Deeper The Roots Quotes

Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That's its balance.

Some say the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice I say the darker the flesh then the deeper the roots

Storms make trees take deeper roots.

When you are up against a wall, put down roots like a tree, until clarity comes from deeper sources to see over that wall and grow.

Storms make oaks take deeper root.

Senses of humor define people, as factions, deeper rooted than religious or political opinions. When carrying out everyday tasks, opinions are rather easy to set aside, but those whom a person shares a sense of humor with are his closest friends. They are always there to make the biggest influence.

I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in me.

As we forge deeper into this issue of forgiveness, we must be prepared to open up and discuss things that bother us before they escalate to a crisis level. We must examine our struggles with forgiveness in which there are not overt offenses or blatant betrayals. I'm convinced that seeds of resentment take root in the silent frustrations that never get discussed. Other people cannot read our minds--or our palms!--and that is why we have tongues to speak.

Somewhere deeper in the city a motor is running, a distant, earthy growl, like an animal panting. in a few hours the bright blush of morning will push through all that darkness, and shapes will reassert themselves, and people will wake up and yawn and brew coffee and get ready for work, everything the same as usual. Life will go on. Something aches at the very core of me, something ancient and deep and stronger than words: the filament that joins each of us to the root of existence, that ancient thing unfurling and resisting and grappling, desperately for a foothold, a way to stay here, breathe, keep going.

But with friends, you design your own relationship, which in turn designs your grief, which can be felt even deeper when they are gone. Those can be roots that are much harder to pull.

Image: An Oak Tree. The oak that resists the wind loses its branches one by one, and with nothing left to protect it, the trunk fi nally snaps. The oak that bends lives long er, its trunk grow ing wider, its roots deeper and more tenacious.

There are two kinds of friendship: the beneficial friendship and the erroneous friendship. The erroneous friendship balances on the principle of "the closer we are, the more okay it is for me to say anything I want to you and for me to treat you any way that I want to, and for me to disrespect you and take advantage of you" while a true friendship is rooted in this principle: "the closer we are, the more respect I have for you, the better I will treat you, the higher I will regard you, the more good things I will wish for you." You will know someone is a true friend by basis of observing their actions towards you as the friendship grows deeper. A true friend will continue to hold you in higher and higher regard while the error of a friend will see your goodwill and newfound fondness as basis to do and say whatever he/she wants, that is disrespectful and non-beneficial to you.

This virus will leave us entirely newborn people. We will all be different, none of us will ever be the same again. We will have deeper roots, be made of denser soil, and our eyes will have seen things.

Economic development is something much wider and deeper than economics, let alone econometrics. Its roots lie outside the economic sphere, in education, organisation, discipline and, beyond that, in political independence and a national consciousness of self-reliance.

Trust yourself. At the root, at the core, there is pure sanity, pure openness. Don’t trust what you have been taught, what you think, what you believe, what you hope. Deeper than that, trust the silence of your being.

What's magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason.

I prayed that our growth would be as strong and determined as the seeds of coconut palms, boldly reaching skyward toward the sun diligently boring deeper into the earth to secure a firm foundation for the beautiful, durable, fruit-bearing trees they would become. For me, Mhonda was the place to continue the growth of the still young but strong roots of my tree planted in Kifungilo. This was my life now, the life I’d prayed for, the life that would provide me with an education and would open doors. I wanted this life very much. I told my wavering spirit to bear with me because, just like the coconut palm, I would sway and bend and bruise, but I would survive. I would have to become the tree in the African saying: ‘The tree that bends with the wind does not break.

The peace we are offered is not a peace that is free from tragedy, illness, bankruptcy, divorce, depression, or heartache. It is peace rooted in the trust that the life Jesus gives us is deeper, wider, stronger, and more enduring than whatever our current circumstances are, because all we see is not all there is and the last word about us and our struggle has not yet been spoken.

How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.

Trials in this life will expose what is in your heart—whether the offense is toward God or others. Tests either make you bitter toward God and your peers or stronger. If you pass the test, your roots will shoot down deeper, stabilizing you and your future. If you fail, you become offended, which can lead to defilement with bitterness.

It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not. I am glad that I know about them, a little.

The best I can say, it's like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell ... It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that's all. That's all there is. A woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark ... I go back into the dark! Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman's power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who'll ask the dark its name?

She was forcing it with her scorn, the kiss she gave me, the hard curl of her lips, the mockery of her eyes, until I was like a man made of wood and there was no feeling within me except terror and a fear of her, a sense that her beauty was too much, that she was so much more beautiful than I, deeper rooted than I. She made me a stranger unto myself, she was all of those calm nights and tall eucalyptus trees, the desert stars, that land and sky, that fog outside, and I had come there with no purpose save to be a mere writer, to get money, to make a name for myself and all that piffle. She was so much finer than I, so much more honest, that I was sick of myself and I could not look at her warm eyes, I suppressed the shiver brought on by her brown arms around my neck and the long fingers in my hair. I did not kiss her. She kissed me, author of The Little Dog Laughed. Then she took my wrist with her two hands. She pressed her lips into the palm of my hand. She placed my hand upon her bosom between her breasts. She turned her lips towards my face and waited. And Arturo Bandini, the great author dipped deep into his colourful imagination, romantic Arturo Bandini, just chock-full of clever phrases, and he said, weakly, kittenishly, 'Hello.

If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn anyone for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper roots for its causes than we have knowledge of.

Dear me! We Tooks and Brandybucks, we can't live long on the heights.' 'No,' said Merry. 'I can't. Not yet, at any rate. But at least, Pippin, we can now see them, and honour them. It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not.

I follow Plato only with my mind Pure beauty strikes me as a little thin A little cold, however beautiful. I am in love with what is mixed and impure Doubtful, dark and hard to disencumber I want beauty I must dig for, search for. Pure beauty is beginning and not end Begin with the sun and drop from sun to cloud From cloud to tree, and from tree to earth itself And deeper yet to the earth dark root. I am in love with what resists my loving With what I have to labor to make live.

Perhaps we have overrated roots as a psychic need. Maybe the greater the urge, the deeper and more ancient is the need, the will, the hunger to be somewhere else.

