Built From Broken Quotes

I now realize that lives fall apart when they need to be rebuilt. Lives fall apart when the foundation upon which they were built needs to be relaid. Lives fall apart, not because God is punishing us for what we have or have not done. Lives fall apart because they need to. They need to because they weren’t built the right way in the first place.

The stars are brilliant at this time of night and I wander these streets like a ritual I don’t dare to break for darling, the times are quite glorious. I left him by the water’s edge, still waving long after the ship was gone and if someone would have screamed my name I wouldn’t have heard for I’ve said goodbye so many times in my short life that farewells are a muscular task and I’ve taught them well. There’s a place by the side of the railway near the lake where I grew up and I used to go there to burry things and start anew. I used to go there to say goodbye. I was young and did not know many people but I had hidden things inside that I never dared to show and in silence I tried to kill them, one way or the other, leaving sin on my body scrubbing tears off with salt and I built my rituals in farewells. Endings I still cling to. So I go to the ocean to say goodbye. He left that morning, the last words still echoing in my head and though he said he’d come back one day I know a broken promise from a right one for I have used them myself and there is no coming back. Minds like ours are can’t be tamed and the price for freedom is the price we pay. I turned away from the ocean as not to fall for its plea for it used to seduce and consume me and there was this one night a few years back and I was not yet accustomed to farewells and just like now I stood waving long after the ship was gone. But I was younger then and easily fooled and the ocean was deep and dark and blue and I took my shoes off to let the water freeze my bones. I waded until I could no longer walk and it was too cold to swim but still I kept on walking at the bottom of the sea for I could not tell the difference between the ocean and the lack of someone I loved and I had not yet learned how the task of moving on is as necessary as survival. Then days passed by and I spent them with my work and now I’m writing letters I will never dare to send. But there is this one day every year or so when the burden gets too heavy and I collect my belongings I no longer need and make my way to the ocean to burn and drown and start anew and it is quite wonderful, setting fire to my chains and flames on written words and I stand there, starring deep into the heat until they’re all gone. Nothing left to hold me back. You kissed me that morning as if you’d never done it before and never would again and now I write another letter that I will never dare to send, collecting memories of loss like chains wrapped around my veins, and if you see a fire from the shore tonight it’s my chains going up in flames. The time of moon i quite glorious. We could have been so glorious.

Once there was a boy,” said Jace. Clary interrupted immediately. “A Shadowhunter boy?” “Of course.” For a moment a bleak amusement colored his voice. Then it was gone. “When the boy was six years old, his father gave him a falcon to train. Falcons are raptors – killing birds, his father told him, the Shadowhunters of the sky. “The falcon didn’t like the boy, and the boy didn’t like it, either. Its sharp beak made him nervous, and its bright eyes always seemed to be watching him. It would slash at him with beak and talons when he came near: For weeks his wrists and hands were always bleeding. He didn’t know it, but his father had selected a falcon that had lived in the wild for over a year, and thus was nearly impossible to tame. But the boy tried, because his father told him to make the falcon obedient, and he wanted to please his father. “He stayed with the falcon constantly, keeping it awake by talking to it and even playing music to it, because a tired bird was meant to be easier to tame. He learned the equipment: the jesses, the hood, the brail, the leash that bound the bird to his wrist. He was meant to keep the falcon blind, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it – instead he tried to sit where the bird could see him as he touched and stroked its wings, willing it to trust him. Hee fed it from his hand, and at first it would not eat. Later it ate so savagely that its beak cut the skin of his palm. But the boy was glad, because it was progress, and because he wanted the bird to know him, even if the bird had to consume his blood to make that happen. “He began to see that the falcon was beautiful, that its slim wings were built for the speed of flight, that it was strong and swift, fierce and gentle. When it dived to the ground, it moved like likght. When it learned to circle and come to his wrist, he neary shouted with delight Sometimes the bird would hope to his shoulder and put its beak in his hair. He knew his falcon loved him, and when he was certain it was not just tamed but perfectly tamed, he went to his father and showed him what he had done, expecting him to be proud. “Instead his father took the bird, now tame and trusting, in his hands and broke its neck. ‘I told you to make it obedient,’ his father said, and dropped the falcon’s lifeless body to the ground. ‘Instead, you taught it to love you. Falcons are not meant to be loving pets: They are fierce and wild, savage and cruel. This bird was not tamed; it was broken.’ “Later, when his father left him, the boy cried over his pet, until eventually his father sent a servant to take the body of the bird away and bury it. The boy never cried again, and he never forgot what he’d learned: that to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed.

We are built from broken parts

There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong, and there was not part of him that was not stronger for having been broken. The cane became a part of the myth he built. No one knew who he was. No one knew where he came from. He'd become Kaz Brekker, cripple and confidence man, bastard of the Barrel.

But I knew he wouldn't kiss me. Not tonight. Not like this. There was too much between us now, all the words and near misses. All the potential, the alternate futures that would stretch out before us in an unending spiral, all built on what happened in this moment. I held his fiery gaze and remembered the five-oh, the half-and-half, the promises I'd whispered to myself in the dawn light. I might lose all my memories one day, but that wouldn't keep me from making them.

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it this brokenness inside me might start healing. Out here its like I'm someone else, I thought that maybe I could find myself if I could just come in I swear I'll leave. Won't take nothing but a memory from the house that built me.

Lives fall apart because they need to. They need to because they weren’t built the right way in the first place.

The perfect simplicity of salvation is broken up upon these rocks that we have built, and scattered for us to ponder and piece together in a test that tries our patience and understanding. We learn that justice may not always follow a just act, that justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected, that a miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned. Whoever knows this is willing to suffer, for he knows that nothing is in vain.

Whatever happened to me just now has gotten to me, broken past the fragile shell I've built. More than my memory is gone. My soul has wings that beat to a heart I don't understand and I see things, feel things that I know aren't from here, but that are so real.

Lowe has broken from the Christianity of his parents, a faith that now seems hopelessly out of date. The meek shall no longer inherit the earth; the go-getters will get it and everything that goes with it. The Christ who went among the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, among lepers and prostitutes, really had no marketing savvy. He has been transfigured into a latter-day entrepreneur, the greatest superstar sales person of all time, who built a multinational outfit from scratch.

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships--and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes--husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer...

The Universe is made of hands; Hands that twist fabric and sizzle in the air. Hands that grasp curls and flick words away Small, smooth fingers pouring gold over gaping wounds Before slicing into soft tissue, Blood mixing with gold. Hands that make it beautiful. The Universe is made of bones; Bones that cut against yards of skin, Warm and yielding and moulded around the wings that splay across his back. Bones that cage the heart and dig into the hollows. Bones that break, Tear the warm, yielding skin. Bones that shred and brush his chin. The Universe is made of lips; Lips that breathe and stutter warm sighs, Caressing the cracks in his broken body, the body that he broke. Lips that carve paths into stone, That leave trails upon gooseflesh, Lips that make incisions, Too delicate to mend. The Universe is made of blood; Blood that runs warm and hot and steady and crimson, Pumping beneath the stone and the gold. Blood that burns with every jerk of limbs. Blood that spills on open palms, Staining the fabric, Filling up his throat. The Universe is made of eyes; Eyes that breach and eyes that splice and eyes that never leave. Eyes that ripple oceans. Eyes that whisper in the dark. Eyes that rip open the seams. Eyes that create wounds, create chaos, create broken shards of blue. Eyes that alight and won’t let go. The Universe was built. The Universe fell. You took it apart, Dragged the chaos from my soul with your hands, Your bones, Your lips, Your blood, Your eyes. And now you’re back. And so is the Universe. And so, I suppose, am I. The Universe is made of five things. The Universe is made of you.

This is a part of post-college life that nobody ever warns you about. Your social life is no longer dropped into your lap by virtue of shared classes and extracurricular activities. Relationships, whether with friends, family, or romantic partners—from here on out, they’re going to take a lot more work. No more built-in friends at the sorority, or hollering down the stairs when I need my mom. It’s certainly not going to be as easy to meet guys now that I’m done with school. It’s not like I can just chat up the cute guy in econ class anymore.

Since I am in this pain, the pain of having what is special taken from me, I look inside myself and I don’t like what I see: a man who is broken and alone. I think of all the time Lily and I spent together, just the two of us—the talks about boys, the Monopoly, the movies, the pizza nights—and I wonder how much of it was real. Dogs don’t eat pizza; dogs don’t play Monopoly. I know this on some level, but everything feels so true. How much of it was an elaborate construct to mask my own loneliness? How much of it was built to convince myself the attempts I made at real life—therapy, dating—were not just that: attempts?

I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his deck, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles- rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships- the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over the years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death. He smashed that one first. My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched his as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottle, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed- a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven. He left the room and went down two doors to my beadroom. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, hollow enough to easily punch a fist through. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands. 'Daddy?' Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand. My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with his fists, and then he opened up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never to do do before, but Buckley came to him. My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. He remembered the day I'd begged him to paint and paper my room purple. Remembered moving in the old National Geographics to the bottom shelves of my bookcases. (I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived. 'You are so special to me, little man,' my father said, clinging to him. Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. 'Hold still,' my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling. Werner’s head swivels lightly on his neck. The wind is strong and gusting stronger, and the corners of the tent strain against their guy ropes, and where the flaps at the two ends come up, he can see trees buck and sway. Everything rustles. Werner zips his old notebook and the little house into his duffel and the man beside him murmurs questions to himself and the rest of the ruined company sleeps. Even Werner’s thirst has faded. He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters. Out there, through the open flaps of the tent, clouds hurtle above treetops. Toward Germany, toward home. Silver and blue, blue and silver. Sheets of paper tumble down the rows of cots, and in Werner’s chest comes a quickening. He sees Frau Elena kneel beside the coal stove and bank up the fire. Children in their beds. Baby Jutta sleeps in her cradle. His father lights a lamp, steps into an elevator, and disappears. The voice of Volkheimer: What you could be. Werner’s body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed. “Ernst,” says the man beside him. “Ernst.” But there is no Ernst; the men in the cots do not reply; the American soldier at the door of the tent sleeps. Werner walks past him into the grass. The wind moves through his undershirt. He is a kite, a balloon. Once, he and Jutta built a little sailboat from scraps of wood and carried it to the river. Jutta painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality. But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and the flat black water swallowed it. Jutta blinked at Werner with wet eyes, pulling at the battered loops of yarn in her sweater. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.” Did they? He hopes they did. He seems to remember a little boat—a more seaworthy one—gliding down a river. It sailed around a bend and left them behind. Didn’t it? The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn’t the wind move the light? Across the field, an American watches a boy leave the sick tent and move against the background of the trees. He sits up. He raises his hand. “Stop,” he calls. “Halt,” he calls. But Werner has crossed the edge of the field, where he steps on a trigger land mine set there by his own army three months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth.

