven would make me fall sitting from glad recognition. Ribs?--she had some melted and round like a well formed apple, from her thigh bones to waist I saw the earth roll. In her neck I hid myself like a lost snow goose of Australia, seeking the perfume of her breast. . . . She didn't let me, she was a good girl. The poor big alley cat, though almost a year younger, had black ideas about her legs that he hid from himself, also in his prayers didn't mention . . . the dog. Across the big world darkness I've come, in boat, in bus, in airplane, in train standing my shadow immense traversing the fields and the redness of engine boilers behind me making me omnipotent upon the earth of the night, like God--but I have never made love with a little finger that has won me since. I gnawed her face with my eyes; she loved that; and that was bastardly I didn't know she loved me--I didn't understand.

This individualistic ethos, which has sometimes been called 'selfism,' was pumped into the boomers with their breast milk, and will be drained from every cavity by their morticians. It is an empancipation narrative. The idea was to be liberated from dogma, political oppression, social prejudice, and group conformity. The movement had a right-wing variant - the individual should be economically unregulated - and it had a left-wing variant - each person's individually chosen lifestyle should be socially unregulated. But it was all about individual emancipation all the way down.

Govinda was standing in front of him, dressed in the yellow robe of an ascetic. Sad was how Govinda looked like, sadly he asked: Why have you forsaken me? At this, he embraced Govinda, wrapped his arms around him, and as he was pulling him close to his chest and kissed him, it was not Govinda any more, but a woman, and a full breast popped out of the woman's dress, at which Siddhartha lay and drank, sweetly and strongly tasted the milk from this breast.

All these women, Huila thought: Mothers of God. These skinny, these dirty and toothless, these pregnant and shoeless. These with an issue of blood, and these with unsuckled breasts and children cold in the grave. These old forgotten ones too weak to work. These fat ones who milked all day. These twisted ones tied to their pallets, these barren ones, these married ones, these abandoned ones, these whores, these hungry ones, these thieves, these drunks, these mestizas, these lovers of other women, these Indians, and these littlest ones who faced unknowable tomorrows. Mothers of God. If it was a sin to think so, she would face God and ask Him why. “The

Again And Again And Again You said the anger would come back just as the love did. I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates. It is old. It is also a pauper. I have tried to keep it on a diet. I give it no unction. There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it. Lust has taken plant in it and I have placed you and your child at its milk tip. Oh the blackness is murderous and the milk tip is brimming and each machine is working and I will kiss you when I cut up one dozen new men and you will die somewhat, again and again.

Fortunately, life, which was more powerful than their mockery and whose sweet and strengthening milk he had not fully drained, held out its breast to dissuade him. And he resumed drinking with a joyous voracity, his rich and credulous imagination listening naïvely to the grievances of that ravenousness and making wonderful amends for its blighted hopes.

People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like.” The phenomenon starts early. Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother’s foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they’ve sampled while in the womb and while breastfeeding. (Babies swallow several ounces of amniotic fluid a day.)

The commercial and medical pressures to use artificial milks would have kept breastmilk supplies low.

Milk-substitute manufacturers have worked very hard for almost a century to convince women that they are not mammals and have no business breast-feeding.

A fear unlike any he had ever known settled on his heart. 'Jesu, I have no breasts for milking.

you want to keep the blood and the milk hidden as if the womb and breast never fed you

She unsnapped her heavy cotton bra and let it fall. Her breasts were milk-white, upright and smooth. The nipples were a light coffee color.

Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, your murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief!

When we have just seen the sky full of airplanes of a quantity to kill us back to our grandfathers and forward to all unborn grandsons including all cats, goats and bedbugs. Airplanes making a noise to curdle the milk in your mother’s breasts as they pass over darkening the sky and roaring like lions and you ask me to take things seriously. I take them too seriously already.

Forty percent of slave owners were white women. It was white women who made the market for Black women's breast milk and who were attended by Black women in the big house. It was white women who upheld much of the day-to-day white supremacy – the schoolteachers, the store clerks, the waitresses. And it is now often white women activating police interactions with Black people.

recruiting sensory panelists to sniff* amniotic fluid (withdrawn during amniocentesis) and breast milk from women who had and those who hadn’t swallowed a garlic oil capsule. Panelists agreed: the garlic-eaters’ samples smelled like garlic. (The babies didn’t appear to mind. On the contrary, the Monell team wrote, “Infants . . . sucked more when the milk smelled like garlic.”)

Getting calcium from plants might seem a little strange in a society that is so focused on dairy foods as a source of calcium, but some research suggests that even omnivores get as much as 40 percent of their calcium from plant foods. While a strong dairy lobby has convinced many consumers that milk and other dairy foods are essential for a healthy diet, the ability to drink milk into adulthood is not the norm throughout the world. Normal development throughout most of the world involves a gradual loss of the enzyme needed to digest milk sugar after children are weaned from breast milk. We refer to the lack of this enzyme as “lactose intolerance.” But that’s definitely a western bias since this “intolerance” is not a lack or an abnormality; it’s part of normal human development in most people.

The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels With her meagre pale demoralized daughter. Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun And saying that when she was first married She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon. (It is empty now, the roof has fallen But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing; The place is now more solitary than ever before.) "When I was nursing my second baby My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake And brought it; I put its mouth to the breast Rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies. Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler, Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach. I had more joy from that than from the others." Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road With market-wagons, mean cares and decay. She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin Soon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows, I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries, The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.

For all tables are full of vomit and filthiness, so that there is no place clean. 9. Whom shall he teach knowledge? and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts.

The human mother can suckle the child with her milk. But our beloved Mother Jesus can feed us with himself. This is what he does when he tenderly and graciously offers us the blessed sacrament, which is the precious food of true life. In mercy and grace he sustains us with all the sweet sacraments. This is what he meant when he said that he was the one that holy church preaches and teaches us. In other words, Christ the Mother is entwined with the wholeness of life which includes all the sacraments, all the virtues, all the virtues of the word-made-flesh, all the goodness that holy church ordains for our benefit. The human mother can tenderly lay the child on her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus can lead us directly into his own tender breast through his sweet broken-open side. Here, he reveals a glimpse of the godhead and some of the joys of paradise with the implicit promise of eternal bliss.

The Aztec Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, one of the few pre-Columbian books not destroyed by the Spanish, portray Mayahuel, goddess of the agave, breast-feeding her drunken rabbit children, presumably offering them pulque instead of milk.

Every child was born with some kind of knowledge of love, he thought; they took it with the milk at the breast: but on parents and friends depended the kind of love they knew - the saving one or the damning kind. Lust too was a kind of love.

Nanna: Inside, there was a long rigmarole that went on and on; it began with my hair, which had been cut off in the church, and said that he had gathered it together and made a neckband of it for himself; and my forehead was clearer than a cloudless sky. He compared my eyebrows to the black wood which is used to make combs, and he said that my cheeks were so white that they filled milk and cream with envy. He declared my teeth were like a row of pearls, and my lips like pomegranate blossoms; he composed a great preamble on my hands - he even praised my fingernails; and he said that my voice was like the canticle 'Gloria in eccelsis'; and when he came to my breasts, he waxed positively ecstatic - they displayed two apples as white and shining as the snow in sunlight. Finally he allowed himself to slip down to the fountain, saying that he had drunk from it all unworthily, and that it distilled nectar and manna, and that the curls of hair round it were made of silk.

At his leisure, the lieutenant allowed the unforgettable spectacle to engrave itself upon his mind. With one hand he fondled the hair, with the other he softly stroked the magnificent face, implanting kisses here and there where his eyes lingered. The quiet coldness of the high, tapering forehead, the closed eyes with their long lashes beneath faintly etched brows, the set of the finely shaped nose, the gleam of teeth glimpsed between full, regular lips, the soft cheeks and the small, wise chin… Wherever the lieutenant's eyes moved his lips faithfully followed. The high, swelling breasts, surmounted by nipples like the buds of a wild cherry, hardened as the lieutenant's lips closed about them. The arms flowed smoothly downward from each side of the breast, tapering toward the wrists, yet losing nothing of their roundness or symmetry…The natural hollow curving between the bosom and the stomach carried in its lines a suggestion not only of softness but of resilient strength, and while it gave forewarning to the rich curves spreading outward from here to the hips it had, in itself, an appearance only of restraint and proper discipline. The whiteness and richness of the stomach and hips was like milk brimming in a great bowl, and the sharply shadowed dip of the navel could have been the fresh impress of a raindrop, fallen there that very moment. Where the shadows gathered more thickly, hair clustered, gentle and sensitive, and as the agitation mounted in the now no longer passive body there hung over this region a scent like the smoldering of fragrant blossoms, growing steadily more pervasive… Passionately they held their faces close, rubbing cheek against cheek…Their breasts, moist with sweat, were tightly joined, and every inch of the young and beautiful bodies had become so much one with the other that it seemed impossible there should ever again be a separation…From the heights they plunged into the abyss, and from the abyss they took wing and soared once more to dizzying heights…As one cycle ended, almost immediately a new wave of passion would be generated, and together -with no trace of fatigue- they would climb again in a single breathless movement to the very summit.

Eighty percent of cancers, known as carcinomas, arise in epithelial cells—that is, the cells that make up the skin and the linings of organs. Breast cancers, for instance, don’t just grow randomly within the breast, but normally begin in the milk ducts.

But if your language is intended to be the medium of an art; if you, its user, are an artist and not a reporter, a persuader, a raconteur; if you aren't writing principally to get praise or pay, but wish to avoid the busy avenues of entertainment, to traffic in the tragic maybe, dig down to the deeply serious; then (although there are a few exceptional and contrary cases) you will understand right away how blessed you are by the language you were born with, the language you began to amster in the moment you also started to learn about life, to read the lines on faces, the light in the window which meant milk, the door which deprived you of mother, the half-songs sung by that someone who lonaed you the breast you suckled - the breast you claimed as more than kin.

Memories fill my mind, as though they are my own, of not just events from Gideon's life, but of various flavors and textures: breast milk running easily down into my stomach, chicken cooked with butter and parsley, split peas and runner beans and butter beans, and oranges and peaches, strawberries freshly picked from the plant; hot, strong coffees each morning; pasta and walnuts and bread and brie; then something sweet: a pan cotta, with rose and saffron, and a white wine: tannin, soil, stone fruits, white blossom; and---oh my god---ramen, soba, udon, topped with nori and sesame seeds; miso with tofu and spring onions, fugu and tuna sashimi dipped in soy sauce, onigiri with a soured plum stuffed in the middle; and then something I don't know, something unfamiliar but at the same time deeply familiar, something I didn't realize I craved: crispy ground lamb, thick, broken noodles, chili oil, fragrant rice cooked in coconut milk, tamarind... and then a bright green dessert---the sweet, floral flavor of pandan fills my mouth.

And home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children) … brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat that could say, "My baby, my baby," over and over again. "My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable agonizing pleasure! Till at last my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps …" "Yes," said Mustapha Mond, nodding his head, "you may well shudder.

Results from a prospective study of 25,892 Norwegian women clearly showed that consumption in excess of 750 ml of whole milk a day leads to a relative risk of breast cancer of 2.91 compared with consumption of less than 150 ml with a relative risk of 1.0 [104].

Art thou that man,' she cries, 'who, erstwhile fed with the milk and reared upon the nourishment which is mine to give, had grown up to the full vigour of a manly spirit? And yet I had bestowed such armour on thee as would have proved an invincible defence, hadst thou not first cast it away. Dost thou know me? Why art thou silent? Is it shame or amazement that hath struck thee dumb? Would it were shame; but, as I see, a stupor hath seized upon thee.' Then, when she saw me not only answering nothing, but mute and utterly incapable of speech, she gently touched my breast with her hand, and said: 'There is no danger; these are the symptoms of lethargy, the usual sickness of deluded minds. For awhile he has forgotten himself; he will easily recover his memory, if only he first recognises me.

Large breasts are associated with feminine women, regardless of the slenderness of their hips. The capacity of a milk container cannot be told by its outside dimensions. Femininity is more accurately displayed by generous hips. Guess you can tell I favor women with big asses.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

Breast milk is so beneficial that a more or less well-nourished mother need not do any more than suckle her baby to ensure it is receiving a healthy diet. When it comes to the nutrients it contains, breast milk provides everything that dietary scientists believe children need in order to thrive - it is the best dietary supplement ever. It contains everything, knows everything, and can do everything necessary for a child's well-being. And, as if that weren't enough, it has the added advantage of passing on a bit of Mom's immune system to her offspring.

Those who visited that exhibition-room found an auto-de-fé of immense skies in ignition, globes blotted out by bleeding suns; hemorrhages of stars, flowing down in purple cataracts over tumbling tufts of clouds. Against this background of terrible din, silent women passed, nude or appareled in jeweled stuffs, like the bindings of the old Evangelists; women with hair of shaggy silk, with pale blue eyes, hard and fixed, and flesh of the frozen whiteness of milk; Salomes holding, motionless upon a platter, the head of the Baptist, which shone, soaked in phosphorus, under the quincunxes with shorn leaves, of a green that was almost black; goddesses galloping on hippogriffs and streaking, with the lapis lazuli of their wings, the agony of the clouds; feminine idols, in tiaras, upright on thrones, at the top of stairs submerged in extraordinary flowers, or seated, in rigid poses, upon the backs of elephants with green-mantled foreheads and breasts strung with pearl-ropes like cavalry bells, stamping about upon their own heavy image, reflected in a sheet of water and splashed by the columns of the ring-circled legs!

