Deep In A Dense Quotes

It's a little dense, don't you think, to antagonize the strongest vampire in the house?' Emmett threw his head back and snorted. 'PLEASE!' [...] I took a deep breath. 'Emmett, how do you feel about a little bet?' He was on his feet at once. 'Awesome. Bring it.

His soul is too dense. If he comes out, he'll dissolve into pieces, like a deep-sea fish pulled to the surface too quickly. I suppose my job is to go on holding him here at the bottom of the sea.

A sharp blade of sadness goes through me, deep and quick. I guess it was bound to happen eventually. I’ve always known it would. Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you. When left to their own devices, people lie and keep secrets and change and disappear, some behind a different face or personality, some behind a dense early morning fog, beyond a cliff. That’s why the cure is so important. That’s why we need it.

The gingko tree leans lazily against the facing wall or perhaps it supports it; Stephen cannot be sure. The dense ridges of its bark now appear like rippled sand with, here and there, pools left behind by the tide. The bark is pocked with white spots, holed and crinkled with age, seemingly dead but for the life sprouting in its leaves, so smooth, so green, so deep. How remarkable this tree is, how changeable, how mysterious its leaves and branches and trunk … how infinite. Stephen reaches for another pipe. The smoke rubs out his yesterdays and tomorrows. There is only now, this tree, this pipe. Another pipe, ah, another pipe.

The mole dug its way deep, deep down, under the foundations of the wall. No magical alarm sounded, though I did hit my head five times on a pebble. Once each on five different pebbles. Not the same pebble five times. Just want to make that clear. Sometimes you human beings are so dense.

Oh! if, when we oppress and grind our fellow-creatures, we bestowed but one thought on the dark evidences of human error, which, like dense and heavy clouds, are rising, slowly it is true, but not less surely, to Heaven, to pour their after-vengeance on our heads; if we heard but one instant, in imagination, the deep testimony of the dead men's voices, which no power can stifle, and no pride shut out; where would be the injury and injustice: the suffering, misery, cruelty, and wrong: that each day's life brings with it!

There had been absolutely nothing I could do to cover up the love I had for her, no desires or goals or bodies dense enough to bury the need that had consumed me since the first time I'd glimpsed her. She'd stolen something from me that I'd never get back, something she kept hidden deep beneath the surface in places I doubted either of us could see, in places neither of us could define.

It was the cool gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation [...] Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy [...] All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene.

Crossing the Swamp" Here is the endless wet thick cosmos, the center of everything—the nugget of dense sap, branching vines, the dark burred faintly belching bogs. Here is swamp, here is struggle, closure— pathless, seamless, peerless mud. My bones knock together at the pale joints, trying for foothold, fingerhold, mindhold over such slick crossings, deep hipholes, hummocks that sink silently into the black, slack earthsoup. I feel not wet so much as painted and glittered with the fat grassy mires, the rich and succulent marrows of earth—a poor dry stick given one more chance by the whims of swamp water—a bough that still, after all these years, could take root, sprout, branch out, bud— make of its life a breathing palace of leaves.

He was called Ice for a number of reasons, but the biggest was because he was truly ice inside. A glacier. Deep, wide, dense, impossible to penetrate. He thought his heart was encased in ice. He thought his emotions long since frozen, but she was changing everything, including his perception of himself.

Long black hair and deep clean blue eyes and skin pale white and lips blood red she's small and thin and worn and damaged. She is standing there. What are you doing here? I was taking a walk and I saw you and I followed you. What do you want. I want you to stop. I breathe hard, stare hard, tense and coiled. There is still more tree for me to destroy I want that fucking tree. She smiles and she steps towards me, toward toward toward me, and she opens he r arms and I'm breathing hard staring hard tense and coiled she puts her arms around me with one hand not he back of my head and she pulls me into her arms and she holds me and she speaks. It's okay. I breathe hard, close my eyes, let myself be held. It's okay. Her voice calms me and her arms warm me and her smell lightens me and I can feel her heart beat and my heart slows and I stop shaking an the Fury melts into her safety an she holds me and she says. Okay. Okay. Okay. Something else comes and it makes me feel weak and scared and fragile and I don't want to be hurt and this feeling is the feeling I have when I know I can be hurt and hurt deeper and more terribly than anything physical and I always fight it and control it and stop it but her voice calms me and her arms warm me and her smell lightens me and I can feel her heart beat and if she let me go right now I would fall and the need and confusion and fear and regret and horror and shame and weakness and fragility are exposed to the soft strength of her open arms and her simple word okay and I start to cry. I start to cry. I want to cry. It comes in waves. THe waves roll deep and from deep the deep within me and I hold her and she holds me tighter and i let her and I let it and I let this and I have not felt this way this vulnerability or allowed myself to feel this way this vulnerability since I was ten years old and I don't know why I haven't and I don't know why I am now and I only know that I am and that it is scary terrifying frightening worse and better than anything I've ever felt crying in her arms just crying in her ams just crying. She guides me to the ground, but she doesn't let me go. THe Gates are open and thirteen years of addiction, violence, hell and their accompaniments are manifesting themselves in dense tears and heavy sobs and a shortness of breath and a profound sense of loss. THe loss inhabits, fills and overwhelms me. It is the loss of a childhood of being a Teeenager of normalcy of happiness of love of trust anon reason of God of Family of friends of future of potential of dignity of humanity of sanity f myself of everything everything everything. I lost everything and I am lost reduced to a mass of mourning, sadness, grief, anguish and heartache. I am lost. I have lost. Everything. Everything. It's wet and Lilly cradles me like a broken Child. My face and her shoulder and her shirt and her hair are wet with my tears. I slow down and I start to breathe slowly and deeply and her hair smells clean and I open my eyes because I want to see it an it is all that I can see. It is jet black almost blue and radiant with moisture. I want to touch it and I reach with one of my hands and I run my hand from the crown along her neck and her back to the base of her rib and it is a thin perfect sheer and I let it slowly drop from the tips of my fingers and when it is gone I miss it. I do it again and again and she lets me do it and she doesn't speak she just cradles me because I am broken. I am broken. Broken. THere is noise and voices and Lilly pulls me in tighter and tighter and I know I pull her in tighter and tighter and I can feel her heart beating and I know she can feel my heart beating and they are speaking our hearts are speaking a language wordless old unknowable and true and we're pulling and holding and the noise is closer and the voices louder and Lilly whispers. You're okay. You're okay. You're okay.

And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep. Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips, murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky. 'Mag-gie!' the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path--the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.

And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor's yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and it's your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk's candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it's only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive--a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bournes and orchards to the solitary hills. Peace.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth. On

Know Deeply, Know Thyself More Deeply" Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths, love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock molten, yet dense and permanent. Go down to your deep old heart, woman, and lose sight of yourself. And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved. Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors. For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths out of sight, in the deep dark living heart. But say, in the dark wild metal of your heart is there a gem, which came into being between us? is there a sapphire of mutual trust, a blue spark? Is there a ruby of fused being, mine and yours, an inward glint? If there is not, O then leave me, go away. For I cannot be bullied back into the appearances of love, any more than August can be bullied to look like March. Love out of season, especially at the end of the season is merely ridiculous. If you insist on it, I insist on departure. Have you no deep old heart of wild womanhood self-forgetful, and gemmed with experience, and swinging in a strange union of power with the heart of the man you are supposed to have loved? If you have not, go away. If you can only sit with a mirror in your hand, an ageing woman posing on and on as a lover, in love with a self that now is shallow and withered, your own self–that has passed like a last summer’s flower– then go away– I do not want a woman whom age cannot wither. She is a made-up lie, a dyed immortelle of infinite staleness.

Happy birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you. Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning. Your face has begun to get shiny when you don’t wash it. And two weeks of a deep and frightening ache this past spring left you with something dropped down from inside: your sack is now full and vulnerable, a commodity to be protected. Hefted and strapped in tight supporters that stripe your buttocks red. You have grown into a new fragility. And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of unyielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights through your window blinds crackling into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between legs, trickles and sticks, cools on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and in the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you.

Then what’s wrong?” He couldn’t be that obtuse. “You’re kidding, right?” “Ah, yeah, gotcha. Modesty issue, huh?” He drove in a deceptively relaxed way. “Look, yours isn’t the first tail I’ve ever seen, okay?” Fury stole Priss’s breath. She reacted without thinking, slugging his hard in the shoulder. “Ow!” He grabbed her wrist and tossed her hand back at her. “I was trying to comfort you, woman.” “Comfort!” He couldn’t be serious. No man could be that dense. “You’re a . . . a Neanderthal!” “Am not.” Flattened by his careless attitude, Priss stared at him in disbelief. He was a gorgeous guy, but still a jerk. Shaggy blond hair, darker and more unkempt than Trace’s, piercing green eyes, a strong jaw and . . . she peeked at his naked chest . . . Built. Her chin lifted. “Where in the world did they even find you?” It had to be under a rock. Or deep in a cave. He glared at her. “They who?” “Trace and Dare.” Giving her a cautious frown, Jackson rubbed at one bloodshot, swollen eye. “That’s top secret.” That’s top secret, she mouthed, making fun of him, lashing out in her embarrassment. He went rigid with affront. “Goddamn it, woman, you blinded me, nutted me, and damn near clubbed me to death. Now you have to ridicule me, too?” He dared to complain to her? “You snuck into my bathroom. You saw me naked!” “Yeah.” His mouth twitched. He nodded just a little. “Yeah, I did.” As he turned on his headlights and pulled onto the street, he said in an aside, “Sorry ’bout that.” He did not sound sorry, not in the least. “Didn’t mean to stare.” He’d been staring? She should kill him. She really shoulder. But . . . she might need him for protection. And Trace probably wouldn’t like it if she offed one of his operatives. “Naked woman and all.” Jackson gestured lamely. “It’s instinct, ya know? Guy’s gotta look.

Every dish I cooked exhumed a memory. Every scent and taste brought me back for a moment to an unravaged home. Knife-cut noodles in chicken broth took me back to lunch at Myeondong Gyoja after an afternoon of shopping, the line so long it filled a flight of stairs, extended out the door, and wrapped around the building. The kalguksu so dense from the rich beef stock and starchy noodles it was nearly gelatinous. My mother ordering more and more refills of their famously garlic-heavy kimchi. My aunt scolding her for blowing her nose in public. Crispy Korean fried chicken conjured bachelor nights with Eunmi. Licking oil from our fingers as we chewed on the crispy skin, cleansing our palates with draft beer and white radish cubes as she helped me with my Korean homework. Black-bean noodles summoned Halmoni slurping jjajangmyeon takeout, huddled around a low table in the living room with the rest of my Korean family. I drained an entire bottle of oil into my Dutch oven and deep-fried pork cutlets dredged in flour, egg, and panko for tonkatsu, a Japanese dish my mother used to pack in my lunch boxes. I spent hours squeezing the water from boiled bean sprouts and tofu and spooning filling into soft, thin dumpling skins, pinching the tops closed, each one slightly closer to one of Maangchi's perfectly uniform mandu.