Don't ever belittle yourself or your beliefs for nobody ~ The Darker The Berry The Deeper The Roots

I wished I was old. I was tired of being so young, so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the Internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I'd try to click on me, try to go any deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or MySpace, it was as if I knew that one morning I'd wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of I existed any more, because the servers all over the world were all down. And that's how rootless. And that's how fragile.

The more a mind thinks upon something, the deeper it will take root and affect all subsequent and related thought.

There were not enough words that could be spoken. They were entangled deeper than roots and always would be, and that was enough. Sometimes silence said enough.

Their bony branches grew barer with each tearing wind. Their tall, leaning forms looked like a gateway to a long-abandoned world. They lived. Their roots were much deeper than mine would ever be. One day my tree would fall and die, gnawed by serpents.

A tree grows taller to the degree that its roots go deeper and wider. If we wish to jump high, we must first bend close to the ground to get the impetus for the spring. Like a jet engine, we move forward by thrusting backward. In therapy each backward move provides the energy for the leap forward. Regression and progression go on side by side.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. Where is the mother who would willingly forget the infant that perished like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang? Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament? Who, even in the hour of agony, would forget the friend over whom he mourns? Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved, when he feels his heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its portal, would accept of consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness? No, the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul. If it has its woes, it has likewise its delights; and when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection, when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved are softened away in pensive meditation on all that it was in the days of its loveliness - who would root out such a sorrow from the heart? Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the bright hour of gaiety, or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of gloom, yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure, or the burst of revelry? No, there is a voice from the tomb sweeter than song. There is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living. Oh, the grave! The grave! It buries every error - covers every defect - extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections.

Solitude is a silent storm that breaks down all our dead branches. Yet it sends our living roots deeper into the living heart of the living earth.

Love is just like the flower; it has hidden depths that we rarely ever explore. Beneath the surface lies a network of roots. You can admire the flower for what it is, or you can dig deeper. The more you dig, the more you will find. The real reasons we love a person sometimes exist in the darkest and deepest part of us, the part that knows no logic…or rationale.

Enmeshed in collective hatred and anger, each side proclaims the crimes of the other and its own righteousness, is unable to listen to the others suffering, and cannot look at the deeper roots of the conflict and how we often need our enemies in order to maintain our rigid identities. (p. 53)

When a good man suffers … perhaps it makes his roots reach deeper for the water?

If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than we have knowledge of.

How is that tree still standing? During better times, it grew deeper roots. Now it can weather any storm.

It is something like the way dame Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be deeper root for its causes than we have knowledge of.

But science has given us new eyes that allow us to see down to the deeper roots of the world’s structure, and there all we see is order and symmetry of pristine mathematical purity.

Compulsive thinking has become a collective disease. Your whole sense of who you are is then derived from mind activity. Your identity, as it is no longer rooted in Being, becomes a vulnerable and ever-needy mental construct, which creates fear as the predominant underlying emotion. The one thing that truly matters is then missing from your life: awareness of your deeper self — your invisible and indestructible reality.

Authenticity is not the search for uniqueness. An oak tree does not try to become an oak tree. A cactus does not try to become a cactus. All living things simply reach for nourishment - they reach for sun, reach for water, reach their roots deeper into the ground. By being open to receiving what they need, they become unique effortlessly. So let yourself fall open. Forget about crafting yourself a unique personality. Just allow. Allow in love. Allow pain. Allow desire. Allow learning. Allow healing. Allow frustration. Allow uncertainty. Allow yourself to experience what you must experience and learn what you need to learn, so that your uniqueness can emerge organically.

What happens when we lose the things that anchor us? What if, instead of grasping at something to hold on to, we pull up our roots and walk away? Instead of trying to find the way back, we walk deeper and deeper into the woods, willing ourselves to get lost. In this place where nothing is recognizable. not the people or the language or the food, we are truly on our own. Eventually, we find ourselves unencumbered by the past or the future. Here is a fleeting glimpse of our truest self, our self in the present moment.

My father tells me that the further you get away from an experience, the deeper it roots itself inside of you. Don't fool yourself, baby, he said. Time does not heal and history is not progressive.

True love is a forever love. It is tested and tried all the time. It's sometimes broken, but it always, always heals itself. It stands strong during the storms, even when it feels like it is about to fall apart. Love's roots grow stronger and deeper after the storm. That's true love. There are ups and downs. You just weather them.

The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity. The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not, themselves, celebrities. That wasn't quite it. (....) It was more the deeper, more tragic and universal conflict of which the celebrity paradox was a part. The conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance. Atwater knew - as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud - that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture. It was everywhere, at the root of everything - of impatience in long lines, of cheating on taxes, of movements in fashion and music and art, of marketing. In particular, he thought it was alive in the paradoxes of audience. It was the feeling that celebrities were your intimate friends, coupled with the inchoate awareness that that untold millions of people felt the same way - and that the celebrities themselves did not. Atwater had had contact with a certain number of celebrities (there was no way to avoid it at BSG), and they were not, in his experience, very friendly or considerate people. Which made sense when one considered that celebrities were not actually functioning as real people at all, but as something more like symbols of themselves.

The Sunflowers Come with me into the field of sunflowers. Their faces are burnished disks, their dry spines creak like ship masts, their green leaves, so heavy and many, fill all day with the sticky sugars of the sun. Come with me to visit the sunflowers, they are shy but want to be friends; they have wonderful stories of when they were young-- the important weather, the wandering crows. Don't be afraid to ask them questions! Their bright faces, which follows the sun, will listen, and all those rows of seeds-- each one a new life!-- hope for a deeper acquaintance; each of them, though it stands in a crowd of many, like a separate universe, is lonely, the long work of turning their lives into a celebration is not easy. Come and let us talk with those modest faces, the simple garments of leaves, the coarse roots in the earth so uprightly burning.

Trees endure the hot sun and rainstorms by sending their roots down deeper. The adversity they face is eventually the source of great stability. The harshness of the elements surrounding them causes them to seek another source of life. They will one day come to the place that even the greatest of windstorms cannot affect their ability to produce fruit.