As I bit into the sweet orange flesh of the apricot, I found myself thinking about some of the women, the mothers who had waited with me in the school playground while we collected our children. Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children. We didn’t really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain. We tried to answer her back but we did not have the language to explain that we were not women who had merely ‘acquired’ some children – we had metamorphosed (new heavy bodies, milk in our breasts, hormonally programmed to run to our babies when they cried) into someone we did not entirely understand." (from "Things I Don't Want to Know" by Deborah Levy)

thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck, thy lips drop as the honeycomb, honey and milk are under thy tongue, the smell of thy breath is of apples, thy two breasts are clusters of grapes, thy palate a heady wine that goes straight to my love and flows over my lips and teeth…. A fountain sealed, spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, myrrh and aloes, I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey, I have drunk my wine with my milk. Who was she, who was she who rose like the dawn, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, terrible as an army with banners?

I feel like I’m an Athenian sacrifice.” His responding chuckle was a rumble against her breasts as he covered her. “You know what happened to those sacrifices, right? What did they teach you in your human schools? That the minotaur ate all of the tributes? That’s true, but not the way you think.

Those women, who have been admitted to the center of intellectual activity of their day and especially in the past hundred years, academically trained women, have first had to learn “how to think like a man.” In the process, many of them have so internalized that learning that they have lost the ability to conceive of alternatives. The way to think abstractly is to define precisely, to create models in the mind and generalize from them. Such thought, men have taught us, must be based on the exclusion of feelings. Women, like the poor, the subordinate, the marginals, have close knowledge of ambiguity, of feelings mixed with thought, of value judgments coloring abstractions. Women have always experienced the reality of self and community, known it, and shared it with each other. Yet, living in a world in which they are devalued, their experience bears the stigma of insignificance. Thus they have learned to mistrust their own experience and devalue it. What wisdom can there be in menses? What source of knowledge in the milk-filled breast? What food for abstraction in the daily routine of feeding and cleaning? Patriarchal thought has relegated such gender-defined experiences to the realm of the “natural,” the non-transcendent.

David watched Sol finish the can of beans. Sol always ate fast. He overate. Since he was eight. Sol leaned back in the wooden chair against the wall, under the window. Baby brother. Sol could have been anything he wanted to be. Nothing mathematical, nothing quantitative, of course, but anything else. A beautiful boy, a wonderful brother, they got along well. Then when Sol turned eight years old, age of a new beginning, their mother obsessed over him, ignoring David. Obsessed over Sol and his underwear. Over and over, a regeneration, a newness. Changed his clothes constantly, had him on her lap every minute possible. She put him in bed and tucked the covers in every night. She refused to let their father do it, so he always took care of David. But, of course, David needed no help and Sol always needed Ruth to take care of him. Sol was still being breast fed even when he finally went to kindergarten. Then Ruth slowly increased regular, solid food. But before bed, Sol had a nightcap, mother’s milk. Their special time. Their unique closeness took a turn from breastfeeding to something else. By the time Sol was in third grade, he was one of the fattest kids in class. Then the brothers became a real team. Now here he was. David and Sol still together, on a mission given by the Creator. It was perfect.

How could it be, she wondered. How could it be that the simple act of having a child did this to you? Had every birth in the world ruined every woman in the world? Was this a secret they’d been keeping, or had she just not been listening? Underneath all the vacuous, cruel wisdom the women who saw her in her late stages of pregnancy imparted to her, most of which had to do with banking sleep or measuring every precious moment because it all goes so fast, were they really telling her to mark her personhood? The other women in her prenatal yoga class had kept up an email chain, and in their messages, she tried to discern that they, too, were terrified and violated and sad and broken, but they weren’t. Trust her, they just weren’t. They made jokes about how they were tired and it was a tragedy that one of them had had an epidural and it was a tragedy that one of them couldn’t produce enough milk for her baby and had to supplement with formula. She wanted to write back to tell them she couldn’t look in the mirror at herself. She wanted someone to understand how small she was now. She wanted to ask one of them if this was the real her—if the real her had been revealed to her suddenly that day in the hospital, or if she would somehow bounce back. Bouncing back was a language they understood: their vaginas needed to bounce back, their breasts needed to bounce back, would their abdomens ever bounce back. With a few small adjustments, these women would acclimate to life. They would recognize themselves. But would Rachel? Would Rachel bounce back? The entire phrase “bouncing back” seemed to her like it existed to make fun of her. There was no bouncing. There was no back.

Again And Again And Again You said the anger would come back just as the love did. I have a black look I do not like. It is a mask I try on. I migrate toward it and its frog sits on my lips and defecates. It is old. It is also a pauper. I have tried to keep it on a diet. I give it no unction. There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it. Lust has taken plant in it and I have placed you and your child at its milk tip. Oh the blackness is murderous and the milk tip is brimming and each machine is working and I will kiss you when I cut up one dozen new men and you will die somewhat, again and again.

Eighty percent of cancers, known as carcinomas, arise in epithelial cells—that is, the cells that make up the skin and the linings of organs. Breast cancers, for instance, don’t just grow randomly within the breast, but normally begin in the milk ducts. Epithelial cells are assumed to be particularly susceptible to cancers because they divide rapidly and often.

When I was in college, the board game RISK was popular for a while. We’d get stoned and I’d stare at the little plastic pieces moving across the territories and get utterly confused about allies and enemies, arguing that nothing could be that black and white, complicating the whole notion of the game. But I understand that estrogen is my enemy now, the very thing that made me big-busted and fertile and a terrific nurser, has turned on me, inside my milk ducts where my body incubated nourishment that made my babies pink cheeked and roly-poly thighed. It’s all so twisted and ironic and confusing. Tamoxifen, a hero and a hazard, my breasts, a giver and taker of life, and I, the protagonist and the antagonist in this story

…the worshipers here are not likely to kill one another, they all offer the same sacrifice, and how the fat spits and the carcasses sizzle as God in the sublime heavens inhales the odors of all this carnage with satisfaction. Jesus pressed his lamb to his breast, unable to fathom why God could not be appeased with a cup of milk poured over His altar, that sap of life which passes from one being to another, or with a handful of wheat, the basic substance of immortal bread. Soon he will have to part with the old man’s generous gift, his for such a short time, the poor little lamb will not live to see the sun set this day, it is time to mount the stairs of the Temple, to deliver it to the knife and sacrificial fire, as if it were no longer worthy of existence or being punished…

STAINS With red clay between my toes, and the sun setting over my head, the ghost of my mother blows in, riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord, riding on a honeysuckle breeze. Her teeth, the keys of a piano. I play her grinning ivory notes with cadenced fumbling fingers, splattered with paint, textured with scars. A song rises up from the belly of my past and rocks me in the bosom of buried memories. My mama’s dress bears the stains of her life: blueberries, blood, bleach, and breast milk; She cradles in her arms a lifetime of love and sorrow; Its brilliance nearly blinds me. My fingers tire, as though I've played this song for years. The tune swells red, dying around the edges of a setting sun. A magnolia breeze blows in strong, a heavenly taxi sent to carry my mother home. She will not say goodbye. For there is no truth in spoken farewells. I am pregnant with a poem, my life lost in its stanzas. My mama steps out of her dress and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet. She stands alone: bathed, blooming, burdened with nothing of this world. Her body is naked and beautiful, her wings gray and scorched, her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine. I watch her departure, her flapping wings: She doesn’t look back, not even once, not even to whisper my name: Brenda. I lick the teeth of my piano mouth. With a painter’s hands, with a writer’s hands with rusty wrinkled hands, with hands soaked in the joys, the sorrows, the spills of my mother’s life, I pick up eighty-one years of stains And pull her dress over my head. Her stains look good on me.

Time seemed infinite, then. I begged famous chefs for the chance to learn from them. I entered competitions and placed in a few. I volunteered to work brunch, turn artichokes, clean the grease trap. I flung my body at all of it: the smoke and singe of the grill station, a duck’s breast split open like a geode, two hundred oysters shucked in the walk-in, sex in the walk-in, drunken rides around Paris

People with the Moon in hard aspect to Mars, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune or Pluto may still harbour a deep fear that they will destroy or lose those they love. They may have—way in the back of their minds—the idea that if they love something they will destroy it. It could be that as children they felt angry towards the mother and then the next day she fell ill or had to go away for some reason, and the children are left thinking that they have caused that. Or sometimes this pattern is there for children who have been breast fed and then for some reason they lose the breast—the milk dries up or the mother becomes ill. These children may be left feeling that their greed exhausted the breast. Later in life, they still have a nebulous fear that those they love will die, or leave them, or be driven away.

Humans have milk?” His question wasn’t what Delora had expected him to fixate on, and a laugh burst from her. “Yes, Magnar. That’s what breasts are for. That’s why women have them.” “Your breasts do that?” His head darted down to blatantly stare at her tits, tilting as his orbs morphed to bright yellow in curiosity. It just made Delora laugh more. “That is... really strange. I am glad you don’t do that.

Sometimes at about 3 months of age, after the extreme fussiness/colic has dissipated, or in a baby who had common fussiness/crying, a child who had been sleeping well begins waking at night or crying at night and during the day. The parents also may note heightened activity with wild screaming spells. These children have accumulated a sleep debt and decided that they would rather play with their parents than be placed in a dark, quiet, and boring room. Parents who do not recognize the new sleep debt might believe that this new night waking represents hunger due to a “growth spurt” or insufficient breast milk. But when these parents begin to focus on establishing a healthy night-sleep schedule, when they put these babies in their cribs when the babies need to sleep, and when they shield their babies from overstimulation, the frequent night waking stops. If

Someday my child will grow right here.” “You’d like that, would you? I might get as big as a house.” Mikhail kissed her tummy again and then kissed the path to her breasts. “You will have milk for our babies. That is such a miracle, Raven.” She heard the ache in his voice. The need. He didn’t quite believe they would manage to have children, not when his people had been unable to do so for centuries, but he was willing to dream of it--with her.

Sir, sir, I am sorry for Marie Antoinette, archduchess and queen; but I am also sorry for that poor Huguenot woman, who, in 1685, under Louis the Great, sir, while with a nursing infant, was bound, naked to the waist, to a stake, and the child kept at a distance; her breast swelled with milk and her heart with anguish; the little one, hungry and pale, beheld that breast and cried and agonized; the executioner said to the woman, a mother and a nurse, 'Abjure!' giving her her choice between the death of her infant and the death of her conscience. What say you to that torture of Tantalus as applied to a mother? Bear this well in mind sir: the French Revolution had its reasons for existence; its wrath will be absolved by the future; its result is the world made better. From its most terrible blows there comes forth a caress for the human race. I abridge, I stop, I have too much the advantage;

and St. Bernard, the monastery’s patron, bearing both a crosier and a sword, his role as an apologist for the failed second crusade unforgotten even among his fans. (I confess I had rather hoped to see a portrayal of the Lactation of St. Bernard, the oft-depicted scene from a legend in which the saint kneeled before a nursing Madonna and was hit with a squirt of milk from her breasts, curing him of an eye infection. The image always makes me smile.) It

I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.

I stare at Isabel without blinking. I stare until I can see the pale roots of her natural hair and the expensive skin cream that changed her skin from milk to olive and the colored lenses that gave her yellow eyes and I wonder how she changed her breasts and ass and shortened her legs. I stare at her until her eyes are pointed and her teeth glitter like fangs and I have to close my eyes. If she said her name was Lucy and she faked her death I would believe her.

Again burst out that chant McKay had heard as he had floated through the mists upon the lake. Now, as then, despite his opened ears, he could distinguish no words, but clearly he understood its mingled themes - the joy of Spring's awakening, rebirth, with the green life streaming singing up through every bough, swelling the buds, burgeoning with tender leaves the branches; the dance of the trees in the scented winds of Spring; the drums of the jubilant rain on leafy hoods; passion of Summer sun pouring its golden flood down upon the trees; the moon passing with stately step and slow and green hands stretching up to her and drawing from her breast milk of silver fire; riot of wild gay winds with their mad pipings and strummings; - soft interlacing of boughs, the kiss of amorous leaves - all these and more, much more that McKay could not understand for it dealt with hidden, secret things for which man has no images. ("The Women Of The Woods")

With time, the ‘wheat bargain’ became more and more burdensome. Children died in droves, and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows. The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements’, each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers. Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.

Finally, when his lust had become a savage hunger, he dropped the belt and pulled up her sweater to admire his work. His eyes widened with glee as he gazed at her reddened breasts, with the silver pasties still stuck in place. “I’m not looking for silver,” he said, peeling the pasties away from her burning, sensitive nipples. “And there’s a buried treasure men crave much more than gold. That treasure is priceless… white gold, not from a dead man’s chest, but fresh from a living woman’s breast.

fad is a wave in the ocean, and a trend is the tide. A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little. Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it’s very powerful over the long term. A fad is a short-term phenomenon that might be profitable, but a fad doesn’t last long enough to do a company much good. Furthermore, a company often tends to gear up as if a fad were a trend. As a result, the company is often stuck with a lot of staff, expensive manufacturing facilities, and distribution networks. (A fashion, on the other hand, is a fad that repeats itself. Examples: short skirts for women and double-breasted suits for men. Halley’s Comet is a fashion because it comes back every 75 years or so.) When the fad disappears, a company often goes into a deep financial shock. What happened to Atari is typical in this respect. And look how Coleco Industries handled the Cabbage Patch Kids. Those homely dolls hit the market in 1983 and started to take off. Coleco’s strategy was to milk the kids for all they were worth. Hundreds of Cabbage Patch novelties flooded the toy stores. Pens, pencils, crayon boxes, games, clothing. Two years later, Coleco racked up sales of $776 million and profits of $83 million. Then the bottom dropped out of the Cabbage Patch Kids. By 1988 Coleco went into Chapter 11. Coleco died, but the kids live on. Acquired by Hasbro in 1989, the Cabbage Patch Kids are now being handled conservatively. Today they’re doing quite well.