It's 10:00 a.m., time for the second round of baking of the day. After feeding the fire with chunks of maple, he loads the bread and pastries according to cooking time: first the fat country rounds, then long, skinny loaves dense with nuts and dried fruit, and finally a dozen purple crescent moons: raspberry croissants pocked with chunks of white chocolate.

And around her, suddenly, joined and overlapping in a way that somehow does not create paradox or cause pain, are her kin. Bright Manhattan, tall and shining, but with the deepest of shadows between his daggerlike skyscrapers. Jittery, jagged Queens, pan-amorous in her welcome to all, genius in her creative hustle and determination to put down roots. Brooklyn is old, family-solid, a deep-rooted thing of brown stone and marble halls and crumbling tenements, last stop for the true-born of New York before they are forced into the wilderness of, horror of horrors, Long Island. And together, they turn and behold their lost sister at last: Staten Island. She is dim compared to their light, suburban where they are dense, thinly populated in comparison to their teeming millions. There are actually farms somewhere amid her substance. And yet. She bristles with tiny throwing daggers in the shape of ferries, and defensive fortifications built in semi-attached two-family blocks. They can feel the strength and attitude of her, blazing more brightly than any sodium lamp. She is so different, so reluctant… but whether she wants to be or not, and whether the rest of them are willing to admit it or not, she is clearly, truly, New York.

THE MEETING" "Scant rain had fallen and the summer sun Had scorched with waves of heat the ripening corn, That August nightfall, as I crossed the down Work-weary, half in dream. Beside a fence Skirting a penning’s edge, an old man waited Motionless in the mist, with downcast head And clothing weather-worn. I asked his name And why he lingered at so lonely a place. “I was a shepherd here. Two hundred seasons I roamed these windswept downlands with my flock. No fences barred our progress and we’d travel Wherever the bite grew deep. In summer drought I’d climb from flower-banked combe to barrow’d hill-top To find a missing straggler or set snares By wood or turmon-patch. In gales of March I’d crouch nightlong tending my suckling lambs. “I was a ploughman, too. Year upon year I trudged half-doubled, hands clenched to my shafts, Guiding my turning furrow. Overhead, Cloud-patterns built and faded, many a song Of lark and pewit melodied my toil. I durst not pause to heed them, rising at dawn To groom and dress my team: by daylight’s end My boots hung heavy, clodded with chalk and flint. “And then I was a carter. With my skill I built the reeded dew-pond, sliced out hay From the dense-matted rick. At harvest time, My wain piled high with sheaves, I urged the horses Back to the master’s barn with shouts and curses Before the scurrying storm. Through sunlit days On this same slope where you now stand, my friend, I stood till dusk scything the poppied fields. “My cob-built home has crumbled. Hereabouts Few folk remember me: and though you stare Till time’s conclusion you’ll not glimpse me striding The broad, bare down with flock or toiling team. Yet in this landscape still my spirit lingers: Down the long bottom where the tractors rumble, On the steep hanging where wild grasses murmur, In the sparse covert where the dog-fox patters.” My comrade turned aside. From the damp sward Drifted a scent of melilot and thyme; From far across the down a barn owl shouted, Circling the silence of that summer evening: But in an instant, as I stepped towards him Striving to view his face, his contour altered. Before me, in the vaporous gloaming, stood Nothing of flesh, only a post of wood.

In a cage of wire-ribs The size of a man’s head, the macaw bristles in a staring Combustion, suffers the stoking devils of his eyes. In the old lady’s parlour, where an aspidistra succumbs To the musk of faded velvet, he hangs in clear flames, Like a torturer’s iron instrument preparing With dense slow shudderings of greens, yellows, blues, Crimsoning into the barbs: Or like the smouldering head that hung In Killdevil’s brass kitchen, in irons, who had been Volcano swearing to vomit the world away in black ash, And would, one day; or a fugitive aristocrat From some thunderous mythological hierarchy, caught By a little boy with a crust and a bent pin, Or snare of horsehair set for a song-thrush, And put in a cage to sing. The old lady who feeds him seeds Has a grand-daughter. The girl calls him ‘Poor Polly’, pokes fun. ’Jolly Mop.’ But lies under every full moon, The spun glass of her body bared and so gleam-still Her brimming eyes do not tremble or spill The dream where the warrior comes, lightning and iron, Smashing and burning and rending towards her loin: Deep into her pillow her silence pleads. All day he stares at his furnace With eyes red-raw, but when she comes they close. ’Polly. Pretty Poll’, she cajoles, and rocks him gently. She caresses, whispers kisses. The blue lids stay shut. She strikes the cage in a tantrum and swirls out: Instantly beak, wings, talons crash The bars in conflagration and frenzy, And his shriek shakes the house.

Our house is full of tulips, if you want any,” said Charles inexplicably. “What do you mean?” “I mean, before the snow got too deep, we went outside and brought them in. Everything’s full of them. The water glasses, even.” Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they’d had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops.

Suddenly I stood up mightily...bent forward a little, and in one go I produced. I turned. What a sight! What a smell! It was a magnificent log of excrement, at first poorly formed, like conglomerate rock that hasn't had the time to set, and dark brown, nearly black, then resolving itself into a dense texture of a rich chestnut hue, with fascinating convolutions. It started deep in the potty, but after a coil or two it rose up like a hypnotised cobra and came to rest against my calf, where I remember it very, very warm, my first memory of temperature. It ended in a perfect moist peak.

Despite the challenges, S'Apposentu slowly bloomed into one of Cagliari's most important restaurants. Roberto brought with him the hundreds of little lessons he had learned on the road and transposed them onto Sardinian tradition and terreno. He turned roasted onions into ice cream and peppered it with wild flowers and herbs. He reimagined porceddu, Sardinia's heroic roast pig, as a dense terrine punctuated with local fruits. He made himself into a master: of bread baking, cheese making, meat curing. In 2006, Michelin rewarded him with a star, one of the first ever awarded in Sardinia.

Only birds and the chittering and rustling of small animals sounded as I entered the still green western forest. I'd never ridden through these woods on my hunts with Lucien. There was no path here, nothing tame about it. Oaks, elms, and beeches intertwined in a thick weave, almost strangling the trickle of sunlight that crept in through the dense canopy. The moss-covered earth swallowed any sound I made. Old- this forest was ancient. And alive, in a way that I couldn't describe but could only feel, deep in the marrow of my bones. Perhaps I was the first human in five hundred years to walk beneath those heavy dark branches, to inhale the freshness of spring leaves masking the damp, thick rot.

almost forty square kilometers of woodland had been killed outright almost immediately. Within ten days, the dense stands of pine lining the main route between Pripyat and the station turned an unusual color, as their foliage changed gradually from deep green to coppery red. The soldiers and scientists who sped down this road had no need to peer from the observation ports of their armored personnel carriers to know they had entered the “Red Forest”; even shielded by armor plate and bulletproof glass, the needles of their radiometers began to swing wildly amid the extraordinary levels of contamination. The forest posed such a threat that it, too, would soon be mown down by combat engineers and buried in concrete-

[New Orleans.] Katrina changed everything. Life here is different, every face altered. Yet we feel and sense the landscape not only in its hurricane-leveled, sodden depressions but — perhaps even more so now in the strangely comforting depths of our shared history. Even in the worst hit areas, not all is dissipated. Dense intricate attachments burrow too deep to underestimate or overlook. This is no featureless town to be rubbed off the map and cast aside. Here the band plays on. Our kindred colors speak to the values of justice, faith and power; to curious combinations of passion, openness, irreverence and loyalty, to the values of individuality, sharing and compassion. Not least, we still enjoy the sounds of music and respond to succulent foods, to the magnificent flowering gardens, to the elements of grace and dreamy escape, and to the languid Southern charm typical of faded days gone by.

Rice paddies climb the hillsides in wet, verdant staircases, dense woodlands trade space with geometric farmscapes, tiny Shinto shrines sprout like mushrooms in Noto forests. Villages seem to materialize from nowhere- wedged into valleys, perched atop hills, finessed into coastal corners. Pull over, climb out of your car, breathe deep for a taste of the finest air that will ever enter your lungs: green as a high mountain, salty and sweet, with just a whisper of decay in the finish. Noto gained its reputation as the Kingdom of Fermentation because of this air. For most of its history, Noto was cut off from the rest of Japan, forced into a subsistence model that in many ways endures today. That was possible not only because of the bounty of Noto's fertile environment of trees, grasslands, fresh water, and sea, but because the air is rich with humidity that encourages the growth of healthy bacteria, the building blocks of fermentation.

Look at me, woman,” Lor growled. I turned my head and met his gaze coolly. “If he tells you anything about us, we’ll kill you. Do you understand that? One word, you die. So if you’re walking around feeling cocky and protected because Barrons likes to fuck you, think again. The more he likes to do you, the more likely it is that one of us will kill you.” I looked up at Ryodan. The owner of Chester’s nodded. “Nobody killed Fiona.” “She was a doormat.” I pushed the arm away from my neck. “Get out of my way.” “I would suggest you cure him of his little problem if you want to survive,” Lor said. “Oh, I’ll survive.” “The farther away from him you get, the safer you are.” “Do you want me to find the Book or not?” Ryodan answered. “We don’t give a fuck if the Book is out there. Or that the walls are down. Times change, we go on.” “Then why are you helping with the ritual? V’lane said Barrons asked you and Lor to handle the other stones.” “For Barrons. But if he breathes one word about himself, you’re dead.” “I thought he was the boss of you guys.” “He is. He made the rules we live by. We’ll still take you from him.” Take you from him. Sometimes I was so dense. “And he knows that.” “We’ve had to do it before,” Lor said. “Kasteo hasn’t said a word to us since. I say get over it already. It’s been a thousand fucking years. What’s a woman worth?” I inhaled slow and deep as the full ramifications of what they’d just told me sunk in. This was why Barrons never answered any of my questions and never would. He knew what they would do to me if he told me—whatever they’d done to Kasteo’s woman a thousand years ago. “You don’t need to worry about it. He hasn’t told me anything.” “Yet,” Lor said. “But more importantly,” I said, looking at Ryodan. “I won’t ask. I don’t need to know.” I realized it was true. I was no longer obsessed with having a name and an explanation for Jericho Barrons. He was what he was. No name, no reasons, would alter anything about him. Or how I felt.

