Cycling Morning Quotes

I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.

Mornings like this one were made for memories.

Sometimes, Gansey forgot how much he liked school and how good he was at it. But he couldn't forget it on mornings like this one—fall fog rising out of the fields and lifting in front of the mountains, the Pig running cool and loud, Ronan climbing out of the passenger seat and knocking knuckles on the roof with teeth flashing, dewy grass misting the black toes of his shoes, bag slung over his blazer, narrow-eyed Adam bumping fists as they met on the sidewalk, boys around them laughing and calling to one another, making space for the three of them because this had been a thing for so long: Gansey-Lynch-Parrish.

None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.

But Adam lingered for a moment after he cast off the covers and stood. Here he was, waking in the Lynch home, wearing last night’s clothing that still smelled of smoke from the grill, having overslept the weight class he had this morning by a magnitude of hours. His mouth remembered Ronan Lynch’s.

Gliding down the bike path on a Saturday morning, you whip by somebody peddling in the opposite direction and give each other a nod. For a moment it's like "Hey, we're both doing the same thing. Let's be friends for a second.

It shouldn't have happened at all, but their friendship had been cemented in only the time it took to get to school that morning - Adam demonstrating how to fasten the Camaro's ground wire more securely, Gansey lifting Adam's bike halfway into the trunk so they could ride to school together, Adam confessing he worked at a mechanic's to put himself through Aglionby, and Gansey turning to the passenger seat and asking, "What do you know about Welsh kings?

After joyfully working each morning, I would leave off around midday to challenge myself to a footrace. Speeding along the sunny paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg, ideas would breed like aphids in my head—for creative invention is easy and sublime when air cycles quickly through the lungs and the body is busy at noble tasks.

Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the body is busy at noble tasks, creativity flows like water in a stream: the artist creates, the writer writes.

Like you? I go out of here every morning… bust my butt…putting up with them crackers everyday…cause I like you? You about the biggest fool I ever saw. It’s my JOB. It’s my RESPONSIBILITY! You understand that? A man got to take care of his family. You live in my house… sleep on my bed clothes…fill you belly up with my food… cause you my son. You my flesh and blood. Not ‘cause I like you! Cause it’s my duty to take care of you. I OWE a responsibility to you! Let’s get this straight right here… before it go along any further… I ain’t got to like you. Mr. Rand don’t five me money come payday cause he likes me. He gives me cause he OWE me. I done give you everything I had to give you. I gave you your life! Me and your mama worked that out between us. And liking your black ass wasn’t part of the bargain. Don’t try and go through life worrying about if somebody like you or not. You best be making sure they doing right by you. You understand what I’m saying, boy?” - August Wilson, Fences, 1986.

Is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s singularity — the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance.

Get up in the morning on a mission to save prospective clients from the shabby, ill-fitting, overpriced and worthless alternatives that those charlatans - who are your competition - are trying to get away with flogging them.

I live in nature where everything is connected, circular. The seasons are circular. The planet is circular, and so is the planet around the sun. The course of water over the earth is circular coming down from the sky and circulating through the world to spread life and then evaporating up again. I live in a circular teepee and build my fire in a circle. The life cycles of plants and animals are circular. I live outside where I can see this. The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost site of that. I don’t live inside buildings because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn’t flow, and where life stops. I don’t want to live in a dead place. People say that I don’t live in a real world, but it’s modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they have stepped outside the natural circle of life. Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes. They wake up every morning in a box of their bedrooms because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them it was time to get up. They eat their breakfast out of a box and then they throw that box away into another box. Then they leave the box where they live and get into another box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken into little cubicle boxes where a bunch of people spend their days sitting and staring at the computer boxes in front of them. When the day is over, everyone gets into the box with wheels again and goes home to the house boxes and spends the evening staring at the television boxes for entertainment. They get their music from a box, they get their food from a box, they keep their clothing in a box, they live their lives in a box. Break out of the box! This not the way humanity lived for thousands of years.

WHAT YOU DO WITH TODAY MATTERS Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place? —JOB 38:12 Today has a place in eternity that no other day can take. There are things God has established for you to accomplish this day, and there are things the devil has set up to distract you. Certainly there is some leeway in this, and God gives an incredible amount of grace, but what we do with today matters, not only for ourselves but also for those God has appointed for us to touch. Father, I do not take today for granted. Download fresh vision and purpose into my spirit today so that I might take advantage of every opportunity You bring my way. I have a fresh anointing for the day ahead that is uncontaminated and uncompromised. By this anointing, every yoke is broken off of my life and every burden is lifted. Your yoke is easy, and Your burden is light. I declare that a new cycle of power and victory in my life begins right now. I break free from the cares of yesterday and will not take on any worries about tomorrow, for You have given me grace that is sufficient for each day in and of itself. Your mercies are new every morning, and You clothe me with newness of purpose as I wait upon You. In Jesus’s name, amen.

There is something ironic in prejudice against the disabled and their families, because their plight might befall anybody. Straight men are unlikely to wake up gay one morning, and white children don't become black; but any of us could be disabled in an instant. People with disabilities make up the largest minority in America; they constitute 15 percent of the population, though only 15 percent of those were born with their disability and about a third are over sixty-five. Worldwide, some 550 million people are disabled. The disability-rights scholar Tobin Siebers has written, "The cycle of life runs in actuality from disability to temporary ability back to disablity, and that only if you are among the most fortunate.

It was still late summer elsewhere, but here, high in Appalachia, fall was coming; for the last three mornings, she'd been able to see her breath. The woods, which started twenty feet back from her backdoor like a solid wall, showed only hints of the impending autumn. A few leaves near the treetops had turned, but most were full and green. Visible in the distance, the Widow's Tree towered above the forest. Its leaves were the most stubborn, tenaciously holding on sometimes until spring if the winter was mild. It was a transitional period, when the world changed its cycle and opened a window during which people might also change, if they had the inclination.

After a thousand years pass, it builds its own funeral pyre, lining it with cinnamon, myrrh and cassia. Climbing to a rest on the very top, it examines the world all throughout the night with the ability to see true good and evil. When the sun rises the next morning, with great sorrow for all that it sees, it sings a haunting song. As it sings, the heat of the sun ignites the expensive spices and the Phoenix dies in the flames. But the Phoenix is not remarkable for its feathers or flames. It is most revered for its ability to climb from its own funeral pyre, from the very ashes of its old charred body, as a brand new life ready to live again once more. Life after life, it goes through this cycle. It absorbs human sorrow, only to rise from death to do it all again. It never wearies, it never tires. It never questions its fate. Some say that the Phoenix is real, that it exists somewhere out there in the mountains of Arabia, elusive and mysterious. Others say that the Phoenix is only a wish made by desperate humans to believe in the continuance of life. But I know a secret. We are the Phoenix.

You could look at the work of any Dutch master for an idea of the morning light we cycle through. There is a white cleanness to it, a rinsed quality. It’s a sober light, without, for example, any of the orange particulate glow you get from the Mediterranean sun.

I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.

Some miles to the North, a ring of mountains rose out of the clouds. The peaks were clad in snow and ice, and together they looked like an ancient, jagged crown resting atop the layers of mist. The eastward-facing scarps shone brilliantly in the light of the morning sun, while long blue shadows cloaked the western sides and stretched dwindling into the distance, tenebrous daggers upon the billowy, snow-white plain.

There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, Or for many years or stretching cycles of years. The early lilacs became part of this child, And grass and white and red morning glories, and white and red clover, And the song of the phoebe-bird, And the Third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal and the cow's calf, And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the pond-side, And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and the beautiful curious liquid, And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads, all became part of him.

The second evolutionary contribution that the REM-sleep dreaming state fuels is creativity. NREM sleep helps transfer and make safe newly learned information into long-term storage sites of the brain. But it is REM sleep that takes these freshly minted memories and begins colliding them with the entire back catalog of your life’s autobiography. These mnemonic collisions during REM sleep spark new creative insights as novel links are forged between unrelated pieces of information. Sleep cycle by sleep cycle, REM sleep helps construct vast associative networks of information within the brain. REM sleep can even take a step back, so to speak, and divine overarching insights and gist: something akin to general knowledge—that is, what a collection of information means as a whole, not just an inert back catalogue of facts. We can awake the next morning with new solutions to previously intractable problems

And it came to pass in those days, as it had come before and would come again, that the Dark lay heavy on the land adn weighed down the hearts of men, and the green things failed, and hope died. And men cried out to the Creator, saying, O Light of the Heavens, Light of the World, let the Promised One be born of the mountian, according to the prophecies, as he was in ages past and will be in ages to come. Let the Prince of the Morning sing to the land that green things will grow and the valleys give forth lams. Let the arm of the Lord of the Dawn shelter us from the Dark, and the great sword of justice defend us. Let the Dragon die again on the winds of time. -from Charal Drianaan te Calamon, The Cycle of the Dragon. Author unknown, the Fourth Age.