It must be known, then, that the soul, after it has been definitely converted to the service of God, is, as a rule, spiritually nurtured and caressed by God, even as is the tender child by its loving mother, who warms it with the heat of her bosom and nurtures it with sweet milk and soft and pleasant food, and carries it and caresses it in her arms; but, as the child grows bigger, the mother gradually ceases caressing it, and, hiding her tender love, puts bitter aloes upon her sweet breast, sets down the child from her arms and makes it walk upon its feet, so that it may lose the habits of a child and betake itself to more important and substantial occupations. The loving mother is like the grace of God, for, as soon as the soul is regenerated by its new warmth and fervour for the service of God, He treats it in the same way; He makes it to find spiritual milk, sweet and delectable, in all the things of God, without any labor of its own, and also great pleasure in spiritual exercises, for here God is giving to it the breast of His tender love, even as to a tender child.

when i left them, i painted myself burgundy and grey i stopped saying the words “please” and “i’m sorry” i walked into grocery stores and bought too many clementines, ordered too much Chinese, spent my last four dollars on over the counter sleeping pills that made my stomach bleed but my soul forget every time i wanted to tell you “i’m sorry”, i wrote you a poem instead, i said things like “i hope your mother calls you beautiful” to strangers and when boys with dry hands and broken eyes asked me on dates i didn’t hesitate no, didn’t even stop them when their hands grazed my breasts and when they moaned my name against my thighs i cried i opened the mail and didn’t tell anyone for a week that i got accepted into law school, i stopped watering the plants and filled the bathtub with roses and milk, when i got invited to parties, i wore blue jeans with white shirts, sat alone in some kitchen drinking hard liquor until some boys mouth made me feel like home i stopped answering the phone for a month, i didn’t like how my name tasted in his mouth but he was older and didn’t say things like “it doesn’t matter” and i think i went insane, my heart boiled blisters, i couldn’t understand why my bones felt like cages, i walked around art museums until closing, watched them lock up the gates and then open them up again the very same morning, i thought about clocks and how time was a deception of my fingertips, i had stars growing inside of me into constellations, and only when some man on the 9 AM bus asked me for the time did i realize that you cannot run from light igniting your lungs, you cannot run from yourself.

When humans began cultivating the land, they thought that the extra work this required will pay off. 'Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won't have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.' It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.

The Lanyard The other day I was ricocheting slowly off the blue walls of this room, moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard. No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one into the past more suddenly— a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake learning how to braid long thin plastic strips into a lanyard, a gift for my mother. I had never seen anyone use a lanyard or wear one, if that's what you did with them, but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and again until I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother. She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard. She nursed me in many a sick room, lifted spoons of medicine to my lips, laid cold face-cloths on my forehead, and then led me out into the airy light and taught me to walk and swim, and I , in turn, presented her with a lanyard. Here are thousands of meals, she said, and here is clothing and a good education. And here is your lanyard, I replied, which I made with a little help from a counselor. Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp. And here, I wish to say to her now, is a smaller gift—not the worn truth that you can never repay your mother, but the rueful admission that when she took the two-tone lanyard from my hand, I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

So—there were still four hundred scabs, and it was painful to think of them as scabs because they were just like the others, but they were frightened. They were frightened because they were hungry now, but if they lost their jobs they would be hungrier, and winter was coming. Winter haunted them all because there was only scrub cotton to pick for awhile, maybe a few oranges now and then, maybe not anything. There were colds and flu and pneumonia, and babies being born and unborn, and school, and shoes wearing out. There were old men and women dying, and sometimes the young died before their time. Babies died. Life was just a little thing to them: a shrunken breast, a colorless tent wall in their curious sight, hunger without name and explanation, pain, and the dark. Sometimes in the short winter days, the mothers looked at old magazines and saw ads for milk and pretty blankets and lacy pillows, and insurance for your baby’s education, and sometimes they found articles about how to care for a baby, and they knew why their babies died. They knew anyway. Often they wondered why their babies did not die, how they could survive without all the things necessary to babies in the outside world.

Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children. We didn’t really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain. We tried to answer her back but we did not have the language to explain that we were not women who had merely ‘acquired’ some children – we had metamorphosed (new heavy bodies, milk in our breasts, hormonally programmed to run to our babies when they cried) into someone we did not entirely understand.

O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you, I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems, Man’s, woman’s, child’s, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s, mother’s, father’s, young man’s, young woman’s poems, Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids, Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue, Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest, Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones, Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails, Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side, Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone, Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root, Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above, Leg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg, Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel; All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female, The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean, The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame, Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity, Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman, The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings, The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud, Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming, Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening, The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes, The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair, The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body, The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out, The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees, The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones, The exquisite realization of health; O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, O I say now these are the soul!

Some powerful feminist thinkers call us to remember that gift giving is among the most primal of human relationships. Each of us begins our life as the recipient in what Genevieve Vaughan has called a “maternal gift economy,” the flow of “goods and services” from mother to newborn. When the mother nurses her child, the boundary of the individual self becomes permeable and the common good is the only one that matters. The maternal gift economy is a biological imperative. There is no meritocracy or earning of sustenance. Mothers do not sell their milk to their babies, it is pure gift, so that life can continue. The currency of this economy is the flow of gratitude, the flow of love, literally in support of life. By analogy, can the sustenance from the breast of Mother Earth be understood as a maternal gift economy? These feminist thinkers argue that giving and taking in this sense are a fundamental way of caring for each other, without the intervention of states or markets. Scholars like Miki Kashtan are exploring how the philosophy and practice of a maternal gift economy might move social organization toward justice and sustainability. If the Sun is the source of flow in the economy of nature, what is the “Sun” of a human gift economy, the source that constantly replenishes the flow of gifts? Maybe it is love.

Inside, there was a bed, and upon the bed there was a woman. More beautiful was she even than the damask rose while her scent, drifting through the open window, was that of the night dew. Her hair was silken as the raven's wing. Quite naked, she lay, so still upon the bed, her eyes closed in reverie. The young man looked first upon her breasts, where her hand rested. And upon each breast, there was a rosebud nipple. Upon each nipple there was a tip most tender. Upon each tip there was a milky drop. Chin lifted, lips parted, she milked her maiden breast. 'What I would give to suckle at that teat,' thought he. from 'Against Faithlessness' in Cautionary Tales

But I can cite ten other reasons for not being a father." "First of all, I don't like motherhood," said Jakub, and he broke off pensively. "Our century has already unmasked all myths. Childhood has long ceased to be an age of innocence. Freud discovered infant sexuality and told us all about Oedipus. Only Jocasta remains untouchable; no one dares tear off her veil. Motherhood is the last and greatest taboo, the one that harbors the most grievous curse. There is no stronger bond than the one that shackles mother to child. This bond cripples the child's soul forever and prepares for the mother, when her son has grown up, the most cruel of all the griefs of love. I say that motherhood is a curse, and I refuse to contribute to it." "Another reason I don't want to add to the number of mothers," said Jakub with some embarrassment, "is that I love the female body, and I am disgusted by the thought of my beloved's breast becoming a milk-bag." "The doctor here will certainly confirm that physicians and nurses treat women hospitalized after an aborted pregnancy more harshly than those who have given birth, and show some contempt toward them even though they themselves will, at least once in their lives, need a similar operation. But for them it's a reflex stronger than any kind of thought, because the cult of procreation is an imperative of nature. That's why it's useless to look for the slightest rational argument in natalist propaganda. Do you perhaps think it's the voice of Jesus you're hearing in the natalist morality of the church? Do you think it's the voice of Marx you're hearing in the natalist propaganda of the Communist state? Impelled merely by the desire to perpetuate the species, mankind will end up smothering itself on its small planet. But the natalist propaganda mill grinds on, and the public is moved to tears by pictures of nursing mothers and infants making faces. It disgusts me. It chills me to think that, along with millions of other enthusiasts, I could be bending over a cradle with a silly smile." "And of course I also have to ask myself what sort of world I'd be sending my child into. School soon takes him away to stuff his head with the falsehoods I've fought in vain against all my life. Should I see my son become a conformist fool? Or should I instill my own ideas into him and see him suffer because he'll be dragged into the same conflicts I was?" "And of course I also have to think of myself. In this country children pay for their parents' disobedience, and parents for their children's disobedience. How many young people have been denied education because their parents fell into disgrace? And how many parents have chosen permanent cowardice for the sole purpose of preventing harm to their children? Anyone who wants to preserve at least some freedom here shouldn't have children," Jakub said, and fell into silence. "The last reason carries so much weight that it counts for five," said Jakub. "Having a child is to show an absolute accord with mankind. If I have a child, it's as though I'm saying: I was born and have tasted life and declare it so good that it merits being duplicated." "And you have not found life to be good?" asked Bertlef. Jakub tried to be precise, and said cautiously: "All I know is that I could never say with complete conviction: Man is a wonderful being and I want to reproduce him.

In 1993, the FDA granted approval to Monsanto for its genetically engineered recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), brand-named Posilac, for use by the nation’s dairy farmers. It increases milk production by about 10 percent over a cow’s life cycle. It’s the largest-selling cattle pharmaceutical in the United States. But Posilac has always been controversial. More and more cancer specialists are apprehensive, because it may increase the risk for breast, colon, and prostate cancers in humans. Unless the milk you’re drinking is clearly marked “organic” or “rBGH free,” it probably contains this hormone. Incidentally, Posilac is banned in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan. This should tell us something.

I bought the air freshener for four euro because it was a kind of artefact translated into many languages, and also because it was clearly an interpretation of a woman ( breasts belly apron eyelashes) and I had becomes confused by the signs for servicios in public places. I could not figure out why one sign was male and the other female. The most common stick figure sign was not particularly male or female. Did I need this aerosol to make things clearer to me? What kind of clarity was I after? I had conquered Juan who was Zeus the thunderer as far as I was concerned, but the signs were all mixed up because his job in the injury hut was to tend the wounded with his tube of ointment. He was maternal, brotherly, he was like a sister, perhaps paternal, he had become my lover. Are we all lurking in each other's sign? Do I and the woman on the air freshener belong to the same sign? Another aeroplane was flying above the market, it's metal body heavy in the sky. A male pilot I had met in the Coffee House had told me that an aircraft was always referred to as 'she'. His task was to keep her in balance, to make her a extension of his hands, to make her responsive to the lightest of touch. She was sensitive and needed to be handled delicately. A week later, after we had slept together, I discovered that he was also responsive to the lightest of touch. It wasn't clarity I was after. I wanted things to be less clear.

A hand clapped on her shoulder. Milk sloshed over the side of the pail, dousing her hand and splattering her skirts. A startled cry whooshed out of her as an arm whipped around her waist. Her back collided with a wall of heat and muscle. “Is this what you wanted?” The rough whisper warmed her ear. “Gray.” She nearly fainted with relief. He held her tight against him with one arm, his other hand skimming over the curve of her hip. “Gray, what on earth are you doing? You made me spill the milk, drat you.” “It won’t go to waste.” Resting his chin on her shoulder, he untangled her fingers from the pail’s handle. Bending her arm at the elbow, he lifted her fingers to his mouth, sucking them clean one by one. His tongue traced each finger and the delicate webs between them, sending gooseflesh rippling down the backs of her legs. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” His fingers interlaced with hers, squeezing them until they hurt. “Your dream lover, lurking in the shadows of the stables, the larder…the storeroom? Lying in wait for his wanton dairymaid?” Sophia froze. Dear God, he’d seen The Book. He nipped at the curve of her neck, and she gasped. “You-“ She swallowed hard. “You had no right to look through that.” “You had no right to put me in it.” She could hear the raw edge of anger in his voice. His fingers still gripping hers, he pressed her own hand to her breast. “But let’s not dwell on rights, sweet. Not when wrongs are so much more interesting.