The dragon roared, deep and thundering, but its triumphant victory call was cut short. I did not hear the weapon discharge over the din of the creature’s bellowing, but I saw, as if in slow motion, the harpoon sailing through the air. It struck the dragon solidly in the chest. A foot higher and it might have slipped through the broken scales to do some damage, but instead our best shot clanked off the dense hide and thudded into the dirt below. The dragon swallowed its roar in surprise and turned its golden eyes to my employer. Jackaby tossed the spent harpoon gun aside and drew the dull machete from his belt. Silhouetted against the firelight, it was almost possible to imagine that he was some brave knight from the storybooks. My desperate mind could turn his ragged coat into a cape and the rusty blade into a sword—although it refused to let the atrocious knit cap become a shining helmet. Even delusions have their limits. Jackaby stood alone against the looming dragon. “Well, Peanut?” he called out. “Shall we finish this?

The men who had inhabited prehistoric Egypt, who had carved the Sphinx and founded the world‘s oldest civilization, were men who had made their exodus from Atlantis to settle on this strip of land that bordered the Nile. And they had left before their ill-fated continent sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a catastrophe which had drained the Sahara and turned it into a desert. The shells which to-day litter the surface of the Sahara in places, as well as the fossil fish which are found among its sands, prove that it was once covered by the waters of a vast ocean. It was a tremendous and astonishing thought that the Sphinx provided a solid, visible and enduring link between the people of to-day and the people of a lost world, the unknown Atlanteans. This great symbol has lost its meaning for the modern world, for whom it is now but an object of local curiosity. What did it mean to the Atlanteans? We must look for some hint of an answer in the few remnants of culture still surviving from peoples whose own histories claimed Atlantean origin. We must probe behind the degenerate rituals of races like the Incas and the Mayas, mounting to the purer worship of their distant ancestors, and we shall find that the loftiest object of their worship was Light, represented by the Sun. Hence they build pyramidal Temples of the Sun throughout ancient America. Such temples were either variants or slightly distorted copies of similar temples which had existed in Atlantis. After Plato went to Egypt and settled for a while in the ancient School of Heliopolis, where he lived and studied during thirteen years, the priest-teachers, usually very guarded with foreigners, favoured the earnest young Greek enquirer with information drawn from their well-preserved secret records. Among other things they told him that a great flat-topped pyramid had stood in the centre of the island of Atlantis, and that on this top there had been build the chief temple of the continent – a sun temple. […] The Sphinx was the revered emblem in stone of a race which looked upon Light as the nearest thing to God in this dense material world. Light is the subtlest, most intangible of things which man can register by means of one of his five senses. It is the most ethereal kind of matter which he knows. It is the most ethereal element science can handle, and even the various kind of invisible rays are but variants of light which vibrate beyond the power of our retinas to grasp. So in the Book of Genesis the first created element was Light, without which nothing else could be created. „The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Deep,“ wrote Egyptian-trained Moses. „And God said, Let there be Light: and there was Light.“ Not only that, it is also a perfect symbol of that heavenly Light which dawns within the deep places of man‘s soul when he yields heart and mind to God; it is a magnificent memorial to that divine illumination which awaits him secretly even amid the blackest despairs. Man, in turning instinctively to the face and presence of the Sun, turns to the body of his Creator. And from the sun, light is born: from the sun it comes streaming into our world. Without the sun we should remain perpetually in horrible darkness; crops would not grow: mankind would starve, die, and disappear from the face of this planet. If this reverence for Light and for its agent, the sun, was the central tenet of Atlantean religion, so also was it the central tenet of early Egyptian religion. Ra, the sun-god, was first, the father and creator of all the other gods, the Maker of all things, the One, the self-born [...] If the Sphinx were connected with this religion of Light, it would surely have some relationship with the sun.

The Northern Lights which had drawn them from their childhood beds in lower latitudes on so many deep winter nights, while summoning in their parents obscure feelings of dread, could now be viewed up here at any time from within, at altitude, in heavenwide pulses of color, dense sheets and billows and colonnades of light and current, in transfiguration unceasing. In small, remote corners of the planet nobody was paying much attention to, between factions nobody knew much about, the undeclared and largely imperceptible war had been under way for years. All up and down the Northern latitudes, clandestine transmitters had been deployed amid pinnacles of ice, in abandoned mining works, in the secret courtyards of ancient Iron-Age fortresses, manned and unmanned, lonely and unearthly in the iceblink. On sky-piercing crags as likely to be frozen seabird guano as rock, scouts of Earth’s Field, desperate, insomniac, interrogated horizons as to any signs of their relief, who were often years late. . . . And indeed for some, the Polar night would last forever—they would pass from the Earth amid unreportable splendor, the aurora in the sky raging up and down spectra visible and invisible. Souls bound to the planetary lines of force, swept pole to pole and through the fabled interior regions as well. . . 

And the black sea of evening, and the deep black bonnet and apron of his grandmother climbing up from the harbour, knitting all the while, leading their ancient donkey burdened with heavy baskets of crab. All the women in the village wore their tippie and carried their knitting easy to hand, under their arm or in their apron pocket, sleeves and sweater-fronts, filigree work, growing steadily over the course of the day. Each village with its own stitch; you could name a sailor’s home port by the pattern of his gansey, which contained a further signature—a deliberate error by which each knitter could identify her work. Was an error deliberately made still an error? Coastal knitters cast their stitches like a protective spell to keep their men safe and warm and dry, the oil in the wool repelling the rain and sea spray, armour passed down, father to son. They knitted shorter sleeves that did not need to be pushed out of the way of work. Dense worsted, faded by the salt wind. The ridge and furrow stitch, like the fields in March when they put in the potatoes. The moss stitch, the rope stitch, the honeycomb, the triple sea wave, the anchor; the hailstone stitch, the lightning, diamonds, ladders, chains, cables, squares, fishnets, arrows, flags, rigging. The Noordwijk bramble stitch. The black-and-white socks of Terschelling (two white threads, a single black). The Goedereede zigzag. The tree of life. The eye of God over the wearer’s heart.

Domenico, my pen pal and the master of ceremonies, emerges from the kitchen in a cobalt suit bearing a plate of bite-sized snacks: ricotta caramel, smoked hake, baby artichoke with shaved bottarga. The first course lands on the table with a wink from Domenico: raw shrimp, raw sheep, and a shower of wild herbs and flowers- an edible landscape of the island. I raise my fork tentatively, expecting the intensity of a mountain flock, but the sheep is amazingly delicate- somehow lighter than the tiny shrimp beside it. The intensity arrives with the next dish, the calf's liver we bought at the market, transformed from a dense purple lobe into an orb of pâté, coated in crushed hazelnuts, surrounded by fruit from the market this morning. The boneless sea anemones come cloaked in crispy semolina and bobbing atop a sticky potato-parsley puree. Bread is fundamental to the island, and S'Apposentu's frequent carb deliveries prove the point: a hulking basket overflowing with half a dozen housemade varieties from thin, crispy breadsticks to a dense sourdough loaf encased in a dark, gently bitter crust. The last savory course, one of Roberto's signature dishes, is the most stunning of all: ravioli stuffed with suckling pig and bathed in a pecorino fondue. This is modernist cooking at its most magnificent: two fundamental flavors of the island (spit-roasted pig and sheep's-milk cheese) cooked down and refined into a few explosive bites. The kind of dish you build a career on.

biomedical view, for its part, increasingly recognizes the power of things like meditation and traditional talk therapy to render concrete structural changes in brain physiology that are every bit as “real” as the changes wrought by pills or electroshock therapy. A study published by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2011 found that subjects who practiced meditation for an average of just twenty-seven minutes a day over a period of eight weeks produced visible changes in brain structure. Meditation led to decreased density of the amygdala, a physical change that was correlated with subjects’ self-reported stress levels—as their amygdalae got less dense, the subjects felt less stressed. Other studies have found that Buddhist monks who are especially good at meditating show much greater activity in their frontal cortices, and much less in their amygdalae, than normal people.n Meditation and deep-breathing exercises work for similar reasons as psychiatric medications do, exerting their effects not just on some abstract concept of mind but concretely on our bodies, on the somatic correlates of our feelings. Recent research has shown that even old-fashioned talk therapy can have tangible, physical effects on the shape of our brains. Perhaps Kierkegaard was wrong to say that the man who has learned to be in anxiety has learned the most important, or the most existentially meaningful, thing—perhaps the man has only learned the right techniques for controlling his hyperactive amygdala.o

But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography. From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate. We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy there more. Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.

What this means is that the (Infinity) of points involved in continuity is greater than the (Infinity) of points comprised by any kind of discrete sequence, even an infinitely dense one. (2) Via his Diagonal Proof that c is greater than Aleph0, Cantor has succeeded in characterizing arithmetical continuity entirely in terms of order, sets, denumerability, etc. That is, he has characterized it 100% abstractly, without reference to time, motion, streets, noses, pies, or any other feature of the physical world-which is why Russell credits him with 'definitively solving' the deep problems behind the dichotomy. (3) The D.P. also explains, with respect to Dr. G.'s demonstration back in Section 2e, why there will always be more real numbers than red hankies. And it helps us understand why rational numbers ultimately take up 0 space on the Real Line, since it's obviously the irrational numbers that make the set of all reals nondenumerable. (4) An extension of Cantor's proof helps confirm J. Liouville's 1851 proof that there are an infinite number of transcendental irrationals in any interval on the Real Line. (This is pretty interesting. You'll recall from Section 3a FN 15 that of the two types of irrationals, transcendentals are the ones like pi and e that can't be the roots of integer-coefficient polynomials. Cantor's proof that the reals' (Infinity) outweighs the rationals' (Infinity) can be modified to show that it's actually the transcendental irrationals that are nondenumerable and that the set of all algebraic irrationals has the same cardinality as the rationals, which establishes that it's ultimately the transcendetnal-irrational-reals that account for the R.L.'s continuity.)

Gian Pero Frau, one of the most important characters in the supporting cast surrounding S'Apposentu, runs an experimental farm down the road from the restaurant. His vegetable garden looks like nature's version of a teenager's bedroom, a rebellious mess of branches and leaves and twisted barnyard wire. A low, droning buzz fills the air. "Sorry about the bugs," he says, a cartoonish cloud orbiting his head. But beneath the chaos a bloom of biodynamic order sprouts from the earth. He uses nothing but dirt and water and careful observation to sustain life here. Every leaf and branch has its place in this garden; nothing is random. Pockets of lettuce, cabbage, fennel, and flowers grow in dense clusters together; on the other end, summer squash, carrots, and eggplant do their leafy dance. "This garden is built on synergy. You plant four or five plants in a close space, and they support each other. It might take thirty or forty days instead of twenty to get it right, but the flavor is deeper." (There's a metaphor in here somewhere, about his new life Roberto is forging in the Sardinian countryside.) "He's my hero," says Roberto about Gian Piero. "He listens, quietly processes what I'm asking for, then brings it to life. Which doesn't happen in places like Siddi." Together, they're creating a new expression of Sardinian terreno, crossing genetic material, drying vegetables and legumes under a variety of conditions, and experimenting with harvesting times that give Roberto a whole new tool kit back in the kitchen. We stand in the center of the garden, crunching on celery and lettuce leaves, biting into zucchini and popping peas from their shells- an improvised salad, a biodynamic breakfast that tastes of some future slowly forming in the tangle of roots and leaves around us.

