Bud Day Quotes

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, And too often is his gold complexion dimm'd: And every fair from fair sometimes declines, By chance or natures changing course untrimm'd; By thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

It takes courage to push yourself to places you have never been before... to test yout limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to stay tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossum.

This evening I spied her in the back orchard. I decided to sacrifice one of my better old shirts and carried it out to her. The weather’s been warm of late. Buds on the apple trees are ready to burst. Usually by this time of the year, at that time of day, the back orchard is full of screaming children. Damut’s boys were the only two. They were on the terrace below her, running through the slanted sunlight, chasing each other around tree trunks. She stood above them, like a merlin watching rabbits play.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live. Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat. Perfection is static, and I am in full progress. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones. -Anais Nin "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." -Bible-Genesis 3:19 "While I thought that I was learning to live, I have been learning how to die" - Leonardo da Vinci

Journey’s end In western lands beneath the Sun The flowers may rise in Spring, The trees may bud, the waters run, The merry finches sing. Or there maybe 'tis cloudless night, And swaying branches bear The Elven-stars as jewels white Amid their branching hair. Though here at journey's end I lie In darkness buried deep, Beyond all towers strong and high, Beyond all mountains steep, Above all shadows rides the Sun And Stars for ever dwell: I will not say the Day is done, Nor bid the Stars farewell.J.

Because there’s no reason to think Paige had to eat anything. Paige is not a low demon. She’s a little girl. A vegetarian. A born humanitarian. A budding Dalai Lama, for chrissake. She only attacked the angel to defend me. That’s all. Besides, she didn’t eat him, she just… gnawed on him a little.

One day it may feel as if energy and enthusiasm are quenched, feelings dried up and emotions scorched, love and affection tangled in a harsh and uninviting setting. Nothing seems to grow anymore. No seed. No flowers. No foreseeable hope. No conceivable prospects. Any blossom of expectation seems to have become an illusion and life appears to have come to a standstill. If no seed of loving care is sown in the untilled, abandoned land, no bud can come into flower. Singer Amy Winehouse felt like lying fallow in the ground of a wasteland "with tears dry, dying a hundred times, going back to black" and leaving eventually for a place of ultimate sorrow and heartbreak, for a point of no return. ( “Amour en friche” )

I am tired of tears and laughter, And men that laugh and weep Of what may come hereafter For men that sow to reap: I am weary of days and hours, Blown buds of barren flowers, Desires and dreams and powers And everything but sleep.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many. It changes not only in growing light toward zenith and decline again, but in texture and mood, in tone and meaning, warped by a thousand factors of season, of heat or cold, of still or multi winds, torqued by odors, tastes, and the fabrics of ice or grass, of bud or leaf or black-drawn naked limbs. And as a day changes so do its subjects, bugs and birds, cates, dogs, butterflies and people.

After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shell-shocked fragments the previous day had left him with. He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

The first rose on my rose-tree Budded, bloomed, and shattered, During sad days when to me Nothing mattered. Grief of grief has drained me clean; Still it seems a pity No one saw,—it must have been Very pretty.

One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom into hysteria.

Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others... but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God "sending us" to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE hell unless it is nipped in the bud.

And so the spring buds burst, and so I gaze, And so the blossoms fall, and so my days ...

When they bombed Hiroshima, the explosion formed a mini-supernova, so every living animal, human or plant that received direct contact with the rays from that sun was instantly turned to ash. And what was left of the city soon followed. The long-lasting damage of nuclear radiation caused an entire city and its population to turn into powder. When I was born, my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said, "This? I've done this before." She says I have old eyes. When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, "Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby." And yet, for someone who's apparently done this already, I still haven't figured anything out yet. My knees still buckle every time I get on a stage. My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth. But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed. My parents named me Sarah, which is a biblical name. In the original story God told Sarah she could do something impossible and she laughed, because the first Sarah, she didn't know what to do with impossible. And me? Well, neither do I, but I see the impossible every day. Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold onto others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk -- they hear you. They feel exactly what you feel at the same time that you feel it. It's what I strive for every time I open my mouth -- that impossible connection. There's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation. But on the front step, a person who was sitting there blocked the rays from hitting the stone. The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light. After the A bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again. But that spring, there were new buds popping up from the earth. When I meet you, in that moment, I'm no longer a part of your future. I start quickly becoming part of your past. But in that instant, I get to share your present. And you, you get to share mine. And that is the greatest present of all. So if you tell me I can do the impossible, I'll probably laugh at you. I don't know if I can change the world yet, because I don't know that much about it -- and I don't know that much about reincarnation either, but if you make me laugh hard enough, sometimes I forget what century I'm in. This isn't my first time here. This isn't my last time here. These aren't the last words I'll share. But just in case, I'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around.

And I got a strong feeling of the passage of time. Not the time of clouds and sun and rain and the moving stars that adorn the night, not spring when its time comes or fall, not the time that makes leaves bud on branches and then tears them off or folds and unfolds and colors the flowers, but the time inside me, the time you can't see but it molds us. The time that rolls on and on in people's hearts and makes them roll along with it and gradually changes us inside and out and makes us what we'll be on our dying day.

Have you ever looked at the bud of a magnolia flower? It’s a tight little pod that stays closed up for a long time on the end of its branch until one day, out of nowhere, it finally bursts open into this gigantic, gorgeous, fragrant flower that’s ten times bigger than the bud itself. It’s impossible to imagine that such a big beautiful thing could pop out of that tiny little bud. But it does.

Such a marvel, the tenacity of the buds to surge with life every spring, to greet the lengthening days and warming weather with exuberance, no matter what hardships were brought by winter.

Concerning trees and leaves... there's a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

...Nameless, unknown to me as you were, I couldn't forget your voice!' 'For how long?' 'O - ever so long. Days and days.' 'Days and days! Only days and days? O, the heart of a man! Days and days!' 'But, my dear madam, I had not known you more than a day or two. It was not a full-blown love - it was the merest bud - red, fresh, vivid, but small. It was a colossal passion in embryo. It never returned.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? E'en in Australia art thou still more hot Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May (Since that's your winter it don't mean a lot) Sometimes too bright the eye of heaven shines And bushfires start through half of New South Wales Just so, when I do see thy bosom's lines A fire consumes me and my breathing fails But thine eternal summer shall not fade This is in no way due to global warming; Nay, from thy breasts shall verses fair be made So damn compulsive they are habit-forming So long as men can read and eyes can see So long lives this, thou 34DD (Based on an idea by William Shakespeare. I'm sure he'd agree that I've improved it)

The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it is almost impossible to achieve. When you strive for quiet, you become impatient, and impatience is itself a noiseless noise. You can block every superficial sound, but, with each new layer extinguished, a next rises up, finer and more entrapping, until you arrive at last in the infinite attitude of your own riotous mind. Inside is where all the memories last like wells, and the unspoken wishes like golden buds, and the pain that you keep, lingering and implicit, staying inside, nesting inside, articulating, articulating, through to the day you die. (p. 240)

It was a day to be inside somewhere, cosseted and loved; by a warm fireside with the clatter of friendly cups and saucers, a sleepy cat licking his paws, a cyclamen in a pot on a windowsill putting forth new buds.

Don't be discouraged if people don't see your vision, your harvest. All they see from their perspective is that you're watering a whole lot of dirt. They don't SEE what seeds you've been planting with blood, sweat, tears and lack of sleep. Make sure you don't abandon or neglect it because "they" don't see it. You have to KNOW and believe for yourself. They don't see the roots and what's budding under the dirt. But it's okay, because it's NOT meant for them to see it. While you wait, MASTER it. You continue to do YOUR work and have unwavering faith! Remember why you started planting in the first place. Your harvest WILL come!

People tend to feel happy when spring arrives, especially after a cold winter. When spring begins, however, cannot be pinpointed to one particular moment. There is no one day that clearly marks when winter ends and spring begins. Spring hides inside winter. We notice it emerging with our eyes, our skin, and other senses. We find it in new buds, a comfortable breeze and the warmth of the sun. It exists alongside winter.

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room. Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure. If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it.... It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me. I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun. We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the yard again. Marvel was what she did at all the flowers and herbs and budding weeds. Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back- at the twists life took. And my parents gave my leftover possessions to the Goodwill, along with Grandma Lynn's things. They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of their life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums. Ray became Dr. Singh... And he had more and more moments that he chose not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white, he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes, that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me. If he ever doubted, he called Ruth. Ruth, who graduated from a closet to a closet-sized studio on the Lower East Side. Ruth, who was still trying to find a way to write down whom she saw and what she had experienced. Ruth, who wanted everyone to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe. Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.

Christmas is like candy; it slowly melts in your mouth sweetening every taste bud, making you wish it could last forever.

I was not unhappy, except one day at a time.

. . . and then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ——Anaïs Nin

Mo Ran was categorically a piece-of-shit jackass, but the sixteen-year-old budding jackass of his previous lifetime simply couldn’t compare to the thirty-two-year-old veteran jackass of the present. This guy grew more shameless with each passing day.

I travelled the old road every day, I took my fruits to the market, my cattle to the meadows, I ferried my boat across the stream and all the ways were well known to me. One morning my basket was heavy with wares. Men were busy in the fields, the pastures crowded with cattle; the breast of earth heaved with the mirth of ripening rice. Suddenly there was a tremor in the air, and the sky seemed to kiss me on my forehead. My mind started up like the morning out of mist. I forgot to follow the track. I stepped a few paces from the path, and my familiar world appeared strange to me, like a flower I had only known in bud. My everyday wisdom was ashamed. I went astray in the fairyland of things. It was the best luck of my life that I lost my path that morning, and found my eternal childhood.

And the day came when the risk to remain closed in a bud became more painful that the risk it took to blossom. [likely not Anaïs Nin; look under "Disputed quotes" on the Wikiquote page for her]

She knew how to hit to a hair's breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty...At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed, they were. The midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.

With a bound, the sun of a molten fiery red cam above the horizon, and immediately thousands of little birds sang out for joy, and a soft chorus of mysterious, glad murmurs came forth from the earth; the low whispering wind left its hiding-place among the clefts and hollows of the hills, and wandered among the rustling herbs and trees, waking the flower-buds to the life of another day.

So often, children are punished for being human. Children are not allowed to have grumpy moods, bad days, disrespectful tones, or bad attitudes, yet we adults have them all the time! We think if we don't nip it in the bud, it will escalate and we will lose control. Let go of that unfounded fear and give your child permission to be human. We all have days like that. None of us are perfect, and we must stop holding our children to a higher standard of perfection than we can attain ourselves. All of the punishments you could throw at them will not stamp out their humanity, for to err is human, and we all do it sometimes.

The courtyard kept changing, dazzling her with the flowers that bloomed between one day and the next, with the bare branches of trees that were swollen with the buds of new leaves and then fuzzed with green. Every day, she drove a familiar road through a new place.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —ANAïS NIN

New eyes awaken. I send Love's name into the world with wings And songs grow up around me like a jungle. Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes Your Spirit played in Eden. Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise Shine on the face of the abyss And I am drunk with the great wilderness Of the sixth day in Genesis. But sound is never half so fair As when that music turns to air And the universe dies of excellence. Sun, moon and stars Fall from their heavenly towers. Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore. Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf, All fear another wind, another thunder: Then one more voice Snuffs all their flares in one gust. And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars And no more buds and no more Eden And no more animals and no more sea: While God sings by himself in acres of night And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.

ON THE DAY I DIE On the day I die, when I'm being carried toward the grave, don't weep. Don't say, He's gone! He's gone. Death has nothing to do with going away. The sun sets and the moon sets, but they're not gone. Death is a coming together. The tomb looks like a prison, but it's really release into union. The human seed goes down in the ground like a bucket into the well where Joseph is. It grows and comes up full of some unimagined beauty. Your mouth closes here, and immediately opens with a shout of joy there. --------------------------------- One who does what the Friend wants done will never need a friend. There's a bankruptcy that's pure gain. The moon stays bright when it doesn't avoid the night. A rose's rarest essence lives in the thorn. ---------------------------------- Childhood, youth, and maturity, and now old age. Every guest agrees to stay three days, no more. Master, you told me to remind you. Time to go. ----------------------------------- The angel of death arrives, and I spring joyfully up. No one knows what comes over me when I and that messenger speak! ------------------------------------- When you come back inside my chest no matter how far I've wandered off, I look around and see the way. At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come then, I'll sit up and sing. -------------------------------------- Last night things flowed between us that cannot now be said or written. Only as I'm being carried out and down the road, as the folds of my shroud open in the wind, will anyone be able to read, as on the petal-pages of a turning bud, what passed through us last night. ------------------------------------- I placed one foot on the wide plain of death, and some grand immensity sounded on the emptiness. I have felt nothing ever like the wild wonder of that moment. Longing is the core of mystery. Longing itself brings the cure. The only rule is, Suffer the pain. Your desire must be disciplined, and what you want to happen in time, sacrificed.

In western lands beneath the Sun the flowers may rise in Spring, the trees may bud, the waters run, the merry finches sing. Or there maybe 'tis cloudless night and swaying beeches bear the Elven-stars as jewels white amid their branching hair. Though here at journey's end I lie in darkness buried deep, beyond all towers strong and high, beyond all mountains steep, above all shadows rides the Sun and Stars for ever dwell: I will not say the Day is done, nor bid the Stars farewell.

THE VOID hates creation. if you ever hear call of the lonesome train with sad days ahead do not forget this direct response at your fingertips: CREATE SOMETHING. anything. even if no buds ever know. this is powerful rebuke against the vast nothing and pushes back to say I AM HERE

So many cells in my body have died and regenerated since the days of the Dream House. My blood and taste buds and skin have long since re-created themselves. My fat still remembers, but just barely — within a few years, it will have turned itself over completely. My bones too. But my nervous system remembers. The lenses of my eyes. My cerebral cortex with its memory and language and consciousness. They will last forever, or at least as long as I do. They can still climb onto the witness stand.

Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of earliest childhood, is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent; which, untouched by all we acquire and all we shed, pushes a green spear through the dead leaves and through the mould, thrusts a scaled bud through the year of darkness until, one day, the light discovers it and shakes the flower free and - we are alive - we are flowering for our moment upon the earth?

I know what you are thinking - you need a sign. What better one could I give than to make this little one whole and new? I could do it, but I will not. I am the Lord and not a conjurer. I gave this mite a gift I denied to all of you - eternal innocence. To you, he looks imperfect but to me he is flawless like the bud that dies unopened or the fledgling that falls from the nest to be devoured by the ants. He will never offend me, as all of you have done. He will never pervert or destroy the work of my Father's hands. He is necessary to you. He will evoke the kindness that will keep you human. His infirmity will prompt you to gratitude for your own good fortune. More! He will remind you every day that I am who I am, that my ways are not yours, and that the smallest dust mite, while in darkest space, does not fall out of my hand. I have chosen you. You have not chosen me. This little one is my sign to you. Treasure him!

