Candle Pictures With Quotes

Why don’t you just pretend that the asshole dropped dead? You can’t call or write to a dead man. Put a couple of candles in front of his picture, say a few Hail Marys, and get it over with.

you feel like a candle in a hurricane, just like a picture with a broken frame. alone and helpless, like you've lost your fight, but you'll be alright, you'll be alright. Cause when push comes to shove you taste what your made of you might bend till you break cause it's all you can take. you get mad, you get strong, wipe your hands, shake it off then you stand!

Are you always so forthright over coffee dates?” “I don’t know. You’re the only one I ever had a crush on.” Oh, boy. “And that was stupid.” Flustered again, he raked his fingers through his hair. “Now I’ve scared you. That sounds scary and obsessive. Like I have an alter somewhere with your pictures over it, where I light candles and chant your name. Jesus! That’s even scarier. Run now. I won’t hold it against you.” She burst out laughing. Had to set her coffee back down before she slouched it over the rim. “I’ll stay if you swear you don’t have the alter.” “I don’t.” He swiped his finger in an X over his heart.

I DRAW A HOT SORROW BATH IN MY DESPAIR ROOM WITH A MISERY CANDLE BURNING I WASH MY HAIR WITH REGRET SHAMPOO AFTER CLEANING MYSELF WITH PAIN SOAP I DRY MYSELF WITH MY GORGEOUS WHITE ONE HUNDRED PERCENT AND IT WILL NEVER CHANGE TOWEL THEN SMOOTH ON MY I DON’T DESERVE LOTION AND I HATE MYSELF FACE CREAM THEN I PUT ON MY ALONE AGAIN SILK PYJAMAS AND GO TO SLEEP WHEN THE HUE HAS GONE BLUE AND YOU CAN’T QUITE GRIN AND BEAR IT LET THIS WORD PICTURE REMIND YOU IT CAN ALWAYS BE WORSE

January 8 has been a lucky day for me. I have started all my books on that day, and all of them have been well received by the readers. I write eight to ten hours a day until I have a first draft, then I can relax a little. I am very disciplined. I write in silence and solitude. I light a candle to call inspiration and the muses, and I surround myself with pictures of the people I love, dead and alive.

Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others... He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds - or on persons devoted to them - have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life. When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a 'dirty little atheist' he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished. If Paine had ceased his writings with 'The Rights of Man' he would have been hailed today as one of the two or three outstanding figures of the Revolution. But 'The Age of Reason' cost him glory at the hands of his countrymen - a greater loss to them than to Tom Paine. I was always interested in Paine the inventor. He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle; the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty. Traducers have said that he spent his last days drinking in pothouses. They have pictured him as a wicked old man coming to a sorry end. But I am persuaded that Paine must have looked with magnanimity and sorrow on the attacks of his countrymen. That those attacks have continued down to our day, with scarcely any abatement, is an indication of how strong prejudice, when once aroused, may become. It has been a custom in some quarters to hold up Paine as an example of everything bad. The memory of Tom Paine will outlive all this. No man who helped to lay the foundations of our liberty - who stepped forth as the champion of so difficult a cause - can be permanently obscured by such attacks. Tom Paine should be read by his countrymen. I commend his fame to their hands. {The Philosophy of Paine, June 7, 1925}

I found Esau’s field guide at the bottom of my pack. Taking a candle into the bedroom, I read his book until my eyes grew heavy. From his vast notes, it seemed that almost every plant and tree in the jungle had a reason for existing. I caught myself wishing there was a page in his guide that had my picture on it with the reason for my existence written underneath in Esau’s neat hand.

She waited uneasily and shyly. From afar he saw that her eyes--clearly her father's--were filled with desperate innocence. He pictured, in her, his own redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky. Leo ran forward with flowers out-thrust.

The trick is to think of life as a process rather than a substance. When a candle is burning, there is a flame that clearly carries energy. When we put the candle out, the energy doesn’t “go” anywhere. The candle still contains energy in its atoms and molecules. What happens, instead, is that the process of combustion has ceased. Life is like that: it’s not “stuff”; it’s a set of things happening. When that process stops, life ends.

Isabel took a drive alone that afternoon; she wished to be far away, under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage and tread upon the daisies. She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter's day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers. There was no gentler nor less consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of worshippers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could not have felt more intimately the suggestiveness of these objects nor have been more liable at such moments to a spiritual visitation.

Under the twinkling trees was a table covered with Guatemalan fabric, roses in juice jars, wax rose candles from Tijuana and plates of food — Weetzie's Vegetable Love-Rice, My Secret Agent Lover Man's guacamole, Dirk's homemade pizza, Duck's fig and berry salad and Surfer Surprise Protein Punch, Brandy-Lynn's pink macaroni, Coyote's cornmeal cakes, Ping's mushu plum crepes and Valentine's Jamaican plantain pie. Witch Baby's stomach growled but she didn't leave her hiding place. Instead, she listened to the reggae, surf, soul and salsa, tugged at the snarl balls in her hair and snapped pictures of all the couples.

She walked on and on till she melted out of the picture - like - like a shadow jumping over a candle ...

If we scrutinize 100,000 pictures, it’s not surprising that occasionally we’ll come upon something like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy, it would be amazing if we couldn’t find one here and there.

Yaicha is named after a song by some group from the last century called the Pousette-Dart Band. Something about a girl, a candle in the falling rain shining amidst the pain. I kind of surprise myself when I can picture Yaicha as that candle. My father named Yaicha after the "haunting melody." I wonder if he ever listened to the lyrics.

In other languages, you are beautiful- mort, muerto- I wish I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean were sitting in that chair playing cards and noticing how famous you are on my cell phone- picture of your eyes guarding your nose and the fire you set by walking, picture of dawn getting up early to enthrall your skin- what I hate about stars is they’re not those candles that make a joke of cake, that you blow on and they die and come back, and you you’re not those candles either, how often I realize I’m not breathing, to be like you or just afraid to move at all, a lung or finger, is it time already for inventory, a mountain, I have three of those, a bag of hair, box of ashes, if you were a cigarette I’d be cancer, if you were a leaf, you were a leaf, every leaf, as far as this tree can say.

He got up. It was too early to go to bed; at least, he was not in the mood for it. He pined for a bit of amusement - something cheap and easy. A seat in the pictures, cigarettes, beer. Useless! No money to pay for any of them. He would read KING LEAR and forget this filthy century. Finally, however, it was THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES that he took from the mantelpiece. SHERLOCK HOLMES was his favorite of all books, because he knew it by heart. The oil in the lamp was giving out and it was getting beastly cold. Gordon dragged the quilt from his bed, wrapped it round his legs and sat down to read. His right elbow on the table, his hands under his coat to keep them warm, he read through "The Adventure of the Speckled Band." The little gas-mantle sighed above, the circular flame of the oil-lamp burned low, a thin bracket of fire, giving out no more heat than a candle.

Rhys lifted one shoulder. "Funny thing is, if you'd made maybe a pre-step that involved, oh, I don't know, giving me any sort of bloody heads-up that you were coming to town, all of this could have been avoided. You could've come in completely unbothered and lit a candle to Da's picture or whatever it is you do when you arrive in a new place, and I would not have had my delightful wife woken up by a phone call that seemed to involved the words 'high-handed' and 'complete asshole.'" He threw Wells a wink. "That's how I knew she was taking about you.

A middle-aged white man smiling and cutting a cake decorated with candles in a picture posted on Facebook isn't celebrating his birthday, but holding a knife.

All the suffering and torment wrought at places of execution, in torture chambers, madhouses, operating theatres, under the arches of bridges in late autumn—all these are stubbornly imperishable, all these persist, are inaccessible but cling on, envious of everything that is, stuck in their own terrible reality. People would like to be allowed to forget much of it, their sleep gliding softly over these furrows in the brain, but dreams come and push sleep aside and fill the picture again. And so they wake up breathless, let the light of a candle dissolve the darkness as they drink the comforting half-light as if it was sugared water. But, alas, the edge on which this security is balancing is a narrow one. Given the slightest little turn and their gaze slips away from the familiar and the friendly, and the contours that had so recently been comforting take the sharp outlines of an abyss of horror.

He started to draw. He drew from memory. He had a good memory, something which, all things considered, was far from a blessing. The pencils moved quickly across the paper, scratching back and forth in deepening shades of grey. He leaned low over the paper, concentrating all his energy on his work. The candles flickered and dripped wax, having nothing better to do. Eventually he lifted his head and looked at his creation. The face of a young woman stared back at him from the paper, a slight smile playing on her lips. She looked as if she was about to say something, and that once she had you would laugh. She looked happy. Seven stared at the picture, his strange eyes unreadable – eyes that, now he made no effort to mask them, were from edge to edge only the deep blue of the dead ocean. He swallowed hard, as if he was trying to imbibe something foul tasting but necessary, like a child sipping medicine, and pulled another sheet of paper from his desk.

When sleep came, I would dream bad dreams. Not the baby and the big man with a cigarette-lighter dream. Another dream. The castle dream. A little girl of about six who looks -like me, but isn’t me, is happy as she steps out of the car with her daddy. They enter the castle and go down the steps to the dungeon where people move like shadows in the glow of burning candles. There are carpets and funny pictures on the walls. Some of the people wear hoods and robes. Sometimes they chant in droning voices that make the little girl afraid. There are other children, some of them without any clothes on. There is an altar like the altar in nearby St Mildred’s Church. The children take turns lying on that altar so the people, mostly men, but a few women, can kiss and lick their private parts. The daddy holds the hand of the little girl tightly. She looks up at him and he smiles. The little girl likes going out with her daddy. I did want to tell Dr Purvis these dreams but I didn’t want her to think I was crazy, and so kept them to myself. The psychiatrist was wiser than I appreciated at the time; sixteen-year-olds imagine they are cleverer than they really are. Dr Purvis knew I had suffered psychological damage as a child, that’s why she kept making a fresh appointment week after week. But I was unable to give her the tools and clues to find out exactly what had happened.

