Calm Rain Quotes

Sunlight shines beauty aglow, by the banks of the river that quietly flow. Misty rain yields comfort to a muggy night. Wind of a gentle breeze, calming the skies destine of rendering light.

A mystical rain calming a boisterous night. A sensuous breeze sending leaves into flight. A beautiful flower reminding one of a more treasured hour. A wandering mind wanting for a better world.

Don't let the rain drive you to the wrong shelter; the shade can turn out to be your protector and also your destroyer, and sometimes the rain is the perfect protector from the rain.

[...] just remember, the storm doesn't last forever. It can scare you; it can shake you to your core. But it never lasts. The rain subsides, the thunder dies, and the winds calm to a soft whisper. And that moment after the storm clouds pass, when all is silent and still, you find peace. Quiet, gentle peace.

You have traveled too fast over false ground; Now your soul has come to take you back. Take refuge in your senses, open up To all the small miracles you rushed through. Become inclined to watch the way of rain When it falls slow and free. Imitate the habit of twilight, Taking time to open the well of color That fostered the brightness of day. Draw alongside the silence of stone Until its calmness can claim you.

I was already beginning to realize that the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past, was to accept the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help.

Our time together feels like a storm, like wild wind and rain, like something too big to handle but too powerful to escape. It blows around me and tangles my hair, leaves water on my face, makes me know that I am alive, alive, alive. There are moments of calm and pause as there are in every storm, and moments when our words fork lightening, at least for each other.

Rain clouds come floating in, not to muddy my days ahead, but to make me calm, happy and hopeful.

Please calm yourselves and stop talking. Plan A01: Rain Destruction has been superseded by Plan B01: Distract and Extract.

...when I think of you it's with tears, because no one else has such delicate hands that can reach into my soul and calm my fears...

Through wind, and tempest, storm, and rain; The calm shall be buried inside of me; A warm stone, heavy and dry; The root, the source, a weapon against pain

Tara. I'm a vampire," Pearl said. "Yeah, whatever, and I'm queen of the sea." "Your Marine Majesty, I'm a vampire," Pearl said. Concentrating, she slid her fangs out. "Tara. Tara!" She curled back her lips to expose the points. "See" Tara screamed. "I won't hurt you," Pearl said. Calm down. Sheesh." Tara continued to scream. Pearl considered biting her merely to shut her up. Regrettably that would be counter productive. Studying her nails, she waited for Tara to quit screaming. She noticed that Tara didn't try to exit the car, which was an interesting choice. "You aren't running away," Pearl said. "Duh, it's raining outside," Tara said.

When the sun sets like fire, I will think of you, when the moon casts its light, I'll remember, too, if a soft rain falls gently, I'll stand in this place, recalling the last time, I saw your kind face. Good fortune go with you, to your journey's end, let the waters run calmly, for you, my dear friend.

Life isn't a lazy cruise on some endless, calm, and temperate sea. Life is a raging ocean with swells and tidal waves that wreck and sink your boat. Life is a series of storms―overcast skies, fierce winds, and pelting rain. You were meant to be immersed in it all―first to float, then swim, and eventually to walk on water.

May the sun smile sweetly. May the rain fall softly. May a breeze ruffle your hair. May your host receive you with charm. May your rest be calm. May you be glad wherever you are.

...I got to love solitude - to see the Moon rise and set - I had time to watch it trace the window square across the wall in silent grace...

You know those days when you've got the means reds?’ ‘Same as the blues?’ ‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘No, the blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re sad that’s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid, and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is. You’ve had that feeling?’ ‘Quite often. Some people call it angst.’ ‘All right. Angst. But what do you do about it?’ ‘Well, a drink helps.’ ‘I’ve tried that. I’ve tried aspirin, too. Rusty thinks I should smoke marijuana, and I did for a while, but it only makes me giggle. What I’ve found does the most good is to just get into a taxi and go to Tiffany’s. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.

Take refuge in your senses, open up to all the small miracles you rushed through. Become inclined to watch the way of rain when it falls slow and free... Draw alongside the silence of stone until its calmness can claim you.

It shouldn't have mattered, not when Miel and the other girls in his class wore jeans more than they wore skirts. Not when they told their brothers what to do, and borrowed their fathers' books. But there was everything else. The idea of being called Miss or Ms. or worse, Mrs. The thought of being grouped in when someone called out 'girls' or 'ladies.' The endless, echoing use of 'she' and 'her,' 'miss' and 'ma'am.' Yes, they were words. They were all just words. But each of them was wrong, and they stuck to him. Each one was a golden fire ant, and they were biting his arms and his neck and his bound-flat chest, leaving him bleeding and burning. 'He.' 'Him.' 'Mister.' 'Sir.' Even teachers admonishing him and his classmates with 'boys, settle down' or 'gentlemen, please.' These were sounds as perfect and clean as winter rain, and they calmed each searing bite of those wrong words.

I covet him. His hot body over mine, sweaty and smelling like grass after the rain. I want to live that moment of Eros again and again and again. Never having enough of him, the masculine image of me, a piece of art, unique masterpiece of God, that is calmly sleeping beside me.

He thought perhaps it was a woman's way, to come out of such a storm of emotion and pain as if she were a ship emerging onto calm seas. She had seemed, not at peace, but emptied of sorrow. As if she had run out of that particular emotion and no other one arose to take its place.

Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.

If I could take a bite of the whole world And feel it on my palate I’d be more happy for a minute or so... But I don’t always want to be happy. Sometimes you have to be Unhappy to be natural... Not every day is sunny. When there’s been no rain for a while, you pray for it to come. So I take unhappiness with happiness Naturally, like someone who doesn’t find it strange That there are mountains and plains And that there are cliffs and grass... What you need is to be natural and calm In happiness and in unhappiness, To feel like someone seeing, To think like someone walking, And when it’s time to die, remember the day dies, And the sunset is beautiful, and the endless night is beautiful... That’s how it is and that’s how it should be...

Just think," I say, trying to calm her down. "The two of us naked in a car, but safe and sound all the same, kissing each other to the clap of thunder and the sound of the driving rain!" "This is impossible," she says. "But just think. Wouldn't you like, from this snug little shelter in the midst of cosmic rage, to stick your tongue out to the entire world?

You make me calm,” I said quietly, “or at least calmer. How do you know how to do that? The way you touch me, the way you look at me…I don’t know what it means.

The prophecy is here: When the storm calms, when rain and fire again leave the country in peace, the world will no longer be the world, but something better.

Happy comes and goes, Tats. Loving someone isn’t that crazy infatuation that you feel at first. That passes. Well, not passes, but it calms down, and then sometimes, when you least expect it, you get a glimpse of the person and it all comes back again, in a big rush. But even that’s not what you’re looking for. What you’re looking for is the feeling that no matter what, being with that person is always going to be better than being without that person. Good times or bad. That having that person around makes whatever you’re going through better, or at least more tolerable.

The rain has stopped, the air is mild, the sky slowly rolls up fine black images : it is more than enough to frame the perfect moment ; to reflect these images, she would cause dark little tides to be born in our hearts. I don't know how to take advantage of the occasion : I walk at random, calm and empty, under this wasted sky.

Not if we kill them—” I began, only to cut off when a sudden rushing noise filled the air. And Ray grabbed my gun and went ballistic on something on the wall over our heads. “Die! Die! Die!” he screamed, emptying the clip and causing spent shells to rain down all around us. And okay, maybe I’d been wrong about the calm thing. Because he was just standing there, trembling and panting and staring— At the air-conditioning vent that he’d just shot the crap out of. “—first.” I took my smoking gun out of his limp fingers and patted him on the back. “See? That’s the spirit.

There's a girl calm people don't know about. It's a girl teen standstill. A motionless peace. It doesn't come from anywhere but inside us, and it only lasts for a few years. It's born from being a not woman yet. It's free flowing and invisible. It's the eye of the violent storm you call my teenage daughter. In this place we are undisturbed by all the moronic things you think about us. Our voices like rain falling. We are serene. Smooth. With more perfect hair and skin than you will ever again know. Daughters of Eve.

The sun shone calm and bright on the grass, refreshed by the rain, on the border of pretty stones, on the sparkling yellow rocks. It was a caricature of a happy scene.

The storm has passed, the field is calm, the air is fresh, after the summer rain, to start with, timidly, like a psalm, after that intensely, sprout the weeds plain…

That’s when you rise, finally. You rise out of the mud, in the rain, and you go back inside and suddenly everything gets really cold and calm. The answer doesn’t lie in your backyard because no one is going to come and save you even if you beg them to. Especially if you beg them to. You’re on your own, like you’ve always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can’t go forward anymore. You have to hang on. You’re almost there. You can make it to the end.

My mother is soil and rain, clay, ash, sand, sun and moonlight. My mother is a weeping willow— strong, daring, dripping. My mother is oceans so salty and wild she can consume whole cities— but, mostly, she chooses to be calm turquoise, washing softly over toes in sand. She is vast— some places un-navigated. She is offering, felt without words, sacred, and restful. She grows life. —mother/Mother Earth

This morning I woke up at four and lay awake for an hour or so in a bad state. It is raining again. I got up finally and went about the daily chores, waiting for the sense of doom to lift — and what did it was watering the house plants. Suddenly joy came back because I was fulfilling a simple need, a living one. Dusting never has this effect (and that may be why I am such a poor housekeeper!), but feeding the cats when they are hungry, giving Punch clean water, makes me suddenly feel calm and happy. Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

Okay.' I can feel the letters vomit off my tongue. O. K. A. Y. I watch the vet insert the syringe into the catheter and inject the second drug. And then the adventures come flooding back: The puppy farm. The gentle untying of the shoelace. THIS! IS! MY! HOME! NOW! Our first night together. Running on the beach. Sadie and Sophie and Sophie Dee. Shared ice-cream cones. Thanksgivings. Tofurky. Car rides. Laughter. Eye rain. Chicken and rice. Paralysis. Surgery. Christmases. Walks. Dog parks. Squirrel chasing. Naps. Snuggling. 'Fishful Thinking.' The adventure at sea. Gentle kisses. Manic kisses. More eye rain. So much eye rain. Red ball. The veterinarian holds a stethoscope up to Lily's chest, listening for her heartbeat. All dogs go to heaven. 'Your mother's name is Witchie-Poo.' I stroke Lily behind her ears the way that used to calm her. 'Look for her.' OH FUCK IT HURTS. I barely whisper. 'She will take care of you.

We struggle, we grow weary, we grow tired. We are exhausted, we are distressed, we despair. We give up, we fall down, we let go. We cry, we are empty, we grown calm. We are ready. We wait quietly. A small shy truth arrives. Arrives from without and within. Arrives and is born. Simple, steady, clear. Like a mirror, like a bell, like a flame. Like rain in summer. A precious truth arrives and is born within us. Within our emptiness. We accept it, we observe it, we absorb it. We surrender to our bare truth. We are nourished, we are changed. We are blessed. We rise up. For this we give thanks. "Short NotesS From The Long History Of Happiness

We’re responsible for not letting our happiness depend on external circumstances—we shouldn’t let the rain, annoying strangers, or a leaking washing machine decide upon our wellbeing.

i wanted to take your hand and run with you together toward ourselves down the street to your street i wanted to laugh aloud and skip the notes past the marquee advertising “women in love” past the record shop with “The Spirit In The Dark” past the smoke shop past the park and no parking today signs past the people watching me in my blue velvet and i don’t remember what you wore but only that i didn’t want anything to be wearing you i wanted to give myself to the cyclone that is your arms and let you in the eye of my hurricane and know the calm before and some fall evening after the cocktails and the very expensive and very bad steak served with day-old baked potatoes after the second cup of coffee taken while listening to the rejected violin player maybe some fall evening when the taxis have passed you by and that light sort of rain that occasionally falls in new york begins you’ll take a thought and laugh aloud the notes carrying all the way over to me and we’ll run again together toward each other yes?

Shouldn’t a catastrophe like this be met with rain? An overcast sky? It didn’t seem right that things were so quiet, so calm, the day so tranquil when so many people had died, lost loved ones or suffered serious injury.

I should bring you home,” he murmured, but he didn’t move to drag me to my feet. Instead, I felt a slight thud in the earth, and the spring rain and new grass scent of him cloyed in my nose as he lay beside me. I tingled with pleasure as he stroked my hair. This was such a lovely dream. I’d never slept so wonderfully before. So warm, nestled beside him. Calm. Faintly, echoing into my world of slumber, he spoke again, his breath caressing my ear. “You’re exactly as I dreamed you’d be, too.” Darkness swallowed everything.

You and I, we’re responsible for our own flourishing. We’re responsible for not letting our happiness depend on external circumstances—we shouldn’t let the rain, annoying strangers, or a leaking washing machine decide upon our wellbeing. Otherwise, we become helpless victims of life circumstances out of hand. As a Stoic student, you learn that only you can ruin your life and only you can refuse to let your inner self be conquered by whatever nasty challenge life throws at you.

I love the rain. It calms me down, somehow, soothes my reckless heartbeats. It’s like chamomile tea for my soul.

I can only wash your tears, my dearest, but I cannot calm your storm when I, myself, can't even stop my rain from pouring.

The rain puts me in a daze. A daze that pulls me away into the worlds I've made.

Perihelion: Please calm yourselves and stop talking. Plan A01: Rain Destruction has been superseded by Plan B01: Distract and Extract.

This night is not calm; the equinox still struggles in its storms. The wild rains of the day are abated; the great single cloud disparts and rolls away from heaven, not passing and leaving a sea all sapphire, but tossed buoyant before a continued, long-sounding, high-rushing moonlight tempest. The Moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale, as glad as if she gave herself to his fierce caress with love. No Endymion will watch for his goddess tonight. there are no flocks out on the mountains; and it is well, for to-night she welcomes Aeolus.

It's all about yin and yang," she said, stroking my hair in her slow calming way, her voice as sweet and delicate as summer rain. "Balancing your energy. When you're angry or upset, stop for a moment and close your eyes. Breath in slowly. Imagine as you do that the air you take in is bright and golden, as lovely and light as your eyes. Let that brightness fill your belly. Then, when you exhale, picture the darkness that had been within you--whatever it was that upset you -- and visualize it leaving your body as you release your breath.

Begin with the soft smelted upturned heart-shaped mouth made for smiling a smile kept for kindness, tenderness, incapable of malice. Am I going too fast for you? The almond eyes see out through their sleepy epicanthic fold. Trusting and calm, if a flicker from slowness, a further flicker from stupidity. Settled in slow-motion beauty, heart-breaking beauty.

Most of the time, his personality is calm waters, still and sparkling and as clear as glass. But a single drop can disrupt the entire surface, and you never know when the rain will hit.

Like a tornado swirling around you, you are the eye of the storm. A front row seat to the destruction of everything you worked so hard to build. But like all tornadoes, the rain will halt and the winds will calm. The pieces that remain from the cataclysmic destruction of your former self, will soon dissolve and you will find that the only thing that was destroyed was the illusion, the attachment. Allowing for you to rebuild a new, a stronger, a more mature, and spiritually evolved you, that you didn’t even know existed. So have faith, this too shall pass.

Our time together feels like a storm, like a wild wind and rain, like something too big to handle but too powerful to escape. It blows around me and tangles my hair, leaves water on my face, makes me know that I am alive, alive, alive. There are moments of calm and pause as there are in every storm , and moments when our words fork like lightning, at least for each other.

Heretofore my life has been calm as a summer's day; but who knows when winter storms may rise, and often I have thought that I was born to know wind and rain and lightning as well as peace and sunshine.

Solitude makes me feel calm. The rain affects me differently. Books never make me feel lonely. I love hugging trees, and sleeping on grass. Can't help being addicted to coffee and writing. What about you?

If you roll the dice often enough you always get the numbers you want. If I tell you the sun will shine tomorrow and that it will rain and there will be snow and that clouds will cover the sky and that wind will blow and that it will be a calm day and that thunder will deafen us, then one of those things will turn out to be true and you'll forget the rest because you want to believe that I really can tell the future.

Love was her nature 
 and that’s why the sun 
 sets behind her smile,
t hat’s why her eyes drown entire oceans,
 that’s why her laughter
 calms the rain,
 when her love pours
 and heals all the pain,
 when storms, winds
 whisper her name,
 when touching her lips
 feels like a hurricane.
 she makes broken
 bloom in her light,
 she’s the sun to
 my dark nights,
 she’s nature, wild and free,
 loving her, is healing me.

And Keema realized it was not sweat that poured down Jun's chin, but tears, for finally, in the calm of this syncopation, we were quieted, the river cleaned of bodies, the knife taken out of a child's back, and a cold rain falling on the burning house, until the hand in the window slipped away and all that remained was smolder.

And you remember how warm bourbon tasted, in a paper cup with water dipped out of the lake at your feet. How the nights were so unbearably, hauntingly beautiful that you wanted to cry. How every patch of light and shadow from the moon seemed deep and lovely. Calm or storm, it didn't matter. It was exquisite and mysterious, just because it was night. I wonder now how I lost it, the mysteriousness, the wonder. It faded steadily until one day it was entirely gone, and night became just dark, and the moon was only something that waxed and waned and heralded a changing in the weather. And rain just washed out graveled roads. The glitter was gone. And the worst part was that you didn't know exactly at what point it disappeared. There was nothing you could point to and say: now, there. One day you saw that it was missing and had been missing for a long time. It wasn't even anything to grieve over, it had been such a long time passing. The glitter and hush-breath quality just slipped away...there isn't even a scene--not for me, nothing so definite--just the seepage, the worms of time...I look at my children now and I think: how long before they slip away, before I am disappointed in them.