Thich Nhat Hanh calls his practice of yes “smile yoga.” He suggests bringing a slight but real smile to our lips many times throughout the day, whether we are meditating or simply stopping for a red light. “A tiny bud of a smile on your lips,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh, “nourishes awareness and calms you miraculously … your smile will bring happiness to you and to those around you.” The power of a smile to open and relax us is confirmed by modern science. The muscles used to make a smile actually send a biochemical message to our nervous system that it is safe to relax the flight, fight or freeze response. A smile is the yes of unconditional friendliness that welcomes experience without fear.

And the roses—the roses! Rising out of the grass, tangled round the sun-dial, wreathing the tree trunks and hanging from their branches, climbing up the walls and spreading over them with long garlands falling in cascades—they came alive day by day, hour by hour. Fair fresh leaves, and buds—and buds—tiny at first but swelling and working Magic until they burst and uncurled into cups of scent delicately spilling themselves over their brims and filling the garden air.

Normally death came at night, taking a person in their sleep, stopping their heart or tickling them awake, leading them to the bathroom with a splitting headache before pouncing and flooding their brain with blood. It waits in alleys and metro stops. After the sun goes down plugs are pulled by white-clad guardians and death is invited into an antiseptic room. But in the country death comes, uninvited, during the day. It takes fishermen in their longboats. It grabs children by the ankles as they swim. In winter it calls them down a slope too steep for their budding skills, and crosses their skies at the tips. It waits along the shore where snow met ice not long ago but now, unseen by sparkling eyes, a little water touches the shore, and the skater makes a circle slightly larger than intended. Death stands in the woods with a bow and arrow at dawn and dusk. And it tugs cars off the road in broad daylight, the tires spinning furiously on ice or snow, or bright autumn leaves.

Spring had come once more to Green Gables-the beautiful, capricious Canadian spring, lingering along through April and may in a succession of sweet, fresh, chilly days, with pink sunsets and miracles of resurrection and growth. The maples in Lover's Lane were red-budded and little curly ferns pushed up around the Dryad's Bubble. Away in the barrens, behind Mr. Silas Sloane's place, the mayflowers blossomed out, pink and white stars of sweetness under their brown leaves. All the school girls and boys had one golden afternoon gathering them, coming home in the clear, echoing twilight with arms and baskets full of flowery spoil.

Between the dark, heavily laden treetops of the spreading chestnut trees could be seen the dark blue of the sky, full of stars, all solemn and golden, which extended their radiance unconcernedly into the distance. That was the nature of the stars. and the trees bore their buds and blossoms and scars for everyone to see, and whether it signified pleasure or pain, they accepted the strong will to live. flies that lived only for a day swarmed toward their death. every life had its radiance and beauty. i had insight into it all for a moment, understood it and found it good, and also found my life and sorrows good.

The news did not trouble her particularly; all news was bad, like wage demands, strikes, or war, and the wise person paid no attention to it. What was important was that it was a bright, sunny day; her first narcissi were in bloom, and the daffodils behind them were already showing flower buds.

And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk to bloom. —ANAÏS NIN

We're all just flowers. Small, nameless flowers. Little, barely budding things supported by something far greater than ourselves. Even so, we all dream of the day when we will eventually blossom. Free. Under the wide open sky...

Her shining tresses, divided in two parts, encircle the harmonious contour of her white and delicate cheeks, brilliant in their glow and freshness. Her ebony brows have the form and charm of the bow of Kama, the god of love, and beneath her long silken lashes the purest reflections and a celestial light swim, as in the sacred lakes of Himalaya, in the black pupils of her great clear eyes. Her teeth, fine, equal, and white, glitter between her smiling lips like dewdrops in a passion-flower's half-enveloped breast. Her delicately formed ears, her vermilion hands, her little feet, curved and tender as the lotus-bud, glitter with the brilliancy of the loveliest pearls of Ceylon, the most dazzling diamonds of Golconda. Her narrow and supple waist, which a hand may clasp around, sets forth the outline of her rounded figure and the beauty of her bosom, where youth in its flower displays the wealth of its treasures; and beneath the silken folds of her tunic she seems to have been modelled in pure silver by the godlike hand of Vicvarcarma, the immortal sculptor.

Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously. How? Why? It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears.

When he embraces me, my dad pats my back for an extended beat, and we hold on longer while he whispers, “I love you, bud, and I’m grateful for you every goddamn day. And I can’t wait to see you marry the man of your dreams.

She told us about the goddess called Persephone, who was forced to spend half a year in the darkness deep underground. Winter happened when she was trapped inside the earth. The days shrank, they became cold and short and dark. Living things hid themselves away. Spring came when she was released and made her slow way up to the world again. The world became brighter and bolder in order to welcome her back. It began to be filled with warmth and light. The animals dared to wake, they dared to have their young. Plants dared to send out buds and shoots. Life dared to come back.

Make food choices that honor your health and taste buds while making you feel good. Remember that you don’t have to eat a perfect diet to be healthy. You will not suddenly get a nutrient deficiency, or gain weight from one snack, one meal, or one day of eating. It’s what you eat consistently over time that matters. Progress, not perfection, is what counts.

I am weary of days and hours, Blown buds of barren flowers, Desires and dreams and powers And everything but sleep.

Of Woman and Chocolate   "Chocolate shares both the bitter and the sweet. Chocolate melts away all cares, coating the heart while smothering every last ache.   Chocolate brings a smile to the lips on contact, leaving a dark kiss behind.   Chocolate is amiable, complimenting any pairing; berries, peanut butter, pretzels, mint, pastries, drinks...everything goes with chocolate.   The very thought of chocolate awakens taste buds, sparking memories of candy-coated happiness.   Chocolate will go nuts with you, no questions asked.   Chocolate craves your lips, melts at your touch, and savors the moment.   Chocolate is that dark and beautiful knight who charges in on his gallant steed ready to slay dragons when needed.   Chocolate never disappoints; it leaves its lover wanting more.   Chocolate is the ultimate satisfaction, synonymous with perfection.   Chocolate is rich, smooth pleasure.   Chocolate has finesse - the charm to seduce and indulge at any time, day or night.   Chocolate is a true friend, a trusted confidant, and faithful lover. Chocolate warms and comforts and sympathizes.   Chocolate holds power over depression, victory over disappointment.   Chocolate savvies the needs of a woman and owns her.   Simply put, chocolate is paradise.

Why Roses Crave Thorns" Petals detach from a wilting bud—a single stem plucked before fully blossomed. They descend in hesitant swirls, too soft and limp to shatter like teardrops. One by one they light to blanket a single shadow below. She is a rose, young and innocent, with beauty incomparable to shame all others. She has flowered enough to stop the observer in his tracks, awestruck. He is compelled to reach out and touch. The petals delight at a silken caress, her bud everything desirable but defenseless—without a sharp edge to make an admirer pause, to warn the intrusive hand. ‘Stay back! Stay back!’ His fingers curl around the stem to tug, and suddenly the rose craves a thorn. It is madness not to want her and yet madness to cut her down. Let the flower thrive and blush to someday flaunt layers of silken favors! But the world will not have it. A single stem is severed in a selfish moment of desire—a yearning to hold and possess. Alone and forgotten her petals cry, raining in hesitant swirls where they accumulate to blanket her shadow below. Dry, withered, craving the thorns. Beautiful no more.

Even in the Moment of Our Earliest Kiss Even in the moment of our earliest kiss, When sighed the straitened bud into the flower, Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this; And that I knew, though not the day and hour. Too season-wise am I, being country-bred, To tilt at autumn or defy the frost: Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did, I say with them, "What’s out tonight is lost." I only hoped, with the mild hope of all Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree, A fairer summer and a later fall Than in these parts a man is apt to see, And sunny clusters ripened for the wine: I tell you this across the blackened vine.

It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before…to test your limits…to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —Anaïs Nin

If someone tells you they love turkey smothered with cranberry sauce, that they love it more than anything else in the world, you might spend the day roasting that someone a turkey and smothering it with cranberry sauce. If that same someone then takes one little bite and says, 'That'll be all, thank you,' you'll likely go red in the face and hurl both these turkeys our the nearest window because clearly, this person never loved turkey smothered with cranberry sauce in the first place. Little bites are never enough when you love something. When you love something, you want it all. That's how it works. And that's how it was for Archer. Archer didn't want a little taste of adventure with a side of leftover discoveries. Archer wanted the whole turkey and he wanted it stuffed with enough salts and spices to turn his taste buds into sparklers.

It was a bright spring morning, full of promise. Most travelers are familiar with this kind of weather- when the wind blows westward and warm but the ground still chills the soles of your feet, when the tree buds have begun to unfurl and scent the air with secret springtime madness- and they know those days are made for leaving.

Each day we live is a glass room Until we break it with the thrusting Of the spirit and pass through The splintered walls to the green pastures Where the birds and buds are breaking Into fabulous song and hue By the still waters. - Each Day We Live is a Glass Room

There are new smells on the wind, the healthy scent of green and growing things, the way a summer day can smell, or a greenhouse, sugarsmooth aroma of budding trees and water flowing free across coarse and sparkling sand.

A leaf is a silent proverb. Did you ever consider that? When it buds on the tree, people rejoice. Throughout is prime, they love it for the shade it provides. But only when it reaches the end of its time on the tree does its brilliance come through. Sometimes yellow, sometimes orange, sometimes deep red. Dazzling in its artistry, like a drop of sunset you can see at all house of the day." Clara smiled. "A leaf has the most extraordinary death. There is so much beauty to it." Mrs. Kip

Unfortunately the next day was not the vast, extraneous expanse of time which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer.

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me. We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun, We found our own my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak. My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach, With the twirl of my tongue I encompass worlds and volumes of worlds. Speech is the twin of my vision.... it is unequal to measure itself. It provokes me forever, It says sarcastically, Walt, you understand enough.... why don’t you let it out then? Come now I will not be tantalized.... you conceive too much of articulation. Do you not know how the buds beneath are folded? Waiting in gloom protected by frost, The dirt receding before my prophetical screams, I underlying causes to balance them at last, My knowledge my live parts.... it keeping tally with the meaning of things, Happiness.... which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.

You wrote to me. Do not deny it. I’ve read your words and they evoke My deep respect for your emotion, Your trusting soul… and sweet devotion. Your candour has a great appeal And stirs in me, I won’t conceal, Long dormant feelings, scarce remembered. But I’ve no wish to praise you now; Let me repay you with a vow As artless as the one you tendered; Hear my confession too, I plead, And judge me both by word and deed. 13 ’Had I in any way desired To bind with family ties my life; Or had a happy fate required That I turn father, take a wife; Had pictures of domestication For but one moment held temptation- Then, surely, none but you alone Would be the bride I’d make my own. I’ll say without wrought-up insistence That, finding my ideal in you, I would have asked you—yes, it’s true— To share my baneful, sad existence, In pledge of beauty and of good, And been as happy … as I could! 14 ’But I’m not made for exaltation: My soul’s a stranger to its call; Your virtues are a vain temptation, For I’m not worthy of them all. Believe me (conscience be your token): In wedlock we would both be broken. However much I loved you, dear, Once used to you … I’d cease, I fear; You’d start to weep, but all your crying Would fail to touch my heart at all, Your tears in fact would only gall. So judge yourself what we’d be buying, What roses Hymen means to send— Quite possibly for years on end! 15 ’In all this world what’s more perverted Than homes in which the wretched wife Bemoans her worthless mate, deserted— Alone both day and night through life; Or where the husband, knowing truly Her worth (yet cursing fate unduly) Is always angry, sullen, mute— A coldly jealous, selfish brute! Well, thus am I. And was it merely For this your ardent spirit pined When you, with so much strength of mind, Unsealed your heart to me so clearly? Can Fate indeed be so unkind? Is this the lot you’ve been assigned? 16 ’For dreams and youth there’s no returning; I cannot resurrect my soul. I love you with a tender yearning, But mine must be a brother’s role. So hear me through without vexation: Young maidens find quick consolation— From dream to dream a passage brief; Just so a sapling sheds its leaf To bud anew each vernal season. Thus heaven wills the world to turn. You’ll fall in love again; but learn … To exercise restraint and reason, For few will understand you so, And innocence can lead to woe.

Wonder of time,' quoth she, 'this is my spite, That, thou being dead, the day should yet be light. 'Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy: Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend: It shall be waited on with jealousy, Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end, Ne'er settled equally, but high or low, That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe. 'It shall be fickle, false and full of fraud, Bud and be blasted in a breathing-while; The bottom poison, and the top o'erstraw'd With sweets that shall the truest sight beguile: The strongest body shall it make most weak, Strike the wise dumb and teach the fool to speak. 'It shall be sparing and too full of riot, Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures; The staring ruffian shall it keep in quiet, Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasures; It shall be raging-mad and silly-mild, Make the young old, the old become a child. 'It shall suspect where is no cause of fear; It shall not fear where it should most mistrust; It shall be merciful and too severe, And most deceiving when it seems most just; Perverse it shall be where it shows most toward, Put fear to valour, courage to the coward. 'It shall be cause of war and dire events, And set dissension 'twixt the son and sire; Subject and servile to all discontents, As dry combustious matter is to fire: Sith in his prime Death doth my love destroy, They that love best their loves shall not enjoy.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

The single best and easiest thing you can do for your health is to recalibrate your taste buds and learn to enjoy pure clean water.

That frail and stooped old man is Bud Day. That is Misty 1.

Like a broken bone, stillness is needed for the mending to begin, just as a rose bud must open for the flower to bloom.

I was seventeen and a half, smoking so much bud that if I remembered an hour from any one of those days it would have been a lot.

There’s a great line from the poet Anaïs Nin that reads: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Sometimes you don’t die when you’re supposed to & now I have a choice repair a world or build a new one inside my body a white door opens into a place queerly brimming gold light so velvet-gold it is like the world hasn’t happened when I call out all my friends are there everyone we love is still alive gathered at the lakeside like constellations my honeyed kin honeyed light beneath the sky a garden blue stalks white buds the moon’s marble glow the fire distant & flickering the body whole bright- winged brimming with the hours of the day beautiful nameless planet. Oh friends, my friends— bloom how you must, wild until we are free.

We are always looking forward to the passing and ending of winter, but when summer is here it seems as if summer must always last. As I went across the fields that day, I found myself half lamenting that the world must fade again, even that the best of her budding and bloom was only a preparation for another spring-time, for an awakening beyond the coming winter’s sleep.