He was completely detached from every thing except the story he was writing and he was living in it as he built it. The difficult parts he had dreaded he now faced one after another and as he did the people, the country, the days and the nights, and the weather were all there as he wrote. He went on working and he felt as tired as if he had spent the night crossing the broken volcanic desert and the sun had caught him and the others with the dry gray lakes still ahead. He could feel the weight of the heavy double-barreled rifle carried over his shoulder, his hand on the muzzle, and he tasted the pebble in his mouth. Across the shimmer of the dry lakes he could see the distant blue of the escarpment. Ahead of him there was no one, and behind was the long line of porters who knew that they had reached this point three hours too late. It was not him, of course, who had stood there that morning, nor had he even worn the patched corduroy jacket faded almost white now, the armpits rotted through by sweat, that he took off then and handed to his Kamba servant and brother who shared with him the guilt and knowledge of the delay, watching him smell the sour, vinegary smell and shake his head in disgust and then grin as he swung the jacket over his black shoulder holding it by the sleeves as they started off across the dry-baked gray, the gun muzzles in their right hands, the barrels balanced on their shoulders, the heavy stocks pointing back toward the line of porters. It was not him, but as he wrote it was and when someone read it, finally, it would be whoever read it and what they found when they should reach the escarpment, if they reached it, and he would make them reach its base by noon of that day; then whoever read it would find what there was there and have it always.

When they were only a few yards from the stone hull, Inej halted and watched the mists wreathing the branches. “He was going to break by legs,” she said. “Smash them with a mallet so they’d never heal….” She took a shaky breath. The words came like a string of gunshots, rapid-fire, as if she resented the very act of speaking them. “I didn’t know if you would come.” Kaz couldn’t blame Van Eck for that. Kaz has built that doubt in her with every cold word and small cruelty. “We’re your crew, Inej. We don’t leave our own at the mercy of merch scum.” It wasn’t the answer he wanted to give. It wasn’t the answer she wanted. When she turned to him, her eyes were bright with anger. “He was going to break my legs,” she said, her chin held high, the barest quaver in her voice. “Would you have come for me then, Kaz? When I couldn’t scale a wall or walk a tightrope? When I wasn’t the Wraith anymore?” Dirtyhands would not. The boy who could get them through this, get their money, keep them alive, would do her the courtesy of putting her out of her misery, then cut his losses and move on. “I would come for you,” he said, and when he saw the wary look she shot him, he said it again. “I would come for you. And if I couldn’t walk, I’d crawl to you, and no matter how broken we were, we’d fight our way out together—knives drawn, pistols blazing. Because that’s what we do. We never stop fighting.” The wind rose. The boughs of the willows whispered, a sly, gossiping sound. Kaz held her gaze, saw the moon reflected there, twin scythes of light. She was right to be cautious. Even of him. Especially of him. Cautious was how you survived. At last she nodded, the smallest dip of her chin.

For The Broken Ones fans... Sneak peek from Broken Prince: "That simple kiss, such an innocent thing, destroyed me. It tore apart the walls I’d built, the rules I’ve lived by, that had been bred into me. It sent my thoughts down paths they should never have gone. Would never have, if not for you." From Broken Prince (Bk 2 of The Broken Ones)

You are comprised of 84 minerals, 23 elements, and 8 gallons of water spread across 38 trillion cells. You have been built up from nothing by the spare parts of the Earth you have consumed, according to a set of instructions hidden in a double helix and small enough to be carried by a sperm. You are recycled butterflies, plants, rocks, streams, firewood, wolf fur, and shark teeth, broken down to their smallest parts and rebuilt into our planet's most complex living thing. You are not living on Earth. You are Earth.

Besides, muscle and strength imbalances are more likely than limited mobility to cause injury.

We don’t like to hurt. And there is no worse pain for fallen people than facing an emptiness we cannot fill. To enter into pain seems rather foolish when we can run from it through denial. We simply cannot get it through our head that, with a nature twisted by sin, the route to joy always involves the very worst sort of internal suffering we can imagine. We rebel at that thought. We weren’t designed to hurt. The physical and personal capacities to feel that God built into us were intended to provide pleasures, like good health and close relationships. When they don’t, when our head throbs with tension and our heart is broken by rejection, we want relief. With deep passion, we long to experience what we were designed to enjoy.

By the middle of the afternoon it had rained so much that the drains were overflowing, clogged up with leaves and newspapers. The water built up until it was sliding across the road in great sheets, rippled by the wind and parted like a football crowd by passing cars. I was shocked by the sheer volume of water that came pouring out of the darkness of the sky. Watching the weight of it crashing into the ground made me feel like a very young child, unable to understand what was really happening. Like trying to understand radio waves, or imagining computers communicating along glass cables. I leant my face against the window as the rain piled upon it, streaming down in waves, blurring my vision, making the shops opposite waver and disappear. There was a time when I might have found this exhilarating, even miraculous, but not that day. That day it made me nervous and tense, unable to concentrate on anything while the noise of it clattered against the windows and the roof. I kept opening the door to look for clear skies, and slamming it shut again. And then around teatime, from nowhere, I smashed all the dirty plates and mugs into the washing-up bowl. Something swept through me, swept out of and over me, something unstoppable, like water surging from a broken tap and flooding across the kitchen floor. I don't quite understand why I felt that way, why I reacted like that. I wanted to be saying it's just something that happens. But I was there, that day, slamming the kitchen door over and over again until the handle came loose. Smacking my hand against the worktop, kicking the cupboard doors, throwing the plates into the sink. Going fuckfuckfuck through my clenched teeth. I wanted someone to see me, I wanted someone to come rushing in, to take hold of me and say hey hey what are you doing, hey come on, what's wrong. But there was no one there, and no one came.

I have it so good. So absurdly, improbably good. I didn't do anything to deserve it, but I have it. I'm healthy. I've never gone hungry. And yes, to answer your question, I'm- I'm loved. I lived in a beautiful place, did meaningful work. The world we made out there, Mosscap, it's- it's nothing like what your originals left. It's a good world, a beautiful world. It's not perfect, but we've fixed it so much. We made a good place, struck a good balance. And yet every fucking day in the City, I woke up hollow, and... and just... tired, y'know? So, I did something else instead. I packed up everything, and I learned a brand-new thing from scratch, and gods, I worked hard for it. I worked really hard. I thought, if I can just do that, if I can do it well, I'll feel okay. And guess what? I do do it well. I'm good at what I do. I make people happy. I make people feel better. And yet I still wake up tired, like... like something's missing. I tried talking to friends, and family, and nobody got it, so I stopped bringing it up, and then I stopped talking to them altogether, because I couldn't explain, and I was tired of pretending like everything was fine. I went to doctors, to make sure I wasn't sick and that my head was okay. I read books and monastic texts and everything I could find. I threw myself into my work, I went to all the places that used to inspire me, I listened to music and looked at art, I exercised and had sex and got plenty of sleep and ate my vegetables, and still. Still. Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?

When The Lamp Is Shattered When the lamp is shattered, The light in the dust lies dead; When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow's glory is shed; When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot. As music and splendor Survive not the lamp and the lute, The heart's echoes render No song when the spirit is mute:-- No song but sad dirges, Like the wind through a ruined cell, Or the mournful surges That ring the dead seaman's knell. When hearts have once mingled, Love first leaves the well-built nest; The weak one is singled To endure what it once possessed. O Love! who bewailest The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home, and your bier? Its passions will rock thee, As the storms rock the ravens on high; Bright reason will mock thee, Like the sun from a wintry sky. From thy nest every rafter Will rot, and thine eagle home Leave thee naked to laughter, When leaves fall and cold winds come. When The Lamp Is Shattered

Neil looked up, ready to turn Nicky down, but Andrew had come up beside Nicky in the doorway. Neil looked at him and thought about Nicky's worried appeal last fall, the warning that one day Exy wouldn't be enough on its own. It could be a safe haven from his thoughts and a reason to get up and the inspiration to fight harder. It could mean the world to him, but it couldn't be everything. It couldn't fill in the broken pieces of him the way the Foxes did. It wouldn't drop everything to get him from the airport or come back for him without question or call him "friend". Neil built his life around Exy after his mother died because he needed something to live for, but Neil wasn't alone anymore.

I’m often asked about my generation, which some people call the Greatest Generation but which I also call the Hardy Generation. What made us hardy? The Depression years. We were not spoiled with money, that’s for sure. When we had disputes we didn’t use attorneys; we settled them on the street, even got broken bones and noses from fighting. In all ways we helped one another. We shared, we had neighborhood picnics, we made our own toys. (There were no toy stores; I built racing cars.) I also rode one of the first skateboards, with a box on the front. We had a single soccer ball for four or five blocks’ worth of kids; you were lucky if you got to kick it once. We had free time to burn. Distractions? Radio, yes, but no TV. Movies were only once a week. We were happier than people are today, despite the hard times. We overcame adversity and each time we did we enhanced our hardiness. We also knew how to win and lose gracefully.

You don’t realize how much of life is built for relationships until, newly single, you find yourself with a broken ankle, cooped up on the couch in your one-bedroom apartment, and you need to go to the restroom. The problem is, you’ve knocked your crutches over and the pain prevents you from moving too much at all. You go through the Rolodex in your head of whom you can call, and every one of them has someone more important than you in their lives to take care of. You have to weigh how much of a bother you’re going to be, and how much you can rely on them. (Obviously you can rely on your friends. Obviously I’m not saying you can’t, but there is always a limit of how much before you’re a burden.)

He saw the towel in her hands. "I've got this." "Let me help." "I think you've helped enough." She thought he was going to leave it at that, but Will told her, "It's been worse today than usual." "Stress is a contributing factor-when you get tired or if something emotional happens." He scrubbed hard at the plate in his hands. Sara saw that he hadn't bothered to roll up his sleeves. The cuffs of his sweater were soaked. He said, "I've been trying to dig a new sewer line to my house. That's why my laundry is behind." Sara had been expecting a non sequitur, but she'd hoped he could hold off for a few moments longer. "My father built this house with money from people who try to do their own plumbing.

