Cypress Tree Quotes

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

When I Am Dead, My Dearest When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress-tree: Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain: And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget.

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore. You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days. Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God. But let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

Within its gates I heard the sound Of winds in cypress caverns caught Of huddling tress that moaned, and sought To whisper what their roots had found. (“A Dream of Fear”)

Never did tombs look so ghastly white. Never did cypress, or yew, or juniper so seem the embodiment of funeral gloom. Never did tree or grass wave or rustle so ominously. Never did bough creak so mysteriously, and never did the far-away howling of dogs send such a woeful presage through the night.

To be sure, I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but (s)he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

See that tree?" It was a stubby cypress tree, all bent and twisted. "Yeah, I see it." "It's my favorite tree." "It's not that great a tree," I said. "That's it. That's exactly it. It's like me. The wind beat the holy crap out of it when it was just a sapling. Never could straighten itself out again." He sort of smiled at me. "But, Zach, it didn't die." He looked like maybe he wanted to cry. But he didn't. "It's alive." "Maybe it should have just given up." "That tree didn't know how to do that. It only knew how to live. Crooked. Bent. Taller trees dwarfing it even more. It just wanted to live. I named it, you know?" He was waiting for me to ask what he'd named it--but I decided I didn't want to ask. "Zach," he whispered. "The tree's name is Zach."[p. 135]

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end? (b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split? (c) Is there a chance (and please check the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason? Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There's nothing to stop you---or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That's the real difference in a life.

Under ancient cypress trees, weeping dreams are harvested from sleep.

I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall... And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry.

I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ‘Tis all barren—and so it is; and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers. I declare, said I, clapping my hands chearily together, that was I in a desart, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections—If I could not do better, I would fasten them upon some sweet myrtle, or seek some melancholy cypress to connect myself to—I would court their shade, and greet them kindly for their protection—I would cut my name upon them, and swear they were the loveliest trees throughout the desert: if their leaves wither’d, I would teach myself to mourn, and when they rejoiced, I would rejoice along with them.

I just can’t do it anymore. It’s too painful. It doesn't mean I’m over you, it means I’m not going to waste the rest of my life being haunted by your memory.

I miss you Annabeth. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t stop thinkin’ about you. I think about you all the damn time.

We lead a difficult life, not always managing to fit our actions to the vision we have of the world. (And when I think I have caught a glimpse of the color of my fate, it flees from my gaze.) We struggle and suffer to reconquer our solitude. But a day comes when the earth has its simple and primitive smile. Then, it is as if the struggles and life within us were rubbed out. Millions of eyes have looked at this landscape, and for me it is like the first smile of the world. It takes me out of myself, in the deepest meaning of the expression. It assures me that nothing matters except my love, and that even this love has no value for me unless it remains innocent and free. It denies me a personality, and deprives my suffering of its echo. The world is beautiful, and this is everything. The great truth which it patiently teaches me is that neither the mind nor even the heart has any importance. And that the stone warmed by the stone or the cypress tree swelling against the empty sky set a boundary to the only world in which "to be right" has any meaning: nature without men. This world reduces me to nothing. It carries me to the very end. Without anger, it denies that I exist. And, agreeing to my defeat, I move toward a wisdom where everything has already been conquered -- except that tears come into my eyes, and this great sob of poetry which swells my heart makes me forget the truth of the world.

She’d never encountered any stories as intricate or compelling as the stories he gave her, nor anything that made her sigh when she read it. She liked best the stories about people becoming other things. Stories where women became swans or echoes. In the evenings, when Finn disappeared into the mysterious recesses of the laboratory, Cat went out to the garden or down to the river and wondered what it would be like to be a stream of water, a cypress tree, a star burning a million miles away.

This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

I wanted a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes. I was my father's daughter. I wanted to be loved by someone like my tough judicious mother and I wanted to run screaming through the headlights with a bottle in my hand. That was the family curse. We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and canceled each other out. The curse implied that if we didn't learn to train our desires in one direction or another we were likely to end up with nothing. Look at my father and mother today. I married in my early twenties. When that went to pieces I loved a woman. At both of those times and at other times, too, I believed I had focused my impulses and embarked on a long victory over my own confusion. Now, in my late thirties, I knew less than ever about what I wanted. In place of youth's belief in change I had begun to feel a nervous embarrassment that ticked inside me like a clock. I'd never meant to get this far in such an unfastened condition. (p.142)

I just can’t do it anymore. It’s too painful. It doesn’t mean I’m over you, it means I’m not going to waste the rest of my life being haunted by your memory.

Marathon 2. Song of the River Once we were happy, we had no memories. For all the repetition, nothing happened twice. We were always walking parallel to a river with no sense of progression though the trees across from us were sometimes birch, sometimes cypress- the sky was blue, a matrix of blue glass. While, in the river, things were going by- a few leaves, a child's boat painted red and white, its sail stained by the water- As they passed, on the surface we could see ourselves; we seemed to drift apart and together, as the river linked us forever, though up ahead were other couples, choosing souvenirs.

And it came to me that these trees had been hardly smaller when I was yet unborn, and had stood as they stood now when I was a child playing among the cypresses and peaceful tombs of our necropolis, and that they would stand yet, drinking in the last light of the dying sun, even as now, when I had been dead as long as those who rested there.

Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn: It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond Stares. And you sing, you sing. That star-enchanted song falls through the air From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound, Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground; And all the night you sing. My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee As all night long I listen, and my brain Receives your song, then loses it again In moonlight on the lawn. Now is your voice a marble high and white, Then like a mist on fields of paradise, Now is a raging fire, then is like ice, Then breaks, and it is dawn.

Čovjek može učiniti sudbonosni korak mimo svakog smisla, a možda i u inat svakome smislu, naročito ako je taj čovjek žena.

With a heavy heart, I pulled out my own pocket knife, and carved three little words beneath Archer’s. A plea and a wish, in a form I could never take back. Return to me.

There are losses which communicate a sublimity to the soul which makes it refrain from lamentation and go about in silence as though among tall black cypress-trees.

Stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temples stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each others shadow.

Far worse, though, was the low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you Desolation tries to colonize you.

Ah, you may sit under them, yes. They cast a good shadow, cold as well-water; but that's the trouble, they tempt you to sleep. And you must never, for any reason, sleep beneath a cypress.' He paused, stroked his moustache, waited for me to ask why, and then went on: 'Why? Why? Because if you did you would be changed when you woke. Yes, the black cypresses, they are dangerous. While you sleep, their roots grow into your brains and steal them, and when you wake up you are mad, head as empty as a whistle.' I asked whether it was only the cypress that could do that or did it apply to other trees. 'No, only the cypress,' said the old man, peering up fiercely at the trees above me as though to see whether they were listening; 'only the cypress is the thief of intelligence. So be warned, little lord, and don't sleep here.

Gregori glided through the cypress trees, tall, fit,healthy. Even his clothes were immaculate. His hair was shining clean, tied at his nape with a leather thong. His silver eyes were clear, and once more his face was a mask of sensual beauty. "Gary"-the voice, as always, was of purity and strength-"please leave us for a few moments." "Will she be all right?" Gary asked fearfully. In spite of himself, he had checked her pulse several times. "She must be all right," Gregori said very softly. The voice was like velvet, but there was something in it that sent a shiver of apprehension through Gary.If anything happened to Savannah,Gary realized that no one,nothing in the world,would ever be safe again from the Carpathian.He hadn't considered that before,and he had no idea where the knowledge came from, but he knew it absolutely.

A panther poised in the cypress tree about to jump is a panther poised in a cypress tree about to jump. The panther is a poem of fire green eyes and a heart charged by four winds of four directions. The panther hears everything in the dark: the unspoken tears of a few hundred human years, storms that will break what has broken his world, a bluebird swaying on a branch a few miles away. He hears the death song of his approaching prey: I will always love you, sunrise. I belong to the black cat with fire green eyes. There, in the cypress tree near the morning star.

It became his habit to creep out of bed even before his mother was awake, to slip into his clothes and to go quietly down to the barn to see Gabilan. In the grey quiet mornings when the land and the brush and the houses and the trees were silver-grey and black like a photograph negative, he stole toward the barn, past the sleeping stones and the sleeping cypress tree. The turkeys, roosting in the tree out of coyotes' reach, clicked drowsily. The fields glowed with a grey frost-like light and in the dew the tracks of rabbits and of field mice stood out sharply. The good dogs came stiffly out of their little houses, hackles up and deep growls in their throats. Then they caught Jody's scent, and their stiff tails rose up and waved a greeting Doubletree Mutt with the big thick tail, and Smasher, the incipient shepherd-then went lazily back to their warm beds. It was a strange time and a mysterious journey, to Jody -an extension of a dream. When he first had the pony he liked to torture himself during the trip by thinking Gabilan would not be in his stall, and worse, would never have been there. And he had other delicious little self-induced pains.

So Recklessly Exposed December and January, gone. Tulips coming up. It's time to watch how trees stagger in the wind and roses never rest. Wisteria and Jasmine twist on themselves. Violet kneels to Hyacinth, who bows. Narcissus winks, wondering what will the lightheaded Willow say of such slow dancing by Cypress. Painters come outdoors with brushes. I love their hands. The birds sing suddenly and all at once. The soul says Ya Hu, quietly. A dove calls, Where, ku? Soul, you will find it. Now the roses show their breasts. No one hides when the Friend arrives. The Rose speaks openly to the Nightingale. Notice how the Green Lily has several tongues but still keeps her secret. Now the Nightingale sings this love that is so recklessly exposed, like you.

And it came to me that these trees had been hardly smaller when I was yet unborn, and had stood as they stood now when I was a child playing among the cypresses and peaceful tombs of our necropolis, and that they would stand yet, drinking in the light of the dying sun, even as now, when I had been dead as long as those who rested there. I saw how little it weighed on the scale of things whether I lived or died, though my life was precious to me. And of those two thoughts I forged a mood by which I stood ready to grasp each smallest chance to live, yet in which I cared not too much whether I saved myself or not. By that mood, as I think, I did live; it has been so good a friend to me that I have endeavored to wear it ever since, succeeding not always, but often.

Color—that’s another thing people don’t expect. In her imagination, in her dreams, everything has color. The museum buildings are beige, chestnut, hazel. Its scientists are lilac and lemon yellow and fox brown. Piano chords loll in the speaker of the wireless in the guard station, projecting rich blacks and complicated blues down the hall toward the key pound. Church bells send arcs of bronze careening off the windows. Bees are silver; pigeons are ginger and auburn and occasionally golden. The huge cypress trees she and her father pass on their morning walk are shimmering kaleidoscopes, each needle a polygon of light. She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks. He is an olive green when he talks to a department head, an escalating series of oranges when he speaks to Mademoiselle Fleury from the greenhouses, a bright red when he tries to cook. He glows sapphire when he sits over his workbench in the evenings, humming almost inaudibly as he works, the tip of his cigarette gleaming a prismatic blue.

It didn't occur to me that I never named my own mystery illness the spring before (except to misdiagnose it to friends as mono), because I'd been afraid to admit, even to my mother, how much I'd wanted to lie down somewhere and hide. Black women, tall and strong as cypress trees, didn't pull that. Pain and shame and cowardice and fear had to be kept secret.

If you can realistically render a cypress tree, would you include one when commissioned to paint a sailor in the midst of a shipwreck?

Friends! It is only when the cold season comes that we know the pine tree and the cypress to be evergreens, and friends are known in adversity.

And I'll hide the maid in a cypress tree, when the footstep of death is near.

They spent the day with Lucia, who promised that the following day she would take them up to Scala, an even tinier, loftier town where her parents now lived. That evening, Mac took her to a restaurant called Il Flauto di Pan- Pan's Flute- perched at the Villa Cimbrone among the gardens and crumbling walls. It was probably the most beautiful restaurant she'd ever seen. The centuries-old villa was embellished with incredible gardens of fuchsia bougainvillea, lemon and cypress trees and flowering herbs that scented the air. Their veranda table had an impossibly gorgeous view of the sea.