Just get to lunch,” I muttered to myself. It was the only way I could control my anxiety. In 1998, I’d made it through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL, or BUD/S, by focusing on just making it to the next meal. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t feel my arms as we hoisted logs over our heads or if the cold surf soaked me to the core. It wasn’t going to last forever. There is a saying: “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is simple: “One bite at a time.” Only my bites were separated by meals: Make it to breakfast, train hard until lunch, and focus until dinner. Repeat.

Six is a bad time too 'cause that's when some real scary things start to happen to your body, it's around then that your teeth start to coming a-loose in your mouth. You wake up one morning and it seems like your tongue is the first one to notice that something strange is going on, 'cause as soon as you get up there it is pushing and rubbing up against one of your front teeth and I'll be doggoned if that tooth isn't the littlest bit wiggly. At first you think it's kind of funny, but the tooth keeps getting looser and looser and one day, in the middle of pushing the tooth back and forth and squinching your eyes shut, you pull it clean out. It's the scariest thing you can think of 'cause you lose control of your tongue at the same time and no matter how hard you try to stop it, it won't leave the new hold in your mouth alone, it keeps digging around in the spot where that tooth used to be. You tell some adult about what's happening but all they do is say it's normal. You can't be too sure, though, 'cause it shakes you up a whole lot more than grown folks think it does when perfectly good parts of your body commence to loosening up and falling of off you. Unless you're as stupid as a lamppost you've got to wonder what's coming off next, your arm? Your leg? Your neck? Every morning when you wake up it seems a lot of your parts aren't stuck on as good as they used to be.

But all of a sudden the scene changed; it was the memory, no longer of old impressions but of an old desire, only recently reawakened by the Fortuny gown in blue and gold, that spread before me another spring, a spring not leafy at all but on the contrary suddenly stripped of its trees and flowers by the name that I had just murmured to myself: “Venice”; a decanted springtime, which is reduced to its own essence and expresses the lengthening, the warming, the gradual unfolding of its days in the progressive fermentation, no longer, now, of an impure soil, but of a blue and virginal water, springlike without bud or blossom, which could answer the call of May only by the gleaming facets fashioned and polished by May, harmonising exactly with it in the radiant, unalterable nakedness of its dusky sapphire. Likewise, too, no more than the seasons to its flowerless creeks, do modern times bring any change to the Gothic city; I knew it, even if I could not imagine it, or rather, imagining it, this was what I longed for with the same desire which long ago, when I was a boy, in the very ardour of departure, had broken and robbed me of the strength to make the journey: to find myself face to face with my Venetian imaginings, to observe how that divided sea enclosed in its meanderings, like the sinuosities of the ocean stream, and urbane and refined civilization, but one that, isolated by their azure girdle, had evolved independently, had had its own schools of painting and architecture, to admire that fabulous garden of fruits and birds in coloured stone, flowering in the midst of the sea which kept it refreshed, lapped the base of the columns with its tide, and, like a somber azure gaze watching in the shadows, kept patches of light perpetually flickering on the bold relief of the capitals.

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it—oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensées?

In the restaurant kitchen, August meant lobsters, blackberries, silver queen corn, and tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes. In honor of the last year of the restaurant, Fiona was creating a different tomato special for each day of the month. The first of August (two hundred and fifty covers on the book, eleven reservation wait list) was a roasted yellow tomato soup. The second of August (two hundred and fifty covers, seven reservation wait list) was tomato pie with a Gruyère crust. On the third of August, Ernie Otemeyer came in with his wife to celebrate his birthday and since Ernie liked food that went with his Bud Light, Fiona made a Sicilian pizza- a thick, doughy crust, a layer of fresh buffalo mozzarella, topped with a voluptuous tomato-basil sauce. One morning when she was working the phone, Adrienne stepped into the kitchen hoping to get a few minutes with Mario, and she found Fiona taking a bite out of red ripe tomato like it was an apple. Fiona held the tomato out. "I'd put this on the menu," she said. "But few would understand.

Ah! listen the song of storm from my disturbed soul;and it scatters flower buds into its lonely halls;like every pain needs a dirge,with wreaths that awful the world framed one for me,and gives the time it calls.

1058 Bloom—is Result—to meet a Flower And casually glance Would scarcely cause one to suspect The minor Circumstance Assisting in the Bright Affair So intricately done Then offered as a Butterfly To the Meridian— To pack the Bud—oppose the Worm— Obtain its right of Dew— Adjust the Heat—elude the Wind— Escape the prowling Bee Great Nature not to disappoint Awaiting Her that Day— To be a Flower, is profound Responsibility—

When Dr. Jung said we must be able to look forward in old age to the next day and to look forward to the great adventure that is ahead, he was making life’s “imperative to grow” personal. As long as we are alive, we must be able to dream of the future, of a better world or better ways of life. We are also invited by our greater Self to dream new dreams of creativity and fresh ways of expressing ourselves, as many great artists have into their nineties.

A man named Bud Osborn, who was helped to recover from his heroin addiction by Gabor, tells me: “The childhood trauma makes you feel bad about everything. Bad about your family, bad about life,” he said. “And then when you take drugs, they make you feel good about your life, about yourself, about being in the world . . . [People] wonder—why do [addicts] keep doing it? Because it makes them feel good, and the rest of their life doesn’t make them feel good.

It's a beautifully beautiful day. A moment to reflect on the beautiful truth that a heart is like a garden. With Roses of Happiness, there would be thorns of pain, with Sunflowers of Joy, there would be weeds of dismay, with colours of Sunshine there would be covers of cloud, after all that's what makes a beautiful garden, a garden that thrives and breathes in all seasons with every hue of Life, every emotion that makes our heart alive in tears and smiles, feeling all the numbness of Life yet warming up to the possibility of a new day as the fallen leaves make way for the new ones, as the bee hums along a bud to see a blossoming rose no matter the thorns, no matter the waves of Life. It is a beautifully beautiful day, and I am happy to be alive. Alive to the possibility of a new day, a tomorrow where a whole new garden of new experiences awaits. To the Hope of Spring. Love & Light, always - Debatrayee

An Adieu" Sorrow, quit me for a while! Wintry days are over; Hope again, with April smile, Violets sows and clover. Pleasure follows in her path, Love itself flies after, And the brook a music hath Sweet as childhood’s laughter. Not a bird upon the bough Can repress its rapture, Not a bud that blossoms now But doth beauty capture. Sorrow, thou art Winter’s mate, Spring cannot regret thee; Yet, ah, yet—my friend of late— I shall not forget thee!

And her heart sprang in Iseult, and she drew With all her spirit and life the sunrise through And through her lips the keen triumphant air Sea-scented, sweeter than land-roses were, And through her eyes the whole rejoicing east Sun-satisfied, and all the heaven at feast Spread for the morning; and the imperious mirth Of wind and light that moved upon the earth, Making the spring, and all the fruitful might And strong regeneration of delight That swells the seedling leaf and sapling man, Since the first life in the first world began To burn and burgeon through void limbs and veins, And the first love with sharp sweet procreant pains To pierce and bring forth roses; yea, she felt Through her own soul the sovereign morning melt, And all the sacred passion of the sun; And as the young clouds flamed and were undone About him coming, touched and burnt away In rosy ruin and yellow spoil of day, The sweet veil of her body and corporal sense Felt the dawn also cleave it, and incense With light from inward and with effluent heat The kindling soul through fleshly hands and feet. And as the august great blossom of the dawn Burst, and the full sun scarce from sea withdrawn Seemed on the fiery water a flower afloat, So as a fire the mighty morning smote Throughout her, and incensed with the influent hour Her whole soul's one great mystical red flower Burst, and the bud of her sweet spirit broke Rose-fashion, and the strong spring at a stroke Thrilled, and was cloven, and from the full sheath came The whole rose of the woman red as flame: And all her Mayday blood as from a swoon Flushed, and May rose up in her and was June. So for a space her hearth as heavenward burned: Then with half summer in her eyes she turned, And on her lips was April yet, and smiled, As though the spirit and sense unreconciled Shrank laughing back, and would not ere its hour Let life put forth the irrevocable flower. And the soft speech between them grew again

In our part of the country, spring passes quickly. If you haven't been out for five days, you find the trees in bud. If you don't see the trees for another five days, you discover that they've put out leaves. In another five days, they're so green you wouldn't recognize them. It makes you wonder: Can these be the same trees I saw a few days before? And you answer yourself: Of course they are. That's how fast spring goes by. You can almost see it. From far away it comes racing toward you. And when it reaches you it whispers in your ear, 'I'm here,' and then runs swiftly on. Spring - what a rush it's in. Every place seems to be urging it to come. If it delays its arrival a bit, the sunlight fades and the earth turns to stone. Trees especially can't endure any delay. Let spring dally even briefly on the way, and many lives are lost. ("Spring In A Small Town")

We are cotton buds sucking up the sadness of others, we are saturated, we are saviours. We absorb pain, too thick with mess to notice that everything around us is drying up and growing over. We will wake up one day in a wasteland, surrounded by the crumbling bones of those who loved us and waited for us to love them back. We did not forget but we were too busy being useful.

Early in March the crocuses crept alight, then blazed yellow and purple in the park. In fact it is about five o'clock in the evening that the first hour of spring strikes - autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day. The air, about to darken, quickens and is run through with mysterious white light; the curtain of darkness is suspended, as though for some unprecedented event. There is perhaps no sunset, the trees are not yet budding - but the senses receive an intimation, an intimation so fine, yet striking in so directly, that this appears a movement in one's own spirit. This exalts whatever feeling is in the heart.

Should God forbid the sun to perform its office upon the Sabbath, cut off its genial rays from warming the earth and nourishing vegetation? Must the system of worlds stand still through that holy day? Should He [207] command the brooks to stay from watering the fields and forests, and bid the waves of the sea still their ceaseless ebbing and flowing? Must the wheat and corn stop growing, and the ripening cluster defer its purple bloom? Must the trees and flowers put forth no bud nor blossom on the Sabbath? In such a case, men would miss the fruits

Things I love about spring are these: Blooming flowers on fruit-bearing trees. Fire-red tulips—their first reveal— Followed by sun-yellow daffodils. Trees acquiring new coats of green. Natural waterfalls glistening. The chirps and melodies of birds. Throaty ribbits of frogs overheard. A passing whiff of mint to smell, Oregano and basil as well. Colorful butterflies with wings. Fuzzy, industrious bees that sting. Sunlight waning late in the day. Warm breezes causing willows to sway. Most of all, a sense of things new, Including budding feelings for you.

On many an idle day have I grieved over lost time. But it is never lost, my lord. Thou hast taken every moment of my life in thine own hands. Hidden in the heart of things thou art nourishing seeds into sprouts, buds into blossoms, and ripening flowers into fruitfulness. I was tired and sleeping on my idle bed and imagined all work had ceased. In the morning I woke up and found my garden full with wonders of flowers.

One day it had rained before sunrise, and a soft spring wind had been blowing ever since, a soothing and persuading wind, that seemed to draw out the buds from the secret places of the dry twigs, and whisper to the roots of the rose-trees that their flowers would be wanted by and by.

To Autumn" Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,— While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

So many cells in my body have died and regenerated since the days of the Dream House. My blood and taste buds and skin have long since re-created themselves. My fat still remembers, but just barely—within a few years, it will have turned itself over completely. My bones too. But my nervous system remembers. The lenses of my eyes. My cerebral cortex, with its memory and language and consciousness. They will last forever, or at least as long as I do.

And I am proud, but mostly, I’m angry. I’m angry, because when I look around, I’m still alone. I’m still the only black woman in the room. And when I look at what I’ve fought so hard to accomplish next to those who will never know that struggle I wonder, “How many were left behind?” I think about my first-grade class and wonder how many black and brown kids weren’t identified as “talented” because their parents were too busy trying to pay bills to pester the school the way my mom did. Surely there were more than two, me and the brown boy who sat next to me in the hall each day. I think about my brother and wonder how many black boys were similarly labeled as “trouble” and were unable to claw out of the dark abyss that my brother had spent so many years in. I think about the boys and girls playing at recess who were dragged to the principal’s office because their dark skin made their play look like fight. I think about my friend who became disillusioned with a budding teaching career, when she worked at the alternative school and found that it was almost entirely populated with black and brown kids who had been sent away from the general school population for minor infractions. From there would only be expulsions or juvenile detention. I think about every black and brown person, every queer person, every disabled person, who could be in the room with me, but isn’t, and I’m not proud. I’m heartbroken. We should not have a society where the value of marginalized people is determined by how well they can scale often impossible obstacles that others will never know. I have been exceptional, and I shouldn’t have to be exceptional to be just barely getting by. But we live in a society where if you are a person of color, a disabled person, a single mother, or an LGBT person you have to be exceptional. And if you are exceptional by the standards put forth by white supremacist patriarchy, and you are lucky, you will most likely just barely get by. There’s nothing inspirational about that.

I know what you are thinking - you need a sign. What better one could I give than to make this little one whole and new? I could do it, but I will not. I am the Lord and not a conjurer. I gave this mite a gift I denied to all of you - eternal innocence. To you, he looks imperfect but to me he is flawless like the bud that dies unopened or the fledgling that falls from the nest to be devoured by the ants. He will never offend me, as all of you have done. He will never pervert or destroy the work of my Father's hands. He is necessary to you. He will evoke the kindness that will keep you human. His infirmity will prompt you to gratitude for your own good fortune. More! He will remind you every day that I am who I am, that my ways are not yours, and that the smallest dust mite, while in darkest space, does not fall out of my hand. I have chosen you. You have not chosen me. This little one is my sign to you. Treasure him!

The sap was rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds. Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling things rustled forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked the wild-fowl driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the air. From

A leaf is a silent proverb. Did you ever consider that? When it buds on the tree, people rejoice. Throughout its prime, they love it for the shade it provides. But only when it reaches the end of its time on the tree does its brilliance come through. Sometimes yellow, sometimes orange, sometimes deep red. Dazzling in its artistry, like a drop of sunset you can see at all hours of the day.” Clara smiled. “A leaf has the most extraordinary death. There is so much beauty to it.

When a man loves you, you will know. You will know it not by the expensive gifts he buys you or thousand times he articulates those three magical words. You will know by the sense of certain knowing, a sense that makes your bones tickle at the mere thought of him. You will know when you don't need to check on him after every another hour through calls or text messages. You will know when you don't have to stalk him on Facebook or last seen status on whats app. You will know when you can feel his laughter seeping through your soul as he hears your voice. You will know when he does not make loud promises but is there to hold your hand when things go wrong. You will know he loves you when either of you don't know what the future holds but still somehow you know you are always together. You will know when a man loves you..by the way he looks at you when you are shabbily dressed or when he discovers that first or second streak of grey hair. You will know..by the way he treats you on special days and ordinary ones...you will know when a man loves you. It is different from your rosy teenage dreams or romantic tales of SRK movies...when a man loves you, you may not hear any bells ringing in your heart, you may not get to pluck the rose buds to know if he is into you or not..when a man loves you, you will know by the way he says your name.