The soul is like a fountain built near its source and the water of life flows into it, not through an aqueduct, but directly from the spring. Its love is now free from servile fear: it has broken all the bonds which previously hindered its progress;

A week ago," Ishmael said, "when we were talking about laws, you said that there's only one kind of law about how people should live--the kind that can be changed by a vote. What do you think now? Can the laws that govern competition in the community be changed by a vote?" "No. But they're not absolutes, like the laws of aerodynamics. They can be broken." "Can't the laws of aerodynamics be broken?" "No. If your plane isn't built according to the law, it doesn't fly." "But if you push it off a cliff, it stays in the air, doesn't it?" "For a while." "The same is true of a civilization that isn't built in accordance with the law of limited competition... Any species that, as a matter of policy, exempts itself from the law of limited competition will end by destroying the community..." "Yes." "Then what have we discovered here?" "We've discovered a piece of certain knowledge about how people ought to live. Must live in fact." "The law we've outlined here enables species to live--enables species to survive, including the human. It won't tell you whether mood-altering drugs should be legalized or not. It won't tell you whether premarital sex is good or bad. It won't tell you if capital punishment is right or wrong. It *will* tell you how you have to live if you want to avoid extinction, and that's the first and most fundamental knowledge anyone needs... You might say that this is one of the law's basic operations: Those who threaten the stability of the community by defying the law automatically eliminate themselves.

Glistening liquid pooled in two spots. Matthew was trying to clean it up, but his hands were shaking, his jaw working. I grabbed some towels from the linen closet and knelt beside him. “I have this,” I whispered. Matthew sat back, lifting his head and closing his eyes. He let out a staggered breath. “This should’ve never happened.” Tear built in my eyes as I sopped up what was left of Adam. “I know.” They are all like my children. Now I’ve lost another, and for what? It doesn’t make sense.” His shoulders shook. “It never makes sense.” “I’m sorry.” Wetness gathered on my cheeks, and I wiped at my face with my shoulder. “His is my fault. He was trying to protect me.” …. “It’s not just your fault Katy. This was a world you stumbled into, one filled with treachery and greed. You weren’t prepared for it. Neither are any of them.” I lifted my head, blinking back tears. “I trusted Blake when I should’ve trusted Daemon. I let this happen.” Matthew twisted toward me, grasping my cheeks. “You cannot take on the full responsibility for this. You didn’t make the choices Blake did. You didn’t force his hand.” I choked on a broken sob as grief tore through me. His words didn’t ease the guilt, and he knew it. Then the strangest thing happened. He pulled me into his arms, and I broke. Sobs raked my entire body. I pressed my head against his shoulder, my body shaking his, or maybe he was crying for his loss, too. Time passed, and it became New Year. I welcomed it with tears streaming down my face and a heart ripped apart. When my tear dried, my eyes nearly swollen shut. He pulled back, pushing my hair aside. “This isn’t the end of anything for you … for Daemon. This is just the beginning, and now you know what you’re truly up against. Don’t end up like Dawson and Bethany. Both of you are stronger than that.

Most people these days chase new things - new houses, new cars, new objects. But, they don't realise that old houses, old cars, and old objects have something that new things don't have - their history and culture. We must look at life from each other's perspective. There is nothing fascinating about chasing new things. My Mom and Dad choose to stay in our old house in my hometown, because it was the house they built with their hard work and love. It is the house where my mother writes her beautiful poetry. It is the house where my father treats his patients. It is a house which has books, culture, cracks and yes history.

I lost loved ones, lost my way, and lost myself. Drained, depressed, and depleted—God picked up my broken pieces and developed my faith, character, and purpose from these very experiences. Insecurities and emotions that were intended to break me built my faith and bolstered my efforts to find myself and a greater purpose.

Perched upon the stones of a bridge The soldiers had the eyes of ravens Their weapons hung black as talons Their eyes gloried in the smoke of murder To the shock of iron-heeled sticks I drew closer in the cripple’s bitter patience And before them I finally tottered Grasping to capture my elusive breath With the cockerel and swift of their knowing They watched and waited for me ‘I have come,’ said I, ‘from this road’s birth, I have come,’ said I, ‘seeking the best in us.’ The sergeant among them had red in his beard Glistening wet as he showed his teeth ‘There are few roads on this earth,’ said he, ‘that will lead you to the best in us, old one.’ ‘But you have seen all the tracks of men,’ said I ‘And where the mothers and children have fled Before your advance. Is there naught among them That you might set an old man upon?’ The surgeon among this rook had bones Under her vellum skin like a maker of limbs ‘Old one,’ said she, ‘I have dwelt In the heat of chests, among heart and lungs, And slid like a serpent between muscles, Swum the currents of slowing blood, And all these roads lead into the darkness Where the broken will at last rest. ‘Dare say I,’ she went on,‘there is no Place waiting inside where you might find In slithering exploration of mysteries All that you so boldly call the best in us.’ And then the man with shovel and pick, Who could raise fort and berm in a day Timbered of thought and measured in all things Set the gauge of his eyes upon the sun And said, ‘Look not in temples proud, Or in the palaces of the rich highborn, We have razed each in turn in our time To melt gold from icon and shrine And of all the treasures weeping in fire There was naught but the smile of greed And the thick power of possession. Know then this: all roads before you From the beginning of the ages past And those now upon us, yield no clue To the secret equations you seek, For each was built of bone and blood And the backs of the slave did bow To the laboured sentence of a life In chains of dire need and little worth. All that we build one day echoes hollow.’ ‘Where then, good soldiers, will I Ever find all that is best in us? If not in flesh or in temple bound Or wretched road of cobbled stone?’ ‘Could we answer you,’ said the sergeant, ‘This blood would cease its fatal flow, And my surgeon could seal wounds with a touch, All labours will ease before temple and road, Could we answer you,’ said the sergeant, ‘Crows might starve in our company And our talons we would cast in bogs For the gods to fight over as they will. But we have not found in all our years The best in us, until this very day.’ ‘How so?’ asked I, so lost now on the road, And said he, ‘Upon this bridge we sat Since the dawn’s bleak arrival, Our perch of despond so weary and worn, And you we watched, at first a speck Upon the strife-painted horizon So tortured in your tread as to soak our faces In the wonder of your will, yet on you came Upon two sticks so bowed in weight Seeking, say you, the best in us And now we have seen in your gift The best in us, and were treasures at hand We would set them humbly before you, A man without feet who walked a road.’ Now, soldiers with kind words are rare Enough, and I welcomed their regard As I moved among them, ’cross the bridge And onward to the long road beyond I travel seeking the best in us And one day it shall rise before me To bless this journey of mine, and this road I began upon long ago shall now end Where waits for all the best in us. ―Avas Didion Flicker Where Ravens Perch

When he was fourteen,, Kaz had put together a crew to rob the bank that had helped Hertzoon prey on him and Jordie. His crew got away with fifty thousand krudge, but he'd broken his leg dropping down from the roof. The bone didn't set right, and he'd limped ever after. So he found himself a Fabrikator and had his cane made. It became a decleration. There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong, and there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken. The cane became a part of the myth he built. No one knew who he was. No one knew where he came from. He'd become Kaz Brekker, cripple and confidence man, the Bastard of the Barrel.

When The Lamp Is Shattered When the lamp is shattered, The light in the dust lies dead; When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow's glory is shed; When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot. As music and splendor Survive not the lamp and the lute, The heart's echoes render No song when the spirit is mute:-- No song but sad dirges, Like the wind through a ruined cell, Or the mournful surges That ring the dead seaman's knell. When hearts have once mingled, Love first leaves the well-built nest; The weak one is singled To endure what it once possessed. O Love! who bewailest The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home, and your bier? Its passions will rock thee, As the storms rock the ravens on high; Bright reason will mock thee, Like the sun from a wintry sky. From thy nest every rafter Will rot, and thine eagle home Leave thee naked to laughter, When leaves fall and cold winds come.

The Universe is Made of Five Things' is how it starts. He thinks it's probably the title, but his fingers don't stop long enough to let him question it any more than that. He rubs his eyes, keeps typing with shaky, jerking fingers. 'The Universe is made of hands; Hands that twist fabric and sizzle in the air. Hands that grasp curls and flick words away. Small, smooth fingers pouring gold over gaping wounds. Before slicing into soft tissue, Blood mixing with gold. Hands that make it beautiful. The Universe is made of bones; Bones that cut against yards of skin, Warm and yielding and moulded around the wings that splay across his back. Bones that cage the heart and dig into the hollows. Bones that break, Tear the warm, yielding skin. Bones that shred and brush his chin. The Universe is made of lips; Lips that breathe and stutter warm sighs, Caressing the craks in his broken body, the body that he broke. Lips that carve paths into stone, That leave trails upon gooseflesh, Lips that nake incisions, Too delicate to mend. The Universe is made of blood; Blood that runs warm and hot and steady and crimson, Pumping beneath the stone and the gold. Blood that burns with every jerk of limbs. Blood that spills on open palms, Staining the fabric, Filling up his throat. The Universe is made of eyes, Eyes that breach and eyes that splice and eyes that never leave. Eyes that ripple oceans. Eyes that whisper in the dark. Eyes that create wounds, create chaos, create broken shards of blue. Eyes that alight and won ' t let go. The Universe was built. The Universe fell. You took it apart, Draggd the chaos from my soul with your hands, Your bones, Your lips, Your blood, Your eyes, And now you're back. And so is the Universe, And so, I suppose, am I. The Universe is made of five things. The Universe is made of you.

Comedy, much of the time, is built on disorder. Comedy is intoxicating to a young mind in distress. You see these famous people pointing out the ridiculousness of a world that you’ve never been able to make sense of. Comedians offer the hope, the chance, however slim, that it’s not you that’s broken but the world. And they dress up in cool clothes! And hang out with various late-night hosts named Jimmy! And they make people laugh, and those people then love them. I can’t say for certain that depression leads people to a career in comedy, but it seems like the path is smoothly paved and well lit. Comedian Solomon Georgio came to the United States as a refugee from Ethiopia when he was three years old, and his family relied on comedy early on for entertainment and education. “We all loved comedy because that’s one of the few things that we comprehended when we didn’t speak the language,” he says. “Surprisingly, standup comedy, too, which, even though we didn’t know what was going on, you kind of see a rhythm and you know people are being entertained and laughing along. So we watched a lot of old television. Three Stooges, I Love Lucy, and, like, slapstick. We just immediately started watching and enjoying. So you can only imagine how disappointed I was when I met my first white person in real life and I was like, ‘Oh, you’re not like the Three Stooges. I can’t slap you and poke you in the eye. You guys aren’t doing any of that stuff out here. Okay.