Do you remember…(doesn’t that appear in each of my letters?), do you remember that you spoke of how eagerly you experienced that period when for the first time autumn and winter were to meet you not in the city, but among the trees whose happiness you knew, whose spring and summer rang in your earliest memories and were mingled with everything warm and dear and tender and with the infinitely blissful melancholies of summer evenings and of long, yearning nights of spring. You knew just as much of them as of the dear people in your surroundings, among whom also summer and spring, kindness and happiness were dedicated to you and whose influence held sway above your growing up and maturing, and whose other experiences would touch you only by report and rarely like a shot in the wood of which superstitious folk tell for a long time. But now you were to remain out in the country house that was growing lonely and were to see the beloved trees suffer in the rising wind, and were to see how the dense park is torn apart before the windows and becomes spacious and everywhere, even in very deep places, discloses the sky which, with infinite weariness, lets itself rain and strikes with heavy drops on the aging leaves that are dying in touching humility. And you were to see suffering where until now was only rapture and anticipation, and were to learn to endure dying in the very place where the heart of life had beaten most loudly upon yours. And you were to behave like the grownups who all at once may know everything, yes, who become grown up just because of the fact that even the darkest and saddest things do not have to be hidden from them, that one does not cover up the dead when they enter, nor hide those whose faces are sawed and torn by a sharp pain.” ―from letter to Clara Westhoff Schmargendorf (Sunday, November 18, 1900)

It was true what Doc had said, that Christmas succeeds Christmas rather than the days it follows. That had become apparent to Smoky in the last few days. Not because of the repeated ritual, the tree sledded home, the antique ornaments lovingly brought out, the Druid greenery hung on the lintels. It was only since last Christmas that all that had become imbued for him with dense emotion, an emotion having nothing to do with Yuletide, a day which for him as a child had nothing like the fascination of Hallowe'en, when he went masked and recognizable (pirate, clown) in the burnt and smoky night. Yet he saw that it was an emotion that would cover him now, as with snow, each time the season came. She was the cause, not he to whom he wrote. "Any," he began again, "my desires this year are a little clouded. I would like one of those instruments you use to sharpen the blades of an old-fashioned lawn mower. I would like the missing volume of Gibbon (Vol. II) which somebody's apparently taken out to use as a doorstop or something and lost." He thought of listing publisher and date, but a feeling of futility and silence came over him, drifting deep. "Santa," he wrote, "I would like to be one person only, not a whole crowd of them, half of them always trying to turn their backs and run whenever somebody" - Sophie, he meant, Alice, Cloud, Doc, Mother; Alice most of all - "looks at me. I want to be brave and honest and shoulder my burdens. I don't want to leave myself out while a bunch of slyboots figments do my living for me." He stopped, seeing he was growing unintelligible. He hesitated over the complimentary close; he thought of using "Yours as ever," but thought that might sound ironic or sneering, and at last wrote only "Yours &c.," as his father always had, which then seemed ambiguous and cool; what the hell anyway; and he signed it: Evan. S. Barnable.

FALL, SIERRA NEVADA This morning the hermit thrush was absent at breakfast, His place was taken by a family of chickadees; At noon a flock of humming birds passed south, Whirling in the wind up over the saddle between Ritter and Banner, following the migration lane Of the Sierra crest southward to Guatemala. All day cloud shadows have moved over the face of the mountain, The shadow of a golden eagle weaving between them Over the face of the glacier. At sunset the half-moon rides on the bent back of the Scorpion, The Great Bear kneels on the mountain. Ten degrees below the moon Venus sets in the haze arising from the Great Valley. Jupiter, in opposition to the sun, rises in the alpenglow Between the burnt peaks. The ventriloquial belling Of an owl mingles with the bells of the waterfall. Now there is distant thunder on the east wind. The east face of the mountain above me Is lit with far off lightnings and the sky Above the pass blazes momentarily like an aurora. It is storming in the White Mountains, On the arid fourteen-thousand-foot peaks; Rain is falling on the narrow gray ranges And dark sedge meadows and white salt flats of Nevada. Just before moonset a small dense cumulus cloud, Gleaming like a grape cluster of metal, Moves over the Sierra crest and grows down the westward slope. Frost, the color and quality of the cloud, Lies over all the marsh below my campsite. The wiry clumps of dwarfed whitebark pines Are smoky and indistinct in the moonlight, Only their shadows are really visible. The lake is immobile and holds the stars And the peaks deep in itself without a quiver. In the shallows the geometrical tendrils of ice Spread their wonderful mathematics in silence. All night the eyes of deer shine for an instant As they cross the radius of my firelight. In the morning the trail will look like a sheep driveway, All the tracks will point down to the lower canyon. “Thus,” says Tyndall, “the concerns of this little place Are changed and fashioned by the obliquity of the earth’s axis, The chain of dependence which runs through creation, And links the roll of a planet alike with the interests Of marmots and of men.

The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly allowance for themselves and their fellow-slaves, were peculiarly enthusiastic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this, when leaving home. They would then sing most exultingly the following words:— "I am going away to the Great House Farm! O, yea! O, yea! O!" This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,—and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart." I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

Meditation led to decreased density of the amygdala, a physical change that was correlated with subjects’ self-reported stress levels—as their amygdalae got less dense, the subjects felt less stressed. Other studies have found that Buddhist monks who are especially good at meditating show much greater activity in their frontal cortices, and much less in their amygdalae, than normal people.n Meditation and deep-breathing exercises work for

Your sister tells you You're stinky as hell Because you don't shower Your mom tells you You're only good Being a disappointment Your brother thinks You're only gloomy Because you don't care They don't know It takes forever to heal, Sometimes, When the wound is deep It takes you forever to get up, Forever to walk, Forever plus one to decide If it's worth it if you eat, And what to eat And how to pick the dishes From the kitchen's cabinet, And that it takes a strength Of walking a marathon To wash them right after They don't know You stopped being you You stopped looking in a mirror That doesn't recognize you To search for a reflection The physics laws have no Dominance when it's your brain That's shut down Fragments of reality getting Forgotten in a dense black hole In your neurons Because for you, Time has frozen, And it's the only physics law That works For you All of them don't know That a corpse doesn’t shower A corpse doesn't hear her mom's tears A corpse doesn't care A corpse is living in darkness Because she's buried since a long Long time A corpse ceases to exist It just is And everyone knows it just is, It's just there Even If it's a breathing one

At last I came upon the hedge maze. Far from the warm circles of light cast by torch and lamp, the leaves and twigs here were wedged in a silver lacework of starlight and shadow. The entrance was framed by two large trees, their branches still bare of any new growth. In the darkness, they seemed less like garden posts marking the way into the labyrinth than two silent sentinels guarding the doorway to the underworld. Shapes writhed in the shadows beyond the archway of bramble and vine, both inviting and intimidating. Yet I was not frightened. The hedge maze smelled like the forest outside the inn, a deep green scent of growth and decay, where life and death were intermingled. A familiar scent. A welcoming scent. The scent of home. Removing my mask, I crossed the threshold, letting darkness swallow me whole. There were no torches or candles lit upon the paths, and neither moonlight nor starlight penetrated the dense bramble. Yet my footing along these paths was sure, every part of me attuned to the wildness around me. Unlike the maze of Schönbrunn Palace, a meticulously manicured and man-made construction, this labyrinth breathed. Nature creeped in along the edges, reclaiming groomed, orderly, and civilized corridors into a twisting tangle of tunnels and tracks, weeds and wildflowers. Paths grew vague, roots unruly, branches untamed. Somewhere deep in the labyrinth, I could hear the giggles and gasps of illicit encounters in the shrubbery. I was careful of my step, lest I trip over a pair of trysting lovers, but when I came upon no one else, I let myself fall into a meditative state of mind. I wandered the recursive spirals of the hedge maze, turn after turn after turn, feeling a measure of calm for the first time in a long time.

The pizzas keep coming: parmigiana di melanzane, planks of eggplant mixed with tomato and Parmesan, roasted in the wood-fired oven until dense and sticky with flavor, then used to crown a pillow-soft disc of dough; la pinsa conciata, a poetic union of pork lard and fig jam and an ancient goat cheese once on the brink of extinction; calzone con scarola riccia, a featherweight shell of blistered impasto stuffed with wilted escarole and anchovy and a tickle of dried chili.

For dinner, he serves dishes such as raw local fish accented with touches like fresh basil and balsamic vinegar; roasted pumpkin soup laced with ishiri; fat, chewy handmade spaghetti with tender rings of squid on a puddle of ink enhanced with another few drops of fish sauce. It's what Italian food would be if Italy were a windswept peninsula in the Far East. If dinner is Ben's personal take on Noto ingredients, breakfast still belongs to his in-laws. It's an elaborate a.m. feast, fierce in flavor, rich in history, dense with centuries of knowledge passed from one generation to the next: soft tofu dressed with homemade soy and yuzu chili paste; soup made with homemade miso and simmered fish bones; shiso leaves fermented kimchi-style, with chilies and ishiri; kaibe, rice mixed with ishiri and fresh baby squid, pressed into patties and grilled slowly over a charcoal fire; yellowtail fermented for six months, called the blue cheese of the sea for its lactic funk. The mix of plates will change from one morning to the next but will invariably include a small chunk of konka saba, mackerel fermented for up to five years, depending on the day you visit. Even when it's broken into tiny pieces and sprinkled over rice, the years of fermentation will pulse through your body like an electric current.

Later that evening the three of us—Lars, Noa, and I—sat together, breathed, and shared our stories. Noa talked about shock, fear, and deep sadness. Lars described his chains and helplessness. I spoke of shock and numbness. If our conversation had stayed there, I think we would have drowned. Instead, I noticed something subtle but deep. We each shared glimpses, soft touches of grace. We reflected on how God had prepared us before the crisis to walk through it. We talked about the different ways He had been with each of us through the long season of Lars’s captivity. We reflected on the gentleness with which He had held us when the kidnapping was over and we each lay wounded, exhausted, and confused in His arms. We spoke these things through tears and trembling words. In doing so, we touched threads of Christ’s presence woven through a dense and traumatic tapestry. It was not a conversation of exultant victory. There was no celebratory glory, but there was certainly glory.