They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong. Compared, calendar page against calendar page, it looks to be the shortest, all right. Spread between January and March like lard on bread, it fails to reach the crust on either slice. In its galoshes it's a full head shorter than December, although in leap years, when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April's nose. However more abbreviated than it's cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old. February is pitiless, and it's boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed. Except to the extent that it "tints the buds and swells the leaves within" February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui holding both progress and contentment at bay. If February is the color of lard on rye, its aroma is that of wet wool trousers. As for sound, it is an abstract melody played on a squeaky violin, the petty whine of a shrew with cabin fever. O February, you may be little but you're small! Where you twice your tiresome length, few of us would survive to greet the merry month of May.

goddamn. what is this shit? early times, called j-bone. best little old drink they is. drink that and you wont feel a thing the next mornin. or any morning. whoo lord, give it here. hello early, come to your old daddy. here, pour some of it in this cup and let me cut it with coca-cola. can't do it, bud. why not? we done tried it. it eats the bottom out. watch it suttree. don't spill none on your shoes lord honey i know they make that old splo in the bathtub but this here is made in the toilet. he was looking at the bottle, shaking it. bubbles the size of gooseshot veered greasily up through the smoky fuel it held. the last time i drank some of that shit i like to died. i stunk from the inside out. i laid in a tub of hot water all day and climbed out and dried and you could still smell it. i had to burn my clothes. early times, he called. make your liver quiver. (page 26)

Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of the following day where everything was so well-arranged because I myself was not yet in it, my good intention would be realized without difficulty, it was better not to start on an evening when I felt ill-prepared. The following days were not, alas, to prove more propitious. But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three days. Confident that by the day after tomorrow I should have written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred to remain patient and then to bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way. Unfortunately the next day was not that vast, extraneous expanse of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would be realized at once, and hence no longer the heart to subordinate everything else to their realization: I began once again to keep late hours...

IN APRIL Again the woods are odorous, the lark Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark, Where branches bare disclosed the empty day. After long rainy afternoons an hour Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings Them at the windows in a radiant shower, And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings. Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies; And cradled in the branches, hidden deep In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

As he later wrote, if he believed there were things he couldn’t do, he would still be working at the meatpacking plant in Sioux City.

You’re not telling us that these promises were not made; you’re just saying they don’t have to be kept?

It was the familiar “rogue agent defense” — the agents had no authority to make the promises, and therefore the promises were not legal.

It was also he who said of Day, “He is, by nature, incapable of allowing injustice to go unchallenged.

Their war plan is simple: kill everyone they meet. If they are not shooting, they are reloading.

Tigers breed tigers. A candy-assed commander will have few tigers working for him. Each makes the other uncomfortable.

So when a Vietnam-era fighter pilot says he flew up north, that means he ripped off the front gate of hell and flew into the deadliest air-defense system ever devised.

Plus, he was a plainspoken man. Four decades later, when former Mistys were interviewed, they to a man spoke of Day’s bluntness. “He called a spade a fucking spade,” one said.

If T. S. Eliot had stayed in St Louis, he would never have held that April was the cruelest month. Well, unless he was a Browns fan. At this moment, in the ragged middle of February, it begins: beneath the snow, roots quicken. In the Deep South, already trees begin to bud. And all over the land – indeed, all over the world, in Japan, in the Caribbean, in Australia – a certain class of mammal, fubsy, amiable, sweet-natured, begins to twitch and wake from hibernation: the baseball fan. Is it the lengthening of the days? Is it some subtle signal that causes them to begin to emerge from a stupor only lightly disturbed by meetings of the Hot Stove League? Naw. It is the magic phrase, ‘pitchers and catchers to report….

My mind had no answers. It was limp and dulled, useless as my missing fingers. One thought came clear: I must do something. I could not stand by while a horror was loosed upon the world. I had the thought that I should find my sister’s workroom. Perhaps there would be something there to help me, some antidote, some great drug of reversal. It was not far, a hall off her bedchamber separated by a curtain. I had never seen another witch’s craft room before, and I walked its shelves expecting I do not know what, a hundred grisly things, kraken livers, dragons’ teeth, the flayed skin of giants. But all I saw were herbs, and rudimentary ones at that: poisons, poppies, a few healing roots. I had no doubt my sister could work plenty with them, for her will had always been strong. But she was lazy, and here was the proof. Those few simples were old and weak as dead leaves. They had been collected haphazardly, some in bud, some already withered, cut with any knife at any time of day. I understood something then. My sister might be twice the goddess I was, but I was twice the witch. Her crumbling trash could not help me. And my own herbs from Aiaia would not be enough, strong as they were. The monster was bound to Crete, and whatever would be done, Crete must guide me.

Evan stares at me. I try to hug him. He takes a step back. I pause, my heart in my throat. I’ve got to reach out to him, let myself be vulnerable. I find the courage, but he backs up again. “You can’t go to Iraq anymore.” “I know.” He looks up at Deanna, then back to me. “Did you fight bad guys? You told me you weren’t.” His voice is suspicious, full of accusation. He doesn’t trust me, and I don’t blame him for that. “No, Evan. I didn’t fight bad guys.” I can’t bring myself to tell him the complete truth. I want so desperately to go back into this fight. I miss it every day. I always felt I could change the world with a rifle in my hands and our flag on my shoulder. “Did you get shot?” he looks me over, apparently searching for bullet wounds. I grin a little. “No, Bud, I didn’t get shot.” “People get shot in Iraq.” “Yes, they do.” It strikes me then that Evan for the first time has a grasp on the dangers that are faced over there. He’s six now, and the world is coming into focus for him. “People get shot, Daddy. They die. Bad guys kill them.” I think of Edward Iwan and Sean Sims. “Yeah, I know they do, Evan.

Sea, autumnal sweetness, islands bathed in light, diaphanous cloak of delicate rainfall clothing Greece’s eternal bareness. “Happy the person,” I thought, “who is deemed worthy, before dying, to sail the Aegean.” This world offers many pleasures: women, fruit, ideas. But I think no pleasure exists that plunges a person’s heart into Paradise more than the joy of cutting across this sea on a gentle autumn day, murmuring the name of each island. Nowhere else are you transported from truth to dream with such serenity and ease. Boundaries fade; the mast of even the most dilapidated ship sprouts buds and grapes. Here in Greece, truly, necessity blossoms most certainly into miracle. Kazantzakis, Nikos. Zorba the Greek (p. 23). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

In earlier times, decades, centuries, even when we drove ourselves mad, even when we lost days or years to drinking, drugging, pain, grief-- the years have always maintained their seasons: trees shedding their leaves for new buds; birds and insects flying away in formation and then returning; the luminous moon waxing and waning; the ocean tides flowing and ebbing; new growth, babies aborning, as certain as trauma, as certain as death. All things went on no matter the chaos inside us. There was a childish anger that everything just carried on, ignored our turmoil-- our grief-- but there was also a deep and profound comfort. We ourselves may be lost but the road continued ever winding... Have we disrupted that continuum? Can we no longer count on that continuity? Is that why our children are so afraid but also so unwilling to swallow systemic lies and deeply imbedded fallacies we allowed ourselves to live by? Because the future-- a future-- any future-- is no longer sure?

The sunshine of a day in early spring, honey pale and honey sweet, was showering over the red brick buildings of Queenslea College, and the grounds about them, throwing through the bare, budding maples and elms, delicate, evasive etchings of gold and brown on the paths, and coaxing into life the daffodils that were peering greenly and perkily up under the windows of the co-eds' dressing-room.

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds. He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clambrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother's thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright trinketware (alas, a thing now of the past!), and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for a budding virgin shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his studied baisemoins. The scent, the smile but more than these, the dark eyes and oleaginous address brought home at duskfall many a commission to the head of the firm seated with Jacob's pipe after like labours in the paternal ingle (a meal of noodles, you may be sure, is aheating), reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the Europe of a month before. But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and the young knighterrant recedes, shrivels, to a tiny speck within the mist. Now he is himself paternal and these about him might be his sons. Who can say? The wise father knows his own child. He thinks of a drizzling night in Hatch street, hard by the bonded stores there, the first. Together (she is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine and of all for a bare shilling and her luckpenny), together they hear the heavy tread of the watch as two raincaped shadows pass the new royal university. Bridie! Bridie Kelly! He will never forget the name, ever remember the night, first night, the bridenight. They are entwined in nethermost darkness, the willer and the willed, and in an instant (fiat!) light shall flood the world. Did heart leap to heart? Nay, fair reader. In a breath 'twas done but - hold! Back! It must not be! In terror the poor girl flees away through the murk. She is the bride of darkness, a daughter of night. She dare not bear the sunnygolden babe of day. No, Leopold! Name and memory solace thee not. That youthful illusion of thy strength was taken from thee and in vain. No son of thy loins is by thee. There is none to be for Leopold, what Leopold was for Rudolph.

Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who will love the smell of garbage and rummage through the bin of my failings to find the wrapped cheeseburger they can do without but consider long enough to get their taste buds used to the idea. Oh for a melodious tongue to sing me a song about french fries.

When a mind has a tendency towards day-dreams, it’s a mistake to shield it from them, to ration them. So long as you divert your mind from its day-dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will be the victim of all sorts of appearances because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Mahomet has been extolled by Moslem writers for the chastity of his early life ; and it is remarkable that, with all the plurality of wives indulged in by the Arabs, and which he permitted himself in subsequent years, and with all that constitutional fondness which he evinced for the sex, he remained single in his devotion to Cadijah to her dying day, never giving her a rival in his house, nor in his heart. Even the fresh and budding charms of Ayesha, which soon assumed such empire over him, could not obliterate the deep and mingled feeling of tenderness and gratitude for his early benefactress. Ayesha was piqued one day at hearing him indulge in these fond recollections : " O, apostle of God, " demanded the youth-ful beauty, "was not Cadijah stricken in years? Has not Allah given thee a better wife in her stead?" " Never ! " exclaimed Mahomet, with an honest burst of feeling — " never did God give me a better ! When I was poor, she enriched me ; when I was pronounced a liar, she believed in me ; when I was opposed by all the world, she remained true tome!

Bloom-is Result-to meet a Flower And casually glance Would cause one scarcely to suspect The minor Circumstance Assisting in the Bright Affair So intricately done Then offered as a Butterfly To the Meridian- To pack the Bud-oppose the Worm Obtain its right of Dew Adjust the Heat-elude the Wind- Escape the prowling Bee Great Nature not to disappoint Awaiting Her that Day- To be a Flower, is profound Responsibility-

Last night I dreamed of the "happy hunting ground." I passed through a place of bones that looked human, but weren't--the skulls were wrong. Then I came to a place where the days were the best of every season, the sweetest air and water in spring, then the dry heat where deer make dust in the road, the fog of fall with good leaves. And you could shoot without a gun, never kill, but the rabbits would do a little dance, all as if it were a game, and they were playing it too. Then winter came with heavy powder-snow, and big deer, horses, goats and buffaloes--all white--snorted, tossed their heads, and I lay down with my Army blanket, made my bed in the snow, then dreamed within the dream. I dreamed I was at Fleety's, and she told me the bones were poor people killed by bandits, and she took me back to the place, and under a huge rock where no light should have shown, a cave almost, was a dogwood tree. It glowed the kind of red those trees get at sundown, the buds were purple in that weird light, and a madman came out with an axe and chopped at the skulls, trying to make them human-looking. Then I went back to the other side of both dreams. --from a letter to his mother, Helen Pancake, where he describes a dream that seems to encapsulate the play between violence and gentleness in his life.

There had been many overseas deployments that separated them from their families. Countless times they had to uproot their families and move to another base, often to substandard quarters that were always too hot or too cold.

When we entered the material world, God lent us a body to act as a vessel and encase our souls. Our body is our temple and, miraculously, it is in a state of constant renewal. Fat cells are replaced at the rate of 10% each year. Skin cells are renewed every two to four weeks. Our 9,000 taste buds are renewed every 10-14 days. Our skeleton is renewed every two years. Every day billions of cells replace the ones that came before them. We are in this miracle of creation and renewal every second of our lives… unless we mess up that renewal. God not only gave us a constantly renewing body, but he also provided a profoundly rich, diverse and constantly-renewing food supply.

But they were still warriors. Their hearts beat as resolutely as when they stormed the beaches on Pacific islands, as when they fought across Europe, and as when they tried to stay warm in the snows of Korea. They were ready to march.

All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo Big Nate series by Lincoln Peirce The Black Cauldron (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Book Thief  by Markus Zusak Brian’s Hunt by Gary Paulsen Brian’s Winter by Gary Paulsen Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis The Call of the Wild by Jack London The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The Giver by Lois Lowry Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling Hatchet by Gary Paulsen The High King (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien Holes by Louis Sachar The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins I Am LeBron James by Grace Norwich I Am Stephen Curry by Jon Fishman Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson LeBron’s Dream Team: How Five Friends Made History by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger The Lightning Thief  (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) by Rick Riordan A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle Number the Stars by Lois Lowry The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton The River by Gary Paulsen The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (written by many authors) Star Wars series (written by many authors) The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann D. Wyss Tales from a Not-So-Graceful Ice Princess (Dork Diaries) by Rachel Renée Russell Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt Under the Blood-Red Sun by Graham Salisbury The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

The most important speaks to the issue of character and integrity, traits noted in many of his ERs. He was more concerned with the welfare of his men than with his own advancement, a rare trait in the Air Force and a sign of a great leader.

Her shining tresses, divided in two parts, encircle the harmonious contour of her white and delicate cheeks, brilliant in their glow and freshness. Her ebony brows have the form and charm of the bow of Kama, the god of love, and beneath her long silken lashes the purest reflections and a celestial light swim, as in the sacred lakes of Himalaya, in the black pupils of her great clear eyes. Her teeth, fine, equal, and white, glitter between her smiling lips like dewdrops in a passion-flower’s half-enveloped breast. Her delicately formed ears, her vermilion hands, her little feet, curved and tender as the lotus-bud, glitter with the brilliancy of the loveliest pearls of Ceylon, the most dazzling diamonds of Golconda. Her narrow and supple waist, which a hand may clasp around, sets forth the outline of her rounded figure and the beauty of her bosom, where youth in its flower displays the wealth of its treasures; and beneath the silken folds of her tunic she seems to have been modelled in pure silver by the godlike hand of Vicvarcarma, the immortal sculptor.