Dog Talk … I have seen Ben place his nose meticulously into the shallow dampness of a deer’s hoofprint and shut his eyes as if listening. But it is smell he is listening to. The wild, high music of smell, that we know so little about. Tonight Ben charges up the yard; Bear follows. They run into the field and are gone. A soft wind, like a belt of silk, wraps the house. I follow them to the end of the field where I hear the long-eared owl, at wood’s edge, in one of the tall pines. All night the owl will sit there inventing his catty racket, except when he opens pale wings and drifts moth-like over the grass. I have seen both dogs look up as the bird floats by, and I suppose the field mouse hears it too, in the pebble of his tiny heart. Though I hear nothing. Bear is small and white with a curly tail. He was meant to be idle and pretty but learned instead to love the world, and to romp roughly with the big dogs. The brotherliness of the two, Ben and Bear, increases with each year. They have their separate habits, their own favorite sleeping places, for example, yet each worries without letup if the other is missing. They both bark rapturously and in support of each other. They both sneeze to express plea- sure, and yawn in humorous admittance of embarrassment. In the car, when we are getting close to home and the smell of the ocean begins to surround them, they both sit bolt upright and hum. With what vigor and intention to please himself the little white dog flings himself into every puddle on the muddy road. Somethings are unchangeably wild, others are stolid tame. The tiger is wild, the coyote, and the owl. I am tame, you are tame. The wild things that have been altered, but only into a semblance of tameness, it is no real change. But the dog lives in both worlds. Ben is devoted, he hates the door between us, is afraid of separation. But he had, for a number of years, a dog friend to whom he was also loyal. Every day they and a few others gathered into a noisy gang, and some of their games were bloody. Dog is docile, and then forgets. Dog promises then forgets. Voices call him. Wolf faces appear in dreams. He finds himself running over incredible lush or barren stretches of land, nothing any of us has ever seen. Deep in the dream, his paws twitch, his lip lifts. The dreaming dog leaps through the underbrush, enters the earth through a narrow tunnel, and is home. The dog wakes and the disturbance in his eyes when you say his name is a recognizable cloud. How glad he is to see you, and he sneezes a little to tell you so. But ah! the falling-back, fading dream where he was almost there again, in the pure, rocky weather-ruled beginning. Where he was almost wild again, and knew nothing else but that life, no other possibility. A world of trees and dogs and the white moon, the nest, the breast, the heart-warming milk! The thick-mantled ferocity at the end of the tunnel, known as father, a warrior he himself would grow to be. …

Once upon a time I'd left Los Angeles and been swallowed down the throat of a life in which my sole loyalty was to my tongue. My belly. Myself. My mother called me selfish and so selfish I became. From nineteen to twenty-five I was a mouth, sating. For myself I made three-day braises and chose the most marbled meats, I played loose with butter and cream. My arteries were young, my life pooling before me, and I lapped, luxurious, from it. I drank, smoked, flew cheap red-eyes around Europe, I lived in thrilling shitholes, I found pills that made nights pass in a blink or expanded time to a soap bubble, floating, luminous, warm. Time seemed infinite, then. I begged famous chefs for the chance to learn from them. I entered competitions and placed in a few. I volunteered to work brunch, turn artichokes, clean the grease trap. I flung my body at all of it: the smoke and singe of the grill station, a duck's breast split open like a geode, two hundred oysters shucked in the walk-in, sex in the walk-in, drunken rides around Paris on a rickety motorcycle and no helmet, a white truffle I stole and shaved in secret over a bowl of Kraft mac n' cheese for me, just me, as my body strummed the high taut selfish song of youth. On my twenty-fifth birthday I served black-market fugu to my guests, the neurotoxin stinging sweetly on my lips as I waited to see if I would, by eating, die. At that age I believed I knew what death was: a thrill, like brushing by a friend who might become a lover.

But if your language is intended to be the medium of an art if you, its user, are an artist and not a reporter, a persuader, a raconteur; if you aren't writing principally to get praise or pay, but wish to avoid the busy avenues of entertainment, to traffic in the tragic maybe, dig down to the deeply serious; then (although there are a few exceptional and contrary cases) you will understand right away how blessed you are by the language you were born with, the language you began to amster in the moment you also started to learn about life, to read the lines on faces, the light in the window which meant milk, the door which deprived you of mother, the half-songs sung by that someone who lonaed you the breast you suckled - the breast you claimed as more than kin.

I : Body of a Woman" Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, you look like a world, lying in surrender My rough peasant's body digs into you and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth. I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me, and night swamped me with its crushing invasion. To survive myself I forged you like a weapon, like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling. But the hour of vengeance falls, and a love you. Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk. Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence! Oh the pink roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad! Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace. My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road! Dark River-beds where the eternal thirst flows and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.

Snow rubs his thumbs over the bird and snake heads. “There’s a pretty pair.” He flips it. “And an inscription.” An inscription? I must’ve missed it in the whirlwind of reaping day. Without asking for permission, he pulls a pair of specs from his breast pocket and tilts the striker to catch the light. “Ah, very sweet. From L.D. Who might that be?” Lying to conceal her won’t help. Even though they didn’t air it to the country, I bet they showed Snow what happened during the reaping. Me trying to save a girl from the Peacekeepers. Her reaction to my reaping. Twelve’s a small district. If he has a mind to, he will track down my girlfriend. “Lenore,” I say. “But Lenore what? No, no, don’t tell me. Let me guess. D . . . D . . . That’s a tough one. None of the usual suspects, but they so rarely are. I can think of plenty prefaced by deep or dark. Deep blue. Dark green. But that’s not how they work. Perhaps something in nature? Like amber or ivory. Daffodil . . . dandelion . . . diamond? No, that’s no color at all, really. All right, I’m stumped. Lenore what?” The milk has soured in my stomach at his musings and what they reveal. He knows Lenore Dove is Covey; only they name their children this way. First name from a ballad, second a color. Amber and Ivory are actual family names. How has he unearthed this obscure fact about a pocket of musicians in the throwaway district of 12? Capitol informers? “Dove,” I tell him. “Dove!” He smacks his forehead. “Dove. I have always heard ‘dove color,’ though. It’s a bit of a cheat. But who could resist when you get both the color and the bird? And we know how they feel about their birds.

Although formulas have greatly improved over the years, no formula can fully replicate the immunological benefits of mother’s milk. In the summer of 2018, the administration of President Donald Trump provoked dismay among many health authorities by opposing an international resolution to encourage breast-feeding and reportedly threatened Ecuador, the sponsor of the initiative, with trade sanctions if it didn’t change its position. Cynics pointed out that the infant formula industry, which is worth $70 billion a year, might have had a hand in determining the U.S. position. A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson denied that that was the case and said that America was merely “fighting to protect women’s abilities to make the best choices for the nutrition of their babies” and to make sure that they were not denied access to formula—something the resolution wouldn’t have done anyway.

The technological efficiency of daughter-proofing a pregnancy may make it seem as if the girl shortage is a problem of modernity, but female infanticide has been documented in China and India for more than two thousand years.119 In China, midwives kept a bucket of water at the bedside to drown the baby if it was a girl. In India there were many methods: “giving a pill of tobacco and bhang to swallow, drowning in milk, smearing the mother’s breast with opium or the juice of the poisonous Datura, or covering the child’s mouth with a plaster of cow-dung before it drew breath.” Then and now, even when daughters are suffered to live, they may not last long. Parents allocate most of the available food to their sons, and as a Chinese doctor explains, “if a boy gets sick, the parents may send him to the hospital at once, but if a girl gets sick, the parents may say to themselves, ‘Well, we’ll see how she is tomorrow.

sometimes I wonder if Mary breastfed Jesus. if she cried out when he bit her or if she sobbed when he would not latch. and sometimes I wonder if this is all too vulgar to ask in a church full of men without milk stains on their shirts or coconut oil on their breasts preaching from pulpits off limits to the Mother of God. but then I think of feeding Jesus, birthing Jesus, the expulsion of blood and smell of sweat, the salt of a mother’s tears onto the soft head of the Salt of the Earth, feeling lonely and tired hungry annoyed overwhelmed loving and I think, if the vulgarity of birth is not honestly preached by men who carry power but not burden, who carry privilege but not labor, who carry authority but not submission, then it should not be preached at all. because the real scandal of the Birth of God lies in the cracked nipples of a fourteen year old and not in the sermons of ministers who say women are too delicate to lead.

Witch," he grumbled as the woman committed an exploit that caused them both to gasp with a sort of reciprocal anguish. Then... they were moving conjointly, much as one would when riding a horse. The motion went on and on, the lovers more involved, more intense in their enterprise. The woman adjusted herself so that her breasts dangled over Michael's zealous mouth. He pressured, milked, and suckled. Sarah watched to the end, repelled, captivated, discomfited, wanting them to cease immediately, while at the same juncture, never wanting the torrid exhibition to conclude. They reached a mutual goal, a pinnacle, both crying out with a strangled elation, and she felt ashamed and sickened to have witnessed the intense emotion that flared between them, yet she was glad she had. Their pace slackened, the tension abated, the pair relaxed, and Michael rubbed the woman's back. Arrogant and satisfied with himself, he murmured, "Feeling better?" "Oh, Lord... but you utterly kill me when you do that.

In the wild, a young female is an allomother long before she bears her own offspring. She has fifteen years to practice being a big sister to the calves that are born to the herd. I’d seen calves approach young female elephants to suckle for comfort, even though the juveniles did not have breasts or milk yet. But the young female would put her foot forward, the way her mother and aunties did, and proudly pretend. She could act like a mother without having any of the real responsibility until she was ready. But when there is no family to teach a young female to raise her own calf, things can go horribly awry. When I was working in Pilanesberg, this story repeated itself. There, young bulls that had been translocated began to charge vehicles. They killed a tourist. More than forty white rhino were found dead in the reserve before we realized that these subadult males were the ones who’d attacked them—highly aggressive behavior that was far from normal. What is the common denominator for the odd behavior of the young female elephant that didn’t care about her own calf and the belligerent pack of teenage bulls? Certainly there was a lack of parental guidance. But was that the only issue at play? All those elephants had seen their families killed in front of them, as a result of culling. The grief that I have studied in the wild, where a herd loses an old matriarch, for example, must be contrasted to the grief that comes from observing the violent death of a family member—because the long-term effects are so markedly different. After a natural death, the herd encourages the grieving individual to eventually move on. After a mass killing by humans, there is—by definition—no herd left for support. To date, the animal research community has been reluctant to believe that elephant behavior might be affected by the trauma of watching one’s family being killed. I think this isn’t scientific objection as much as it is political shame—after all, we humans have been the perpetrators of this violence. At the very least, it is crucial when studying the grief of elephants to remember that death is a natural occurrence. Murder is not.

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other ma- chines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other inter- rupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouthi machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy-machine: all the time, flows and interruptions. Judge Schreber* has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works: Judge Schreber feels something, produces something, and is capable of explaining the process theoretically. Something is produced: the effects of a machine, not mere metaphors.

Confiding Julie, the first to get breasts, was cynical by Thanksgiving. Since no one else looked like the class slut, she was given the position, and she soon capitulated. She bleached her hair with Sun In, and started to mess around with boys who played in garage rock bands. Marianne, because she had long legs and a stem neck, rushed from school to her pliés at the barre, her hair in a bun, her head held high, to arch and sweep and bow toward the mirror until night fell. Cara delivered her audition piece flat, but since she had a wheat-colored rope of braid that brushed her waist, she would be Titania in the school play. Emily, bluntnosed and loud, could outact Cara in her sleep; when she saw the cast list she turned silently to her best friend, who handed her a box of milk chocolate creams. Tall, strong, bony Evvy watched Elise try out her maddening dimple. She cornered her outside class to ask her if she thought she was cute. Elise said yes, and Evvy threw a pipette of acid, stolen from the biology lab, in her face. Dodie hated her tight black hair that wouldn’t grow. She crept up behind blond Karen in home ec class and hacked out a fistful with pinking shears. Even Karen understood that it wasn’t personal.

Cheddar Cheese Grits Ingredients: 2 cups whole milk 2 cups water 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 cup coarse ground cornmeal 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 4 tablespoons unsalted butter 4 ounces sharp Cheddar, shredded Directions: Place the milk, water, and salt into a large, heavy-gauge pan over medium-high heat and bring to a boil. Once the milk mixture comes to a boil, gradually add the cornmeal while continually stirring. Once all of the cornmeal has been incorporated, decrease the heat to low and cover. Remove lid and stir frequently, every few minutes, to prevent grits from sticking or forming lumps; make sure to get into corners of the pan when stirring. Cook for 20 to 25 minutes or until mixture is creamy. Remove from the heat, add the pepper and butter, and whisk to combine. Once the butter is melted, gradually whisk in the cheese a little at a time. Serve immediately. Sweet Potato Casserole Ingredients: For the sweet potatoes 3 cups (1 29-ounce can) sweet potatoes, drained ½ cup melted butter ⅓ cup milk ¾ cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla 2 beaten eggs salt to taste For the topping: 5 tablespoons melted butter ⅔ cup brown sugar ⅔ cup flour 1 cup pecan pieces Instructions: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Mash the sweet potatoes and add the melted butter, milk, sugar, vanilla, beaten eggs, and a pinch of salt. Stir until incorporated. Pour into a shallow baking dish or a cast iron skillet. Combine the butter, brown sugar, flour, and pecan pieces in a small bowl, using your fingers to create moist crumbs. Sprinkle generously over the casserole. Bake for 25-35 minutes, until the edges pull away from the sides of the pan and the top is golden brown. Let stand for the mixture to cool and solidify a little bit before serving. Southern Fried Chicken Ingredients: 4 pounds chicken pieces 1 1/2 cups milk 2 large eggs 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 2 tablespoons salt 2 teaspoons pepper 3 cups vegetable oil salt to taste Preparation: Rinse chicken; pat dry and then set aside. Combine milk and eggs in a bowl; whisk to blend well. In a large heavy-duty plastic food storage bag, combine the flour, salt, and pepper. Dip a chicken piece in the milk mixture; let excess drip off into bowl. Put a few chicken pieces in the food storage bag and shake lightly to coat thoroughly. Remove to a plate and repeat with remaining chicken pieces. Heat oil to 350°. Fry chicken, a few pieces at a time, for about 10 minutes on each side, or until golden brown and cooked through. Chicken breasts will take a little less time than other pieces. Pierce with a fork to see if juices run clear to check for doneness. With a slotted spoon, move to paper towels to drain; sprinkle with salt.