SUCH SILENCE As deep as I ever went into the forest I came upon an old stone bench, very, very old, and around it a clearing, and beyond that trees taller and older than I had ever seen. Such silence! It really wasn’t so far from a town, but it seemed all the clocks in the world had stopped counting. So it was hard to suppose the usual rules applied. Sometimes there’s only a hint, a possibility. What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason. I hope everyone knows that. I sat on the bench, waiting for something. An angel, perhaps. Or dancers with the legs of goats. No, I didn’t see either. But only, I think, because I didn’t stay long enough.

The movement of descent and discovery begins at the moment you consciously become dissatisfied with life. Contrary to most professional opinion, this gnawing dissatisfaction with life is not a sign of "mental illness," nor an indication of poor social adjustment, nor a character disorder. For concealed within this basic unhappiness with life and existence is the embryo of a growing intelligence, a special intelligence usually buried under the immense weight of social shams. A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to become alive in a special sense—to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided. It has been said, and truly I think, that suffering is the first grace. In a special sense, suffering is almost a time of rejoicing, for it marks the birth of creative insight. But only in a special sense. Some people cling to their suffering as a mother to its child, carrying it as a burden they dare not set down. They do not face suffering with awareness, but rather clutch at their suffering, secretly transfixed with the spasms of martyrdom. Suffering should neither be denied awareness, avoided, despised, not glorified, clung to, dramatized. The emergence of suffering is not so much good as it is a good sign, an indication that one is starting to realize that life lived outside unity consciousness is ultimately painful, distressing, and sorrowful. The life of boundaries is a life of battles—of fear, anxiety, pain, and finally death. It is only through all manner of numbing compensations, distractions, and enchantments that we agree not to question our illusory boundaries, the root cause of the endless wheel of agony. But sooner or later, if we are not rendered totally insensitive, our defensive compensations begin to fail their soothing and concealing purpose. As a consequence, we begin to suffer in one way or another, because our awareness is finally directed toward the conflict-ridden nature of our false boundaries and the fragmented life supported by them.

Great poetry is capable of dealing with erotic passion, but it has to be the very greatest to represent that deeper and more tortuous love -- more rooted, more absolute -- which we devote to our children, and which it is so hard to talk about.

Aye, but do they really kneel to him, or to the elf-weapons his guards carry?” “What matters is that they kneel.” “Are fear and respect really the same?” “Of course not,” said Yarvi, walking on and leaving more of his many guards to clear away the crowd. “Respect soon blows away in a storm. Fear has far deeper roots.” Teams of

Almost Easter Shaking bone meal from my bare hands into the rose bed where only one bush grows, I feel as if I’m scattering my father’s ashes all over again. This month marks the seventh year my father has lain in my garden, his ashes in my hands still as palpable as bone meal or thorns. Easter Sunday, I will hide an egg behind his ear. Jesus will call down to him to get up and play. He won’t. But the rose bush that is turning green, this rose will sink its roots a little deeper in the earth and in a few months drop its petals like so many red tears. — Felicia Mitchell

The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing.

Haven't people learnned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?

A storm makes a tree grow its roots deeper so it can keep standing

You can avoid the issues from abuse for only so long. Sooner or later, the problems in your life cause you to either face it or go deeper into denial. Most of you will eventually be forced into admitting that it is indeed the sexual abuse that is the root of your problems. Even then, the tendency will be to ‘forgive and forget’ in the belief that by doing so the pain will be assuaged.

We all crave latitude in life, yet simultaneously dig ourselves deeper into domestic entrapment. We may dream of traveling light but accumulate as much as we can to keep us burdened and rooted to one spot. And we have no one to blame but ourselves. Because-though we all muse on the theme of escape-we stil find the notion of responsibility irresistible. The career, the house, the dependents, the debt-it grounds us. Provides us with a necessary security, a reason to get upin the morning. It narrows choice and ergo, gives us certainty. And though just about every man I know rails against being so cul-de-saced by domesic burden, we all embrace it. Embrace it with a vengeance.

the deeper one's awareness of one's powerlessness and the more desperate, the more willing one is to reach out for help. This help is offered in the next two steps. You turn yourself over to a Higher Power who you believe can heal you and work with you in the long journey of dismantling the emotional programs for happiness. They are the root causes of all our problems. We try to squeeze gratification or satisfaction out of the symbols of those three emotional programs in the culture to which we belong.

As a child, I would place my back against one of our trees and feel its reassuring solidity, its immobility. It was not going to move, it would never go anywhere, it was rooted to its spot. For as long as they are alive, trees remain where they are. This is one of life's few certainties. The roots of trees go deep and take many directions, we cannot foresee their subterranean spread any more than we can predict how a child will grow. Beneath the earth, trees live their secret lives, at times going deeper into the ground than up into the sky, entwined below with other trees which appear in no way connected above the ground.

As soon as I decided I'd have to dig down still deeper to uncover the root of my listless withdrawal from life, I became aware of some interference from the past distracting and confusing my thoughts, causing me a sensation that was at the same time oppressive, expectant and empty. In these somewhat contradictory feelings, I came to recognize my childish sense of having run down like a clock that needed someone to wind it before it could go again; and saw that I was now no less helpless than in those far-off days when I waited for somebody to take me by the hand and tell me what to do. On my own initiative I could do nothing, take no responsibility, make no decisions only watch my existence unroll.

The real issue isn’t whether our generation is wearing enough bedazzled cross T-shirts; it’s whether we are allowing the message of Jesus to root deeper than our wardrobe, blog posts, music playlists, tweets, and Facebook statuses. We’ve become a tribe of people who rank our faith in a measurement of likes, re-tweets, and memory verses. We need to up our game.

The modern science of nature is significant for many other reasons, beyond the obvious setting of conservation priorities and actions. Foremost in my mind being the fact that it is beautiful. Its wondrous mathematical synchronicities, the specifics of its chemical analyses, the complexity of its physics are beyond both the practical and intuitive knowledge of most lay naturalists (or mystics), no matter how seasoned. When mingled with the wildness of the natural world and the creativity of the human mind, good science reveals its center, its story, its deeper teaching. The science has its own poetic force.

When we mistake yoga for a workout routine, reduce it to physical fitness or even practice some of the deeper practices without an eye to the whole system of liberation it offers, we rob ourselves and each other of the potential of this practice.