In his room, scanning through the poetry book for one to read in class, Tate found a poem by Thomas Moore: ... she's gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, She paddles her white canoe. And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see, And her paddle I soon shall hear; Long and loving our life shall be, And I'll hide the maid in a cypress tree, When the footstep of death is near. The words made him think of Kya, Jodie's little sister. She'd seemed so small and alone in the marsh's big sweep. He imagined his own sister lost out there. His dad was right- poems made you feel something.

newer and more modern cemeteries, devoid of cypress trees or any other vegetation, were usually situated well outside the new quarters and surrounded by tall concrete walls, just like factories, military bases, and hospitals.

As they climbed towards Delphi, the cypress trees lined the road like javelin heads, and when they passed its sanctuary of Apollo, a place pagans once thought of as the navel of the world, the light was beginning to fade with the sun…

The landscape is unrecognisable to her now; the crumbling outbuildings and copses of trees look dark and furtive, the land between them a silent battleground, where returning soldiers and foreign fighters slip between the cypress trees like ghosts

(T)here is no darkness, not the kind they imagine. Everything is composed of webs and lattices and upheavals of sound and texture... Colour - that's another thing people don't expect. In her imagination, in her dreams, everything has colour. The museum buildings are beige, chestnut, hazel. Its scientists are lilac and lemon yellow and fox brown. Piano chords loll in the speaker of the wireless in the guard room projecting rich blacks and complicated blues down the hall toward the key pound. Church bells send arcs of bronze careening off the windows. Bees are silver, pigeons are ginger and auburn and occasionally golden. The huge cypress trees she and her father pass on their morning walk are shimmering kaleidoscopes, each needle a polygon of light.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

Do you remember the suburbs and the plaintive flock of landscapes The cypress trees projected their shadows under the moon That night when as summer waned I listened To a languorous bird forever wroth And the eternal noise of a river wide and dark (The Voyager)

Longing is the absent chatting with the absent. The distant turning toward the distant. Longing is the spring’s thirst for the jar-carrying women, and vice versa. Longing allows distance to recede, as if looking forward, although it may be called hope, were an adventure and a poetic notion. The present tense is hesitant and perplexed, the past tense hangs from a cypress tree standing on its rooted leg behind a hill, enveloped in its dark green, listening intently to one sound only: the sound of the wind. Longing is the sound of the wind

When I think about you with him, it guts me. I feel like you ripped open my chest and tore out my damn heart. Do you even realize that? I know I should want you to be happy, but I can’t wish it for anyone else other than me. I belong to you, and that’s never going to change.

The groves and thickets of smaller trees are full of blooming evergreen vines. These vines are not arranged in separate groups, or in delicate wreaths, but in bossy walls and heavy, mound-like heaps and banks. Am made to feel that I am now in a strange land. I know hardly any of the plants, but few of the birds, and I am unable to see the country for the solemn, dark, mysterious cypress woods which cover everything.

It is so still and transcendent, the cypress trees poise like flames of forgotten darkness, that should have been blown out at the end of the summer. For as we have candles to light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the darkness aflame in the full sunshine.

By that tomb grows Gibran's sorrow together with the cypress trees, and above the tomb his spirit flickers every night commemorating Selma, joining the branches of the trees in sorrowful wailing, mourning and lamenting the going of Selma, who, yesterday was a beautiful tune on the lips of life and today is a silent secret in the bosom of the earth. . Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow. Solitude is the ally of sorrow as well as a companion of spiritual exaltation. . He lives spiritually in the past because the present passes swiftly, and the future seems to him an approach to the oblivion of the grave. . Now I know that there is something higher than heaven and deeper than the ocean and stranger than life and death and time. I know now what I did not know before. . When I walked in the fields, I saw the token of Eternity in the awakening of nature, and when I sat by the seashore I heard the waves singing the song of Eternity. . We were three people, gathered and crushed by the hands of destiny; and all of us were toys in the hands of fate. . Be happy because I shall live in you after my death. . This is the only friend I shall have after you are gone, but how can he console me when he is suffering also? How can a broken heart find consolation in a disappointed soul? A sorrowful woman cannot be comforted by her neighbour's sorrow, nor can a bird fly with broken wings. . It is hard to write down in words the memories of those hours when I met Selma −−those heavenly hours, filled with pain, happiness, sorrow, hope, and misery. . A bird with broken wings cannot fly in the spacious sky. . He was born like a thought and died like a sigh and disappeared like a shadow. . His life began at the end of the night and ended at the beginning of the day.

Something had shifted between us, faintly, but the change was almost palpable. Our friendship had sat lightly between us, an ephemeral thing, without weight or gravity. Once, in the Boboli Gardens, under the shadow of a cypress tree on an achingly beautiful October afternoon, he had kissed me, a solemnly sweet and respectful kiss. But weeks had passed and we had not spoken of it. I had attributed it to the sunlight, shimmering gold like Danaë's shower, and had pressed it into the scrapbook of memory, to be taken out and admired now and then, but not to be dwelled upon too seriously. Perhaps I had been mistaken.

Color--that’s another thing people don’t expect. In her imagination, in her dreams, everything has color. The museum buildings are beige, chestnut, hazel. Its scientists are lilac and lemon yellow and brown. Piano chords loll in the speaker of the wireless in the guard station, projecting rich blacks and complicated blues down the hall toward the key pound. Church bells send arcs of bronze careening off the windows. Bees are silver; pigeons are ginger and auburn and occasionally golden. The huge cypress trees she and her father pass on their morning walk are shimmering kaleidoscopes, each needle a polygon of light

One of the drawbacks about adventures is that when you come to the most beautiful places you are often too anxious and hurried to appreciate them; so that Arvis (though she remembered them years later) had only a vague impression of gray lawns, quietly bubbling fountains, and the long black shadows of cypress trees.