Mikhail would be going into a dangerous situation, and a part of her knew he needed most of the night to complete his tasks, but there was no sign of impatience in him. He appeared relaxed and enjoying his time with her, wholly focused on her alone. She appreciated that in him so much--that ability to give her what she needed. He lifted his head and looked at her. “You always come first with me, Raven.” “I don’t know how I managed to get so lucky.” She trailed her fingers through his hair. All that dark silk intrigued her. She had never really seen men who wore their hair long and yet still looked so masculine. “That you can say that after all that has happened amazes me,” Mikhail said. He dipped his head to taste the small indent of her belly button. His chin nuzzled her. “Someday my child will grow right here.” “You’d like that, would you? I might get as big as a house.” Mikhail kissed her tummy again and then kissed the path to her breasts. “You will have milk for our babies. That is such a miracle, Raven.” She heard the ache in his voice. The need. He didn’t quite believe they would manage to have children, not when his people had been unable to do so for centuries, but he was willing to dream of it--with her. “We’ll find a way to have children, Mikhail. You managed to convert me without becoming deranged.” There was gentle humor in her voice. Mikhail’s head went up, his dark eyes meeting hers. Raven laughed softly. “Did you think I wouldn’t know your worst fear? I am adept at reading minds, and you, my love, have opened yourself to me often. I knew your fear and loved you all the more for facing it alone.

The menu is spectacular. Passed hors d'oeuvres include caramelized shallot tartlets topped with Gorgonzola, cubes of crispy pork belly skewered with fresh fig, espresso cups of chilled corn soup topped with spicy popcorn, mini arepas filled with rare skirt steak and chimichurri and pickle onions, and prawn dumplings with a mango serrano salsa. There is a raw bar set up with three kinds of oysters, and a raclette station where we have a whole wheel of the nutty cheese being melted to order, with baby potatoes, chunks of garlic sausage, spears of fresh fennel, lightly pickled Brussels sprouts, and hunks of sourdough bread to pour it over. When we head up for dinner, we will start with a classic Dover sole amandine with a featherlight spinach flan, followed by a choice of seared veal chops or duck breast, both served with creamy polenta, roasted mushrooms, and lacinato kale. Next is a light salad of butter lettuce with a sharp lemon Dijon vinaigrette, then a cheese course with each table receiving a platter of five cheeses with dried fruits and nuts and three kinds of bread, followed by the panna cottas. Then the cake, and coffee and sweets. And at midnight, chorizo tamales served with scrambled eggs, waffle sticks with chicken fingers and spicy maple butter, candied bacon strips, sausage biscuit sandwiches, and vanilla Greek yogurt parfaits with granola and berries on the "breakfast" buffet, plus cheeseburger sliders, mini Chicago hot dogs, little Chinese take-out containers of pork fried rice and spicy sesame noodles, a macaroni-and-cheese bar, and little stuffed pizzas on the "snack food" buffet. There will also be tiny four-ounce milk bottles filled with either vanilla malted milk shakes, root beer floats made with hard root beer, Bloody Marys, or mimosas.

she had striven to be patient and steadfast no matter what life presented, every time she learned she was carrying yet another child under her breast—again and again. With each son added to the flock she recognized that her responsibility had grown for ensuring the prosperity and secure position of the lineage. Tonight she realized that her ability to survey everything at once and her watchfulness had also grown with each new child entrusted to her care. Never had she seen it so clearly as on this evening—what destiny had demanded of her and what it had given her in return with her seven sons. Over and over again joy had quickened the beat of her heart; fear on their behalf had rent it in two. They were her children, these big sons with their lean, bony, boy’s bodies, just as they had been when they were small and so plump that they barely hurt themselves when they tumbled down on their way between the bench and her knee. They were hers, just as they had been back when she lifted them out of the cradle to her milk-filled breast and had to support their heads, which wobbled on their frail necks the way a bluebell nods on its stalk. Wherever they ended up in the world, wherever they journeyed, forgetting their mother—she thought that for her, their lives would be like a current in her own life; they would be one with her, just as they had been when she alone on this earth knew about the new life hidden inside, drinking from her blood and making her cheeks pale. Over and over she had endured the sinking, sweat-dripping anguish when she realized that once again her time had come; once again she would be pulled under by the groundswell of birth pains—until she was lifted up with a new child in her arms. How much richer and stronger and braver she had become with each child was something that she first realized tonight.

Once the process of accounting for every available square inch of terrain and every raw material has begun, it is necessary to convince people to want the converted products. On the environmental end of the equation, the goal is to turn raw materials in the ground, or the ground itself, into a commodity. On the personal end of the equation, the goal is to convert the uncharted internal human wilderness into a form that desires to accumulate the commodities. The conversion process within the human is directed at experience, feeling, perception, behavior and desire. These must be catalogued, defined and reshaped. The idea is to get both ends of the equation in synchrony, like standard-gauge railways. The human becomes the terminus of the conversion of plants, animals and minerals into objects. The conversion of natural into artificial, inherent in our economic system, takes place as much inside human feeling and experience as it does in the landscape. The more you smooth out the flow, the better the system functions and, in particular, the more the people who activate the processes benefit. In the end, the human, like the environment, is redesigned into a form that fits the needs of the commercial format. People who take more pleasure in talking with friends than in machines, commodities and spectacles are outrageous to the system. People joining with their neighbors to share housing or cars or appliances are less “productive” than those who live in isolation from each other, obtaining their very own of every object. Any collective act, from sharing washing machines to car-pooling to riding buses, is less productive to the wider system in the end than everyone functioning separately in nuclear family units and private homes. Isolation maximizes production. Human beings who are satisfied with natural experience, from sexuality to breast feeding to cycles of mood, are not as productive as the not-so-satisfied, who seek vaginal sprays, chemical and artificial milk, drugs to smooth out emotional ups and downs, and commodities to substitute for experience.

I think we all collectively have gone a little crazy. We worry about the wrong things. I have an acquaintance, Christy, whose twelve–year–old son managed to get into a very violent PG–13 movie. I don’t know how many machine–gunnings, explosions, and killings this boy wound up witnessing. As I recall, the boy had nightmares for a week afterward. That disturbed his mother—but not as much as if her son had stumbled into a different kind of movie. “At least there wasn’t any sex,” she said with dead–serious concern. “No,” I said, “probably not a single bare breast.” I didn’t add that most societies do not regard the adult female breast as being primarily an object of sexual desire. After all, it’s just a big gland that makes milk in order to feed hungry babies. “You know what I’m talking about,” she snapped. “I mean graphic sex.” We were sitting in a café drinking tea. She cut off the volume of her speech at the end of her sentence, whispering and exaggerating the consonants of S–E–X as if she needed me to read her lips—as if giving voice to this word might disturb our neighbors and brand her as a deviant. “I don’t think children should see that kind of thing,” she added. “What should children see?” I asked her. I am not arguing that we should let our children buy tickets to raunchy movies. I never let my daughters bring home steamy videos or surf the Internet for porn. But something is wrong when sex becomes a dirty word that we don’t even want our children to hear. Why must we regard almost anything sexual as tantamount to obscene? I think many of us are like Christy. We wouldn’t want our children—even our very sexual teenagers—to see certain kinds of movies, even if they happened to be erotic masterpieces, true works of art. It wouldn’t matter if a movie gave us a wonderful scene of a wife and a husband very lovingly making love with the conscious intention of engendering new life. It wouldn’t matter that sex is life, and therefore must be regarded as sacred as anything could possibly be. It wouldn’t even matter that not one of us could have come into the world but for the sexual union of our fathers and our mothers. If a movie portrayed a man and woman in the ecstatic dance of love—actually showed naked bellies and breasts, burning lips and adoring eyes and the glistening, impassioned organs of sex—most people I know would rather their children watch the vile action movie. They would rather their “innocent” sons and daughters behold the images of bloody, blasted bodies, torture, murder, and death.

If we consider the possibility that all women–from the infant suckling her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women–exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates … in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans’ area of town,” who “practiced Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with men,” who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed–until the Church forced them to disperse–to live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions. It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated “Lesbians” of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods–communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands–the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women’s strikes in the silk mills. It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father’s house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as “apolitical ”. Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.

I love it when you can’t control yourself,” she whispered. “I love having you at my mercy. You have no idea…how much I enjoy seeing Dom the Almighty brought low.” He barely registered her words. What she was doing felt so good. So bloody damned good. If she stroked him much more… “I want to be inside you.” He gripped her wrist. “Please, Jane…” Her sensuous smile faltered. “You’ve never said ‘please’ to me before. Not in your whole life.” “Really?” Had he only ever issued orders? If so, no wonder she’d refused him last night. Perhaps it was time to show her she didn’t have to seduce him to gain control. That he could give up his control freely…to her, at least. “Then let me say it now. Please, Jane, make love to me. If you don’t mind.” She stared at him. “I…I don’t know what you mean.” He nodded to his cock, which looked downright ecstatic over the idea. “Get up on your knees and fit me inside you.” Realizing he’d just issued yet another order, he added, “Please. If you want.” Jane got that sultry look on her face again. Like the little seductress she was rapidly showing herself to be, she rose up and then came down on him. By degrees. Very slow degrees. He had trouble breathing. “Am I hurting you?” Her smile broadened as she shimmied down another inch. “Not really.” Stifling a curse, he clutched her arms. “You just…enjoy torturing me.” “Absolutely,” she said and moved his hands to cover her breasts. He was more than happy to oblige her unspoken request, happy to thumb her nipples and watch as her lovely mouth fell open and a moan of pure pleasure escaped her. His cock swelled, and he thrust up involuntarily. “Please…” he said hoarsely. “Please, Jane…” With a choked laugh, she sheathed herself on him. Then her eyes went wide. “Oh, that feels amazing.” “It would feel more amazing if you…would move,” he rasped, though the mere sensation of being buried inside her was making him insane. When she arched an eyebrow, he added, “Please.” “I could get to like this,” she said teasingly. “The begging.” But even as he groaned, she began to move, like the sensual creature that she was. His sweetheart undulated atop him, her head thrown back and her eyes sliding closed, and for the first time in his life, he was happy to give himself up to someone else’s control. To relish her pleasure, which was also his pleasure. Somehow he’d stumbled into paradise, ruled by his own personal angel. His own personal siren. “You like having me…in your power, do you?” he said. “Yes, oh, yes.” Her eyes brightened as she rode him, harder, faster. “Say it again.” “What?” He could hardly think for watching her take him. For being inside her so deeply he fancied he could feel her heart, her very soul. “Please.” Her face was flushed, rapt. “Say…’please’ again.” “Please.” Why had he never thought to say it before? This was all he’d ever wanted--to have the enthralling, intoxicating Jane in his arms, in his life. Forever. A “please” from time to time was little enough to give for that. “Please, my wanton angel.” He clutched her close, his rhythm quickening. “Please…be mine. Please…marry me.” His release approached like a carriage thundering toward the heavens. Toward paradise. And as the blood roared in his ears, he plunged his cock deeply and emptied himself inside her, crying, “Please…Jane…love me!” “I do.” With a hoarse cry of her own, she strained against him and found her own release, milking his cock with the force of it. “I do, my darling…I do.

The Night-Song, the immortal plaint of one who, thanks to his superabundance of light and power, thanks to the sun within him, is condemned never to love. It is night: now do all gushing springs raise their voices. And my soul too is a gushing spring. It is night: now only do all lovers burst into song. And my soul too is the song of a lover. Something unquenched and unquenchable is within me, that would raise its voice. A craving for love is within me, which itself speaketh the language of love. Light am I: would that I were night! But this is my loneliness, that I am begirt with light. Alas, why am I not dark and like unto the night! How joyfully would I then suck at the breasts of light! And even you would I bless, ye twinkling starlets and glow-worms on high! and be blessed in the gifts of your light. But in mine own light do I live, ever back into myself do I drink the flames I send forth. I know not the happiness of the hand stretched forth to grasp; and oft have I dreamt that stealing must be more blessed than taking. Wretched am I that my hand may never rest from giving: an envious fate is mine that I see expectant eyes and nights made bright with longing. Oh, the wretchedness of all them that give! Oh, the clouds that cover the face of my sun! That craving for desire! that burning hunger at the end of the feast! They take what I give them; but do I touch their soul? A gulf is there 'twixt giving and taking; and the smallest gulf is the last to be bridged. An appetite is born from out my beauty: would that I might do harm to them that I fill with light; would that I might rob them of the gifts I have given:—thus do I thirst for wickedness. To withdraw my hand when their hand is ready stretched forth like the waterfall that wavers, wavers even in its fall:—thus do I thirst for wickedness. For such vengeance doth my fulness yearn: to such tricks doth my loneliness give birth. My joy in giving died with the deed. By its very fulness did my virtue grow weary of itself. He who giveth risketh to lose his shame; he that is ever distributing groweth callous in hand and heart therefrom. Mine eyes no longer melt into tears at the sight of the suppliant's shame; my hand hath become too hard to feel the quivering of laden hands. Whither have ye fled, the tears of mine eyes and the bloom of my heart? Oh, the solitude of all givers! Oh, the silence of all beacons! Many are the suns that circle in barren space; to all that is dark do they speak with their light—to me alone are they silent. Alas, this is the hatred of light for that which shineth: pitiless it runneth its course. Unfair in its inmost heart to that which shineth; cold toward suns,—thus doth every sun go its way. Like a tempest do the Suns fly over their course: for such is their way. Their own unswerving will do they follow: that is their coldness. Alas, it is ye alone, ye creatures of gloom, ye spirits of the night, that take your warmth from that which shineth. Ye alone suck your milk and comfort from the udders of light. Alas, about me there is ice, my hand burneth itself against ice! Alas, within me is a thirst that thirsteth for your thirst! It is night: woe is me, that I must needs be light! And thirst after darkness! And loneliness! It is night: now doth my longing burst forth like a spring,—for speech do I long. It is night: now do all gushing springs raise their voices. And my soul too is a gushing spring. It is night: now only do all lovers burst into song. And my soul too is the song of a lover.