We look at the way some kids behave and instantly blame the parents, and more often than not we’re correct. The school bully is often a sign of poor parenting. That’s the immediate cause, but if we search for the root cause we have to dig much deeper than that. What on earth in that kid’s head makes it seem okay to bully people? Why are the parents doing such a poor job of bringing up their children? Probably because they didn’t have very effective role models themselves when they were growing up. It could go back generations

Was it the wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who chose leaders after their own hears? On the face of it, it seemed unlikely that one Leader could force a million Englishmen against their will. If, for instance, Mordred had been anxious to make the English wear petticoats, or stand on their heads, they would surely not have joined his party -- however clever or persuasive or deceitful or even terrible his inducements? A leader was surely forced to offer something which appealed to those he led? He might give the impetus to the falling building, but surely it had to be toppling on its own account before it fell? If this were true, then wars were not calamities into which amiable innocents were led by evil men.They were national movements, deeper, more subtle in origin. And, indeed, it did not feel to him as if he or Mordred had led their country to its misery. If it was so easy to lead one's country in various directions, as if she was a pig on a string, why had he failed to lead her into chivalry, into justice, and into peace? He had been trying. Then again -- this was the second circle -- it was like the Inferno -- if neither he nor Mordred had really set the misery in motion, who had been the cause? How did the fact of war begin in general? For any one war seemed so rooted in its antecedents. Mordred went back to Morgause, Morgause to Uther Pendragon, Uther to his ancestors. It seemed as if Cain had slain Abel, seizing his country, after which the men of Abel had sought to win their patrimony again for ever. Man had gone on, through age after age, avenging wrong with wrong, slaughter with slaughter. Nobody was the better for it, since both sides always suffered, yet everybody was inextricable. The present war might be attributed to Mordred or to himself. But also it was due to a million Thrashers, to Lancelot, Guenever, Gawaine, everybody. Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it. It was as if everything would lead to sorrow, so long as man refused to forget the past. The wrongs of Uther and of Cain were wrongs which could have been righted only by the blessing of forgetting them.

My sickness is a lot worse than you think: it has far deeper roots. And that's why I want you to go on ahead of me if you can. Don't wait for me. Sleep with other girls if you want to. Don't let thoughts of me hold you back. Just do what you want to do. Otherwise, I might end up taking you with me, and that is the one thing I don't want to do. I don't want to interfere with your life. I don't want to interfere with anybody's life. Like I said before, I want you to come to see me every once in a while, and always remember me. That's all I want.

One of the most important hopes we have for this book is to provoke the sorts of conversations that make it easier for couples to make their way across this difficult emotional terrain together, with a deeper, less judgmental understanding of the ancient roots of these inconvenient feelings and a more informed, mature approach to dealing with them. Other than that, we really have little helpful advice to offer.

Friendship is more dangerous than love, since its roots are stronger and go deeper than the roots of love. The anguish of friendship is more bitter than the anguish of love. Certain souls love friendship as others love love; they suffer through friendship as others through love. They have in their lives only one friendship as others have but a single love. It is when they lose friendship that they despair hopelessly.

The basic pleasure in the phonetic elements of a language and in the style of their patterns, and then in a higher dimension, pleasure in the association of these word-forms with meanings, is of fundamental importance. This pleasure is quite distinct from the practical knowledge of a language, and not the same as an analytic understanding of its structure. It is simpler, deeper-rooted, and yet more immediate than the enjoyment of literature. Though it may be allied to some of the elements in the appreciation of verse, it does not need any poets, other than the nameless artists who composed the language. It can be strongly felt in the simple contemplation of a vocabulary, or even in a string of names.

The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the "poor in spirit.

The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the "poor in spirit." They have reached an inward state paralleling the outward circumstances of the common beggar in the streets of Jerusalem; that is what the word "poor" as Christ used it actually means. These blessed poor are no longer slaves to the tyranny of things. They have broken the yoke of the oppressor; and this they have done not by fighting but by surrendering. Though free from all sense of possessing, they yet possess all things. "Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Though Kurt and Jimmy were not “family,” I invited them to be, and that invitation can sometimes be even more intimate than the connection to any blood relative. There was no biological obligation here; we were bonded for other reasons: our parallel spirits, our love of music, and our mutual appreciation. You cannot choose family, and when you lose family, there is a biological imperative that implies a built-in type of mourning. But with friends, you design your own relationship, which in turn designs your grief, which can be felt even deeper when they are gone. THOSE CAN BE ROOTS THAT ARE MUCH HARDER TO PULL.

A man is not saved by the truth of the things he believes, but by the truth of his belief- its sincerity, its harmony with his character. The absurdities of the popular religions do not matter; what matters is the lukewarm belief, the empty forms, the shallow conceptions of life and duty. We are prone to think that if the creed is false, the religion is false. Religion is an emotion, an inspiration, a feeling of the Infinite, and may have its root in any creed or no creed... Any creed that ennobles character and opens a door or window upon the deeper meanings of this marvelous universe is good enough to live by, and good enough to die by.

Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time. It is a phenomenon with roots deeper than our money system, for it depends on the prior quantification of time. An animal or a child has “all the time in the world.” The same was apparently true for Stone Age peoples, who usually had very loose concepts of time and rarely were in a hurry. Primitive languages often lacked tenses, and sometimes lacked even words for “yesterday” or “tomorrow.” The comparative nonchalance primitive people had toward time is still apparent today in rural, more traditional parts of the world. Life moves faster in the big city, where we are always in a hurry because time is scarce. But in the past, we experienced time as abundant. The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed in Helena Norberg-Hodge’s film Ancient Futures sums it all up in describing her city-dwelling sister: “She has a rice cooker, a car, a telephone—all kinds of time-saving devices. Yet when I visit her, she is always so busy we barely have time to talk.” For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor. If you were born before adult schedules invaded childhood and children were rushed around from activity to activity, then perhaps you still remember the subjective eternity of childhood, the afternoons that stretched on forever, the timeless freedom of life before the tyranny of calendar and clocks. “Clocks,” writes John Zerzan, “make time scarce and life short.” Once quantified, time too could be bought and sold, and the scarcity of all money-linked commodities afflicted time as well. “Time is money,” the saying goes, an identity confirmed by the metaphor “I can’t afford the time.” If the material world

But in the end, there will still be a morning like this one, full of new beginning and a distant voice will be heard like a memory of before you became people. And the tones of the song will well up, the gentle lull of the first mother. This song yes, indeed will be ours. The memory of a deeper root that they were unable to wretch out of us. All this will happen if we are able to rid ourselves of this time that has made animals out of us. Let us strive to die like the people we no longer are. Let the animal die that this world has turned us into.