The whole long day was a blaze of sunshine. The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life. This murmur arose from all the land, fraught with the joy of living. It came from the things that lived and moved again, things which had been as dead and which had not moved during the long months of frost. The sap was rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds. Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling things rustled forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked the wild-fowl driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the air.

With Tommy by his side but Anthony Jr. nowhere to be seen, Anthony cranks out an old 8mm projector, and soon choppy black- and-white images appear on the cream wall capturing a few snapshots from the canyon of their life—that tell nothing, and yet somehow everything. They watch old movies, from 1963, 1952, 1948, 1947—the older, the more raucous the children and parents becoming. This year, because Ingrid isn’t here, Anthony shows them something new. It’s from 1963. A birthday party, this one with happy sound, cake, unlit candles. Anthony is turning twenty. Tatiana is very pregnant with Janie. (“Mommy, look, that’s you in Grammy’s belly!” exclaims Vicky.) Harry toddling around, pursued loudly and relentlessly by Pasha—oh, how in 1999 six children love to see their fathers wild like them, how Mary and Amy love to see their precious husbands small. The delight in the den is abundant. Anthony sits on the patio, bare chested, in swimshorts, one leg draped over the other, playing his guitar, “playing Happy Birthday to myself,” he says now, except it’s not “Happy Birthday.” The joy dims slightly at the sight of their brother, their father so beautiful and whole he hurts their united hearts—and suddenly into the frame, in a mini-dress, walks a tall dark striking woman with endless legs and comes to stand close to Anthony. The camera remains on him because Anthony is singing, while she flicks on her lighter and ignites the candles on his cake; one by one she lights them as he strums his guitar and sings the number one hit of the day, falling into a burning “Ring of Fire ... ” The woman doesn’t look at Anthony, he doesn’t look at her, but in the frame you can see her bare thigh flush against the sole of his bare foot the whole time she lights his twenty candles plus one to grow on. And it burns, burns, burns . . . And when she is done, the camera—which never lies—catches just one microsecond of an exchanged glance before she walks away, just one gram of neutral matter exploding into an equivalent of 20,000 pounds of TNT. The reel ends. Next. The budding novelist Rebecca says, “Dad, who was that? Was that Grammy’s friend Vikki?” “Yes,” says Anthony. “That was Grammy’s friend Vikki.” Tak zhivya, bez radosti/bez muki/pomniu ya ushedshiye goda/i tvoi serebryannyiye ruki/v troike yeletevshey navsegda . . . So I live—remembering with sadness all the happy years now gone by, remembering your long and silver arms, forever in the troika that flew by . . . Back

You can have mad thoughts in here. Like ... tell me, when I die, do they bring my corpse back to my cell to serve out the full term of my second sentence plus those seven years? Perhaps I've already been brought back and have just forgotten it? Maybe I'm already a corpse? A breathing cadaver? But no, no. A cadaver couldn't smile at himself this way. Somewhere, somehow, there's got to be something funny about all of this. Something horrendously funny. A wild cosmic joke on me, a real knee-slapper in some demonic heaven or hell. A while back someone was crying out eerily down the corridor in the echoing half-darkness. "Slur the buds!" he cried out dementedly, repeating those meaningless words over and over again in a ghostly voice, softly hissing and hollow. "Slur the buds! Slur the buds!" That's all I could make out. He must have called it out in that soft hollow hiss a dozen times in the course of fifteen minutes. Still other voices picked it up, and for a short while there was an impromptu ghostly chorus of "Slur the buds!" echoing down these unholy corridors. I never learned what the words meant. I never learned who it was who called out. Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe that was just me myself calling out in the demented darkness of my own imagination. Doing time does this thing to you. But, of course, you don't do time. You do without it. Or rather, time does you. Time is a cannibal that devours the flesh of your years day by day, bite by bite. And as he finishes the last morsel, with the juices of your life running down his bloody chin, he smiles wickedly, belches with satisfaction, and hisses out in ghostly tones, "Slur the buds!"

Have you ever seen a rabbit go to a pharmacy, a hospital, or a mental asylum?” he asks rhetorically. “They don’t look for medicine, they heal themselves or die. Humans aren’t so simple; they’ve let technology get in the way of who they really are.” It’s an idea that I’ve thought a lot about, and one that doesn’t always sit comfortably. Yes the modern world has its drawbacks, but nature can also be brutal. So I interrupt the budding diatribe. “But rabbits get eaten by wolves,” I say. Hof doesn’t skip a beat at my interjection. “Yes, they know fight and flight. The wolf chases them and they die. But everything dies one day. It is just that in our case we aren’t eaten by wolves. Instead, without predators, we’re being eaten by cancer, by diabetes, and our own immune systems. There’s no wolf to run from, so our bodies eat themselves.

A woman once told me that, for a time after her husband died, her grief was as constant as breathing. Then one day, while pushing a shopping cart, she realized she was thinking about yogurt. With time, thoughts in this vein became contiguous. With more time thoughts in this vein became sustained. Eventually they won a kind of majority. Her grieving had ended while she wasn’t watching (although, she added, grief never ends). And so it was with my depression. One day in December I changed a furnace filter with modest interest in the process. The day after that I drove to Gorst for the repair of a faulty seat belt. On the thirty-first I went walking with a friend—grasslands, cattails, asparagus fields, ice-bound sloughs, frost-rimed fencerows—with a familiar engrossment in the changing of winter light. I was home, that night, in time to bang pots and pans at the year’s turn: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.” It wasn’t at all like that—this eve was cloudy, the stars hidden by high racing clouds—but I found myself looking skyward anyway, into the night’s maw, and I noticed I was thinking of January’s appointments without a shudder, even with anticipation. Who knows why, but the edge had come off, and being me felt endurable again. My crucible had crested, not suddenly but less gradually than how it had come, and I felt the way a newborn fawn looks in an elementary school documentary. Born, but on shaky, insecure legs. Vulnerable, but in this world for now, with its leaf buds and packs of wolves. Was it pharmacology, and if so, is that a bad thing? Or do I credit time for my healing? Or my Jungian? My reading? My seclusion? My wife’s love? Maybe I finally exhausted my tears, or my dreams at last found sufficient purchase, or maybe the news just began to sound better, the world less precarious, not headed for disaster. Or was it talk in the end, the acknowledgments I made? The surfacing of so many festering pains? My children’s voices down the hall,

You feel it first in your heart, the possibility that winter might have passed. You may not trust it at the beginning, but then you do. Because now the sun is out and there are little nubby buds on the trees and your neighbors have taken off their heavy coats. And maybe there’s a new airiness to your thoughts on the morning you decide to pull out every window in your apartment so you can spray the glass and wipe down the sills. It allows you to think, to wonder if you’ve missed out on other possibilities by becoming a wife to this man in this house with these children. Maybe you spend the whole day considering new ways to live before finally you fit every window back into its frame and empty your bucket of Pine-Sol into the sink. And maybe now all your certainty returns, because yes, truly, it’s spring and once again you’ve made the choice to stay.

The little prince, who was present at the first appearance of a huge bud, felt at once that some sort of miraculous apparition must emerge from it. But the flower was not satisfied to complete the preparations for her beauty in the shelter of her green chamber. She chose her colours with the greatest care. She adjusted her petals one by one. She did not wish to go out into the world all rumpled, like the field poppies. It was only in the full radiance of her beauty that she wished to appear. Oh, yes! She was a coquettish creature! And her mysterious adornment lasted for days and days.

Russ Vaughn, a member of the fabled 101st Airborne Division who had served in Vietnam, published a widely circulated poem that told how the Swifties had won the “last battle of Vietnam.” The poem ended with “To our Brothers, forever, on that long black wall / You’ve been vindicated now, one and all.

He closed with a partial verse from “Sir Andrew Barton,” one of the ballads in Percy’s Reliques, published in 1765. Barton had been wounded in battle. “Fight on, my men,” Sir Andrew sayes, “A little Ime hurt, but yett not slaine; He but lye downe and bleede awhile, And then He rise and fight againe.

The ravens of the night were hush'd, The bird of dawn began his lay, The rose-bud, newly wakened, blush'd To feel the touch of springing day; And bade the roses round unveil, Roused by the warbling nightingale. The jasmine stood all bathed in dew; Wet were the violet's lids of blue. - Zuleika's Dream

it cannot be the intention of Congress or the Executive Department (defendant) to provide the aged Private Ryans a discriminatory hemlock drink from the cup of life after reaching age sixty-five. If in fact that is the intention, then this government of William Jefferson Clinton is not worth fighting for.

When they had been young enough that they neither of them could reach the tops of bookshelves without stools and magic, he had told her that sometimes he felt like dreams split him from the inside out, dreams that bloomed into tales of faraway worlds. He had told her that he gave those stories to her in the hopes that one day they would grow into life, buds opening like blades and catching on the edges of reality. He had told her, quietly, so that their parents could not hear, of a world he had dreamed up—a kind world, where war was a thing of days past and life was not something they crushed in calloused hands.

After dark vapors have oppress’d our plains For a long dreary season, comes a day Born of the gentle South, and clears away From the sick heavens all unseemly stains. The anxious month, relieved of its pains, Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May; The eyelids with the passing coolness play Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains. The calmest thoughts came round us; as of leaves Budding—fruit ripening in stillness—Autumn suns Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves— Sweet Sappho’s cheek—a smiling infant’s breath— The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs— A woodland rivulet—a Poet’s death.

It doesn’t matter if, like the Doolittle Raiders, the time comes when the Mistys can be counted on one hand. When only one Misty is left, that man will have his own reunion, and he will hoist a glass to his brothers who flew up north and who were in the shit on every mission. He will drink to those who never came back.

A diary, the first of a long succession, was given to me for Christmas 1920, and the entry for New Year’s Day might have been written by a child of five. Here was no budding woman, ripe for sex instruction, but someone who perhaps had been left behind on the Never Never Island in Peter Pan. I quote: ‘New Year’s Day. I oversleep myself. We go for a long walk in the morning and stay indoors in the afternoon. It is my teddy-bear’s birthday. I give a party for her. Angela is very annoying. Jeanne and I box, and then I pretend I am a midshipman hunting slaves. Daddy says I have a stoop. I begin to read a book called With Allenby in Palestine.

Harvest Do not let a woman with a sexy rump deceive you with wheedling and coaxing words; she is after your barn. -Hesiod Shall we gather the sunset pluck what is ripe harness the cicada's song? Even if this isn't the season of new love let us remember the buds and reap what we can. No crop is too small. No harvest too lean. The grain will yield. So scatter and slash call in the cows and let us milk them all dry. Plow as you will. Bulldoze away. Why not make every season our season each day our day to till and tease to clear and seed to plant and replant as we please. Come my sweet smell of hay do not be deceived by Hesiod. He says that I am after your barn. I want the whole fucking farm!

And ever since the day before, Françoise, rejoicing in the opportunity to devote herself to that art of cooking at which she was so gifted, stimulated, moreover, by the prospect of a new guest, and knowing that she would have to compose, by methods known to her alone, a dish of boeuf à la gelée, had been living in the effervescence of creation; since she attached the utmost importance to the intrinsic quality of the materials which were to enter into the fabric of her work, she had gone herself to the Halles to procure the best cuts of rump-steak, shin of beef, calves’-feet, just as Michelangelo spent eight months in the mountains of Carrara choosing the most perfect blocks of marble for the monument of Julius II.

The Garden of Proserpine" Here, where the world is quiet; Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds' and spent waves' riot In doubtful dreams of dreams; I watch the green field growing For reaping folk and sowing, For harvest-time and mowing, A sleepy world of streams. I am tired of tears and laughter, And men that laugh and weep; Of what may come hereafter For men that sow to reap: I am weary of days and hours, Blown buds of barren flowers, Desires and dreams and powers And everything but sleep. Here life has death for neighbour, And far from eye or ear Wan waves and wet winds labour, Weak ships and spirits steer; They drive adrift, and whither They wot not who make thither; But no such winds blow hither, And no such things grow here. No growth of moor or coppice, No heather-flower or vine, But bloomless buds of poppies, Green grapes of Proserpine, Pale beds of blowing rushes Where no leaf blooms or blushes Save this whereout she crushes For dead men deadly wine. Pale, without name or number, In fruitless fields of corn, They bow themselves and slumber All night till light is born; And like a soul belated, In hell and heaven unmated, By cloud and mist abated Comes out of darkness morn. Though one were strong as seven, He too with death shall dwell, Nor wake with wings in heaven, Nor weep for pains in hell; Though one were fair as roses, His beauty clouds and closes; And well though love reposes, In the end it is not well. Pale, beyond porch and portal, Crowned with calm leaves, she stands Who gathers all things mortal With cold immortal hands; Her languid lips are sweeter Than love's who fears to greet her To men that mix and meet her From many times and lands. She waits for each and other, She waits for all men born; Forgets the earth her mother, The life of fruits and corn; And spring and seed and swallow Take wing for her and follow Where summer song rings hollow And flowers are put to scorn. There go the loves that wither, The old loves with wearier wings; And all dead years draw thither, And all disastrous things; Dead dreams of days forsaken, Blind buds that snows have shaken, Wild leaves that winds have taken, Red strays of ruined springs. We are not sure of sorrow, And joy was never sure; To-day will die to-morrow; Time stoops to no man's lure; And love, grown faint and fretful, With lips but half regretful Sighs, and with eyes forgetful Weeps that no loves endure. From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. Then star nor sun shall waken, Nor any change of light: Nor sound of waters shaken, Nor any sound or sight: Nor wintry leaves nor vernal, Nor days nor things diurnal; Only the sleep eternal In an eternal night.

The thought, "What will my friends say or think of me?" nips many a good inclination in the bud....Young man, be of good courage. Care not for what the world says or thinks: you will not be with the world always. Can man save your soul? No. Will man be your judge in the great and dreadful day of account? No. Can man give you a good conscience in life, a good hope in death, a good answer in the morning of resurrection? No! no! no! Man can do nothing of the sort. Then "fear not the reproach of men, neither be afraid of their revilings: for the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool" (Isa. 51:7,8). Call to your mind the saying of good Colonel Gardiner: "I fear God, and therefore I have none else to fear." Go and be like him.

In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals of this people—the strife for another and a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the danger is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold.... What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-wakened black millions? Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty and Truth gone glimmering?

