Destiny Arrives Quotes

There's that day when you realize that everything that happened before that one person found you, probably happened to prepare you and to prepare everything, for that person's arrival. It's not that everything suddenly "makes sense" but it's more that you understand why this didn't work and that didn't work and you fell into this ditch and you broke a certain bone somewhere. It's so they'd find you. Or so that you'd find them. So you'd find each other.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING. I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers. I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore. I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive. I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeks he his own down-going. I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going. I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing. I love him who reserves no share of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walks he as spirit over the bridge. I love him who makes his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more. I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to. I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and does not give back: for he always bestows, and desires not to keep for himself. I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: "Am I a dishonest player?"--for he is willing to succumb. I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going. I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones. I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God. I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goes he willingly over the bridge. I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things that are in him: thus all things become his down-going. I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causes his down-going. I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds. Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the SUPERMAN.--

Anyway, those things would not have lasted long. The experience of the years shows it to me. But Destiny arrived in some haste and stopped them. The beautiful life was brief. But how potent were the perfumes, On how splendid a bed we lay, To what sensual delight we gave our bodies. An echo of the days of pleasure, An echo of the days drew near me, A little of the fire of the youth of both of us, Again I took in my hands a letter, And I read and reread till the light was gone. And melancholy, I came out on the balcony Came out to change my thoughts at least by looking at A little of the city that I loved, A little movement on the street and in the shops. Translated by Rae Dalven

This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be.

The first thing I noticed as we exited the theater was how much colder it was than when we arrived. The second thing I noticed was how slick the sidewalk was. I didn’t notice that it was snowing until I was sprawled on the pavement. “Scout! Are you okay?” Alex’s face loomed above me. “I think I broke my butt.

Where are you, oh heart, which I loved from the start? Did you ever arrive? How long must we stay apart?

We walked home in silence,which I guess was pretty normal, since he was a dog after all.When we arrived at the house, he wasn't impressed at all.In fact, he showed me just how unimpressed he was by growling at the walls for at least three straight hours. “Enough already. The wall is not gonna bark back, Mister Fancy Pants!” He growled at me.Maybe he didn’t like his name? “Don't pee on my carpet,no sniffing, no barking, and no chewing while I'm gone. Stay away from the coffee—touch it and you're gone.” He blinked at me and then snapped his head back at the walls and went back to circling them like a sentry—well,a growling, whining sentry. My cell phone rang, startling me, and I answered it.I winced as the dog continued to go off at the walls as if they would attack him. “Stop barking!” “What?” Ryder asked. “I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to Mister Fancy Pants.” I should seriously change his name. It was too long. “Who the fuck is Mister Fancy Pants?” I snickered as he said my dog's name. Coming out of his mouth, it really sounded bad.

When you take the right stairs you will arrive at the precise destination.

That's the thing about your destiny how are you supposed to know when it arrives? How are you supposed to recognise it from random life?

Once your baby arrives, the world is no more the same than you are. Because from our very bodies we add to the collective human destiny. Our deepest urge is always toward life, to wholeness and well being.