Mother’s estate—our estate—a thousand acres centered in a million more. Lawns the size of small prairies with grass so perfect it beckoned a body to lie on it, to nap on its soft perfection. Noble shade trees making sundials of the Earth, their shadows circling in stately procession; now mingling, now contracting to midday, finally stretching eastward with the dying of the day. Royal oak. Giant elms. Cottonwood and cypress and redwood and bonsai. Banyan trees lowering new trunks like smooth-sided columns in a temple roofed by sky. Willows lining carefully laid canals and haphazard streams, their hanging branches singing ancient dirges to the wind.

Reelfoot is, and has always been, a lake of mystery. In places it is bottomless. Other places the skeletons of the cypress-trees that went down when the earth sank, still stand upright so that if the sun shines from the right quarter, and the water is less muddy than common, a man, peering face downward into its depths, sees, or thinks he sees, down below him the bare top-limbs upstretching like drowned men's fingers, all coated with the mud of years and bandaged with pennons of the green lake slime.

Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

On the side of the road bathed in moonlight, the olive trees looked like the silver clouds floating six feet above the ground, and the cypresses like black feathers.

For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

The Everglades was the only place on earth where alligators (broad snout, fresh water, darker skin) and crocodiles (pointy snout, salt water, toothy grin) lived side by side. It was the only home of the Everglades mink, Okeechobee gourd, and Big Cypress fox squirrel. It had carnivorous plants, amphibious birds, oysters that grew on trees, cacti that grew in water, lizards that changed colors, and fish that changed genders. It had 1,100 species of trees and plants, 350 birds, and 52 varieties of porcelain-smooth, candy-striped tree snails. It had bottlenose dolphins, marsh rabbits, ghost orchids, moray eels, bald eagles, and countless other species that didn't seem to belong on the same continent, much less in the same ecosystem.

The susurration of rushes and the hiss of sedges was swept on by the grasses and leaves of the trees and swiftly the soughing of cypresses and sallows sent the sound through the breeze.

Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road, with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of form as the apple-trees in Japanese pictures—such was our course and the surroundings of it.

We proaged on thru the woods that was full of magnolia, pine, cedar, oak, cypress, hickory, and many kinds of trees whose names I do not know. It is hard to know all the trees in Florida.

Song When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain: And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget. Sir Thomas Wyatt has been credited with introducing the Petrarchan sonnet into the English language. Wyatt's father had been one of Henry VII's Privy Councilors and remained a trusted adviser when Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509. Wyatt followed his father to court, but it seems the young poet may have fallen in love with the king’s mistress, Anne Boleyn. Their acquaintance is certain, although whether or not the two actually shared a romantic relationship remains unknown. But in his poetry, Wyatt called his mistress Anna and there do seem to be correspondences. For instance, this poem might well have been written about the King’s claim on Anne Boleyn:

Soft green grass grew in front of the house. There stood the cypress too, and, as if on purpose, it was singing with its tree-voice, its sweet-sounding voice, inviting to the ear. Then there were bees which had lived under a tile and were humming in the air. And then, like a miracle, so unexpected that it made them rub their eyes, there was a small lilac tree in full blossom.

For myself I will plant a cypress tree and it will outlive me. That's what I miss about the fields, the sense of the future as well as the present. That one day what you plant will spring up unexpectedly; a shoot, a tree, just when you were looking the other way, thinking about something else. I like to know that life will outlive me, that's a happiness Bonaparte never understood.

How divine the coming of the morning,—the coming of the Sun,—exorcising the shadowy terrors of the night with infinite restoration of color! I look upon the woods, and they are not the same: the palms have vanished; the cypresses have fled away; trees young and comely and brightly green replace them. A hand is laid upon my shoulder,—the hand of the gray Captain: 'Go forward, and see what you have never seen before.' Even as he speaks, our boat, turning sharply, steams out of the green water into—what can I call it?—a flood of fluid crystal,—a river of molten diamond,—a current of liquid light?

This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over nature, there were better versions of them in control.

There is a Zen story about a student who felt he hadn’t really received the deepest essence of his master’s teaching, and so he went to question him. His master replied, “On your way here, did you see the cypress in the courtyard?” Perhaps the student was not yet very mindful. The master was saying that if, on the way to see our teacher, we go past a cypress tree or a beautiful plum tree in blossom and we don’t really see it, then when we arrive in front of our teacher, we won’t see our teacher either. We shouldn’t miss any opportunity to really see our cypress tree. There are wonders of life we walk past every day, and yet we haven’t truly seen them. What is the cypress tree on the path you take to work every day? If you cannot even see the tree, how can you see your loved ones? How can you see God?

Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you. As

ANOTHER TWILIGHT Allow the point of the Croccodrillo its hazy cypress trees in profile Like a rough sketch for the Isle of the Dead, as seen from yellow stucco, his Villa Igea where Lawrence finished "Sons and Lovers," wild thyme scenting olive-grove grass, crime scenery come back to more than once. Again you're mirrored in lake shadow, a white sail flaking on its turquoise wavelets, keep awake by traffic noise Along the Gardesana...and you know that this beauty's unbearable as before even if seen from its opposite shore.