Mornings at 300 Fox Way were fearful, jumbled things. Elbows in sides and lines for the bathroom and people snapping over tea bags placed into cups that already had tea bags in them. There was school for Blue and work for some of the more productive (or less intuitive) aunts. Toast got burned, cereal went soggy, the refrigerator door hung open and expectant for minutes at a time. Keys jingled as car pools were hastily decided.

Death is just another path to take, as real as morning.

Wednesday, November 8th, 1893 Here I sit in the still winter night on the drifting ice-floe, and see only stars above me. Far off I see the threads of life twisting themselves into the intricate web which stretches unbroken from life’s sweet morning dawn to the eternal death-stillness of ice. Thought follows thought—you pick the whole to pieces, and it seems so small—but high above all towers one form … Why did you take this voyage? … Could I do otherwise? Can the river arrest its course and run up hill? My plan has come to nothing. That palace of theory which I reared, in pride and self-confidence, high above all silly objections has fallen like a house of cards at the first breath of wind. Build up the most ingenious theories and you may be sure of one thing—that fact will defy them all. Was I so very sure? Yes, at times; but that was self-deception, intoxication. A secret doubt lurked behind all the reasoning. It seemed as though the longer I defended my theory, the nearer I came to doubting it. But no, there is not getting over the evidence of that Siberian drift-wood. But if, after all, we are on the wrong track, what then? Only disappointed human hopes, nothing more. And even if we perish, what will it matter in the endless cycles of eternity?

Like you? I go out of here every morning...bust my butt...cause I like you? It's my job. It's my responsibility!... Not cause I like you! Cause it's my duty to take care of you. ...liking your black ass wasn't part of the bargain.

Outside, overgrown grass lapped dew on Ronan’s boots, and mist curled around the tyres of the charcoal BMW. The sky over Monmouth Manufacturing was the colour of a muddy lake. It was cold, but Ronan’s gasoline heart was firing. He settled into the car, letting it become his skin. The night air was still coiled beneath the seats and lurking in the door pockets; he shivered as he tethered his raven to the seat belt fastener in the passenger seat. Not the fanciest setup, but effective for keeping a corvid from flapping around one’s sports car. Chainsaw bit him, but not as hard as the early morning cold.

Woman . . . I do the best I can do. I come in here every Friday. I carry a sack of potatoes and a bucket of lard. You all line up at the door with your hands out. I give you the lint from my pockets. I give you my sweat and my blood. I ain't got no tears. I done spent them. We go upstairs in that room at night . . . and I fall down on you and try to blast a hole into forever. I get up Monday morning . . . find my lunch on the table. I go out. Make my way. Find my strength to carry me through to the next Friday.

As they ate and played, and talked and told jokes, as they fished and wrestled, as they walked in the woods practicing Tatiana’s English and swam naked across the river and back, as he helped her with their laundry and the laundry of four old women, as he carried the water from the well for her and her milk pails, as he brushed her hair each morning and made love to her many times a day, never tiring, never ceasing to be aroused by her, Alexander knew that he was living the happiest days of his life. He held no illusions. Lazarevo was not going to come again, neither for him nor for her. Tatiana held those illusions. And he thought—it was better to have them. Look at him. And look at her. Tatiana so ceaselessly and happily did for him, so constantly smiled and touched him and laughed—even as their twenty-nine moon-cycle days spun faster around the loop of grief—that Alexander had to wonder if she ever even thought about the future. He knew she sometimes thought about the past. He knew she thought about Leningrad. She had a stony sadness around her edges that she had not had before. But for the future, Tatiana seemed to harbor a rosy hope, or at the very least a sense of humming unconcern. What are you doing? she would ask him when he was sitting on the bench and smoking. Nothing, Alexander would reply. Nothing but growing my pain. He smoked and wished for her.

Spiritual age is determined by the acts which make the mornings and evenings of the soul, and not by the motions of the physical globe. The soul should have its own cycles and revolutions, presenting in turn every portion of its existence to the vivifying influence of the great source of light.

He would have noticed it sooner if he hadn't been overcome by gray days- days where morning seemed bled of color and getting up unimportant.

Mornings were a sport. One that Blue liked to think she was getting better at. But

Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down. Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins; it’s only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free. Far from being sunshine in a pill, then, lithium acts as “anti-sunlight.” Neurologically, it undoes sunlight and thereby compresses the circadian clock back to twenty-four hours—preventing both the mania bubble from forming and the Black Tuesday crash into depression.

LIBERATION FROM BIRTH-AND-DEATH Fulfil and complete everything from morning to evening, form birth to death. When you attain fkulfilment, you will be liberated from the cycle of birth and death.

Ditching the demon drink means walking away from the endless cycle of negativity and bashing of self – the mornings filled with recriminations and self-hatred, when the only option appears to be hiding under the duvet and wishing the world would disappear, will

He held no illusions. Lazarevo was not going to come again, neither for him nor for her. Tatiana held those illusions. And he thought—it was better to have them. Look at him. And look at her. Tatiana so ceaselessly and happily did for him, so constantly smiled and touched him and laughed—even as their twenty-nine moon-cycle days spun faster around the loop of grief—that Alexander had to wonder if she ever even thought about the future. He knew she sometimes thought about the past. He knew she thought about Leningrad. She had a stony sadness around her edges that she had not had before. But for the future, Tatiana seemed to harbor a rosy hope, or at the very least a sense of humming unconcern. What are you doing? she would ask him when he was sitting on the bench and smoking. Nothing, Alexander would reply. Nothing but growing my pain. He smoked and wished for her. It was like wishing for America when he was a few years younger. Wishing for a life with her, a life that was full of nothing else but her, a simple, long, married life of being able to smell her and taste her, to hear the lyre of her voice and see the honey of her hair. To feel her staggering comfort. All of it, every day. Could he find a way to turn his back on Tatiana and have her faithful face free him? Would she forgive him? For leaving her, for dying, for killing her? He felt punched in the gut when he watched her skip stark naked out of the cabin in the morning, and throw herself squealing into the river, and then get out and head across the clearing to him, sitting on his stump of a heart. Watching her nipples hard from the cold, her flawless body trembling to be held by him, Alexander gritted his teeth and smiled and thanked God that when he pressed her to him, she could not see his contorted face. Alexander smoked and watched her from his tree stump bench. What are you doing? she would ask him. Nothing, he would reply. Nothing but growing my pain into madness.

It was one of the rare mornings when Dad was around. He’d gotten up early to go cycling, and he was sweaty, standing at the counter in his goony fluorescent racing pants, drinking green juice of his own making. His shirt was off, and he had a black heart-rate monitor strapped across his chest, plus some shoulder brace he invented, which is supposedly good for his back because it pulls his shoulders into alignment when he’s at the computer. “Good morning to you, too,” he said disapprovingly. I must have made some kind of face. But I’m sorry, it’s weird to come down and

Oh, sure,” I joke, my voice trembling only slightly. His face is so close I can smell the shampoo he used this morning. See the fine lashes against his cheek. I’m scared to want him—but I want him anyway. My next words come out breathy and faint. “Damsel in distress activates your hero mode?”The passion in his voice, the breathless force of it, is enough to make me shiver. “You’re not a damsel to me, Bree. You’re a warrior. You’re strong and you’re beautiful and you’re brilliant and brave.” He presses his forehead against mine, his eyes squeezed shut, and takes a slow, ragged breath. “And I’d really like to kiss you.

There were no witnesses except the woman who'd been up all night, had consumed two beers and three vodka tonics before switching to (and sharing) the play-wright's Scotch, and she (the witness) could remember the morning only in snatches, like the digital stills and clips that cycled through her computer's screensaver.

But as he stood, rubbing his eyes in the early morning light, he started to feel scared. He had fallen asleep so full of courage and wild ideas, but was awakened by fears leaping around inside his chest; a feeling that, most of all, he wanted to go back to safety, to his bed, to his village in Orissa, and to his family.

Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer’s part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions.

That merely glimpsing three good wooden boxes on a baggage-wain could lead to such broodings made Daniel wonder that he could get out of bed in the morning. Once, he had feared that old age would bring senility; now, he was certain it would slowly paralyze him by encumbering each tiny thing with all sorts of significations.

At the level of second attention, however, this cycle is irrelevant. One doesn’t need to repeal the law of karma at all. Despite all the activity on the surface of life, a speck of awareness inside is not touched. The instant they wake up in the morning, a saint and a sinner are in the same place. They both feel themselves to be alive and aware. This place stands outside reward and punishment. It knows no duality; therefore in stage four your challenge is to find this place, hold on to it, and live there. When you have accomplished this task, duality is gone. You are free from all bondage of good or bad actions. In Christian terms, your soul is redeemed and returned to innocence.

When you hit the snooze button repeatedly, you're doing two negative things to yourself. First, you're fragmenting what little extra sleep you're getting so it is of poor quality. Second, you're starting to put yourself through a new sleep cycle that you aren't giving yourself enough time to finish. This can result in persistent grogginess throughout the day.

Someone once asked the celebrated biologist, Sir Frederick Grant Banting, why he cared so much about daily Communion. “Have you ever reflected,” he answered, “what would happen if the dew did not fall every night? No plant would develop. The grass and flowers could not survive the evaporations and the dryness that the day’s heat brings in one way or another. Their cycle of energies, their natural renewal, the balance of their lymphatic fluids, the very life of plants requires this dew….” After a pause, he continued: “Now my soul is like a little plant. It is something rather frail that the winds and heat do battle with every day. So it is necessary that every morning I go get my fresh stock of spiritual dew, by going to Holy Communion.

Every morning I wake up to have the same hope, that mankind had survived its own greed, its own desire to self-destruct, its own monopoly to destroy the environment regardless of the consequences, its own religious and ideological dogma that kept it in turmoil since inception….I listen to the morning news to find out that nothing had changed, and realize more certainly that we are living on a barrowed time, and sometime in the future, if we wake up there will be fewer and fewer of us who will wonder but never learn what went wrong….this is human history, keep repeating itself in destruction, greed and chaos, at the best of times it is organized chaos….and at the worst of time it is mayhem, all to serve the few….who leaves crumbs for us to continue the cycle…

Galbatorix glanced over his shoulder and said, “It was inconsiderate of you to attack so early in the morning. I was already awake--I rise well before dawn--but you woke Shruikan. He gets rather irritated when he’s tired, and when he’s irritated, he tends to eat people. My guards learned long ago not to disturb him when he’s resting. You would have done well to follow their example.

The pace of this modern age is not conducive to maintaining one’s consciousness. Glued to our electronics, we are blind and deaf to the world around us. Run down by our long work days, we are too exhausted to think and too hurried to feel. The day ends in a haze of strained thoughts, numbness, and fatigue. And we rise the next morning only to start the cycle again. In this age of distraction, if you desire to fritter away your life with empty diversions, there is an abundance of gadgets available to aid you. Quietness is a characteristic of ages gone by. Our generation is the one it died with. Connected to the virtual world, we ignore the presence of those in our home. One can only hope we will awaken to the need for balance before we look up from the screen to find our loved ones have gone, and our life has passed us by.

Once I abandon the fight to return to sleep and claim my wakefulness, I can find a slanting love for this part of the night, the almost-morning. As the only one awake, I luxuriate in a space in which I can drink in the silence. It’s an undemanding moment in the twenty-four-hour cycle. Nobody can reasonably expect you to be checking texts or emails, and the scrolling feeds of social media have fallen quiet. In a world where it’s hard to feel alone, this finally represents solitude.

According to Robert S. Rosenberg, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Centers of Prescott Valley and Flagstaff, Arizona, “When you hit the snooze button repeatedly, you’re doing two negative things to yourself. First, you’re fragmenting what little extra sleep you’re getting so it is of poor quality. Second, you’re starting to put yourself through a new sleep cycle that you aren’t giving yourself enough time to finish. This can result in persistent grogginess throughout the day.

According to Robert S. Rosenberg, medical director of the Sleep Disorders Centers of Prescott Valley and Flagstaff, Arizona, "When you hit the snooze button repeatedly, you're doing two negative things to yourself. First, you're fragmenting what little extra sleep you're getting so it is of poor quality. Second, you're starting to put yourself through a new sleep cycle that you aren't giving yourself enough time to finish. This can result in persistent grogginess throughout the day.

It is doubt multiplied by the fear of failure, unconfronted, which leads to the creation of a vicious cycle where self-belief is eroded and nothing is achieved. Doubts can and should be confronted, as should fear. This is best done in daylight, under rigorous examination. (Three o’clock in the morning is a difficult time to confront any such messengers.) Write down your doubts and fears. Examine them. Hold them up to the light. Suck the wisdom out of them and discard their husks in the trash.

Paint thinner is the boatyard’s morning dew. The stringent smell awakens the mind of a sailor as spring flowers awaken the mind of a poet. The boatyard, a reflection of your life, reminds us that the least desirable jobs often prove to be the most important and fulfilling. The harder the task, the more one feels rewarded when accomplishing it. Paint erratically splatters on skin in the same fashion that the stars come to fill up the night sky, the constellations on your forearms telling of the most recent project.

ESTABLISHING A DAILY MEDITATION First select a suitable space for your regular meditation. It can be wherever you can sit easily with minimal disturbance: a corner of your bedroom or any other quiet spot in your home. Place a meditation cushion or chair there for your use. Arrange what is around so that you are reminded of your meditative purpose, so that it feels like a sacred and peaceful space. You may wish to make a simple altar with a flower or sacred image, or place your favorite spiritual books there for a few moments of inspiring reading. Let yourself enjoy creating this space for yourself. Then select a regular time for practice that suits your schedule and temperament. If you are a morning person, experiment with a sitting before breakfast. If evening fits your temperament or schedule better, try that first. Begin with sitting ten or twenty minutes at a time. Later you can sit longer or more frequently. Daily meditation can become like bathing or toothbrushing. It can bring a regular cleansing and calming to your heart and mind. Find a posture on the chair or cushion in which you can easily sit erect without being rigid. Let your body be firmly planted on the earth, your hands resting easily, your heart soft, your eyes closed gently. At first feel your body and consciously soften any obvious tension. Let go of any habitual thoughts or plans. Bring your attention to feel the sensations of your breathing. Take a few deep breaths to sense where you can feel the breath most easily, as coolness or tingling in the nostrils or throat, as movement of the chest, or rise and fall of the belly. Then let your breath be natural. Feel the sensations of your natural breathing very carefully, relaxing into each breath as you feel it, noticing how the soft sensations of breathing come and go with the changing breath. After a few breaths your mind will probably wander. When you notice this, no matter how long or short a time you have been away, simply come back to the next breath. Before you return, you can mindfully acknowledge where you have gone with a soft word in the back of your mind, such as “thinking,” “wandering,” “hearing,” “itching.” After softly and silently naming to yourself where your attention has been, gently and directly return to feel the next breath. Later on in your meditation you will be able to work with the places your mind wanders to, but for initial training, one word of acknowledgment and a simple return to the breath is best. As you sit, let the breath change rhythms naturally, allowing it to be short, long, fast, slow, rough, or easy. Calm yourself by relaxing into the breath. When your breath becomes soft, let your attention become gentle and careful, as soft as the breath itself. Like training a puppy, gently bring yourself back a thousand times. Over weeks and months of this practice you will gradually learn to calm and center yourself using the breath. There will be many cycles in this process, stormy days alternating with clear days. Just stay with it. As you do, listening deeply, you will find the breath helping to connect and quiet your whole body and mind. Working with the breath is an excellent foundation for the other meditations presented in this book. After developing some calm and skills, and connecting with your breath, you can then extend your range of meditation to include healing and awareness of all the levels of your body and mind. You will discover how awareness of your breath can serve as a steady basis for all you do.

morning, as he clung to a spike on her neck, Eragon said, I have a new name for pain. What’s that? The Obliterator. Because when you’re in pain, nothing else can exist. Not thought. Not emotion. Only the drive to escape the pain. When it’s strong enough, the Obliterator strips us of everything that makes us who we are, until we’re reduced to creatures less than animals, creatures with a single desire and goal: escape. A good name, then. I’m falling apart, Saphira, like an old horse that’s plowed too many fields. Keep hold of me with your mind, or I may drift apart and forget who I am.