A Rock, A River, A Tree Hosts to species long since departed, Mark the mastodon. The dinosaur, who left dry tokens Of their sojourn here On our planet floor, Any broad alarm of their of their hastening doom Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, Come, you may stand upon my Back and face your distant destiny, But seek no haven in my shadow. I will give you no hiding place down here. You, created only a little lower than The angels, have crouched too long in The bruising darkness, Have lain too long Face down in ignorance. Your mouths spelling words Armed for slaughter. The rock cries out today, you may stand on me, But do not hide your face. Across the wall of the world, A river sings a beautiful song, Come rest here by my side. Each of you a bordered country, Delicate and strangely made proud, Yet thrusting perpetually under siege. Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore, currents of debris upon my breast. Yet, today I call you to my riverside, If you will study war no more. Come, clad in peace and I will sing the songs The Creator gave to me when I And the tree and stone were one. Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow And when you yet knew you still knew nothing. The river sings and sings on. There is a true yearning to respond to The singing river and the wise rock. So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew, The African and Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek, The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh, The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The privileged, the homeless, the teacher. They hear. They all hear The speaking of the tree. Today, the first and last of every tree Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the river. Plant yourself beside me, here beside the river. Each of you, descendant of some passed on Traveller, has been paid for. You, who gave me my first name, You Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, You Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, Then forced on bloody feet, Left me to the employment of other seekers-- Desperate for gain, starving for gold. You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot... You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, Bought, sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare Praying for a dream. Here, root yourselves beside me. I am the tree planted by the river, Which will not be moved. I, the rock, I the river, I the tree I am yours--your passages have been paid. Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need For this bright morning dawning for you. History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, Need not be lived again. Lift up your eyes upon The day breaking for you. Give birth again To the dream. Women, children, men, Take it into the palms of your hands. Mold it into the shape of your most Private need. Sculpt it into The image of your most public self. Lift up your hearts. Each new hour holds new chances For new beginnings. Do not be wedded forever To fear, yoked eternally To brutishness. The horizon leans forward, Offering you space to place new steps of change. Here, on the pulse of this fine day You may have the courage To look up and out upon me, The rock, the river, the tree, your country. No less to Midas than the mendicant. No less to you now than the mastodon then. Here on the pulse of this new day You may have the grace to look up and out And into your sister's eyes, Into your brother's face, your country And say simply Very simply With hope Good morning.

You cannot arrive at your life’s purpose by starting with a focus on yourself. You must begin with God, your Creator. You exist only because God wills that you exist. You were made by God and for God – and until you understand that, life will never make sense. It is only in God that we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance, and our destiny. Every other path leads to a dead end.

Destiny is the road that unravels before us, the order of things both happy and tragic. Destiny is that which rules our long lives. And life is the distance we travel on that road. So there is no one real path. We all arrive at our destination, even after getting lost countless times.

The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.

Destiny and fate are of one’s own making, and riches and happiness are rarely found at the end of an easily-traversed path.

Tis the moment where a decision is set to alter the course of her destiny. She walks toward the light where he patiently awaits her arrival.

Inside of you, God plants His dream for your life. It is up to you to seek it, find it, and fulfill it. Don't cheat yourself out of His best for you life by allowing your daily routines to overcome His great purpose for you. It will take courage to pursue His calling. It will stretch you beyond reason. Reflect on the feeling that will wash over you when you finally arrive at the destination you have always dreamed about but hardly dared hope for.

Breathlessly you reach the station just as the train is arriving! But alas, the train doesn't stop. It keeps going. It doesn't care how forlorn you look as it passes by. It doesn't even see you! But wait. What's that sound in the distance? Another train is coming soon and it is yours. A train that will take you to a more beautiful place.

Not accomplishing your Life Plan is a tragic act of free will. It is akin to charting an elaborate vacation itinerary before arriving at your holiday destination, with all kinds of plans for outdoor adventures and intentions to go sightseeing and shopping, but then ending up spending the whole trip in your hotel room ordering from room service and watching television. In a similar fashion the unconscious soul spends a lifetime in the semi-conscious state of Divine Disconnection and then returns home mostly ‘empty-handed’.

Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was the son of a councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility of the bar. It was said that his father, destining him to be the heir of his own post, had married him at a very early age, eighteen or twenty, in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent in parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however, it was said that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well formed, though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and to gallantry.

... that destiny has to make many turnings before arriving anywhere, destiny alone knows what it has cost ...

Claire: Once your baby arrives, the world is no more the same than you are. Because from our very bodies we add to the collective human destiny.

...destiny has to make many turnings before arriving anywhere...

Even dumb objects have their destiny. Rarely given a second thought, they perform their unconsidered duty day by day until their moment arrives and everything seems to hang on their location.