Maybe before a big storm rolls in, you’ll use it to catch fireflies (see, I did remember something, city mouse. But they’re still lightning bugs down here). And if you do, just remember, the storm doesn’t last forever. It can scare you; it can shake you to your core. But it never lasts. The rain subsides, the thunder dies, and the winds calm to a soft whisper. And that moment after the storm clouds pass, when all is silent and still, you find peace. Quiet, gentle peace. That’s what I wish for you. Even if you couldn’t find it with me.

How every patch of light and shadow from the moon seemed deep and lovely. Calm or storm, it didn’t matter. It was exquisite and mysterious, just because it was night. I wonder now how I lost it, the mysteriousness, the wonder. It faded steadily until one day it was entirely gone, and night became just dark, and the moon was only something that waxed and waned and heralded a changing in the weather. And rain just washed out graveled roads. The glitter was gone.

It looks like fallen petals, and it looks like rain. It looks like the sounds the birds make at dawn. It looks like the aisle of grocery stores when a song I love suddenly begins to play overhead, and I cannot help but dance a little dance. It looks like a sigh, a kiss, an unmade bed. It looks like Cheerios in a white bowl with a bit of silence on the side. It looks like a plain vanilla cupcake in white paper, a dance with the wind, pink toenails, warm socks. It looks like a fire against the cold of winter, and a deep lake cool against a summer sky. It looks like chick flicks, books that make you cry, and all the candles blown out on the first try.

Picture the Bay of Bengal as an expanse of tropical water: still and blue in the calm of the January winter, or raging and turbid with silt at the peak of the summer rains. Picture it in two dimensions on a map, overlaid with a web of shipping channels and telegraph cables and inscribed with lines of distance. Now imagine the sea as a mental map: as a family tree of cousins, uncles, sisters, sons, connected by letters and journeys and stories. Think of it as a sea of debt, bound by advances and loans and obligations. Picture the Bay of Bengal even where it is absent — deep in the Malaysian jungle, where Hindu shrines sprout from the landscape as if washed up by the sea, left behind.

A red veil covers the room as walls, which flow but do not stand. Screams echo from every stone. Incense I smell of sandalwood and lavender, and lavender I taste as well. A tea, a brew, or a liquid I sip. Calm I feel. Gyfu shows a great sacrifice will be made. I feel tied in knots as light reflects from crystals found in rock. All is not what it seems. Choices are made, the white handled bolline swings, the steps slide, gates swing open, memories flow like rain—betrayal and it is done. --A quote by Gannon reciting his vision

Underneath the sky, so void of light, the rain soaked me through. I held on to the railing and felt calm, even content, and then he had to reach through the dark, raise my temperature and make my heart beat a little bit faster. Not very gallant I should say...especially so close to bedtime. Friend or not, should he rob me of sleep, I'll be sure to take his.

Sometimes we rain on our own parade just by failing to rein in our emotions.

Rain-bow. Harmonizing.

My Life Philosophy: Always keep your mind calm, work like fun, earn like rain, and live life like celebration.

V. R. Lang You are so serious, as if a glacier spoke in your ear or you had to walk through the great gate of Kiev to get to the living room. I worry about this because I love you. As if it weren't grotesque enough that we live in hydrogen and breathe like atomizers, you have to think I'm a great architect! and you float regally by on your incessant escalator, calm, a jungle queen. Thinking it a steam shovel. Looking a little uneasy. But you are yourself again, yanking silver beads off your neck. Remember, the Russian Easter Overture is full of bunnies. Be always high, full of regard and honor and lanolin. Oh ride horseback in pink linen, be happy! and ride with your beads on, because it rains.

Our time together feels like a storm, like wild wind and rain, like something too big to handle but too powerful to escape. It blows around me and tangles my hair, leaves water on my face, makes me know that I am alive, alive, alive. There are moments of calm and pause as there are in every storm, and moments when our words fork lightning, at least for each other.

1 The summer our marriage failed we picked sage to sweeten our hot dark car. We sat in the yard with heavy glasses of iced tea, talking about which seeds to sow when the soil was cool. Praising our large, smooth spinach leaves, free this year of Fusarium wilt, downy mildew, blue mold. And then we spoke of flowers, and there was a joke, you said, about old florists who were forced to make other arrangements. Delphiniums flared along the back fence. All summer it hurt to look at you. 2 I heard a woman on the bus say, “He and I were going in different directions.” As if it had something to do with a latitude or a pole. Trying to write down how love empties itself from a house, how a view changes, how the sign for infinity turns into a noose for a couple. Trying to say that weather weighed down all the streets we traveled on, that if gravel sinks, it keeps sinking. How can I blame you who kneeled day after day in wet soil, pulling slugs from the seedlings? You who built a ten-foot arch for the beans, who hated a bird feeder left unfilled. You who gave carrots to a gang of girls on bicycles. 3 On our last trip we drove through rain to a town lit with vacancies. We’d come to watch whales. At the dock we met five other couples—all of us fluorescent, waterproof, ready for the pitch and frequency of the motor that would lure these great mammals near. The boat chugged forward—trailing a long, creamy wake. The captain spoke from a loudspeaker: In winter gray whales love Laguna Guerrero; it’s warm and calm, no killer whales gulp down their calves. Today we’ll see them on their way to Alaska. If we get close enough, observe their eyes—they’re bigger than baseballs, but can only look down. Whales can communicate at a distance of 300 miles—but it’s my guess they’re all saying, Can you hear me? His laughter crackled. When he told us Pink Floyd is slang for a whale’s two-foot penis, I stopped listening. The boat rocked, and for two hours our eyes were lost in the waves—but no whales surfaced, blowing or breaching or expelling water through baleen plates. Again and again you patiently wiped the spray from your glasses. We smiled to each other, good troopers used to disappointment. On the way back you pointed at cormorants riding the waves— you knew them by name: the Brants, the Pelagic, the double-breasted. I only said, I’m sure whales were swimming under us by the dozens. 4 Trying to write that I loved the work of an argument, the exhaustion of forgiving, the next morning, washing our handprints off the wineglasses. How I loved sitting with our friends under the plum trees, in the white wire chairs, at the glass table. How you stood by the grill, delicately broiling the fish. How the dill grew tall by the window. Trying to explain how camellias spoil and bloom at the same time, how their perfume makes lovers ache. Trying to describe the ways sex darkens and dies, how two bodies can lie together, entwined, out of habit. Finding themselves later, tired, by a fire, on an old couch that no longer reassures. The night we eloped we drove to the rainforest and found ourselves in fog so thick our lights were useless. There’s no choice, you said, we must have faith in our blindness. How I believed you. Trying to imagine the road beneath us, we inched forward, honking, gently, again and again.

Tree fairies were known to be calm and even-tempered, in harmony with nature and magic. And when you fucked with nature, we fucked back. We rained down in fury and blood. Until you were Ash…

And when the earth began to rumble and quake, as fear and frantic set in, he ran back inside the house past his wife and children, gathering all the valuables and things he thought of importance, and ran back to his car packing away. After making two trips in and out, he waited in the car for his family to come out, in fear they darted through the darkness and pelting cold rain. When everything calmed down, and the house was intact and safe, he returned putting everything back in its place, had the kids go to bed, told his wife he loves her and turned off the light.

Soon it becomes clear that we are not, after all, in control, not a high-functioning sailor standing stably on a nice calm deck, a deck that we have created through our virtue. The ship is pitching, and the deck is covered in ice, and we’re wearing special headphones that distort what our crewmates are shouting and special mouthpieces that distort what we’re shouting back in return.

Everything is going to be okay,” he mumbles against my head. The words instantly settle over me like a calming rain. He always has this way of making me believe it, and he’s never been wrong before.

The fact that Aracely might understand what he could not say, it seeded in him a want, new and raw, like not knowing he was thirsty until water was in front of him. No one else, not his mother, not even Miel, could understand this wanting to live a life different from the one he was born into, so much that his own skin felt like ice cracking. It shouldn't have mattered, not when Miel and the other girls in his class wore jeans more than they wore skirts. Not when they went out as late as they wanted. Not when they told their brothers what to do, and borrowed their fathers' books. But there was everything else. The idea of being called Miss or Ms. or, worse, Mrs. The thought of being grouped in when someone called out 'girls' or 'ladies.' The endless, echoing use of 'she' and 'her,' 'miss' and 'ma'am.' Yes, they were words. They were all just words. But each of them was wrong, and they stuck to him. Each one was a golden fire ant, and they were biting his arms and his neck and his bound-flat chest, leaving him bleeding and burning. 'He. Him. Mister. Sir.' Even teachers admonishing him and his classmates with 'boys, settle down,' or 'gentlemen, please.' These were sounds as perfect and clean as winter rain, and they calmed each searing bite of those wrong words.

Surely... the great mountains of the world are a present remedy if men did but know it against our modern discontent and ambitions. In the hills is wisdom's fount. They are deep in time. They know the ways of the sun and the wind, the lightning's fiery feet, the frost that shattereth, the rain that shroudeth, the snow that putteth about their nakedness a softer coverlet than fine lawn: which if their large philosophy question not if it be a bridal sheet or a shroud, hath not this unpolicied calm his justification ever in the returning year, and is it not an instance to laugh our carefulness out of fashion? Of us, little children of the dust, children of a day, who with so many burdens do burden us with taking thought and with fears and desires and devious schemings of the mind, so that we wax old before our time and fall weary ere the brief day be spent and one reaping-hook gather us home at last for all our pains.

The rain had abated. The sails were hoisted, and the barrels we had placed everywhere filled with that precious gift from the sky. Calm reigned during a botched dawn in which pitch black shaded off into dark grey. Isolated sunrays pierced the clouds to shed light on a terribly flat sea like a lake of tar. Far, very far away, cracked muted peals of thunder. The storm approached quickly, lightning streaking the leaden ceiling while the sea shivered and quivered under a fresh wind.

It is the fire that consumes me; It is an inexplicable love, It is the rain that calms me; It is a melody from above. It is the wind that humbles me; It is everywhere and nowhere, It is the sand that fuels me; It is the artistry of nature. I’m consumed by what I am, I’m calmed by a riotous noise, I’m humbled through arrogance, I’m fueled by what is in poise. I’ve much cherished the mystifying, I’ve heard the unreal symphonies, I’ve been moved by the inevitable, And I’ve hailed the epiphanies.

Why is it that no one is excited? I hear people talking in the Laundromat about the end of the world, and they're no more excited than if they were comparing detergents. People talk about the destruction of the ozone layer and the death of all life. They talk about the devastation of the rain forests, about deadly pollution that will be with us for thousands and millions of years, about the disappearance of dozens of species of life every day, about the end of speciation itself. And they seem perfectly calm.

Happy comes and goes, Tats. Loving someone isn’t that crazy infatuation that you feel at first. That passes. Well, not passes, but it calms down, and then sometimes, when you least expect it, you get a glimpse of the person and it all comes back again, in a big rush.

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollows of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flesh of tattered flags kindling in the doom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore. It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking; which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only. The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.

What is Life? But a fleeting moment of a passing dream, a dream that flows too swiftly, nimble and calm, yet all but a moment's walk, a mad jest of a thousand voices finding a harmony in a conundrum of Time. Finding calm in chaos, for a mind that never rests. Smoky nights in the lull of rainy reflection.

Thought I saw you on the beach this morning...Thought I saw you standing on the white strand, your back to the wind. The rain had stopped and there was a brisk clarity in the air. You watched me over your left shoulder, head tucked in coyly. Seabirds flying low in the sky, and the grey-green waves at your foot. A whole panorama thrown up behind you. I was on the coast road coming back from the shops. I stopped walking once I caught sight of you. You were wearing a reefer jacket with the collar turned up against the weather. It might have been navy, but it looked black in the distance. As did your trousers. As did your shoes. All of you was black except your face and hair. You wore no hat...Never once saw you in Winter clothes, yet there you were as clear as day for a whole moment. Only your eyes were visible above the upturned collar. Your hair was in your eyes. You watched me through those pale strands. And I watched you. Intently. The man from down the road drove by in his faded red car. He was going the other way, so he didn't offer a lift. He just waved. I waved back. And then I turned to you again, and we looked at each other a little longer. Very calm. Heart barely shifted. Too far away to see your features. No matter. There was salt on your face. Sea salt. It was in your hair. It was on your mouth. It was all over you, as though you gazed at me through ice. And it was all over me. It tingled on my skin. After a time I moved off, and you broke into two. You realigned yourself into driftwood and stone. I came inside and lit a fire. Sat in front of it and watched it burn. The window fogged up as my clothes and hair dried out. That was hours ago. The fire is nearly gone. But I can still taste the salt on my lips. It is a dry and stinging substance and it is everywhere now. It has touched everything that is left. Coated every surface with its sparkling silt. I will always be thirsty.

Going beyond fear begins when we examine our fear: our anxiety, nervousness, concern, and restlessness. If we look into our fear, if we look beneath its veneer, the first thing we find is sadness, beneath the nervousness. Nervousness is cranking up, vibrating, all the time. When we slow down, when we relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle. Sadness hits you in your heart, and your body produces a tear. Before you cry, there is a feeling in your chest and then, after that, you produce tears in your eyes. You are about to produce rain or a waterfall in your eyes and you feel sad and lonely, and perhaps romantic at the same time. That is the first tip of fearlessness, and the first sign of real warriorship.

Single parenthood: Where you bite every bullet Suck up spells of pouring rain And wake with open wounds Still dripping with the liquid of yesterday's pain The objective being to simply get up, withstand, endure Fight an inch harder, love a little more And draw a smile on your face Tie a ribbon of calm around your racing heart For the one(s) that you so beautifully adore

One November afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain storm of several days’ duration, when the sky was still completely overcast and the air was full of mist, I observed that the pond was remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish its surface; though it no longer reflected the bright tints of October, but the sombre November colors of the surrounding hills.

A Wood in Sound The pine tree sways in the smoke, Which streams up and up. There's a wood in sound. My legs lose themselves Where the river mirrors daffodils Like faces in a dream. A cold wind and the white memory Of a sasanqua. Warm rain comes and goes. I'll wait calmly on the bank Till the water clears And willows start to bud. Time is singed on the debris Of air raids. Somehow, here and now, I am another.

It kind of freaked me out. Because I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of thing yet.” Or maybe the problem was that I wasn’t prepared for how ready I was… “Ready for-?” He broke off, and then frowned as if it had all become clear. “Wait.” He dropped his arms from around my waist and took a step away from me. “You think I spent the night wit you?” “Didn’t you?” I blinked back at him. “There’s only the one bed. And…well, you were in it when I woke up.” Thunder boomed overhead. It wasn’t as loud as the violent cracks that had occurred in my dream. Although the rumbles were long enough-and intense enough-that the silverware on the table began to make an eerie tinkling sound. And my bird, who’d been calmly cleaning herself on the back of my chair, suddenly took off, seeing shelter on the highest bookshelf against the far wall. I realized I’d just insulted my host, and no joke was going to get me out of it this time. “For your information, Pierce,” John said, his tone almost disturbingly calm-but his eyes flashed the same shade as the stone around my neck, which had gone the color of the metal studs at his wrists-“I spent most of last night on the couch. Until one point early this morning, when I heard you call my name. You were crying in your sleep.” The salt water I’d tasted on my lips. Not due to rain from a violent hurricane, but from the tears I’d shed, watching him die in front of me. “Oh,” I said uncomfortably. “John, I’m so-“ It turned out he wasn’t finished. “I put my arms around you to try to comfort you, because I know what this place can be like, at least at first. It’s not exactly hell, but it’s the next closest place to it. You wouldn’t let go of me. You held on to me like you were drowning, and I was your only lifeline.” I swallowed, astonished at how close he’d come to describing my dream…except it had been the other way around. I’d been his lifeline; only he’d let go of me, sacrificing himself so that I could live. “Right,” I said. “Of course. I’m sorry.” I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been, especially since my mother had always worried so much about my talking in my sleep. On the other hand, I had been upfront with him about my lack of experience when it came to men. “But this is good, see?” I reached out to take his hand. “I told you I could never hate you-“ He pulled his hand away, exactly like in my dream. Well, not exactly, because he wasn’t being sucked from my grasp by a giant ocean swell. Instead, he’d dropped my fingers because he was leaving to go sort the souls of the dead. “You will,” he assured me, bitterly. “You’re already regretting your decision to-what was it you called it? Oh, right-cohabitate with me.” “No,” I insisted. “I’m not. All I said was that I want to take things more slowly-“ That had nothing to do with him-it had to do with me and my fear of not being able to control myself when he was kissing me. It was too humiliating to admit that out loud, however.

What would happen if, deliberately, calmly, with malice aforethought and obvious premeditation, I disobeyed? I know what would happen: nothing. Nothing would happen. And the knowledge depresses me. Some girl downstairs I never saw before (probably with a bad skin also) would simply touch a few keys on some kind of steel key punch that would set things right again, and it would be as though I had not disobeyed at all. My act of rebellion would be absorbed like rain on an ocean and leave no trace. I would not cause a ripple. I suppose it is just about impossible for someone like me to rebel anymore and produce any kind of lasting effect. I have lost the power to upset things that I had as a child; I can no longer change my environment or even disturb it seriously. They would simply fire and forget me as soon as I tried. They would file me away.