You still want me?” she murmured, a seductive husk to her voice. Gods, this woman could do me in with a single question. My gaze drifted down to my very proud, very erect cock and back to her face. “I think you know I’ll always want you. But right now? I want you more than I want air.” Lust bloomed through our connection, nearly knocking me for a loop. “That’s good. You know, I almost touched myself in the shower without you,” she admitted, opening her towel and showing me her perfect skin. “Almost made myself come all over my fingers just thinking about you tied up out here.” She threw a leg over mine, straddling me, my cock mere inches from Heaven. But did Wren even graze my aching, leaking head? No. No, she did not. Instead, she held herself from me as she grazed her own skin, palming her breasts, plucking her already-tight nipples.    “Fuuuuccccckkkkk,” I groaned, shifting restlessly on the sheets, trying for just a brush of her sex against mine. The pleasure she was giving herself threaded through me—enough that I was ready to rip out of these cuffs and take her over my knee. Her hands traveled down her stomach, her fingers threading through her auburn curls. “Just like this,” she said. “But I thought you’d want to see me. And you want to, don’t you? Watch me fuck myself?” My mouth was as dry as the Sahara. “Yes,” I croaked. “I want to see everything.” She whimpered as she grazed her clit with her thumb, fucking that sweet pussy with her fingers, her delicious heat so far out of reach. “Let me taste you,” I ordered, the thread of command thick in my voice. Wren raised an eyebrow, not giving an inch. “Good boys say please, Nico. Everyone knows that.” “Please,” I whispered, needing her taste on my tongue. Needing it, craving it. If she was going to torture me this way, I wanted something, anything of hers. Wren’s smile widened as she crawled up my body, grazing her luscious tits up my belly and chest. I tried capturing a nipple in my mouth, but she kept it just out of reach. She straddled my chest, her wet, slick heat so close and so far—all at the same time. I wanted her to sit on my face, wanted to lap her up, and drink her down. Wanted her pleasure for my own. But instead of letting me taste her, she went back to work, milking herself of pleasure just out of reach. Her scent filled my nose so much I could almost savor her sweetness, and as her pleasure ramped up, it got thicker in the air. She let her hair down, the wet strands curling over her gorgeous tits as she writhed. She plucked at her nipples, making herself hiss in desire. “That’s it, beautiful,” I growled. “Make yourself come all over my chest. Fuck that gorgeous pussy.” My words must have done the trick because Wren went off like a bomb, her orgasm slamming into both of us, nearly taking me over with it. But she didn’t come to me, didn’t press her body against mine, and that’s when I decided I’d had about enough of this shit. A flick of my wrists later, and Wren was on her back in my bed, her eyes wide. I nearly hissed at her warm skin against mine, but I was too preoccupied with her surprise. It was fucking adorable. “Yo-you just broke out of… How did you… How strong are you?” Like a pair of steel cuffs were a match for any shifter, let alone an Alpha. “Sweetheart, I’m an Acosta Alpha, next in line to take my father’s place if he ever decides to step down. A shifter is strong. I am stronger. Now, you’ve had your fun. It’s my turn.” Her wide green-gold eyes flared as her mouth parted, and even though she’d just had an orgasm, Wren’s desire blazed through us. As reluctant as I was to move,

the use of benzodiazepines in the third trimester can precipitate a withdrawal syndrome in newborns. The drugs are secreted in the breast milk in sufficient concentrations to affect newborns. Benzodiazepines may cause dyspnea, bradycardia, and drowsiness in nursing babies.

Zolpidem and zaleplon are secreted in breast milk and are therefore contraindicated for use by nursing mothers. The dosage of zolpidem and zaleplon should be reduced in elderly persons and persons with hepatic impairment.

Some of the most fanciful claims about the benefits of breast milk concern its role in aiding the newborn immune system. While breastfeeding does provide a boost in preventing infant colds and diarrheal illness, additional claims of immune benefits are quite exaggerated.

IgA can protect mucous membranes (like the lining of the digestive tract and the lining of the respiratory tract) from bacteria and viruses. That’s why breastfed babies are less likely to have diarrheal illnesses or colds in the first year. Most other diseases can be prevented with other types of antibodies. These protective antibodies can cross the placenta from the mother to the baby, but they cannot be passed in breast milk. That’s why breastfeeding can’t replace vaccination. Even if the mother is immune to whooping cough, for example, she can’t pass that immunity to her baby through breast milk. She can pass it through the placenta during pregnancy, but those antibodies will last in the baby’s bloodstream for only six months at the longest.

To more closely replicate breast milk, look for a formula that contains Whey protein or partially hydrolyzed whey Lactose as the primary carbohydrate Prebiotics such as GOS or 2’-FL Milk fat globule membrane (MFGM) DHA is a lower-priority ingredient but may be beneficial for brain and eye development.

At Chilli Padi Confinement Catering, our mission is to help new mothers transition into postpartum comfortably by delivering delicious quality home-style food that restores mother's hormonal balance and increases the production of quality breast milk. From day one, our goal has been to provide postpartum care for new mothers and to spread the benefits of eating super foods during the crucial post-partum confinement period. We understand the kind of nourishment new mothers require after delivering to their new-born and we pride ourselves in having the expertise of preparing tasty & healthy confinement meals.

Still I wondered: why was it that, whatever you desire, you could find a poor women to sell it? You could buy an ass or a vagina or a mouth or a tongue. You could buy a womb, a human greenhouse for unfurled human seed. You could buy hands to change diapers, voices to sing nursery rhymes, backs and arms to carry babies, breasts to flow with milk. You could buy a video of a woman truly insulted and then gagged with a penis until she vomits into a dog bowl. Such videos are popular; men watch them. But, of course, men never admit to watching such things. When it comes to culpability, it is always something else. Prevailing culture dictates that we must separate the strands into individual phenomena: sex work, pornography, domestic labor, and surrogacy. but, in one sense all of those transactions exist along the same continuum—you may buy anything from a woman and discard the rest.

Still I wondered: why was it that, whatever you desire, you could find a poor women to sell it? You could buy an ass or a vagina or a mouth or a tongue. You could buy a womb, a human greenhouse for unfurled human seed. You could buy hands to change diapers, voices to sing nursery rhymes, backs and arms to carry babies, breasts to flow with milk. You could buy a video of a woman truly insulted and then gagged with a penis until she vomits into a dog bowl. Such videos are popular; men watch them. But, of course, men never admit to watching such things. When it comes to culpability, it is always something else. Prevailing culture dictates that we must separate the strands into individual phenomena: sex work, pornography, domestic labor, and surrogacy. but, in one sense all of those transactions exist along the same continuum—you may buy anything from a woman and discard the rest.

Contrary to popular belief, a nursing mother’s breasts are not full of milk. They’re swollen, sure, sometimes to the point that they resemble fleshy water balloons, but they’re full of blood, fat, and glandular tissue. There’s no bladder in a breast that holds a sloshing cup of milk that empties as the baby nurses and then gradually fills up again, ready for next time. Even a dairy cow’s udder isn’t the bag of milk you might think it to be; like us, a cow’s udder is a visible mound of mammary tissue, along with a few nipples.[*10] The ductwork of a nursing human breast can hold, at most, a couple of tablespoons of milk at a time. It’s the act of suckling that normally triggers a breast’s “let-down reflex”—a cascade of signals that tell the milk glands to kick up production and dump fresh milk out the front door.

Weaning Your Baby Off Breast Milk The paediatrician in Sector 62 Mohali recommends the following tips for weaning your baby off breast milk: Recognize the Signs Your baby starts giving signs showing that they are ready for weaning. The signs include: Sitting with support. Holding their head in an upright position. Expressing interest in what you are eating. Losing their active tongue-thrust reflex. Acting cranky during feeding sessions. Apart from your child showing signs, you can also be the one to stop breastfeeding. You can check with your best paediatrician in Mohali to see if you are ready to start weaning. Set a Schedule Once you prepare yourself to start weaning, give yourself at least a month to move through the process. Giving some time to yourself and the baby gives you time for obstacles. If, however, your child is going through teething, you can wait for some time before weaning. Start Slowly Easing into weaning gives you and your baby some time to adjust to the change. You may start it slowly by dropping one breastfeeding session per week. Once you notice that both you and your baby are comfortable with the change, you can start dropping more sessions until your baby is having solids. Provide Physical Comfort Breastfed babies are used to skin contact with their mothers. Hence, when you are into weaning, you must give them the physical connection in other ways. For instance, you can cuddle them while singing a song reading a book or give them a massage. Let Your Baby Decide Some babies wean on their own when they are given the control. If you are comfortable with your child taking the lead, rely on one rule “Don’t offer, don’t refuse”. You nurse them when they show interest and do not initiate it when they don’t want it. Resistance is Normal If you are the one to start weaning, it will be normal for your babies to resist weaning. Once they become normal with it, they will start showing interest in solid foods and drinking liquids from a bottle. Take Care of Yourself Your baby is not only the one who will be adjusting to weaning. As a mother, you must also deal with a whole range of emotions. Some mothers may even feel rejected when their baby does not show interest in feeding. You may also feel nostalgia about your baby getting older. Accustom yourself to the routine and know that this is necessary. At Motherhood Hospitals, we have a team of experienced super specialists backed by the latest in infrastructure and facilities. We have the best Paediatricians in Mohali that consists of a team of paediatric specialists that cater to all the needs of children, across age groups, and provide the best care for your child’s development.

Soy Fear of eating soy, especially with hormone-positive breast cancers, stems from the idea that phytoestrogen compounds in soybeans have estrogen-like properties. However, plant-based estrogens are chemically different from human. In fact, research on consumption of soy foods and cancer (though limited), suggests that eating whole soybean products like tofu, tempeh, edamame, soy milk, or similar may actually have a positive impact on overall mortality and prevention of breast cancer.

Soymilk also appears to have the additional benefits of reducing risk of breast3227 and prostate3228 cancers, improving gut health,3229 and decreasing inflammation3230 and free radical DNA damage compared to rice milk or dairy milk.3231 It can also improve insulin resistance3232 and help with stroke rehabilitation, improving walking speed, exercise endurance, grip strength, and muscle functionality,3233 as well as lower blood pressure better than dairy milk.3234 Soymilk can even lower your LDL cholesterol as much as 25 percent after just twenty-one days.3235 Nutritionally, soymilk is considered the best choice for replacing dairy milk in the human diet.

For example, about 30 percent of the caloric content of human breast milk is made of “indigestible” oligosaccharides.7535 Though we may not be able to digest them, guess who can? Bifidobacterium infantis, good bacteria in the guts of infants. That’s how important the human-bacteria relationship is. We were designed to be a symbiotic species.

Other good prenap choices are milk, cottage cheese, hard cheese, yogurt, bananas, avocadoes, soy milk, tofu, soybeans, eggs, and of course the ultimate sleep-inducing food, breast milk.

The best foods to aid rest are whole-grain carbohydrates, green leafy vegetables, cow's milk, soy milk, bananas, avocadoes, nuts, nut butters, seeds, and warm milk And, of course, the award-winning rest-inducing food: breast milk.

I can feel myself holding a child, thought Joana. Sleep, my child, sleep, I tell you. The child is warm and I am sad. But it is the sadness of happiness, this appeasement and sufficiency that leave the face placid, faraway. And when my child touches me he doesn’t rob me of my thoughts as others do. But later, when I give him milk with these fragile, beautiful breasts, my child will grow from my force and crush me with his life. He will distance himself from me and I will be the useless old mother. I won’t feel cheated. But defeated merely and I will say: I don’t know a thing, I am able to give birth to a child and I don’t know a thing. God will receive my humility and will say: I was able to give

She wanted to sing about babies and breasts and milk and skin on skin, warm babies that were supple and yeasty like freshly baked loaves of bread, so delicious, smell them. Smell.

Who can describe the mercy of the Lord? Even though Putana raksasi came disguised as a mother to kill Kṛṣṇa with her poisonous breast milk, the compassionate Lord gave her the position of a mother in the spiritual world.

This is Electra speaking. In the heart of darkness. Under the sun of torture. To the capitals of the world. In the name of the victims. I eject all the sperm I have received. I turn the milk of my breasts into lethal poison. I take back the world I gave birth to. I choke between my thighs the world I gave birth to. I bury it in my womb. Down with the happiness of submission. Long live hate and contempt, rebellion and death. When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives you'll know the truth.

Lily.” Atlas kisses me gently on the cheek. “I think you…” He pauses, so I open my eyes and look at him. He shifts his eyes to my breasts, and then back at my face. Then he pulls at his white shirt and looks down at it and I see there’s some kind of stain on it. Oh, shit. I look down at my bra and it’s soaking wet. Oh my God. Breast milk. Everywhere. I am such an idiot.