In his little speech to Alice, Humpty Dumpty sketches the future of human hopes and gives the clue to our salvation: to become masters of the words we speak, to make language answer our needs, Humpty Dumpty was a prophet, a man who spoke truths the world wasn't ready for. For all men are eggs, in a manner of speaking. We exist, but we haven't yet achieved the form that is our destiny. We are pure potential, an example of the not-yet-arrived. For man is a fallen creature--we know that from Genesis. Humpty Dumpty is also a fallen creature. He falls from his wall, and no one can put him back together again--neither his king, nor his horses, nor his men. But that is what we must all now strive to do. It is our duty as human beings to put the egg back together again.

You can be the most grateful person in the world, but if you have not arrived at the place God wants you to be, to do the thing God has destined you and only you to do, that longing will never go away.

The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.

The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway as Moshe’s sobs cascaded up and down the walls, bouncing from one side to the other. The discourse on Doc Roberts was forgotten now as the group tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from different lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly, like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them—Isaac, Nate, and the rest—into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled; for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought. Had the group of stragglers moping down the hallway seen that future, they would have all turned en masse and rushed from the hospital out into the open air and collapsed onto the lawn and sobbed like children. As it was, they moved like turtles toward Chona’s room as Moshe’s howl rang out. They were in no hurry. The journey ahead was long. There was no promise ahead. There was no need to rush now.

Long before the Europeans arrived in Africa, the blacks were enslaving each other. They still do,” said Valmorain. “Just as whites are enslaving each other, monsieur,” the physician countered. “Not all Negroes are slaves, nor all slaves black. Africa is a continent of free people. Millions of Africans are subjected to slavery but many more are free. Slavery is not their destiny, just as is also the case with thousands of whites who are slaves.

The end is also the beginning. In order to arrive at your destiny, you must first accept the path that lies ahead. It is paved with loss, betrayal, and sorrow, but the circle is not at its end You must continue on until you find your true center and your peace.

Throughout history, different cultures have produced creation myths that explain our origins as the result of cosmic forces shaping our destiny. These histories have helped us to ward off feelings of insignificance. Although origin stories typically begin with the big picture, they get down to Earth with impressive speed, zipping past the creation of the universe, of all its contents, and of life on Earth, to arrive at long explanations of myriad details of human history and its social conflicts, as if we somehow formed the center of creation.

Whether we trek, crawl, or fly, we are bound to arrive where we ought to.

My arrival saved the kingdom, while his only reiterated that his blood would fill the throne one day.

Keep moving, no matter how slow you move, you will definitely arrive at your destination.

Dear Daughter, Get ready to embrace growth in its totality if you want to arrive at a great destiny.

I used not to know where I was going, but I knew I would arrive, I knew there would be an end to the long blind road.

Destiny is never clear when it arrives. Sometimes we just refuse to do what we no longer feel good about doing. These moments are mysteries in our lives, but we know everything will change.

It is not true that we only get to choose our friends, but not our family. We actually choose our families before birth. It is part of our spiritual life plan before we arrive on this planet. And as that plan unfolds, some of us will be blessed with abundant love and support from our families, while others will not. Either way, it will all be part of our original plan. Because sometimes we need a lousy family to get us started on our journey towards personal growth, success and spiritual fulfillment. But if someday you reach a tipping point, where the lack of family love and support no longer serves your path towards fulfilling your true destiny... it is never too late to find a new tribe. Sometimes a life plan also demands that we choose our families more than once in a lifetime.

child is father to the man," and with such training, whatever may be his natural disposition, it cannot well be otherwise than that, on arriving at maturity, the sufferings and miseries of the slave will be looked upon with entire indifference. The influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who, among, their equals, are regarded as humane and generous.         Young Master Epps possessed some noble qualities, yet no process of reasoning could lead him to comprehend, that in the eye of the Almighty there is no distinction of color. He looked upon the black man simply as an animal, differing in no respect from any other animal, save in the gift of speech and the possession of somewhat higher instincts, and, therefore, the more valuable. To work like his father's mules— to be whipped and kicked and scourged through life— to address the white man with hat in hand, and eyes bent servilely on the earth, in his mind, was the natural and proper destiny of the slave. Brought up with such ideas—in the notion that we stand without the pale of humanity—no wonder the oppressors of my people are a pitiless and unrelenting race.