Those who live in retirement, whose lives have fallen amid the seclusion of schools or of other walled-in and guarded dwellings, are liable to be suddenly and for a long while dropped out of the memory of their friends, the denizens of a freer world. Unaccountably, perhaps, and close upon some space of unusually frequent intercourse—some congeries of rather exciting little circumstances, whose natural sequel would rather seem to be the quickening than the suspension of communication—there falls a stilly pause, a wordless silence, a long blank of oblivion. Unbroken always is this blank; alike entire and unexplained. The letter, the message once frequent, are cut off; the visit, formerly periodical, ceases to occur; the book, paper, or other token that indicated remembrance, comes no more. Always there are excellent reasons for these lapses, if the hermit but knew them. Though he is stagnant in his cell, his connections without are whirling in the very vortex of life. That void interval which passes for him so slowly that the very clocks seem at a stand, and the wingless hours plod by in the likeness of tired tramps prone to rest at milestones—that same interval, perhaps, teems with events, and pants with hurry for his friends. The hermit—if he be a sensible hermit—will swallow his own thoughts, and lock up his own emotions during these weeks of inward winter. He will know that Destiny designed him to imitate, on occasion, the dormouse, and he will be conformable: make a tidy ball of himself, creep into a hole of life's wall, and submit decently to the drift which blows in and soon blocks him up, preserving him in ice for the season. Let him say, "It is quite right: it ought to be so, since so it is." And, perhaps, one day his snow-sepulchre will open, spring's softness will return, the sun and south-wind will reach him; the budding of hedges, and carolling of birds and singing of liberated streams will call him to kindly resurrection. Perhaps this may be the case, perhaps not: the frost may get into his heart and never thaw more; when spring comes, a crow or a pie may pick out of the wall only his dormouse-bones. Well, even in that case, all will be right: it is to be supposed he knew from the first he was mortal, and must one day go the way of all flesh, As well soon as syne.

But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her father's estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the Sacred Heart Convent—an educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy—showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant education she had—her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O'Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.

Florence lives alone in the great dreary house, and day succeeded day, and still she lived alone; and the blank walls looked down upon her with a vacant stare, as if they had a Gorgon-like mind to stare her youth and beauty into stone. No magic dwelling-place in magic story, shut up in the heart of a thick wood, was ever more solitary and deserted to the fancy, than was her father's mansion in its grim reality, as it stood lowering on the street: always by night, when lightd were shining from neighbouring windows, a blot upon its scanty brightness; always by day, a frown upon its never-smiling face. There were not two dragon sentries keeping ward before the gate of this above, as in magic legend are usually found on duty over the wronged innocence imprisoned; but besides a glowering visage, with its thin lips parted wickedly, that surveyed all comers from above the archway of the door, there was a monstrous fantasy of rusty iron, curling and twisting like a petrification of an arbour over threshold, budding in spikes and corkscrew points, and bearing, one on either side, two ominous extinguishers, that seemed to say, 'Who enter here, leave light behind!

It was a perfect spring day. The air was sweet and gentle and the sky stretched high, an intense blue. Harold was certain that the last time he had peered through the net drapes of Fossebridge Road (his home), the trees and hedges were dark bones and spindles against the skyline; yet now that he was out, and on his feet, it was as if everywhere he looked, the fields, gardens, trees, and hedgerows and exploded with growth. A canopy of sticky young leaves clung to the branches above him. There were startling yellow clouds of forsythia, trails of purple aubrietia; a young willow shook in a fountain of silver. The first of the potato shoots fingered through the soil, and already tiny buds hung from the gooseberry and currant shrubs like the earrings Maureen used to wear. The abundance of new life was enough to make him giddy.

Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the New York Post and Esquire. She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher. Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does: A journalists gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why. As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.” The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence: “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento. . .blah, blah, blah.” The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment. Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’” “It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls. “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.” For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment had a secret—a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

We are cotton buds sucking up the sadness of others, we are saturated, we are saviours. We absorb pain, too thick with mess to notice that everything around us is drying up and growing over. We will wake up one day in a wasteland, surrounded by the crumbling bones of those who loved us and waited for us to love them back. We did not forget but we were too busy being useful. We will crumble next to them but it will take forever, we will sit amongst the piles of dust alone.

The Dining Out is a formal affair rooted in ancient history. From pre-Christian Roman legions, to marauding Vikings, to King Arthur’s knights, a banquet to celebrate military victories has long been customary among warriors. British soldiers brought the practice to colonial America, where it was adopted by George Washington’s army. Close bonds between U.S. Army Air Forces pilots and Royal Air Force (RAF) officers during World War II cemented the custom in the U.S. military.

April. It teaches us everything. The coldest and nastiest days of the year can happen in April. It won’t matter. It’s April. The English word for the month comes from the Roman Aprilis, the Latin aperire: to open, to uncover, to make accessible, or to remove whatever stops something from being accessible. It maybe also partly comes from the name of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, whose happy fickleness with various gods mirrors the month’s own showery-sunny fickleness. Month of sacrifice and month of playfulness. Month of restoration, of fertility-festivity. Month when the earth and the buds are already open, the creatures asleep for the winter have woken and are already breeding, the birds have already built their nests, birds that this time last year didn’t exist, busy bringing to life the birds that’ll replace them this time next year. Spring-cuckoo month, grass-month. In Gaelic its name means the month that fools mistake for May. April Fool’s Day also probably marks what was the old end of the new year celebrations. Winter has Epiphany. Spring’s gifts are different. Month of dead deities coming back to life. In the French revolutionary calendar, along with the last days of March, it becomes Germinal, the month of return to the source, to the seed, to the germ of things, which is maybe why Zola gave the novel he wrote about hopeless hope this revolutionary title. April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective.

THE cadets came to their feet and the stadium erupted in a cheer that must have been heard all the way to Denver. Day marched the POWs to the center of the field, where they halted, pivoted, and faced the cadets. Risner ordered, “Present arms,” and the POWs saluted the cadets. The cadets popped to attention and returned the salute. In that frozen moment, nothing was said. But much was understood. Cadets barely in their twenties and long-retired officers in their seventies were joined across a half century.

Frankly, as an oyster’s.’ ‘Really, my dear Charlotte,’ I exclaimed, naturally upset. How very unfortunate that I should have hurried away from Göhren. Why had I not stayed there two or three days, as I had at first intended? It was such a safe place; you could get out of it so easily and so quickly. If I were an oyster—curious how much the word disconcerted me—at least I was a happy oyster, which was surely better than being miserable and not an oyster at all. Charlotte was certainly nearer being miserable than happy. People who are happy do not have the look she had in her eyes, nor is their expression so uninterruptedly determined. And why should I be lectured? When I am in the mood for a lecture, my habit is to buy a ticket and go and listen; and when I have not bought a ticket, it is a sign that I do not want a lecture. I did not like to explain this beautifully simple position to Charlotte, yet felt that at all costs I must nip her eloquence in the bud or she would keep me out till it was dark; so I got up,

We can stop…” Cassius said. “We can…” He felt Merrick’s breath upon his mouth. “I do not want to,” Cassius replied. “I do not want to either.” Then their mouths were lightly teasing one another. They pressed gentle kisses upon each other’s lips as though they were testing the waters again. “I felt you all day…the evidence of you being inside me. Each time I sat or moved, my body recalled taking you deep.” Cas shuddered. “I wish I could feel you inside me as well, so I would always know you there.” They were kissing again then, more hungrily. Cassius had never tasted anything as sweet as the prince on his tongue. His prick hardened, ached. He wished to embed the mixture of brandy and Merrick into his taste buds. To feel the strength of Merrick deep within his ass. To burn Merrick into the memory of his fingertips so he could recall it over and over and over again. “You wreck me, Cas,” Merrick said against his mouth. Their tongues moved together. Merrick’s hand cupped the back of his head, slid under his hat, and threaded his fingers there

It is easy for the student to feel that with all his labour he is collecting only a few leaves, many of them now torn or decayed, from the countless foliage of the Tree of Tales, with which the Forest of Days is carpeted. It seems vain to add to the litter. Who can design a new leaf? The patterns from bud to unfolding, and the colours from spring to autumn were all discovered by men long ago. But that is not true. The seed of the tree can be replanted in almost any soil, even in one so smoke-ridden (as Lang said) as that of England. Spring is, of course, not really less beautiful because we have seen or heard of other like events: like events, never from world's beginning to world's end the same event. Each leaf, of oak and ash and thorn, is a unique embodiment of the pattern, and for some this very year may be the embodiment, the first ever seen and recognized, though oaks have put forth leaves for countless generations of men. We do not, or need not, despair of drawing because all lines must be either curved or straight, nor of painting because there are only three 'primary' colours. We may indeed be older now, in so far as we are heirs in enjoyment or in practice of many generations of ancestors in the arts. In this inheritance of wealth there may be a danger of boredom or of anxiety to be original, and that may lead to a distaste for fine drawing, delicate pattern, and 'pretty' colours, or else to mere manipulation and over-elaboration of old material, clever and heartless. But the true road of escape from such weariness is not to be found in the willfully awkward, clumsy, or misshapen, not in making all things dark or unremittingly violent; nor in the mixing of colours on through subtlety to drabness, and the fantastical complication of shapes to the point of silliness and on towards delirium. Before we reach such states we need recovery. We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses – and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. In that sense only a taste for them may make us, or keep us, childish.

She was still obliged to leave the house every day, on her usual hunt for food; and especially on days of bad weather she had no other solution but to leave Useppe alone, his own guard, locking him in the room. It was then that Useppe learned to pass time thinking. He would press both fists to his brow and begin to think. What he thought about is not given to us to know; and probably his thoughts were imponderable futilities. But it's a fact that, while he was thinking in this way, the ordinary time of other people was reduced for him almost to zero. In Asia there exists a little creature known as the lesser panda, which looks like something between a squirrel and a teddy bear and lives on the trees in inaccessible mountain forests; and every now and then it comes down to the ground, looking for buds to eat. Of one of these panda it was told that he spent millennia thinking on his own tree, from which he climbed down to the ground every three hundred years. But in reality, the calculation of such periods was relative: in fact, while three hundred years had gone by on earth, on that panda's tree barely ten minutes had passed.

Grand Sky/Grand Prairie Both harbor the vastness of space. One holds the space Of starlight, thunder snow, rock and icy comets, scrolls Of clouds; the other the spaces inside see heart and ovum, Root webs, spider webs, budded blossoms. They lean together tightly day and night, pressing One into the other, each creating the horizon of the other. They exchange themselves. At evening one becomes The steady night in which the other lives. Yet witness How the moon first rises from the body of the prairie Into the height of the sky that then possesses it. Their horizons are persistent illusion.

Sonnet 70: That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect, For slander’s mark was ever yet the fair; The ornament of beauty is suspect, A crow that flies in heaven’s sweetest air. So thou be good, slander doth but approve Thy worth the greater, being wooed of time; For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love, And thou present’st a pure unstained prime. Thou hast passed by the ambush of young days Either not assailed, or victor being charged; Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise, To tie up envy, evermore enlarged, If some suspect of ill masked not thy show, Then thou alone kingdoms of hearts shouldst owe.

Finally, and in light of what was about to take place, the most crucial bit of background information is to know something about military culture, particularly the inviolate concepts of honor and duty, of adhering to principle. (The overtly corrupt world where Congress, the military, and the defense industry come together, and the political world of generals, are obvious exceptions.) If a civilian can’t get his arms around the simple fact that honor and patriotism and adherence to a code of conduct are the inviolate core of the military heart, then he will never begin to understand the men and women in uniform.

Ode to the West Wind I O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear! II Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion, Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith’s height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear! III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull’d by the coil of his crystàlline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear! IV If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

As for the world beyond my family—well, what they would see for most of my teenage years was not a budding leader but rather a lackadaisical student, a passionate basketball player of limited talent, and an incessant, dedicated partyer. No student government for me; no Eagle Scouts or interning at the local congressman’s office. Through high school, my friends and I didn’t discuss much beyond sports, girls, music, and plans for getting loaded. Three of these guys—Bobby Titcomb, Greg Orme, and Mike Ramos—remain some of my closest friends. To this day, we can laugh for hours over stories of our misspent youth. In later years, they would throw themselves into my campaigns with a loyalty for which I will always be grateful, becoming as skilled at defending my record as anyone on MSNBC. But there were also times during my presidency—after they had watched me speak to a big crowd, say, or receive a series of crisp salutes from young Marines during a base tour—when their faces would betray a certain bafflement, as if they were trying to reconcile the graying man in a suit and tie with the ill-defined man-child they’d once known. That guy? they must have said to themselves. How the hell did that happen? And if my friends had ever asked me directly, I’m not sure I’d have had a good answer.

Out beyond and way back and further past that still. And such was it since. But after all appearances and some afternoons misspent it came to pass not all was done and over with. No, no. None shally shally on that here hill. Ah, but that was idle then and change was not an old hand. No, no. None shilly shilly on that here first rung. So, much girded and with new multitudes, a sun came purple and the hail turned in a year or two. And that was not all. No, no. None ganny ganny on that here moon loose. Turns were taken and time put in, so much heft and grimace, there, with callouses, all along the diagonal. Like no other time and the time taken back, that too like none other that can be compared to a bovine heap raising steam, or the eye-cast of a flailing comet. Back and forth, examining the egg spill and the cord fray and the clowning barnacle. And all day with no break to unwrap or unscrew or squint and flex or soak the brush. No, no. None flim flim on that here cavorting mainstay. From tree to tree and the pond there deepening and some small holes appearing and any number of cornstalks twisting into a thing far from corn. That being the case there was some wretched plotting, turned to stone, holding nothing. No, no. None rubby rubby on that here yardstick. Came then from the region of silt and aster, all along the horse trammel and fire velvet, first these sounds and then their makers. When passed betwixt and entered fully, pails were swung and notches considered. There was no light. No, none. None wzm wzm on that here piss crater. And it being the day, still considered. Oh, all things considered and not one mentioned, since all names had turned in and handed back. Knowing this the hounds disbanded and knowing that the ground muddled headstones and milestones and gallows and the almond-shaped buds of freshest honeysuckle. And among this chafing tumult fates were scrambled and mortality made untidy and pithy vows took themselves a breather. This being the way and irreversible homewards now was a lifted skeletal thing of the past, without due application or undue meaning. No, no. None shap shap on that here domicile shank. From right foot to left, first by the firs, then by the river, hung and loitered, and the blaze there slow to come. All night waking with no benefit of sleeping and the breath cranking and the heart-place levering and the kerosene pervading but failing to jerk a flame from out any one thing. No, none. None whoosh whoosh on that here burnished cunt. Oh, the earth, the earth and the women there, inside the simpering huts, stamped and spiritless, blowing on the coals. Not far away, but beyond the way of return.