Christianity can be built around isolating ourselves from evildoers and sinners, creating a community of religious piety and moral purity. That’s the Christianity I grew up with. Christianity can also be built around joining with the broken sinners and evildoers of our world crying out to God, groaning for grace. That’s the Christianity I have fallen in love with. In

I told her stories. They were only a sentence long, each one of them. That’s all I knew how to find. So I told her broken stories. The little pieces of broken stories I could find. I told her what I could. I told her that the Global Alliance had issued more warnings about the possibility of total war if their demands were not met. I told her that the Emperor Nero, from Rome, had a giant sea built where he could keep sea monsters and have naval battles staged for him. I told her that there had been rioting in malls all over America, and that no one knew why. I told her that the red-suited Santa Claus we know — the regular one? — was popularized by the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. I told her that the White House had not confirmed or denied reports that extensive bombing had started in major cities in South America. I told her, “There’s an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we’re all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there’s nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.

But for a society built on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress. And now, if nothing else is done, Syl Anagist must again find a way to fission its people into subgroupings and create reasons for conflict among them. There's not enough magic to be had just from plants and genegineered fauna; someone must suffer, if the rest are to enjoy luxury.

But at the last the gates of Utumno were broken and the halls unroofed, and Melkor took refuge in the uttermost pit. Then Tulkas stood forth as champion of the Valar and wrestled with him, and cast him upon his face; and he was bound with the chain Angainor that Aulë had wrought, and led captive; and the world had peace for a long age. Nonetheless the Valar did not discover all the mighty vaults and caverns hidden with deceit far under the fortresses of Angband and Utumno. Many evil things still lingered there, and others were dispersed and fled into the dark and roamed in the waste places of the world, awaiting a more evil hour; and Sauron they did not find. But when the Battle was ended and from the ruin of the North great clouds arose and hid the stars, the Valar drew Melkor back to Valinor, bound hand and foot, and blindfold; and he was brought to the Ring of Doom. There he lay upon his face before the feet of Manwë and sued for pardon; but his prayer was denied, and he was cast into prison in the fastness of Mandos, whence none can escape, neither Vala, nor Elf, nor mortal Man. Vast and strong are those halls, and they were built in the west of the land of Aman. There was Melkor doomed to abide for three ages long, before his cause should be tried anew, or he should plead again for pardon.

Everything lives on earth according to the law of nature, and from that law emerges the glory and joy of liberty; but man is denied this fortune, because he set for the God-given soul a limited and earthly law of his own. He made for himself strict rules. Man built a narrow and painful prison in which he secluded his affections and desires. He dug out a deep grave in which he buried his heart and its purpose. If an individual, through the dictates of his soul, declares his withdrawal from society and violates the law, his fellowmen will say he is a rebel worthy of exile, or an infamous creature worthy only of execution. Will man remain a slave of self-confinement until the end of the world? Or will he be freed by the passing of time and live in the Spirit for the Spirit? Will man insist upon staring downward and backward at the earth? Or will he turn his eyes toward the sun so he will not see the shadow of his body amongst the skulls and thorns?

I’m spending until dawn with you,” I said firmly. “Don’t bother to argue.” “God forbid,” said Jesse, solemn. I pushed past him into the cottage. He’d been waiting up for me, I could tell. There was a book spread facedown upon the table, a pair of lamps lit beside it. “I thought you said you were resting tonight. “Aye. I was. But then it occurred to me that the bed wasn’t nearly so comfortable without you. So I got up and hoped.” I crossed my arms over my chest and dug my toes into the soft nap of the rug. The cottage had been built within a protective circle of birches; even during the heat of the day, it was never very warm. “You hoped for me?” I asked, uncertain. Jesse came close, put his arms around me, and buried his face in my hair. “As always. As ever.” “And I came,” I whispered, closing my eyes, breathing him. The ache behind my forehead began to unbind. “And you came,” he agreed. And he summoned the magic that was all his own, beyond stars and starfire. A magic of mortal lips and hands, of bristly new whiskers scraping my chin, of melting kisses that made the whiskers unimportant. Our bodies entwined, or hearts. Our lives. I think that was the night a very quiet, very powerful part of me began to comprehend how it was going to be. I think the part of me that was magic, that had broken away from the practical earth to slip along Jesse’s celestial family of stars, to allow them to bind me in their spell… That part of me knew.

The church of God is never so well built up as when it is built up with men of broken hearts. I have prayed to God in secret many a time, of late, that he would be pleased to gather out from among us a people who have a deep experience, who should know the guilt of sin, who should be broken and ground to powder under a sense of their own inability and unworthiness… He who has never been in the dungeon, who has never been in the abyss, who has never felt as if he were cast out from the sight of God, how can he comfort many who are outcasts, and who are bound with the fetters of despair?”2

The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviors are among our worst and most damaging, words like 'evil' and 'soul' will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty brakes, that they will be as rarely spoken in a courtroom as in an auto repair shop. And crucially, the analogy holds in a key way, extending to instances of dangerous people without anything obviously wrong with their frontal cortex, genes, and so on. When a car is being dysfunctional and dangerous and we take it to a mechanic, this is not a dualistic situation where (a) if the mechanic discovers some broken widget causing the problem, we have a mechanistic explanation, but (b) if the mechanic can’t find anything wrong, we’re dealing with an evil car; sure, the mechanic can speculate on the source of the problem—maybe it’s the blueprint from which the car was built, maybe it was the building process, maybe the environment contains some unknown pollutant that somehow impairs function, maybe someday we’ll have sufficiently powerful techniques in the auto shop to spot some key molecule in the engine that is out of whack—but in the meantime we’ll consider this car to be evil. Car free will also equals 'internal forces we do not understand yet.

Both Johnny and Jane went home alone because nobody knew they'd broken up. One day they just woke up and felt like strangers living inside a life they've built together, and it was scary. It was scary to look into the eyes of the person whose health insurance you were on every morning and have her look at you like a stranger. It was fucking scary to come home every day to the man who built your table your bed your couch your life, who'd scaffolded up your sense of self for five years, and have him tell you when you come home from the job that pays for his motorcycle insurance and gas, that he hadn't even the inkling of a notion of how to start to talk to you now." (47)

Unbelief is nearly supreme in the world to-day. Were an angel to descend from heaven in the middle of a great square, the crowd would think he had got himself up on pulleys and wires, and would try to discover his apparatus. Were he, in wrath, to cast destruction upon them, and with fire blazing from his wings, slay a thousand of them with the mere shaking of a pinion, those who were left alive would either say that a tremendous dynamite explosion had occurred, or that the square was built on an extinct volcano which had suddenly broken out into frightful activity. Anything rather than believe in angels — the nineteenth century protests against the possibility of their existence.

But as yet, the neighbourhood was shy to own the Railroad. One or two bold speculators had projected streets; and one had built a little, but had stopped among the mud and ashes to consider farther of it. A bran-new Tavern, redolent of fresh mortar and size, and fronting nothing at all, had taken for its sign The Railway Arms; but that might be rash enterprise—and then it hoped to sell drink to the workmen. So, the Excavators’ House of Call had sprung up from a beer shop; and the old-established Ham and Beef Shop had become the Railway Eating House, with a roast leg of pork daily, through interested motives of a similar immediate and popular description. Lodging-house keepers were favourable in like manner; and for the like reasons were not to be trusted. The general belief was very slow. There were frowzy fields, and cow-houses, and dunghills, and dustheaps, and ditches, and gardens, and summer-houses, and carpet-beating grounds, at the very door of the Railway. Little tumuli of oyster shells in the oyster season, and of lobster shells in the lobster season, and of broken crockery and faded cabbage leaves in all seasons, encroached upon its high places. Posts, and rails, and old cautions to trespassers, and backs of mean houses, and patches of wretched vegetation stared it out of countenance. Nothing was the better for it, or thought of being so. If the miserable waste ground lying near it could have laughed, it would have laughed it to scorn, like many of the miserable neighbours.

With just a tap on the gas, the car flew off of the road and skidded sideways into the encompassing woods. And I felt the sudden impact as the tires scraped against mounds of dirt, buried roots and jagged stones. The blood-red moon lightly broke through the scattered leaves above us as we bounced among the hidden marshes that could have stretched for miles. But I had no recollection of time because everything, the sounds and the surrounding scenery swept by so quickly. Gripping the steering wheel, his feet on the pedals, spine arched, and my hair whipping my face in the wind from the freshly broken glass on my passenger-side-window I couldn’t help but smile with the childish pleasure of being hurtled through the air as if we were on a rollercoaster built for two.

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers, introduced in February 1955, have been in service for an impressive 58 years, and they will probably be phased out around 2045. The grandchildren of people who flew the original batch of B-52s could be flying B-52s today. The last B-52H was built in 1962, and this last group of 85 planes still in service has been modified and improved several times. These bombers can go 650 miles per hour and climb to 50,000 feet with a range of 10,145 miles, and they have broken many flight records. They have flown around the world non-stop in 45 hours 19 minutes with in-flight refueling, and can fly from Japan to Spain with one load of fuel. A B-52 can land sideways in a heavy cross-wind, using its in-board landing gear with coupled steering.

Most people these days chase new things - new houses, new cars, new objects. But, they don't realise that old houses, old cars, and old objects have something that new things don't have - their history and culture. We must look at life from each other's perspective. New things will make you feel good but maybe for a short time. There is nothing fascinating about chasing new things. Which is why some people, like my parents, love old things, because these things have emotions, and sentiments attached to them. My Mom and Dad choose to stay in our old house in my hometown, because it was the house they built with their hard work and love. It is the house where my mother writes her beautiful poetry. It is the house where my father treats his patients. It is a house which has books, culture, cracks and yes history.

Through their wickedness we were divided amongst ourselves; and the better to keep their thrones and be at ease, they armed the Druze to fight the Arab, and stirred up the Shiite to attack the Sunnite, and encouraged the Kurdish to butcher the Bedouin, and cheered the Mohammedan to dispute with the Christian. Until when shall a brother continue killing his own brother upon his mother's bosom? Until when shall the Cross be kept apart from the Crescent before the eyes of God? Oh Liberty, hear us, and speak in behalf of but one individual, for a great fire is started with a small spark. Oh Liberty, awaken but one heart with the rustling of thy wings, for from one cloud alone comes the lightning which illuminates the pits of the valleys and the tops of the mountains. Disperse with thy power these black clouds and descend like thunder and destroy the thrones that were built upon the bones and skulls of our ancestors.