First, it is imperative that you create a private Sacred Space and set up an altar with a photo of yourself as a child, a candle, or anything else that speaks to you. I have a picture of the Dalai Lama and Oprah Winfrey.

I pictured Becs and myself together, squabbling, but always over little things, while I rotted away at the core from love of Ferris. It was hopeless. ‘Here.’ I laid my hands on the table, palms up, and jerked my head at them, ‘put yours on top.’ Ferris did not move. ‘Please,’ I said. He laid his cold hands on mine and I curled my fingers, folding his within them. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘I’ve neither accepted nor refused. Speak it out plainly, tell me and I’ll do it.’ He cried, ‘Don’t put it onto me! Choose for yourself.’ ‘This is choosing. Tell Aunt I will do whatever you’ll have me do, and that’s my answer.’ I kept hold of his fingers. We stayed there silent and motionless for some time, while the candles burnt down. At last he said quietly, ‘It is a lot to give up.’ ‘Well. My history is bad enough without bigamy,’ I replied, at which he smiled but made no reply. The candles were half burnt. I took one and rose. ‘Goodnight, Ferris.’ ‘Goodnight, Jacob.

His hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor and lay there sputtering. He placed his foot on it and put it out. Then he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by the table and buried his face in his hands.

That night when I went to bed, I laid there in the dark and pictured a clothesline full of somebody's else's troubles. I knew for sure there were a lot of them I'd rather pluck off of that line than mine. I imagined what the other troubles might be. There would probably be toothaches and failed math tests. Lost cats and ugly hair. Cheating boyfriends and broken-down cars. But none of those could hold a candle to my troubles, weighing down that clothesline like a sack full of bricks.

His love of music, unlike his other loves, owned to vaguenesses, but while, on his comparatively shaded sofa, and smoking, smoking, always smoking, in the great Fawns drawing-room as everywhere, the cigars of his youth, rank with associations – while, I say, he so listened to Charlotte’s piano, where the score was ever absent but, between the lighted candles, the picture distinct, the vagueness spread itself about him like some boundless carpet, a surface delightfully soft to the pressure of his interest.

As the prospect gradually revealed itself and disclosed the scene over which the wind had wandered in the dark, like my memory over my life, I had a pleasure in discovering the unknown objects that had been around me in my sleep. At first they were faintly discernible in the mist, and above them the later stars still glimmered. That pale interval over, the picture began to enlarge and fill up so fast that at every new peep I could have found enough to look at for an hour. Imperceptibly my candles became the only incongruous part of the morning, the dark places in my room all melted away, and the day shone bright upon a cheerful landscape, prominent in which the old Abbey Church, with its massive tower, threw a softer train of shadow on the view than seemed compatible with its rugged character.

One night, we workers formed a circle around the tallow candle as it burned, allowing each other to bond by holding hands. It felt strange to connect with fellow people from Mira again. We have all become estranged from each other as we slave away for the woman leader. In our circle, we closed our eyes and prayed. I pictured the streets of Mira, adorned with the rugged rawness of our original footprints. We once stepped together or passed each other by, busy but comfortable with our work in various trades. Now we are anonymous, our identities stripped away from us.

Yes. All the worth-while things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in candle-light. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures. People—all kinds of people. Work that you love. And growth—growth and watching people grow. Feeling very strongly about things and then developing that feeling to—to make

You're gay!" she shrilled, and he pulled the phone away from his ear. "How in the hell do you know you're gay?" He smiled a little to himself. It was sort of private information, but he figured he owed her a little after the last four months. "Because when I look at pictures of naked men, my penis goes off like a roman candle," he said frankly, and that was when she hung up.

A cell phone rang from the end table to my right and Kristen bolted up straight. She put her beer on the coffee table and dove across my lap for her phone, sprawling over me. My eyes flew wide. I’d never been that close to her before. I’d only ever touched her hand. If I pushed her down across my knees, I could spank her ass. She grabbed her phone and whirled off my lap. “It’s Sloan. I’ve been waiting for this call all day.” She put a finger to her lips for me to be quiet, hit the Talk button, and put her on speaker. “Hey, Sloan, what’s up?” “Did you send me a potato?” Kristen covered her mouth with her hand and I had to stifle a snort. “Why? Did you get an anonymous potato in the mail?” “Something is seriously wrong with you,” Sloan said. “Congratulations, he put a ring on it. PotatoParcel.com.” She seemed to be reading a message. “You found a company that mails potatoes with messages on them? Where do you find this stuff?” Kristen’s eyes danced. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you have the other thing though?” “Yeeeess. The note says to call you before I open it. Why am I afraid?” Kristen giggled. “Open it now. Is Brandon with you?” “Yes, he’s with me. He’s shaking his head.” I could picture his face, that easy smile on his lips. “Okay, I’m opening it. It looks like a paper towel tube. There’s tape on the—AHHHHHH! Are you kidding me, Kristen?! What the hell!” Kristen rolled forward, putting her forehead to my shoulder in laughter. “I’m covered in glitter! You sent me a glitter bomb? Brandon has it all over him! It’s all over the sofa!” Now I was dying. I covered my mouth, trying to keep quiet, and I leaned into Kristen, who was howling, our bodies shaking with laughter. I must not have been quiet enough though. “Wait, who’s with you?” Sloan asked. Kristen wiped at her eyes. “Josh is here.” “Didn’t he have a date tonight? Brandon told me he had a date.” “He did, but he came back over after.” “He came back over?” Her voice changed instantly. “And what are you two doing? Remember what we talked about, Kristen…” Her tone was taunting. Kristen glanced at me. Sloan didn’t seem to realize she was on speaker. Kristen hit the Talk button and pressed the phone to her ear. “I’ll call you tomorrow. I love you!” She hung up on her and set her phone down on the coffee table, still tittering. “And what did you two talk about?” I asked, arching an eyebrow. I liked that she’d talked about me. Liked it a lot. “Just sexually objectifying you. The usual,” she said, shrugging. “Nothing a hot fireman like you can’t handle.” A hot fireman like you.I did my best to hide my smirk. “So do you do this to Sloan a lot?” I asked. “All the time. I love messing with her. She’s so easily worked up.” She reached for her beer. I chuckled. “How do you sleep at night knowing she’ll be finding glitter in her couch for the next month?” She took a swig of her beer. “With the fan on medium.” My laugh came so hard Stuntman Mike looked up and cocked his head at me. She changed the channel and stopped on HBO. Some show. There was a scene with rose petals down a hallway into a bedroom full of candles. She shook her head at the TV. “See, I just don’t get why that’s romantic. You want flower petals stuck to your ass? And who’s gonna clean all that shit up? Me? Like, thanks for the flower sex, let’s spend the next half an hour sweeping?” “Those candles are a huge fire hazard.” I tipped my beer toward the screen. “Right? And try getting wax out of the carpet. Good luck with that.” I looked at the side of her face. “So what do you think is romantic?” “Common sense,” she answered without thinking about it. “My wedding wouldn’t be romantic. It would be entertaining. You know what I want at my wedding?” she said, looking at me. “I want the priest from The Princess Bride. The mawage guy.

Life, it now seems, is a stained glass window composed of bits of translucence and opacity—fragments of yesterday, chips of today, pieces of someday, soldered with time. Some jewel-like and whole. Some fractured by the weather. Others fallen from their leaden frames. Only fusion and repair complete the image and allow us to make out the picture. Am I a scale, a harp, a star? A candle, anchor or heart? And what about tomorrow?

... a fountain pen with a curious label: For finding dreams that don't exist yet. Evangeline had been unable to resist trying the pen, and as soon as she did, a fledgling dream had taken form. She didn't know how long she'd spent drawing, only that when her piece was done, it felt like a picture of a promise. Evangeline and her love were at the end of a dock covered in candles, which made the ocean glow so that it looked like a sea of fallen stars. Only night and her moon watched. No one else was there, just Evangeline and her groom. Their foreheads were pressed together- and she might not have known exactly what they were doing if not for the words her pen had etched in to the sky. And then they will write their vows on their hands and place them over each other's chests, so they may sink in to their hearts, where they will be kept safe forever and always.

On Easter Monday there was a great display of fireworks from the Castle of St. Angelo. We hired a room in an opposite house, and made our way, to our places, in good time, through a dense mob of people choking up the square in front, and all the avenues leading to it; and so loading the bridge by which the castle is approached, that it seemed ready to sink into the rapid Tiber below. There are statues on this bridge (execrable works), and, among them, great vessels full of burning tow were placed: glaring strangely on the faces of the crowd, and not less strangely on the stone counterfeits above them. The show began with a tremendous discharge of cannon; and then, for twenty minutes or half an hour, the whole castle was one incessant sheet of fire, and labyrinth of blazing wheels of every colour, size, and speed: while rockets streamed into the sky, not by ones or twos, or scores, but hundreds at a time. The concluding burst - the Girandola - was like the blowing up into the air of the whole massive castle, without smoke or dust. In half an hour afterwards, the immense concourse had dispersed; the moon was looking calmly down upon her wrinkled image in the river; and half - a - dozen men and boys with bits of lighted candle in their hands: moving here and there, in search of anything worth having, that might have been dropped in the press: had the whole scene to themselves.