Still the heights of flying remains to be arrived. Still the wise lessons of life remains to be experienced. Its only the handful of accomplishments has been achieved. The real destiny is yet to be won.

It's that feeling you get somehow knowing that something great is about to happen... about to happen. While every passing day nothing great really does happen. You wake up, go to classes, study, sleep and wait for another monotonous day. You know the great day is not tomorrow, not even the day after, not even in a week or a month's time. But it says it will come soon, the way you live your life, one day at a time, only to realize 20 years have elapsed effortlessly. It will come soon, the way you meet someone without expecting or knowing that you are going to have so much fun together. It will come soon, the way dreams come true overnight- demanding years of perspiration, ironically. It will come soon like a gush of cold air in a hot afternoon. It will come soon like a stranger you feel you have already met. It will come like a guest who would be here to stay. It will come like an eternity, a serendipity, an irony. It will come when it is time for it to come, the way you fall asleep and dreams arrive from a distant land, surely but stealthily.

Remember to conduct yourself in life as if at a banquet,” Epictetus said. “As something being passed around comes to you, reach out your hand and take a moderate helping. Does it pass you by? Don’t stop it. It hasn’t yet come? Don’t burn in desire for it, but wait until it arrives in front of you. Act this way with children, a spouse, toward position, with wealth—one day it will make you worthy of a banquet with the gods.

What is necessary, Luther insisted, was an entirely different mode of thinking, an ad modum scripturae (in the manner of scripture), a fundamental change of the story. As early as his Lectures on Romans he remaks that the biblical story of the exodus had been interpreted (tropologically) to mean the exodus from vice to virtue. Now, however, it must be interpreted as the exodus from virtue to the grace of God! Grace must be the story. It is grace that determines the relationship between God, the creature, creation, and its destiny. Grace is what God is all about. Grace is what God is up to. And a graced creation is what God aims to arrive at.

They are what we once dreamed of as gods, mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death, that poor old peasant laborer, bent over his scythe, no longer is. Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered-carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his somber dignity, and beings like these won’t even let him in the tradesman’s entrance.

There is no destiny for all of mankind, only for some. To recover their divinity, but not as the “unconscious Gods,” but with full consciousness, as a Total-Man, in the sense of the Jungian “individuation,” a God conscious of Himself which is only possible to achieve on this earth. To achieve this is the meaning of Esoteric Hitlerism. When one arrives at such a state, one becomes the UFO, or the Vimana itself, without need of an external new science or a new technology, because one has achieved a parallel world, or a new place-situation, where we shall meet the Fuhrer and the warriors of the Last Battalion. This will be the real space colonization as the ultimate expression of the Faustian soul.

If character is destiny, I was fated to be carried off into the desert. From the deck of the ship I had imagined my own ghost and seen my unvanishing footsteps. When you don't belong anywhere it doesn't matter where you are or where you go, if you stay or move on. You arrive at a place where the view forwards and backwards is the same, where the sun rises in the east one day and the west the next, where you stop planning and live like the birds and beasts by intuition and instinct.

The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world mounting to the brain of one man,—this would be mortal to civilization were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,—these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear.

One of the open secrets of life on earth is that the answer to life’s burning question has been inscribed in one’s soul all along. The soul is a kind of ancient vessel that holds the exact knowledge we seek and need to find our way in life. Each life is a pilgrimage intended to arrive at the center of the pilgrim’s soul. From that vantage point, the issue is not whether we managed to choose the right god or the only way to live righteously; such notions fail to recognize the inborn intimacy each soul already has with the divine.

Do not live because of the fear of death. Live because of the fear of the death of the real reason why you live. Death is no respecter of persons. Death can come when we have not even given him our attention. Death doesn't mind that you are in tension and even when you in the mid of doing something at his arrival, you shall go with nothing. The most important thing to death is to take you at a sudden. Mind your time then! Mind your true purpose! And mind the real reasons why you wake up each day and retire when the sun sets! Life is once, live it well!