The important parts of my story, I was realizing, lay less in the surface value of my accomplishments and more in what undergirded them—the many small ways I’d been buttressed over the years, and the people who’d helped build my confidence over time. I remembered them all, every person who’d ever waved me forward, doing his or her best to inoculate me against the slights and indignities I was certain to encounter in the places I was headed—all those environments built primarily for and by people who were neither black nor female. I thought of my great-aunt Robbie and her exacting piano standards, how she’d taught me to lift my chin and play my heart out on a baby grand even if all I’d ever known was an upright with broken keys. I thought of my father, who showed me how to box and throw a football, same as Craig. There were Mr. Martinez and Mr. Bennett, my teachers at Bryn Mawr, who never dismissed my opinions. There was my mom, my staunchest support, whose vigilance had saved me from languishing in a dreary second-grade classroom. At Princeton, I’d had Czerny Brasuell, who encouraged me and fed my intellect in new ways. And as a young professional, I’d had, among others, Susan Sher and Valerie Jarrett—still good friends and colleagues many years later—who showed me what it looked like to be a working mother and consistently opened doors for me, certain I had something to offer. These were people who mostly didn’t know one another and would never have occasion to meet, many of whom I’d fallen out of touch with myself. But for me, they formed a meaningful constellation. These were my boosters, my believers, my own personal gospel choir, singing, Yes, kid, you got this! all the way through. I’d never forgotten it. I’d tried, even as a junior lawyer, to pay it forward, encouraging curiosity when I saw it, drawing younger people into important conversations.

Racism is group consciousness at its most repugnant, built on the premise that human beings can be divided by skin color into innately superior and inferior groups. Yet, paradoxically, racism is also a form of group blindness. Racial categories like 'black,' 'white,' and 'Asian' erase ethnic differences and identities. The original African slaves brought to America knew - and might have tried to tell their children - that they hailed from the Mandinka tribe or the Ashanti people, or that they were descended from a long line of Yoruba kings. But even as they were stripped of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, America's slaves were also stripped of these ethnic identities. Slave families were deliberately broken up, and heritages were lost, reduced by the powerful to a pigment and nothing more. Even now, immigrants from, say, Ghana, Jamaica, or Nigeria are often stunned to discover that in America they are just 'black.

In the late 1800s a certain man taught Sunday school for over 20 years in a Baptist church; he eventually became the wealthiest man in the world. He also did not pay tithes. He was not generous toward anyone, quite the opposite, he was the reason that journalists came up with the term, "Robber Baron." The man was John D. Rockefeller. He engaged in ruthless and illegal business practices and built an oil company called Standard Oil that was so large that, when it was broken up by antitrust laws, several major oil companies were created from that one company. Over one hundred years ago, John D. Rockefeller was worth over one billion dollars, which would be 50 to 100 billion dollars in today’s money. If he did pay tithes it would have meant an income of 100 million dollars (5 to 10 billion today) to his local church. It was not God that "blessed" him with great wealth; it was Satan, the god of greed. God does not lead people to engage in ruthless and illegal business practices in a desire for more, more, more. Even in his old age, he displayed his greed by giving away dimes. He always had dimes in his pocket so he could generously give one to people he met! What lessons are we to learn from this? One very important thing is that very often Satan will give people lots of money because Satan knows that money is very deceitful and can make even the most devout Christian materialistic and greedy. Let's take a look at another example. There is today a man who planned to become a missionary when he was young, but he not only turned against his calling, he turned against Christianity. Do you suppose that God has blessed this man? He is today a multi-billionaire, media-mogul. The man is Ted Turner, who started CNN and is a partner in Time-Warner and other media companies. Can we use him as an example that God blesses a righteous man? No, actually, the opposite is most likely true, that Satan prospers those who turn from the straight way.

Chitta means “mind” and also “heart” or “attitude.” Bodhi means “awake,” “enlightened,” or “completely open.” Sometimes the completely open heart and mind of bodhichitta is called the soft spot, a place as vulnerable and tender as an open wound. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love. Even the cruelest people have this soft spot. Even the most vicious animals love their offspring. As Trungpa Rinpoche put it, “Everybody loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.” Bodhichitta is also equated, in part, with compassion—our ability to feel the pain that we share with others. Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put up protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance and pride. But fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment—love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy—to awaken bodhichitta. An analogy for bodhichitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment, and blame. But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This is our link with all those who have ever loved. This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we’re arrogant and soften us when we are unkind. It awakens us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all. The Buddha said that we are never separated from enlightenment. Even at the times we feel most stuck, we are never alienated from the awakened state. This is a revolutionary assertion. Even ordinary people like us with hang-ups and confusion have this mind of enlightenment called bodhichitta. The openness and warmth of bodhichitta is in fact our true nature and condition. Even when our neurosis feels far more basic than our wisdom, even when we’re feeling most confused and hopeless, bodhichitta—like the open sky—is always here, undiminished by the clouds that temporarily cover it.

I woke up hollow, and … and just … tired, y’know? So, I did something else instead. I packed up everything, and I learned a brand-new thing from scratch, and gods, I worked hard for it. I worked really hard. I thought, if I can just do that, if I can do it well, I’ll feel okay. And guess what? I do do it well. I’m good at what I do. I make people happy. I make people feel better. And yet I still wake up tired, like … like something’s missing. I tried talking to friends, and family, and nobody got it, so I stopped bringing it up, and then I just stopped talking to them altogether, because I couldn’t explain, and I was tired of pretending like everything was fine. I went to doctors, to make sure I wasn’t sick and that my head was okay. I read books and monastic texts and everything I could find. I threw myself into my work, I went to all the places that used to inspire me, I listened to music and looked at art, I exercised and had sex and got plenty of sleep and ate my vegetables, and still. Still. Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?

Once there was a boy. When the boy was 6 years old, his father gave him a falcon to train. Falcons are raptors - killing birds, his father told him, the Shadowhunters of the sky. The falcon didn't like the boy, and he didn't like it, either. Its sharp beak made him nervous, and its bright eyes always seemed to be watching him. It would slash at him with his beak and talons when he came near: For weeks his wrists and hands were always bleeding. He didn't know it, but his father had selected a falcon that had lived in the wild for over a year, and thus was nearly impossible to train. But the boy tried, because his father had told him to make the falcon obedient, and he wanted to please his father. He stayed with the falcon constantly, keeping it awake by talking to it and even playing music to it, because a tired bird was ment to be easier to tame. He leard the equipment: the jesses, the hood, the brail, the leash that bound the bird to his wrist. He was ment to keep the bird blind, but he couldn't bring himself to do it - instead he tryed to sit where the bird could see him as he touched and stroked its wings, willing it to trust him. He fed it from his hand, and at first it would not eat. Later it ate so savagely that the beak cut his palm. But the boy was glad, because it was progress, and because he wanted the bird to know him, even if it had to consume his blood to make that happen. He began to see that the falcon was beautiful, that its slim wings were built for the speed of flight, that it was strong and swift, fierce and gentle. When it dived to the ground, it moved like light. When it learned to circle and land on his wrist, he nearly shouted with delight. Sometimes the bird would hop to his sholder and but its beak in his hair. He knew his falcon loved him, and when he was certain that it was not just tamed but perfectly tamed, he went to his father and showed him what he had done, expecting him to be proud. Instead his father took the bird, now tame and trusting, in his hands, and broke its neck. 'I told you to make him obedient,' his father said, and dropped the falcon's lifeless body to the ground. "Instead, you taught it to love you. Falcons are not ment to be loving pets: They are fierce and wild, savage and cruel. This bird was not tamed; it was broken.' Later, when his father left him, the boy cried over his pet, until his father sent a servant to take the body of the bird away and bury it. The boy never cried again, and he never forgot what he'd learned: That to love is to destroy, and to be loved is to be the one destroyed.

University Hospital, Boston The trees on the hospital lawn are lush and thriving. They too are getting the best of care, like you, and the anonymous many, in the clean rooms high above this city, where day and night the doctors keep arriving, where intricate machines chart with cool devotion the murmur of the blood, the slow patching-up of bone, the despair of the mind. When I come to visit and we walk out into the light of a summer day, we sit under the trees- buckeyes, as sycamore and one black walnut brooding high over a hedge of lilacs as old as the red-brick building behind them, the original hospital built before the Civil War. We sit on the law together, holding hands while you tell me: you are better. How many young men, I wonder, came here, wheeled on cots off the slow trains from th red and hideous battlefields to lie all summer in the small and stuffy chambers while doctors did what they could, longing for tools still unimagined, medicines still unfound, wisdoms still unguessed at, and how many died staring at the leaves of the trees, blind to the terrible effort around them to keep them alive? I look into your eyes which are sometimes green and sometimes gray, and sometimes full of humor, but often not, and tell myself, you are better, because my life without you would be a place of parched and broken trees. Later, walking the corridors down to the street, I turn and step inside an emty room. Yesterday someone was here with a gasping face. Now the bed is made all new, the machines have been rolled away. The silence continues, deep and neutral, as I stand there, loving you.

Homer looked back at me. 'Pete, can I tell ya somethin' real important?' 'Sure, what is it?' I couldn't imagine what Homer was about to say. He sat down on a rounded rock. I sat down too. 'One thing I've learned is that ya never know what's gonna happen to ya in this old life. Everything can change, just like that.' He snapped his fingers, loud and fast. 'You never know what might happen to ya and that dawg ah yers. Ya know what you should do? You ought to settle down here ... On my mountain.' His words were coming quickly and eagerly. 'I'll teach ya all the ways of livin' up here, and someday when ya get a place built, you can have yerself a family.' Homer wasn't kidding me. 'And, besides, ya know I ain't gonna be here forever. When I leave, then you can take care of this place for me. You understand more than anyone why I love this place so much. I know ya wouldn't let them lumbermen and hunters come up here and hurt my place.' There was a shell around Homer and reaching his heart was like breaking a granite boulder with your bare hands. But now, Homer's heart was breaking. After he finished he turned away from me. When he turned back, his questioning eyes were teary. 'Homer, what you just said was beautiful.' I looked down at my boots and rolled a rock back and forth under my heel. 'But, I don't know. I'll have to give it some serious thought, okay?' As quickly as Homer had broken his stride and opened himself up, he was fast on his feet walking back up the mountain. He stayed as quiet as the king trees that he loved so much, never again saying a word to me about his amazing invitation.

The Hatter To understand what they did to the Hatter, I must first tell you about people who know how to play with your brokenness like it is a fidget spinner without so much as touching your skin—a form of abuse known as gaslighting.   You say it happened, they say it did not.   You say it had to, they say it cannot.   They pull at a thread of pain left by someone in your mind, and sew an entire ghost out of you.   Build you a dark wonderland and ask you to call it home. Tell you, ‘Why can’t you just be happy?’ And you cannot because happiness in this story is a queen you do not trust being built from your own delusions.   When this happens, you are like the Hatter. Trapped here in this fairytale world, half mad because someone you love keeps lying to you. Is this rain, dear? No it isn’t, it’s a raven.   Is this a door? No, it is a writing desk.   Is this my mind? No, it is now my rabbit hole, and I’m going to make you fall so far down there is no way out.   This is why the raven becomes like a writing desk, nonsensical riddles and memories become valid, nothing makes sense anymore anyway.   You start wondering if anything you ever thought happened to you actually happened to you and this is their violence. This is their abuse. It has left bruises and gashes along your brain that no one else knows are there.   Doubting yourself is now a reflex. Trusting yourself is no longer muscle memory but a long, strenuous process.   They called the Hatter completely mad. Because he is cursed to both remember and to forget. They call me mad too because my curse is to heal through remembering everything you tried to make me forget.