Color—that’s another thing people don’t expect. In her imagination, in her dreams, everything has color. The museum buildings are beige, chestnut, hazel. Its scientists are lilac and lemon yellow and fox brown. Piano chords loll in the speaker of the wireless in the guard station, projecting rich blacks and complicated blues down the hall toward the key pound. Church bells send arcs of bronze careening off the windows. Bees are silver; pigeons are ginger and auburn and occasionally golden. The huge cypress trees she and her father pass

BOWLS OF FOOD Moon and evening star do their slow tambourine dance to praise this universe. The purpose of every gathering is discovered: to recognize beauty and love what’s beautiful. “Once it was like that, now it’s like this,” the saying goes around town, and serious consequences too. Men and women turn their faces to the wall in grief. They lose appetite. Then they start eating the fire of pleasure, as camels chew pungent grass for the sake of their souls. Winter blocks the road. Flowers are taken prisoner underground. Then green justice tenders a spear. Go outside to the orchard. These visitors came a long way, past all the houses of the zodiac, learning Something new at each stop. And they’re here for such a short time, sitting at these tables set on the prow of the wind. Bowls of food are brought out as answers, but still no one knows the answer. Food for the soul stays secret. Body food gets put out in the open like us. Those who work at a bakery don’t know the taste of bread like the hungry beggars do. Because the beloved wants to know, unseen things become manifest. Hiding is the hidden purpose of creation: bury your seed and wait. After you die, All the thoughts you had will throng around like children. The heart is the secret inside the secret. Call the secret language, and never be sure what you conceal. It’s unsure people who get the blessing. Climbing cypress, opening rose, Nightingale song, fruit, these are inside the chill November wind. They are its secret. We climb and fall so often. Plants have an inner Being, and separate ways of talking and feeling. An ear of corn bends in thought. Tulip, so embarrassed. Pink rose deciding to open a competing store. A bunch of grapes sits with its feet stuck out. Narcissus gossiping about iris. Willow, what do you learn from running water? Humility. Red apple, what has the Friend taught you? To be sour. Peach tree, why so low? To let you reach. Look at the poplar, tall but without fruit or flower. Yes, if I had those, I’d be self-absorbed like you. I gave up self to watch the enlightened ones. Pomegranate questions quince, Why so pale? For the pearl you hid inside me. How did you discover my secret? Your laugh. The core of the seen and unseen universes smiles, but remember, smiles come best from those who weep. Lightning, then the rain-laughter. Dark earth receives that clear and grows a trunk. Melon and cucumber come dragging along on pilgrimage. You have to be to be blessed! Pumpkin begins climbing a rope! Where did he learn that? Grass, thorns, a hundred thousand ants and snakes, everything is looking for food. Don’t you hear the noise? Every herb cures some illness. Camels delight to eat thorns. We prefer the inside of a walnut, not the shell. The inside of an egg, the outside of a date. What about your inside and outside? The same way a branch draws water up many feet, God is pulling your soul along. Wind carries pollen from blossom to ground. Wings and Arabian stallions gallop toward the warmth of spring. They visit; they sing and tell what they think they know: so-and-so will travel to such-and-such. The hoopoe carries a letter to Solomon. The wise stork says lek-lek. Please translate. It’s time to go to the high plain, to leave the winter house. Be your own watchman as birds are. Let the remembering beads encircle you. I make promises to myself and break them. Words are coins: the vein of ore and the mine shaft, what they speak of. Now consider the sun. It’s neither oriental nor occidental. Only the soul knows what love is. This moment in time and space is an eggshell with an embryo crumpled inside, soaked in belief-yolk, under the wing of grace, until it breaks free of mind to become the song of an actual bird, and God.

Tate found a poem by Thomas Moore: . . . she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, She paddles her white canoe. And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see, And her paddle I soon shall hear; Long and loving our life shall be, And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress tree, When the footstep of death is near. The words made him think of Kya, Jodie’s little sister. She’d seemed so small and alone in the marsh’s big sweep. He imagined his own sister lost out there. His dad was right—poems made you feel something.

Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.

Never did the tombs look so ghastly white; never did cypress, or yew, or juniper so seem the embodiment of funeral gloom; never did tree or grass wave so ominously; never did bough creak so mysteriously; and never did the far-away howling of dogs send such a woeful presage through the night.

Rid of the world’s injustice, and his pain, He rests at last beneath God’s veil of blue: Taken from life when life and love were new The youngest of the martyrs here is lain, Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain. No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew, But gentle violets weeping with the dew Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain. O proudest heart that broke for misery! O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene! O poet-painter of our English land! Thy name was writ in water — it shall stand: And tears like mine will keep thy memory green, As Isabella did her Basil tree. Rome

Color—that’s another thing people don’t expect. In her imagination, in her dreams, everything has color. The museum buildings are beige, chestnut, hazel. Its scientists are lilac and lemon yellow and fox brown. Piano chords loll in the speaker of the wireless in the guard station, projecting rich blacks and complicated blues down the hall toward the key pound. Church bells send arcs of bronze careening off the windows. Bees are silver; pigeons are ginger and auburn and occasionally golden. The huge cypress trees she and her father pass on their morning walk are shimmering kaleidoscopes, each needle a polygon of light. She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks. He is an olive green when he talks to a department head, an escalating series of oranges when he speaks to Mademoiselle Fleury from the greenhouses, a bright red when he tries to cook. He glows sapphire when he sits over his workbench in the evenings, humming almost inaudibly as he works, the tip of his cigarette gleaming a prismatic blue.

The coast redwood tree is an evergreen conifer and a member of the cypress family. It's scientific name is Sequoia sempervirens. No one knows exactly when or where the redwood entered the history of life on earth, though it is an ancient kind of tree, and has come down to our world as an inheritance out of deep time.

Then he said something about how L.A. is dust and exhaust and the hot, dry wind that sets your nerves on edge and pushes fire up the hillsides in ragged lines like tears in the paper that separates us from hell, and it’s towering clouds of smoke, and it’s sunshine that won’t let up and cool ocean fog that gets unrolled at night over the whole basin like a clean white hospital sheet and peeled back again in the morning. It’s a crescent moon in a sky bruised green after the sunset has beaten the shit out of it. It’s a lazy hammock moon rising over power lines, over the skeletal silhouettes of pylons, over shaggy cypress trees and the spiky black lionfish shapes of palm-tree crowns on too-skinny trunks. It’s the Big One that’s coming to turn the city to rubble and set the rubble on fire but not today, hopefully not today. It’s the obviousness of pointing out that the freeway looks like a ruby bracelet stretched alongside a diamond one, looks like a river of lava flowing counter to a river of champagne bubbles. People talk about the sprawl, and, yeah, the city is a drunk, laughing bitch sprawled across the flats in a spangled dress, legs kicked up the canyons, skirt spread over the hills, and she’s shimmering, vibrating, ticklish with light. Don’t buy a star map. Don’t go driving around gawking because you’re already there, man. You’re in it. It’s all one big map of the stars.