The hard length of his arousal pressed against her stomach, no longer a weapon to be feared but an instrument of pleasure. Lara reached for it cautiously, encircling the shaft with her fingers, sliding them along the hot silken skin. Her touch made him shiver, his body responding eagerly to the caress. She sensed that there were things he wanted to show her, teach her, but for now he let her explore him as she liked. She moved down to the pouch between his legs, testing the pendulous weight, and slid her fingers up the shaft to the smooth, broad tip. He groaned and lowered his mouth to her throat, kissing her, telling her in guttural murmurs how much he wanted her. Pushing her knees upward and apart, he settled in the lee of her thighs and took her, sheathing himself in a deep slide. Lara gasped and wriggled to accommodate him. There was only an instant of discomfort before her body accepted him in dewy welcome. He began a steady rhythm, driving straight and sure within her, angling himself to press against her sex with each stroke. She lifted herself up to him, cradling him with her hips, her hands gripping the dense muscles of his back. He was hard, delicious, riding her just as she wanted, covering her with his masculine weight, plunging deeper, deeper... The pleasure of it was overwhelming. She cried out at the height of it, her body filled with a liquid rush of delight, a shudder of satisfaction. It was equally pleasurable to share Hunter's fulfillment, to hold him in her arms and feel him shake with sensations he could no longer control. He remained inside her for a long time while his mouth covered hers, caressing and tasting.

Except for the coconut cake (filled with Meyer lemon curd and glazed with brown sugar), most of the desserts she made for Walter were not her best or most original, but they were exemplars of their kind: portly, solid-citizen desserts, puddings of rice, bread, and noodles-sweets that the Pilgrims and other humble immigrants who had scraped together their prototypes would have bartered in a Mayflower minute for Greenie's blood-orange mousse, pear ice cream, or tiny white-chocolate eclairs. Walter had also commissioned a deep-dish apple pie, a strawberry marble cheesecake, and a layer cake he asked her to create exclusively for him. "Everybody expects one of those, you know, death-by-chocolate things on a menu like mine, but what I want is massacre by chocolate, execution by chocolate- firing squad by chocolate!" he told her. So that very night, after tucking George in bed, Greenie had returned to the kitchen where she made her living, in a basement two blocks from her home, and stayed up till morning to birth a four-layer cake so dense and muscular that even Walter, who could have benched a Shetland pony, dared not lift it with a single hand. It was the sort of dessert that appalled Greenie on principle, but it also embodied a kind of uberprosperity, a transgressive joy, flaunting the potential heft of butter, that Protean substance as wondrous and essential to a pastry chef as fire had been to early man. Walter christened the cake Apocalypse Now; Greenie held her tongue. By itself, this creation doubled the amount of cocoa she ordered from her supplier every month. After it was on his menu for a week, Walter bet her a lobster dinner that before the year was out, Gourmet would request the recipe, putting both of them on a wider culinary map.

It's barely 8:00 a.m., but my train mates waste little time in breaking out the picnic material. But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography. From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate. We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy three more. Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.

He looked at her, his expression suddenly softened, and he sighed: “However, you did save my life… If it weren’t for you, I would have died in the Abyss of Cangwu that time.” She didn’t expect him to say these words, she was stunned for a moment with tears on her face. Five years ago, when she pulled the unconscious Master out of the Cangwu Abyss, she was shocked and frightened, and her face was full of tears like now. The 13-year-old girl was carrying him on her back shivering, running through the deep forest, falling down and getting up again and again. They got lost in the dense forest as he was in a coma the entire time. It took her a month to walk through the Nightmare Forest and drag him back to the Jiuyi Temple, taking care of him as he was dying. It’s hard to say a word about the indescribable hardships she went through, but she, who was so young at that time, never gave up on him, even when she was on the brink of death. After that, he gifted her the Jade Bone.

Nutrient-dense real food; optimal levels of nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients; the right balance of hormones; the right types of exercise; optimal quality and duration of sleep; deep, restorative practices like meditation or breath work; the right light at the right times, honoring our circadian rhythms; clean water and air; the right mindset and mastering our mind’s negative inner dialogue, which registers in every cell in our body; meaning and purpose; community and connection and love. These are the fundamental building blocks of human health, most of which we as a culture do not prioritize.

The horses, reluctant and excited from the first, become furious and wild. At the next shoal-personal nastiness being past consideration-we dismount, at knee-deep, to give them a moment's rest, shifting the mule's saddle to the trembling long-legged mare, and turning Mr. Brown loose, to follow as he could. After a breathing-spell we resume our splashed seats and the line of wade. Experience has taught us something, and we are more shrewd in choice of footing, the slopes around large trees being attractively high ground, until, by a stumble on a covered root, a knee is nearly crushed against a cypress trunk. Gullies now commence, cut by the rapid course of waters flowing off before north winds, in which it is good luck to escape instant drowning. Then quag again; the pony bogs; the mare, quivering and unmanageable, jumps sidelong among loose corduroy; and here are two riders standing waist-deep in mud and water between two frantic, plunging-horses, fortunately not beneath them. Nack soon extricates himself, and joins the mule, looking on terrified from behind. Fanny, delirious, believes all her legs broken and strewn about her, and falls, with a whining snort, upon her side. With incessant struggles she makes herself a mud bath, in which, with blood-shot eyes, she furiously rotates, striking, now and then, some stump, against which she rises only to fall upon the other side, or upon her back, until her powers are exhausted, and her head sinks beneath the surface. Mingled with our uppermost sympathy are thoughts of the soaked note-books, and other contents of the saddle-bags, and of the.hundred dollars that drown with her. What of dense soil there was beneath her is now stirred to porridge, and it is a dangerous exploit to approach. But, with joint hands, we length succeed in grappling her bridle, and then in hauling her nostrils above water. She revives only for a new tumult of dizzy pawing, before which we hastily retreat. At a second pause her lariat is secured, and the saddle cut adrift. For a half-hour the alternate resuscitation continues, until we are able to drag the head of the poor beast, half strangled by the rope, as well as the mud and water, toward firmer ground, where she recovers slowly her senses and her footing. Any further attempts at crossing the somewhat "wet" Neches bottoms are, of course, abandoned, and even the return to the ferry is a serious sort of joke. However, we congratulate ourselves that we are leaving, not entering the State.

The forest was dense, and filled with all manner of vines and rank undergrowth; the road was a vague opening, where obstructing trees had been felled, the stumps and rotten trunks remaining. Across actual quags a track of logs and saplings had been laid, but long ago, now rotten and in broken patches. As far as the eye could reach, muddy water, sent back by a south wind from the gulf, extended over the vast flat before us, to a depth of from two to six feet, as per immediate personal measurement. We spurred in. One foot: Two feet, with hard bottom: Belly-deep, hard bottom: Shoulder-deep, soft bottom: Shoulder-deep, with a sucking mire: The same, with a network of roots, in which a part of the legs are entangled, while the rest are plunging. The same, with a middle ground of loose poles; a rotten log, on which we rise dripping, to slip forward next moment, head under, haunches in air. It is evident we have reached one of the spots it would have been better to avoid.

Norman slid down a 30 cm (12 inches) wide bench of snow beside the creek on his hip until he reached a rock bowl. At the far side, the stream emptied over an icy waterfall on to sharp rocks 15 m (50 ft) below. Somehow he used cracks to worm his way down from rocky crease to icy blister. The slope wasn’t steep here, but Norman had to traverse giant shale boulders. His stomach was chewing itself and exhaustion tore at him like an animal. He staggered woozily on until looked up and saw the meadow of snow 180 m (600 ft) down slope. But the mountain still wasn’t done with him. Now the enemy was a snarling mass of buckthorn, which lurked below a thin layer of snow. He dropped into it and stuck deep in the well formed by the jagged branches, unable to climb out. A plane passed high above. He yelled and waved. It circled. It had seen him. No. It sailed over the massive ridgeline. ‘I never gave up. My dad taught me to never give up.’ From Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollestad. With the last ounces of his strength, Norman scrabbled and slithered out of the nest of buckthorn. With a flush of euphoria he found he had made it to the oasis of the snow meadow. It was tempting to sit down and celebrate, but he knew he might never get up again. He had to push on. But how would he get out? The vines wove a dense forest on the other side of the meadow. Then, he found some footprints. They were fresh. Norman followed them. After a few minutes, he realized the boot tracks made a circle. Was he delirious? Panic flooded his system. Then: ‘Hello! Anybody there?’ Norman screamed his lungs out. A teenage boy and his dog appeared out of the thickening gloom. ‘You from the crash?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Anyone else?

Nevertheless, the chief thing is: Whatever the others surrounding you in a wide circle may say about you, in superior wisdom, in bestial (except that beasts are not like that) denseness, in diabolical kindness, in homicidal love - I, I, Milena, know to my last fibre that whatever you do you will be doing right, whether you stay in Vienna, or do now this, now that. What, after all, should I be doing with you if I didn't know this? As in the deep sea there is no tiniest spot that isn't always under the heaviest pressure, so it is with you, but any other life is a disgrace and makes me sick to think of; until recently I thought I couldn't endure life, couldn't endure people, and was very ashamed of it, but you confirm to me now that it wasn't life that seemed undendurable to me.

Dina looked up and found herself in a quiet glade, though that was the only thing her eyes could make sense of. Sunlight, much brighter than the tepid dawn, beat down through a circle of sky above her, a deep summer blue. Her skin prickled with an awareness that magic was at work here, though she wasn't sure if it was a witch's or the woodland itself. The entire glade was impossibly carpeted with bluebells. It was November, they shouldn't have been in bloom. But there they were, a dense meadow of bluish-purple flowers swaying in the breeze before her eyes. Impossible. Magical.

The wind was now licking her with force. Pale and fragile, breathing gently, she could feel it salty and playful, pervading and penetrating her entire body, reviving her. She half opened her eyes. Down there below, the sea shone in waves of copper, stretched out, deep, opaque, serene. It came dense and rebellious, rising in spirals. Then it extended itself ... spreading itself over the peaceful sands like a living body. The sea — she said in a whisper, her voice hoarse.

From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn’t walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall—feeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I’d survived rape—I’d have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change. This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation. I wrote it.