How odd, she never drank coffee after her one allotted morning cup anymore; it made her too shaky. As she got the grounds from the refrigerator and started scooping them into a filter, she realized what she was doing. She was conjuring her mother and her aunts, her protectors, all dead now. The surest way to get the attention of the Mancini sisters—even in the afterlife—was coffee in any of its stages: percolating, freshly brewed, stale and burnt, reheated in a microwave. The life cycle of a pot of coffee was the smell of her mother’s apartment. She didn’t know how they did it, those women. They lived on coffee

Sometimes, Gansey forgot how much he liked school and how good he was at it. But he couldn't forget it on mornings like this one--fall fog rising out of the fields and lifting in front of the mountains, the Pig running cool and loud, Ronan climbing out of the passenger seat and knocking knuckles on the roof with teeth flashing, dewy grass misting the black toes of his shoes, bag slung over his blazer, narrow-eyed Adam bumping fists as they met on the sidewalk, boys around them laughing and calling to one another, making space for the three of them because this had been a thing for so long: Gansey-Lynch-Parrish. Mornings like this one were made for memories.

The problem is particularly acute for teenagers because their circadian cycles can be up to two hours adrift from those of their elders, turning them into comparative night owls. When a teenager struggles to get up in the morning, that isn’t laziness; it’s biology. Matters are compounded in America by what The New York Times in an editorial called “a dangerous tradition: starting high school abnormally early.” According to the Times, 86 percent of U.S. high schools start their day before 8:30 a.m., and 10 percent start before 7:30. Later start times have been shown to produce better attendance, better test results, fewer car accidents, and even less depression and self-harm.

It was one of the rare mornings when Dad was around. He’d gotten up early to go cycling, and he was sweaty, standing at the counter in his goony fluorescent racing pants, drinking green juice of his own making. His shirt was off, and he had a black heart-rate monitor strapped across his chest, plus some shoulder brace he invented, which is supposedly good for his back because it pulls his shoulders into alignment when he’s at the computer. “Good morning to you, too,” he said disapprovingly. I must have made some kind of face. But I’m sorry, it’s weird to come down and see your Dad wearing a bra, even if it is for his posture. Mom came in from the pantry covered with spaghetti pots. “Hello, Buzzy!

Darkness Always Ends No matter how your day goes, the sun always rises the next day. You get a fresh start. Likewise, I’ve learned every dark season in life comes to an end. If you hang in there long enough, you’ll reach the dawn. I believe God created that sunrise-sunset pattern as a reminder for us when life gets difficult. For official records, we measure time by the midnight hour. Our calendar days go from midnight to midnight. We begin and end our days in darkness. And when we consider our days, we split them into two parts: daytime first, followed by nighttime. Light first, then the darkness. But not everyone views the cycle that way. The biblical account of creation reverses our cycle: “And there was evening and there was morning, one day” (Genesis 1:5). The Jewish calendar follows suit with that original creation account. That calendar runs from sunset to sunset. The full hours of darkness come first, followed by the full hours of light. In other words, from God’s perspective, each day ends with light. Year after year, I’ve derived such encouragement from that picture. I believe this is why the psalmist David wrote, “Weeping may last for the night, but a shout of joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). You have every reason to believe for a miracle. You have every reason to believe God won’t abandon you. Nothing in this life lasts forever. Your dark season will come to an end. And chances are, it won’t take until your dying day. It won’t kill you. Things might look bleak at first, but they can improve. With night and day, God has given us a picture of hope. The sun always rises. Things will always get brighter. “The end of a matter is better than its beginning” (Ecclesiastes 7:8). Whether it’s a day or a season in your life, it doesn’t matter how things look in the midst of it. What matters is how it ends. Oftentimes, for the circumstances to improve, we must take particular steps along the way. A bright outcome might depend, in part, on how we choose to respond to what has occurred. Or preemptive steps might put us at an advantage down the road. God give us a role to perform. But the breakthrough is available.

Steve Harmon, thirty-six, had esophageal cancer growing at the inlet of his stomach. For six months, he had soldiered through chemotherapy as if caught in a mythical punishment cycle devised by the Greeks. He was debilitated by perhaps the severest forms of nausea that I had ever encountered in a patient, but he had to keep eating to avoid losing weight. As the tumor whittled him down week by week, he became fixated, absurdly, on the measurement of his weight down to a fraction of an ounce, as if gripped by the fear that he might vanish altogether by reaching zero. Meanwhile, a growing retinue of family members accompanied him to his clinic visits: three children who came with games and books and watched, unbearably, as their father shook with chills one morning; a brother who hovered suspiciously, then accusingly, as we shuffled and reshuffled medicines to keep Steve from throwing up; a wife who bravely shepherded the entire retinue through the whole affair as if it were a family trip gone horribly wrong. One morning, finding Steve alone on one of the reclining chairs of the infusion room, I asked him whether he would rather have the chemotherapy alone, in a private room. Was it, perhaps, too much for his family—for his children? He looked away with a flicker of irritation. “I know what the statistics are.” His voice was strained, as if tightening against a harness. “Left to myself, I would not even try. I’m doing this because of the kids.

there’s never been a safer time to go for a ride. Sadly, though, there’s a problem. You see, cycling is seen now not as something that might be exhilarating or even useful but as a frontline propaganda weapon in the war on capitalism, banking, freedom, McDonald’s, injustice, Swiss drug companies, rape and progress. Every morning London is chock-full of little individually wrapped Twiglets, their wizened faces contorted with hatred for all that they see. Fat people. Cars. Chain stores. It’s all fascism. Fascism, d’you hear? From what they see as the moral high ground, they sneer at pedestrians, howl at buses, bang on cars, scream at taxi drivers and charge through every convention that defines society with their walnutty bottoms in the air and their stupid legs going nineteen to the dozen.

This morning, remind yourself of what is in your control and what’s not in your control. Remind yourself to focus on the former and not the latter. Before lunch, remind yourself that the only thing you truly possess is your ability to make choices (and to use reason and judgment when doing so). This is the only thing that can never be taken from you completely. In the afternoon, remind yourself that aside from the choices you make, your fate is not entirely up to you. The world is spinning and we spin along with it—whichever direction, good or bad. In the evening, remind yourself again how much is outside of your control and where your choices begin and end. As you lie in bed, remember that sleep is a form of surrender and trust and how easily it comes. And prepare to start the whole cycle over again tomorrow.

Last night it had been merely drink. It was medicine now. He lifted the empty pint to his mouth. One warm drop crawled like slow syrup through the neck of the bottle. It lay on his tongue, useless, all but impossible to swallow. He thought of all the mornings (and as he thought of them he knew he was in for another cycle of harrowing mornings) when, at such times as these, he would drag himself into the kitchen and examine the line-up of empty quarts and pints on the floor under the sink, pick them up separately and hold them upside down over a small glass, one by one for minutes at a time, extracting a last sticky drop from one bottle, two drops from another, maybe nothing from a third, and so on through a long patient nerve-wracking process till he had collected enough, perhaps, to cover the bottom of the glass. It was like a rite—the slow drinking of it still more so; and it was never enough.