But it was probably long before anyone thought of pottery that the river was first perceived as a metaphor of destiny, the "clan river" of eternity connecting the three worlds. The bear signaled--perhaps seemed even to oversee--the arrival of the salmon. The salmon were human food too, which made the first link in the man-bear-river-salmon system a tangible reality. We can only guess how the river's eternal flow, the upstream movement of the miraculous fish from the depths of a watery matrix toward the almost ethereal spring at the headwaters, or their fate in the stomach of the bear might have stimulated the concept of reincarnation. In time, the spiritual forces represented by the physical realities could be grappled with by a shaman, who would travel the river to the ancestral downstream and the immortal upstream in a trance instead of a boat.

The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway as Moshe’s sobs cascaded up and down the walls, bouncing from one side to the other. The discourse on Doc Roberts was forgotten now as the group tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from different lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly, like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them—Isaac, Nate, and the rest—into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled; for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.

A man with a destiny is a man who fears nothing,” he whispered to himself. He had said the same to Lord Balam. When the pilgrims who had brought him from Obregi to Cuecola had dropped him at Balam’s doorstep, the lord had inquired about his past and his tutors and, of course, his mother. Serapio had told him as much as he thought prudent and kept the rest to himself. He did not think Balam truly wanted to know about the horrors of his childhood or what he had endured to arrive at this point. A morbid curiosity did not justify an inquiry into his pain after all, and pain it was.

His unpunctuality was to be a lifelong trait; even as prime minister he would arrive late or with only minutes to spare for meetings with Cabinets and monarchs and for debates in Parliament. As his exasperated wife was to say, ‘Winston always likes to give the train a sporting chance to get away.

His unpunctuality was to be a lifelong trait; even as prime minister he would arrive late or with only minutes to spare for meetings with Cabinets and monarchs and for debates in Parliament. As his exasperated wife was to say, ‘Winston always likes to give the train a sporting chance to get away.’47

Churchill had arrived in Persia secure in his nineteenth-century belief in England’s imperial destiny; he left having learned a cold lesson. He now had no choice but to regard the status of his small island nation from a mid-twentieth-century vantage point, and it was one of declining geopolitical might.

As the twentieth century arrived, America’s manifest destiny had been fulfilled. The 1890 census found so many settlements as to declare the extinction of the frontier. Having reached the Pacific, our forebears looked back and saw a denuded landscape: mountains demolished and rivers fouled by the Gold Rush, and species vanishing as cities grew larger and their smokestacks taller. Between 1883 and 1898, bird populations in twenty-six states dropped by nearly half. In 1914, Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon on earth, died in the Cincinnati Zoo. Four years later her cage hosted the death of Incas, the last of the Carolina Parakeets.

The so-called ‘ego’ — We are none of us that which we appear to be in accordance with the states for which alone we have consciousness and words, and consequently praise and blame; those cruder outbursts of which alone we are aware make us misunderstand ourselves, we draw a conclusion on the basis of data in which the exceptions outweigh the rule, we misread ourselves in this apparently most intelligible of handwriting on the nature of our self. Our opinion of ourself, however, which we have arrived at by this erroneous path, the so-called ‘ego’, is thenceforth a fellow worker in the construction of our character and our destiny. —

The love between Uncle Dees and Roger was every bit as enduring as it had been immediate. They were never to be seen apart, man and dog, not since the moment of their introduction. Very quickly after their arrival in Amsterdam four years earlier, Roger had given Alma to understand that he was no longer her dog--that, in fact, he had never been her dog, nor had he ever been Ambrose's dog, but that he had been Dees' dog all along, by force of pure and plain destiny. The fact that Roger was born in distant Tahiti, whereas Dees van Devender resided in Holland, had been the result, Roger appeared to believe, of an unfortunate clerical error, now thankfully rectified.