From the still heart of darkness two notes echoed forth, one low, one high- and the eternal globe immediately spun into motion. Blessed be the first octave that opened this heavenly hymn! Let it gather the days from sabbath to sabbath into its magic web. It sings from the hills to the valleys, from the springs to the streams, from the streams to the rivers, from the rivers to the seas; its music trembles through the air and sets the budding flowers ashimmer. The earth's quivering breast heaves a sigh of love, and the chorus of stars reverberates through infinity, now receding, now returning back on itself, now contracting, now expanding, scattering the seeds of new creations far and wide.

In the deep woods of the far North, under feathery leaves of fern, was a great fairyland of merry elves, sometimes called forest brownies. These elves lived joyfully. They had everything at hand and did not need to worry much about living. Berries and nuts grew plentiful in the forest. Rivers and springs provided the elves with crystal water. Flowers prepared them drink from their flavorful juices, which the munchkins loved greatly. At midnight the elves climbed into flower cups and drank drops of their sweet water with much delight. Every elf would tell a wonderful fairy tale to the flower to thank it for the treat. Despite this abundance, the pixies did not sit back and do nothing. They tinkered with their tasks all day long. They cleaned their houses. They swung on tree branches and swam in forested streams. Together with the early birds, they welcomed the sunrise, listened to the thunder growling, the whispering of leaves and blades of grass, and the conversations of the animals. The birds told them about warm countries, sunbeams whispered of distant seas, and the moon spoke of treasures hidden deeply in the earth. In winter, the elves lived in abandoned nests and hollows. Every sunny day they came out of their burrows and made the forest ring with their happy shouts, throwing tiny snowballs in all directions and building snowmen as small as the pinky finger of a little girl. The munchkins thought they were giants five times as large as them. With the first breath of spring, the elves left their winter residences and moved to the cups of the snowdrop flowers. Looking around, they watched the snow as it turned black and melted. They kept an eye on the blossoming of hazel trees while the leaves were still sleeping in their warm buds. They observed squirrels moving their last winter supplies from storage back to their homes. Gnomes welcomed the birds coming back to their old nests, where the elves lived during winters. Little by little, the forest once more grew green. One moonlight night, elves were sitting at an old willow tree and listening to mermaids singing about their underwater kingdom. “Brothers! Where is Murzilka? He has not been around for a long time!” said one of the elves, Father Beardie, who had a long white beard. He was older than others and well respected in his striped stocking cap. “I’m here,” a snotty voice arose, and Murzilka himself, nicknamed Feather Head, jumped from the top of the tree. All the brothers loved Murzilka, but thought he was lazy, as he actually was. Also, he loved to dress in a tailcoat, tall black hat, boots with narrow toes, a cane and a single eyeglass, being very proud of that look. “Do you know where I’m coming from? The very Arctic Ocean!” roared he. Usually, his words were hard to believe. That time, though, his announcement sounded so marvelous that all elves around him were agape with wonder. “You were there, really? Were you? How did you get there?” asked the sprites. “As easy as ABC! I came by the fox one day and caught her packing her things to visit her cousin, a silver fox who lives by the Arctic Ocean. “Take me with you,” I said to the fox. “Oh, no, you’ll freeze there! You know, it’s cold there!” she said. “Come on.” I said. “What are you talking about? What cold? Summer is here.” “Here we have summer, but there they have winter,” she answered. “No,” I thought. “She must be lying because she does not want to give me a ride.” Without telling her a word, I jumped upon her back and hid in her bushy fur, so even Father Frost could not find me. Like it or not, she had to take me with her. We ran for a long time. Another forest followed our woods, and then a boundless plain opened, a swamp covered with lichen and moss. Despite the intense heat, it had not entirely thawed. “This is tundra,” said my fellow traveler. “Tundra? What is tundra?” asked I. “Tundra is a huge, forever frozen wetland covering the entire coast of the Arctic Ocean.

Because this tea kaiseki would be served so soon after breakfast, it would be considerably smaller than a traditional one. As a result, Stephen had decided to serve each mini tea kaiseki in a round stacking bento box, which looked like two miso soup bowls whose rims had been glued together. After lifting off the top dome-shaped cover the women would behold a little round tray sporting a tangle of raw squid strips and blanched scallions bound in a tahini-miso sauce pepped up with mustard. Underneath this seafood "salad" they would find a slightly deeper "tray" packed with pearly white rice garnished with a pink salted cherry blossom. Finally, under the rice would be their soup bowl containing the wanmori, the apex of the tea kaiseki. Inside the dashi base we had placed a large ball of fu (wheat gluten) shaped and colored to resemble a peach. Spongy and soft, it had a savory center of ground duck and sweet lily bulb. A cluster of fresh spinach leaves, to symbolize the budding of spring, accented the "peach," along with a shiitake mushroom cap simmered in mirin, sake, and soy. When the women had finished their meals, we served them tiny pink azuki bean paste sweets. David whipped them a bowl of thick green tea. For the dry sweets eaten before his thin tea, we served them flower-shaped refined sugar candies tinted pink. After all the women had left, Stephen, his helper, Mark, and I sat down to enjoy our own "Girl's Day" meal. And even though I was sitting in the corner of Stephen's dish-strewn kitchen in my T-shirt and rumpled khakis, that soft peach dumpling really did taste feminine and delicate.

The newspapers came out every day with horror stories of sheep buried in snowdrifts, of song-birds frozen to the branches on which they perched, of fruit trees hopelessly nipped in the bud, and the situation seemed dreadful to those who, like Mrs Heathery, believe all they see in print without recourse to past experience. I tried to cheer her up by telling her, what, in fact, proved to be the case, that in a very short time the fields would be covered with sheep, the trees with birds, and the barrows with fruit just as usual. But though the future did not disturb me I found the present most disagreeable, that winter should set in again so late in the spring, at a time when it would not be unreasonable to expect delicious weather, almost summer-like, warm enough to sit out of doors for an hour or two.

The whiles some one did chaunt this louely lay; Ah see, who so faire thing doest faine to see, In springing flowre the image of thy day; Ah see the Virgin Rose, how sweetly shee Doth first peepe forth with bashfull modestee, That fairer seemes, the lesse ye see her may; Lo see soone after, how more bold and free Her bared bosome she doth broad display; Loe see soone after, how she fades, and falles away. So passeth, in the passing of a day, Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre, Ne more doth flourish after first decay, That earst was sought to decke both bed and bowre, Of many a Ladie, and many a Paramowre: Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime, For soone comes age, that will her pride deflowre: Gather the Rose of love, whilest yet is time, Whilest louing thou mayst loued be with equall crime.

Oh! many and many a dreary year Must pass away ere the buds appear: Many a night of darksome sorrow Yield to the light of a joyless morrow, Ere birds again, on the clothed trees, Shall fill the branches with melodies. She will dream of meadows with wakeful streams; Of wavy grass in the sunny beams; Of hidden wells that soundless spring, Hoarding their joy as a holy thing; Of founts that tell it all day long To the listening woods, with exultant song; She will dream of evenings that die into nights, Where each sense is filled with its own delights, And the soul is still as the vaulted sky, Lulled with an inner harmony; And the flowers give out to the dewy night, Changed into perfume, the gathered light; And the darkness sinks upon all their host, Till the sun sail up on the eastern coast— She will wake and see the branches bare, Weaving a net in the frozen air.

Spring was a long time unfolding. During the last weeks of Lent the weather was clear and frosty. In the daytime it thawed in the sun, but at night it went down to seven below; there was such a crust that carts could go over it where there was no road. There was still snow at Easter. Then suddenly, on Easter Monday, a warm wind began to blow, dark clouds gathered, and for three days and nights warm, heavy rain poured down. On Thursday the wind dropped, and a thick grey mist gathered, as if concealing the mysteries of the changes taking place in nature. Under the mist waters flowed, ice blocks cracked and moved off, the muddy, foaming streams ran quicker, and on the eve of Krasnaya Gorka the mist scattered, the dark clouds broke up into fleecy white ones, the sky cleared, and real spring unfolded. In the morning the bright sun rose and quickly ate up the thin ice covering the water, and the warm air was all atremble, filled with the vapours of the reviving earth. The old grass and the sprouting needles of new grass greened, the buds on the guelder-rose, the currants and the sticky, spiritous birches swelled, and on the willow, all sprinkled with golden catkins, the flitting, newly hatched bee buzzed. Invisible larks poured trills over the velvety green fields and the ice-covered stubble, the peewit wept over the hollows and marshes still filled with brown water; high up the cranes and geese flew with their spring honking. Cattle, patchy, moulted in all but a few places, lowed in the meadows, bow-legged lambs played around their bleating, shedding mothers, fleet-footed children ran over the drying paths covered with the prints of bare feet, the merry voices of women with their linen chattered by the pond, and from the yards came the knock of the peasants’ axes, repairing ploughs and harrows. The real spring had come.

Vinyasa has three parts: arising, abiding, and dissolving. And the dissolving of one thing is the arising of the next. Every day turns into night turns into day. Winter becomes spring becomes summer becomes autumn becomes winter. Waves roll in and slip back out, tides ebb and flow. Every breath is like this. Every life is like this. Each flower buds, ripens, and blooms, wilts and fades away. The leaves fall to the earth and create the ground for a new plant to grow. The Sanskrit word vinyasa means "to place in a special way". It means that everything is connected and the sequence of things matters. It means that every action, thought, or word that arises now is planting the seed for future fruit. "In a special way" means the unfolding of life is logical. If you plant a tomato seed, you will get a tomato. If you plant an apple seed and you wait long enough, you will get an apple tree. And if you plant a hard thought, you will get a hard heart.

In front of the mound: a mile of naked strangers. In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon . . . soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it’s chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered—look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes—or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors—the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit—well, son, your possibilities, as unrealized as the erections of your penis—in a moment—soon—will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered—not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us. And that we were.

But Denise left the kitchen and took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you’d be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he’d established that his daughter, Denise, was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip’s living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence in which he couldn’t absolutely rule out the possibility, for example, that his wife, Enid, was handing him a plate of feces in the parlor of a brothel; and no sooner had he reconfirmed Denise and the snacks and Chip’s living room than the leading edge of time added yet another layer of new cells, so that he again faced a new and ungrasped world; which was why, rather than exhaust himself playing catch-up, he preferred more and more to spend his days down among the unchanging historical roots of things.

KNEE SURGERY I’D FIRST HURT MY KNEES IN FALLUJAH WHEN THE WALL FELL on me. Cortisone shots helped for a while, but the pain kept coming back and getting worse. The docs told me I needed to have my legs operated on, but doing that would have meant I would have to take time off and miss the war. So I kept putting it off. I settled into a routine where I’d go to the doc, get a shot, go back to work. The time between shots became shorter and shorter. It got down to every two months, then every month. I made it through Ramadi, but just barely. My knees started locking and it was difficult to get down the stairs. I no longer had a choice, so, soon after I got home in 2007, I went under the knife. The surgeons cut my tendons to relieve pressure so my kneecaps would slide back over. They had to shave down my kneecaps because I had worn grooves in them. They injected synthetic cartilage material and shaved the meniscus. Somewhere along the way they also repaired an ACL. I was like a racing car, being repaired from the ground up. When they were done, they sent me to see Jason, a physical therapist who specializes in working with SEALs. He’d been a trainer for the Pittsburgh Pirates. After 9/11, he decided to devote himself to helping the country. He chose to do that by working with the military. He took a massive pay cut to help put us back together. I DIDN’T KNOW ALL THAT THE FIRST DAY WE MET. ALL I WANTED to hear was how long it was going to take to rehab. He gave me a pensive look. “This surgery—civilians need a year to get back,” he said finally. “Football players, they’re out eight months. SEALs—it’s hard to say. You hate being out of action and will punish yourselves to get back.” He finally predicted six months. I think we did it in five. But I thought I would surely die along the way. JASON PUT ME INTO A MACHINE THAT WOULD STRETCH MY knee. Every day I had to see how much further I could adjust it. I would sweat up a storm as it bent my knee. I finally got it to ninety degrees. “That’s outstanding,” he told me. “Now get more.” “More?” “More!” He also had a machine that sent a shock to my muscle through electrodes. Depending on the muscle, I would have to stretch and point my toes up and down. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is clearly a form of torture that should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention, even for use on SEALs. Naturally, Jason kept upping the voltage. But the worst of all was the simplest: the exercise. I had to do more, more, more. I remember calling Taya many times and telling her I was sure I was going to puke if not die before the day was out. She seemed sympathetic but, come to think of it in retrospect, she and Jason may have been in on it together. There was a stretch where Jason had me doing crazy amounts of ab exercises and other things to my core muscles. “Do you understand it’s my knees that were operated on?” I asked him one day when I thought I’d reached my limit. He just laughed. He had a scientific explanation about how everything in the body depends on strong core muscles, but I think he just liked kicking my ass around the gym. I swear I heard a bullwhip crack over my head any time I started to slack. I always thought the best shape I was ever in was straight out of BUD/S. But I was in far better shape after spending five months with him. Not only were my knees okay, the rest of me was in top condition. When I came back to my platoon, they all asked if I had been taking steroids.