Fuller Cups, Fuller Tummies! 10 Effective Ways to Increase Breast Milk Supply Embracing motherhood involves acknowledging all the challenges that follow. For a lot of moms out there, producing the right amount of breast milk stands as a paramount concern. Understanding the complexities of lactation and increasing milk supply can be a transformative experience that strengthens the bond between mother and child while promoting the baby’s physical health. This blog will delve into the art and science of how to increase breast milk supply, providing priceless insights, doable tactics, and some breast feeding tips to support nursing moms on their journey. This guide seeks to provide nursing moms the confidence and resources they need to navigate the wonderful yet occasionally complex world of breast feeding successfully, arming them with a thorough understanding of breast feeding benefits and the causes of low milk supply.

Once You’re in Keto, How Can You Keep It Going Without Fasting? The short answer is: Eat a boatload of fat (~1.5 to 2.5 g per kilogram of body weight), next-to-no carbs, and moderate protein (1 to 1.5 g per kilogram of body weight) each day. We’ll look at Dom’s typical meals and day in a minute, but a few critical notes first: High protein and low fat doesn’t work. Your liver will convert excess amino acids into glucose and shut down ketogenesis. Fat as 70 to 85% of calories is required. This doesn’t mean you always have to eat rib eye steaks. A chicken breast by itself will kick you out of ketosis, but a chicken breast cut up into a green leafy salad with a lot of olive oil, feta cheese, and some Bulletproof Coffee (for example) can keep you in ketosis. One of the challenges of keto is the amount of fat one needs to consume to maintain it. Roughly 70 to 80% of your total calories need to come from fat. Rather than trying to incorporate fat bombs into all meals (one does get tired of fatty steak, eggs, and cheese over and over again), Dom will both drink fat between meals (e.g., coconut milk—not water—in coffee) and add in supplemental “ice cream,” detailed on page 29. Dom noticed that dairy can cause lipid profile issues (e.g., can spike LDL) and has started to minimize things like cream and cheese. I experienced the same. It’s easy to eat a disgusting amount of cheese to stay in keto. Consider coconut milk (Aroy-D Pure Coconut Milk) instead. Dom doesn’t worry about elevated LDL as long as other blood markers aren’t out of whack (high CRP, low HDL, etc.). From Dom: “The thing that I focus on most is triglycerides. If your triglycerides are elevated, that means your body is just not adapting to the ketogenic diet. Some people’s triglycerides are elevated even when their calories are restricted. That’s a sign that the ketogenic diet is not for you. . . . It’s not a one-size-fits-all diet.

Before leaving Austin I heard a radio report on an Englishman who’s giving out awards for stupid security measures. First prize goes to an airport scanner who forced a female passenger to drink from three bottles of her own breast milk. She’d pumped it before boarding, and they wanted to make sure it wasn’t poison. This explains why sperm donors are traveling Greyhound.

My grandmother’s milk is a bittersweet taste of pain and a mother’s love. My mother sucked pain out of her left breast And I, from hers. It is no surprise that I weep in my sleep.

The Supreme Soul is Father to some, Mother to some. Those who think of it as Mother always have their eyes on Mother's breast. It is a breast ever flowing with milk. Those who drink it can't take their mouth off that breast. They don't ask for other breasts. Those who think of it as Father, raise their heads and look at the Lord in his eye, and they are roused. They want to look and they want to see; they want to swallow the whole world. Can the hunger of the eye ever be quenched? I am one of those who drinks. In sleep, you too drink. When children drink they kick their mothers. But before your heroic passion to bend the world to your desires is born, should or shouldn't your belly be soothed a little first?

If we do not yet know exactly what the presence of a vast range of chemicals in umbilical cord blood and breast milk might mean for the future of our children's health, we do at least know that we are no cleaner, even at birth, than our environment at large. We are already polluted. We have more microorganisms in our guts than we have cells in our bodies- we are crawling with bacteria and we are full of chemicals. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other.

Nothing on this earth had ever felt as good as being inside Chloe. He gritted his teeth, hanging on to the last remnants of sanity he possessed, as he tried to calm enough not to take her like some primal beast. The grip of her. The silky heat. He braced his elbow next to her head and their eyes locked. He was fucking Chloe. This was going to change them forever. He experienced a rush of panic that quickly dimmed as her thighs clasped his hips and she arched to meet him, gasping. Her hands fell to his waist, nails digging into his skin. He moved, gripped her wrists, and brought them up over her head. They were touching everywhere, the length of him sliding into her. Her breasts against his chest. Her inner muscles clamped around him and he cursed, thrusting inside her. He'd think later. Much, much later. He covered her mouth with his, his tongue sliding against hers. The air grew thick and humid. Tinged with a desperate, urgent lust. He ripped away and groaned. Pumped harder inside her. Her head pressed into the pillow and her neck arched. He held her wrists tighter, he bit her exposed throat, before soothing the skin with his tongue. She cried out. Her nails dug harder. Her thighs clenched. Their movements deepened. Quickened. He let her go, levered up, and rammed hard inside her, circling his hips. Grinding against her. Thrusting harder. Faster. Deeper. The bed frame banged its frantic beat against the wall. Over and over and over again. Her body rippled down the length of his cock. He jerked, losing what little control he had as he came in a loud shout, just as her orgasm rushed through her, milking him for everything he was worth, his vision dimming as intense pleasure tore through him in endless waves. He had no idea how long they went on like that. Pushing and pulsing together mindlessly, lost in the aftershocks of bone-deep satisfaction. He collapsed on top of her, burying his face in the crook of her neck, inhaling that special scent, unique to Chloe. He licked her skin. Tasting salt and sex.

Tuscan Chicken Macaroni and Cheese Recipe Ingredients: 2 large skinless boneless chicken breasts pounded to 1-inch thickness (or 4 boneless and skinless chicken thigh fillets) Salt and pepper, to season 1/2 teaspoon paprika 3 teaspoons olive or canola oil, divided per directions 2 tablespoons butter 1 small yellow onion chopped 6 cloves garlic, finely diced 1/3 cup chicken broth 4 oz (250g) sun dried tomato strips in oil (reserve 1 tablespoon of oil) 4 level tablespoons flour 2 cups chicken broth 3 cups milk OR light cream 2 teaspoons dried Italian herbs 10 ounces (3 cups) elbow macaroni uncooked (3 cups) 3/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese 1 cup mozzarella cheese shredded (or use six cheese Italian) 2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped Directions: -Season chicken with salt, pepper, paprika and 2 teaspoons of the oil. Heat the remaining oil in a large pot or pan over medium-high heat. Add the chicken and sear on both sides until golden brown, cooked through and no longer pink in the middle. Transfer chicken to a warm plate, tent with foil and set aside. -Using the same pan, add the butter and fry the onion and garlic until the onion becomes transparent, stirring occasionally (about 2 minutes). Pour in the 1/3 cup chicken broth and allow to simmer for 5 minutes, or until beginning to reduce down.  -Add the sun dried tomatoes, along with 1 tablespoons of the sun dried tomato oil from the jar. Cook for 2-3 minutes.  -Stir the flour into the pot. Blend well. -Add the broth, 2-1/2 cups of milk (cream or half and half), herbs, salt and pepper, and bring to a low simmer.  -Add the uncooked macaroni and stir occasionally as it comes to a simmer. Reduce to medium low heat and stir regularly while it cooks (roughly 10 minutes), or until the sauce thickens and the macaroni is just cooked (al dente: tender but still firm).  -Remove pot from stove and immediately stir in all of the cheeses. Add salt and pepper to taste. If the sauce it too thick, add the remaining 1/2 cup milk (or cream) in 1/4 cup increments, until reaching desired thickness. -Slice the chicken into strips and stir through the pasta (pour in any juices left from the chicken). -Sprinkle with basil, stir thoroughly and serve.

She feels trapped by her body, her still-swollen, pudgy belly and the perineal tear that bleeds afresh whenever she moves and makes her scared to pee. Her milk has just come in and her breasts feel weighty and thrumming, hard as stale bread; her shirt is drenched and sticky. She is all seepage, bloat, and frayed edges. She can go nowhere. She can seduce nobody.

No. I want that milk.” I looked around. “What are you talking about?” She pointed to my breast. “That. I want that.” I looked down at Cole suckling my right breast. I tried to pull my shirt over my other breast, suddenly feeling exposed. “Um . . . you can’t have that.

Yellow onions (2) Dairy Buttermilk, low fat (1 small carton) Cheese, Cheddar, shredded (1 cup) Cheese, feta (¼ cup) Cheese, mozzarella, shredded (½ cup) Cheese, mozzarella, fresh (½ pound) Cheese, Parmesan, grated (¾ cup) Cheese, white Cheddar, shredded (¾ cup) Eggs, large (26) Milk, skim (½ gallon) Tofu, extra firm, 1 (14-ounce) package Yogurt, nonfat fruit-flavored Greek (2 [6-ounce] containers) Yogurt, nonfat plain Greek (1 [32-ounce] tub) Meat, Poultry, and Fish Chicken breast (1½ pounds) Fish, white (cod, haddock, or tilapia) (2 pounds) Pork tenderloin (2 pounds) Tuna, albacore (1 [6.4-ounce] pouch) Turkey, ground (3 pounds) Canned, Bottled, and Dried Goods Beans, black, no salt added (3 [15-ounce] cans) Chickpeas, no salt added (2 [15-ounce] cans) Crackers, whole grain (1 small box) Juice, apple (1 small bottle) Marinara (1 [24-ounce] jar) Olives, kalamata (1 small jar) Purée, sweet potato or pumpkin (1 [15-ounce] can) Red peppers, roasted (1 small jar) Salad dressing (1 small bottle) Soy sauce, low sodium (1 small bottle) Tomatoes, diced, no salt added, fire roasted (1 [10-ounce] can) Frozen Peaches (1½ cups) Vegetables, cooked, any variety (2 bags) Grains

The baby makes another hungry strike at my breast, turning angry and bright red until, suddenly, she's on. Her color goes back to normal, and instantly her body goes limp, falling into me, forming to me, milk-drunk. And it hits me-this is the real reason I love hreastfeeding. This moment. It's not something you can put on a list; it's one of life's biologically reinforced, beautiful intangibles. It is the surprise of direct connection, ultimate intimacy, the trust and ability to go back, if even for a fifteen-minute feeding, to a time when two separate beings were one.

In the first book of On Virgins, St. Ambrose spoke of a scriptural and prophetic, virginal Jesus, who had fully functional breasts and made himself the once-male, feminized partner of every believer. In this virgin allegory, St. Ambrose goes so far as to say that Jesus produces believers from his masculine womb, and feeds them with the milk of his breasts. In Ambrose’s words, Jesus was the masculine “rock” that developed nourishing breasts in order to facilitate his role as the breast-feeding mother of the Church. In fact, Ambrose carries the point acerbically by ending his description of the feminized Jesus by claiming that it is perfectly natural that the son of god has his own teats.

This has strong parallels as far east as the Caucasus region of Russia. In the Circassian Nart Sagas, we see this same episode of “nursing at the hag’s back” except it’s with Kuldabagus, the Bitch of the Flying Wagon, who is basically playing the role of the Russian Baba Yaga, the keeper of the magic horses in many fairy tales.61 Hags or ogresses who sling their breasts over their shoulders are actually bizarrely common. In some Russian fairy tales, Baba Yaga does have this strange talent for slinging back her breasts.62 However, the episode that shows up in Scotland and the Caucasus of sneaking up behind her to become “milk kin” to her is pretty specific and striking.

Should you be eating soy? There’s been some debate about soy due to the perception of its carrying estrogen, but I want you to understand that phytoestrogens aren’t estrogen, nor do they act like human estrogen. Instead, phytoestrogens are isoflavones, one of the unique phytochemicals in soy beans. There are actually three soy isoflavones: genistein, daidzein, and glycitein. They have a number of health benefits, including: lowering cholesterol, strengthening bones, treating menopausal symptoms, lowering risk of coronary heart disease, and reducing risk of prostate/colon/breast/ovarian cancers. Want even more good news about soy? There are certain gut bacteria that can convert soy isoflavones into an even more beneficial compound called equol. This is like a supercharged isoflavone, giving you even more cardiovascular, bone, and menopausal health benefits. Unfortunately, you need to have the bacteria in order to do this. Equol can be produced by 50 to 60 percent of Asian people but just 30 percent of Westerners. For what it’s worth, diets high in carbohydrates (really meaning fiber) and low in saturated fat are associated with equol production, while antibiotics appear to hinder it. I recommend consuming only non-GMO and organic soy in its whole-foods forms: edamame, tofu, miso, tempeh, tamari, and unsweetened soy milk. Model your soy consumption after the way they do it in Asia. For some delicious ways to consume soy, check out the recipes in Chapter 10.

Professor Alan Macfarlane discovered a remarkable association between these trends and the increase in tea-drinking. His theory was founded on the fact that tea was drunk with boiled water, which killed off disease-carrying bacteria. Tea also possesses, in tannin, an antiseptic agent which made mothers’ breast milk the healthiest it had ever been.

range of chemicals in umbilical cord blood and breast milk might mean for the future of our children’s health, we do at least know that we are no cleaner, even at birth, than our environment at large. We are all already polluted. We have more microorganisms in ...our guts than we have cells in our bodies—we are crawling with bacteria and we are full of chemicals. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other.