As he made his way back to his home on the Dijver, along the canals, beside the calm waters, Borluut felt his regret, his remorse at having divulged his worries grow at the sight of the noble swans, sealed-in snow, which, prisoners of the canals, prey to the rain, the sadness of the bells, the shadow of the gables, have the modesty to remain silent and only complain, with a voice that is almost human, when they are about to die...

​ "This place is fun, Downtown is fun!" I said, looking at the blurred lights of the lamps on the street. "No wonder you left me for this… I wouldn't be surprised if a ghost came out." I closed my fist, trying to catch the lights. "Now I get it, Dan! You're a ghost!" ​ "Am I?" he talked to me in an accommodating way, like anyone would do with a friend too drunk to think clearly. ​ "Yes! There's even two of you now." ​ "Of course, that would be the only possible reason." We reached the parking lot. ​ "Say Dan, have you come back to help me with Shallie? But if you're a ghost, can you just call her for me?" I grabbed his arm. "Can you? Can you bring her to me?" Suddenly all the fake happiness I was feeling before left me in a deep, black desperation. Dan's expression changed too, and got darker. ​ "I'm not a ghost, Drew," he said, calmly, securing the helmet under my chin. "I'm sorry," he added.

Ishmael pondered this for a minute or two. “One of the pupils I mentioned yesterday felt obliged to explain to me what she was looking for, and she said, ‘Why is it that no one is excited? I hear people talking in the Laundromat about the end of the world, and they’re no more excited than if they were comparing detergents. People talk about the destruction of the ozone layer and the death of all life. They talk about the devastation of the rain forests, about deadly pollution that will be with us for thousands and millions of years, about the disappearance of dozens of species of life every day, about the end of speciation itself. And they seem perfectly calm.’ “I said to her, ‘Is this what you want to know then—why people aren’t excited about the destruction of the world?’ She thought about that for a while and said, ‘No, I know why they’re not excited. They’re not excited because they believe what they’ve been told.’ 

That’s when you rise, finally. You rise out of the mud, in the rain, and you go back inside and suddenly everything gets really cold and calm. The answer doesn’t lie in your backyard because no one is going to come and save you even if you beg them to. Especially if you beg them to. You’re on your own, like you’ve always been on your own. You have to keep going forward, until you can’t go forward anymore. You have to hang on. You’re almost there. You can make it to the end.

I close my eyes and think about everything she just told me. I think about how i feel during those times. Storms are mysterious. No one knows for sure what they are going to bring. They can be loud and booming with lightning striking the earth and thunder clapping every few minutes. They can bring little rain with heat lightning. Or they can bring the threat of tornadoes. Afterwards, the earth is calm and everything goes back to normal. Greenery regrows and people work together the bring back order.. -Ryanne

A LITTLE while, a little while, The weary task is put away, And I can sing and I can smile, Alike, while I have holiday. Where wilt thou go, my harassed heart-- What thought, what scene invites thee now What spot, or near or far apart, Has rest for thee, my weary brow? There is a spot, 'mid barren hills, Where winter howls, and driving rain; But, if the dreary tempest chills, There is a light that warms again. The house is old, the trees are bare, Moonless above bends twilight's dome; But what on earth is half so dear-- So longed for--as the hearth of home? The mute bird sitting on the stone, The dank moss dripping from the wall, The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown, I love them--how I love them all! Still, as I mused, the naked room, The alien firelight died away; And from the midst of cheerless gloom, I passed to bright, unclouded day. A little and a lone green lane That opened on a common wide; A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain Of mountains circling every side. A heaven so clear, an earth so calm, So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air; And, deepening still the dream-like charm, Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere. THAT was the scene, I knew it well; I knew the turfy pathway's sweep, That, winding o'er each billowy swell, Marked out the tracks of wandering sheep. Could I have lingered but an hour, It well had paid a week of toil; But Truth has banished Fancy's power: Restraint and heavy task recoil. Even as I stood with raptured eye, Absorbed in bliss so deep and dear, My hour of rest had fleeted by, And back came labour, bondage, care.

In a world where war was all around me and where I had ridden in dangerous little aeroplanes that roared and zoomed and crashed and caught fire, blindness, not to mention life itself, was no longer too important. Survival was not something one struggled for any more. I was already beginning to realize that the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past, was to accept the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help.

All the stories, all the incidents that made the life were stopped in a second - opinions stopped, and the ability to feel, all stopped without any meaning.'He wanted to make himself know what happened, for he could feel the beginning of the calm settling upon him. He wanted to cry out once in personal pain before he was cut off and unable to feel sorrow or resentment. There were little stinging drops of cold on his head. He looked up and saw that it was raining gently. The drops fell on Elizabeth's cheeks and flashed in her hair.

Vicky turned her face away from her son, towards the sea. She spoke softly, too softly for him to hear. “I only want to remember him.” The thrashing of the rain had dug tiny gutters around her feet. The ground had begun to loosen and Alexander felt it shift. A crack opened between them: twenty-two years of standing in the same spot had undermined the cliff’s foundation. Alexander reached out frantically towards his mother, his eyes wide with fright. He screamed for her to take his hand. Vicky reached out towards her son but when her hand was almost in his, she stopped. Her fear left her and she smiled. She let her hand drop to her side. “For God’s sake, Mother!” Alexander could say nothing more. The wind and rain howled, and blasts of thunder and lightning crashed everywhere, but he had never seen his mother so calm, so beautiful. It was as if she had been waiting for her turn, and it had finally come. The ground gave out under her and he watched his mother disappear with the cliff’s crumbling edge. Her body was never found. All the villagers said that she was finally returned to her beloved Tom, beneath the ocean’s waves.

He stood up, a giant of a man—er, male, his dark hair catching the dim light from the street lamps out in front of the condo. A wave of sadness came over her, and she closed her eyes. “Hey,” he said, sitting down next to her. “None of that. We’re not sad. You and me? We’re not sad. We don’t do sad.” She laughed with a choking sound. “How did you know what I was feeling? Or do I look that pathetic?” He tapped his nose. “I can smell it. Spring rain is what the scent’s like.” “I hate this good-bye shit.” “Me, too.” He leaned down and brushed his lips against her forehead. “Here.” He shrugged out of his long-sleeved shirt, balled it up, and put it under her cheek. “Pretend this is me.” She breathed in deep, caught the bonding scent, and was calmed a little. As he stood, he looked so strong in just a muscle shirt, invincible, like a superhero. And yet he breathed. “Please…be careful.” “Always.” He bent over and kissed her again. “I love you.” As he pulled away, she reached out and grabbed his arm. Words failed, but the silence said enough. “I hate the leaving, too,” he replied roughly. “But I’ll be back. I promise.” -Vishous & Jane

night.” “Sometimes, yes,” Meggie had said. “But it only works for children.” Which made Mo tweak her nose. Mo. Meggie had never called her father anything else. That night—when so much began and so many things changed forever—Meggie had one of her favorite books under her pillow, and since the rain wouldn’t let her sleep she sat up, rubbed the drowsiness from her eyes, and took it out. Its pages rustled promisingly when she opened it. Meggie thought this first whisper sounded a little different from one book to another, depending on whether or not she already knew the story it was going to tell her. But she needed light. She had a box of matches hidden in the drawer of her bedside table. Mo had forbidden her to light candles at night. He didn’t like fire. “Fire devours books,” he always said, but she was twelve years old, she surely could be trusted to keep an eye on a couple of candle flames. Meggie loved to read by candlelight. She had five candlesticks on the windowsill, and she was just holding the lighted match to one of the black wicks when she heard footsteps outside. She blew out the match in alarm—oh, how well she remembered it, even many years later—and knelt to look out of the window, which was wet with rain. Then she saw him. The rain cast a kind of pallor on the darkness, and the stranger was little more than a shadow. Only his face gleamed white as he looked up at Meggie. His hair clung to his wet forehead. The rain was falling on him, but he ignored it. He stood there motionless, arms crossed over his chest as if that might at least warm him a little. And he kept on staring at the house. I must go and wake Mo, thought Meggie. But she stayed put, her heart thudding, and went on gazing out into the night as if the stranger’s stillness had infected her. Suddenly, he turned his head, and Meggie felt as if he were looking straight into her eyes. She shot off the bed so fast the open book fell to the floor, and she ran barefoot out into the dark corridor. This was the end of May, but it was chilly in the old house. There was still a light on in Mo’s room. He often stayed up reading late into the night. Meggie had inherited her love of books from her father. When she took refuge from a bad dream with him, nothing could lull her to sleep better than Mo’s calm breathing beside her and the sound of the pages turning. Nothing chased nightmares away faster than

It is a strange thing, looking at the sea. When it is calm, or with only gentle ripples, it gives an impression of being soft and kind. But often, on such a calm, the wind suddenly blows, thrusting the water back into angry waves. At such times, in a certain sense, one feels sorry for the sea. Never of itself offensive to others, it is all too often attacked by wind and rain, the rain falling densely upon it, shaming the beauty of its calm face with a million bouncing bubbles. Were the wind to stop blowing, the ocean, surely, would never afflict the land with any calamity, nor would any human beings suffer.

She canted her wings and soared toward the top of it, where she could see a never-ending line of trees tossing violently in the wind. The hurricane made one more effort to throw her back into the sea, but she fought with her last reserves until she felt earth beneath her talons. She collapsed forward, clutching the wet soil for a moment, grateful to be alive. Keep going. They’re not safe yet. Clearsight pushed herself up and faced the trees. They were coming. The first two dragons she would meet in this strange new world. What would it be like to face unfamiliar tribes, completely different from the ones she knew? There wouldn’t be any NightWings like her here. No sand dragons, no sea dragons, no ice dragons. She’d glimpsed what these new dragons would look like, but she didn’t know anything yet about their tribes . . . or whether they would trust her. They stepped out of the trees, eyeing her with wary curiosity. Oh, they’re beautiful, she thought. One was dark forest green, the color of the trees all around them. His wings curved gracefully like long leaves on either side of him, and mahogany-brown underscales glinted from his chest. But it was the other who took Clearsight’s breath away. His scales were iridescent gold layered over metallic rose and blue, shimmering through the rain. He outshone even the RainWings she’d occasionally seen in the marketplace, and those were the most beautiful dragons in Pyrrhia. Not only that, but his wings were startlingly weird. There were four of them instead of two; a second pair at the back overlapped the front ones, tilting and dipping at slightly different angles from the first pair to give the dragon extra agility in the air. Like dragonflies, she realized, remembering the delicate insects darting across the ponds in the mountain meadows. Or butterflies, or beetles. She sat up and spread her front talons to show that she was harmless. “Hello,” she said in her very least threatening voice. The green one circled her slowly. The iridescent one sat down and gave her a small smile. She smiled back, although her heart was pounding. She knew she had to wait for them to make the first move. “Leefromichou?” said the green dragon finally, in a deep, calm voice. “Wayroot?” Take a breath. You knew it would be like this at first. “My name is Clearsight,” she said, touching her forehead. “I am from far over the sea.” She pointed at the churning ocean stretching way off to the east behind her. “Anyone speak Dragon?

He [Dr. Juvenal Urbino] arose at the crack of dawn, when he began to take his secret medicines: potassium bromide to raise his spirits, salicylates for the ache in his bones when it rained, ergosterol drops for vertigo, belladonna for sound sleep. He took something every hour, always in secret, because in his long life as a doctor and teacher he had always opposed prescribing palliatives for old age: it was easier for him to bear other people's pains than his own. In his pocket he always carried a little pad of camphor that he inhaled deeply when no one was watching to calm his fear of so many medicines mixed together.

Sunday Morning I Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding across wide water, without sound. The day is like wide water, without sound, Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre. II Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul. III Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind He moved among us, as a muttering king, Magnificent, would move among his hinds, Until our blood, commingling, virginal, With heaven, brought such requital to desire The very hinds discerned it, in a star. Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be The blood of paradise? And shall the earth Seem all of paradise that we shall know? The sky will be much friendlier then than now, A part of labor and a part of pain, And next in glory to enduring love, Not this dividing and indifferent blue. IV She says, "I am content when wakened birds, Before they fly, test the reality Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields Return no more, where, then, is paradise?" There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured As April's green endures; or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow's wings

Like this wind. It’s cold because it’s early winter, and people run from it. They stay inside to keep warm. But I embrace it. I cherish the feeling of the wind on my face, the heat of the sun on my cheeks in the summer. I want to dance in the rain. I dream of lying in the snow, feeling its coldness in my bones.” She opened her eyes. The crest of the sun began to inch into the sky. “When I was getting treatment, when I was confined to my hospital bed, when I was in pain and going crazy from every aspect of my life, I would get the nurses to turn my bed to the window. The sunrise each day would calm me. It would restore my strength. It would fill me with hope.

But this day he was lost in the story he made of their bodies. The men were in the midst of saving a six-inch Mickey Mouse trapped in a prison made of black VHS tapes. ...Before he could make out his mother's face, the backhand blasted the side of his head, followed by another, then more. A rain of it. A storm of mother. The boy's grandmother, hearing the screams, rushed in and, as if by instinct, knelt on all fours over the boy, make a small and feeble house with her frame. Inside it, the boy curled into his clothes and waited for his mother to calm. Through his grandmother's trembling arms, he noticed the videocassettes had toppled over. Mickey Mouse was free.

So, O king, does the present life of man on earth seem to me, in comparison with the time which is unknown to us, as though a sparrow flew swiftly through the hall, coming in by one door and going out by the other, and you, the while, sat at meat with your captains and liegemen, in wintry weather, with a fire burning in your midst and heating the room, the storm raging out of doors and driving snow and rain before it. For the time for which he is within, the bird is sheltered from the storm, but after this short while of calm he flies out again into the cold and is seen no more. Thus the life of man is visible for a moment, but we know not what comes before it or follows after it.

RYLAN!" I feel Ivy's palm on my chest and, with a powerful shove, she pushes me back, away from fire, danger, and death. In that moment after the tree plunges, I see Ivy for a single second as I fall. In those emerald eyes is a look of complete calm, undying gratitude, and powerful, protective love. The tree crashes down, the sound echoing in my head. For an eternal moment, I sit there on my butt, staring at the spot where Ivy was standing. I'm numb, only registering the slightest changes; the wind dying down, the rain lessening. What just happened? Desperately, I look side to side, praying that Ivy jumped to the side and what I saw was just an illusion made up by my panicked mind. But Ivy's nowhere. And there's an arm sticking out from under the trunk. "IVY!" I sprint to the fallen tree. The smoldering wood stings my hand when I grab the trunk, but I grit my teeth and bear it. Pulling with all my might, I throw the remains of the tree aside. Ivy's lying there, her eyes closed and her lower half on fire. "No..." I fall to my knees and yank off my sweatshirt to try and smother the flames, but they burn strong, and soon the fabric's on fire. I toss it away, not knowing where it lands as I'm unable to tear my eyes off the most gut-wrenching sight of my life. My hands go to my head and my shouting grows even louder. "No, no, no!" This can't be happening. She can't be—

In real life, a group of boys actually were shipwrecked on a remote Polynesian island in 1965, as Rutger Bregman described in his book Humankind. What happened in this true story? The kids hollowed out tree trunks to catch rain water. They worked in pairs, drawing up a schedule of chores to ensure that gardening, cooking, and guard duty all got taken care of. They started a fire and kept it going for 15 months, until they were rescued. How did they manage such remarkable cooperation? Whenever they got into conflicts, they had a ritual. Each boy would go to opposite ends of the island to calm down. They created time and space, in other words. Then, after about four hours apart, they’d come back together and apologize.

I’m free like a wind. I’m wild like an ocean. I’m calm like a morning sunrise. I’m mysterious like a first star in the sky. I’m a fresh rain, that nourish the whole Nature. I’m one with Mother Nature. I’m dancing with the fire that lights up my heart. I’m a first snow in a calm winter day. My warm loving heart is the sun of the universe. I’m a daughter of God. I’m one with God whose wisdom runs through my veins, who is my greatest creator. I’m a free citizen of the Earth, of all the galaxies, of the Universe. I’m light, I’m energy, I’m pure consciousness, I’m unlimited potentiality. I’m you. You are me. We are one. My race is a human race. My politics is unity for all. I teach peace and love is my religion. -Iryna Dalton

He never learned her, quite. Year after year that territory, without seasons, shifted under his eye. An hour he could be lost in the walled anger of her quarried hurt on turning, see cool water laughing where the day before there were stones in her voice. He charted. She made wilderness again. Roads disappeared. The map was never true. Wind brought him rain sometimes, tasting of sea— and suddenly she would change the shape of shores faultlessly calm. All, all was each day new; the shadows of her love shortened or grew like trees seen from an unexpected hill, new country at each jaunty helpless journey. So he accepted that geography, constantly strange. Wondered. Stayed home increasingly to find his way among the landscapes of her mind.

Sometime toward dawn the rain ceases. But it is not yet day when Cash drives the last nail and stands stiffly up and looks down at the finished coffin, the others watching him. In the lantern light his face is calm, musing; slowly he strokes his hands on his raincoated thighs in a gesture deliberate, final and composed. Then four of them - Cash and pa and Vernon and Peabody - raise the coffin to their shoulders and turn towards the house. it is light, yet they move slowly; empty, yet they carry it carefully; lifeless, yet they move with hushed precautionary words to one another, speaking of it as though, complete, it now slumbered lightly alive, waiting to come awake. On the dark floor their feet clump awkwardly, as though for a long time they have not walked on floors.