There’s our homecoming picture. Last Halloween, when I dressed up as Mulan and Peter wore a dragon costume. There’s a receipt from Tart and Tangy. One of his notes to me, from before. If you make Josh’s dumb white-chocolate cranberry cookies and not my fruitcake ones, it’s over. Pictures of us from Senior Week. Prom. Dried rose petals from my corsage. The Sixteen Candles picture. There are some things I didn’t include, like the ticket stub from our first real date, the note he wrote me that said, I like you in blue. Those things are tucked away in my hatbox. I’ll never let those go. But the really special thing I’ve included is my letter, the one I wrote to him so long ago, the one that brought us together. I wanted to keep it, but something felt right about Peter having it. One day all of this will be proof, proof that we were here, proof that we loved each other. It’s the guarantee that no matter what happens to us in the future, this time was ours. When he gets to that page, Peter stops. “I thought you wanted to keep this,” he said. “I wanted to, but then I felt like you should have it. Just promise you’ll keep it forever.” He turns the page. It’s a picture from when we took my grandma to karaoke. I sang “You’re So Vain” and dedicated it to Peter. Peter got up and sang “Style” by Taylor Swift. Then he dueted “Unchained Melody” with my grandma, and after, she made us both promise to take a Korean language class at UVA. She and Peter took a ton of selfies together that night. She made one her home screen on her phone. Her friends at her apartment complex said he looked like a movie star. I made the mistake of telling Peter, and he crowed about it for days after. He stays on that page for a while. When he doesn’t say anything, I say, helpfully, “It’s something to remember us by.” He snaps the book shut. “Thanks,” he says, flashing me a quick smile. “This is awesome.

My son was something of a disciple of flying things. On his bedroom wall were posters of fighter planes and wild birds. A model of a helicopter was chandeliered to his ceiling. His birthday cake, which sat before me on the picnic table, was decorated with a picture of a rocket ship - a silver-white missile with discharging thrusters. I had been hoping that the baker would place a few stars in the frosting as well (the cake in the catalog was dotted with yellow candy sequins), but when I opened the box I found that they were missing. So this is what I did: as Joshua stood beneath the swing set, fishing for something in his pocket, I planted his birthday candles deep in the cake. I pushed them in until each wick was surrounded by only a shallow bracelet of wax. Then I called the children over from the swing set. They came, tearing up divots in the grass. We sang happy birthday as I held a match to the candles. Joshua closed his eyes. "Blow out the stars," I said, and his cheeks rounded with air.

opportunity. The bizarre codes on the pages she’d sorted for Randy suddenly made sense. They must have been the files that kept track of where the bank had stashed millions of dollars. Jim wanted the money out, and so did the Covellis. The Mob was somehow involved with the bank’s dealings, and Carmichael worked for them. Being a bartender was just a facade. Beatrice hadn’t known him at all. But Tony and Max had known him, she realized. Tony was a police detective; he was the one who told her about the Covellis in the first place. He must have known. Every word Carmichael might have overheard at the bar replayed in her mind—her conversations with Tony about snooping around the bank, the missing safe deposits, the missing master key. Maybe Tony had wanted Carmichael to hear. The old man pointed the gun at Teddy in her head. Maybe the Covellis would bring down the bank if law enforcement failed. No one, not even Tony, suspected that she and Max had the power to do anything but run. Max was right. They all underestimated women like them. Beatrice stepped out from behind the curtain with the keys in her hand and crept toward the vault. CHAPTER 72 Friday, August 28, 1998 A black-and-white photograph of two women looked up from Box 547 in the yellow glow of the detective’s flashlight. They were smiling. The glass in the silver picture frame was cracked. Iris picked it up and handed it to Detective McDonnell. Underneath it she found a brown leather book and a candle. That was it. “What the hell is this?” Iris

It is possible - given absolute control over the media and the police - to rewrite the memories of hundreds of millions of people, if you have a generation to accomplish it in. Almost always, this is done to improve the hold that the powerful have on power, or to serve the narcissism or megalomania or paranoia of national leaders. It throws a monkey wrench into the error-correcting machinery. It works to erase public memory of profound political mistakes, and thus to guarantee their eventual repetition. In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I’m imagining here is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather that small numbers of people will have so much control over news stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes.

I had not yet been down to the cellar where I was to sleep. I took a candle with me but was too tired to look around beyond finding a bed, pillow and blanket. Leaving the trap door of the cellar open so that cool, fresh air could reach me, I took off my shoes, cap, apron and dress, prayed briefly, and lay down. I was about to blow out the candle when I noticed the painting hanging at the foot of my bed. I sat up, wide awake now. It was another picture of Christ on the Cross, smaller than the one upstairs but even more disturbing. Christ had thrown his head back in pain, and Mary Magdalene’s eyes were rolling. I Iay back gingerly, unable to take my eyes off it. I could not imagine sleeping in the room with the painting. I wanted to take it down but did not dare. Finally I blew out the candle—I could not afford to waste candles on my first day in the new house. I lay back again, my eyes fixed to the place where I knew the painting hung. I slept badly that night, tired as I was. I woke often and looked for the painting. Though I could see nothing on the wall, every detail was fixed in my mind. Finally, when it was beginning to grow light, the painting appeared again and I was sure the Virgin Mary was looking down at me.

Now this is grand, she thought, the white linen well-pressed, the warm light glimmering from a score of candles, the silver plate polished like mirrors. It was a feast in a picture book, a queen's banquet in a fairy castle. At the centre rose a vast Desert Island molded from sugar-paste, just as Aunt Charlotte had used to make it. A stockade of licorice crowned the peak, and a pathway of pink sugar sand stretched to the shore. The whole was surrounded by a sea of broken jelly, swimming with candied fish. First off, she ate the two tiny sugar castaways from the lookout on her island- very sweet and crisp they were, too. She stood to make a toast. "To you, Jack, my own true love," and took a long draught. Sugarplums next; a whole pyramid to herself, of every color: raspberry, orange, violet, pistachio. She was eating dinner back to front, and she recommended it heartily. Next, her teeth sank into a sticky mass of moonshine jelly- it was good, very good.

When asked if he had a special feeling for books, critic-turned-filmmaker Francois Truffaut answered, "No. I love them and films equally, but how I love them!" As an example, Truffaut gave the example that his feeling of love for "Citizen Kane" (USA, 1941) "is expressed in that scene in 'The 400 Blows' where Antoine lights a candle before the picture of Balzac.' My book lights candles for m any of the great authors of this world: Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Angela Carter (UK), Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (India), Janet Frame (New Zealand), Yu Hua (China), Stieg Larsson (Sweden), Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Naguib Mifouz (Egypt), Murasaki Shikibu (Japan), and Alice Walker (USA) - to name but a few. Furthermore, graphic novels, manga, musicals, television, webisodes and even amusement park rides like 'Pirates of the Caribbean' can inspire work in adaptation. Let's be open to learning from them all. ("Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling," 2)

The introduction of cinematography enabled us to corral time past and thus retain it not merely in the memory - at best, a falsifying receptacle - but in the objective preservative of a roll of film. But, if past, present and future are the dimensions of time, they are notoriously fluid. There is no tension in the tenses and yet they are always tremulously about to coagulate. The present is a liquid jelly which settles into a quivering, passive mass, the past, as soon as - if not sooner than - we are aware of it as present. Yet this mass was intangible and existed only conceptually until arrival of the preservative, cinema. The motion picture is usually regarded as only a kind of shadow play and few bother to probe the ontological paradoxes it presents. For it offers us nothing less than the present tense experience of time irrefutably past. So that the coil of film has, as it were, lassoed inert phenomena from which the present had departed, and when projected upon a screen, they are granted a temporary revivification. [...] The images of cinematography, however, altogether lack autonomy. Locking in programmed patterns, they merely transpose time past into time present and cannot, by their nature, respond to the magnetic impulses of time future for the unachievable future which does not exist in any dimension, but nevertheless organizes phenomena towards its potential conclusions. The cinematographic model is one of cyclic recurrences alone, even if these recurrences are instigated voluntarily, by the hand of man viz. the projectionist, rather than the hand of fate. Though, in another sense, the action of time is actually visible in the tears, scratches and thumbprints on the substance of the film itself, these are caused only by the sly, corrosive touch of mortality and, since the print may be renewed at will, the flaws of aging, if retained, increase the presence of the past only by a kind of forgery, as when a man punches artificial worm-holes into raw or smokes shadows of fresh pain with a candle to produce an apparently aged artefact. Mendoza, however, claimed that if a thing were sufficiently artificial, it became absolutely equivalent to the genuine.

On this side of eternity, Christmas is still a promise. Yes, the Savior has come, and with him peace on earth, but the story is not finished. Yes, there is peace in our hearts, but we long for peace in our world. Every Christmas is still a “turning of the page” until Jesus returns. Every December 25 marks another year that draws us closer to the fulfillment of the ages, that draws us closer to . . . home. When we realize that Jesus is the answer to our deepest longing, even Christmas longings, each Advent brings us closer to his glorious return to earth. When we see him as he is, King of kings and Lord of lords, that will be “Christmas” indeed! Talk about giving Christmas gifts! Just think of this abundance . . . You do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. (1 Cor. 1:7) And carols? You’re about to hear singing like you’ve never heard before. Listen . . . Then I heard something like the voice of a great multitude and like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, saying, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.” (Rev. 19:6, nasb) Christmas choirs? Never was there a choir like the one about to be assembled . . . They held harps given them by God and sang . . . the song of the Lamb: “Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages.” (Rev. 15:2–3) True, Main Street in your town may be beautifully decorated for the season, but picture this . . . The twelve gates [of the city] were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of pure gold, like transparent glass. (Rev. 21:21) Oh, and yes, we love the glow of candles on a cold winter’s night and the twinkling of Christmas lights in the dark, but can you imagine this? There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. (Rev. 22:5) Heaven is about to happen. The celebration is about to burst on the scene. We stand tiptoe at the edge of eternity, ready to step into the new heaven and the new earth. And I can hardly wait.