Nick? That you?” Russ. I instinctively freeze, but Nick lifts his head, a frustrated groan rising from his chest.Another voice nearby. “Who’s that—?” Oh God. Evan too. “Whoa!”At some point, we’d rotated so that my back is toward the way we’d come, and Nick is facing Russ and Evan’s disembodied voices. Thank the Lord, too,because I can duck my face into Nick’s shoulder and catch my breath instead of die of mortication in front of frat boy Evan Cooper. Evan crows. “Oh-kayyy, y’all! Sheeit...! Get it!” He’s wheezing with laughter.“Is this a good morning kiss or a good night kiss?” Russ calls, the sound of agrin all over his voice. “Are we coming or going?” “Kinda busy right now, guys.” I can’t help but feel a little thrill at the steel underneath Nick’s hoarse voice.“Oh, we can see that.” Russ laughs at his own joke while Evan says, “Sorry to interrupt, my liege! Please, proceed with thy gentle tonguing!

the morning, I drove to Pennsylvania, thirty miles or so to the north. The Appalachian Trail runs for 230 miles in a northeasterly arc across the state, like the broad end of a slice of pie. I never met a hiker with a good word to say about the trail in Pennsylvania. It is, as someone told a National Geographic reporter in 1987, the place “where boots go to die.” During the last ice age it experienced what geologists call a periglacial climate—a zone at the edge of an ice sheet characterized by frequent freeze—thaw cycles that fractured the rock. The result is mile upon mile of jagged, oddly angled slabs of stone strewn about in wobbly piles known to science as felsenmeer (literally, “sea of rocks”). These require constant attentiveness if you are not to twist an ankle or sprawl on your face—not a pleasant experience with fifty pounds of momentum on your back. Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest

As he drew near his tent, he saw Arya waiting for him by the entrance. Eragon quickened his stride, but before he could greet her, someone called out: “Shadeslayer!” Eragon turned and saw one of Nasuada’s pages trotting toward them. “Shadeslayer,” the boy repeated, somewhat out of breath, and bowed to Arya. “Lady Nasuada would like you to come to her tent an hour before dawn tomorrow morning, in order to confer with her. What shall I tell her, Lady Arya?” “You may tell her I will be there when she wishes,” Arya replied, inclining her head slightly. The page bowed again, and then he spun around and ran off in the direction from which he had come. “It’s somewhat confusing, now that we’ve both killed a Shade,” Eragon observed with a faint grin. Arya smiled as well, the motion of her lips almost invisible in the darkness. “Would you rather I had let Varaug live?” “No…no, not at all.” “I could have kept him as a slave, to do my bidding.” “Now you’re teasing me,” he said. She made a soft sound of amusement.

healthy eating go-to scripts God has given me power over my food choices. I’m supposed to consume food. Food isn’t supposed to consume me. He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” . . . For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:9–10) I was made for more than to be stuck in a vicious cycle of defeat. You have circled this mountain long enough. Now turn north. (Deuteronomy 2:3 NASB) When I’m considering a compromise, I will think past this moment and ask myself, How will I feel about this choice tomorrow morning? Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. (1 Corinthians 6:19–20) When tempted, I either remove the temptation or remove myself from the situation. If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it. Therefore, my dear friends, flee. (1 Corinthians 10:12–14) When there’s a special event, I can find other ways to celebrate rather than blowing my healthy eating plan. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. (Revelation 3:8) Struggling with my weight isn’t God’s mean curse on me, but an outside indication that internal changes are needed for me to function and feel well. “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! . . . I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” (Isaiah 43:18–19) I have these boundaries in place not for restriction but to define the parameters of my freedom. I am using an example from everyday life because of your human limitations. Just as you used to offer yourselves as slaves to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer yourselves as slaves to righteousness leading to holiness. (Romans 6:19)

Keep this thought at the ready at daybreak, and through the day and night—there is only one path to happiness, and that is in giving up all outside of your sphere of choice, regarding nothing else as your possession, surrendering all else to God and Fortune.” —EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 4.4.39 This morning, remind yourself of what is in your control and what’s not in your control. Remind yourself to focus on the former and not the latter. Before lunch, remind yourself that the only thing you truly possess is your ability to make choices (and to use reason and judgment when doing so). This is the only thing that can never be taken from you completely. In the afternoon, remind yourself that aside from the choices you make, your fate is not entirely up to you. The world is spinning and we spin along with it—whichever direction, good or bad. In the evening, remind yourself again how much is outside of your control and where your choices begin and end. As you lie in bed, remember that sleep is a form of surrender and trust and how easily it comes. And prepare to start the whole cycle over again tomorrow.

He looks more like an elf than he does his own flesh and blood. I wouldn’t count on his loyalty any more than the Urgals’.” The third man spoke up again: “Have you noticed, he’s always freshly shaven, no mater how early in the morning we break camp?” “He must use magic for a razor.” “Goes against the natural order of things, it does. That and all the other spells being tossed around nowadays. Makes you want to hide in a cave somewhere and let the magicians kill each other off without any interference from us.” “I don’t seem to recall you complaining when the healers used a spell instead of a pair of tongs to remove that arrow from your shoulder.” “Maybe, but the arrow never would have ended up in my shoulder if it weren’t for Galbatorix. And it’s him and his magic that’s caused this whole mess.” Someone snorted. “True enough, but I’d bet every last copper I have that, Galbatorix or no, you still would’ve ended up with an arrow sticking out of you. You’re too mean to do anything other than fight.” “Eragon saved my life in Feinster, you know,” said Svern. “Aye, and if you bore us with the story one more time, I’ll have you scrubbing pots for a week.” “Well, he did…

Ho there, my fine fellow!” said the same man who had ordered the soldiers to halt. “Ho there, I say! Who are you to sit here this splendid morning, drinking and enjoying a merry game of chance, as if you hadn’t a care in the world? Do we not merit the courtesy of being met with drawn swords? Who are you, I say?” Slowly, as if he had just noticed the presence of the soldiers and considered it to be of little importance, Roran raised his gaze from the table to regard a small bearded man with a flamboyantly plumed helm who sat before him on an enormous black war-horse, which was heaving like a pair of bellows. “I’m nobody’s fine fellow, and certainly not yours,” Roran said, making no effort to conceal his dislike at being addressed in such a familiar manner. “Who are you, I might ask, to interrupt my game so rudely?” The long, striped feathers mounted atop the man’s helm bobbed and fluttered as he looked Roran over, as if Roran were an unfamiliar creature he had encountered while hunting. “Tharos the Quick is my name, Captain of the Guard. Rude as you are, I must tell you, it would grieve me mightily to kill a man as bold as yourself without knowing his name.” As if to emphasize his words, Tharos lowered the spear he held until it was pointing at Roran.

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . . on you roll, across a countryside whose light is forever changing--castles, heaps of rock, moons of different shapes and colors come and go. There are stops at odd hours of teh mornings, for reasons that are not announced: you get out to stretch in lime-lit courtyards where the old men sit around the table under enormous eucalyptus trees you can smell in the night, shuffling the ancient decks oily and worn, throwing down swords and cups and trumps major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus is idling, waiting--"passengers will now reclaim their seats" and much as you'd like to stay, right here, learn the game, find your old age around this quiet table, it's no use: he is waiting beside the door of the bus in his pressed uniform, Lord of the Night he is checking your tickets, your ID and travel papers, and it's the wands of enterprise that dominate tonight...as he nods you by, you catch a glimpse of his face, his insane, committed eyes, and you remember then, for a terrible few heartbeats, that of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity--but there is meanwhile this trip to be on ... over your own seat, where there ought to be an advertising plaque, is instead a quote from Rilke: "Once, only once..." One of Their favorite slogans. No return, no salvation, no Cycle--that's not what They, nor Their brilliant employee Kekule, have taken the Serpent to mean.

At first of course everybody had been quiet, fearful. The funeral procession snaked its way through the drab, slushy little city in dead silence. The only sound was the slap-slap-slap of thousands of sockless shoes on the silver-wet road that led to the Mazar-e-Shohadda. Young men carried seventeen coffins on their shoulders. Seventeen plus one, that is, for the re-murdered Usman Abdullah, who obviously could not be entered twice in the books. So, seventeen-plus-one tin coffins wove through the streets, winking back at the winter sun. To someone looking down at the city from the ring of high mountains that surrounded it, the procession would have looked like a column of brown ants carrying seventeen-plus-one sugar crystals to their anthill to feed their queen. Perhaps to a student of history and human conflict, in relative terms that's all the little procession amounted to: a column of ants making off with some crumbs that had fallen from the high table. As wars go, this was only a small one. Nobody paid much attention. So it went on and on. So it folded and unfolded over decades, gathering people into its unhinged embrace. Its cruelties became as natural as the changing seasons, each came with its own unique range of scent and blossom, its own cycle of loss and renewal, disruption and normalcy, uprisings and elections. Of all the sugar crystals carried by the ants that winter morning, the smallest crystal of course went by the name of Miss Jebeen.