I saw Mr. Prospero constantly, and always in distress; now soaked to the skin pathetically grinding the handle of his camera in an impenetrable pall of rain; now prostrate under the bare feet of a stampeding mob, like a football in a rugger scrum, now lamed, now groaning with indigestion, now shuddering in high fever. He became a figure from classic tragedy, inexorably hunted by hostile fates. After we had been in Addis Ababa some time a copy of a poster arrived from America advertising his news reel. It represented a young man of military appearance and more than military intrepidity standing calmly behind his camera while bombs burst overhead and naked warriors rolled interlocked about his knees. In vast letters across this scene of carnage was printed : " O.K., BOYS, YOU CAN START THE WAR NOW PROSPERO IS THERE.

Maybe I’m not cut out for monogamy,” G. had said to me early on. “Maybe I should just live in a room by myself and have girlfriends.” Another woman might have said, “Now, where did I put my coat?” Being a madly infatuated rationalist who had read her Simone de Beauvoir, I took a deep breath and carefully and calmly explained that of course he had to make up his own mind about how he wanted to live, and that I understood fidelity wasn’t for everyone, that some people could be perfectly happy without it, but I wanted to give my whole self in love and I couldn’t do that if I was being compared to other women on a daily basis (which I was) or if our relationship was only tentative and provisional (which it was). “Sweetie!” he said when I finished. “I love it that you can say how you feel without getting angry at me.” That other woman would have slammed the door behind her before he’d finished speaking. They say philanderers are attractive to women because of the thrill of the chase—you want to be the one to capture and tame that wild quarry. But what if a deeper truth is that women fall for such men because they want to be those men? Autonomous, in charge, making their own rules. Imagine that room G. spoke of, in which the women would come and go—is there not something attractive about it? Rain tapping softly on the tin ceiling, a desk, a lamp, a bed. A woman dashes up the narrow stairs, her raincoat flaring, her wet face lifted up like a flower. And then, the next day—maybe even the same day—different footsteps, another expectant face. I had to admit, it was an exciting scenario. You wouldn’t want to be one of the women trooping up and down the staircase, but you might want to be the man who lived in the room.

Ages before men had lived on the earth, there had been the creatures of the wilderness, and the holes of the rocks and the nests of the trees, and rain, frost, heat, dew, sunlight, and night, storm and calm, the honey of the wild flower and the instinct of the bee-all the beautiful and multiple forms of life with their inscrutable design. To know something of them and to love them was to be close to the kingdom of earth-perhaps to the greater kingdom of heaven. For whatever breathed and moved was a part of that creation. The coo of the dove, the lichen on the mossy rock, the mourn of a hunting wolf, and the murmur of the waterfall, the ever-green and growing tips of the spruces and the thunderbolts along the battlements of the heights-these one and all must be actuated by the Great Spirit-that incalculable thing in the universe that had produced man and soul.

Jesus, he’s actually waiting for me like he wants to get beat up. The kid has a screw loose. Or I do. Because I prowl forward and the mechanical gates guarding his house start to open for me. He’s wet through, golden hair scraped off his forehead. I hate how sexy he looks. My shirt is soaked to my chest too. I realize as we stare at each other, we probably look like one of those teen fucking romance movies, where they do some shit in the rain. In every drunk or sober situation this shouldn’t be happening. I shouldn’t be looking at his mouth like I’m on death row and he’s a steak dinner. I’m not gay. My drunk-ass brain chants over and over until the lie is part of my taste buds. My hazy eyes focus. He presses into my chest before I know it and he tugs the front of my hair until my mouth is hovering over his. “Your move, Maverick.” He says with calm ease. Rain drips off his tempting lips. Goddamn.

I tell you, I know what it is.” “What is it? What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?” It hits Rabbit depressingly that he really wants to be told. Underneath all this I-know-more-about-it-than-you heresies-of-the-early-Church business he really wants to be told about it, wants to be told that it is there, that he’s not lying to all those people every Sunday. As if it’s not enough to be trying to get some sense out of this crazy game you have to carry around this madman trying to swallow your soul. The hot strap of the bag gnaws at his shoulder. “The truth is,” Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice embarrassed but determined, “you’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.” They reach the tee, a platform of turf beside a hunchbacked fruit tree offering fists of taut ivory-colored buds. “Let me go first,” Rabbit says. “ ’Til you calm down.” His heart is hushed, held in mid-beat, by anger. He doesn’t care about anything except getting out of this tangle. He wants it to rain. In avoiding looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn’t heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather’s color stretched dense across the north. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler-edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he’s fooled, for the ball makes its hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. “That’s it!” he cries and, turning to Eccles with a grin of aggrandizement, repeats, “That’s it.

One find in Western Australia turned up zircon crystals dated to 4.4 billion years ago, just a couple of hundred million years after the earth and the solar system formed. By analyzing their detailed composition, researchers have suggested that ancient conditions may have been far more agreeable than previously thought. Early earth may have been a relatively calm water world, with small landmasses dotting a surface mostly covered by ocean.15 That’s not to say that earth’s history didn’t have its moments of flaming drama. Roughly fifty to one hundred million years after its birth, earth likely collided with a Mars-sized planet called Theia, which would have vaporized the earth’s crust, obliterated Theia, and blown a cloud of dust and gas thousands of kilometers into space. In time, that cloud would have clumped up gravitationally to form the moon, one of the larger planetary satellites in the solar system and a nightly reminder of that violent encounter. Another reminder is provided by the seasons. We experience hot summers and cold winters because earth’s tilted axis affects the angle of incoming sunlight, with summer being a period of direct rays and winter being a period of oblique ones. The smashup with Theia is the likely cause of earth’s cant. And though less sensational than a planetary collision, both the earth and the moon endured periods of significant pummelings by smaller meteors. The moon’s lack of eroding winds and its static crust have preserved the scars but earth’s thrashing, less visible now, was just as severe. Some early impacts may have partially or even fully vaporized all water on earth’s surface. Despite that, the zircon archives provide evidence that within a few hundred million years of its formation, earth may have cooled sufficiently for atmospheric steam to rain down, fill the oceans, and yield a terrain not all that dissimilar from the earth we now know. At least, that’s one conclusion reached by reading the crystals.

The best way to hide your wealth is to give it away. If you are generous with your wealth, the money that would have disappeared sooner or later becomes an everlasting jewel, deeply engraved in the heart of the recipient.” The air I inhale enters my body and becomes part of me. The air that I exhale moves into someone else and becomes part of her. Just by looking at how the air moves, we realize we are all connected to one another, not just figuratively but also literally. “Whether we like it or not, we are all connected, and it is unthinkable to be happy all by oneself.” —HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA* The whole universe is contained in an apple wedge in a lunch box. Apple tree, sunlight, cloud, rain, earth, air, farmer’s sweat are all in it. Delivery truck, gas, market, money, cashier’s smile are all in it. Refrigerator, knife, cutting board, mother’s love are all in it. Everything in the whole universe depends on one another. Now, think about what exists in you. The whole universe is in us.

Tears were running down her cheeks but a smile trembled on her lips. 'We will still die together." With a shaking hand, she reached for the teapot. 'Will you have a last cup of tea with me?' He turned his gaze on her. An odd calmness was welling up in him. 'I would rather have a kiss. My first and last, I think.' 'Your first kiss?' He laughed shakily. 'My circumstances have not lent themselves to the giving or receiving of kisses.' She blinked and the tears spilled faster. 'For me, also.' She leaned a little closer to him and then stopped. He looked at her. She had closed her eyes. Her hair was sleek, her skin like cream, her lips pink. Her first kiss would come from a scaled dragon-man. He leaned in and found her mouth with his. He kissed her softly, unsure of how it was done, expecting her to pull away in revulsion. Instead, when he leaned back, she was smiling through her tears. 'To be touched by a man, with gentleness,' she said, as if that wonder were so great, it dispelled the circling dragons.

Did you ever notice how very fickle males are?” she asked the horse. “And how very foolish females are about them?” she added, aware of how inexplicably deflated she felt. She realized as well that she was being completely irrational-she had not intended to come here, had not wanted him to be waiting, and now she felt almost like crying because he wasn’t! Giving the ribbons of her bonnet an impatient jerk, she untied them. Pulling the bonnet off, she pushed the back door of the cottage open, stepped inside-and froze in shock! Standing at the opposite side of the small room, his back to her, was Ian Thornton. His dark head was slightly bent as he gazed at the cheery little fire crackling in the fireplace, his hands shoved into the back waistband of his gray riding breeches, his booted foot upon the grate. He’d taken off his jacket, and beneath his soft lawn shirt his muscles flexed as he withdrew his right hand and shoved it through the side of his hair. Elizabeth’s gaze took in the sheer male beauty of his wide, masculine shoulders, his broad back and narrow waist. Something in the somber way he was standing-added to the fact that he’d waited more than two hours for her-made her doubt her earlier conviction that he hadn’t truly cared whether she came or not. And that was before she glanced sideways and saw the table. Her heart turned over when she saw the trouble he’d taken: A cream linen tablecloth covered with crude china, obviously borrowed from Charise’s house. In the center of the table a candle was lit, and a half-empty bottle of wine stood beside a platter of cold meat and cheese. In all her life Elizabeth had never known that a man could actually arrange a luncheon and set a table. Women did that. Women and servants. Not men who were so handsome they made one’s pulse race. It seemed she’d been standing there for several minutes, not mere seconds, when he stiffened suddenly, as if sensing her presence. He turned, and his harsh face softened with a wry smile: “You aren’t very punctual.” “I didn’t intend to come,” Elizabeth admitted, fighting to recover her balance and ignore the tug of his eyes and voice. “I got caught in the rain on my way to the village.” “You’re wet.” “I know.” “Come over by the fire.” When she continued to watch him warily, he took his foot off the grate and walked over to her. Elizabeth stood rooted to the floor, while all of Lucinda’s dark warnings about being alone with a man rushed through her mind. “What do you want?” she asked him breathlessly, feeling dwarfed by his towering height. “Your jacket.” “No-I think I’d like to keep it on.” “Off,” he insisted quietly. “It’s wet.” “Now see here!” she burst out backing toward the open door, clutching the edges of her jacket. “Elizabeth,” he said with reassuring calm, “I gave you my word you’d be safe if you came today.” Elizabeth briefly closed her eyes and nodded, “I know. I also know I shouldn’t be here. I really ought to leave. I should, shouldn’t I?” Opening her eyes again, she looked beseechingly into his-the seduced asking the seducer for advice. “Under the circumstances, I don’t think I’m the one you ought to ask.

A lot goes through your mind when you’re dying. What they say about life flashing before your eyes is true. You remember things from your childhood and adolescence—specific images, vivid and real, like brilliant sparks of light exploding in your brain. Somehow you’re able to comprehend the whole of your life in that single instant of reflection, as if it were a panoramic view. You have no choice but to look at your decisions and accomplishments—or lack of them—and decide for yourself if you did all that you could do. And you panic just a little, wishing for one more chance at all the beautiful moments you didn’t appreciate, or for one more day with the person you didn’t love quite enough. You also wonder in those frantic, fleeting seconds, as your spirit shoots through a dark tunnel, if heaven exists on the other side, and if so, what you will find there. What will it look like? What color will it be? Then you see a light—a brilliant, dazzling light—more calming and loving than any words can possibly describe, and everything finally makes sense to you. You are no longer afraid, and you know what lies ahead. Sunshine and Rain

I find myself in a dark hallway. At the end of the hall is a door, slightly open with white light spilling around its edges. The hall is full of galoshes and rain coats. I walk slowly and silently to the door and carefully look in to the next room. Morning light fills up the room and is painful at first, but as my eyes adjust I see that in the room is a plain wooden table next to a window. A woman sits at the table facing the window. A teacup sits at her elbow. Outside is the lake, the waves rush up the shore and recede with calming repetition which becomes like stillness after a few minutes. The woman is extremely still. Something about her is familiar. She is an old woman; her hair is perfectly white and lies long on her back in a thin stream, over a slight dowager's hump. She wears a sweater the colour of coral. The curve of her shoulders, the stiffness in her posture says her is someone who is very tired, and I am very tired, myself. I shift my weight from one foot to the other and the floor creaks; the woman turns and sees me and her face is remade in to joy. I am suddenly amazed; this is Clare, Clare old! and she is coming to me, so slowly, and I take her in to my arms.

We feel, mostly, that our actions matter, and that earnest communication is happening, that we are real and permanent and in control of our fate. And under normal circumstances, these things are (mostly) true: we are sane sailors on a sturdy ship in a calm harbor. But every now and then the scrim drops (there’s a scrim in this metaphorical harbor) and out there: the open ocean, huge waves, fierce winds. And we find ourselves heading out. Soon it becomes clear that we are not, after all, in control, not a high-functioning sailor standing stably on a nice calm deck, a deck that we have created through our virtue. The ship is pitching, and the deck is covered in ice, and we’re wearing special headphones that distort what our crewmates are shouting and special mouthpieces that distort what we’re shouting back in return. And now the ship is going down and some action is required, some cooperation, some compassion. And we intend to be compassionate, we really do, but the intended compassion, passing out through those distorting mouthpieces and being received through those distorting headphones, is off; it doesn’t help, and may even hurt, or, worst of all, may make no difference at all.

my boyfriend drives a lil bucket when it rain it fills up with rain my boyfriend he gon pick me up don't distract him at the wheel in his lane he's the only one my boyfriend he misses me when i'm gone so he don't forget me there's a song he sings calms his nerve, endings my boyfriend is friendly and we don't want no problems i could say that i'm happy they let me and my boyfriend become married i could say that i'm happy but cross my heart i didn't notice hope to die no never, we voted me and my boyfriend cast our ballot every kiss reads like a poem making wrongs right like a poem i couldn't say i dream of you because my dreams are filled with no one and all is lost me and my boyfriend we found we don't hope for beyonds at all me and my boyfriend spend time and that's all i'm holding on this time we got permission nothing's above condition but this ain't a thang it's a mission can't join the band so sing along me and my boyfriend got it going on sleep with fans and t shirts on asleep in vans your legs all strewn across my lap tan lines where your watch was strapped you took off to make time cut your hair you left it long i love to stare there's nothing wrong and if i die while i'm asleep i pray to God my boyfriend keeps my secret peace

Watch The Sky. Look how majestically it walks, it moves and shifts, it growls and screams, and sometimes sheds tears, like every drizzle or a rain droplet is a tear of either a deep melancholy or a mad ecstasy, like the clouds float along the sky drifting in a tune of their own, as if they are dancing in the Stage of this Magnificent Pathway, a string of Stars play hide and seek in its camouflage and while everything treads along this hurricane of a very Chaotic Forever Moving Wheel, there is this Calm, this innate Calm that is so breathable, so palpable, so tangible, as if the Whole Sky is a Magic weave of Something Eternal, something Extraordinarily Strangely Beautiful, something Simple yet Unfathomable, something that churns Hope and Despondency at the same time, something Smiling and Crying at the same time, something beyond our Understanding. Something that when we closely look in, we can just be, we can just float like those clouds and release the droplets of chaos from our mind in the very Silence of its mystical Majesticity, and slowly, perhaps very very distinctly in a snail's pace our Mind finally declutters its passing turmoil knowing how everything moves and shifts, growls and screams, but eventually finds a Silence of its own.

The denial of the angel who, in being born, refused to be a slave constituted the equilibrium of the world, and the movement of the stars began. And the infinite space admires this love of liberty, which is immense enough to fill the void of eternal night and strong enough to withstand God’s hatred. But God could not hate the most noble of his children, and he only had her feel his anger in order to confirm her power. And the Verb of God himself, as if he were jealous of Lucifer, also wished to descend from heaven and triumphantly traverse the shadows of hell. He wished to be proscribed and condemned: and he planned in advance the terrible hour when he would cry out, at the zenith of his agony: “My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me?” As the morning star precedes the sun, Lucifer’s insurrection announced to nature newly born the next incarnation of God. Perhaps Lucifer, in falling into the night, dragged with him a rain of suns and stars attracted by his glory! Perhaps our sun is a demon among the stars, like Lucifer is a star among the angels. This is why, no doubt, he remains calm as he illuminates the horrible anguishes of humanity and the slow agony of the earth, it is because he is free in his solitude and because he possesses his own light.

seemed relentless. ‘We can’t leave yet,’ Laura said reluctantly. ‘We have to try to disable this ship. H.I.V.E. has no chance while this thing is floating out here raining missiles down on the island.’ Wing knew that Laura was right, but at the same time he needed to find Cypher. He was not prone to letting his emotions control him but the burning anger he felt when he visualised that black glass mask was fierce and relentless. He had no idea what Cypher was hoping to achieve with his assault on the school, but he knew that he was going to stop him, or die trying. ‘We must return to the island,’ Wing replied. ‘Once the situation there is resolved we can worry about this ship.’ ‘I know you want to go after him, Wing,’ Laura said, ‘but we have to do this first.’ ‘Or we could just do both,’ Shelby said, knowing that if Wing and Laura started to argue it would just be a competition to see who could be most stubborn. A very long, very boring competition that they really didn’t have time for right now. ‘What do you propose?’ Wing asked. ‘Well, why don’t you take the boat back to the island and we’ll stay here and try to disable this thing,’ Shelby said. ‘Splitting up seems ill advised at this point,’ Wing said calmly. ‘Maybe, but what other choice do we have? And besides, what makes you think we’d need your help anyway?’ Shelby said with a grin.