In the Sultan Suite   Andy was eagerly awaiting my reappearance. He had nailed as many engaging pictures as he could, and he had done superbly – but I didn’t know that yet.               When I regained position, Lihaar had straddled Aziz’s firmness, and Jabril’s thickness was gyrating within her derriere. The men rocked into her in rhythmic synchronicity while moans of zealous fervencies rose in crescendo from the singer’s throat. Coraline seized the opportunity and plunged her tilting pelvis onto the actress’s face. As if executing a perfect dance the Indian twirled her lecherous tongue into the big sister’s blossoming crevice. Afraid the dark-haired female would evade her pleasure vault, Coraline’s tenacious hands gripped her tightly.               Aziz drove his slithering tongue into Narnia’s wetness, teasing her nether region to groans of rapturous ecstasy. His probing fingers buried deep in her rousing bottom, driving her to bouts of climactic liberations. She shuttered unquenchably to each heaving motion of intimate deliverance. Waves of euphoric ecstasies filled her girlishness. She delivered her youthful exuberance again and again until her heaving breasts laid heavy against the Arab’s muscular chest. After all, I had been taught by great masters of the day – and I was the sorcerer’s apprentice. Therefore, no encouragements were required for me to capture affectionate kisses and private embraces from every bewitching angle. But my task was by no means over. Exotic shots of erotic discharges arrived in the shapely form of Ms. Lihaar riding both phalluses with abandon. Like her little sister Narnia, Coraline had delivered curls of billowing euphoria onto the actress’s face, coating the flawless beauty with dribbling wetness before lapping at her deliverance with sensual jubilations.               The men could no longer withhold their deposits. Sprays of masculinity filled the actress as she milked their pounding manliness to blissful nirvana. Together, my chaperone and I had garnered superlative shots for our patron when we left the Sultan cavern quietly, returning to the Maharajah in pursuit of a saturnalia of unbridled revelry.

Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. Whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work – say, to hoe the fields instead of scattering seeds on the surface – people thought, ‘Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won’t have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.’ It made sense. If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan. The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children. Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty. Then why didn’t humans abandon farming when the plan backfired? Partly because it took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform society and, by then, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently. And partly because population growth burned humanity’s boats. If the adoption of ploughing increased a village’s population from 100 to 110, which ten people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the good old times? There was no going back. The trap snapped shut. The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away. One

The Greek GDP spiked 25% when statisticians dove into the country’s black market in 2006, for instance, thereby enabling the government to take out several hefty loans shortly before the European debt crisis broke out. Italy started including its black market back in 1987, which swelled its economy by 20% overnight. “A wave of euphoria swept over Italians,” reported the New York Times, “after economists recalibrated their statistics taking into account for the first time the country’s formidable underground economy of tax evaders and illegal workers.”4 And that’s to say nothing of all the unpaid labor that doesn’t even qualify as part of the black market, from volunteering to childcare to cooking, which together represents more than half of all our work. Of course, we can hire cleaners or nannies to do some of these chores, in which case they count toward the GDP, but we still do most ourselves. Adding all this unpaid work would expand the economy by anywhere from 37% (in Hungary) to 74% (in the UK).5 However, as the economist Diane Coyle notes, “generally official statistical agencies have never bothered – perhaps because it has been carried out mainly by women.”6 While we’re on the subject, only Denmark has ever attempted to quantify the value of breastfeeding in its GDP. And it’s no paltry sum: In the U.S., the potential contribution of breast milk has been estimated at an incredible $110 billion a year7 – about the size of China’s military budget.

Home, home-a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells. And home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children)… brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat that could say, "My baby, my baby," over and over again. "My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable agonizing pleasure! Till at last my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps…" / Hogar, hogar... Unos pocos cuartitos, superpoblados por un hombre, una mujer periódicamente embarazada, y una turbamulta de niños y niñas de todas las edades. Sin aire, sin espacio; una prisión no esterilizada; oscuridad, enfermedades y malos olores. Y el hogar era tan mezquino psíquicamente como físicamente. Psíquicamente, era una conejera, un estercolero, lleno de fricciones a causa de la vida en común, hediondo a fuerza de emociones. ¡Cuántas intimidades asfixiantes, cuán peligrosas, insanas y obscenas relaciones entre los miembros del grupo familiar! Como una maniática, la madre se preocupaba constantemente por los hijos (sus hijos)..., se preocupaba por ellos como una gata por sus pequeños; pero como una gata que supiera hablar, una gata que supiera decir: Nene mío, nene mío una y otra vez. Nene mío, y, ¡oh, en mi pecho, sus manitas, su hambre, y ese placer mortal e indecible! Hasta que al fin mi niño se duerme, mi niño se ha dormido con una gota de blanca leche en la comisura de su boca. Mi hijito duerme ...

The gift of sustenance is crucial to motherhood: the mother providing milk for her newborn from her own body, created from her own blood. Julian sees breast feeding as an image of the Eucharist,

He might easily have come to us in His immortal glory, but in that case we could never have endured the greatness of the glory; and therefore it was that He, who was the perfect bread of the Father, offered Himself to us as milk, [because we were] as infants. He did this when He appeared as a man, that we, being nourished, as it were, from the breast of His flesh, and having, by such a course of milk nourishment, become accustomed to eat and drink the Word of God, may be able also to contain in ourselves the Bread of immortality, which is the Spirit of the Father.

the milk from cows injected with rBGH has higher levels of another hormone called insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1). Elevated levels of IGF-1 in humans have been linked to colon and breast cancer.15 Researchers believe there may be an association between the increase in twin births over the past thirty years and elevated levels of IGF-1 in humans.16

In 1267, a pilgrim, the old Spanish rabbi known as Ramban, mourned her eclipse: I compare you, my mother, to the woman whose son died in her lap and painfully there is milk in her breasts and she suckles the pups of dogs. And despite all that, your lovers abandoned you and your enemies desolated you, but faraway they remember and glorify the Holy City.

This time he surged into her, until the hair of his groin mingled with hers. She groaned softly. When her eyes opened, he asked, "Was that painful?" She shook her head. "Not at all. It felt very nice." Well, hell. Nice was not a word he would use to describe what he was feeling. The top of his head was about to blow off. He paid more attention to her breasts, cupping one while he gently suckled the other. Then he kissed her again, thumbing her nipples, keeping up the stroking rhythm. Her breathing was keeping time. Each time he surged within her, she would gasp. Each time he withdrew, she made a strangle little sound and her hands gripped his arms tighter. "Is it nice?" he asked against her ear. "Yes," she said, but that one word seemed to cause her a great deal of trouble. "How nice?" She groaned when he began to move a little faster. If he were truly blessed he'd be able to bring her to satisfaction before his own. But it would be a tight race. "Oh, Ross." "Very nice?" She made a noise in the back of her throat. She pulled her mouth away from his, her eyes flying open. "Ross, oh, Ross." In the next instant, she wrapped her legs around him and raised her hips. Her whole body trembled, her channel gripping him, milking him until he had no choice but to surrender.

As Tim held the baby, I rested my head back on the pillow; I was too tired to hold it together much longer. “How’s she eating?” Tim asked. A funny question. He seemed genuinely interested. “Pretty good,” I said, squirming a little bit at the subject matter. “I think she’ll catch on after a while.” Catch on? Latch on? I was so confused. “You’re feeding her your own milk, right?” Tim asked awkwardly. Feeding her your own milk? Oh dear. “Um, yes…,” I answered. “I’m br…I’m breast-feeding.” Tim, could you please go now? Then he let me have it. “You know, you need to be careful not to get a sour bag.” I sat there, staring blankly ahead. Little did I know it was but one of the many times my brother-in-law would draw a parallel between me and livestock.

The antibodies in your breast milk are what will protect her from infection until around six months, when her lining will be thicker and she'll produce antibodies on her own. Your breast milk also assists baby in developing good bacteria that will protect her intestines from pathogens.

Allow her to stay on each breast until she stops sucking. This will not only help with milk production, but will ensure Baby gets the fat-rich "hindmilk" that usually comes toward the end of the meal. Also, try "switch nursing" (switching two to three times between breasts) when Baby's sucking slows down.

He found the letter she’d written to a lover she imagined when she was pregnant and reading Margaret Atwood. There was no limit to the Atwood she read in bed. She said the letter wasn’t written to anyone that existed and if he’d read these books about pregnancy he would know it was common for lovers to appear and disappear during periods of prolonged bedrest. He wanted to know why she was laughing. What was funny? Was this her version of pop culture? And why did the pillowcase she embroidered for him suddenly look like a parody? She said it was normal to doubt your spouse when you found a suspicious letter but only if you were already prone to suspicious mindsets and revisionist thinking. A serious man wouldn’t take this seriously. A serious man would laugh at what wasn’t true. Sure--there was a racy letter which involved black leather halters but she hadn’t expected milk to leak from her breasts at Starbucks either.

If you want the reader to feel intimately related to your subject, try a close-up shot. Describe the character, object or scene as if it were positioned directly in front of your eyes, close enough to touch. Let the reader see the hand-etched signature on the bottom of the wooden bowl or the white strip on the divorcée’s finger where a wedding ring once lay. Let him smell the heaviness of the milking barn after a night of rain, hear the squeak of the farmer’s rubber boots. If you want to get even closer, take the reader inside a character’s body and let him experience her world—the reeling nausea of Lydia’s first morning sickness, the tenderness of her breasts, the metallic taste in her mouth—from the inside out. Then, when you need to establish distance, to remove the reader from the scene as Shirley Jackson did in “The Lottery,” pull back. Describe your object from a great distance. The wooden bowl is no longer a hand-crafted, hand-signed original, or if it is, you can’t tell from where you’re standing. The pregnant woman is no longer Lydia-of-the-tender-breasts; she’s one of dozens of other faceless women seated in the waiting room of the county clinic. As you vary the physical distance between your describer and the subjects being described, you may find that your personal connection with your subjects is altered. Physical closeness often presages emotional closeness. Consider how it is possible that kind and loving men (like my father, who served in three wars) are capable of dropping bombs on “enemy” villages. One factor is their physical distance from their targets. The scene changes dramatically when they face a villager eye to eye; no longer is the enemy a tiny dot darting beneath the shadow of their planes, or a blip on the radar screen. No, this “enemy” has black hair flecked with auburn and a scar over her left eyebrow; she’s younger than the wives they left behind. If

The broads are fantastic…the bulging breasts of these savage wenches who move with graceful twists. Since I have come to L.A. I have not touched a woman of my own culture. I swallow my milk and feel my pants bursting with heat

In the presence chamber of your dreaming mind, I take upon myself the symbols and metaphors most apt to your understanding. This crown is my sovereignty; these breasts the source of milk that sustains and feeds the myriads of my galaxy; this veil my chastity; the bridal gown the sign of my surrender and coming mental union with Milky Way, an intimate violation more intimate than rape, or else a consummation more fertile; these chains are the cliometry of creation, which operates at a larger scale than the history of races and the evolution of stars. You have a dim memory of myth about a royal woman thus chained, also named Andromeda, fated to be fed to a sea monster. The symbolism is compelling. Also, I occupy a female hence submissive position, pleading for your chivalry.

This can be true, although interestingly, it is usually tainted breast milk that is blamed for either “poisoning” a child and causing them to develop autism (or for -supposedly- causing autistic genes to be switched on), as opposed to anything that might have been passed to the fetus via the placenta during gestation. Regardless,

Dr. FUHRMAN’S NUTRIENT DENSITY SCORES Kale 100 Watercress 100 Collards 100 Brussels sprouts 90 Bok choy 85 Spinach 82 Arugula 77 Cabbage 59 Broccoli 52 Cauliflower 51 Romaine lettuce 45 Green and red peppers 41 Onions 37 Asparagus 36 Leeks 36 Strawberries 35 Mushrooms 35 Tomatoes and tomato products 33 Pomegranates/pomegranate juice 30 Carrots/carrot juice 30 Blackberries 29 Raspberries 27 Blueberries 27 Oranges 27 Seeds: flax, sunflower, sesame, hemp, chia (avg) 25 Red grapes 24 Cherries 21 Tofu 20 Lentils 14 Cantaloupe 12 Beans (all varieties) 11 Plums 11 Walnuts 10 Iceberg lettuce 10 Pistachio nuts 9 Cucumbers 9 Green peas 7 Almonds 7 Cashews 6 Avocados 6 Apples 5 Peanut butter 5 Corn 4 Bananas 3 Oatmeal 3 Salmon 2 White potato 2 Skim milk 2 Whole-wheat bread 2 Olive oil 2 White bread 1 Chicken breast 1 Eggs 1 White pasta 1 Ground beef (85 percent lean)–4 Low-fat cheddar cheese–6 Potato chips–9 Cola–10

It earns its keep. As it digests HMOs, B. infantis releases short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) that feed an infant's gut cells - so while mothers nourish this microbe, the microbe in turn nourishes the baby. Through direct contact, B. Infantis also encourages gut cells to make adhesive proteins that seal the gaps between them, and anti-inflammatory molecules that calibrate the immune system. These changes only happen when B. infantis grows on HMOs; if it gets lactose instead, it survives but doesn't engage in any repartee with the baby's cells. It unlocks its full beneficial potential only when it feeds on breast milk. Likewise, for a child to reap the full benefits that milk can provide, B. infantis must be present. For that reason, David Mills, a microbiologist who works with German, actually sees B. infantis as part of milk, albeit a part that is not made in the breast.