Completed in Arles late in 1888 and now housed in the National Gallery, London, this painting depicts the artist’s humble chair and pipe. The work was completed shortly after Gauguin’s departure from the Yellow House. The two artists had quarrelled bitterly, causing Gauguin to write to Theo, “The incompatibility of both our characters means that Vincent and I cannot live together peacefully. It is imperative that I leave.” Vincent was devastated, seeing his dreams of establishing an artists’ commune with Gauguin shatter and disappear. In response, he painted his and Gauguin’s empty chairs, symbolising the loneliness and isolation that he felt. Van Gogh’s wooden chair is more modest, with the pipe and tobacco adding to its humble image; whilst Gauguin’s more elaborate chair, holding a book and candle, suggests learning and ambition. Van Gogh’s choice of colours for his chair include yellow and violet, hinting at daylight and a metaphorical idea of hope for the future. In contrast, Gauguin’s chair is depicted in darker colours of red and green, which along with the candle, enforce the idea of night-time. Together, the pictures represent day and night, with the painting of Gauguin’s chair suggesting that the absent friend had brought light and happiness to van Gogh’s evenings.

Here the genie of fire showed me in a crimson tableau the booth of a chestnut-seller where a pair of non-commissioned officers, their belts abandoned on chairs, were playing cards, without suspecting that they had been conjured out of the darkness by a magician, like a stage apparition, and presented as they actually were at that very moment to the eyes of a stopping passer-by who was invisible to them. In a little junk shop, a half-spent candle projected its red glow on to an engraving and turned it to the colour of blood, while the light cast by a big lamp, struggling with the darkness, bronzed a fragment of leather, nielloed a dagger with glittering spangles, spread a sheen of precious gold like the patina of the past or the varnish of a master over pictures which were only bad copies, and turned this whole hovel, in which there was nothing but cheap imitations and cast-off rubbish, into a marvellous Rembrandt painting. Occasionally I looked up towards some vast old apartment with its shutters still open and where amphibious men and women, adapting themselves each evening to living in an element different from their daytime one, swam about slowly in the dense liquid which at nightfall rises incessantly from the wells of lamps and fills the rooms to the brink of their walls of stone and glass, and as they moved about in it, their bodies sent forth unctuous golden ripples.

I left Brookstone and went to the Pottery Barn. When I was a kid and everything inside our house was familiar, cheap, and ruined, walking into the Pottery Barn was like entering heaven. If they really wanted people to enjoy church, I thought back then, they should make everything in church look and smell like the Pottery Barn. My dream was to surround myself one day with everything in the store, with the wicker baskets and scented candles, the brushed-silver picture frames. But that was a long time ago. I had already gone through a period of buying everything there was to buy at the Pottery Barn and decorating my apartment like a Pottery Barn outlet, and then getting rid of it all during a massive upgrade. Now everything at the Pottery Barn looked ersatz and mass-produced. To buy any of it now would be to regress in aspiration and selfhood. I didn’t want to buy anything at the Pottery Barn so much as I wanted to recapture the feeling of wanting to buy everything from the Pottery Barn. Something similar happened at the music store. I should try to find some new music, I thought, because there was a time when new music could lift me out of a funk like nothing else. But I wasn’t past the Bs when I saw the only thing I really cared to buy. It was the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which had been released in 1965. I already owned Rubber Soul. I had owned Rubber Soul on vinyl, then on cassette, and now on CD, and of course on my iPod, iPod mini, and iPhone. If I wanted to, I could have pulled out my iPhone and played Rubber Soul from start to finish right there, on speaker, for the sake of the whole store. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to buy Rubber Soul for the first time all over again. I wanted to return the needle from the run-out groove to the opening chords of “Drive My Car” and make everything new again. That wasn’t going to happen. But, I thought, I could buy it for somebody else. I could buy somebody else the new experience of listening to Rubber Soul for the first time. So I took the CD up to the register and paid for it and, walking out, felt renewed and excited. But the first kid I offered it to, a rotund teenager in a wheelchair looking longingly into a GameStop window, declined on the principle that he would rather have cash. A couple of other kids didn’t have CD players. I ended up leaving Rubber Soul on a bench beside a decommissioned ashtray where someone had discarded an unhealthy gob of human hair. I wandered, as everyone in the mall sooner or later does, into the Best Friends Pet Store. Many best friends—impossibly small beagles and corgis and German shepherds—were locked away for display in white cages where they spent their days dozing with depression, stirring only long enough to ponder the psychic hurdles of licking their paws. Could there be anything better to lift your spirits than a new puppy?

An inch?” Minh held his fingers apart trying to judge the unfamiliar measurement. Shake took his hand and squeezed the fingers closer together.           “By such small amounts...we win or lose.”           “Nobody won in that fight, Minh. We both lost.”           “The dreams...”           “Yes. I have them too...and you are always there.”           “Where is all the hate?”           “Gone. It always goes...when you realize your enemy is just another man...just another soldier trying to do his duty.”           “That’s how you think of me?”           “It is now. Before this you were the black-eyed monster of my nightmares.”           “And you were the green-eyed monster...”           They smiled and studied the glow of the candle.           “You stayed in your Marine Corps...”           “Yes. I had nothing in common with civilians. Didn’t like them much. I was comfortable as a Marine...among others who understand me.”           “I understand you...”           “I believe you do, Minh.”           “Did you marry? Have children?”           “I was married but that is finished now. This is my daughter...my only child.”Shake reached for his wallet and pulled out Stacey’s high school graduation picture in cap and gown.           “A scholar. She is very beautiful.”           “Yes...she is everything to me.”           “And if I had killed you that night up on those walls, she would never have been born.”Minh handed the photo back and nodded. “I wish I had known this. It makes me feel better.

Tinker Bell, meanwhile, was drifting with purpose up to the highest leafy branches of the jungle. Her light glowed warmly off the leaves below, the droplets seeping off their thick veins, the sweet sap running down the trunks of the trees. It made the whole clearing look... Well, like it was touched by fairies, Wendy thought with a smile. All her life she had looked for fairies in more mundane places, experiencing a rush of hope and warmth whenever a scene even palely imitated the one before here now. Candles at Christmas, fireflies in the park, flickering lamps in teahouses. The sparkling leaded glass windows of a sweets shop on winter afternoons when dusk came at four. A febrile, glowing crisscross of threads on a rotten log her cousin had once shown her out in the country: fox fire, magical mushrooms. And here it was, for real! Tinker Bell was performing what appeared to be a slow and majestic dance. First, she moved to specific points in the air around her, perhaps north, south, east, and west, twirling a little at each stop. Then she flew back to the center and made a strange bowing motion, keeping her tiny feet daintily together and putting her arms out gracefully like a swan. As she completed each movement, fairy dust fell from her wings in glittering, languorous trails, hanging in the air just long enough to form shapes. She started the dance over again, faster this time. And again even faster. Her trail of sparkles almost resolved into a picture, crisscrossed lines constantly flowing slowly down like drips of luminous paint. Wendy felt a bit like John, overwhelmed with a desire to try to reduce and explain and thereby translate the magic. But she also felt a lot like Michael, with an almost overwhelming urge to break free from her hiding place and see it up close, to feel the sparkles on her nose, to run a hand through the sigils not for the purpose of destruction but form a hapless, joyful desire to be part of it all.

Last night I undressed for bed. But instead of crawling between the sheets I decided to stand, naked, in front of the large full-length mirror that is propped against the wall next to my bed. ⠀ ⠀ I turned off the bright lights, and found a song that spoke to the energy I could feel under my skin. For a while I just stood there. And I looked at myself. Bare skin. Open Heart. Clear truth. ⠀ ⠀ It's a wonder, after 42 years on earth, to allow it to fully land, this knowing that I can stop, and look at myself and think things other than unkind words. ⠀ ⠀ Don't get me wrong. I don't want to paint you a pretty social media picture that doesn't play out in real life. I'm not suddenly completely fine with all that is. I'm human and I'm a woman in the midst of this particular culture, and so of course I'd love to be tighter and firmer and lifted. I'd love to have the skin and metabolism I did in my twenties. I wish, often, that my stomach were flatter. I wear makeup and I dye away my gray hair. I worry about these things too, of course I do. ⠀ ⠀ But finally, and fully - I can stand and look at myself and be filled, completely, with love. I can look at myself entirely bare and think, yes, I like myself now. Just as I am. Even if nothing changes. This me. She is good. And she is beautiful. ⠀ ⠀ And even in the space of allowing myself to be human, and annoyed with those things I view as imperfections, I honor and celebrate this shift. ⠀ ⠀ And so last night I was able to stand there. Naked and unashamed and run my own hands gently along my own skin. To offer the tenderness of the deepest seduction. To practice being my own best lover, to romance my own soul. To light the candles and buy the flowers. To hold space for my own knowing. ⠀ ⠀ And to touch my own skin while the music played. Gently. Lightly. With reverence. My thighs, my arms, my breasts, my belly, the points where my pulse makes visible that faint movement that proves me alive. To trace the translucent blue veins, the scars, the ink that tells stories. To whisper to the home of my own desire. ⠀ ⠀ I love you. ⠀ I respect your knowing. ⠀ Thank you for waiting for me to get here. ⠀ I finally see that you are holy.