50. Keep Grounded When was the last time you ventured into the great outdoors? I mean really ventured, where you set out into the unknown with just a map and compass, backpack and sleeping bag - the sort of venturing that makes your heart beat faster. Have you experienced the hypnotic patter of rain on your tent, the clear call of an owl or the rustling of the wind through the leaves at night? It’s a feeling of absolute freedom and belonging - a chance to reconnect with both ourselves and planet Earth. At night in the outdoors is also a reminder that the best things in life aren’t things. Money can’t buy the quiet calm that comes from sitting beside a mountain stream as it ‘tinkles’ through the rock and heather. Money can’t buy the inspiration that you feel sat on a clifftop above the pounding of the ocean surf as it hits the rocks far below. You can’t bottle feelings like that. And sitting around a campfire under a sky of stars is the most ancient and wonderful of human activities. It reminds us of our place in the world, and in history - and it’s hard not to be humbled. These sorts of simple activities cost so little yet they give us precious time to be ‘still- - time to reconnect, to clear our heads of the dross, to remind ourselves of our dreams and to see things in the perspective they often require. We all need that regularly in our lives - more than you might imagine.

One thing I'm sure, you can't tell about love, or the lack of it, except from the outside, from the way two people look at each other, from the things they do. It's like the way you can tell about a house, about the people in it, whether they're happy, from the way it looks from the street: A small pot of marigolds, a couple of chairs in the shade, tells you pretty much everything you need to know. I could tell what they had. I could tell by the way he'd wrapped her up in that big coat of his that day in the rain, like he was a magician who could make them both disappear, by the way she'd walk next to him, or look at him when he talked to other people, that look saying, "This man is mine and I like how he is -- how he moves, how he laughs -- and he knows it and it's the two of us from here on, for everything." It was easy, unforced -- walking down the hall, she'd touch his elbow with a finger and he'd turn like a ship; she'd sigh and he'd look up. Sometimes at lunch, or in the library, you'd catch them looking at each other, a kind of calm in their eyes like after a smile, or before it, and know they were talking. She loved him -- what more is there to say? There were times I'd look at them and feel something in my chest and throat, an ache that made it harder to breathe, but I was OK with it. I can say that now. I was OK with it. I didn't know it then, but I loved them both. Who's to say which one of them more? It was the pot of flowers, the chair in the shade. . . .

Mal’s calm, the surety he seemed to carry in his steps. “Do you think it’s out there?” I asked one afternoon when we’d taken shelter in a dense cluster of pines to wait out a storm. “Hard to say. Right now, I could just be tracking a big hawk. I’m going on my gut as much as anything, and that always makes me nervous.” “You don’t seem nervous. You seem completely at ease.” I could hear the irritation in my voice. Mal glanced at me. “It helps that no one’s threatening to cut you open.” I said nothing. The thought of the Darkling’s knife was almost comforting—a simple fear, concrete, manageable. He squinted out at the rain. “And it’s something else, something the Darkling said in the chapel. He thought he needed me to find the firebird. As much as I hate to admit it, that’s why I know I can do it now, because he was so sure.” I understood. The Darkling’s faith in me had been an intoxicating thing. I wanted that certainty, the knowledge that everything would be dealt with, that someone was in control. Sergei had run to the Darkling looking for that reassurance. I just want to feel safe again. “When the time comes,” Mal asked, “can you bring the firebird down?” Yes. I was done with hesitation. It wasn’t just that we’d run out of options, or that so much was riding on the firebird’s power. I’d simply grown ruthless enough or selfish enough to take another creature’s life. But I missed the girl who had shown the stag mercy, who had been strong enough to turn away from the lure of power, who had believed in something more. Another casualty of this war. “It still doesn’t seem real to me,” I said.

You... you were telling me about your diet?" "Well, mostly I was raised on milk, potatoes, dulse, fish-" "I beg your pardon, did you say 'dulse'? What is that, exactly?" "A kind of seaweed," MacRae said. "As a lad, it was my job to go out at low tide before supper and cut handfuls of it from the rocks on shore." He opened a cupboard to view a small store of cooking supplies and utensils. "It goes in soup, or you can eat it raw." He glanced at her over his shoulder, amusement touching his lips as he saw her expression. "Seaweed is the secret to good health?" Merritt asked dubiously. "No, milady, that would be whisky. My men and I take a wee dram every day." Seeing her perplexed expression, her continued, "Whisky is the water of life. It warms the blood, keeps the spirits calm, and the heart strong." "I wish I liked whisky, but I'm afraid it's not to my taste." MacRae looked appalled. "Was it Scotch whisky?" "I'm not sure," she said. "Whatever it was, it set my tongue on fire." "It was no' Scotch, then, but rotgut. Islay whisky starts as hot as the devil's whisper... but then the flavors come through, and it might taste of cinnamon, or peat, or honeycomb fresh from the hive. It could taste of a long-ago walk on a winter's eve... or a kiss you once stole from your sweetheart in the hayloft. Whisky is yesterday's rain, distilled with barley into a vapor that rises like a will-o'-the-wisp, then set to bide its time in casks of good oak." His voice had turned as soft as a curl of smoke. "Someday we'll have a whisky, you and I. We'll toast health to our friends and peace to our foes... and we'll drink to the loves lost to time's perishing, as well as those yet to come.

My faith isn’t in time, it’s in God.” “Then why are you hesitant to help your people? Why do you insist on pawning off the hard jobs to others? Tell me”—he leans forward again—“what is your purpose here?” I fumble for an answer. “To ask you questions. And to help Wilbur Sherrod with his work.” He shakes his head with a patient blink. “As much as I relish discussing Wilbur Sherrod’s skill with design, I must redirect you. Why are you here? In the world. The big picture.” I stare at him. He stares back, waiting, calm. I’m ruffled. “A-Actually, that’s one of my questions for you. How do I find out God’s plan for my life?” “He doesn’t have one.” My head jerks. “What do you mean? He’s God. Doesn’t He have a specific purpose for everything? Everyone? For me?” At this, the Preacher laughs. “Purpose?” he asks when he takes a breath. “Life is meaningless.” Anger just short of panic threatens to block my throat. “No, it’s not. He has a plan, I know it.” “What is it?” I throw my arms up. “I was hoping you’d help me find out. Is it to save Radicals? Write my biography? Start life over in Ivanhoe? Keep Mrs. Newton company? What is it?” “Tell me, are you a pregnant virgin?” My breath seizes and I’m in front of Trevor Rain again, answering whether or not I’ve been kissed. It’s so embarrassing I struggle against the urge to laugh. “No.” I shake my head. “I mean, no, I’m not pregnant, but yes . . .” I swallow. “I’m a . . .” He spares me. “Have you spoken to a burning bush?” My eyes narrow. “Are you mocking me?” “I’m just pointing out that if God has a specific plan for your life, He’ll tell you like he told Mary and Moses. But the disturbing truth is, you have to decide what you want, just decide it with prayer.” I stand limp. Defeated. “I don’t know what I want.” “If you were in a ditch with your life seeping out of you, what’s the one thing you’d want? What do you want today?

Nonna tucked each of her hands into the opposite sleeve, a wizened Confucius in a leopard bathrobe. "Michelangleo, he goes. For days and days he stays away from Elisabetta. The other girls, the prettier girls, have hope again. And then, there he goes once more, carrying only his nonno's ugly old glass-his telescope-and a bag of figs. These he lays at her feet. "'I see you,' he tells her. 'Every day for months, I watch. I see you. Where you sit, the sea is calm and dolphins swim near you. I see your mended net looks like a lady's lace. I see you dance in the rain before you run home. I see the jewel mosaic you leave to be scattered and remade again and again, piu bella than gold and pearls. You are piu bella than any other, queen of the sea. "'You do not need silk or pearls. I see that. But they are yours if you wish. I am yours if you wish.If you like what you see.' He gives her the glass. She takes it. Then she asks, 'What about the figs? My bisnonno, he laughs. 'It might take time, your looking to see if you like me. I bring lunch.'" Nonna slapped her knee again, clearly delighted with little Michelangelo's humor. "There is the love story. You like it?" I swallowed another yawn. "Si, Nonna.It's a good story." I couldn't resist. "But...a talking seagull? A dolphin guide? That kinda stretches the truth, dontcha think?" Nonna shrugged. "All truth, not all truth, does it matter? My nonno Guillermo came to Michelangelo and Elisabetta, then my papa Euplio to him, then me, your papa, you." She lowered her feet to the floor. Then pinched my cheek. Hard. Buona notte, bellissima." "Okay,Nonna." I yawned and pulled the white eyelet quilt up.I'd inked abstract swirl-and-dot patterns all over it when I redecorated my room. They're a little optic when I'm that tired. "Buona notte." As I was dozing off,I heard her rummaging in the linen cupboard next to my door. Reorganizing again, I though. She does that when Mom can't see her. They fold things completely different ways.

Mortals, I’ve observed, sometimes marry for very silly reasons. The Folk do not, because one cannot marry someone who does not match them. The word has a connotation of accepting one’s fate.” “You are trying to calm me with a linguistics lesson,” I said. He smiled. “Is it working?” I let out a breath of laughter. “Then—you purpose we marry by the old traditions? A simple declaration?” “Why not?” he said. It was a strange thing, I had been viewing the marriage question with such trepidation—the ceremony, the spectacle, all that came after it, in the form of this and beautiful kingdom that would thence be half mine. And yet, as I sat there upon the lake amidst the tree-shadow and reflected light and the dragonflies tussling with the wind, I no longer knew why I had been so afraid. Likely it was also the threat of Queen Arna hanging over is like a guillotine—well, the prospect of imminent death tends to put things into perspective. It was not that my worries vanished— no magic could manage that. I only realized how much smaller they were than the world that lay before me. A world that I wanted, even after all I had seen, and amidst such a thicket of danger. I wanted it very much. And I especially wanted to share it with Wendell. “All right,” I said. “How does this work? Must I stand? I warn you, my balance is unsteady in all forms of watercraft.” Wendell blinked for a moment. And then his expression flooded with such delight and relief that I was taken aback. “You thought I would say no!” I exclaimed, batting his hand in indignation. “Good grief. And you are always boasting about how well you know me.” He laughed again, a sound that echoed across the lake, and it seemed the trees were stirred by it, raining their leaves down upon the lakeshore. He rubbed a hand over his face. “I didn’t think that,” he said. “I didn’t know what you would say. It appears you still have the ability to surprise me, Em.” I rolled my eyes. There was an echo of nervousness in his gaze, and I decided I’d had enough of that. Additionally, he was looking very handsome just then, with the sunlight picking out at least a dozen shades of gold in his hair, so I took hold of his cloak, thumb looping through one of the buttonholes, and drew him towards me. “Well, come on, what must we do?” I said when we at least broke apart, breathless. I hoped this tradition would not involve lengthy speeches. I had not improved much when it comes to putting feelings into words. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s done. Look.” “I followed his gaze to the lakeshore. A hundred tiny lights dotted the forest—more than a hundred. A thousand? They kept appearing among the shadows, different in size and luminance depending on the lantern. I hadn't realized the forest was so full of Folk. And among the trees, the silver faerie stones began to glow. "All this for a mortal queen?" I muttered, flushed and overwhelmed.

Although I am still far from this kind of interior understanding of myself, with profound respect for its significance I have sought to preserve my individuality―worshipped the unknown God. With a premature anxiety I have tried to avoid coming in close contact with those things whose force of attraction might be too powerful for me. I have sought to appropriate much from them, studied their distinctive characteristics and meaning in human life, but at the same time guarded against coming, like the moth, too close to the flame. I have had little to win or to lose in association with the ordinary run of men, partly because what they do―so-called practical life―does not interest me much, partly because their coldness and indifference to the spiritual and deeper currents in man alienate me even more from them. With few exceptions my companions have had no special influence upon me. A life that has not arrived at clarity about itself must necessarily exhibit an uneven side-surface; confronted by certain facts [*Facta*] and their apparent disharmony, they simply halted there, for, as I see it, they did not have sufficient interest to seek a resolution in a higher harmony or to recognize the necessity of it. Their opinion of me was always one-sided, and I have vacillated between putting too much or too little weight on what they said. I have now withdrawn from their influence and the potential variations of my life's compass resulting from it. Thus I am again standing at the point where I must begin again in another way. I shall now calmly attempt to look at myself and begin to initiate inner action; for only thus will I be able, like a child calling itself "I" in its first consciously undertaken act, be able to call myself "I" in a profounder sense. But that takes stamina, and it is not possible to harvest immediately what one has sown. I will remember that philosopher's method of having his disciples keep silent for three years; then I dare say it will come. Just as one does not begin a feast at sunrise but at sundown, just so in the spiritual world one must first work forward for some time before the sun really shines for us and rises in all its glory; for although it is true as it says that God lets his sun shine upon the good and the evil and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust, it is not so in the spiritual world. So let the die be cast―I am crossing the Rubicon! No doubt this road takes me into battle, but I will not renounce it. I will not lament the past―why lament? I will work energetically and not waste time in regrets, like the person stuck in a bog and first calculating how far he has sunk without recognizing that during the time he spends on that he is sinking still deeper. I will hurry along the path I have found and shout to everyone I meet: Do not look back as Lot's wife did, but remember that we are struggling up a hill." ―from_Journals_, (The Search for Personal Meaning)

Soon after that, Eno briefly joined a group called the Scratch Orchestra, led by the late British avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew. There was one Cardew piece that would be a formative experience for Eno—a piece known as “Paragraph 7,” part of a larger Cardew masterwork called The Great Learning. Explaining “Paragraph 7” could easily take up a book of its own. “Paragraph 7”’s score is designed to be performed by a group of singers, and it can be done by anyone, trained or untrained. The words are from a text by Confucius, broken up into 24 short chunks, each of which has a number. There are only a few simple rules. The number tells the singer how many times to repeat that chunk of text; an additional number tells each singer how many times to repeat it loudly or softly. Each singer chooses a note with which to sing each chunk—any note—with the caveats to not hit the same note twice in a row, and to try to match notes with a note sung by someone else in the group. Each note is held “for the length of a breath,” and each singer goes through the text at his own pace. Despite the seeming vagueness of the score’s few instructions, the piece sounds very similar—and very beautiful—each time it is performed. It starts out in discord, but rapidly and predictably resolves into a tranquil pool of sound. “Paragraph 7,” and 1960s tape loop pieces like Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain,” sparked Eno’s fascination with music that wasn’t obsessively organized from the start, but instead grew and mutated in intriguing ways from a limited set of initial constraints. “Paragraph 7” also reinforced Eno’s interest in music compositions that seemed to have the capacity to regulate themselves; the idea of a self-regulating system was at the very heart of cybernetics. Another appealing facet of “Paragraph 7” for Eno was that it was both process and product—an elegant and endlessly beguiling process that yielded a lush, calming result. Some of Cage’s pieces, and other process-driven pieces by other avant-gardists, embraced process to the point of extreme fetishism, and the resulting product could be jarring or painful to listen to. “Paragraph 7,” meanwhile, was easier on the ears—a shimmering cloud of sonics. In an essay titled “Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts,” published in Studio International in 1976, a 28-year-old Eno connected his interest in “Paragraph 7” to his interest in cybernetics. He attempted to analyze how the design of the score’s few instructions naturally reduced the “variety” of possible inputs, leading to a remarkably consistent output. In the essay, Eno also wrote about algorithms—a cutting-edge concept for an electronic-music composer to be writing about, in an era when typewriters, not computers, were still en vogue. (In 1976, on the other side of the Atlantic, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were busy building a primitive personal computer in a garage that they called the Apple I.) Eno also talked about the related concept of a “heuristic,” using managerial-cybernetics champion Stafford Beer’s definition. “To use Beer’s example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going up’ will get him there,” Eno wrote. Eno connected Beer’s concept of a “heuristic” to music. Brecht’s Fluxus scores, for instance, could be described as heuristics.