White Dawn, That Tak'st The Heaven With Sweet Surprise White dawn, that tak'st the heaven with sweet surprise of amorous artifice, art thou the bearer of my perfect hour divine, untrod, from some forgotten window of Paradise by mighty winds of God blown down the world, before my haunted eyes at length to flower? Nay, virgin dawn, yet art thou all too known, too crowded light to take my boundless hour of flaming peace: thou common dayspring cease; and be there only night, the only night, more than all other lone: be the sole secret world one rose unfurl'd, and nought disturb its blossom'd peace intense, that fills the living deep beyond all dreams of sense enmesh'd in errorous multiplicity: — let be nought but her coming there: what else were fair? It asks no golden web, no censer-fire to tell the dense incarnate mystery where one delight is wed with one desire. No leaves bestrow that passage to the rose of all fulfill'd delight; no silver trumpets blow majestic rite, but silence that is sigh'd from faery lands, or wraps the feet of Beauty where she treads dim fields of fading stars, be round our meeting heads, and seeking hands: draw near, ye heavens, and be our chamber-bars; and thou, maternal heart of holy night, close watch, what hush'd and sacramental tide a soul goes forth wide-eyed, to meet the archangel-sword of loneliest delight

try to hypnotize Chris here,” Bear says, “and then we’ll teach him the Greek alphabet. Right, Sam?” “If Chris is a good subject, and I believe he very well might be, it should work,” Hutto says in a surprisingly deep voice. “But don’t fuck around with him,” the Bear warns. “Any funny stuff and I’ll break your goddamn neck.” Hutto’s look of fright is a visual contract that he won’t try any funny stuff. “You wanna’ try it, Chris?” I ask. He nods uncertainly. “OK, Sam. Let’s give it a whirl.” Hutto directs a study lamp and pulls a chair up close to the Martian’s, leaning forward against its back. At his nod, Dense turns out the overhead light. He removes a shiny fountain pen and holds it vertically in front of the Martian. The steady pen sparkles in the lamplight. “Now Chris,” he says softly, “I want you to relax

Unfortunately this primordial mind remains buried deep within our being for most of the time, unseen and unnoticed. Due to a dense overlay of spiritual ignorance, the various facets of enlightenment that are present in that mind, such as compassion, insight, tolerance and so forth, can only reveal themselves in a perverted and distorted manner. Thus, love becomes attachment and jealousy, compassion becomes hatred and anger, insight becomes opinionatedness and stupidity. These and other negative emotions then become the driving force for ever-greater egoism and spiritual poverty.

The conquest was not achieved without one frightful convulsion of revolt. “In this year A.D. 61”, according to Tacitus, “a severe disaster was sustained in Britain.” Suetonius, the new governor, had engaged himself deeply in the West. He transferred the operational base of the Roman army to Chester. Because it was the centre of Druid resistance he prepared to attack “the populous island of Mona [Anglesey], which had become a refuge for fugitives, and he built a fleet of flat-bottomed vessels suitable for those shallow and shifting seas. The infantry crossed in the boats, the cavalry went over by fords: where the water was too deep the men swam alongside of their horses. The enemy lined the shore, a dense host of armed men, interspersed with women clad in black like the Furies, with their hair hanging down and holding torches in their hands. Round this were Druids

For hundreds of millennia, humans connected tightly to the land and the life forms their survival depended upon, because that was how it had to be. Failure to connect was not an option; if you didn’t know how plants grew, how animals bred, how rivers ran, how the seasons and the weather changed, then you did not survive. In some parts of the world – the Native American tribal lands of West Coast USA, the dense forests of West Papua, the deep valleys and jagged mountains of northern India – these connections remain, and cling on despite the best efforts of those who seek to gain more from the land than ‘mere’ survival. This connection has ebbed away from the majority of humanity, in many cases to the extent that people feel nothing for anything humans have not created themselves. But we cannot eat concrete; we cannot breathe television; we cannot drink money.

There is now a distance, pressing quite persistent, May be only inches apart, but as if an artery is blocked. There now seem some secrets, a word which was earlier so needless. May be they now laugh so less, and even in summers, the air between them feels dense. Who connects? Who neglects? Barely matters when you are no more friends.

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

Protogenesis The Seven Secret Sayings of God Before athe beginning when God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep, God said bI AM THAT. And it is so. Also, being in eternity which is neither linear nor sequential, where all is nowever, God said, YOU MUST DRAW THE LINE SOMEWHERE. And it was drawn. But it was no dreary straight line or flat wall, for God then said, HAVE A BALL. And there was a ball, in the image whereof all stars and planets came to be formed. Thereupon God said, THERE ARE TWO SIDES TO EVERYTHING. And there are: the inside and the outside, the dense and the spacious, the right and the wrong, the left and the taken, for, as it is written, cOne shall be taken, and the other left. And God said, IT MUST BE IN TIME. And thereafter it was, is, and will be, for as it is written again, dAs it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be, through all ages of ages. Amen. And forthwith God said, SPACE IT OUT. Whereupon it came to pass that, beside this and that and now and then, there is also here and there. And God beheld ehow firm a foundation this was and said unto himself, GET LOST. And there you are.

The Caribbean is still an exciting destination. I have been to just about every notable island surrounding this sea and have yet to be bored. Some of the islands are administered by other countries like Saint Martín; some are independent countries such as Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The languages differ from island to island and include English, French, Spanish, Dutch Haitian Creole and Papiamento although English is understood on most islands. This time I returned to the Dominican Republic, an island nation that I first visited when Santo Domingo was called Ciudad Trujillo in 1955 and have returned numerous times. I have also been to Haiti the country that shares the Island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic and I have stood at the mountainous border dividing the two countries. Driving around the country offers magnificent views with every turn in the road. On this visit I enjoyed the northern Atlantic coast named the Amber Coast because of the amount of amber found there. The primary site along the northern coast is La Cordillera Septentrional. The amber-bearing stones named clastic rocks are usually washed down the steep inclines along with sandstone and other debris and are even found in deep water at the end of the run. The Amber Coast of the Dominican Republic has mostly low mountains and beautiful beaches. Overlooking the city of Puerto Plata is Mount Isabel de Torres, which is covered by dense jungles but can be ascended by a cableway. Some of these jungle areas were used as sites for the movie Jurassic Park. A new 30 acre tourist port for Carnival Cruise Lines has been constructed in Amber Cove at a cost of $85 Million. It is one of the newest destinations to visit in the Caribbean and well worth the effort.

They were brought over a mix of different kinds of rosy-seabass sashimi. The surface of its skin had been lightly scorched. On her first bite, Rika widened her eyes at the deep sweetness of the meaty flesh. Next to appear was her bowl of rice, its shining white grains forming a mound over the rim of the bowl. Rika picked up her chopsticks and tucked in. On the other side of the table, Reiko was biting into her onigiri wrapped in dense black nori. Both of their expressions took on an ecstatic cast. Each individual grain of rice was so intensely sweet. She could sense not only the flavor of the grains on her tongue, but their shape as well. When she chewed them, the inside of her mouth loosened, and when she made to greedily absorb them and taste them, she could feel the insides of her body whirring round as if all its cogs were moving. A soft heat rose up from her solar plexus. Cutting the taste with the pumpkin pickles, pale pink millet roe, and the umeboshi brought out with the rice, she worked her way through in small mouthfuls.

I think he'll be able to live only in the hidden room. His soul is too dense. If he comes out, he'll dissolve into pieces, like a deep-sea fish pulled to the surface too quickly. I suppose my job is to go on holding him here at the bottom of the sea.

Schwieger ordered the submarine to the bottom so his crew could dine in peace. “And now,” said Zentner, “there was fresh fish, fried in butter, grilled in butter, sautéed in butter, all that we could eat.” These fish and their residual odors, however, could only have worsened the single most unpleasant aspect of U-boat life: the air within the boat. First there was the basal reek of three dozen men who never bathed, wore leather clothes that did not breathe, and shared one small lavatory. The toilet from time to time imparted to the boat the scent of a cholera hospital and could be flushed only when the U-boat was on the surface or at shallow depths, lest the undersea pressure blow material back into the vessel. This tended to happen to novice officers and crew, and was called a “U-boat baptism.” The odor of diesel fuel infiltrated all corners of the boat, ensuring that every cup of cocoa and piece of bread tasted of oil. Then came the fragrances that emanated from the kitchen long after meals were cooked, most notably that close cousin to male body odor, day-old fried onions. All this was made worse by a phenomenon unique to submarines that occurred while they were submerged. U-boats carried only limited amounts of oxygen, in cylinders, which injected air into the boat in a ratio that varied depending on the number of men aboard. Expended air was circulated over a potassium compound to cleanse it of carbonic acid, then reinjected into the boat’s atmosphere. Off-duty crew were encouraged to sleep because sleeping men consumed less oxygen. When deep underwater, the boat developed an interior atmosphere akin to that of a tropical swamp. The air became humid and dense to an unpleasant degree, this caused by the fact that heat generated by the men and by the still-hot diesel engines and the boat’s electrical apparatus warmed the hull. As the boat descended through ever colder waters, the contrast between the warm interior and cold exterior caused condensation, which soaked clothing and bred colonies of mold. Submarine crews called it “U-boat sweat.” It drew oil from the atmosphere and deposited it in coffee and soup, leaving a miniature oil slick. The longer the boat stayed submerged, the worse conditions became. Temperatures within could rise to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “You can have no conception of the atmosphere that is evolved by degrees under these circumstances,” wrote one commander, Paul Koenig, “nor of the hellish temperature which brews within the shell of steel.

The brisk wind, flowing river, rocky mountains, dense forest, and blue sky all contribute to my deep understanding of life.

Walnuts Philosophers have said that we love music because it resembles the sphere-sounds of union. We've been part of a harmony before, so these moments of treble and bass keep our remembering fresh. But how does this happen within these dense bodies full of forgetfulness and doubt and grieving? It's like water passing through us. It becomes acidic and bitter, but still as urine it retains watery qualities. It will put out a fire! So there is this music flowing through our bodies that can dowse restlessness. Hearing the sound, we gather strength. Love kindles with melody. Music feeds a lover composure, and provides form for the imagination. Music breathes on personal fire and makes it keener. The waterhole is deep. A thirsty man climbs a walnut tree growing next to the pool and drops walnuts one by one into the beautiful place. he listens carefully to the sound as they hit and watches the bubbles. A more rational man gives advice, "You'll regret doing this. You're so far from the water that by the time you get down to gather walnuts, the water will have carried them away." He replies, "I'm not here for walnuts, I want the music they make when they hit.

Under Dr. Nasha’s care most experience far better clinical outcomes (some cases we can truly call “miracles”) and a better quality of life living with cancer than patients adhering strictly to the conventional medical model. Because of her emphasis on traditional, whole food, nutrient-dense, and therapeutic diets, Dr. Nasha teamed up with master nutrition therapist Jess Higgins Kelley in order to expand treatment and education options for her patients. Together we knew there had to be a better way to approach this largely preventable and debilitating disease—and we have found it.

The whole district of Australia where I lived was just a small plot in the immensity of the huge continent whose fringes only had been explored. Berrima, in fact, was merely a little paddock which had been carved out of the wilderness. Yet even here in the stillness of the early evening I had a feeling that as a human being I was an intruder in the forest. For these dense forests belonged to the pale ghostly trees and to the strange creatures that were hidden in them. Then, suddenly, I would jump as if a gun had been fired close to me, as the silence was rent by the piercing din of the kookaburra, screeching and screeching from the branches of a tree above, until the menacing sound changed to a mocking laugh. The low, hoarse laugh would seem unending. Abruptly it would finish in an obscene, deep-throated chuckle, which had an odd quality of knowingness and familiarity, suggesting an intimate awareness of the stark fear of the man walking through the undergrowth below, and a malicious pleasure at the prospect of some inevitable and terrible doom.