She fell asleep within minutes, unaware that the rain that had been falling since evening had turned to sleet, or that the roads were becoming impassable. As she slept, she began to dream, but instead of a continuous scene, it consisted of images flashing through her mind, like looking at old pictures in an album. Cat was sitting at the kitchen table. Her mother was standing beside her, laughing as she set a birthday cake in front of her. There were four candles on her cake, and her daddy was taking a picture. “Smile,” he’d said. She looked up just as the flash went off. She was still blinking from the flash when the image shifted. It was cold. The blowing wind burned her skin. She was at a cemetery, staring down at a small, flat marker. Cat couldn’t read, but somehow she knew it bore hermother’s name. She could hear her father crying. It scared her worse than the fact that her mother had gone away. “Daddy…where did she go?” “Heaven.” “Is it far?” “Yes.” “Can we go, too?” She never heard his answer, because the image shifted again. This time, she was being led through a long series of hallways. The smell of orange oil from wood polish burned her nose. The sound of her footsteps echoed on the tiled floors. Yesterday she’d been in the hospital. She’d asked to go home. But someone had told her she couldn’t go home because there was no one left to take care of her. The horror of that knowledge had frightened her so much that she’d been afraid to ask what came next. She walked through an open door as a woman said her name. The woman took her by the hand, and they walked away. She couldn’t see the woman’s face. She never remembered the faces, and it didn’t matter, because they never stayed the same.

The unexpected dinner invitation from the budgerow started Mr Doughty off on a journey of garrulous reminiscence. 'Oh my boy!' said the pilot to Zachary, as they stood leaning on the deck rail. 'The old Raja of Raskhali: I could tell you a story or two about him--Rascally-Roger I used to call him!' He laughed, thumping the deck with his cane. 'Now there was a lordly nigger if ever you saw one! Best kind of native--kept himself busy with his shrub and his nautch-girls and his tumashers. Wasn't a man in town who could put on a burra-khana like he did. Sheeshmull blazing with shammers and candles. Paltans of bearers and khidmutgars. Demijohns of French loll-shrub and carboys of iced simkin. And the karibat! In the old days the Rascally bobachee-connah was the best in the city. No fear of pishpash and cobbily-mash at the Rascally table. The dumbpokes and pillaus were good enough, but we old hands, we'd wait for the curry of cockup and the chitchky of pollock-saug. Oh he set a rankin table I can tell you--and mind you, supper was just the start: the real tumasher came later, in the nautch-connah. Now there was another chuckmuck sight for you! Rows of cursies for the sahibs and mems to sit on. Sittringies and tuckiers for the natives. The baboos puffing at their hubble-bubbles and the sahibs lighting their Sumatra buncuses. Cunchunees whirling and tickytaw boys beating their tobblers. Oh, that old loocher knew how to put on a nautch all right! He was a sly little shaytan too, the Rascally-Roger: if he saw you eyeing one of the pootlies, he'd send around a khidmutgar, bobbing and bowing, the picture of innocence. People would think you'd eaten one too many jellybees and needed to be shown to the cacatorium. But instead of the tottee-connah, off you'd go to a little hidden cumra, there to puckrow your dashy. Not a memsahib present any the wiser--and there you were, with your gobbler in a cunchunee's nether-whiskers, getting yourself a nice little taste of a blackberry-bush.' He breathed a nostalgic sigh. 'Oh they were grand old goll-mauls, those Rascally burra-khanas! No better place to get your tatters tickled.' Zachary nodded, as if no word of this had escaped him.

oday so many children aren't involved in their families' lives. Let's change that! Get them active in your family. Start by creating times for sharing and conversation.. .at the dinner table. Turn off the TV, all phones (including cells), and any other distractions. Toward the end of the meal, ask everyone this question: "What's the best thing that happened to you today?" Make dinnertime fun. Find out what's happening in your children's hearts and lives, and let them know what's happening in yours. Honor jobs well done, good grades, and positive contributions to the family and community. love having family pictures all over the house. It's a great way to promote family identity. Do team sports together. Have a family night out every now and then. The apostle Paul says, "If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ. . .then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose" (Philippians 2:1-2). hen was the last time you did something really special to say "I love you" to your husband or boyfriend? In the morning, tell your husband, "Honey, tonight is a special evening-just for the two of us." Then get busy. Set up a card table on your patio or deck-or even in the living room. Get out a beautiful tablecloth, your best napkins, flowers, and candles! Fix him his favorite meal and your best dessert, put on some soft romantic music, give yourself enough time to look your best, and you're all set for when he gets home. He'll feel like a king and know he's a top priority in your life.

ant to spruce up your bathroom? Don't hesitate to hang pictures in there. Plaques, posters, framed magazine covers-whatever strikes your fancy. Mirrors and clocks are naturals too. Flowers are always a plus. Seashells are also at home in the bathroom. Put them in a bowl, hang them, or glue them to a frame. Add favorite bathroom accessories such as lamps and scented candles. Potpourri gives everything a special ambience. Put in a few unexpected touches to make your bathroom unique. A guaranteed hope-producer is spending time with children. Get down on the floor and talk to them. And listen to them. Let their youth and enthusiasm rub off on you. And here's the best tip of all, taken from Psalm 39:7: "But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you." May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him. ey, if little things can drag you down, then little things can also pick you up! Here are a few ideas. • Always keep something green in a little vase or pot by your kitchen sink. And I'm not talking about cash-I'm talking plants.

ave you thought of your family photos as a collection? One of my tables held photos of many generations of women in our family. I displayed them in a variety of frames, and the mother-daughter-granddaughter theme pulled the collection together. No one could resist stopping and taking a peek. Group as black-and-white photos or formal or informal in groups. Another idea is to keep the same frames but change the photos for the seasons. If you have a ton of photos, rotate them so you can enjoy your entire collection. And for a designer touch, add a surprise to your grouping-something that doesn't "match," such as that silly picture of your Aunt Lily. The idea is to share yourself with others in a way that is interesting. ant to change your room? Put two lamps of different sizes on a side table with books, a small clock, a pot of flowers, or a ceramic creation. These change the look and provide better lighting. Your coffee table is an ideal spot for a plant or a terracotta pot with candles. For a softer look, add a throw rug made of mohair or wool-something warm and inviting. And I don't know about you, but I like bookshelves in the living room-complete with books, family pictures, and a mixture of the things I collect. I also love to frame favorite scriptures to welcome me as I go from room to room.

Helen was dressed all in brightly colored spandex, her shirt clinging to her rolls of fat and featuring a picture of a candle flame. One of her feet was booted and the other was clad in a red converse sneaker. Was she wearing a cape?

The wonderful thing about Moab is that everything happens in a story-book setting, with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish and Wyeth and Joe Coll, and all the rest of them, whichever way you look. Imagine a blue sky—so clear-blue and pure that you can see against it the very feathers in the tails of wheeling kites, and know that they are brown, not black. Imagine all the houses, and the shacks between them, and the poles on which the burlap awnings hang, painted on flat canvas and stood up against that infinite blue. Stick some vultures in a row along a roof-top—purplish—bronze they’ll look between the tiles and sky. Add yellow camels, gray horses, striped robes, long rifles, and a searching sun-dried smell. And there you have El-Kerak, from the inside. From any point along the broken walls or the castle roof you can see for fifty miles over scenery invented by the Master-Artist, with the Jordan like a blue worm in the midst of yellow-and-green hills twiggling into a turquoise sea. The villains stalk on-stage and off again sublimely aware of their setting. The horses prance, the camels saunter, the very street-dogs compose themselves for a nap in the golden sun, all in perfect harmony with the piece. A woman walking with a stone jar on her head (or, just as likely, a kerosene can) looks as if she had just stepped out of eternity for the sake of the picture. And not all the kings and kaisers, cardinals and courtezans rolled into one great swaggering splurge of majesty could hold a candle to a ragged Bedouin chief on a flea-bitten pony, on the way to a small-town mejlis.

I showed a photo of a bowl of ramen I had taken earlier in the day and asked what she thought of that as a profile picture. She just shook her head. OH, I GUESS I CAN’T HOLD A CANDLE TO THAT STREET SIGN DUDE, HUH?

Well then, Juliet, since you can't find anything funny about our predicament, let's see what Charlotte can do," he announced with a flippant, offhand charm. And then, before she could protest, he plucked the baby from her arms, laid her on the bed, and tickled her until she batted at his hands and began shrieking with delight. "See? Charlotte thinks it's funny, don't you, Charlie-girl?" The baby, who obviously adored him, gurgled and squealed, and Juliet found herself staring at the tender picture the two of them made; he, so tall and strong and masculine, her daughter, so tiny and helpless. She swallowed, hard. There was something deep and moving in this powerful image of Lord Gareth de Montforte as a father — a role that seemed to come as easily to him as flight to a bird. Her heart beat faster as she finally acknowledged what she'd been afraid to admit all along. She desired him. Desired him so badly it scared her. He glanced over at her, grinning. She shook her head and folded her arms, feigning annoyance but unable to prevent the growing amusement from sparking her eyes. Then he bent over Charlotte, his nose nearly touching hers, a few locks of hair tumbling over his brow and brushing the baby's forehead. He put his fingers into the corners of his mouth and pulled his cheeks wide, all the while making an absurd gurgling noise and glancing playfully at Juliet out of the corner of his eye to ensure that she was watching, too. He looked completely ridiculous. Worse, he knew he looked completely ridiculous and reveled in it. Unbidden, a burst of laughter escaped Juliet, mingling with Charlotte's happy shrieks. Letting go of his cheeks, Gareth laughed right along with them, a big, happy sound that brightened the room as the candles never could have done. It was warm laughter, family laughter, the kind of laughter that Juliet had never expected to share in ever again. Something

To contend against Omnipotence is insanity. For any man, I care not who he may be, to put himself in opposition to God is utter folly. I have often watched, as doubtless you have done, the foolish moth attracted by the glare of the candle or the gas. Plunge he makes at it, as though he would put it out, and he drops, full of exquisite pain, upon the table. He has enough wing left to make another dash at the flame, and again he is filled with another pain, and unless you mercifully kill him outright he will continue as long as he has any strength to fight with the fire which destroys him. That is an apt picture of the sinner’s life, and such will be the sinner’s death.