We placed his remains under a cypress, the upright mountain being scooped out to receive them. And then Clara said, ‘If you wish me to live, take me from hence. There is something in this scene of transcendent beauty, in these trees, and hills and waves, that for ever whisper to me, leave thy cumbrous flesh, and make a part of us. I earnestly entreat you to take me away.

This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, or cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them–gods who looked suspiciously like themselves–so that even if they were powerless over nature, there were better versions of them in control. Or perhaps it was not for the sake of control over the terror of nature at all that they created their gods. Perhaps it was because the world, with all its beauty, was not enough. Simply being alive was not enough. The Greeks needed a new fantasy to make the world more exciting. With their war, wine, poetry, gods, and food, they needed to get high. Maybe we all did.

A man on his deathbed left instructions For dividing up his goods among his three sons. He had devoted his entire spirit to those sons. They stood like cypress trees around him, Quiet and strong. He told the town judge, 'Whichever of my sons is laziest, Give him all the inheritance.' Then he died, and the judge turned to the three, 'Each of you must give some account of your laziness, so I can understand just how you are lazy.' Mystics are experts in laziness. They rely on it, Because they continuously see God working all around them. The harvest keeps coming in, yet they Never even did the plowing! 'Come on. Say something about the ways you are lazy.' Every spoken word is a covering for the inner self. A little curtain-flick no wider than a slice Of roast meat can reveal hundreds of exploding suns. Even if what is being said is trivial and wrong, The listener hears the source. One breeze comes From across a garden. Another from across the ash-heap. Think how different the voices of the fox And the lion, and what they tell you! Hearing someone is lifting the lid off the cooking pot. You learn what's for supper. Though some people Can know just by the smell, a sweet stew From a sour soup cooked with vinegar. A man taps a clay pot before he buys it To know by the sound if it has a crack. The eldest of the three brothers told the judge, 'I can know a man by his voice, and if he won't speak, I wait three days, and then I know him intuitively.' The second brother, 'I know him when he speaks, And if he won't talk, I strike up a conversation.' 'But what if he knows that trick?' asked the judge. Which reminds me of the mother who tells her child 'When you're walking through the graveyard at night and you see a boogeyman, run at it, and it will go away.' 'But what,' replies the child, 'if the boogeyman's Mother has told it to do the same thing? Boogeymen have mothers too.' The second brother had no answer. 'I sit in front of him in silence, And set up a ladder made of patience, And if in his presence a language from beyond joy And beyond grief begins to pour from my chest, I know that his soul is as deep and bright As the star Canopus rising over Yemen. And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm Of words sweeping down, I know him from what I say, And how I say it, because there's a window open Between us, mixing the night air of our beings.' The youngest was, obviously, The laziest. He won.

I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that "they asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this? He replied, Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents.—Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.

Catching frogs can take a toll on your body. I have repeatedly been battered and actually was knocked out cold when I dove headfirst into a cypress tree. One time, I jumped out of a boat to catch a frog in a thicket, and as I lunged to grab the frog, a purple poisonous thorn stuck me behind the ear. I vomited for three days and my face was badly swollen. If it had stuck me in the temple, I probably would have died. My greatest frog catch occurred after our boat ran aground. I saw the biggest bullfrog I’ve ever seen! The problem was, there were three snakes in between the frog and me: a cottonmouth water moccasin, a nonvenomous water snake, and then a bigger fish snake. Undeterred, I triple-jumped the three snakes and grabbed the frog in one swoop. Then I triple-jumped back the other way without getting bit. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but, hey, I got the frog!

A botanist would have been stumped, coming across a tree like this one. Yet, if we are to judge a tree by its fruit, it was clearly an avocado. I picked the fruit, sliced it open, and tasted it to make sure. There was no doubt in my mind. If it looks like an avocado and tastes like an avocado, it has got to be an avocado. However, the tree itself had a white bark like that of a birch and its sap tasted like birch juice. Its leaves were delicate like that of a cypress, while its trunk and the root system reminded me of a baobab. Could it be that someone had grafted an avocado on to a baobab tree? And if so, why the bark so white and the leaves so, well, feathery, and delicate yet bold like a dragonfly’s wing? Why is there not another tree like it nearby? Where had the seed of this tree come from? I had no answer. So, I put the seed of the fruit in my pocket and took it home with me to see if I could make it grow.

So the days passed into weeks and the weeks into months, and gradually she too faded until many years later when I came across a photograph of us together on a hillside in Greece, our only holiday. A photograph I'd long forgotten tumbled from its envelope carrying the perfume of her after all those years. That perfume! It would be on the pillow, on my shirt, in every room. Now I breathed it in and was back among the cypresses of a monastery in Greece. We had walked for hours to the garden above the sea. We were given minted honey and yogurt and cool retsina by a young monk. Evening came and it was time to return to the hotel. She asked if we could stay in the monastery and the young monk said yes. And in an ancient stone cell, she fell asleep. I lay awake listening to her soft breathing. A bone in her foot cracked. A tiny cry in the throat. Even the chanting of the monks in the early morning did not wake her. And now there was only this photograph, the ghost of her smiling at me in the shade of cypress trees.

The forno in Cortona bakes a crusty bread in their wood oven, a perfect toast. Breakfast is one of my favorite times because the mornings are so fresh, with no hint of the heat to come. I get up early and take my toast and coffee out on the terrace for an hour with a book and the green-black rows of cypresses against the soft sky, the hills pleated with olive terraces that haven't changed since the seasons were depicted in medieval psalters. Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me.