I had stayed closer to Japan than she had. I yearned for Japan, Japanese food, Japanese people; I loved the Japanese language and, more than anything, Japanese literature written with the three distinct systems of Japanese writing: graceful hiragana ひらがな, spartan katakana カタカナ, and dense kanji 漢字. Someday soon I was to return to Japan, to the country that held all things dear to me, and when I did, then at last I would awaken deep, slumbering yearnings and embark triumphantly and ecstatically on a new life—my real life. Yet that day never came, and I had ended up spending an unconscionable portion of my one-and-only life on foreign soil, far from where I was meant to be.

Nothing is ingrained more deeply in American ideology than that ours is a free country. Yet freedom and slavery were densely entangled in the early United States.

Close your eyes and imagine a vast, open space, perhaps a meadow or a clearing in a forest. In the center of this space stands a young tree, still delicate and small. This tree represents you at the beginning of your smoking journey. Its brown and withered leaves symbolize the harmful effects of smoking on your health and life. With each cigarette you’ve smoked, the tree has suffered another blow. Its leaves have turned browner, its bark has become more cracked, and its branches more brittle. But then, you make the decision to quit smoking. As soon as you make this decision, the tree begins to change. With each smoke-free day, new green leaves sprout. Its bark becomes smoother, its branches sturdier. It grows and extends its roots deep into the earth, absorbing nutrients and reaching for the sky. With each passing day, the tree becomes larger, stronger, and more vibrant. Months and years go by, and the tree becomes a monumental testament to your determination and willpower. Its dense foliage offers shelter and shade, and its sturdy trunk withstands the fiercest storms. It is a symbol of health, growth, and longevity. This tree represents your life without cigarettes. It shows that from a decision, from a first step, powerful change can arise. Every time you feel the urge to smoke, remember your Tree of Life and see how it continues to evolve, bloom, and thrive. Use this image as inspiration and a reminder that you have the power to change yourself and your life for the better.

Staring into that shadow, that perfect black, Dan thought of an ocean, endless and deep. Not an ocean of water but an ocean of time. Where dense kelp forests of memory and emotion shimmered. Where abstract shapes lay dormant and asleep like bugs that waited a dozen cycles of the seasons before waking. Found you, the broken glass said as it rattled and hummed.

The story was about three women who haunted the forest of Aokigahara. According to legend, the trio had been dropped so deep into the vast, dense forest that they could never find their way out. The only souls they ever stumbled across were those who came there to die, and even those dark souls were so terrified of their hideous faces, they refused to speak with them. For the rest of their days, they were doomed to wander the sea of trees, surrounded by death and sorrow.

Then a deep, satisfied chuckle overcame me as the upper branches of the oak began snapping off, and when they crashed to the ground, the charred wood crumbled into a dense gray ash. “How the hell ye’ do that?” Haragh suddenly croaked out from behind me, and I abruptly stopped chuckling to myself like a lunatic as I looked over my shoulder. “New rune I’m testing out,” I said with a lethal grin. “It don’t make a sound,” the half-ogre breathed as he stared at the smoldering oak like he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Is it burnin’ or… ?” “It’s burning,” I assured him. “No light, no sound, and hardly any smoke, but it spreads rapidly and is capable of burning any substance, even metal. The only give away is the smell, and safe to say, it’s already too late by the time anyone notices. The ultimate stealth weapon.” “I worry about you sometimes,” Haragh muttered. “You’re one take-over plan away from a real villainous streak, you know that?” I shrugged as I sent the half-ogre a careless smirk. “Don’t worry, I’m not the one pulling the trigger anyways.” Then I turned around, and as Stan saluted Haragh with his tiny rifle proudly propped up on his shoulder, the half-ogre’s expression shifted to terror as he looked between the mini metal man and the destruction he’d caused. “Have ye’ lost your fuckin’ mind?” the half-ogre scoffed.

The creation of new souls is a fascinating procedure, one that Judy was able to explain in graphic detail. She showed Val an image of a light being shattered into many fragments, with a solid part remaining intact at the core. This very dense core of energy embodies old souls, and those fragments exploding to the outside represent newer souls. We are all part of the same original spirit and the spirit fragments spread outward with the newest souls on the outer fringes. Judy explained further, “When this shattering takes place, part of our soul heals and stays in spirit and another part moves on, so we go into different areas. The new souls are the less dense parts of that spirit energy.” This means there is a part of every soul in each new one created, as we are all growing, all evolving, at all times. At this stage, as my head was spinning with thoughts and images of all these fragments, M came to my rescue, saying that this explains the oneness of all life. The original energy that fragmented, creating the first souls, is what most people refer to as “God” (also the Creator, the Divine, the Source, Spirit). Each fragment then becomes its own spirit entity, before eventually fragmenting again, and so on. M also explained that new souls come from only the more advanced spirits; I found it comforting to know that spirits in the dark side are not given this capability. It also explains, for me, why so many gifted children are being born in recent years—their deep soul wisdom and advanced intelligence are sorely needed in the future to help us in these turbulent times.

Areas that are densely populated today, Chicago, New York, Manchester, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin, Moscow -- in fact most of North America and northern Europe -- were absolutely uninhabitable due to the fact that they were covered by ice-caps several kilometers thick. Conversely, many areas that are uninhabitable today -- on account of being on the bottom of the sea, or in the middle of hostile deserts such as the Sahara (which bloomed for about 4000 years at the end of the last Ice Age) -- were once (and relatively recently) desirable places to live that were capable of supporting dense populations. Geologists calculate that nearly 5 per cent of the earth's surface -- an area of around 25 million square kilometers or 10 million square miles -- has been swallowed by rising sea-levels since the end of the Ice Age. That is roughly the equivalent to the combined areas of the United States and the whole of South America. It is an area almost three times as large as Canada and much larger than China and Europe combined. What adds greatly to the significance of these lost lands of the last Ice Age is not only their enormous area but also -- because they were coastal and in predominantly warm latitudes -- that they would have been among the very best lands available to humanity anywhere in the world at that time. Moreover, although they represent 5 per cent of the earth's surface today, it is worth reminding ourselves that humanity during the Ice Age was denied useful access to much of northern Europe and North America because of the ice-sheets. So the 25 million square kilometers that were lost to the rising seas add up to a great deal more than 5 per cent of the earth's useful and habitable landspace at that time.

They’re a lot bigger than the last ones,” I say. “Yeah, they must be four weeks old. She must have dropped this litter early. Can you sit with your legs out to hold them?” Without a subterranean den, we had to coral them somehow. Inside the copse, there is barely room to move. I drop down to a sitting position with my legs splayed out, and the pups wiggle en masse against my thigh. Their noses press against my pant leg. They calm down and begin to nuzzle into each other. Dirt streaks their coats, which range from coal to warm gray. Their heads are covered in dense auburn fur, and all of them have now closed their milky-gray eyes. I stare at them in disbelief at the thought that, not so long ago, settlers threw dynamite into wolf puppy dens. Their muzzles appear foreshortened and out of proportion to the long and wide jaws they will grow into one day. Something compels one pup to move closer and closer to me until the little wolf wedges its nose firmly into my groin. The other pups trail behind it, tunneling between each other and pawing their way over one another until all four are piled together between my legs. I try not to think about the fact that suddenly I am a temporary nursemaid to some of the world’s rarest wolves while their mother likely paces a few dozen yards away. Adjusting the puppies is futile, as they seem hardwired to nuzzle their way into the warmest, tightest spot they can find. The brambles, while thick on the outside, form a natural opening in the middle that is just large enough for a wolf to circle around in. The mother had dug a very shallow earthen dish - only a few inches deep - to keep her babies in. “Doesn’t seem like much of a den,” I remark. “I thought we’d find another big hole in the ground.” “It varies,” Ryan says. “Sometimes we find them in these bowl depressions, usually where the woods are thicker and the ground is flatter, like here. But sometimes they’re in holes. When the ground is sloped, they’ll dig back into the slope. That’s the most typical kind of den. But we’ve found them in storm culverts, too. It’s all over the map.” Ryan sets to work pulling out rubber gloves, blood-sample supplies and ID chips. Chris snaps and cracks his way to us. He crawls through the copse and curses at the dense vegetation. Finally, he reaches the inner sanctum, where there is barely enough room to sit Indian style jammed up against Ryan’s legs and mine. Roomy for a wolf, maybe, but cramped for three human adults. “What a sorry little den,” Chris remarks. He glances at the scratched-out dirt bed and porous brush overhead. Rain drips through, wetting our heads. “Is she nearby?” “Somewhere over there.” Ryan gestures behind us. “She’s not going far, though, you can be sure of that. These guys squealed their guts out.

Of American cities, Pittsburgh was the smokiest, partly because of its location, partly because of its heavy industry. The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, visiting Canada and the United States in 1861, judged Pittsburgh to be “the blackest place which I ever saw.” The site was “picturesque,” Trollope thought, “for the spurs of the mountains come down close round the town, and the rivers are broad and swift.” Pittsburgh’s setting at the foot of the Alleghenies, in a deep valley at the junction of two rivers, was one reason it collected smoke: “Even the filth and wondrous blackness of the place are picturesque when looked down upon from above. The tops of the churches are visible, and some of the larger buildings may be partially traced through the thick, brown, settled smoke. But the city itself is buried in a dense cloud.”11

As the battle began Ivo Taillefer, the minstrel knight who had claimed the right to make the first attack, advanced up the hill on horseback, throwing his lance and sword into the air and catching them before the English army. He then charged deep into the English ranks, and was slain. The cavalry charges of William’s mail-clad knights, cumbersome in manœuvre, beat in vain upon the dense, ordered masses of the English. Neither the arrow hail nor the assaults of the horsemen could prevail against them. William’s left wing of cavalry was thrown into disorder, and retreated rapidly down the hill. On this the troops on Harold’s right, who were mainly the local “fyrd”, broke their ranks in eager pursuit. William, in the centre, turned his disciplined squadrons upon them and cut them to pieces. The Normans then re-formed their ranks and began a second series of charges upon the English masses, subjecting them in the intervals to severe archery. It has often been remarked that this part of the action resembles the afternoon at Waterloo, when Ney’s cavalry exhausted themselves upon the British squares, torn by artillery in the intervals. In both cases the tortured infantry stood unbroken. Never, it was said, had the Norman knights met foot-soldiers of this stubbornness. They were utterly unable to break through the shield-walls, and they suffered serious losses from deft blows of the axe-men, or from javelins, or clubs hurled from the ranks behind. But the arrow showers took a cruel toll. So closely, it was said, were the English wedged that the wounded could not be removed, and the dead scarcely found room in which to sink upon the ground. The autumn afternoon was far spent before any result had been achieved, and it was then that William adopted the time-honoured ruse of a feigned retreat. He had seen how readily Harold’s right had quitted their positions in pursuit after the first repulse of the Normans. He now organised a sham retreat in apparent disorder, while keeping a powerful force in his own hands. The house-carls around Harold preserved their discipline and kept their ranks, but the sense of relief to the less trained forces after these hours of combat was such that seeing their enemy in flight proved irresistible. They surged forward on the impulse of victory, and when half-way down the hill were savagely slaughtered by William’s horsemen. There remained, as the dusk grew, only the valiant bodyguard who fought round the King and his standard. His brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine, had already been killed. William now directed his archers to shoot high into the air, so that the arrows would fall behind the shield-wall, and one of these pierced Harold in the right eye, inflicting a mortal wound. He fell at the foot of the royal standard, unconquerable except by death, which does not count in honour. The hard-fought battle was now decided. The last formed body of troops was broken, though by no means overwhelmed. They withdrew into the woods behind, and William, who had fought in the foremost ranks and had three horses killed under him, could claim the victory. Nevertheless the pursuit was heavily checked. There is a sudden deep ditch on the reverse slope of the hill of Hastings, into which large numbers of Norman horsemen fell, and in which they were butchered by the infuriated English lurking in the wood. The dead king’s naked body, wrapped only in a robe of purple, was hidden among the rocks of the bay. His mother in vain offered the weight of the body in gold for permission to bury him in holy ground. The Norman Duke’s answer was that Harold would be more fittingly laid upon the Saxon shore which he had given his life to defend. The body was later transferred to Waltham Abbey, which he had founded. Although here the English once again accepted conquest and bowed in a new destiny, yet ever must the name of Harold be honoured in the Island for which he and his famous house-carls fought indomitably to the end.