Social anthems and protest songs had long been part of the heritage of rock—but not like this. “Earth Song” was something more epic, dramatic, and primal. Its roots were deeper, its vision more panoramic. It was a lamentation torn from the pages of the Old Testament; a “sorrow song” in the tradition of slave spirituals; an apocalyptic prophecy with echoes of Blake, Yeats and Eliot. It conveyed musically what Picasso’s masterful painting, Guernica, conveyed in art. Inside its swirling scenes of destruction and suffering were voices—crying, pleading, shouting to be heard. (“What about us?”)

Apathy? I see something taking place in the Church all over the world today that grieves God’s heart: a widespread apathy toward sin. God’s people are no longer outraged about the filth and evil bombarding their lives and homes. On the contrary, millions of believers sit by passively and let their minds become saturated with sensual movies, videos, television, the Internet, magazines and other media. It is unbelievable how these Christians willingly allow their lusts to be fed as their imaginations are filled with deep roots of evil. If you think I am focusing too much on the secret sins of Christians, then I say you are out of touch with what is happening in the world today. You must know nothing of how widespread the infection of sin is among God’s people. I cite to you, for example, the scores of Christians who flock to movie theaters each week and hear the name of Christ used as a curse word. I have never understood how anyone who fears almighty God and wishes to walk righteously before Him can sit by idly as the Lord’s name is being damned. That is simply beyond my comprehension. Yet multitudes of believers are doing just that. Little by little, they are drifting deeper into pits of secret, hidden sin. Slowly but surely, their sense of conviction is being drained out of them. They do not realize it, but their minds are being corrupted by what they are allowing their eyes to feast on.

Propaganda, as we know to our cost, is the art of imposing a pattern on reality, and to impose it so successfully that the victim can no longer conceive it in different terms. Such a pattern will be the more likely to exert its spell the deeper it is rooted in tradition, the more affinity it has with the typical nightmares and dreams of mankind. The Messianic Rulder who brings back the Golden Age is precisely such a perennial dream, and we have seen that it did exert the spell on subsequent generations who saw the teeming life of the real Quattrocento fall into this deceptively simple configuration.

Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind. Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now. So anyone who is identified with their mind and, therefore, disconnected from their true power, their deeper self rooted in Being, will have fear as their constant companion. The number of people who have gone beyond mind is as yet extremely small, so you can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear. Only the intensity of it varies. It fluctuates between anxiety and dread at one end of the scale and a vague unease and distant sense of threat at the other. Most people become conscious of it only when it takes on one of its more acute forms.

There is a theory of space and time embedded in the way we use words. There is a theory of matter and a theory of causality, too. Our language has a model of sex in it (actually, two models), and conceptions of intimacy and power and fairness. Divinity, degradation, and danger are also ingrained in our mother tongue, together with a conception of well-being and a philosophy of free will. These conceptions vary in their details from language to language, but their overall logic is the same. They add up to a distinctively human model of reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of reality eked out by our best science and logic. Though these ideas are woven into language, their roots are deeper than language itself. They lay out the ground rules for how we understand our surroundings, how we assign credit and blame to our fellows, and how we negotiate our relationships with them. A close look at our speech-our conversations, our jokes, our curses, our legal disputes, the names we give our babies-can therefore give us insight into who we are.

I was a vase. The thought struck her as she gazed at the wall of them. She had been a vessel; it was true. She'd stepped into this shop, introduced herself, asked for a job, hoped it would fill her. And then, sitting with Jacob at the community table, she'd been a flower. Snipped from the root, quick to wilt, temporary. She'd existed to be lovely and to be chosen. No one had expected her to last. But she hadn't been a flower when she'd gone to live with Claire, had she? Emilie traveled deeper into the shop. She was in the addition now, its ceiling higher, its rows of tables laden with houseplants. Water, she decided. That's what she'd been with Claire. Shapeless, colorless, but necessary. She'd done what she had to. She had been there for her grandmother. She'd kept her family afloat. But what was she now?

People slice up tree trunks, nail the pieces together into boxy shapes, and then go inside to sleep. Trees use the wood in their trunks for a different purpose—namely, they use it to fight with other plants. From dandelions to daffodils, from ferns to figs, from potatoes to pine trees—every plant growing on land is striving toward two prizes: light, which comes from above, and water, which comes from below. Any contest between two plants can be decided in one move, when the winner simultaneously reaches higher and digs deeper than the loser. Consider the tremendous advantage that wood confers to one of the contestants during such a battle: armed with a stiff-yet-flexible, strong-yet-light prop that separates—and connects—leaves and roots, trees have dominated the tournament for more than four hundred million years.

The west, and especially the United States, has shown no serious or sustained interest in the Middle East until the last half century. We tend to be comfortably ignorant of the history of Western interventionism in the region over centuries — or even over a millennium. We are only superficially aware of Middle Eastern critiques of Western policies that touch on oil, finances, political intervention, Western-sponsored coups, Western support for pro-Western dictators, and carte blanche American support for Israel in the complex Palestinian problem — which, after all, had its roots not in Islam, but in Western persecution and butchery of European Jews. European powers have also exported their local quarrels and parleyed them into two world wars that were fought out partly on Middle Eastern soil, as was much of the Cold War as well. All this suggests that many other causative factors are at work that have at least as much explanatory power for the current turmoil as does “Islam.” It is not simply a matter of “blaming the West” as some readers might rush to suggest here. I argue that deeper geopolitical factors have created numerous confrontational factors between the East and the West that predate Islam, continued with Islam and around Islam, and may be inherent in the territorial imperatives and geopolitical outlook of any states that occupy those areas, regardless of religion.