I built, of blocks, a town three hundred thousand strong, whose avenues were paved with a wine-colored rug and decorated by large leaves outlined inappropriately in orange, and on this leafage I'd often park my Tootsie Toy trucks, as if on pads of camouflage, waiting their deployment against catastrophes which included alien invasions, internal treachery, and world war. It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town's construction, every toy I possessed: my electronic train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails. In time, the armies, the citizens, even the streets would divide: loyalties, friendships, certainties, would be undermined, the city would be shaken by strife; and marbles would rain down from formerly friendly planes, steeples would topple onto cars, and shellfire would soon throw aggie holes through homes, soldiers would die accompanied by my groans, and ragged bands of refugees would flee toward mountain caves and other chairs and tables.

The Universe is made of hands; Hands that twist fabric and sizzle in the air. Hands that grasp curls and flick words away Small, smooth fingers pouring gold over gaping wounds Before slicing into soft tissue, Blood mixing with gold. Hands that make it beautiful.   The Universe is made of bones; Bones that cut against yards of skin, Warm and yielding and moulded around the wings that splay across his back. Bones that cage the heart and dig into the hollows. Bones that break, Tear the warm, yielding skin. Bones that shred and brush his chin.   The Universe is made of lips; Lips that breathe and stutter warm sighs, Caressing the cracks in his broken body, the body that he broke. Lips that carve paths into stone, That leave trails upon gooseflesh, Lips that make incisions, Too delicate to mend.   The Universe is made of blood; Blood that runs warm and hot and steady and crimson, Pumping beneath the stone and the gold. Blood that burns with every jerk of limbs. Blood that spills on open palms, Staining the fabric, Filling up his throat.   The Universe is made of eyes; “Eyes that breach and eyes that splice and eyes that never leave. Eyes that ripple oceans. Eyes that whisper in the dark. Eyes that rip open the seams. Eyes that create wounds, create chaos, create broken shards of blue. Eyes that alight and won t  let  go.   The Universe was built. The Universe fell. You took it apart, Dragged the chaos from my soul with your hands, Your bones, Your lips, Your blood, Your eyes.   And now you’re back. And so is the Universe. And so, I suppose, am I. The Universe is made of five things. The Universe is made of you.

If a man jumped as high as a louse (lice), he would jump over a football field. In Ancient Egypt, the average life expectancy was 19 years, but for those who survived childhood, the average life expectancy was 30 years for women and 34 years for men. The volume of the moon is equivalent to the volume of the water in the Pacific Ocean. After the 9/11 incident, the Queen of England authorized the guards to break their vow and sing America’s national anthem for Americans living in London. In 1985, lifeguards of New Orleans threw a pool party to celebrate zero drownings, however, a man drowned in that party. Men and women have different dreams. 70 percent of characters in men’s dreams are other men, whereas in women its 50 percent men and 50 percent women. Men also act more aggressively in dreams than women. A polar bear has a black skin. 2.84 percent of deaths are caused by intentional injuries (suicides, violence, war) while 3.15 percent are caused by diarrhea. On average people are more afraid of spiders than they are afraid of death. A bumblebee has hairs on its eyes, helping it collect the pollen. Mickey Mouse’s creator, Walt Disney feared mice. Citarum river in Indonesia is the dirtiest and most polluted river in the world. When George R R Martin saw Breaking Bad’s episode called “Ozymandias”, he called Walter White and said that he’d write up a character more monstrous than him. Maria Sharapova’s grunt is the loudest in the Tennis game and is often criticized for being a distraction. In Mandarin Chinese, the word for “kangaroo” translates literally to “bag rat”. The first product to have a barcode was a chewing gum Wrigley. Chambarakat dam in Iraq is considered the most dangerous dam in the world as it is built upon uneven base of gypsum that can cause more than 500,000 casualties, if broken. Matt Urban was an American Lieutenant Colonel who was nicknamed “The Ghost” by Germans because he always used to come back from wounds that would kill normal people.

A future where disability justice won looks like queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, folks of colour, and women, girls, and nonbinary humans are living in a world where disability is the norm, and where access is no longer a question but a fait accompli. Gone are the days where our disabled bodies and minds are compared to the able-bodied and able-minded. We’ve flipped the script. We still like our non-queer, non–people of colour, non-disabled friends and we’ll have them at our fully accessible dance parties (which include comfy chairs and couches for our aches and pains, subwoofers that make you feel the vibrations, active listeners, and personal support workers, so we can fully enjoy our time out, and plenty of room as well as fully accessible bathrooms for wheelchair-users to dance, dance, and dance as well as pee with ease, and no stairs in sight and clear paths to sway or rest as we please). Because, please, did you really think this could go on, this able-bodied and -minded domination? It’s not that we’ve flipped the script to exert power and replicate oppressions on our able-bodied and able-minded friends, they just over time learned to not take up so much space and not be offended or feel left out if we don’t organize with them in mind. Actually, in our accessible/disabled future, binaries are broken. We fully live on and in the spectrum of possibilities of non-stigmatized minds and bodies. In this spectrum, we are fully connected to one another, which means that decolonization has happened and is still happening and that patriarchy has been toppled and much more. This interconnectedness that we now live daily means that sometimes our able-bodied and able-minded friends are learning every day, including from their mistakes, and are understanding in how many ways our differences and disabilities manifest. This also means that we have collectively built this future and thus have learned and understood differences and disabilities, and all of us are still doing that important work even when it is hard because this future world is ours! -KARINE MYRGIANIE JEAN-FRANÇOIS AND NELLY BASSILY, DAWN (DISABLED WOMEN’S NETWORK) CANADA

That, for a while, seemed like life. And if I was really being honest with myself, I wasn’t into it. The only option was to sit in the pews every Sunday at church and casually wonder if I was going to go to hell because of who I was? No, thank you. Or to understand that the structures on which the country was built were engineered against me? Hard pass. What choice did I have besides constantly code-switching between identities as a means of hiding in plain sight? And wasn’t it just normal to feel like such a mistake as an adult that every time I walked over a bridge or stood on a subway platform, I had to talk myself out of stepping over the edge? I came to believe I was a monster and that I deserved to feel the way I felt. And I didn’t want to turn the page. But through it all there was a constant tethering me to the idea of a future: the library. The library is the place where I could borrow first Grover’s philosophical tome, then a couple of Choose Your Own Adventures I could cheat at, and later a stack of mysteries I could spoil for myself, all attempts to look for some other way of understanding who I was. In the book stacks, I found The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple and Giovanni’s Room and David Rakoff’s Fraud and more. I saw a new vision of Otherness in those books, and the pages kept turning. At the end of every one was a wall waiting to be broken down—a lurch toward becoming—a new paragraph in a story with an ending far different from what I’d ever dared imagine. Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.” It seems simple but it’s a bold declaration. How many times in life do we receive the message, implicit or explicit, that what we’ve experienced or what we feel isn’t noteworthy or remarkable? The books that I found in the library, ones that I deeply understood and ones that seemed so outside of my experience they might as well have been written in Klingon, all carried the same hopes: to be seen, to be heard, to exist.

Ronan hadn't thought much about the future. This was a way he and Adam had always been opposites. Adam seemed to only think about the future. He thought about what he wanted to happen days or weeks or years down the road, and then he backfilled actions to make it happen. He was good at depriving himself in the now in order to have something better in the later. Ronan, on the other hand, couldn't seem to get out of the now. He always remembered consequences too late. After a bloody nose. A broken friendship. A huge tattoo. A cat with human hands. But his head didn't seem built to hold the future. He could imagine it for just a few seconds until, like a weak muscle, his thoughts collapsed back into the present. But there was one future he could imagine. It was a little bit of a cheat, because it was buried in a memory, and Ronan was better at thinking of the past than the future. It was an indulgent memory, too, one he'd never have copped to out loud. There wasn't much to it. It was from the summer after Adam had graduated, the summer he'd spent with Ronan at the Barns. Ronan had come in from working on the fences outdoors and tossed his work gloves onto the grass-cluttered rug by the mudroom door. As he did, he'd seen that Adam's mechanic gloves were lined up neatly on top of his shoes. Ronan had already known Adam was inside the house, but nonetheless, the image made him pause. They were just gloves, grease-stained and very old. Thrifty Adam always tried to get as much wear out of things as possible. They were long and narrow like Adam himself, and despite their age and stains, they were otherwise impeccably clean. Ronan's work gloves, in comparison, were cruddy and creased and coarse-looking, tossed with carefree abandon, the fingers lassoed over Adam's. Seeing the two pairs tumbled together, a nameless feeling had suddenly overwhelmed Ronan. It was about Adam's gloves here, but it was also Adam's jacket tossed on the dining room chair, his soda can forgotten on the foyer table, him somewhere tossed with equal comfort in the Barns, his presence commonplace enough that he was not having to perform or engage with Ronan at all times. He was not dating Ronan; he was living in Ronan's life with him. Shoes kicked off by the door, gloves off.

We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams; — World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems. With wonderful deathless ditties We build up the world's great cities, And out of a fabulous story We fashion an empire's glory: One man with a dream, at pleasure, Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song's measure Can trample a kingdom down. We, in the ages lying, In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself in our mirth; And o'erthrew them with prophesying To the old of the new world's worth; For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that is coming to birth. A breath of our inspiration Is the life of each generation; A wondrous thing of our dreaming Unearthly, impossible seeming — The soldier, the king, and the peasant Are working together in one, Till our dream shall become their present, And their work in the world be done. They had no vision amazing Of the goodly house they are raising; They had no divine foreshowing Of the land to which they are going: But on one man's soul it hath broken, A light that doth not depart; And his look, or a word he hath spoken, Wrought flame in another man's heart. And therefore to-day is thrilling With a past day's late fulfilling; And the multitudes are enlisted In the faith that their fathers resisted, And, scorning the dream of to-morrow, Are bringing to pass, as they may, In the world, for its joy or its sorrow, The dream that was scorned yesterday. But we, with our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see, Our souls with high music ringing: O men! it must ever be That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. For we are afar with the dawning And the suns that are not yet high, And out of the infinite morning Intrepid you hear us cry — How, spite of your human scorning, Once more God's future draws nigh, And already goes forth the warning That ye of the past must die. Great hail! we cry to the comers From the dazzling unknown shore; Bring us hither your sun and your summers; And renew our world as of yore; You shall teach us your song's new numbers, And things that we dreamed not before: Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers, And a singer who sings no more.