Through a chink in my fingers, I watched Mel react. She fished around in her sock, producing a switchblade. She clicked it open and whipped it through the air. The steel blade caught the sunlight, and flashed. Then she tore after the creature, squealing and hoofing as it had. It looked up at her in dismay, and I partially pitied it, pitied the terror on its homely face. She swiped the blade across its side as it attempted to turn around, its legs scrabbling, its pudgy body squirming and twitching, trying in vain to push through the dense tangle. Mel had a chance to knife it again—I could see her debating whether she should, but she wiped the bloody blade against her sock instead. The injured creature finally made headway into the creepers. Another squeal, and then its backside and tufted tail disappeared into the undergrowth. Shuddering, I moved my hands from my face. I stared at Mel. I tried to breathe. The pig’s blood looked bright and alarming against the grimy cotton of her sock. FROM DAMSELFLY “Will it die?” I whispered. “I didn’t get it very deep. I should have killed it. Killed it before it killed you.

Where is everyone?” Cat asked, looking around the deserted ship. “Shore leave,” he said laconically. “What about us?” “If it’s urgent, we’ll just have to swim.” Cat yawned and stretched languidly, feeling boneless from Travis’s loving and a long, wonderful nap. “Swim? Ha. I’d go down like a brick. Looks like you’re stuck with me.” Travis tilted her face up and kissed her swiftly. “Remember that, witch. You’re mine.” Her eyes widened into misty silver pools. She looked up at him through dense lashes that glinted red and gold. He smiled. “You really are a pirate, aren’t you?” Cat muttered. “Where you’re concerned, yes.” The sensual rasp in Travis’s voice sent echoes of ecstasy shimmering through her. His smile was rakish and utterly male, reminding her of what it was like to have him deep inside her. It was all Cat could do not to simply stand and stare at her lover. In the slanting afternoon light his eyes had a jewel-like purity of color. His skin was taught, deeply bronzed, and his beard was spun from dark gold. Beneath his faded black T-shirt and casual shorts, his body radiated ease and power. “Don’t move,” Cat ordered, heading back to the cabin. “Where are you going?” “Don’t move!” She raced below deck, grabbed the two camera cases she used most often, and ran back on deck. While Travis watched her with a lazy, sexy gleam in his eyes, she pulled out a camera and a small telephoto lens. When she retreated a few feet back along the deck, he moved as though to follow. “No,” she said. “Stay right where you are. You’re perfect.” “Cat,” he said, amusement curling in his voice, “what are you doing?” “Taking pictures of an off-duty buccaneer.” The motor drive surged quickly, pulling frame after frame of film through the camera. “You’re supposed to be taking pictures of the Wind Warrior,” Travis pointed out. “I am. You’re part of the ship. The most important part. Creator, owner, soul.” She caught the sudden intensity of his expression, an elemental recognition of her words. The motor drive whirred in response to her command. After a few more frames she lowered the camera and walked back to him. “Get used to looking into a camera lens.” Cat warned Travis. “I’ve been itching to photograph you since the first time I looked into those gorgeous, sea-colored eyes of yours.” Laughing softly, he snaked one arm around her and pulled her snugly against his side.

We built new houses on the new riverbanks and our abandoned riverbed became, seen from space (we saw pictures), a long, pale line by day, a deep, black slash at night. Ode to Asa Bundy Sheffey, which was Robert Hayden’s birth name, reduced from three trochees to two. It was a family issue, his unhappy mother giving him to unhappy neighbors, the Haydens, who raised him, and called him Robert Hayden, though they never bothered to make it legal. From time to time, he’d see his blood parents—in a blur, his eyes so bad he never knew what they looked like, nor even what he himself looked like, without his glasses, which were so thick sometimes sight got lost inside them. Might he have left, or found, some poems in those dense lenses? An austere militant of reticence: Robert Hayden Asa Bundy Sheffey. Permissionless, I’m adding three more tumbling trochees, making five in a row, to inject into your name even more velocity. They’re all I can give you, in gratitude for some truths you left, in deep-set ink, on the page.

the nickname for the project was Continental Shotgun. Bury a lot of very powerful nuclear munitions and use their energy when they explode to pump a huge field of single-use particle beam tubes. The research project aimed to turn a section of a planet about a hundred kilometers square into a one-time-only dense field of particle beams that could annihilate an invasion fleet when it passed above that region of the planet.” Jamenson gasped a deep breath before she could continue speaking. “But it was abandoned because the weapon effectively destroyed the planet it was supposed to defend. The seismic impact of that many explosions that massive, the amount of material hurled into the atmosphere, the huge amount of nuclear contamination, it all combined to inflict massive damage and render a planet almost uninhabitable. That, and the target had to pass over the weapon, which was hard to guarantee.

I extended my right leg, and the right arm, elbow down and in, wrist level with my sternum. She did the same. The backs of our wrists touched. Well-shaped nails, no wedding ring. Her skin was dense and fine-grained, taut over smooth muscle, and her bones slender. She looked the sort of woman who has studied ballet for twelve years. Her eyes were blue, the deep blue of still-wet-from-the-dye denim, with lighter flecks near pupils tight with concentration. Her hair was in a French twist. A French twist for the gym.

means to penetrate dense emotions. This meditative awareness, I’ve found, can bring us a remarkably subtle understanding of our emotional patterns and so help us find ways to unravel deep fixations and destructive habits.

Even in darkness, if you close your eyes and try to walk, a serenade of light guides you. And it is not just blank philosophy, it's absolutely true and something that we actually know in the deepest corner of our heart, if only our minds let us look deep enough. And at this time when the world is seeped in a cloud of uncertainty, a shade of darkness that is so dense that an unknown fear clutch us and we fall deep inside that pit of fire, I hope we do not forget that often fire is the most potent element in this Earth to purify us, and even from the ashes one can rise provided we hold on to that Hope, that is the very wings of Faith. This time, this quarantine as they call it, or this Solitude as I call it is making us realize so much and each time I come across a post breathing with life be it music, art, introspective words, I know that this time is letting some of us sink deep in the realm of spiritual growth, even if the outer countenance of that is limited to a shape. The paintings, the songs, the dance and act performances, the cooking dishes, the motivating words, the happiness of spending time with family, the mirth and laughter, even in the frugalities showing the battles of survival, and actually in every littlest post, all I can see is how everyone is getting hold of their inner light and delving into something that gives them the fuel to this light. Sometimes a wreck of clouds bring in a burst of rainfall that perhaps had been long due and yet a silver lining often lurks around as a surprising gift of that grey canopy of clouds. The rain might jolt on the fields of harvest but brings in the promise of a better harvest, and soothes the earth with the harmony of tranquil serenity. The sky shines with a rainbow that we embrace in our hearts through that belief in our abilities and the joy of love, the complete invincible love for ourselves with each and every particle of our soul, and there we rise in compassion and shine in gratitude. I believe, I always believe that anything that we practice often, again and again and yet again, becomes a part of us and sometimes all of us. And perhaps the best practice that we can all indulge in at the moment is the practice of mindfulness, of knowing what truly we want not what we are programmed to want but what lies deep dormant in the innermost vicinity of our hearts where we as souls reside because once we know that, we would know how silence speaks in the sharpest tongue beckoning us again and again onto the path of love, where a serenade of light leads us even through the darkest of gloom.

A study published by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2011 found that subjects who practiced meditation for an average of just twenty-seven minutes a day over a period of eight weeks produced visible changes in brain structure. Meditation led to decreased density of the amygdala, a physical change that was correlated with subjects’ self-reported stress levels—as their amygdalae got less dense, the subjects felt less stressed. Other studies have found that Buddhist monks who are especially good at meditating show much greater activity in their frontal cortices, and much less in their amygdalae, than normal people.n Meditation and deep-breathing exercises work for similar reasons as psychiatric medications do, exerting their effects not just on some abstract concept of mind but concretely on our bodies, on the somatic correlates of our feelings.

Maintenance - Preventing Crashes and Loss   The Phantom 3 is a very reliable quadcopter - especially when compared to earlier models. The dual GPS system as well as improvements in the accessibility of the Failsafe system help increase the chances of your Phantoms survival.   Operator Error is responsible for many crashes, “flyaways” and other losses. Here is a list of the major items to confirm before you take flight. 1.Make sure your battery is fully charged and give the pins and spade connectors on the Phantom a visual inspection for corrosion. Clean if needed and apply conductive grease or gold contact cleaner (De-Oxit is one well known brand). 2.Make certain that your flying area is not near power lines or dense housing where the radio frequencies may cause the Phantom to become confused. Flying in urban areas, caves or deep canyons may be problematic is you desire to use the GPS mode. 3.Make certain that your compass was recently calibrated - it’s a good idea to redo this every couple

There are things in life that alter you for this lifetime. And they happen to be love and grief. Loving someone opens the doorway to another world: where courage is born in a fearful soul, and dreams are awakened in a despairing deep. Grief, on the other hand, carves the pathway to endurance. It builds the rocks yet as you walk through the dense grief, you find wildflowers opening in the cracks. Though love and grief are stark opposites, they are still knitted together, revealing to you, the shores of light.

Mere language fails in times of intense grief, while poetry conquers by diving deep into that dense sadness, stirring the emotions, and finding that unstirred joy, the place of still deep where God resides.

Night so deep it is not night but a dense and timeless outer dark into which the weary soul is cast, unable to rest, unable to think, unable to feel.