General lighting / cleaning lighting: A ceiling lamp or light fixture that spreads ambient light over the whole room. Work lighting / task lighting: A reading lamp by the armchair or sofa; lighting over work surfaces in the kitchen; a desk lamp. Spot lighting: Accent lighting or spotlights directed at a wall of pictures, a work of art, a bookcase, or shadow play on the wall. Atmospheric lighting / decorative lighting: Mood lighting, dimmable small lamps, string lights, candles.

Fowl Ceiling lights Flush lights Track lighting Recessed lighting Pendant lamps Something in Between Floor and reading lamps Table lamps on taller bureaus and sideboards Clamp spotlights on the bookcase Picture lights Spotlights with the light directed at walls or works of art Pendant window lamps Fish Low lamps standing on the windowsill Candles and votives on the side tables Low floor lamps Spotlights inset in the floor LED strings on the baseboards or in window recesses

Lady Esmeralda’s background was no less interesting than herself; it was a colourful picture of luxury and squalor. Armies of servants thronged the great houses; coaches rumbled up to the doors. Huge meals were eaten at tables laden with silver and lit by candles; there was drinking and gambling and duelling. Highwaymen frequented lonely roads and footpads lurked in the streets. Thieves were hanged and crowds gathered to see the grisly entertainment. The picture of life in those far-off days became so real and clear that I felt as if I had lived in them myself. It was almost as if I remembered them. Sometimes I returned to them in my dreams (which was not always enjoyable) and occasionally I found myself

The door closed behind her, and Ed just stood there—unable to connect with the present reality. It was as though he had been zapped by a stun gun of words, and the effect had made him momentarily immobile. A few minutes passed, and he broke free from the paralyzing shock. He walked into the bedroom that he and Laura had once shared. Now, like him, it was missing her presence. Pictures had been taken off of the dresser, the scented candles were gone, and her pillow was not on the bed. He walked over to the closet, opened it up, and found that her clothes, and shoes were also gone. He looked around the half empty room, and found himself venturing into a tormenting cycle of confusion. A livid syrup had just been poured out onto a panicked waffle that had been setting on a perturbed plate for several daunting months, and Ed suddenly found himself acquiring an unhealthy appetite for destruction. Tears began to fall down his face, and an inward storm began to rage.

...but that very thought, that she might become his wife, had for some reason entered his head the very first time she sat in his study at a little round table, diligently taking down in shorthand the words he dictated in his muffled voice—and he had been purposely dry and sharp with her that day, so she would not feel the power she had already gained over him, but when, as he dictated to her, he imagined himself kneeling before her beneath the flickering light of a nearly spent candle and kissing her feet, with her unable to leave because she was his wife, and about to blow out the candle so they could plunge into the passionate, exquisite swim, then his voice became hoarse and he shut his eyes to blot out the sight of this little girl, as he purposely tried to picture her to help restrain his imagination, girl students being as untouchable as postulants...

When Derek Sivers first built his business CDbaby.com, he set up a standard confirmation email to let customers know their order had been shipped. After a few months, Derek felt that this email wasn’t aligned with his mission—to make people smile. So he sat down and wrote a better one. Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed on a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th. I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!! —Derek Sivers, Anything You Want The result wasn’t just delighted customers. That one email brought thousands of new customers to CD Baby. The people who got it couldn’t help sharing it with their friends. Try Googling “private CD Baby jet”; you’ll find over 900,000 search results to date. Derek’s email has been cited by business blogs the world over as an example of how to authentically put your words to work for your business.

Our philosophy is that home decor shouldn’t be taken too seriously, because we want our homes to reflect who we are, no one else. We want things to be fun and interesting, but we want things we can really live with and around. We want a place where you can use Play-Doh or prop up crusty old cowboy boots on the coffee table. We’re not afraid of candle drippings or drink rings. We believe all these things help our homes tell a tale of love and family. A tale of history and future. A tale of the American experience. Our homes spin the story we want to live in every day. We firmly believe your home should be your sanctuary, where you surround yourself with every sensible and nonsensible thing you love, a place that speaks of where you’ve been and where you’re going. Make no mistake: Our homes are far from perfect! Just beyond the frame of every camera angle is a pile of dirty clothes, three half-unpacked suitcases, and a room still waiting to be decorated. Because that, my friends, is real. C’mon in anyway and stay awhile. Our hope is that you’ll find an idea—a project, a picture, a spark of divine fire—that will inspire you. Because just like the wild woods or the glorious road, like fingerprints or feathers, your home is unique—and it should be uniquely you.

other pagan beliefs which have found a home in rabbinical Judaism, such as the existence of demons in bathrooms,[193] the breaking of glass in weddings,[194] reincarnation of souls,[195] belief in the existence of the little Mermaid,[196] practices of witchcraft,[197] God versus the god of the sea,[198] the belief in a time of purgatory,[199] prayers for raising the souls of the dead (“kaddish”),[200] the industry of amulets,[201] turning Purim into a pagan carnival,[202] putting rocks on tombstones,[203] worshipping pictures of saints,[204] using sacred candles,[205] changing the new year (i.e., Rosh Hashanah) into a pagan date,[206] and the custom of women separating a tenth of the challah bread (הפרשת חלה).[207]

That night when I went to bed, I laid there in the dark and pictured a clothesline full of somebody else's troubles. I knew for sure there were a lot of them I'd rather pluck off of that line than mine. I imagined what the other troubles might be. There would probably be toothaches and failed math tests. Lost cats and ugly hair. Cheating boyfriends and broken-down cars. But none of those could hold a candle to my troubles, weighing down that clothesline like a sack full of bricks.

Attention is a yin to the yang in focus. Attention (mindfulness) and attention (focus) work together to provide a true, rounded experience of both being centered on the task at hand (whatever it may be), as well as being fully aware of, and responsive to, the many facets of the moment in which you are. In most forms of meditation you must demonstrate a certain level of concentration as well as free mind. What You’ll Get Out of It You must expand your mind and embrace the fullness of the moment in which you are. We might compare our sensitivity to light: When we concentrate on something, we could say we're "shining a spotlight" about it. Instead of shining a spotlight on one particular thing, as we exercise transparent consciousness, we may suggest that we encourage our awareness to "shine" in every direction around us, like the glow of a candle flame. This light of consciousness surrounding us will be referred to as our area of knowledge. The response area is the total sum of all the sensory input. The practice of open consciousness is an experiment of encouraging the senses to feel the fullness of the present moment, being mindful of even the subtleties you would usually forget, neglect or completely miss, such as the warmth of the air around you or the occasional crackling of floorboards. When we just accept and allow things to be as they are, we disengage instinctively from the urges that would try to control or change things. In passivity or indifference, this isn't a custom–quite the contrary. This is an exercise of opening your mind and encouraging you to obtain all the knowledge you can potentially before you make any moves or take any action. Remember that the term makes. We don't push ourselves to pick up on sensory input; perception simply grows from a state of quiet, comfortable allowing. We have a biological tendency to "brace for impact" when we are resistant to something that is happening, which means we withdraw and tighten up the muscles in our body. The subconscious then automatically begins to think all the way things could or ought to be different from what they are. When we're open to something, we seem to be more enthusiastic about the unexpected, and even more willing to embrace, leaving the body more at ease. It helps us to be more open to learning what we're doing and to learn. With an open mind we strive to see more options on issues and multiple perspectives. Open Awareness Meditation will strengthen the ability to see things as they really are and embrace them for what they are. By practicing Open Awareness Meditation, you will cultivate: Discernment Open Awareness Meditation allows us to better appreciate the moment we are at. The more we know the more educated our choices can be in any situation. Through cultivating conscious awareness, we develop discernment by being more sensitive to the larger picture, and how it is connected to the present moment.

Old age is the enemy of memories. The memories are like burning candles. But I don't remember your look, Which I can determine with your eyes. Your voice melts in the ears & I can picture your eyes.-

There was definitely a cat and another animal, probably a rabbit, in the shed. Her suspicions were confirmed soon enough. Madeleine lit a candle, its light illuminating a wooden hutch where an enormous rabbit was nibbling at some freshly picked clover. In her lap, the little grey cat was all grown up; it was the same cat Madeleine had been holding on the balcony the day when one look from her teal-colored eyes had been enough to floor poor Solange. Holy pictures were pinned over the hutch: Saint Anne, the Miraculous Virgin of the Smile (who cured ten-year-old Thérèse), Saint Veronica holding her veil, and Saint Joan of Arc had all been carefully pinned in a row, looking down tenderly over the big orange rabbit who went on munching his clover. Pinned to the frame of the hutch was a piece of wax paper with the animal's name- Lazarus- written on it. "His name's Lazarus," Madeleine whispered as she grabbed him by the ears. Solange winced in pain. "You have to pick them up by the ears or else you hurt them. I'll set him down on your lap." Solange had never touched a living rabbit before. She stroked Lazarus, who right then seemed to her to be the gentlest, most charming thing to ever have walked this earth.