I was not allowed to rest. How could I rest? I formed the habit of taking promenades quite late—at sunset. For some reason I felt compelled to find the stream of water, the cypress tree, and the lily plant. I had become accustomed to these promenades in the same way that I had become addicted to opium; it was as though some force compelled me to them. All the time along the way I thought only about her, recalling my initial glimpse of her. I wanted to find the place where I had seen her on the Thirteenth day of Farvardin. If I could find that place, and if I could sit under that cypress tree, I was sure some tranquility would appear in my life. But, alas, there was nothing there but refuse, hot sand, the ribcage of a horse, and a dog sniffing the top of the trash. Had I really met her? Never. I only saw her stealthily through a hole, through an ill-fated hole in the closet of my room. I was like a hungry dog that sniffs and searches the garbage. When people appear with more trash, he runs away and, out of fear, hides himself. Later he returns to seek his favorite pieces in the new trash. I was in a similar situation, only for me the hole had been blocked up. To me she was a fresh and tender bouquet of flowers thrown on top of a trash pile.

Hecate watched the maelstrom of thoughts flash through his mind. The past. The feel of her soft skin, the press of her naked flesh, their mutual need. Hands running through hair, lifting, entangling. The present. Cypress and wind; fire and union in the void. The future. Red flowers clinging to a tree that rose from the field of gray, branches entwining through others' branches. Red, ripe fruit hung on interlocked boughs. Radiating out from the tree came soft grasses and flowers that spread over immeasurable ground. Hecate imparted in three voices what she saw. "Embrace and cherish these visions, Aidoneus. They belong to both of you.

Scupper walked to the sitting room, calling back, “I used to know most of it by heart, but not anymore. But here it is, I’ll read it to ya.” He sat back down at the table and began reading. When he got to this segment: “And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar; And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said, ‘Please close that door. It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm— Since I left Plumtree down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.’” Scupper and Tate chuckled. “Your mom always laughed at that.” They smiled, remembering. Just sat there a minute. Then Scupper said he’d wash up while Tate did his homework. In his room, scanning through the poetry book for one to read in class, Tate found a poem by Thomas Moore: . . . she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp, Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp, She paddles her white canoe. And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see, And her paddle I soon shall hear; Long and loving our life shall be, And I’ll hide the maid in a cypress tree, When the footstep of death is near. The words made him think of Kya, Jodie’s little sister. She’d seemed so small and alone in the marsh’s big sweep. He imagined his own sister lost out there. His dad was right—poems made you feel something.

On this bald hill the new year hones its edge. Faceless and pale as china The round sky goes on minding its business. Your absence is inconspicuous; Nobody can tell what I lack. Gulls have threaded the river’s mud bed back To this crest of grass. Inland, they argue, Settling and stirring like blown paper Or the hands of an invalid. The wan Sun manages to strike such tin glints From the linked ponds that my eyes wince And brim; the city melts like sugar. A crocodile of small girls Knotting and stopping, ill-assorted, in blue uniforms, Opens to swallow me. I’m a stone, a stick, One child drops a carrette of pink plastic; None of them seem to notice. Their shrill, gravelly gossip’s funneled off. Now silence after silence offers itself. The wind stops my breath like a bandage. Southward, over Kentish Town, an ashen smudge Swaddles roof and tree. It could be a snowfield or a cloudbank. I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all. Already your doll grip lets go. The tumulus, even at noon, guargs its black shadow: You know me less constant, Ghost of a leaf, ghost of a bird. I circle the writhen trees. I am too happy. These faithful dark-boughed cypresses Brood, rooted in their heaped losses. Your cry fades like the cry of a gnat. I lose sight of you on your blind journey, While the heath grass glitters and the spindling rivulets Unpool and spend themselves. My mind runs with them, Pooling in heel-prints, fumbling pebble and stem. The day empties its images Like a cup of a room. The moon’s crook whitens, Thin as the skin seaming a scar. Now, on the nursery wall, The blue night plants, the little pale blue hill In your sister’s birthday picture start to glow. The orange pompons, the Egyptian papyrus Light up. Each rabbit-eared Blue shrub behind the glass Exhales an indigo nimbus, A sort of cellophane balloon. The old dregs, the old difficulties take me to wife. Gulls stiffen to their chill vigil in the drafty half-light; I enter the lit house.

Spend more time in nature to boost your own natural killer cells and enhance your immune system; bonus points for frequently visiting a forest with lots of evergreen trees. Or at least use some forest-based essential oils like cypress. •​Consider boron supplements for stem cells, as well as the other listed stem cell enhancers. Calcium fructoborate or food-grade boron (tetraborate) work well. •​Make sure your sexual function is that of a young person. If it isn’t, get your hormone levels checked and look at any prescription meds that may be causing a problem. To improve sexual function, consider GAINSWave treatments or simply practice Kegel exercises on a daily basis.