I had not chosen to be single but love is rare and it is frequently unreciprocated. Without love I saw no reason to form a permanent attachment to any particular place. Love determined how humans arrayed themselves in space. Because it affixed people into their long-term arrangements, those around me viewed it as an eschatological event, messianic in its totality. My friends expressed a religious belief that it would arrive for me one day, as if love were something the universe owed to each of us, which no human could escape. I had known love, but having known love I knew how powerless I was to instigate it or ensure its duration. Still, I nurtured my idea of the future, which I thought of as the default denouement of my sexuality, and a destiny rather than a choice. The vision remained suspended, jewel-like in my mind, impervious to the storms of my actual experience, a crystalline point of arrival. But I knew that it did not arrive for everyone, and as I got older I began to worry that it would not arrive for me.

If we wish to understand Indian thought, we must return to its sources, that is, to the great civilization that preceded the arrival of the Aryans, which has continued to the present time and of which the Shaiva religion, the cosmological theory called Sâmkhyä, the practices of Yogä, as well as the bases of what we consider to be the Hindu philosophy, are part.

If you consciously accept this moment just the way it is, you arrive at a certain ease within yourself. Ease is a consequence of the relaxation of all you have created. You can, in turn, experience the whole of existence as yourself. Everything becomes a part of you, as creation in its very nature exists as one whole. Knowing this experience is yoga, or the ultimate union.

I crash landed to find him. I fell from the sky to know him. I died a mortal death to be worthy of him. I am reborn because of him. “If rescue never comes, know I didn’t need it. If help never arrives, know I didn’t want it. If we die here together, be happy knowing this was our destiny. “Don’t find us. Don’t mourn us. Don’t weep for us. Because we were the lucky ones, the chosen ones, the only ones for each other.

The term may have been coined in 1845, but the seeds of Manifest Destiny arrived with Christopher Columbus when he stumbled onto the shores of North America—the self-styled “New World.” Since then, the death grip of its ideology has been the operating principle of the American Empire—a fervent, fanatical, at times religious mandate to carry out economic and geo-political acts that will always benefit the chosen few, which, in today’s parlance is the “one percent.” In fact, this Draconian gospel of exceptionalism has been the all-powerful dogma fueling American imperialism and free-market fundamentalism at the core of U.S. armed atrocities—both domestic and foreign. Writer and cabinetmaker Charles Sullivan offers this allegory: “It is the unquestioned religion of America that also bears a strange resemblance to the ideology of the cancer cell.

And we really should be considering the moral implications of what we're doing. What kind of a species are we that we treat the rest of life so cheaply? There are those who think that's the destiny of Earth: We arrived, we're humanizing the Earth, and it will be the destiny of Earth for us to wipe humans out and most of the rest of biodiversity. But I think the great majority of thoughtful people consider that a morally wrong position to take, and a very dangerous one.

When You Are Your True Self 1. Your life has a unique purpose. 2. That purpose is unfolding continually, becoming richer and deeper. 3. If you align yourself with your purpose, that is enough. 4. As your life unfolds, awareness expands without limits. 5. With expanded awareness, desires can be fulfilled completely. 6. Challenges are solved by rising to a level higher than the challenge. 7. Your life is part of a single human destiny: arriving at unity consciousness.

When we focus on thoughts about bitter past memories or imagined dreadful futures to the exclusion of everything else, we prevent the body from regaining homeostasis. In truth, we’re capable of turning on the stress response by thought alone. If we turn it on and then can’t turn it off, we’re surely headed for some type of illness or disease—be it a cold or cancer—as more and more genes get downregulated in a domino effect, until we eventually arrive at our genetic destiny.

Every human being is a world in miniature. It has its own centre of observation, its own way of forming concepts and of arriving at conclusions, its own degree of sensibility, its own life's work to do, and its own destiny to reach. All these features may be encompassed by general conditions, governed by general laws, and subject to unforeseen influences and incidents, but within the sphere of their own activity, they constitute that great principle which we call individuality.