SILVER CITY IS NO PLACE FOR AMATEURS I left Colorado Springs the next morning and got back in the fucking car for another day of driving for the Tour of the Gila. I’d never driven in snow before, but I made it to Santa Fe and then Albuquerque in the afternoon, careful to dodge all the tumbleweeds on the highway in New Mexico. I hadn’t known that those existed outside of cartoons. Already exhausted when I got off the interstate, I was surprised when my GPS said “48 miles remaining, 1.5 hours’ drive time”—I was sure that couldn’t be right. Then I saw the steep climbs, bumpy cattle guards, and dangerous descents on the road into Silver City. I drove as fast as I could, sliding my poor car around hairpins in the dark. I made it to the host house, fell asleep, and found two flat tires when I went outside to unpack the car in the morning. They probably weren’t meant for drifting. My luck didn’t improve when the race started. I got a flat tire when I went off the road to dodge a crash, and I chased for over an hour to get back to the field. Between the dry air and altitude, I got a major nosebleed. My car was parked at the base of the finishing climb, and I got there several minutes behind the field, my new white Cannondale and all my clothes covered in blood. The course turned right to go up the climb, and I turned left, climbed into my car, and got the hell out of there. I might have made the time cut, but for the second time in two weeks, I opted to climb in the car instead. I got out of that town like I was about to turn into a pumpkin, and made it back to San Diego nine hours later. If there wasn’t a Pacific Ocean to stop me, I’d have driven another day, just to get farther from Gila.

The twice-tolling clock, the Count explained, had been commissioned by his father from the venerable firm of Breguet. Establishing their shop in Paris in 1775, the Breguets were quickly known the world over not only for the precision of their chronometers (that is, the accuracy of their clocks), but for the elaborate means by which their clocks could signal the passage of time. They had clocks that played a few measures of Mozart at the end of the hour. They had clocks that chimed not only at the hour but at the half and the quarter. They had clocks that displayed the phases of the moon, the progress of the seasons, and the cycle of the tides. But when the Count’s father visited their shop in 1882, he posed a very different sort of challenge for the firm: a clock that tolled only twice a day. “Why would he do so?” asked the Count (in anticipation of his young listener’s favorite interrogative). Quite simply, the Count’s father had believed that while a man should attend closely to life, he should not attend too closely to the clock. A student of both the Stoics and Montaigne, the Count’s father believed that our Creator had set aside the morning hours for industry. That is, if a man woke no later than six, engaged in a light repast, and then applied himself without interruption, by the hour of noon he should have accomplished a full day’s labor. Thus, in his father’s view, the toll of twelve was a moment of reckoning. When the noon bell sounded, the diligent man could take pride in having made good use of the morning and sit down to his lunch with a clear conscience. But when it sounded for the frivolous man—the man who had squandered his morning in bed, or on breakfast with three papers, or on idle chatter in the sitting room—he had no choice but to ask for his Lord’s forgiveness.

There was a bell clanging in the tower of the building next to the black-shrike-thorn-cave. She found the noise irritating, so she twisted her neck and loosed a jet of blue and yellow flame at it. The tower did not catch fire, as it was stone, but the rope and beams supporting the bell ignited, and a few seconds later, the bell fell crashing into the interior of the tower. That pleased her, as did the two-legs-round-ears who ran screaming from the area. She was a dragon, after all. It was only right that they should fear her. One of the two-legs paused by the edge of the square in front of the black-shrike-thorn-cave, and she heard him shout a spell at her, his voice like the squeaking of a frightened mouse. Whatever the spell was, Eragon’s wards shielded her from it--at least she assumed they did, for she noticed no difference in how she felt or in the appearance of the world around her. The wolf-elf-in-Eragon’s-shape killed the magician for her. She could feel how Blödhgarm grasped hold of the spellcaster’s mind and wrestled the two-legs-round-ears’ thoughts into submission, whereupon Blödhgarm uttered a single word in the ancient-elf-magic-language, and the two-legs-round-ears fell to the ground, blood seeping from his open mouth. Then the wolf-elf tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Ready yourself, Brightscales. Here they come.” She saw Thorn rising above the edge of the rooftops, Eragon-half-brother-Murtagh a small, dark figure on his back. In the light of the morning sun, Thorn shone and sparkled almost as brilliantly as she herself did. Her scales were cleaner than his, though, as she had taken special care when grooming earlier. She could not imagine going into battle looking anything but her best. Her enemies should not only fear her, but admire her. She knew it was vanity on her part, but she did not care. No other race could match the grandeur of the dragons. Also, she was the last female of her kind, and she wanted those who saw her to marvel at her appearance and to remember her well, so if dragons were to vanish forevermore, two-legs would continue to speak of them with the proper respect, awe, and wonder.

In My Prayer. My silent niche. You incarnate in my prayer. Dawn is all dancing like a rainbow in your smile. Anxious to uncover dreams after morning. The desire to arrange sparkly beads in your hair. Reduce heartbeat, please at the tips of your fingers. I will pray together with night just to keep remembering you. A never ending memory to always say your name. Silence that leads to longing for the rising of light. Horizon knocked on all the gates, which grabbed a reprehensible body, who hesitated to stop at the tip of the tongue. Lips murmuring, stringing questions hung at the end of time. The self that is always broken and dishonest, who is kufr and who is infidel. All beings submit to the most holy feet. Let silence accept everything that is magical. Although the reflection of the moon's face is filled with wounds with lies in our mouths, betrayed by lust and unstoppable desires. May you soon incarnate so that a million flowers bloom in the heart of the most cursory. The eyes are altered, betraying a million flashes of light from the darkest night. The most beautiful gems are buried in mud puddles. Even though the sky is still dark. Heavy rain that is redder than all blood. Which surpassed the fangs of the old snake. The endless cycle of the sun throws puzzles about the mysteries of the universe that are never answered. The beginning of all this sorrow in myself. If only you please, transform into a butterfly in my prayer tonight. A pair of wings that burned like a fire of longing in my heart. Who suddenly fidgeted and flew into your eyes. Then descend on the branch of the Khuldi tree, before breaking into my tears. Suppose tonight, in my prayer, you incarnate like a thunderous storm. Like the sound of noisy thunder. The footsteps stepped hurriedly on the foggy road. Infiltrate the gaps of our thoughts and feelings. Shackle our arms, knees and breath. If only, in my prayer tonight you will be transformed into murky tears. Who trembled, even though it would patiently take care of my sadness. The pain that somehow healed my soul. Beliefs that keep mysteries for my deepest secrets, which you endlessly hum, in order to be a comfort for my sad life. My dear. Lady of my heart. My love. My soul. Bless me with all your generosity. With your mercy, with your endless love. With your infinite anger.

It is said that, as he wandered the streets of the City, an ancient jackbird cycled three times above him, then came to rest upon Sam's shoulder, saying: "Are you not Maitreya, Lord of Light, for whom the world has waited, lo, these many years–he whose coming I prophesyed long ago in a poem?" "No, my name is Sam," he replied, "and I am about to depart the world, not enter into it Who are you?" "I am a bird who was once a poet. All morning have I flown, since the yawp of Garuda opened the day. I was flying about the ways of Heaven looking for Lord Rudra, hoping to befoul him with my droppings, when I felt the power of a weird come over the land. I have flown far, and I have seen many things, Lord of Light." "What things have you seen, bird who was a poet?" "I have seen an unlit pyre set at the end of the world, with fogs stirring all about it. I have seen the gods who come late hurrying across the snows and rushing through the upper airs, circling outside the dome. I have seen the players upon the ranga and the nepathya, rehearsing the Masque of Blood, for the wedding of Death and Destruction. I have seen the Lord Vayu raise up his hand and stop the winds that circle through Heaven. I have seen all-colored Mara atop the spire of the highest tower, and I have felt the power of the weird he lays–for I have seen the phantom cats troubled within the wood, then hurrying in this direction. I have seen the tears of a man and of a woman. I have heard the laughter of a goddess. I have seen a bright spear uplifted against the morning, and I have heard an oath spoken. I have seen the Lord of Light at last, of whom I wrote, long ago: Always dying, never dead; Ever ending, never ended; Loathed in darkness, Clothed in light, He comes, to end a world, As morning ends the night. These lines were writ By Morgan, free, Who shall, the day he dies, See this prophecy." The bird ruffled his feathers then and was still. "I am pleased, bird, that you have had a chance to see many things," said Sam, "and that within the fiction of your metaphor you have achieved a certain satisfaction. Unfortunately, poetic truth differs considerably from that which surrounds most of the business of life." "Hail, Lord of Light!" said the bird, and sprang into the air. As he rose, he was pierced through by an arrow shot from a nearby window by one who hated jackbirds. Sam hurried on.