Fir, cedar, pines, oaks, and maples densely timbered this section. But it was the redwoods that never failed to fill him with awe. Their feathery-looking needles and reddish bark. The way they stretched up to incredible heights and the sheer magnitude of their circumferences. How long ago had God planted their seeds? Hundreds of years? Thousands? As he stood amongst those mighty giants, he realized the land wasn’t his at all. It was God’s. God had formed and planted the seeds. He’d tended the soil and caused it to rain. He’d needed no man. Least of all Joe. Yet over and over Joe had thought of this as his own. My land. My logging camp. My house. My woman. My everything. Picking up his ax, he returned to his work. But in his mind, he reviewed a list of men in the Bible who’d left everything they held dear for parts unknown. Abraham. Jacob. Joseph. Moses. Even a woman. Esther. In every case, their circumstances were much more severe than his. God hadn’t commanded Joe to leave his land, though he’d prayed for guidance. Fasted. Read his Bible. But God had remained silent. Joe simply assumed God was letting him choose. But no matter what he chose, none of it was really his. It was all God’s. And God was sharing it with him. So which did he want? Both. Like a spoiled child, he definitely wanted both. But if he could only have one, wouldn’t he still be a man blessed? Yes. And he’d praise God and thank Him. But that didn’t immediately make the grief shrivel up and blow away. Eyeing where he wanted the tree to fall, he adjusted his stance. I want Anna, Lord. I choose Anna. Yet as long as he lived, he’d always miss this land. He’d miss the Territory. He’d miss the logging. He’d miss his friends. The cypress began to pop and splinter. Jumping away, he braced his feet, threw back his head, and shouted with everything he had. “Timber-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!” The tree wavered, then crashed to the forest floor. Noise resounded through the copse. The ground shook. Debris flew. Before any of it settled, Joe fell to his knees, doubled over, and sobbed.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing. In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep-laden boats pull in against the coast where the canneries dip their tails into the bay. The figure is advisedly chosen, for if the canneries dipped their mouths into the bay the canned sardines which emerge from the other end would be metaphorically, at least, even more horrifying. Then cannery whistles scream and all over the town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. Then shining cars bring the upper classes down: superintendents, accountants, owners who disappear into offices. Then from the town pour Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women in trousers and rubber coats and oilcloth aprons. They come running to clean and cut and pack and cook and can the fish. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats and the boats rise higher and higher in the water until they are empty. The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, straggle out and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again-quiet and magical. Its normal life returns. The bums who retired in disgust under the black cypress-tree come out to sit on the rusty pipes in the vacant lot. The girls from Dora's emerge for a bit of sun if there is any. Doc strolls from the Western Biological Laboratory and crosses the street to Lee Chong's grocery for two quarts of beer. Henri the painter noses like an Airedale through the junk in the grass-grown lot for some pan or piece of wood or metal he needs for the boat he is building. Then the darkness edges in and the street light comes on in front of Dora's-- the lamp which makes perpetual moonlight in Cannery Row. Callers arrive at Western Biological to see Doc, and he crosses the street to Lee Chong's for five quarts of beer. How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise-- the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream-- be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will on to a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-- to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

Certainly in a period of history in which we have become so acutely aware of our alienation in its different manifestations, it has become difficult to unmask the illusion that the final solution for our experience of loneliness is to be found in human togetherness. It is easy to see how many marriages are suffering from this illusion. Often they are started with the hope of a union that can dispel all painful feelings of “not belonging” and continue with the desperate struggle to reach a perfect physical and psychological harmony. Many people find it very hard to appreciate a certain closedness in a marriage and do not know how to create the boundaries that allow intimacy to become an always new and surprising discovery of each other. Still, the desire for protective boundaries by which man and woman do not have to cling to each other, but can move graciously in and out of each other’s life circle, is clear from the many times that Kahlil Gibran’s words are quoted at a wedding ceremony: Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone. Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Stand together yet not too near together For the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must have touched the waves and spattered them—the dolphins circling deeper and deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Sea of Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy. In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours the sand and the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then it pelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standing stiff by the turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle. Sandra’s veils were swirled about her. “I will give you my copy,” said Jacob. “Here. Will you keep it?” (The book was the poems of Donne.) Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark. Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great towns—Paris—Constantinople—London—were black as strewn rocks. Waterways might be distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here perhaps in some southern wood an old man lit dry ferns and the birds were startled. The sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly towards another. The English sky is softer, milkier than the Eastern. Something gentle has passed into it from the grass–rounded hills, something damp. The salt gale blew in at Betty Flanders’s bedroom window, and the widow lady, raising herself slightly on her elbow, sighed like one who realizes, but would fain ward off a little longer—oh, a little longer!—the oppression of eternity. But to return to Jacob and Sandra. They had vanished. There was the Acropolis; but had they reached it? The columns and the Temple remain; the emotion of the living breaks fresh on them year after year; and of that what remains?

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

Land and Sea The brilliant colors are the first thing that strike a visitor to the Greek Isles. From the stunning azure waters and blindingly white houses to the deep green-black of cypresses and the sky-blue domes of a thousand churches, saturated hues dominate the landscape. A strong, constant sun brings out all of nature’s colors with great intensity. Basking in sunshine, the Greek Isles enjoy a year-round temperate climate. Lemons grow to the size of grapefruits and grapes hang in heavy clusters from the vines of arbors that shade tables outside the tavernas. The silver leaves of olive trees shiver in the least sea breezes. The Greek Isles boast some of the most spectacular and diverse geography on Earth. From natural hot springs to arcs of soft-sand beaches and secret valleys, the scenery is characterized by dramatic beauty. Volcanic formations send craggy cliffsides plummeting to the sea, cause lone rock formations to emerge from blue waters, and carve beaches of black pebbles. In the Valley of the Butterflies on Rhodes, thousands of radiant winged creatures blanket the sky in summer. Crete’s Samaria Gorge is the longest in Europe, a magnificent natural wonder rife with local flora and fauna. Corfu bursts with lush greenery and wildflowers, nurtured by heavy rainfall and a sultry sun. The mountain ranges, gorges, and riverbeds on Andros recall the mainland more than the islands. Both golden beaches and rocky countrysides make Mykonos distinctive. Around Mount Olympus, in central Cyprus, timeless villages emerge from the morning mist of craggy peaks and scrub vegetation. On Evia and Ikaria, natural hot springs draw those seeking the therapeutic power of healing waters. Caves abound in the Greek Isles; there are some three thousand on Crete alone. The Minoans gathered to worship their gods in the shallow caves that pepper the remotest hilltops and mountain ranges. A cave near the town of Amnissos, a shrine to Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, once revealed a treasure trove of small idols dedicated to her. Some caves were later transformed into monasteries. On the islands of Halki and Cyprus, wall paintings on the interiors of such natural monasteries survive from the Middle Ages. Above ground, trees and other flora abound on the islands in a stunning variety. ON Crete, a veritable forest of palm trees shades the beaches at Vai and Preveli, while the high, desolate plateaus of the interior gleam in the sunlight. Forest meets sea on the island of Poros, and on Thasos, many species of pine coexist. Cedars, cypress, oak, and chestnut trees blanket the mountainous interiors of Crete, Cyprus, and other large islands. Rhodes overflows with wildflowers during the summer months. Even a single island can be home to disparate natural wonders. Amorgos’ steep, rocky coastline gives way to tranquil bays. The scenery of Crete--the largest of the Greek Isles--ranges from majestic mountains and barren plateaus to expansive coves, fertile valleys, and wooded thickets.