James was exactly the same height as Harry. He was wearing the clothes in which he had died, and his hair was untidy and ruffled, and his glasses were a little lopsided, like Mr. Weasley’s. Sirius was tall and handsome, and younger by far than Harry had seen him in life. He loped with an easy grace, his hands in his pockets and a grin on his face. Lupin was younger too, and much less shabby, and his hair was thicker and darker. He looked happy to be back in this familiar place, scene of so many adolescent wanderings. Lily’s smile was widest of all. She pushed her long hair back as she drew close to him, and her green eyes, so like his, searched his face hungrily, as though she would never be able to look at him enough. “You’ve been so brave.” He could not speak. His eyes feasted on her, and he thought that he would like to stand and look at her forever, and that would be enough. “You are nearly there,” said James. “Very close. We are…so proud of you.” “Does it hurt?” The childish question had fallen from Harry’s lips before he could stop it. “Dying? Not at all,” said Sirius. “Quicker and easier than falling asleep.” “And he will want it to be quick. He wants it over,” said Lupin. “I didn’t want you to die,” Harry said. These words came without his volition. “Any of you. I’m sorry--” He addressed Lupin more than any of them, beseeching him. “--right after you’d had your son…Remus, I’m sorry--” “I am sorry too,” said Lupin. “Sorry I will never know him…but he will know why I died and I hope he will understand. I was trying to make a world in which he could live a happier life.” A chilly breeze that seemed to emanate from the heart of the forest lifted the hair at Harry’s brow. He knew that they would not tell him to go, that it would have to be his decision. “You’ll stay with me?” “Until the very end,” said James. “They won’t be able to see you?” asked Harry. “We are part of you,” said Sirius. “Invisible to anyone else.” Harry looked at his mother. “Stay close to me,” he said quietly. And he set off. The dementors’ chill did not overcome him; he passed through it with his companions, and they acted like Patronuses to him, and together they marched through the old trees that grew closely together, their branches tangled, their roots gnarled and twisted underfoot. Harry clutched the Cloak tightly around him in the darkness, traveling deeper and deeper into the forest, with no idea where exactly Voldemort was, but sure that he would find him. Beside him, making scarcely a sound, walked James, Sirius, Lupin, and Lily, and their presence was his courage, and the reason he was able to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

In any culture in which God is largely absent, sex, money, and politics will fill the vacuum for different people. This is the reason that our political discourse is increasingly ideological and polarized. Many describe the current poisonous public discourse as a lack of bi-partisanship, but the roots go much deeper than that. As Niebuhr taught, they go back to the beginning of the world, to our alienation from God, and to our frantic efforts to compensate for our feelings of cosmic nakedness and powerlessness. The only way to deal with all these things is to heal our relationship with God.

The essential reason for choosing a person must be personal, not merely sexual. Life will determine the value of a choice and the value and true magnitude of love. It is put to the test most severely when the sensual and emotional reactions themselves grow weaker, and sexual values as such lose their effect. Nothing then remains except the value of the person, and the inner truth about the love of those connected comes to light. If their love is a true gift of self, so that they belong to the other, it will not only survive but grow stronger, and sink deeper roots. Whereas if it was never more than a sort of synchronization of sensual and emotional experiences it will lose its raison d’être [reason for existence] and the persons involved in it will suddenly find themselves in a vacuum. We must never forget that only when love between human beings is put to the test can its true value be seen.

The way of life is towards fulfillment, however, wherever it may lead. To restore a human being to the current of life means not only to impart self-confidence but also an abiding faith in the processes of life. A man who has confidence in himself must have confidence in others, confidence in the fitness and Tightness of the universe. When a man is thus anchored he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the behavior of his fellow-men, about right and wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit. He will draw his nourishment from above and below; he will send his roots down deeper and deeper, fearing neither the depths nor the heights. The life that’s is in him will manifest itself in growth, and growth is an endless eternal process. He will not be afraid of withering, because decay and death are part of growth. As a seed he began and as a seed he will return. Beginnings and endings are only partial steps in the eternal process. The process is everything … the way … the Tao. The way of life! A grand expression. Like saying Truth. There is nothing beyond it … it is all. And so the analyst says Adapt yourself! He does not mean, as some wish to think—adapt yourself to this rotten state of affairs! He means: adapt yourself to life! Become an adept! That is the highest adjustment—to make oneself an adept.

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman’s tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of the dots. At length, I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn’t find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn’t make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at the very moment with great emotion, in intricate detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, “that was a good time then, a good time to be living.” And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water…I saw may apples in forest, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided and apples grew striped and spotted in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves, and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wilds ducks flew, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remembered the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean’s shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, “Yes, that’s how it was then, that part there we called ‘France’”. I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes.

I beg your pardon, Mrs. Graham - but you get on too fast. I have not yet said that a boy should be taught to rush into the snares of life, - or even wilfully to seek temptation for the sake of exercising his virtue by overcoming it; - I only say that it is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble the foe; - and if you were to rear an oak sapling in a hothouse, tending it carefully night and day, and shielding it from every breath of wind, you could not expect it to become a hardy tree, like that which has grown up on the mountain-side, exposed to all the action of the elements, and not even sheltered from the shock of the tempest.' 'Granted; - but would you use the same argument with regard to a girl?' 'Certainly not.' 'No; you would have her to be tenderly and delicately nurtured, like a hot-house plant - taught to cling to others for direction and support, and guarded, as much as possible, from the very knowledge of evil. But will you be so good as to inform me why you make this distinction? Is it that you think she has no virtue?' 'Assuredly not.' 'Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation; - and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith. It must be either that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded, that she cannot withstand temptation, - and though she may be pure and innocent as long as she is kept in ignorance and restraint, yet, being destitute of real virtue, to teach her how to sin is at once to make her a sinner, and the greater her knowledge, the wider her liberty, the deeper will be her depravity, - whereas, in the nobler sex, there is a natural tendency to goodness, guarded by a superior fortitude, which, the more it is exercised by trials and dangers, is only the further developed - ' 'Heaven forbid that I should think so!' I interrupted her at last." 'Well, then, it must be that you think they are both weak and prone to err, and the slightest error, the merest shadow of pollution, will ruin the one, while the character of the other will be strengthened and embellished - his education properly finished by a little practical acquaintance with forbidden things. Such experience, to him (to use a trite simile), will be like the storm to the oak, which, though it may scatter the leaves, and snap the smaller branches, serves but to rivet the roots, and to harden and condense the fibres of the tree. You would have us encourage our sons to prove all things by their own experience, while our daughters must not even profit by the experience of others. Now I would have both so to benefit by the experience of others, and the precepts of a higher authority, that they should know beforehand to refuse the evil and choose the good, and require no experimental proofs to teach them the evil of transgression. I would not send a poor girl into the world, unarmed against her foes, and ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself; - and as for my son - if I thought he would grow up to be what you call a man of the world - one that has "seen life," and glories in his experience, even though he should so far profit by it as to sober down, at length, into a useful and respected member of society - I would rather that he died to-morrow! - rather a thousand times!' she earnestly repeated, pressing her darling to her side and kissing his forehead with intense affection. He had already left his new companion, and been standing for some time beside his mother's knee, looking up into her face, and listening in silent wonder to her incomprehensible discourse. Anne Bronte, "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (24,25)