If prices break below the lower band, wait for a bounce above the lower band, and then go long. Place your stop just below the low price of the move beneath the band. Candlestick patterns can be used effectively when Bollinger bands are brought into the picture. For overbought conditions, wait for the first red candle to dip beneath the upper band before you go short. For oversold conditions, wait until the first white candle appears before you go long. Reversal patterns often form above or below the Bollinger bands. These patterns provide additional confirmation that a reversal is at hand. The right way to use Bollinger bands is: 1. After prices cross above the expanded upper Bollinger band, wait for them to fall back beneath the upper band, then trade from the short side, using a stop-loss on the short just above the high point of the move. 2. After prices cross below the expanded lower Bollinger band, wait for them to rise back above the lower band; then trade from the long side, using a stop-loss on the long just below the low point of the move. 3. When Bollinger bands have contracted to a narrow range, wait for prices to break above the upper band; then trade from the long side, using a stop-loss on the long just below the upper band. 4. When Bollinger bands have contracted to a narrow range, wait for prices to break beneath the lower band; then trade from the short side, using a stop-loss on the short just above the lower band.

By this time it was dark, the candle carried by Robert only making one nucleus of light as he moved about holding it before the pictures one by one. The broad, bare window looked out upon the pale sky, tinged with the last cold flicker of the twilight. The ivy rustled against the glass with the same ominous shiver as that which agitated every leaf in the garden, prophetic of the storm that was to come.

That’s what it all comes down to in the end,” he said. “A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?” I threw away picture-frame wire, metal bookends, cork coasters, plastic key tags, dusty bottles of Mercurochrome and Vaseline, crusted paintbrushes, caked shoe brushes, clotted correction fluid. I threw away candle stubs, laminated placemats, frayed pot holders. I went after the padded clothes hangers, the magnetic memo clipboards. I was in a vengeful and near savage state. I bore a personal grudge against these things. Somehow they’d put me in this fix. They’d dragged me down, made escape impossible.

Wren knew all the ways to make wishes and included pictures of those things: the first star you saw at night, birthday candles, a wispy white dandelion, three birds on a telephone wire, a digital clock at 11:11, a fountain full of coins. There was even one of her stray eyelashes in the collage, but no one knew it was there but her.

But that’s the thing I’ve only recently come to understand about birthdays. They’re not about presents or streamers. They’re not about parties or pictures or petite pastel candles on your cake. They’re about having a brief sense of hope. For that one day, we’re able to close the door on our mistakes and cling to the false idea that we’ll approach the next year wiser. We make wishes. We blow out candles. We tell ourselves this will be our year.

Beauty is more than just pictures on a wall. It is also about colors that bring pleasure, smooth and nubby textures that reward the touch, the wafting fragrance of food in the oven that keeps us sniffing appreciatively, the comfort or excitement of music on the stereo. Beauty is found in the way we light the rooms (we keep a well-stocked shelf of candles and lighters in constant use), the books we open again and again, the way we arrange the furniture and set the table. It is found in natural objects we use for decorating potted plants, shells, autumn leaves, always fresh flowers or pine boughs brought in from our yard and open windows that draw the eye toward the beautiful outdoors.

Creating Sacred Space Sacred space is a way to separate your time of meditation from the rest of your day. It's not going to have to be a literal place you never use for anything else. Sacred space can be an energetic, sacred time now. While you don't have to, you may find that just for your meditation practice you want to have a special room or corner. Creating one is fun, and it is very personal. It also makes meditation easy to start as all your items can stay in one place: your cushion or chair for meditation, your blanket, and any crystals, props, candles, pictures, etc. When you meditate, sacred space is essential. It will encourage you to be actively free. Be mindful that during meditation, you may become delicate. Harsh noise or words could have an easier effect on you right after you're done. You're going to let down your guard. You're going to be. And, that's why it's important to have time to meditate to concentrate and time after to absorb the practice so that the effects of meditation will impact you at the cellular level. Listening to Your Body’s Wisdom You're preparing to be with what comes up when you're silent when you create the space or time as sacred. You're preparing to spend time with the parts you're dealing with when you're outwardly focused on others, or what you're going to do next. You're going to be here right now when you create sacred space. For chakra healing, it's time to check in and see how you feel when you come to this quiet place. These are the answers to which chakras are out of control as you consider how you look. Become Attuned to How You Feel You may have an immediate and reliable answer when someone asks how you are, "I'm fine," "I'm sleepy," or "I'm fantastic! It's helpful to know how you are instantly; it indicates you're linked to the common understanding of how you feel. It's good to know this instant, and then take time to go deeper. Take time to watch. Taking time to feel how you feel physically, emotionally, mentally, and energetically gives you a more comprehensive picture of how you are right now. It can help you to know what to balance in your energy centers if you notice how you feel, so you feel even better. An instant response, "I'm tired," indicates that there are chakras out of balance that you may want to look into so that you feel alert and well-rested.

Altar of the East in a clear vase, one bud a thin and dawn-pink ribbon a cone of dark incense from the farthest desert a white candle the picture of a child a single feather a flute carved of reed . . . a scroll, inscribed by hand a stoppered silver bottle containing just your breath

That sounded scary and obsessive, like I have an altar somewhere with your pictures over it where I light candles and chant your name. Jesus, that's even scarier. Run now, I won't hold it against you.

October 25: A day of despair, in the middle of such a horribly senseless city, and of wondering whether there were not still—somewhere in America—a place where a gravel lane, wet from the rains, led up a hill, between the yellow trees and past occasional vistas of a valley full of quiet farms and woodlands, to a house where candles and a warm hearth defied the early darkness and dampness of autumn and where human warmth and simplicity and graciousness defied the encroachments of a diseased world and of people drugged and debilitated by automobiles and advertisements and radios and moving pictures.

The kids had no desire to see grief counselors and, perhaps because I didn’t either, I didn’t push it. Instead, we did what we always did. We drew pictures and played music and lit candles and danced around the house with bare feet singing “Ring Around the Rosie.” We did our own version of familial mourning. We made stuff and burned stuff and cried and laughed and made macabre jokes and decorated the house for Halloween with skeletons and a dozen freshly purchased gravestones. We shopped for plots in the cemetery while blasting haunted-house sound effects on our phones. We sang along to Hal’s favorite songs. We danced in the middle of grocery aisles, life-sized plastic skeletons in our arms. We laughed until we cried until we cried until we laughed and ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

I threw away picture-frame wire, metal bookends, cork coasters, plastic key tags, dusty bottles of Mercurochrome and Vaseline, crusted paintbrushes, caked shoe brushes, clotted correction fluid. I threw away candle stubs, laminated placemats, frayed pot holders. I went after the padded clothes hangers, the magnetic memo clipboards. I was in a vengeful and near savage state. I bore a personal grudge against these things. Somehow they’d put me in this fix. They’d dragged me down, made escape impossible. The two girls followed me around, observing a respectful silence. I threw away my battered khaki canteen, my ridiculous hip boots. I threw away diplomas, certificates, awards and citations. When the girls stopped me, I was working the bathrooms, discarding used bars of soap, damp towels, shampoo bottles with streaked labels and missing caps.

PETE TOWNSHEND WROTE a lengthy essay, “A Discourse on Mick Jagger’s Fortieth Birthday,” and sent us a picture of himself holding a lit candle with “Happy Birthday Mick” written across his chest.

It didn’t take peering at the brass plates at the bottom of the paintings to guess who they must have been: my very own Lord and Lady Uppington, presiding over Uppington Hall in paint as they once had in the flesh. One could almost picture them stepping out of their frames to play host, sweeping aside the tourists and signaling the silent harp into song. The re-enactors were all wrong; from their costumes, they were late Regency, 1820 or so, rather than the pre-Regency period in which I was interested. There was a wide gap between the two, in style and in outlook. But the servants would probably have looked very much the same, in their livery in the Uppington colors, and so would the pre-Victorian Christmas decorations. If I ignored the “party guests” and the other tourists, it was just possible to picture what it might have been like two hundred years ago, when Lord and Lady Uppington had held Christmas at the family seat. I paused, struck by the symmetry of it. It would have been almost exactly two hundred years ago, wouldn’t it? December 1803 to December 2003. It would have been Colin’s ancestors’ first Christmas together after the mad upheaval of their marriage the previous spring. There would have been candles, just as there were now, and the smell of oranges and cloves. There would have been gaily gowned ladies and excited children and tables laden with ratafia biscuits and dried fruit and the inevitable sticky sweet slices of mince pie….

What remains? Our children? Homer touched the flame of the candle with his fingers. The answer wasn’t easy to find for him, Achmed’s words still hurt him. He himself had been damned to be without children, unable for this kind of immortality, so he couldn’t do anything but choose another path to immortatlity. Again he reached for his pen. They can look like us. In their reflection we mirror ourselves in a mysterious way. United with those we had loved. In their gestures, in their mimics we happily find ourselves or with sorrow. Friends confirm that our sons and daughters are just like us. Maybe that gives us a certain extension of ourselves when we are no more. We ourselves weren’t the first. We have been made from countless copies that have been before us, just another chimera, always half from our fathers and mothers who are again the half of their parents. So is there nothing unique in us but are we just an endless mixture of small mosaic parts that never endingly exist in us? Have we been formed out of millions of small parts to a complete picture that has no own worth and has to fall into its parts again? Does it even matter to be happy if we found ourselves in our children, a certain line that has been traveling through our bodies for millions of years? What remains of me?