As a nine-year-old, the circadian rhythm would have the child asleep by around nine p.m., driven in part by the rising tide of melatonin at this time in children. By the time that same individual has reached sixteen years of age, their circadian rhythm has undergone a dramatic shift forward in its cycling phase. The rising tide of melatonin, and the instruction of darkness and sleep, is many hours away. As a consequence, the sixteen-year-old will usually have no interest in sleeping at nine p.m. Instead, peak wakefulness is usually still in play at that hour. By the time the parents are getting tired, as their circadian rhythms take a downturn and melatonin release instructs sleep—perhaps around ten or eleven p.m., their teenager can still be wide awake. A few more hours must pass before the circadian rhythm of a teenage brain begins to shut down alertness and allow for easy, sound sleep to begin. This, of course, leads to much angst and frustration for all parties involved on the back end of sleep. Parents want their teenager to be awake at a “reasonable” hour of the morning. Teenagers, on the other hand, having only been capable of initiating sleep some hours after their parents, can still be in their trough of the circadian downswing. Like an animal prematurely wrenched out of hibernation too early, the adolescent brain still needs more sleep and more time to complete the circadian cycle before it can operate efficiently, without grogginess. If this remains perplexing to parents, a different way to frame and perhaps appreciate the mismatch is this: asking your teenage son or daughter to go to bed and fall asleep at ten p.m. is the circadian equivalent of asking you, their parent, to go to sleep at seven or eight p.m. No matter how loud you enunciate the order, no matter how much that teenager truly wishes to obey your instruction, and no matter what amount of willed effort is applied by either of the two parties, the circadian rhythm of a teenager will not be miraculously coaxed into a change. Furthermore, asking that same teenager to wake up at seven the next morning and function with intellect, grace, and good mood is the equivalent of asking you, their parent, to do the same at four or five a.m. Sadly, neither society nor our parental attitudes are well designed to appreciate or accept that teenagers need more sleep than adults, and that they are biologically wired to obtain that sleep at a different time from their parents. It’s very understandable for parents to feel frustrated in this way, since they believe that their teenager’s sleep patterns reflect a conscious choice and not a biological edict. But non-volitional, non-negotiable, and strongly biological they are. We parents would be wise to accept this fact, and to embrace it, encourage it, and praise it, lest we wish our own children to suffer developmental brain abnormalities or force a raised risk of mental illness upon them.

In our family, we live by the Hard Thing Rule. It has three parts. The first is that everyone—including Mom and Dad—has to do a hard thing. A hard thing is something that requires daily deliberate practice. I’ve told my kids that psychological research is my hard thing, but I also practice yoga. Dad tries to get better and better at being a real estate developer; he does the same with running. My oldest daughter, Amanda, has chosen playing the piano as her hard thing. She did ballet for years, but later quit. So did Lucy. This brings me to the second part of the Hard Thing Rule: You can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other “natural” stopping point has arrived. You must, at least for the interval to which you’ve committed yourself, finish whatever you begin. In other words, you can’t quit on a day when your teacher yells at you, or you lose a race, or you have to miss a sleepover because of a recital the next morning. You can’t quit on a bad day. And, finally, the Hard Thing Rule states that you get to pick your hard thing. Nobody picks it for you because, after all, it would make no sense to do a hard thing you’re not even vaguely interested in. Even the decision to try ballet came after a discussion of various other classes my daughters could have chosen instead. Lucy, in fact, cycled through a half-dozen hard things. She started each with enthusiasm but eventually discovered that she didn’t want to keep going with ballet, gymnastics, track, handicrafts, or piano. In the end, she landed on viola. She’s been at it for three years, during which time her interest has waxed rather than waned. Last year, she joined the school and all-city orchestras, and when I asked her recently if she wanted to switch her hard thing to something else, she looked at me like I was crazy. Next year, Amanda will be in high school. Her sister will follow the year after. At that point, the Hard Thing Rule will change. A fourth requirement will be added: each girl must commit to at least one activity, either something new or the piano and viola they’ve already started, for at least two years. Tyrannical? I don’t believe it is. And if Lucy’s and Amanda’s recent comments on the topic aren’t disguised apple-polishing, neither do my daughters. They’d like to grow grittier as they get older, and, like any skill, they know grit takes practice. They know they’re fortunate to have the opportunity to do so. For parents who would like to encourage grit without obliterating their children’s capacity to choose their own path, I recommend the Hard Thing Rule.

Burke and others published a pair of studies in 2016 using a protocol dubbed “sleep low,” which involved a high-quality carbohydrate-fueled workout in the late afternoon, followed by a carbohydrate-free dinner; then, the next morning, a carbohydrate-depleted moderate workout before breakfast.38 Repeating this cycle just three times, for a total of six days, produced a 3 percent improvement in 20-kilometer cycling times.

Kristen had dreamed of having children since she was herself a child and had always thought that she would love motherhood as much as she would love her babies. “I know that being a mom will be demanding,” she told me once. “But I don’t think it will change me much. I’ll still have my life, and our baby will be part of it.” She envisioned long walks through the neighborhood with Emily. She envisioned herself mastering the endlessly repeating three-hour cycle of playing, feeding, sleeping, and diaper changing. Most of all, she envisioned a full parenting partnership, in which I’d help whenever I was home—morning, nighttime, and weekends. Of course, I didn’t know any of this until she told me, which she did after Emily was born. At first, the newness of parenthood made it seem as though everything was going according to our expectations. We’ll be up all day and all night for a few weeks, but then we’ll hit our stride and our lives will go back to normal, plus one baby. Kristen took a few months off from work to focus all of her attention on Emily, knowing that it would be hard to juggle the contradicting demands of an infant and a career. She was determined to own motherhood. “We’re still in that tough transition,” Kristen would tell me, trying to console Emily at four A.M. “Pretty soon, we’ll find our routine. I hope.” But things didn’t go as we had planned. There were complications with breast-feeding. Emily wasn’t gaining weight; she wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t play. She was born in December, when it was far too cold to go for walks outdoors. While I was at work, Kristen would sit on the floor with Emily in the dark—all the lights off, all the shades closed—and cry. She’d think about her friends, all of whom had made motherhood look so easy with their own babies. “Mary had no problem breast-feeding,” she’d tell me. “Jenny said that these first few months had been her favorite. Why can’t I get the hang of this?” I didn’t have any answers, but still I offered solutions, none of which she wanted to hear: “Talk to a lactation consultant about the feeding issues.” “Establish a routine and stick to it.” Eventually, she stopped talking altogether. While Kristen struggled, I watched from the sidelines, unaware that she needed help. I excused myself from the nighttime and morning responsibilities, as the interruptions to my daily schedule became too much for me to handle. We didn’t know this was because of a developmental disorder; I just looked incredibly selfish. I contributed, but not fully. I’d return from work, and Kristen would go upstairs to sleep for a few hours while I’d carry Emily from room to room, gently bouncing her as I walked, trying to keep her from crying. But eventually eleven o’clock would roll around and I’d go to bed, and Kristen would be awake the rest of the night with her. The next morning, I would wake up and leave for work, while Kristen stared down the barrel of another day alone. To my surprise, I grew increasingly disappointed in her: She wanted to have children. Why is she miserable all the time? What’s her problem? I also resented what I had come to recognize as our failing marriage. I’d expected our marriage to be happy, fulfilling, overflowing with constant affection. My wife was supposed to be able to handle things like motherhood with aplomb. Kristen loved me, and she loved Emily, but that wasn’t enough for me. In my version of a happy marriage, my wife would also love the difficulties of being my wife and being a mom. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have to earn the happiness, the fulfillment, the affection. Nor had it occurred to me that she might have her own perspective on marriage and motherhood.

The concept of public toilets has not yet caught on in most of India. Morning and evening, villagers simply squat along the main road with a bucket of water to do their business.

When a child who has pinworms scratches his or her bottom, the eggs get lodged underneath his or her fingernails. Without serious scrubbing every morning, including underneath fingernails, it’s easy for those eggs to get around. They’re sticky little things and they easily make their way from fingers to everything the child touches—doorknobs, furniture, toys, even food. When other children touch those surfaces, they pick up some eggs. Eventually, those curious fingers make their way into mouths and some eggs are ingested orally, worms hatch in the small intestine, migrate to the large intestine, and begin the cycle again.