Taking the ring from her, Sebastian slid it onto his own hand. His hands were so much larger that the circlet would only fit the tip of his smallest finger. Grasping her chin in an intractable hold, he glared into her eyes. “I’ll take your bet,” he said grimly. “I’m going to win it. And in three months, I’m going to put this back on your finger, and take you to bed, and do things to you that are outlawed in the civilized world.” Evie’s resolve did not shield her from the heart-thumping alarm that any rational woman would feel upon hearing such an ominous statement. Nor did it prevent her knees from turning to jelly as he jerked her against his body and fitted his mouth to hers. Her hands, suspended in mid-air, went to his head in a trembling butterfly descent. The texture of his hair, the locks so cool and thick on the surface, so warm and damp at the roots, was too alluring to resist. She slid her fingers into the gleaming golden layers and pulled him even closer, helplessly reveling in the urgent pressure of his mouth. Their tongues mated, slid, stroked, and with each slippery-sweet caress inside the joined cavern of their mouths, she felt a hot coiling deep in her belly… no, deeper than that… in the tightening, liquefying core where she had once taken his invading flesh. It shocked her to realize how much she wanted him there again. She whimpered as he pulled away from her, while frustration washed over them both. “You didn’t say that I couldn’t kiss you,” Sebastian said, his eyes bright with devil-fire. “I’m going to kiss you as long and as often as I like, and you’re not to utter a word of protest. That’s the concession you’ll give in return for my celibacy. Damn you.” Giving her no time either to agree or to object, he released her and strode to the door. “And now, if you’ll excuse me… I’m going to go kill Joss Bullard.

Certainty is an unrealistic and unattainable ideal. We need to have pastors who are schooled in apologetics and engaged intellectually with our culture so as to shepherd their flock amidst the wolves. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. They know little of the riches of deep understanding of Christian truth, of the confidence inspired by the discovery that one’s faith is logical and fits the facts of experience, and of the stability brought to one’s life by the conviction that one’s faith is objectively true. God could not possibly have intended that reason should be the faculty to lead us to faith, for faith cannot hang indefinitely in suspense while reason cautiously weighs and reweighs arguments. The Scriptures teach, on the contrary, that the way to God is by means of the heart, not by means of the intellect. When a person refuses to come to Christ, it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart. unbelief is at root a spiritual, not an intellectual, problem. Sometimes an unbeliever will throw up an intellectual smoke screen so that he can avoid personal, existential involvement with the gospel. In such a case, further argumentation may be futile and counterproductive, and we need to be sensitive to moments when apologetics is and is not appropriate. A person who knows that Christianity is true on the basis of the witness of the Spirit may also have a sound apologetic which reinforces or confirms for him the Spirit’s witness, but it does not serve as the basis of his belief. As long as reason is a minister of the Christian faith, Christians should employ it. It should not surprise us if most people find our apologetic unconvincing. But that does not mean that our apologetic is ineffective; it may only mean that many people are closed-minded. Without a divine lawgiver, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. This means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say that you are right and I am wrong. No atheist or agnostic really lives consistently with his worldview. In some way he affirms meaning, value, or purpose without an adequate basis. It is our job to discover those areas and lovingly show him where those beliefs are groundless. We are witnesses to a mighty struggle for the mind and soul of America in our day, and Christians cannot be indifferent to it. If moral values are gradually discovered, not invented, then our gradual and fallible apprehension of the moral realm no more undermines the objective reality of that realm than our gradual, fallible apprehension of the physical world undermines the objectivity of that realm. God has given evidence sufficiently clear for those with an open heart, but sufficiently vague so as not to compel those whose hearts are closed. Because of the need for instruction and personal devotion, these writings must have been copied many times, which increases the chances of preserving the original text. In fact, no other ancient work is available in so many copies and languages, and yet all these various versions agree in content. The text has also remained unmarred by heretical additions. The abundance of manuscripts over a wide geographical distribution demonstrates that the text has been transmitted with only trifling discrepancies.

The moral, dear child, is that such powers are never to be considered as the main object; it ought in fact to be obvious from the start that any one's True Will must be deeper and more comprehensive than any mere technical achievement. I will go further and say that any such endeavour must be a magical mistake, like cherishing a gun or a clock or a fishing-rod for its own sake, and not for the use that one can make of it. Indeed, that remark goes to the root of the matter; for all these powers, if we understand them properly, are natural by-products of one's real Great Work. My own experience was very convincing on this point; for one power after another came popping up when it was least wanted, and I saw at once that they represented so many leaks in my boat. And really they are quite a bit of a nuisance. Their possession is so flattering, and their seduction so subtle. One understands at once why all the first-class Teachers insist so sternly that the Siddhi (or Iddhi) must be rejected firmly by the Aspirant, if he is not to be side-tracked and ultimately lost.