Ione III. TO-DAY my skies are bare and ashen, And bend on me without a beam. Since love is held the master-passion, Its loss must be the pain supreme — And grinning Fate has wrecked my dream. But pardon, dear departed Guest, I will not rant, I will not rail; For good the grain must feel the flail; There are whom love has never blessed. I had and have a younger brother, One whom I loved and love to-day As never fond and doting mother Adored the babe who found its way From heavenly scenes into her day. Oh, he was full of youth's new wine, — A man on life's ascending slope, Flushed with ambition, full of hope; And every wish of his was mine. A kingly youth; the way before him Was thronged with victories to be won; so joyous, too, the heavens o'er him Were bright with an unchanging sun, — His days with rhyme were overrun. Toil had not taught him Nature's prose, Tears had not dimmed his brilliant eyes, And sorrow had not made him wise; His life was in the budding rose. I know not how I came to waken, Some instinct pricked my soul to sight; My heart by some vague thrill was shaken, — A thrill so true and yet so slight, I hardly deemed I read aright. As when a sleeper, ign'rant why, Not knowing what mysterious hand Has called him out of slumberland, Starts up to find some danger nigh. Love is a guest that comes, unbidden, But, having come, asserts his right; He will not be repressed nor hidden. And so my brother's dawning plight Became uncovered to my sight. Some sound-mote in his passing tone Caught in the meshes of my ear; Some little glance, a shade too dear, Betrayed the love he bore Ione. What could I do? He was my brother, And young, and full of hope and trust; I could not, dared not try to smother His flame, and turn his heart to dust. I knew how oft life gives a crust To starving men who cry for bread; But he was young, so few his days, He had not learned the great world's ways, Nor Disappointment's volumes read. However fair and rich the booty, I could not make his loss my gain. For love is dear, but dearer, duty, And here my way was clear and plain. I saw how I could save him pain. And so, with all my day grown dim, That this loved brother's sun might shine, I joined his suit, gave over mine, And sought Ione, to plead for him. I found her in an eastern bower, Where all day long the am'rous sun Lay by to woo a timid flower. This day his course was well-nigh run, But still with lingering art he spun Gold fancies on the shadowed wall. The vines waved soft and green above, And there where one might tell his love, I told my griefs — I told her all! I told her all, and as she hearkened, A tear-drop fell upon her dress. With grief her flushing brow was darkened; One sob that she could not repress Betrayed the depths of her distress. Upon her grief my sorrow fed, And I was bowed with unlived years, My heart swelled with a sea of tears, The tears my manhood could not shed. The world is Rome, and Fate is Nero, Disporting in the hour of doom. God made us men; times make the hero — But in that awful space of gloom I gave no thought but sorrow's room. All — all was dim within that bower, What time the sun divorced the day; And all the shadows, glooming gray, Proclaimed the sadness of the hour. She could not speak — no word was needed; Her look, half strength and half despair, Told me I had not vainly pleaded, That she would not ignore my prayer. And so she turned and left me there, And as she went, so passed my bliss; She loved me, I could not mistake — But for her own and my love's sake, Her womanhood could rise to this! My wounded heart fled swift to cover, And life at times seemed very drear. My brother proved an ardent lover — What had so young a man to fear? He wed Ione within the year. No shadow clouds her tranquil brow, Men speak her husband's name with pride, While she sits honored at his side —

Feeling like a displaced person Laura struggles with being defined by her status as a widow. “Distracted by the word widow, which had taken root, budded and bloomed in her mind like a weed in a vacant lot, Laura opened the dictionary on her desk. Flipping past thousands of words, she used in every-day communication with family, friends, and acquaintances – those little black letters, symbols to express thoughts for the ear to hear and the heart to feel – she wondered, What words gave expression to her pain? What words described the sense of something lurking inside her, or the dark shadows stalking her mind? Widow: a five-letter word, preceded by words like wide, and widget and followed by words like widow’s peak, widow’s weeds, and widower. This little word – widow- in small case, had no business masquerading as a noun: a person, place or thing. In contrast, - widget, a small mechanical object, not a feeling thing, just an object – seemed an honest noun. Widow is not an object, she thought. “It’s a word so thin as to be nothing but a wisp of breath passing through one’s vocal cords and disappearing almost imperceptibly between one’s lips. It has no life of its own. It’s a mere label, and it could just as well be a piece of paper saying, chocolate cookies or best before date.

I stood next to Breeze in a small quartz room. A sea lantern served as the only light source, bathing the room in its pale blue light. Against the center of one wall stood a mysterious object. It was three meters tall, three meters wide, and flat, like a banner. However, instead of dyed wool was a surface like the calmest pool of water. Breeze reached out with her right hand. Her fingers touched those of her reflection. After she lowered her arm, we continued staring at ourselves in silence. In awe. It was the first time we'd seen ourselves this way. But more than that were our outfits. Our clothes were made of spider silk, a type of cloth crafted using spider string. Puddles, the owner of the Clothing Castle, had worked with the humans for days to craft perfect recreations of Earth fashion. Then, to make us look even more majestic, our cloaks had been modified to fall over our shoulders. Poster children. Symbols of hope. Villagetown's biggest stars. That's what we've become. Some say it's sweet: a budding romance between two young heroes fighting valiantly against all odds. I'd say that's an exaggeration. Although Breeze and I are close, we haven't had much time for anything beyond battle or preparing for the next. I guess the mayor wants to change that, though. The people need something to believe in, he says. I suppose that's why he whisked us away in

The path of what was to come was awful. It was the enormous dying, a sea of blood. From it the new sun arose, awful and a reversal of that which we call day. We have seized the darkness and its sun will shine above us, bloody and burning like a great downfall. When I comprehended my darkness, a truly magnificent night came over me and my dream plunged me into the depths of the millennia, and from it my phoenix ascended. But what happened to my day? Torches were kindled, bloody anger and disputes erupted. As darkness seized the world, the terrible war arose and the darkness destroyed the light of the world, since it was incomprehensible to the darkness and good for nothing anymore. And so we had to taste Hell. I saw which vices the virtues of this time changed into, how your mildness became hard, your goodness became brutality; your love became hate, and your understanding became madness. Why did you want to comprehend the darkness! But you had to or else it would have seized you. Happy the man who anticipates this grasp. Did you ever think of the evil in you? Oh, you spoke of it, you mentioned it, and you confessed it smilingly; as a generally human vice, or a recurring misunderstanding. But did you know 1 what evil is, and that it stands precisely right behind your virtues, that it is also your virtues themselves, as their inevitable substance?7! You locked Satan in the abyss for a millennium, and when the millennium had passed, you laughed at him, since he had become a children's fairy tale.72 But if the dreadful great one raises his head, the world winces. The most extreme coldness draws near. With horror you see that you are defenseless, and that the army of your vices falls powerless to its knees. With the power of daimons, you seize the evil, and your virtues cross over to him. You are completely alone in this struggle, since your Gods have become deaf You do not know which devils are greater, your vices, or your virtues. But ofone thing you are certain, that virtues and vices are brothers. 73We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end.74 You are not forced to live eternally; but you can also die, since there is a will in you for both. Life and death must strike a balance in your existence.75 Today's men need a large slice of death, since too much incorrectness lives in them, and too much correctness died in them. What stays in balance is correct, what disturbs balance is incorrect. But if balance has been attained, then that which preserves it is incorrect and that which disturbs it is correct. Balance is at once life and death. For the completion of life a balance with death is fitting. If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death!

This Compost" Something startles me where I thought I was safest, I withdraw from the still woods I loved, I will not go now on the pastures to walk, I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea, I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me. O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken? How can you be alive you growths of spring? How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you? Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead? Where have you disposed of their carcasses? Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd, I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath, I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat. 2 Behold this compost! behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold! The grass of spring covers the prairies, The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden, The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward, The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches, The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree, The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests, The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs, The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare, Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves, Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards, The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead. What chemistry! That the winds are really not infectious, That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me, That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, That all is clean forever and forever, That the cool drink from the well tastes so good, That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy, That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me, That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease. Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

SERVANT. Have mercy upon your servant, my queen! QUEEN. The assembly is over and my servants are all gone. Why do you come at this late hour? SERVANT. When you have finished with others, that is my time. I come to ask what remains for your last servant to do. QUEEN. What can you expect when it is too late? SERVANT. Make me the gardener of your flower garden. QUEEN. What folly is this? SERVANT. I will give up my other work. I will throw my swords and lances down in the dust. Do not send me to distant courts; do not bid me undertake new conquests. But make me the gardener of your flower garden. QUEEN. What will your duties be? SERVANT. The service of your idle days. I will keep fresh the grassy path where you walk in the morning, where your feet will be greeted with praise at every step by the flowers eager for death. I will swing you in a swing among the branches of the saptaparna, where the early evening moon will struggle to kiss your skirt through the leaves. I will replenish with scented oil the lamp that burns by your bedside, and decorate your footstool with sandal and saffron paste in wondrous designs. QUEEN. What will you have for your reward? SERVANT. To be allowed to hold your little fists like tender lotus-buds and slip flower chains over your wrists; to tinge the soles of your feet with the red juice of ashoka petals and kiss away the speck of dust that may chance to linger there. QUEEN. Your prayers are granted, my servant, you will be the gardener of my flower garden.

Four Years Since Today I remember the day but to be honest it is everyday That day then, the moment then, when you left us all here More than just a father I call, a gem I treasure, that day I lost We four girls, my mom’s other half, my brothers best bud, our first love, we lost Holding the key to the future called You, I stand still facing the gate of the past Why I keep on asking the same question? Why you? Why out of all those people? Why too soon? Why? It has been years, 4 years exact, it seems like yesterday yes You were taken too soon, words aren’t enough to express It’s not fair, but who I am to blame, who Am I to question? My eyes express longing you cannot fathom From my open mouth my broken heart pours Words that try to capture that image so faint He is the picture I could not ever paint Yet our memories is in the solid bowl being kept Spare me even just 5 or 10 minutes of your presence To build up this longing I feel, I am asking I want to hear your nag; I want to hear your laugh In my dreams please see me there I won’t get afraid nor get frightened Like a waterfalls my tears keeps on flowing Like a bubble your voice keeps on vanishing He, his shadow, he himself starts from fading I don’t want to forget you please stop time from ticking I don’t want to open my eyes don’t wake me from dreaming You are the art of my painting, the muse of my poem My strength, my inspiration why I’m still holding on My king, my superman, name them all, you are my only one I miss the old golden days when you used to carry us one by one Look papa, how I am now, hoping always, you’ll be proud It pains me to know this inevitable truth, yes That I can’t see you for now yes it’s the truth, but My father’s love undeniable not easily obtained Something that few, many people rather don’t have But I’m blessed and proud I have mine claimed.

Sometimes I feel impatient about how much ableism has forced us to emphasize accessibility to get people to pay even a modicum of attention to it. Collective access is revolutionary because disabled people of color (and disabled people in general) choosing each other is revolutionary. And, in many ways access should not be a revolutionary concept. It is the routine, every day part of the work. It is only the first step in movement building. People talk about access as the outcome, not the process, as if having spaces be accessible is enough to get us all free. Disabled people are so much more than our access needs; we can’t have a movement without safety and access, and yet there is so much more still waiting for us collectively once we build this skillset of negotiating access needs with each other. Tonight I am taking time to appreciate and enjoy access as a communication of our deepest desires. When my new friend makes their house wheelchair accessible so I can come over, a whole new level of safety and trust opens up. When a love takes initiative to reach out to event organizers to make sure my buds and I can fully participate, that’s thoughtfulness, and also political commitment in practice. When I eat dinner with dear ones and they know which spoon or cup to grab, that’s attunement. When I can ask a friend to move my body, it’s because I know they want me to be comfortable out in the world. When I can do the impairment-related parts of my routine around someone, that’s intimacy, a gift of letting each other into our most private worlds. Feeling thankful for access—and interdependence—as an opportunity for us to show up for one another, and also for crip spaces that give us a taste of what can take place when we have each other. I am so hungry for us to be together. I am so ready for what is around the corner. —STACEY PARK

Cassie,” I growl at the young brunette. “How’s the sobriety?” Alex brought the submissive to us. She’s an addict that he councils at Transcend. I don’t want to be mean to her right now, especially since my best friend brought her here, but I’m furious and she’s an outlet. She can’t strike back. “Ninety days sober,” she says with pride. “That’s awesome,” I say enthusiastically and smile at her. “I love how we have to give fuck ups a medal when they behave. I would think it should go to those who never fuck up. What’s the incentive to behave if all you have to do is get shit-faced and steal shit for years and then ninety days on the straight-and-narrow we have to pat you on the back for being a good girl,” I say in a saccharine voice. She gazes at me with huge, glassy brown eyes. I can see the tears forming. Cassie worries her full bottom lip between her teeth and tries not to blink. “But hey, what do I know. It just seems like the system is flawed. The good little boys and girls just don’t get the recognition that a crack-whore thief gets,” I shrug. Cassie blinks and the surface of her tears breaks and they finally slide down her cheeks in shame. “But go you!” I shout sarcastically. I give her a thumbs up and walk down the hall. “Cold… that was just cold, dude,” Alex chuckles at me. That was so bad that I have to laugh or I’d puke. I shake my head as my belly contracts from laughter. “Score on my newest asshattery?” I ask my partner in crime. If I didn’t have him I’d scream. I’ll owe Master Marcus forever. He stripped me bare until Font was naked in the impact room at Brownstone I trained in. Alex walked in and shook my hand- instant best friend. “Ah…” He taps his chin in thought and the bastard tucks his black hair behind his ear. I growl at him because he did it on purpose. He knows how much I miss the feel of my hair swinging at my jawline. Alex arches a perfect brow above his aqua eye and smirks. He runs his hands through his hair and groans in pleasure. “8.5. It was a decent attempt, but you pulled your hit. You’re too soft. I bet you were scared you’d make her relapse.” “Yeah,” I say bashfully. “Not happening, bud. I’m just that fucking good. I better go do some damage control. Don’t hurt any more subs. Pick on the big bastards. They may bite back, but their egos are delicate.

By the time Jessica Buchanan was kidnapped in Somalia on October 25, 2011, the twenty-four boys back in America who had been so young during the 1993 attack on the downed American aid support choppers in Mogadishu had since grown to manhood. Now they were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-five, and each one had become determined to qualify for the elite U.S. Navy unit called DEVGRU. After enlisting in the U.S. Navy and undergoing their essential basic training, every one of them endured the challenges of BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, where the happy goal is to become “drownproofed” via what amounts to repeated semidrowning, while also learning dozens of ways to deliver explosive death and demolition. This was only the starting point. Once qualification was over and the candidates were sworn in, three-fourths of the qualified Navy SEALS who tried to also qualify for DEVGRU dropped out. Those super-warriors were overcome by the challenges, regardless of their peak physical condition and being in the prime of their lives. This happened because of the intensity of the training. Long study and practice went into developing a program specifically designed to seek out and expose any individual’s weakest points. If the same ordeals were imposed on captured terrorists who were known to be guilty of killing innocent civilians, the officers in charge would get thrown in the brig. Still, no matter how many Herculean physical challenges are presented to a DEVGRU candidate, the brutal training is primarily mental. It reveals each soldier’s principal foe to be himself. His mortal fears and deepest survival instinct emerge time after time as the essential demons he must overcome. Each DEVGRU member must reach beyond mere proficiency at dealing death. He must become two fighters combined: one who is trained to a state of robotic muscle memory in specific dark skills, and a second who is fluidly adaptive, using an array of standard SEAL tactics. Only when he can live and work from within this state of mind will he be trusted to pursue black operations in every form of hostile environment. Therefore the minority candidate who passes into DEVGRU becomes a member of the “Tier One” Special Mission Unit. He will be assigned to reconnaissance or assault, but his greatest specialty will always be to remain lethal in spite of rapidly changing conditions. From the day he is accepted into that elite tribe, he embodies what is delicately called “preemptive and proactive counterterrorist operations.” Or as it might be more bluntly described: Hunt them down and kill them wherever they are - and is possible, blow up something. Each one of that small percentage who makes it through six months of well-intended but malicious torture emerges as a true human predator. If removing you from this world becomes his mission, your only hope of escaping a DEVGRU SEAL is to find a hiding place that isn’t on land, on the sea, or in the air.