From an essay on early reading by Robert Pinsky: My favorite reading for many years was the "Alice" books. The sentences had the same somber, drugged conviction as Sir John Tenniel's illustrations, an inexplicable, shadowy dignity that reminded me of the portraits and symbols engraved on paper money. The books were not made of words and sentences but of that smoky assurance, the insistent solidity of folded, textured, Victorian interiors elaborately barricaded against the doubt and ennui of a dreadfully God-forsaken vision. The drama of resisting some corrosive, enervating loss, some menacing boredom, made itself clear in the matter-of-fact reality of the story. Behind the drawings I felt not merely a tissue of words and sentences but an unquestioned, definite reality. I read the books over and over. Inevitably, at some point, I began trying to see how it was done, to unravel the making--to read the words as words, to peek behind the reality. The loss entailed by such knowledge is immense. Is the romance of "being a writer"--a romance perhaps even created to compensate for this catastrophic loss--worth the price? The process can be epitomized by the episode that goes with one of my favorite illustrations. Alice has entered a dark wood--"much darker than the last wood": [S]he reached the wood: It looked very cool and shady. "Well, at any rate it's a great comfort," she said as she stepped under the trees, "after being so hot, to get into the--into the--into what?" she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. "I mean to get under the--under the--under this, you know!" putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. "What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name--why to be sure it hasn't!" This is the wood where things have no names, which Alice has been warned about. As she tries to remember her own name ("I know it begins with L!"), a Fawn comes wandering by. In its soft, sweet voice, the Fawn asks Alice, "What do you call yourself?" Alice returns the question, the creature replies, "I'll tell you, if you'll come a little further on . . . . I can't remember here". The Tenniel picture that I still find affecting illustrates the first part of the next sentence: So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm. "I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight. "And dear me! you're a human child!" A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed. In the illustration, the little girl and the animal walk together with a slightly awkward intimacy, Alice's right arm circled over the Fawn's neck and back so that the fingers of her two hands meet in front of her waist, barely close enough to mesh a little, a space between the thumbs. They both look forward, and the affecting clumsiness of the pose suggests that they are tripping one another. The great-eyed Fawn's legs are breathtakingly thin. Alice's expression is calm, a little melancholy or spaced-out. What an allegory of the fall into language. To imagine a child crossing over from the jubilant, passive experience of such a passage in its physical reality, over into the phrase-by-phrase, conscious analysis of how it is done--all that movement and reversal and feeling and texture in a handful of sentences--is somewhat like imagining a parallel masking of life itself, as if I were to discover, on reflection, that this room where I am writing, the keyboard, the jar of pens, the lamp, the rain outside, were all made out of words. From "Some Notes on Reading," in The Most Wonderful Books (Milkweed Editions)

At the end of the lane Elizabeth put down her side of the trunk and sank down wearily beside Lucinda upon its hard top, emotionally exhausted. A wayward chuckle bubbled up inside her, brought on by exhaustion, fright, defeat, and the last remnants of triumph over having gotten just a little of her own back from the man who’d ruined her life. The only possible explanation for Ian Thornton’s behavior today was that he was a complete madman. With a shake of her head Elizabeth made herself stop thinking of him. At the moment she had so many new worries she hardly knew how to begin to cope. She glanced sideways at her stalwart duenna, and an amused smile touched her lips as she recalled Lucinda’s actions at the cottage. On the one hand, Lucinda rejected all emotional displays as totally unseemly-yet at the same time she herself was possessed of the most formidable temper Elizabeth had ever witnessed. It was as if Lucinda did not regard her own outbursts of ire as emotional. Without the slightest hesitation or regret Lucinda could verbally flay a wrongdoer into small, bite-sized pieces and then mentally stamp him into the ground and grind him beneath the heel of her sturdy shoe. On the other hand, were Elizabeth to exhibit the smallest bit of fear right now over their daunting predicament, Lucinda would instantly stiffen up with disapproval and deliver one of her sharp reprimands. Cognizant of that, Elizabeth glanced worriedly at the sky, where black clouds were rolling in, heralding a storm; but when she spoke she sounded deliberately and absurdly bland. “I believe it’s starting to rain, Lucinda,” she remarked while cold drizzle began to slap the leaves of the tree over their heads. “So it would seem,” said Lucinda. She opened her umbrella with a smart snap, holding it over them both. “It’s fortunate you have your umbrella.” “We aren’t likely to drown from a little rain.” “I shouldn’t think so.” Elizabeth drew a steadying breath, looking around at the harsh Scottish cliffs. In the tone of one asking someone’s opinion on a rhetorical question, Elizabeth said, “Do you suppose there are wolves out here?” “I believe,” Lucinda replied, “they probably constitute a larger threat to our health at present than the rain.” The sun was setting, and the early spring air had a sharp bite in it; Elizabeth was almost positive they’d be freezing by nightfall. “It’s a bit chilly.” “Rather.” “We have warmer clothes in the trunks, though.” “I daresay we won’t be too uncomfortable, in that case.” Elizabeth’s wayward sense of humor chose that unlikely moment to assert itself. “No, we shall be snug as can be while the wolves gather around us.” “Quite.” Hysteria, hunger, and exhaustion-combined with Lucinda’s unswerving calm and her earlier unprecedented entry into the cottage with umbrella flailing-were making Elizabeth almost giddy. “Of course, if the wolves realize how hungry we are, there’s every change they’ll give us a wide berth.” “A cheering possibility.” “We’ll build a fire,” Elizabeth said, her lips twitching. “That will keep them at bay, I believe.” When Lucinda remained silent for several moments, occupied with her own thoughts, Elizabeth confided with an odd surge of happiness. “Do you know something, Lucinda? I don’t think I would have missed today for anything.” Lucinda’s thin gray brows shot up, and she cast a dubious sideways glance at Elizabeth. “I realize that must sound extremely peculiar, but can you imagine how absolutely exhilarating it was to have that man at the point of a gun for just a few minutes? Do you find that-odd?” Elizabeth asked when Lucinda stared straight ahead in angry, thoughtful silence. “What I find off,” she said in a tone of frosty disapproval mingled with surprise, “is that you evoke such animosity in that man.” “I think he’s quite demented.” “I would have said embittered.” “About what?” “That is an interesting question.

When it stopped hailing ang raining, the hot day had suddenly turned cool. The whole world seemed to be quiet and calm and I wanted to be the world and feel like that.

Thanks by Maisie Aletha Smikle Giving thanks need no ranks From the dinosaurs to the ants Thanks for all Great and small Giving thanks is an everyday affair Even though Thanksgiving comes but once a year A thank you we must share Giving thanks for what is dear Be it far Or be it near Thanks for things present Even though you may receive no presents Thanks for the past Oh Lord how time goes by fast Thanks for the future For indeed we have been given nature Water that rains from up above Springs that emerge from the rocks beneath To nourish and make all things flourish Without which all would perish Food that grows Trees that bloom Flowers that calm And herbs for balm Giving thanks may sometimes make you sad If you recall something bad Give thanks for all things good And the times you have withstood

Whatever you like.’ Mum rolled herself off the bed and headed into the bathroom. ‘Just keep her close. It’s good for her to bond.’ ‘Like Mika.’ I smiled, then gazed down at the little face in front of me. Her eyes were closed, and her nose was the tiniest thing I’d even seen, except for her eyelashes, which made me gasp out loud when I noticed them. I peeked inside the blanket wrap and saw a little fist, closed up but relaxed, with the tiniest little fingers ever. And fingernails! ‘Oh!’ I said. I couldn’t help myself. We sat on the armchair for ages. Mum must have had the longest shower ever in the history of showers, but I guess she had a lot of icky stuff to wash off, plus with the power going off, the rain, and the mud I tracked in, everything had seemed kind of grubby at home. I didn’t mind, though. I just sat with my baby sister, looking at her and talking to her, and falling in love. Yes, I was in love with her. It was true. And astounding. For so many months, I had hated the thought of having a baby in the house, but the second I’d met her, everything was different. I looked towards the bathroom door. Mum was still in there, but I wanted to apologise. For everything. For thinking Mum wouldn’t love me as much if she had another baby. For thinking I was getting squeezed out. For assuming Mum didn’t care. ‘Love grows,’ I whispered to the baby. ‘There’s enough for everybody to have one hundred per cent of it.’ I blew on her forehead, just gently. She stirred and moved her hand, and I smiled to myself. In the stillness, the room seemed to shrink until it was just me and my baby sister, sitting together in the light and calm.

When I heard Toni’s calm soothing tone, I said, “Aha! Your words are telling me you understand, but your tone is telling me to calm down. There is nothing so infuriating as being told to calm down when you’re angry.” Sarah, another mom in the group, immediately agreed. “Those are two words my husband is never allowed to say to me. If he dares, I will rip his head off!” “Imagine this. You call me and say, ‘What a horrible day. The kids were totally hyper and it was pouring rain

Well, it come a famine and all de crops was dried up and Brother John was ast to pray. He had prayed for rain last year and it had rained, so all de white folks 'sembled at they church and called on Brother John to pray agin, so he got down and prayed: "Lord, first thing, I want you to understand that this ain't no n****r talking to you. This is a white man and I want you to hear me. Pay some attention to me. I don't worry and bother you all the time like these n****rs--asking you for a whole heap of things that they don't know what to do with after they git 'em--so when I do ask a favor, I want it granted. Now, Lord, we want some rain. Our crops is all burning up and we'd like a little rain. But I don't mean for you to come in a hell of a storm like you did last year--kicking up racket like n****rs at a barbecue. I want you to come calm and easy. Now, another thing, Lord, I want to speak about. Don't let these n****rs be as sassy as they have been in the past. Keep 'em in their places, Lord, Amen.

Albeit, the light explodes at the end of tunnel and, an end of a sojourn from darkness eternal. Or, resembling calmness at the end of a storm. A rainbow concludes the rain and promises a new norm. I continue to steer successfully with high courage, thru ‘Impediments, as if it’s an opportunity, challenged. It signifies am ‘optimism’ @ success across the funnel, translating into visible ‘progress’ at the end of tunnel (c) 2020, Priyavrat Thareja

The most important question for us humans is, "What is human?" "What is life?" "What is life?" If you can't answer this question, you can't live your life seriously. So Tolstoy, Russia's main gate, for a long time of 15 years I wrote my last book at the end of my career. What is life?It's 입니다. In this book, Tolstoy defines life like this. "Life is holding onto a thin arrowroot vine in a desperate situation where it doesn't know when it's going to break off." What do you think life is? Someone said that life is about luck. What is "WOON 7G3"? It means that luck is 70% and opportunity is 30%. Life is luck. Do you really think life is luck? Then you're lucky to live well, Is it bad luck not to be able to buy it? Being healthy is good luck, Is it bad luck to be sick? That's not true. Life is not luck. Victor Wigor thinks about what life is and then expresses it in one word. It's a voyage. Life is a voyage in which a boat floating on the sea plumped and sailed through a port. Ships floating in the sea of the world have calmness, rough waves, and scary typhoons. Life is not easy. So Job says life like this. "Isn't there hard labor in life on this land?" (Job 7:1) There is a theory of life in today's text. Section 13 of the body. "Those who say they will profit by doing business" (approximately 4:13) What is business and profit? Business is selling things to make money. What are the benefits? It's money from the business. Jews thought it was important to make money. So Jewish tactics are world-famous. The Jews were the geniuses of the tactics. In the old days, money was all coins. Our country also made money into a not. This is called Yupjeon. Heavy coins were very uncomfortable for traders. So the Jews made bills instead of coins, they made checks, they made bills. And the Jews thought about how to sell things without discounting them I made a department store in America. The Jews also taught their children this way. "The whole world is a business. Even white clouds become rain when squeezed." These people are Jewish. Trade was the best way to make money in the days of the First Church. Especially in the early church era, it was the best environment to make money from trade. In this era, it was Pax Romana.

Rain fell from the overcast sky in sporadic bursts, quick manic showers followed by moments of nothingness. The weatherman on channel six had predicted a calm day, but the woman knew better. A tumultuous storm was rolling in. There was no way to avoid it.

I don’t believe we can save our civilization; I do, I do believe it. I don’t want this poem to be beautiful. I do. I have no skills; I have no hope; I don’t want any hope. I simply want to sit here, in this calm. I don’t want the electricity to fail. I don’t want war to come here. I DON’T WANT WAR TO COME HERE! I sat beneath the tree for a while. There was only one tree left. Here it is pouring rain. The two men are in a contest to take over the world. They will be voted for to make it seem as if this is what we want. Don’t ever speak to me from ecstasy, my life is broken. Tell me what style you like though,

I’ll be damned,” the captain murmured, leaning toward the screen, the light illuminating her angular face. “Those are lead blocks.” He suppressed a shiver. The River Queen had been right. Down to the last detail. “Circle them.” But … Chains draped from the block onto the seafloor. They were empty. The captain observed, “Whoever those chains held is long gone. They either got eaten or they exploded from the pressure.” Tharion marked the chains, nodding. But his gaze snagged on something. He glanced at the captain to see if she’d noticed the anomaly, but her face revealed no sign of surprise. So Tharion kept silent, letting her bring the small submersible back up to the surface, where the first mate hauled it onto the deck. Two hours later, back on land—soggy and muddy from the rain—Tharion calmed his chattering teeth long enough to call his queen. The River Queen answered after the first ring. “Talk.” Used to the curt, yet ethereal voice, Tharion said, “I found the lead blocks. The chains were still attached.” “So?” “There was no body.” A sigh of disappointment. He shivered yet again—not entirely from the cold. “But the shackles had been unlocked.” The sigh paused. He’d learn to read her pauses, as varied as the life in her river. “You’re sure of this?” He refrained from asking why the currents hadn’t told her about this particularly vital detail. Maybe they were as capricious as she. Tharion said mildly, “No signs of damage. At least as far as I could tell on the crappy screen.” “You think Sofie Renast freed herself?

The rain has subsided to a light trickle, as if to mock me. Because when it was pouring, I was calm and sure of my resolve while the world around me was howling and raging. I wanted him—craved him—but I was certain I would never love him. And now that the rain has calmed, my resolve has shattered, and I’m left with a screaming heart and a silenced world.

Against All Odds --- Nobody taught me how to swim. So, I swam and followed the rivers, hoping that I'd end up in the ocean; the calm seas. To see some dolphins and the colourful fish. But the river that chose me was long with hard turns, blockages, and fishing traps. On some days, the river would run dry, leaving me nowhere but in the middle of hard cracks. While suffering underneath the hot sun, the rains would hit again on my sore flesh. Luckily by then, I'd still be breathing; even though affected, harmed, and bleeding. But, I had a dream that was heavier than my challenges. So I continued with my journey, following the stream of the river. Hoping to reach the ocean; the calm seas. Some days the current would be brutal, even though I was flowing with it. It would hit on my body, my bones would crack. Sometimes the river would eject me to the side. Where I'd need to survive while I found my way back to it. I'd have to fend off snakes, defending myself from harm and malice. Back in the river, I'd have to fend off scorpions, rocks, and the debris. So, there I went, alone in the river I flowed. At times I'd meet with swimmers who'd be cooling off from the same waters. Some were kayaking; others fishing. All oblivious to my dreams, and to my state of struggle. Some would greet me; smiling at me. While some laughed the hardest, laughing at me. Some would express pity, while some expressed their sympathy. Some would pretend that I wasn't even there. And those who ignored me equalled my presence to that of the debris. I remember that a few picked me up and placed me in their small boats; helping me to cruise afloat. But, eventually, they left me in my struggle too. Those who carried me, left me in the rivers where they'd found me. Those who passed me by, passed-by me again on the following days. Some shouted the loudest from their lungs encouraging me from the sides. Telling me that I was almost reaching the seas. That the ocean was at a hand's reach. But those who shouted the most rarely did anything else to help. I also learnt that those who picked me up rarely shouted about their help. Some used my vulnerability to gain charity points. They'd say, "see I helped her, now clap for me from your joints". But, above all the help, true or fake, my dream was carrying me for my sake. With my dream to reach the ocean, the calm seas, I held my head the highest and swam beyond all the peaks.

I gave you everything," Hal shouted. "No, you took everything!" she yelled back. "You took my name away!" Hal looked as bewildered as if she'd slapped him. Then his jolly, reasonable look was back, the mask once again in place. "Daisy," he said, his voice calm. "That's not my name!" she shrieked. He reached out to put his hands on her shoulders, as he'd done so many times before, to hold her still, to instruct her, and in her head she ducked and saw Hal stumbling forward, grabbing for the wobbly post, the one that had never been repaired. She saw his feet skid on the slick surface of the deck, saw his arms pinwheeling, hands groping, reaching for her, for help that wouldn't come. She saw him fall, thudding down one, two, three, four, five, six flights of stairs, to lie, broken and motionless, on the sand, limbs twisted, eyes open to the rain. She saw herself look down at him, seeing nothing but a male body around a man-shaped void. Not a man at all, but a creature with cold, flat eyes, a monster with instincts for self-preservation and a species of low cunning, but not a man, not a person who had loved her, or anyone.

Larkyra had learned the hard way that calm often camouflaged the most vicious of intent.

Larkyra wasn't in the mood for a fight, but she also didn't want to merely walk away. Not now. Yet currently, with only one proper working hand... Ours, crooned her magic. Let us do it for you. Larkyra internally stroked her powers, which paced restless in her lungs, a master calming a hungry tiger. Gentle, she coaxed.

I feel the rage and hatred take over my sadness and settle into righteous anger. At the moment my anger is like calm water, a light breeze with no protection. But do we have any other choice than to accept the showers and the torrential rains, the earthquakes, when everything changes place and season?

Sorry,” said Henry flatly. It was no good. He could never make Jane really care. He could never make her suffer a tenth of what he himself suffered whenever they quarrelled. She was so dear to him, so painfully dear. And so sweet to him too, except when they quarrelled, and said bitter things to each other; and even then there was no malice in what she said, none of the pent-up resentment that drove him to wound himself savagely in saying cruel things to her. “It’s just that I’m not your type really, Henry,” Jane had said yesterday, calmly, pleasantly even, in the tone she might have said it was raining or asked for the marmalade.

Everly was the beauty of a gathering storm over the ocean, so quiet and composed until the lightning struck and you saw the clouds and the rain and the waves of emotion creating brilliance. Seeing what I caused in her, the lightning over what I thought was a calm sea, it made me feel godlike.