Kanya looks away. "You deserve it. It's your kamma. Your death will be painful." "Karma? Did you say karma?" The doctor leans closer, brown eyes rolling, tongue lolling. "And what sort of karma is it that ties your entire country to me, to my rotting broken body? What sort of karma is it that behooves you to keep me, of all people, alive?" He grins. "I think a great deal about your karma. Perhaps it's your pride, your hubris that is being repaid, that forces you to lap seedstock from my hand. Or perhaps you're the vehicle of my enlightenment and salvation. Who knows? Perhaps I'll be reborn at the right hand of Buddha thanks to the kindnesses I do for you." "That's not the way it works." The doctor shrugs. "I don't care. Just give me another like Kip to fuck. Throw me another of your sickened lost souls. Throw me a windup. I don't care. I'll take what flesh you throw me. Just don't bother me. I'm beyond worrying about your rotting country now." He tosses the papers into the pool. They scatter across the water. Kanya gasps, horrified, and nearly lunges after them before steeling herself and forcing herself to draw back. She will not allow Gibbons to bait her. This is the way of the calorie man. Always manipulating. Always testing. She forces herself to look away from the parchment slowly soaking in the pool and turn her eyes to him. Gibbons smiles slightly. "Well? Are you going to swim for them or not?" He nods at Kip. "My little nymph will help you. I'd enjoy seeing you two little nymphs frolicking together." Kanya shakes her head. "Get them out yourself." "I always like it when an upright person such as yourself comes before me. A woman with pure convictions." He leans forward, eyes narrowed. "Someone with real qualifications to judge my work." "You were a killer." "I advanced my field. It wasn't my business what they did with my research. You have a spring gun. It's not the manufacturer's fault that you are likely unreliable. That you may at any time kill the wrong person. I built the tools of life. If people use them for their own ends, then that is their karma, not mine." "AgriGen paid you well to think so." "AgriGen paid me well to make them rich. My thoughts are my own." He studies Kanya. "I suppose you have a clean conscience. One of those upright Ministry officers. As pure as your uniform. As clean as sterilizer can make you." He leans forward. "Tell me, do you take bribes?" Kanya opens her mouth to retort, but words fail her. She can almost feel Jaidee drifting close. Listening. Her skin prickles. She forces himself not to look over her shoulder. Gibbons smiles. "Of course you do. All of your kind are the same. Corrupt from top to bottom.

Mark swings his own door open and meets us by the tailgate. "Why don't we ask Emma who she's coming with? I mean, it's her choice, right?" The look Galen gives me is clear: Take care of this, or I will. Or maybe it's more like, It would be my pleasure to take care of this. Either way, I don't want Mark taken care of. Standing between them, the testosterone-to-air ratio is almost suffocating. If I pick Galen, the chances of Mark ever calling me again are as good as Galen eating a whole cheesecake by himself. If I choose Mark, the changes of Galen not wielding his built-in brass knuckles are as good as Rayna giving someone a compliment. My desire to salvage this date with Mark is almost as strong as my desire to salvage his face from certain disfigurement. But salvaging the date as opposed to his face would be selfish in the long run. I sigh in defeat. "I'm sorry, Mark." Mark lets out a gust of air. "Ouch." Scratching the back of his neck, he chuckles. "I guess I should be more superstitious, huh?" He's right. I screwed this up. I should have salvaged the date, his pride. And I should have broken Galen's Royal nose with my own Syrena fist. I turn to His Highness. "Galen, could you give me a minute please? You'll have the next hour to talk to me since you're taking me straight home." Without a word, Galen nods and walks away. I can't quite meet Mark's eyes when I say, "I'm so sorry. I don't know what his deal is. He never acts like this." Except that time he beat Toraf like a stepchild on the beach when he kissed me. But only because Toraf betrayed Rayna. Right? Mark smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes. "Can't say I blame him. I can already tell you're worth it. I just never had the guts to ask you out. Chloe threatened my life. You know that chick could hit like a man, right? She said you were too good for me. I think she was right." "Wh...what? Chloe knew you liked me?" "Yeah. She never told you? Course not. She thought I was a player." I not, still too stunned that my best friend also acted as my bodyguard without me knowing. "She did think you were a player. And she couldn't definitely hit like a man." "That's what my friend Jax says anyway." Then a little lower, "Geez, Galen's watching me like a hawk right now. He has serial-killer eyes, you know that?" I giggle. "What do you think he'd do if I kissed you good-bye on the cheek?" he whispers conspiratorially. "Don't worry, I'll protect you." He has no idea how serious I am. As he leans in, I brace myself. At the slightest spark of electricity, I'm prepared to turn around with my fists up. But the lightning doesn't strike. Galen is behaving for now. As Mark pulls away from his barely there peck, he sighs. "Do me a favor," he whispers. "Mmm?" "Keep my number. Give me a call if he screws up again." I smile. "I will, I promise. I had a good time tonight." Did the date and Mark's face get salvaged? Do I have a chance to redeem myself with him? He chuckles. "Yeah, glad we got to drive here from Middle Point together. next time, we'll make it a real adventure and take the bus. See you at school, Emma." "Bye.

A Tale of Two Parking Requirements The impact of parking requirements becomes clearer when we compare the parking requirements of San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Francisco limits off-street parking, while LA requires it. Take, for example, the different parking requirements for concert halls. For a downtown concert hall, Los Angeles requires, as a minimum, fifty times more parking than San Francisco allows as its maximum. Thus the San Francisco Symphony built its home, Louise Davies Hall, without a parking garage, while Disney Hall, the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, did not open until seven years after its parking garage was built. Disney Hall's six-level, 2,188-space underground garage cost $110 million to build (about $50,000 per space). Financially troubled Los Angeles County, which built the garage, went into debt to finance it, expecting that parking revenues would repay the borrowed money. But the garage was completed in 1996, and Disney Hall—which suffered from a budget less grand than its vision—became knotted in delays and didn't open until late 2003. During the seven years in between, parking revenue fell far short of debt payments (few people park in an underground structure if there is nothing above it) and the county, by that point nearly bankrupt, had to subsidize the garage even as it laid employees off. The money spent on parking shifted Disney Hall's design toward drivers and away from pedestrians. The presence of a six-story subterranean garage means most concert patrons arrive from underneath the hall, rather than from the sidewalk. The hall's designers clearly understood this, and so while the hall has a fairly impressive street entrance, its more magisterial gateway is an "escalator cascade" that flows up from the parking structure and ends in the foyer. This has profound implications for street life. A concertgoer can now drive to Disney Hall, park beneath it, ride up into it, see a show, and then reverse the whole process—and never set foot on a sidewalk in downtown LA. The full experience of an iconic Los Angeles building begins and ends in its parking garage, not in the city itself. Visitors to downtown San Francisco have a different experience. When a concert or theater performance lets out in San Francisco, people stream onto the sidewalks, strolling past the restaurants, bars, bookstores, and flower shops that are open and well-lit. For those who have driven, it is a long walk to the car, which is probably in a public facility unattached to any specific restaurant or shop. The presence of open shops and people on the street encourages other people to be out as well. People want to be on streets with other people on them, and they avoid streets that are empty, because empty streets are eerie and menacing at night. Although the absence of parking requirements does not guarantee a vibrant area, their presence certainly inhibits it. "The more downtown is broken up and interspersed with parking lots and garages," Jane Jacobs argued in 1961, "the duller and deader it becomes ... and there is nothing more repellent than a dead downtown.

If a man can only obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a revolutionary); he acts out of anger, disappointment, resentment, yet not in the name of a conviction or a principle. … Obedience to a person, institution or power (heteronomous obedience) is submission; it implies the abdication of my autonomy and the acceptance of a foreign will or judgment in place of my own. Obedience to my own reason or conviction (autonomous obedience) is not an act of submission but one of affirmation. My conviction and my judgment, if authentically mine, are part of me. If I follow them rather than the judgment of others, I am being myself; (p. 6) In order to disobey, one must have the courage to be alone, to err and to sin. ... …; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth. (p. 8) At this point in history the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization. (p. 10) It is the function of the prophet to show reality, to show alternatives and to protest; it is his function to call loudly, to awake man from his customary half-slumber. It is the historical situation which makes prophets, not the wish of some men to be prophets. (p. 12) Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see (p. 17) That which was the greatest criticism of socialism fifty years ago—that it would lead to uniformity, bureaucratization, centralization, and a soulless materialism—is a reality of today’s capitalism. (p. 31) Man, instead of being the master of the machines he has built, has become their servant. But man is not made to be a thing, and with all the satisfactions of consumption, the life forces in man cannot be held in abeyance continuously. We have only one choice, and that is mastering the machine again, making production into a means and not an end, using it for the unfolding of man—or else the suppressed life energies will manifest themselves in chaotic and destructive forms. Man will want to destroy life rather than die of boredom. (p. 32) The supreme loyalty of man must be to the human race and to the moral principles of humanism. (p. 38) The individual must be protected from fear and the need to submit to anyone’s coercion. (p. 42) Not only in the sphere of political decisions, but with regard to all decisions and arrangements, the grip of the bureaucracy must be broken in order to restore freedom. (p. 42) According to its basic principles, the aim of socialism is the abolition of national sovereignty, the abolition of any kind of armed forces, and the establishment of a commonwealth of nations. (p. 43) It is exactly the weakness of contemporary society that it offers no ideals, that it demands no faith, that it has no vision—except that of more of the same. (p. 49) Socialism must be radical. To be radical is to go to the roots; and the root is Man. (p. 49)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