Circadian lighting, in essence, follows a "sunrise to sunset" cycle, according to which lights should be brighter and bluer in the morning (blue makes us feel alert), and warmer orange light that mimics dusk to facilitate sleep should be used in the evening.

begin. This, of course, leads to much angst and frustration for all parties involved on the back end of sleep. Parents want their teenager to be awake at a “reasonable” hour of the morning. Teenagers, on the other hand, having only been capable of initiating sleep some hours after their parents, can still be in their trough of the circadian downswing. Like an animal prematurely wrenched out of hibernation too early, the adolescent brain still needs more sleep and more time to complete the circadian cycle before it can operate efficiently, without grogginess. If this remains perplexing to parents, a different way to frame and perhaps appreciate the mismatch is this: asking your teenage son or daughter to go to bed and fall asleep at ten p.m. is the circadian equivalent of asking you, their parent, to go to sleep at seven or eight p.m. No matter how loud you enunciate the order, no matter how much that teenager truly wishes to obey your instruction, and no matter what amount of willed effort is applied by either of the two parties, the circadian rhythm of a teenager will not be miraculously coaxed into a change.

These flowers, which were splendid and sprightly, Waking in the dawn of the morning, In the evening will be a pitiful frivolity, Sleeping in the cold night’s arms.

I am particularly troubled by intense anxiety early in the morning. It wakes me up with a jolt.” This anxious feeling throws their worrying into hyperdrive, as they try to figure out what they are supposed to worry about. When they can’t find anything specific, they start getting in the habit of worrying about just about any old darn thing in the future, whether it warrants worrying or not.

Dr John Nash Ott had reported improved health that an outdoor lifestyle can bring in his books. He believed it could cure prolonged illness. I had a similar experience. I had achieved what had been impossible during the previous decade, a return to the weight I was in my thirties. I had far more energy and far less days of chronic fatigue. I was mentally alert and suffered far less forgetfulness and confusion. I slept better on a two stage sleep cycle that Dr John Nash Ott had reported as an effect of the outdoor lifestyle. I would go to bed earlier, typically a couple of hours after sunset and wake up around 1-2 AM before falling asleep again until morning twilight. My body had automatically aligned with the twilight times. It was common in the morning to be awake in bed listening to the morning chorus of the birds and the “Cock-a-doodle-do!” of the roosters.

People work hard five out of seven days to be able to afford the material objects that they think will bring them happiness and that they believe represent success. Once they attain the object, they realize that it hasn’t filled them up, so they get into debt trying to buy more things to fill the void just to wake up every morning and still feel unhappy … and even more broke. The cycle goes on and on.

Almost intermixed with the animals are the Masai following the grass cycle with their cattle herds, living off the milk and blood of their cows. We would go early in the morning from a base camp in Land Rovers and all-terrain vehicles, armed with cameras and binoculars. The tour operators apologized for the presence of the Masai.

Part 1 A Woman is a Fate? Or a Bless? When a baby is girl is born, to some is a blessing. She will grow as wonderful woman, beautiful, with nice features and showers love as a daughter, a sister, as a wife, as a friend and as a mother. It is also luck, or a Mahalakshmi to the house. Some centuries back, and to some people when she is born, she is a fate. An ill fated to some in orthodox families and believe that she brings bad luck. So, there is this ritual in some places or villages where, when a new born baby girl will be poisoned to death upon her arrival on earth. It is brutal and devastating. Yes it is still happening till today. Where did this ritual came from? Who started it? Where was it written that the baby must be killed if it is a girl. And WHY? Has anyone thought, that it was a woman who carried her for 9 months, loved her from the day she is created in her womb, and the moment when she is born, the tear of a joy and her happiness the moment she sees her little tiny human girl arrived, and her dreams as mother and to love her all her life… will be no longer alive in the next few minutes? I have always respected woman, for uncountable reasons. As much as I am happy to see them successful, but it also worries me most of the time. 99.9% of it I am worried for them! The one who gave birth to us, is a woman. We also worship to a female God and beg her to show mercy on us. It is also a woman, who becomes a wife and satisfies a husband’s needs. But still, there are no respect shown to them despite knowing these basics. In some houses while her parents off to work, or being abandoned, or lets just say the parents passed. It is her responsibility to take care the rest of her family as the family head. When it comes to education, she is not safe to study among the boys, neither in higher education. Same goes to a woman at work. As she will have those wild eyes on her, she has to take care of her virginity, her womb, and her dignity. Beyond these, there are also some beasts, who is talented in sweet talking and flirtatious towards her. When she is too naïve and fall for the trap, it happens to be a one night stand. Once a woman marriage is fixed, she gets married and goes off to her in laws. Her life changes in the moment the knots tied by the man. In todays millennia, womens are still carrying the burden of the responsibility of her maternal side, together with her new in-laws. Every morning she wakes up, she serves the husband, deal the day with by preparing him for his day, every day. As well taking care of her new in-laws all of her life. Then, comes the pregnancy moment, again, she carries her child her womb, making sure he is safe in there, and taking care of her world on the outside. She loses all her beauty, her happiness, her wishes, her ambitions, and it is all sacrificed for the sake of her marriage. And then the cycle never stops. She raises her children, become beautiful, and then one day they too get married. But as mother, she never stopped caring and provide them all the love, the needs, etc. It never stops. There are some man and in laws who support their daughter in law and I have a big salute to them. They are an example for today’s woman millennia, don’t stop her for what she is capable of, and don’t clip her wings..

Write your routine, Ronan. Now. While I watch. I want to see it." 7:45 A.M.: The most important meal of the day. 8:00 A.M.: Feed animals. 9:30 A.M.: Repair barns or house. 12:00 P.M.: Lunch @ that weird gas station. 1:30 P.M.: Ronan Lynch's marvelous dream emporium. "What does this one mean, Ronan?" It meant practice makes perfect. It meant ten thousand hours to mastery, if at first you don't succeed, there is no try only do. Ronan had spent hours over the last year dreaming ever more complex and precise objects into being, culminating in an intricate security system that rendered the Barns largely impossible to find unless you knew exactly where you were going. After Cambridge, though, it felt like all the fun had run out of the game. "I don't ask what you do at work, Declan." 6:00 P.M.: Drive around. 7:15 P.M.: Nuke some dinner, yo. 7:30 P.M.: Movie time. 11:00 P.M.: Text Parrish. Adam's most recent text had said simply: $4200. It was the amount Ronan had to send to cover the dorm room repairs. *11:30 P.M.: Go to bed. *Saturday/Sunday: Church/DC *Monday: Laundry & Grocery *Tuesday: Text or call Gansey These last items were in Declan's handwriting, his addendums subtly suggesting all the components of a fulfilling grown-up life Ronan had missed when crafting it. They only served to depress Ronan more. Look how you can predict the next forty-eight hours, seventy-two hours, ninety-six hours, look how you can predict the rest of your life. The entire word routine depressed Ronan. The sameness. Fuck everything. Gansey texted: Declan told me to tell you to get out of bed. Ronan texted back: why He watched the morning light move over the varied black-gray shapes in his bedroom. Shelves of model cars; an open Uilleann pipes case; an old scuffed desk with a stuffed whale on it; a metal tree with wondrously intricate branches; heaps of laundry curled around beet-read wood shavings. Gansey texted back: don't make me get on a plane I'm currently chained to one of the largest black walnut trees in Oregon

•​No smoking after 7 p.m.—People who smoke a few hours before bedtime struggle to fall asleep because nicotine disrupts their natural sleep–wake cycle, and withdrawal symptoms set in before the morning alarm clock goes off, often leaving them feeling even more restless and agitated.

WHEN PEOPLE ARE WIRED AND TIRED, THE CORE ISSUE IS THAT their adrenal hormone levels are highly variable. Rather than having a consistent morning peak and evening shut-off, people at this level can make too much cortisol late in the day and too much early in the day. This often causes their energy levels to be erratic and inconsistent.

Twice weekly do a morning interval workout while running outdoors or on any aerobic machine.

People who are Wired and Tired often can sleep, but not at practical times. They may notice that after a night of tossing and turning, they finally go into a deep sleep at 4 or 5 AM. If possible, they would happily stay up until early morning and sleep until late in the day. Usually, most life schedules will not accommodate this.

light therapy has to be done differently than for those at the Stressed level. Rather than first thing in the morning, use thirty minutes of bright overhead light exposure in the early evening—ideally, five hours before your projected bedtime.

Since ashwaganda helps correct cortisol levels, it can be a good fit for boosting morning energy levels and lowering them at night. A normal dose is 500 to 1,000 mg once or twice daily of the powdered root in capsules.