Gregory?” Julia’s voice gentled. She had noticed the sudden change in him. “Please talk to me.” Talk was the last thing he wanted from her now. He didn’t want to talk or to think. He didn’t want to continue to hate himself in front of the one person he was beginning to adore. Gregory didn’t speak the truth. Instead, he lashed out with a lie. “Very well, if you must know. I’m tired of waiting for our bargain to be completed.” He practically growled the words as he turned to her, and Julia shrank back in surprise. “If you’re not interested in your duties as a wife, then say so and I’ll be on my way. But your indecision has interfered with my plans, so either return to the house and find your way into my bed, Your Grace, or bid me farewell.” Julia never spoke, only watched calmly as Gregory finished and rose, tromping off to collect his ward. Felicity was still hopping near the creek, gleefully squealing whenever Miss Winslow attempted to get her under control. “Felicity!” he shouted. That got the child’s attention. “Put your shoes on and return to the house at once—” “Your Grace?” Miss Winslow kept one hand to her bonnet, trying to stop the wind from snatching it away, and pointed at something behind him. “The duchess is leaving.” Gregory whirled around in shock and saw that the governess was right. Julia had taken her horse and was currently riding it in the exact opposite direction of the house. She cantered farther ahead, into the heart of the storm as the clouds burst open and rain began to pound the countryside. Dear God, she’d be soaked and catch her death, or else thrown from her horse in the storm and break her neck. “Damn everything to hell,” Gregory snapped. He raced for his own horse, saddled up, and rode hard after his errant wife.

those folks on the ship who created that moan that became the Spirituals that turned into Jazz and Blues and everything all the way up to Rap and whatever will come next. We who do words are doing what we do. We are not trying to get folk who are frightened of us to be calm around us. We are reminding folk who love us that this is a good thing. Black Ink should be a soup or a drink or something we can embrace with pride. Black Lives Matter. Black Ink reminds us of why.

A repetitive strain injury of the mind. How to exist in the 21st century and not have a panic attack Keep an eye on yourself. Be your own friend. Be your own parent. Be kind to yourself. Check on what you are doing. Do you need to watch the last episode of the series when it is after midnight? Do you need that third or fourth glass of wine? Is that really in your best interests? Declutter your mind. Panic is the product of overload. In an overloaded world we need to have a filter. We need to simplify things. We need to disconnect sometimes. We need to stop staring at our phones. To have moments of not thinking about work. A kind of mental feng shui. Listen to calm noise. Things that aren’t as stimulating as music. Waves, your own breath, a breeze through the leaves, the purr of a cat, and best of all: rain. Let it happen. If you feel panic rising the instinctive reaction is to panic some more. To panic about the panic. To metapanic. The trick is to try to feel panic without panicking about it. This is nearly—but not quite—impossible. I had panic disorder—a condition defined not by the occasional panic attack but by frequent panic attacks and the continuous hellish fear of the next one. By the time I’d had hundreds of panic attacks I began to tell myself I wanted it. I didn’t, obviously. But I used to work hard at trying to invite the panic—as a test, to see how I could cope. The more I invited it, the less it wanted to stay around. Accept feelings. And accept that they are just that: feelings. Don’t grab life by the throat. “Life should be touched, not strangled,” said the writer Ray Bradbury. It is okay to release fear. The fear tries to tell you it is necessary, and that it is protecting you. Try to accept it as a feeling, rather than valid information. Bradbury also said: “Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get.” Be aware of where you are. Are your surroundings overstimulating? Is there somewhere you can go that is calmer? Is there some nature you can look at? Look up. In city centers, the

How to exist in the 21st century and not have a panic attack Keep an eye on yourself. Be your own friend. Be your own parent. Be kind to yourself. Check on what you are doing. Do you need to watch the last episode of the series when it is after midnight? Do you need that third or fourth glass of wine? Is that really in your best interests? Declutter your mind. Panic is the product of overload. In an overloaded world we need to have a filter. We need to simplify things. We need to disconnect sometimes. We need to stop staring at our phones. To have moments of not thinking about work. A kind of mental feng shui. Listen to calm noise. Things that aren’t as stimulating as music. Waves, your own breath, a breeze through the leaves, the purr of a cat, and best of all: rain.

Accepting anxiety doesn’t mean you’re a victim of it or that you’re giving up and allowing it to control you. Acceptance doesn’t even mean you like what you’re experiencing. Acceptance is the idea that it is what it is. When you look out the window and see rain you don’t say to yourself, “It’s raining, I have to fix this!” You also don’t say, “I’m a victim of the rain,” or “I’m being abused by the rain,” or “It’s raining, I give up.” Perhaps you don’t love the rain, but you pull out an umbrella, you keep moving forward, and you know that eventually the rain will stop.

Taking a moment to be thankful for the things that easily could be, but are not. If we live in a place where there are no bloodthirsty lions walking around on the roads, let's be thankful. If there's no inbound asteroid or other imminent extinction event befallen on us, let's be thankful. If we are mostly free of disease or disorder in ourselves and those around us, let's be thankful. If there's no starvation in our own house or the house of neighbour, let's be thankful. If there's no lifethreatening pollution in our parts of the atmosphere, or water, let's be thankful. If we're not isolated, imprisoned, without any real prospects of a good future, let's be thankful. If we do not live near an active volcano, or within an area prone to earthquakes, super storms or other destabilizing natural phenomenae, let's be thankful. If it's not raining diamonds or acid [as is reality on some cosmic bodies], and if every part of our mighty Earth is habitable and healthy, let's be thankful. And if we collected some parts of tranquility for ourselves, or others, in this otherwise brief life, let's be thankful. It can be difficult to see, without concious effort to remind ourselves, that things are probably pretty good, also. Though, it is no excuse for laziness and inaction with regards to our duties in lending a hand according to the size of our hand, and perhaps with some regard for our own dignity, and to foresight.

Let us always be out of doors among trees and grass, and rain and wind and sun. There the breeze comes and strikes the cheek and sets it aglow: the gale increases and the trees creak and roar, but it is only a ruder music. A calm follows, the sun shines in the sky, and it is the time to sit under an oak, leaning against the bark, while the birds sing and the air is soft and sweet. By night the stars shine, and there is no fathoming the dark spaces between these brilliant points, nor the thoughts that come as it were between the fixed stars and landmarks of the mind. Or it is morning on the hills, when hope is as wide as the world; or it is the evening on the shore. A red sun sinks, and the foam-tipped waves are crested with crimson; the booming surge breaks, and the spray flies afar, sprinkling the face watching under the pale cliffs. Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients call divine can be found and felt there still.

begins to shake our airplane as if it were a plaything. People cry out as objects fall on their heads from the open overhead lockers. Bags, flowers, packages, toys, wrapped gifts, jackets and clothing rain down hard on us; sandwich trays and bags soar through the air; half-finished drinks pour on heads and shoulders. People are frightened; they scream and start to cry. “Hopefully, all will be OK,” my mother says. I can feel her nervousness, while I myself am still pretty calm. Yes, I begin to worry, but I simply can’t imagine that… Then I suddenly see a blinding white light over the right wing. I don’t know whether it’s a flash of lightning or an explosion. I lose all sense of time. I can’t tell whether all this lasts minutes or only a fraction of a second: I’m blinded by that blazing light; while at the same time, I hear my mother saying quite calmly: “Now it’s all over.” Today I know that at that moment she had already grasped what would happen. I, on the other hand, have grasped nothing at all. An intense astonishment comes over me, because now my ears, my head, my whole body is completely filled with the deep roar of the plane, while its nose slants almost vertically downwards. We’re falling fast. But this nosedive, too, I experience as if it lasted no longer than the blink of an eye. From one moment to the next, people’s screams go silent. It’s as if the roar of the turbines has been erased. My mother is no longer at my side and I’m no longer in the airplane. I’m still strapped into my seat, but I’m alone.

Prepare. Plan. Work. Sacrifice. Rework. Spend cheerfully on matters of worth. Carry the calm, and wear the assurance of having done the best you could with what you had. If you work hard and prepare earnestly, it will be very difficult for you to give in or give up or wear down. If you labor with faith in God and in yourself and in your future, you will have built upon a rock. Then, when the winds blow and the rains come—as surely they will—you shall not fall (see Matthew 7:24–25).

THE EYE OF THE STORM Fear not that the whirlwind will carry you hence, Nor wait for its onslaught in breathless suspense, Nor shrink from the blight of the terrible hail, But pass through the edge to the heart of the tale, For there is a shelter, sunlighted and warm, And Faith sees her God through the eye of the storm. The passionate tempest with rush and wild roar And threatenings of evil may beat on the shore, The waves may be mountains, the fields battle plains, And the earth be immersed in a deluge of rains, Yet, the soul, stayed on God, may sing bravely its psalm, For the heart of the storm is the center of calm. Let hope be not quenched in the blackness of night, Though the cyclone awhile may have blotted the light, For behind the great darkness the stars ever shine, And the light of God’s heavens, His love will make thine, Let no gloom dim your eyes, but uplift them on high To the face of your God and the blue of His sky. The storm is your shelter from danger and sin, And God Himself takes you for safety within; The tempest with Him passes into deep calm, And the roar of the winds is the sound of a psalm. Be glad and serene when the tempest clouds form; God smiles on His child in the eye of the storm.

You will testify against me? You, Sedric Meldar, a lowly servant? Then do so now, before all of us. Tell us then, give us one instance of my unfaithfulness to my wife. Just one will do.” His gaze was sharper than a knife. Alise saw victory dancing in his dark eyes. Sedric drew a breath. The trembling she had felt as she gripped his arm stilled. He spoke clearly, his voice pitched to carry to everyone there. “I shared your bed for years, before you took Alise as your wife, and for years afterward. You spent your wedding night with me. And in the years that followed, you made her a laughingstock among our fellows. In that circle, all knew that you disdained the company of women for that of men. I was your lover, Hest Finbok. I helped you deceive her, and I did not speak up when you mocked her. And if need be, I will stand before all of Trehaug and all of Bingtown and attest to that. You were an unfaithful husband to her, and I, I was a treacherous friend.” Alise stared at Sedric as he committed social suicide. But he turned and met her gaze and said, “And again, Alise, I am so sorry. Would that I could take back those years of your life and give them to you unscathed.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. Sedric had just destroyed all chance that he could ever return to Bingtown and resume his life. Even if he remained in Kelsingra forever, if even one Trader returned to Bingtown, all would know not only what he had done to her, but what he was. “I forgave you, Sedric. I told you that a long time ago.” “I know that,” he said very quietly. His hand covered hers as he added, “But I did not deserve your forgiveness then. Perhaps I can say I have earned it now?” “You have,” she said quietly. “And more. But Sedric, what have you done? All will know that you…” “That I am what I am,” he said calmly. “I do not apologize for that. Ever.” She sensed someone behind them and turned slightly, thinking it might be Leftrin. It was not. Carson was grinning, but as he stepped forward, a single tear tracked down his sunburned cheek. He folded Sedric into an embrace from behind that lifted the smaller man off his feet. “Proud of you, Bingtown boy,” he said huskily. He set him down on his feet and leaned down to kiss him. The kiss did not end quickly, and Sedric’s hands came up to cradle Carson’s bearded face to his own. Several of the keepers favored the couple with knowing whoops that drowned out the incredulous muttering from the watching prisoners. Alise found herself smiling, as much for joy for them as the stunned expression on Hest’s face. She felt a nudge, and turned to see Leftrin. He stuck out the crook of his elbow, and she took his arm in his ragged coat sleeve. “I think we were going to get some tea?” he asked her conversationally. She nodded, and instantly forgave him the triumphant look he shot over her head at Hest. She walked a dozen steps with Leftrin before she glanced back. Hest was standing alone, staring after them.

The water had gone down. There was still plenty of dead fish to eat. It wasn’t fresh, but it was filling. She wasn’t dead. At least not yet. Sintara shifted her weight. Her feet were sore from the constant immersion. The water was less acid than it had been, but her claws still felt soft, as if they were decaying. And she had never had less hope for herself. She, Sintara, a dragon who should have ruled the sea, the sky, and the land, had been picked up and tumbled head over heels like a rabbit struck by a hawk. She’d floundered and gasped. She’s clung to a log like a drowning rat. “No dragons have ever endured what we have,” she said. “None has ever sunk so low.” “There is nothing ‘low’ about survival,” Mercor contradicted her. As always, his voice was calm, almost placid. “Think of it as experience hard won, Sintara. When you die and are eaten, or when your young hatch from the egg, they will carry forward your memories of this time. No hardship endured is a loss. Someone will learn from it. Someone profits from it.” “Someone is tired of your philosophizing,” scarlet Ranculos grumbled.

Timid, dim witted eyes peer through the dark shadows of the dense forest and blinked, as the rhythm of the steady rain continued to beat down upon them, through the magic of a Grand Master Wizard. The cold mountain air breathed in wet, fresh and crisp, as the two bumblers huddled together in the forest for warmth and in wait. All within the camp seemed tranquil and calm. Suddenly without warning, the sleeping figures began to glow with the glimmering dust the cagy, old Wizard had deposited around the slumbering camp. The glittering and glimmering powder began to spark and flit all around the army camp with the spirited life of fairy fire bees, or perhaps more to the point, tiny, tormenting furies. Edgerton/Assassins of Dreamsongs 172 For that is what they quickly became, "tiny, tormenting furies"! Men awoke from the night, shrieking and screaming, as if they had been burned . . . for indeed they had! Where the sparkling dust touched, blankets caught on fire and clothes were engulfed in tiny, tormenting flames. The horizon was lit up, as all of the figures in the camp danced around in torment, against the blackness of the night. Men darted about the camp in panic and agony, screaming in supreme surprise and torment. Confused beyond belief, they ran into each other and became entangled in ridiculous heaps of flesh, cloth and hot armor. The whole army became piles of human clumps of torment, writhing on the ground. Panic ruled the night and even the small forest creatures stopped their nightly routines, to stare at the odd sight of the ridiculous creatures; arms and legs flailing about. Two rather comical figures strolled casually into the panic ridden encampment, whistling badly a stale, romantic tune. The two bumblers walked in slow, trembling saunters while whistling and laughing hysterically in fear. They both were as casual, as obvious trembling can allow one to be, when they approached the giant, blond Nobleman chained to the tree. The fairy fire bees bypassed the two bumblers with their tormenting magic. With stuttering steps and downcast eyes, they made their way to the tree and the man who would be King. Garish roared uncontrollably with laughter, at the sight of the writhing army and the two bumblers here for his rescue. Edgerton/Assassins of Dreamsongs 173 "We've c-c-come to s-s-save you my Lord." Godfrey stammered out the words trembling, nearly swallowing his tongue. Both stiffened in absolute fear, as they watched the turmoil the Wizard had caused around them, expecting discovery at any moment! Garish finally found his breath. "Well, let's get on with it! The furies can't last forever, although I wish they would!" "Oh right!" Godfrey fumbled around in his clothes for the magic key Arkin had given him. "The magic key, it must be around here somewhere. Did the Old Man give the key to you Humphrey?" "No, I thought you had it!" Humphrey scowled, already seeing his head in the guillotine. "Well, someone's got to have it!" Garish roared. A brawny guard in agonizing pain turned and caught sight of the fumbling escape. Screaming a battle cry, the burly guard stalked forward, to challenge them. Garish brought the chains up around the brute's neck and crushed him against the tree, the sparkling furies making him shriek for mercy. "Ah . . .here it is!" Godfrey exclaimed finding the magic key in his tunic. The key glowed with a golden power all its’ own, as he fished it from his pocket. His fingers trembled beyond that which he could remember, as he fitted the key into the lock. The chains quickly melted to the ground, to his delight and he laughed, as they all turned to flee. Edgerton/Assassins of Dreamsongs 174 Their escape was immediately hampered by a confrontation with a huge Knight, as he rose from the ground, to challenge them. Garish buried both fists into the giant's stomach, in hammering blows and then bore his powerfully bulk up over his head.

That was diverse.” Poppy looks surprised as she slides down the wall like a bird that’s forgotten how to fly, landing in a crumpled heap on the curb. “Positively Dionysian,” I manage to slur. The world is a crazed kaleidoscope. Colors fight for space, desperate to steal each other’s names. “They’re just labels!” I yell at the untidy bundle of shades and bones near my foot. “Are you talking to me?” Patterns birthed by multiple reflections coalesce into Poppy’s face. “Maybe. I think other people’s musical chi has saturated my cells.” Myriad venues and tonal flavors are scattered through my memory, like broken harmonies. “Why did I feed on so many tunes?” “You wanted filtered sounds to rain down and seep clean through, beyond blood, to the soul.” A lone streetlight flickers behind her and for a few alienating seconds she shimmers in and out of existence. “Too much.” My stomach turns over, but I manage to keep everything down. If I throw up now, nothing will come out but music. “Tonight’s orgy of sound has left us in a pure, concentrated haze of other people’s emotions,” Poppy announces proudly, unperturbed by the fact I’m squatting in a gutter. She holds out her arms to me, palms turned up. “Look, I’m full of music.” I stare at the small woman, posed like a crazed Messiah. The cat mask is still caught in her hair. A cracking sound fills the air and her face starts to fracture into pieces, like shards of a broken mirror. Closing my eyes, I take deep breaths till my head calms down. When I open them again, Poppy is gone.

So… You realise you just said you love me, right?” he says, and I can see he is trying to act calm about the joy that those few words give him. “I know,” I shrug, trying to stay as casual as possible. He soaks in the words, and I stand waiting. “Well?” I prompt. “Well, what?” “Don’t you have something to say to me?” I ask, widening my eyes. Travis thinks about it for a minute. “You hair has come out of its clip at the back.” I smack him on the arm. “That’s not what I meant and you know it!” “I know,” he smiles and it softens all the features of his face. I love when he smiles at me like that. “But if I said it now, you would just go home and overthink whether I just said it because you said it to me first.” I open my mouth to argue, but then close it. Damn it, he’s right. “And, I’m not going to just say it so you have a good scene for your book,” he says, eyeing me as though he knows exactly what is going through my head. What is he, psychic? “Can we at least have a great kiss?” I argue in exasperation. “Well, it’s not raining,” he says, looking up at the clear sky. “And your hair is kind of all over the place.” I put my hand up to my hair and know that he’s right. Those sixteen blocks didn’t do my bun any favours. “Should we maybe back up a little and slowly walk towards each other so I can twirl you at the end?” he asks, the smile tugging at his lips. Actually, that’s exactly what I want to do, but I obviously can’t suggest it now. “Or maybe I could push my way through this large crowd, trying to get−” “Oh, just shut up and kiss me,” I say, grabbing his face and pulling it to mine.