There are many who profess to be religious and speak of themselves as Christians, and, according to one such, “as accepting the scriptures only as sources of inspiration and moral truth,” and then ask in their smugness: “Do the revelations of God give us a handrail to the kingdom of God, as the Lord’s messenger told Lehi, or merely a compass?” Unfortunately, some are among us who claim to be Church members but are somewhat like the scoffers in Lehi’s vision—standing aloof and seemingly inclined to hold in derision the faithful who choose to accept Church authorities as God’s special witnesses of the gospel and his agents in directing the affairs of the Church. There are those in the Church who speak of themselves as liberals who, as one of our former presidents has said, “read by the lamp of their own conceit.” (Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine [Deseret Book Co., 1939], p. 373.) One time I asked one of our Church educational leaders how he would define a liberal in the Church. He answered in one sentence: “A liberal in the Church is merely one who does not have a testimony.” Dr. John A. Widtsoe, former member of the Quorum of the Twelve and an eminent educator, made a statement relative to this word liberal as it applied to those in the Church. This is what he said: “The self-called liberal [in the Church] is usually one who has broken with the fundamental principles or guiding philosophy of the group to which he belongs. . . . He claims membership in an organization but does not believe in its basic concepts; and sets out to reform it by changing its foundations. . . . “It is folly to speak of a liberal religion, if that religion claims that it rests upon unchanging truth.” And then Dr. Widtsoe concludes his statement with this: “It is well to beware of people who go about proclaiming that they are or their churches are liberal. The probabilities are that the structure of their faith is built on sand and will not withstand the storms of truth.” (“Evidences and Reconciliations,” Improvement Era, vol. 44 [1941], p. 609.) Here again, to use the figure of speech in Lehi’s vision, they are those who are blinded by the mists of darkness and as yet have not a firm grasp on the “iron rod.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, when there are questions which are unanswered because the Lord hasn’t seen fit to reveal the answers as yet, all such could say, as Abraham Lincoln is alleged to have said, “I accept all I read in the Bible that I can understand, and accept the rest on faith.” . . . Wouldn’t it be a great thing if all who are well schooled in secular learning could hold fast to the “iron rod,” or the word of God, which could lead them, through faith, to an understanding, rather than to have them stray away into strange paths of man-made theories and be plunged into the murky waters of disbelief and apostasy? . . . Cyprian, a defender of the faith in the Apostolic Period, testified, and I quote, “Into my heart, purified of all sin, there entered a light which came from on high, and then suddenly and in a marvelous manner, I saw certainty succeed doubt.” . . . The Lord issued a warning to those who would seek to destroy the faith of an individual or lead him away from the word of God or cause him to lose his grasp on the “iron rod,” wherein was safety by faith in a Divine Redeemer and his purposes concerning this earth and its peoples. The Master warned: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better … that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” (Matt. 18:6.) The Master was impressing the fact that rather than ruin the soul of a true believer, it were better for a person to suffer an earthly death than to incur the penalty of jeopardizing his own eternal destiny.

Remember, the anvil does not get broken even if you keep on striking it, but it breaks all the hammers. You must do the same. Just hold on, and these fires will not consume you. If the fire should burn up your piety, it would only prove that your piety was not worth having. If you cannot stand a few jokes and jeers, then you are not built together in that habitation of God that He has made fireproof. Endure to the end, and you will find that this difficult situation, this severe discipline, did you much good and made you a better man than you ever would have been if you had been gently rocked on the lap of piety and kept from the battle.

2020 Quarantine Killings by Playon Patrick And they ask: how do black boys write about their city? How do we know street if we don't know un-cracked sidewalk? They ask: how do these black boys know anything about their city? How the buildings are sitting on corners where brothers' bodies are still learning how to rot. There are small crosses placed in the grass where families cannot afford to bury their loved ones Reminds my brothers and I that we are early graves before we are anything else. We call those corners playgrounds, We call those corners the killing fields. We call our bodies bullets even if we were never aimed in the right direction We called the remnants of our mother's family the Diaspora tree. We make a catalog of prayers out of broken hands We pray for our family tree to make its way back home to this soil. We use our hands to dig the graves we cannot afford. We are farmers - our broken black bodies - We have never know city, never known comfort, Never known safe street in any city. We use our feet to walk streets paved by sunlight, And asked our shadows if they meant to choose this skin. We make a catalyst of bodies our dinner menu And we eat with our eyes closed. We are fed lies so easily it tastes like medicine. Always conflicted between being black and being people. I wish God could have given us a choice. For years we have been told that there is something we need to scrub off this body As if this dirt could go away Working in the field make you realize how easily black can cook in the sun. How easily we turn on each other for a little slice of the pie. We don't know this city - how it was built with our grandmother's arthritic hands. how we wouldn't have gotten a house or a bed when it was first built When it was first settled - when it was first taken from the Indians When our God believed in the same beginning. We don't know home. We don't know how generations of our people could use these legs Could run miles on end into the night Our faces bedazzled with the remnants of the stars We will forever search for our forefathers' footsteps We don't know home - we know run We know this land has never been ours We know how to fold ourselves into nothing We know our sweat and tears tenderize this soil Somehow we make fertilizer for the soil We know how to make these hands be useful We are the farmers of every revolution No country was built without the piling up of dead bodies This country just happens to be where our dead were dragged and hung up. America: the land of the free and home of the brave We fought and died for that slogan right beside our white brothers Doesn't that make us worth something? Tonight a riot is the language of the unheard

Resolve painful joints. Stop the bleeding before going any further. You now know that working through joint pain means that you are actively fraying connective tissue fibers and damaging nerves. It’s not OK to work through joint pain. Toughing it out is dumb. Plain and simple. So before worrying about your beach body or how you will deadlift 600 pounds, work on establishing a baseline of pain-free movement capability.

I released a long breath, letting my eyes fall closed once more and taking comfort from the touch of all four of my kings surrounding me. I may have been lost and grieving all over again. But no one could take this from me. The five of us right here were it. Family. One we'd built for ourselves and which no one could ever steal from us. Five broken, hurting souls who had needed each other so much that despite the many obstacles placed between us, we'd finally figured out where we belonged in the world. And that was right here. Together.

It’s not so much that a strong or weak currency is inherently good or bad per se, but rather that an artificially strong or weak currency relative to a country’s trade balance is bad. If a country has a persistent trade surplus but constantly weakens its otherwise-appreciating currency by accumulating central bank reserves (mercantilism), then value is siphoned away from workers and toward the leaders. Similarly, if a country has a persistent trade deficit but has an extra monetary premium built onto its otherwise-depreciating currency due to its imperial prowess, then its workers are not very competitive in terms of global labor rates and will likely stagnate, while their political leaders, multinational corporations, and wealthy elite will thrive.

Hunt held Rigelus’s dead stare on the central screen. A zap of icy wind through his body courtesy of Sandriel warned him to avert his eyes. He did not. He could have sworn the Head of the Asteri smiled. Hunt’s blood turned to ice, not just from Sandriel’s wind, and he lowered his eyes. This empire had been built to last for eternity. In more than fifteen thousand years, it had not broken. This war would not be the thing that ended it. The Asteri said together, “Farewell.” Another small smile from all of them—the worst being Rigelus’s, still directed at Hunt. The screens went dark.

Adaptations in your brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nerves can outlast the original injury and lead to structure changes, which include the sprouting of new nerve endings and the formation of new synapses between neurons.

catastrophizing—when fear of additional pain and injury becomes exaggerated. Pain scientists have found that catastrophizing leads to negative outcomes independent of the actual pain.

you can work through discomfort safely just by reducing the weight and slowing down the repetition speed to at least three seconds during the lifting (concentric) phase and three seconds during the lowering (eccentric) phase.

10 pounds of weight loss equals about 40 pounds of stress relief on your knees.

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.

What’s not always so clear in our minds is that the process of acquiring money has a range of built-in psychological opportunity costs that we too easily ignore. We pay for our wealth with broken nights, fractious relationships, distant family ties – at times, with life itself. We should look not only at the money we have accumulated, but also at the calm that we have forfeited while doing so.

Pedagogically speaking, a good share of physics and mathematics was—and is—writing differential equations on a blackboard and showing students how to solve them. Differential equations represent reality as a continuum, changing smoothly from place to place and from time to time, not broken in discrete grid points or time steps. As every science student knows, solving differential equations is hard. But in two and a half centuries, scientists have built up a tremendous body of knowledge about them: handbooks and catalogues of differential equations, along with various methods for solving them, or “finding a closed-form integral,” as a scientist will say. It is no exaggeration to say that the vast business of calculus made possible most of the practical triumphs of post-medieval science; nor to say that it stands as one of the most ingenious creations of humans trying to model the changeable world around them. So by the time a scientist masters this way of thinking about nature, becoming comfortable with the theory and the hard, hard practice, he is likely to have lost sight of one fact. Most differential equations cannot be solved at all.

St Paul's cathedral stands like a cornered beast on Ludgate hill, taking deep breaths above the smoke.  The fire has made terrifying progress in the night and is closing in on the ancient monument from three directions.  Built of massive stones, the cathedral is held to be invincible, but suddenly Pegge sees what the flames covet: the two hundred and fifty feet of scaffolding erected around the broken tower.  Once the flames have a foothold on the wooden scaffolds,, they can jump to the lead roof, and once the timbers burn and the vaulting cracks, the cathedral will be toppled by its own mass, a royal bear brought down by common dogs.

Load training is the only therapeutic intervention that addresses all five primary causes of joint pain—posture, movement quality, muscle imbalances, tendinopathy, and collagen degradation.

When there’s no power in my life, instead of going from place to place, conference to conference trying to find it, I need to stop and get into the Word so that the Word can get in me. I’m lacking because there is a lack of seed growing in me. It begins with the Seed of the Word. If I am in a love deficit with the Father, turning to someone else to fill that deficit isn’t going to do it. There is a better way. Take ten passages about His love and get the Seed down into you. Then, in community, let that seed be watered by other people’s words falling on top of the written Word in you. Let the podcasts and conference speakers water what is already growing in you. Over time, you will find that you have fruit. You will begin to believe the Word. You will begin to shape your thoughts according to that Truth. You will have a new confidence, built not on faith, or circumstances, but on the very principles of the Word of God.

wobble boards, BOSU balls, or the inflatable Swiss balls.

Pain has a dual role in your body: communication and protection. It is the body’s last resort mechanism to get your attention. You have ignored the subtle signals that your body has sent you: the strange feelings, muscle tightness, reduced range of motion, and so on. To make you take notice and stop your destructive behavior, your body is forced to take harsh action and makes you hurt—terribly. Your pain is trying to help you prevent further or more serious injury.

Federation of State High School Associations showed that single-sport athletes are 70% more likely to suffer an injury than are multisport athletes.

This is the most important injury-prevention lesson in the book: being sedentary all week and then playing golf or tennis on the weekend is the easiest way to get injured and develop joint pain. Even within daily time periods, being sedentary all day and then exercising intensely for one hour will lead to injury. It might show up as tendinopathy, or it might be an acute tear or sprain. But it will happen.

you must challenge your joints with weights around 80% of your one-repetition maximum to elicit the greatest adaptive response. This equates to a weight you can lift about eight times before reaching failure. Unsurprisingly, eight times is also in the range of recommended reps for building muscle.

Stretching has its place. But mobility training, corrective exercise, and adding more varied movement are much more effective strategies.

It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out—it’s the grain of sand in your shoe. — Anonymous