NAMING THE EARTH (a poem of light for national poetry day) And the world will be born again in circles of steaming breath and beams of light as each one of us directs our inner eye upon its name. Hear the cry of wings, the sigh of leaves and grass, smell the new sweet mist rising as the pathway is cleared at last. Stones stand ready - they have known since ages and ages ago that they were not alone. Water carries the planet's energy into skies and down to earth and bones. The cold parts steadily as we come together, bodies and hearts warm, hands tingling. We are silent but our eyes are singing. We look, we feel, we know, we trust each other's souls, we have no need to speak. Not now, but later, when the time is right, the name will ring within the iron core of each other's listening - and the very earth's being. Every creature, every plant, will hear it calling, tolling like a bell - a sound we've always felt but never dared to hope to hear reverberating - true at last, at every level of existence. The poets come together to open the intimate centre. Believe in life and air - breathe the light itself, for these are the energies and rhythms that we need to see, to touch, to reach, to identify, to say, the NAME. Colours on your skin fuse and dissolve - leave the river clean for pure space and time to enter and flow in. We all become one fluid stream of stillness and motion, of flaring thought pulses discovering weird pools and twists within where darkness hides from the flames in our eyes but will not snare us. We probe deeper still, journeying towards a unity which will be more raw and yet also more formed than anything written or spoken before. Our fragile bodies fall away - and the trees, and the roots of trees, guide us - lead us away from the faces we remember seeing each day in the mirror - into an ocean of dreams seething with warmth, love, where the beginning is real, ripe, evolving. And the world is born again in circles of steaming breath and beams of light. An ache - a signal - a trembling moment - and the time is right to say the name. We sing as one whole voice of the universal - all the words, the names of every tiny thirsting thing, and they ring out together as one sound, one energy, one sense, one vibration, one breath. And the world listens, beats, shines, glows - IS - Exists!

If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.

HAPPINESS: "Flourishing is a fact, not a feeling. We flourish when we grow and thrive. We flourish when we exercise our powers. We flourish when we become what we are capable of becoming...Flourishing is rooted in action..."happiness is a kind of working of the soul in the way of perfect excellence"...a flourishing life is a life lived along lines of excellence...Flourishing is a condition that is created by the choices we make in the world we live in...Flourishing is not a virtue, but a condition; not a character trait, but a result. We need virtue to flourish, but virtue isn't enough. To create a flourishing life, we need both virtue and the conditions in which virtue can flourish...Resilience is a virtue required for flourishing, bur being resilient will not guarantee that we will flourish. Unfairness, injustice, and bad fortune will snuff our promising lives. Unasked-for pain will still come our way...We can build resilience and shape the world we live in. We can't rebuild the world...three primary kinds of happiness: the happiness of pleasure, the happiness of grace, and happiness of excellence...people who are flourishing usually have all three kinds of happiness in their lives...Aristotle understood: pushing ourselves to grow, to get better, to dive deeper is at the heart of happiness...This is the happiness that goes hand in hand with excellence, with pursuing worthy goals, with growing mastery...It is about the exercise of powers. The most common mistake people make in thinking about the happiness of excellence is to focus on moments of achievement. They imagine the mountain climber on the summit. That's part of the happiness of excellence, and a very real part. What counts more, though, is not the happiness of being there, but the happiness of getting there. A mountain climber heads for the summit, and joy meets her along the way. You head for the bottom of the ocean, and joy meets you on the way down...you create joy along the way...the concept of flow, the kind of happiness that comes when we lose ourselves through complete absorption in a rewarding task...the idea of flow..."Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times...The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."...Joy, like sweat, is usually a byproduct of your activity, not your aim...A focus on happiness will not lead to excellence. A focus on excellence will, over time, lead to happiness. The pursuit of excellence leads to growth, mastery, and achievement. None of these are sufficient for happiness, yet all of them are necessary...the pull of purpose, the desire to feel "needed in this world" - however we fulfill that desire - is a very powerful force in a human life...recognize that the drive to live well and purposefully isn't some grim, ugly, teeth-gritting duty. On the contrary: "it's a very good feeling." It is really is happiness...Pleasures can never make up for an absence of purposeful work and meaningful relationships. Pleasures will never make you whole...Real happiness comes from working together, hurting together, fighting together, surviving together, mourning together. It is the essence of the happiness of excellence...The happiness of pleasure can't provide purpose; it can't substitute for the happiness of excellence. The challenge for the veteran - and for anyone suddenly deprived of purpose - is not simple to overcome trauma, but to rebuild meaning. The only way out is through suffering to strength. Through hardship to healing. And the longer we wait, the less life we have to live...We are meant to have worthy work to do. If we aren't allowed to struggle for something worthwhile, we'll never grow in resilience, and we'll never experience complete happiness.

Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake. . . . The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. . . . Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. . . . So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it. . . . There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties. . . . Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians. The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. . . . Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more. This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.

Well, Mr Markham, you that maintain that a boy should not be shielded from evil, but sent out to battle against it, alone and unassisted - not taught to avoid the snares of life, but boldly to rush into them, or over them, as he may - to seek danger rather than shun it, and feed his virtue by temptation - would you-' 'I beg your pardon, Mrs Graham - but you get on too fast. I have not yet said that a boy should be taught to rush into the snares of life - or even wilfully to seek temptation for the sake of exercising his virtue by overcoming it - I only say that it is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble the foe; and if you were to rear an oak sapling in a hot-house, tending it carefully night and day, and shielding it from every breath of wind, you could not expect it to become a hardy tree, like that which has grown up on the mountain-side, exposed to all the action of the elements, and not even sheltered form the shock of the tempest.' 'Granted; but would you use the same arguments with regard to a girl?' 'Certainly not.' 'No; you would have her to be tenderly and delicately nurtured, like a hot-house plant - taught to cling to others for direction and support, and guarded, as much as possible, from the very knowledge of evil. But will you be so good as to inform me why you make this distinction? Is it that you think she has no virtue?' 'Assuredly not.' 'Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation; and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith. It must be, either, that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded that she cannot withstand temptation - and though she may be pure and innocent as long as she is kept in ignorance and restraint, yet, being destitute of real virtue, to teach her how to sin, is at once to make her a sinner, and the greater her knowledge, the wider her liberty, the deeper will be her depravity - whereas, in the nobler sex, there is a natural tendency to goodness, guarded by a superior fortitude, which, the more it is exercised by trials and dangers, it is only further developed-' 'Heaven forbid that I should think so!' I interrupted her at last. 'Well then, it must be that you think they are both weak and prone to err, and the slightest error, the nearest shadow of pollution, will ruin the one, while the character of the other will be strengthened and embellished - his education properly finished by a little practical acquaintance with forbidden things. Such experience, to him (to use a trite simile), will be like the storm to the oak, which, though it may scatter the leaves, and snap the smaller branches, serves but to rivet the roots, and to harden and condense the fibres of the tree. You would have us encourage our sons to prove all things by their own experience, while our daughters must not even profit by the experience of others.