This is the simplest of spells, and foundation to all others. Magic seeks to better understand, and eventually to build on, the connection between minds and bodies. Even to calm a storm, you treat the wind and rain as if they were alive and corporeal. That is why blood is part of the spell, along with words and symbols.

Acclimatizing to its customs and particular brand of bustle, he’d gotten a sense of Wewoka. Without the lens of a fever-induced vision, it proved to be a dense, vertical city of narrow, terraced streets with expansive walkways. Largely devoid of motor traffic, any point could be reached by foot in fifteen minutes. Pictures painted on the sidewalks provided a colorful trail. With a central street lined with shops bustling with commerce, the noise and smell were different from what he was used to. Wewoka had none of the overworked smokestacks from innumerable factories; much of the city was made up by parks. The air had a hint of ozone to it. A collection of buildings sprouted at the heart of the city. Gleaming green and metallic spires in the distance, the sun reflected from their solar panels. A mushroom-like structure drew in sewer water from its “roots” and funneled it to its dome. Solar energy evaporated the water, which was then collected and released throughout the streets, watering the surrounding green spaces. Photovoltaic panels lined solar drop towers. Titanium dioxide reacted with ultraviolet rays and smog, filtering and dissipating them. They had developed similar technology in Jamaica. Vertical gardens and vegetation covered the steep towers of housing units and work offices. The exterior vertical gardens filtered the rain, which was reused with liquid wastes for farming needs. A deep calm reverberated through the city, quiet preserved like a commodity. Desmond

The calm, collected man has evaporated. In his wake stands the beast—the monster ready to rain hell down on this earth

Brewer said the basic idea is to not fight the urge to, say, smoke a cigarette. That doesn’t mean you succumb to the urge and light up a cigarette. It just means you don’t try to push the urge out of your mind. Rather, you follow the same mindfulness technique that you’d apply to other bothersome feelings—anxiety, resentment, melancholy, hatred. You just calmly (or as calmly as possible, under the circumstances) examine the feeling. What part of your body is the urge felt in? What is the texture of the urge? Is it sharp? Dull and heavy? The more you do that, the less the urge seems a part of you; you’ve exploited the basic irony of mindfulness meditation: getting close enough to feelings to take a good look at them winds up giving you a kind of critical distance from them. Their grip on you loosens; if it loosens enough, they’re no longer a part of you. There’s an acronym used to describe this technique: RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling (rather than try to drive it away). Then you Investigate the feeling and its relationship

NAKED AND WARM   We lay together naked and warm. The light from the outside becomes more overcast with rain starting to trickle on the roof with the sound of a restful peace that draws us even closer. We lie together listening to the sounds of rainfall as a calm comfort cloaks our minds from all else. At times the sounds from the outside seem to perish into the distance as we lay in awe of each other, too in love to let go, she watching me as I quietly study her and the way that she exists when she is with me. I stare deep into her beautiful eyes with our limbs intertwined, answering her with my gentle traveling touch. Her small hands reach up and run across the bottom of my face and neck as my hands move gradually through her hair. I fall for her each time she looks at me, each time kissing her as if it were the first time. I open her mouth with mine as I seek to give all of myself to her again, time having for once become meaningless.

TO COMFORT   In her being here we have begun to prevail, having undone the enigmatical quality of question. She tells me softly, her words being sound to my ears like the scent of sweet nectar to the first flying creature introduced to spring. She kindly whispers as she brushes my hair and rubs my back, she trying to calm my troubled heart. Being kind to her wishes I reach up to kiss the grenadine from her petaled lips as she receives me with absolutely all that is left of her.   Hearing her voice become calm and tender from the glow of our kiss, her eyes fill with a love that trembles with affection. I stop to pull her closer to me, standing with her along a wet and steamy trail that slowly absorbs the fresh rain. I kiss her sweet lips, passionately holding her lips to me beneath a tree that shades us in a kiss. And now I can only anticipate the moment when she will again be in my arms and under this spell that I cast for only her.   She gives me everything just by letting me hear her voice. Every time that she looks at me with those eyes I wonder how I’ll ever be able to repay her. Catching the raw emotion that has begun to slip from her, I respond with a smile, feeling my heart bend just a little to the very sound of her voice.

Decades have passed The morning star Can be seen on the distance Greeting the seasons That have leave its footprints On this humble soul That walk without umbrella Despite the gross rain Everything continue to looks so near That seem touchable But it is so unachievable That I cannot draw near my hand I can just observe How the time continues advancing To a closed point Where I cannot caress That magical dream That I pulled from heaven On an attempt to had in my world A piece of paradise And here I wait Calmly looking the back Of that antique book That has my name sealed on it But, how much I should wait A century would be enough Maybe I should be born again To conquer the wind That on this life disappeared That from this gap has vanished.

We don't have plays and music and contact with sophisticated minds, and a round of social engagements. All we have are sun and wind and rain, and space in which to move and breathe. All we have are the forests, and the calm expanses of the lakes, and time to call our own. All we have are the hunting and fishing and the swimming, and each other.

Now just a word about zoos. Many folks think that animals in a zoo know no comforts; nothing but constant fright from living in captivity. Such folks do not stop to think of a thing or two about an animal’s wild condition. Wild animals must not only constantly hunt for food, but invariably fight to kill it and to hold it, too; for, in such a fight, a big antagonist will naturally win from a small individual. Thus, what food is found, is also lost; and hunting must go on, day by day, or night by night until a tragic climax—by thirst or starvation. But in a zoo, food is brought daily, with facility for drinking, and laid right in front of hoofs, paws or bills. For small animals, roofs and thick walls ward off cold winds and rain; and so, days of calm inactivity, daily naps without worrying about attack; and a carting away of all rubbish and filth soon puts a zoo animal in bodily form which has no comparison with its wild condition. Lack of room in which to climb, roam or play, may bring a zoo animal to that condition known as “soft”; but, as it now has no call for vigor, and its fighting passions find no opportunity for display, such an animal is gradually approaching that condition which has brought Man, who is only an animal, anyway, to his lofty point in Natural History, today. Truly, with such tribulations, worry, and hard work as Man puts up with to obtain his food and lodging, a zoo animal, if it could only know of our daily grind, would comfortably yawn, thankful that Man is so kindly looking out for it. With similar animals all around it, and, day by day, just a happy growth from cub-hood to maturity, I almost wish that I was a zoo animal, with no boss to growl about my not showing up, mornings, at a customary hour!

Jun was a calm lake; Tomo was a waterfall. And I was the water, swept every which way, unable to shape myself into what I wanted.

There is an uncommonly harsh beauty to the Tibetan landscape. Its nakedness makes it seem incapable of deception, but under its calm deportment it conceals winds so brutal that yaks are known to die while their jaws are in masticating bliss. On hot summer days the sun licks up the rain within minutes. No puddles are formed; no moisture lingers in the air. It is only the droplets on tiny leaves of the baby turnip plant that betray rain.

You remain. (Hebrews 1:11) There are so many people who sit by their fireplace all alone! They sit by another chair, once filled, and cannot restrain the tears that flow. They sit alone so much, but there is someone who is unseen and just within their reach. But for some reason, they don’t realize His presence. Realizing it is blessed yet quite rare. It is dependent upon their mood, their feelings, their physical condition, and the weather. The rain or thick fog outside, the lack of sleep and the intense pain, seem to affect their mood and blur their vision so they do not realize His presence. There is, however, something even better than realizing, and even more blessed. It is completely independent of these other conditions and is something that will abide with you. It is this: recognizing that unseen presence, which is so wonderful, quieting, soothing, calming, and warming. So recognize the presence of the Master. He is here, close to you, and His presence is real. Recognizing will also help your ability to realize but is never dependent upon it. Yes, there is immeasurably more—the truth is a presence, not a thing, a fact, or a statement. Some One is present, and He is a warmhearted Friend and the all-powerful Lord. This is a joyful truth for weeping hearts everywhere, no matter the reason for the tears, or whatever stream their weeping willow is planted beside. Samuel Dickey Gordon

It comes back all at once: a woman on a beach, a tree, a wind that calms, a rain that cleanses, but does not wet.

If slow, calming breaths were of any use, I would have quit smoking.

Whatever kind of energy you bring to it, it will give it right back to you. If you’re frustrated, it’ll act frustrated. If you’re calm, it’s more likely to be calm, too.

Two hours later, the drawing room converted, the costumes wrapped, the electric-kerosene lamps flickering in a semicircle at their feet, the performers enacted the thirty-minute ode to love and the Mediterranean, Home by the Sea. Miss Charming kept a ferocious grip on her script and gave oily air kisses to Colonel Andrews. Amelia was calm and sweet, melting into her dialogue with Captain East as though into his arms. Jane knelt beside Mr. Nobley, the wounded war captain, as he nearly died, and did her best to sound earnest. Old Jane would’ve run away or laughed self-consciously throughout. New Jane decided to feel as enchanting as Miss Charming and performed each line with relish and passion. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t a very good actress. Mr. Nobley’s character miraculously recovered all the same, leading to the part where he stood and took her hands. They were still cold. He paused, as though trying to remember what came next. He looked. Looked at her. At her and into her. Into her eyes as though he couldn’t bear to look away. And there was a delicious curl in his smile. “I love you,” he said. Zing, thought Jane. It was his line, more or less, though simplified. Stripped of similes and farms and rain and moon and all, it pierced her. She opened her mouth to say her own line but couldn’t remember a single word. And she didn’t want to. He leaned. She leaned. Then Aunt Saffronia, who’d been laughing encouragingly during the parts that were supposed to be sad and clapping gleefully whenever a new character came onstage, now cleared her throat as though intensely uncomfortable. Mr. Nobley hesitated, then kissed Jane’s cheek. His lips were warm, his cheek slightly scratchy. She smiled and breathed him in. At length, the six actors stood side by side, pretending the bright yellow wall of the drawing room opened to a view of the Mediterranean Sea, and said their closing lines. Jane: Trying to sound actress-y. “At last, we are all truly happy.” Miss Charming: Pause. Crinkling of paper. Frantic searching for line. “Indeed.” Amelia: With a shy smile for the tall man beside her. “Our travels are ended.” Captain East: With a manly smile for his lady. “We can rest peacefully in each other’s arms.” Colonel Andrews: As always, with panache! “And no matter where we may roam…” Mr. Nobley: A sigh. “This will always be our home.” His voice unhappy with the line. “By the sea.” And, silence as the audience waited for who knows what--a better ending line? A better play? Colonel Andrews cleared his throat, and Jane inclined her head in a hurried curtsy. “Oh,” Aunt Saffronia said and started the applause. The audience clapped enthusiastically and arhythmically, and the cast bowed, Miss Charming giggling. Jane squinted past the lamps to get her first good look at the audience, now that the play was over and stage fright couldn’t prickle her. Aunt Saffronia, beaming. Mrs. Wattlesbrook, looking for all the world like a proud schoolmarm. Matilda, bored, and a few other servants, equally bored.

You cannot tame the wind, stop the rain, nor calm a storm.

When she bent to set another pitcher beside Travis, and he absently reached out to hug her hips, Cade's composure cracked. Lily gasped in surprise as Travis's hand was ripped from her side and then Travis himself was hauled from his chair and shoved toward the door. Ollie leapt up, knocking his own chair over as he attempted to interfere, but Cade grabbed his collar with his spare hand and shoved him in the same direction as Travis. Both men came up swinging, but Cade already had the door open, and with the kick of his boot and a block from his shoulder, he shoved them out into the pouring rain and slammed the door after them. Roy came to the door of his cubicle to investigate the commotion. Lily stared at Cade's calm features for a second, then in an explosion of rage, slammed out of the room in the direction of her chambers. Cade pointed his finger at Roy, sending him scurrying back to bed. Tankard in hand, Ephraim looked up from the table at the young giant standing in the room's center, water streaming from his soaked clothing as he visibly forced his fists to unclench in the sudden emptiness of the room. The older man shook his head and took a sip of his steaming drink. "You certainly do know how to empty a room," Ephraim commented to the house at large. Surveying the havoc he had wreaked, the overturned chairs and spilled plates, the tracks of mud across clean planked floors, the condemning silence of closed doors, Cade reached for a plate and the hot stew kept warming by the fire for him. Without a word, he filled his plate, sat down across from the old man, and began to eat. Ephraim raised his shaggy eyebrows, took a drink, and hid his grin in his cup. It didn't seem like the rest of his company was going to return any too soon. It looked like he'd better learn to get along with this one. Generously,

Stay calm,” the mayor said, though it was unnecessary. They were calm, resigned to the storms that had, over these months, worn them thin. How fast a new normal took hold.

I can’t hide my secrets anymore. Not when it feels like they’re stealing my breath, not when these truths feel like they’re consuming me. Realization fills me, certain as the rain pours down. It’s my time to stop being such a damn nobody. Hiding from what I really want. Just because I can't talk about magic, it doesn’t mean that I can’t be me. Because there’s more to me than a spell or charm. Because I’m more than that. I’m the girl who’s Lia’s best friend. I’m Remy’s best—and only—sister. I had surgery at three damn weeks old and I’m a survivor. I’m calm and resilient when people comment about my scar. There’s so much more to me than what any of them see, and they’re not the kind of people whose opinions I care about.

... love being a calm storm of heavy rain falling through warm air and sunlight hitting the black clouds from the west into rainbow, and sometimes sun came strong, and sometimes the clouds rolled deep, and life were two abandoned, scorched, and desolate souls holding out light in the darkness for one another, and sharing milk at the kitchen counter in that dark night; ...

Sound. The use of sound is very powerful for engaging a calm response. You can use rain sticks, bells, chimes, and music.

Our life is like seasons, sometimes there is sunshine and sometimes there is rain. But there is always going to be the night to calm it down and eventually a bright new day.

Consider this analogy. When it rains heavily, the water does not necessarily penetrate the earth. If the surface is dry and hard, the rain water floods the surface and runs off. But if it rains gradually for many days continuously, and the ground is moist, then the water seeps deep into the earth, which is good for cultivation and for life. Similarly in ourselves, we must moisten our muscles and nerves through the expansion and extension of the various asana. In this way, the stress that saturates the brain is diffused throughout the rest of the body, so the brain is rested and released from strain and the body releases its stress and strain through movement. Similarly, while doing the various types of pranayama the whole body is irrigated with energy. The nerves are soothed, the brain is calmed, the hardness and rigidity of the lungs are loosened. The nerves are made to remain healthy. There is a certain vibration, which you can make rhythmic and subtler in your asana and pranayama practice without force or stress. You are one with yourself and that is in and of itself a meditative state.

So laced and lush is this ecosystem that we walk our several miles through it today without making a footfall, only scuffs. Carol tells me that these Olympic rain forests and the rough coast to their west provide her the greatest calm of any place she has been. That she can walk in this rain forest and only be walking in this rain forest, moving in simple existence. Surprising, that, because neither of us thinks we are at all mystic. Perhaps, efficient dwellers we try to be, we simply admire the deft fit of life systems in the rain forest. The flow of growth out of growth, out of death . . . I do not quite ease off into beingness as she can. Memories and ideas leap to mind. I remember that Callenbach’s young foresters of Ecotopia would stop in the forest to hug a fir and murmur into its bark, brother tree. . . . This Hoh forest is not a gathering of brothers to humankind, but of elders. The dampness in the air, patches of fog snagged in the tree tops above, tells me another story out of memory, of having read of a visitor who rode through the California redwood forest in the first years of this century. He noted to his guide that the sun was dissipating the chilly fog from around them. No, said the guide looking to canyon walls of wood like these, no, “The trees is drinkin’ it. That’s what they live on mostly. When they git done breakfast you’ll git warm enough.” For a time, the river seduces me from the forest. This season, before the glacier melt begins to pour from the Olympic peaks, the water of the Hoh is a painfully lovely slate blue, a moving blade of delicate gloss. The boulder-stropped, the fog-polished Hoh. Question: why must rivers have names? Tentative answer: for the same reason gods do. These Peninsula rivers, their names a tumbled poem of several tongues—Quinault, Quillayute, Hoh, Bogashiel, Soleduck, Elwha, Dungeness, Gray Wolf—are as holy to me as anything I know. Forest again. For comparison’s sake I veer from the trail to take a look at the largest Sitka spruce along this valley bottom. The Park Service has honored it with a sign, giving the tree’s dimensions as sixteen feet four inches in diameter, one hundred eighty feet in height, but now the sign is propped against the prone body of the giant. Toppled, it lies like a huge extracted tunnel bore. Clambering onto its upper surface I find that the Sitka has burls, warts on the wood, bigger around than my body. For all that, I calculate that it is barely larger, if any, than the standard nineteenth-century target that Highpockets and his calendar crew are offhandedly devastating in my writing room. Evening, and west to Kalaloch through portals of sawed-through windfalls, to the campground next to the ocean. In fewer than fifty miles, mountain and ocean, arteried by this pulsing valley.

There is always a messed up music behind a messed up rain.. Calm and listen with your soul,Feel the pain... Nothing happens without a reason

Was this what it was like to live an ordinary life? Orderly, peaceful, calm. Work, yes, endless as rain, but also warmth and plenty and safety.