If brute force wouldn't suffice, however, there was always the famous Viking cunning. The fleet was put to anchor and under a flag of truce some Vikings approached the gate. Their leader, they claimed, was dying and wished to be baptized as a Christian. As proof, they had brought along the ailing Hastein on a litter, groaning and sweating.  The request presented a moral dilemma for the Italians. As Christians they could hardly turn away a dying penitent, but they didn't trust the Vikings and expected a trick. The local count, in consultation with the bishop, warily decided to admit Hastein, but made sure that he was heavily guarded. A detachment of soldiers was sent to collect Hastein and a small retinue while the rest of the Vikings waited outside.  Despite the misgivings, the people of Luna flocked to see the curiosity of a dreaded barbarian peacefully inside their city. The Vikings were on their best behavior as they were escorted to the cathedral, remaining silent and respectful. Throughout the service, which probably lasted a few hours, Hastein was a picture of reverence and weakness, a dying man who had finally seen the light. The bishop performed the baptism, and the count stood in as godfather, christening Hastein with a new name. When the rite had concluded, the Vikings respectfully picked up the litter and carried their stricken leader back to the ships.  That night, a Viking messenger reappeared at the gates, and after thanking the count for allowing the baptism, sadly informed him that Hastein had died. Before he expired, however, he had asked to be given a funeral mass and to be buried in the holy ground of the cathedral cemetery.  The next day a solemn procession of fifty Vikings, each dressed in long robes of mourning, entered the city carrying Hastein's corpse on a bier. Virtually all the inhabitants of the city had turned out to witness the event, joining the cavalcade all the way to the cathedral. The bishop, surrounded by a crowd of monks and priests bearing candles, blessed the coffin with holy water, and led the entire procession inside.  As the bishop launched into the funerary Mass, reminding all good Christians to look forward to the day of resurrection, the coffin lid was abruptly thrown to the ground and a very much alive Hastein leapt out. As he cut down the bishop, his men threw off their cloaks and drew their weapons. A few ran to bar the doors, the rest set about slaughtering the congregation.  At the same time – perhaps alerted by the tolling bell – Bjorn Ironside led the remaining Vikings into the city and they fanned out, looking for treasure. The plundering lasted for the entire day. Portable goods were loaded onto the ships, the younger citizens were spared to be sold as slaves, and the rest were killed. Finally, when night began to fall, Hastein called off the attack. Since nothing more could fit on their ships, they set fire to the city and sailed away.97 For the next two years, the Norsemen criss-crossed the Mediterranean, raiding both the African and European coasts. There are even rumors that they tried to sack Alexandria in Egypt, but were apparently unable to take it by force or stealth.

It didn’t necessarily mean that he’d been awake all night washing away his mother’s blood. She looked under the bed and felt behind the wardrobe. No porn. No girlie posters on the walls. In fact there were no pictures on the walls at all, only a framed certificate from his catering course. What did he do for sex? Probably used the Internet, like most of the UK’s male population. It came to Vera that more than likely he was a virgin. In contrast, Miranda’s room was surprisingly big. Opulent and glamorous in an old-fashioned way. It held a double bed, piled with pillows and silk-covered cushions, in various shades of purple. These seemed to have been artfully arranged – another sign, Vera thought, that Miranda hadn’t been to bed the night before. There was a small wrought-iron grate, just for decoration now. Where the fire would once have been laid stood a candle in a big blue candle-holder, identical to the one on the table on the terrace. Was that significant? Vera tried to remember if she’d seen one like it in the main house. On one side of the chimneybreast, bookshelves had been built into the alcove, and on the other stood a big Victorian wardrobe. There was a dressing table with an ornate framed mirror under the window, and an upholstered stool in front of it. No PC. So what did Miranda do for sex? The question came, unbidden, into her head. Vera sat on the stool and gave a wry smile into the mirror. She knew her team had sometimes asked the same question about her. But not recently. As you got older, folk seemed to think you could do without. This is where Miranda would have sat to prepare herself to meet the residents. Again Vera was reminded of an ageing actress. Her dressing table was scattered with make-up. The woman hadn’t shared her son’s obsession with order and cleanliness. And beyond the mirror there was a view to the coast. It wasn’t possible to see the terrace from here – it was in the shadow of the big house. But the beach was visible. What had Miranda been thinking as she put on her face, as she brushed her hair and held it in place with spray? That her life as a writer was over? Or did she still hope for the big break, the posters on the Underground and the reviews in the Sunday papers? Was she still writing? It seemed to Vera that this question was so important, so fundamental, that she’d been a fool not to consider it before. If Miranda had written a new book, and Tony Ferdinand had offered to help her find a home for it, of course Miranda would be shattered to find him dead. The stabbed body would symbolize her shattered dreams. It wouldn’t be easy for a middle-aged

personally begin by asking for white light protection, as discussed earlier in this and all of my books. Light the white candle. Write the name of the loved one you are wishing to make a connection with on the piece of paper and fold it twice. I like to put my hand on the memento or hold the picture and think back to a happy memory of them. Please do not dredge up negative memories, regrets, or how they passed or suffered. Now, ask your spirit guides to assist you in making a connection while you sleep. Again, keep it simple; you don't need to beg or plead. Just a simple request that's short and sweet: "I would love to make a connection with (name) in spirit tonight. Thank you." If you can safely do so, you can burn the paper with the name on it. Please be careful in doing so and make sure that the ashes are completely out. Alternately - and this works just as well - you can simply tear the paper twice. No matter what you choose, the paper with the name must be destroyed as you are ceremoniously letting the person go free in spirit. This is very important; don't skip this. Blow out the candle. Again, please make sure it's

Applause washed toward her, liquid and sparkling. People in the audience held up their phones to take her picture, cameras held like candles. She had enough vanity left to wish for privacy. In heaven, she thought, tired and uncomforted, the lights will be even brighter. Maybe there it will not be so bad to be seen for what we are.

Chaz thought that he would eventually charm his new bride into sharing her vast inheritance. He had pictured the intimate ceremony taking place in the bedroom, of course, after a night of athletic lovemaking—Joey, still aglow, unfolding the pre-nup and holding it to the flame of a lilac-scented candle. It had never happened, though, and after nearly two years of waiting Chaz had given up hope. Joey wasn’t hoarding the family fortune so much as ignoring it, which Chaz regarded as a crime against nature. What was the point, he’d asked himself, of staying wed to a wealthy woman who refused to act like one? The answer: There was no point.

To automatic write, you start by sitting quietly, relaxing with a few deep breaths, and lighting a candle if it helps you to focus. State aloud or in your head that you only intend to work with your highest angels and guides to call in the most positive energy, and then say a short prayer asking them to protect you and allow only high-level energy to assist and guide your writing. If your writings sound negative or pushy, stop immediately and picture yourself in a bubble of God’s white light. Ask your angels and guides to clear the room and start again.

Someone’s gotta do it. No one’s gonna do it. So I’ll do it. Your honor, I rise in defense of drunken astronauts. You’ve all heard the reports, delivered in scandalized tones on the evening news or as guaranteed punch lines for the late-night comics, that at least two astronauts had alcohol in their systems before flights. A stern and sober NASA has assured an anxious nation that this matter, uncovered by a NASA-commissioned study, will be thoroughly looked into and appropriately dealt with. To which I say: Come off it. I know NASA has to get grim and do the responsible thing, but as counsel for the defense—the only counsel for the defense, as far as I can tell—I place before the jury the following considerations: Have you ever been to the shuttle launchpad? Have you ever seen that beautiful and preposterous thing the astronauts ride? Imagine it’s you sitting on top of a 12-story winged tube bolted to a gigantic canister filled with 2 million liters of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Then picture your own buddies—the “closeout crew”—who met you at the pad, fastened your emergency chute, strapped you into your launch seat, sealed the hatch and waved smiling to you through the window. Having left you lashed to what is the largest bomb on planet Earth, they then proceed 200 feet down the elevator and drive not one, not two, but three miles away to watch as the button is pressed that lights the candle that ignites the fuel that blows you into space. Three miles! That’s how far they calculate they must go to be beyond the radius of incineration should anything go awry on the launchpad on which, I remind you, these insanely brave people are sitting. Would you not want to be a bit soused? Would you be all aflutter if you discovered that a couple of astronauts—out of dozens—were mildly so? I dare say that if the standards of today’s fussy flight surgeons had been applied to pilots showing up for morning duty in the Battle of Britain, the signs in Piccadilly would today be in German. Cut these cowboys some slack. These are not wobbly Northwest Airlines pilots trying to get off the runway and steer through clouds and densely occupied airspace. An ascending space shuttle, I assure you, encounters very little traffic. And for much of liftoff, the astronaut is little more than spam in a can—not pilot but guinea pig. With opposable thumbs, to be sure, yet with only one specific task: to come out alive. And by the time the astronauts get to the part of the journey that requires delicate and skillful maneuvering—docking with the international space station, outdoor plumbing repairs in zero-G—they will long ago have peed the demon rum into their recycling units.

The Goddess of the Witches?” After Ana had met Breda, she had made Veronika promise to light a black candle for Morana every time she tried to do magic. Her sister’s spells had a way of going wrong in the worst possible way. “Yes. She is also the goddess of winter and of death.” “Goran gave me a book. It has a picture of girls drowning Morana in the river, so the spring can return.” Ana wrinkled her nose. “You didn’t like the story?” Breda smiled at her. “It said Vesna, the spring, and Morana can’t exist at the same time. I know it can’t be summer and winter both, but the seasons are one thing, a cycle.” Breda’s smile broadened. “Well done. In older stories, Morana was first the goddess of life—that whole cycle, as you said, from birth to death. Dažbog, the Sun God, loved her—and she loved him as all life loves the Sun. But she was the goddess of every living thing and had many lovers. In jealousy, Dažbog cast her into Nav, the place of the dead. He still loved her though and had to be with her, even there. So for half the year he joined her in the Nav, bringing winter.

I pictured hope as a candle that needed to keep burning, no matter what.

Yes. All the worth-while things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in candle-light. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures. People—all kinds of people. Work that you love. And growth—growth and watching people grow. Feeling very strongly about things and then developing that feeling to—to make something fine come of it.