When we focus on thoughts about bitter past memories or imagined dreadful futures to the exclusion of everything else, we prevent the body from regaining homeostasis. In truth, we’re capable of turning on the stress response by thought alone. If we turn it on and then can’t turn it off, we’re surely headed for some type of illness or disease—be it a cold or cancer—as more and more genes get downregulated in a domino effect, until we eventually arrive at our genetic destiny. For

It was time that this vast man should fall. The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world mounting to the brain of one man, — this would be mortal to civilization were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears, — these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear. Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite, and his fall had been decided on. He embarrassed God. Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the Universe.

If you are a long-time reader, then you know the story thus far. You were there when the Alma Alerons first arrived at Hogwarts in their peculiar flying cars. You know how the new Hogwarts headmaster came to be, and what his story is. You know all about the Gremlins—including Ted Lupin's dark secret, and Petra Morganstern's tragic past. You witnessed the raising of the Wocket, the return of the Gatekeeper, and the Hogwarts all-school debate. In short, you are prepared (as much as you can be) for what is to come.

ce qui (...) peut arriver de mieux à un individu c'est d' "avoir la chance d'être né au sein du peuple qu'il faut au moment de l'histoire qu'il faut" : grec et non barbare, aux siècles de Solon et Périclès ; romain et non pas grec, au temps d'Auguste et des débuts de la Pax romana ; chrétien et non pas juif, ensuite, quand l'Europe se christianise et que commencent les pogromes (...) le mieux qui puisse arriver à un sujet c'est de naître occidental ; le pire, la catastrophe irrémédiable, la figure même de l'infortune, du tragique, de la damnation, c'est d'être né burundais, angolais, sud-soudanais, colombien ou, comme la petite Srilaya, sri-lankais. (ch. 15 Arendt, Sarajevo : qu'est-ce qu'être damné ?)

If they want you, a youngish Quell had once written of the Harlan’s World ruling elite, sooner or later they’ll scoop you up off the globe, like specks of interesting dust off a Martian artifact. Cross the gulf between the stars, and they can come after you. Go into centuries of storage, and they’ll be there waiting for you, clone new, when you resleeve. They are what we once dreamed of as gods, mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death, that poor old peasant laborer, bent over his scythe, no longer is. Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered-carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his somber dignity, and beings like these won’t even let him in the tradesman’s entrance.

She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn’t fashionable these days, but it’s her way of seeing. A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity.

Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it—and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognize. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But—I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve. And it is no use to try to take a shortcut and want to start, already knowing that the voice says little, starting straightaway with being depersonal. For the journey exists, and the journey is not simply a manner of going. We ourselves are the journey. In the matter of living, one can never arrive beforehand. The via crucis is not a detour, it is the only way, one cannot arrive except along it and with it. Persistence is our effort, giving up is the reward. One only reaches it having experienced the power of building, and, despite the taste of power, preferring to give up. Giving up must be a choice. Giving up is the most sacred choice of a life. Giving up is the true human instant. And this alone, is the very glory of my condition.

I would not speak of a betrothal to you if I weren’t also compelled by what’s in my heart.” And what’s in your heart, I wanted to ask, but the question was brash and dangerous and I sensed that what lay there was a difficult puzzle—a jumble of God, destiny, duty, and love that couldn’t be solved, much less explained. If we married, I would always look over my shoulder for God. “I’m unsuited for you,” I said. “Certainly you know this.” I couldn’t think why I would try to discourage him, except to test his resolve. “I don’t just refer to my family’s wealth and ties to Herod Antipas, but to myself. You said you’re not like other men. Well, I’m not like other women—you’ve said so yourself. I have ambitions as men do. I’m racked with longings. I’m selfish and willful and sometimes deceitful. I rebel. I’m easy to anger. I doubt the ways of God. I’m an outsider everywhere I go. People look on me with derision.” “I know all of this,” he said. “And you would still have me?” “The question is whether you will have me.” I heard Sophia sigh into the wind—Here, Ana, here it is. And despite all that Jesus had just said, all his prevarication and provisos, the most curious feeling came over me, that I was always meant to arrive at this moment. I said, “I will have you.

Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer No. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No. Because of God. Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of facts was in preparation, in which there was no longer any room for Napoleon. The ill will of events had declared itself long before. It was time that this vast man should fall. The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world mounting to the brain of one man,—this would be mortal to civilization were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,—these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear. Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been decided on. He embarrassed God. Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the Universe.

MT: The arrival of Christ disturbs the sacrificial order, the cycle of little false periods of temporary peace following sacrifices? RG: The story of the “demons of Gerasa” in the synoptic Gospels, and notably in Mark, shows this well. To free himself from the crowd that surrounds him, Christ gets on a boat, crosses Lake Tiberias, and comes to shore in non-Jewish territory, in the land of the Gerasenes. It's the only time the Gospels venture among a people who don't read the Bible or acknowledge Mosaic law. As Jesus is getting off the boat, a possessed man blocks his way, like the Sphinx blocking Oedipus. “The man lived in the tombs and no one could secure him anymore, even with a chain. All night and all day, among the tombs and in the mountains, he would howl and gash himself with stones.” Christ asks him his name, and he replies: “My name is Legion, for there are many of us.” The man then asks, or rather the demons who speak through him ask Christ not to send them out of the area—a telling detail—and to let them enter a herd of swine that happen to be passing by. And the swine hurl themselves off the edge of the cliff into the lake. It's not the victim who throws himself off the cliff, it's the crowd. The expulsion of the violent crowd is substituted for the expulsion of the single victim. The possessed man is healed and wants to follow Christ, but Christ tells him to stay put. And the Gerasenes come en masse to beg Jesus to leave immediately. They're pagans who function thanks to their expelled victims, and Christ is subverting their system, spreading confusion that recalls the unrest in today's world. They're basically telling him: “We'd rather continue with our exorcists, because you, you're obviously a true revolutionary. Instead of reorganizing the demoniac, rearranging it a bit, like a psychoanalyst, you do away with it entirely. If you stayed, you would deprive us of the sacrificial crutches that make it possible for us to get around.” That's when Jesus says to the man he's just liberated from his demons: “You're going to explain it to them.” It's actually quite a bit like the conversion of Paul. Who's to say that historical Christianity isn't a system that, for a long time, has tempered the message and made it possible to wait for two thousand years? Of course this text is dated because of its primitive demonological framework, but it contains the capital idea that, in the sacrificial universe that is the norm for mankind, Christ always comes too early. More precisely, Christ must come when it's time, and not before. In Cana he says: “My hour has not come yet.” This theme is linked to the sacrificial crisis: Christ intervenes at the moment the sacrificial system is complete. This possessed man who keeps gashing himself with stones, as Jean Starobinski has revealed, is a victim of “auto-lapidation.” It's the crowd's role to throw stones. So, it's the demons of the crowd that are in him. That's why he's called Legion—in a way he's the embodiment of the crowd. It's the crowd that comes out of him and goes and throws itself off of the cliff. We're witnessing the birth of an individual capable of escaping the fatal destiny of collective violence. MT

DEAR YOUNG DEMIGOD, Your destiny awaits. Now that you have discovered your true parentage, you must prepare yourself for a difficult future—fighting monsters, adventuring across the world, and dealing with temperamental Greek and Roman gods. I don’t envy you. I hope this volume will help you on your journeys. I had to think long and hard before publishing these stories, as they were given to me in the strictest confidence. However, your survival comes first, and this book will give you an inside look at the world of demigods—information that may help keep you alive. We’ll begin with “The Diary of Luke Castellan.” Over the years, many readers and campers at Camp Half-Blood have asked me to tell the story of Luke’s early days, adventuring with Thalia and Annabeth before they arrived at camp. I have been reluctant to do this, as neither Annabeth nor Thalia likes to talk about those times. The only information I have is recorded in Luke’s own handwriting, in his original diary given to me by Chiron. I think it’s time, though, to share a little of Luke’s story. It may help us understand what went wrong for such a promising young demigod. In this excerpt you will find out how Thalia and Luke arrived in Richmond, Virginia, chasing a magic goat, how they were almost destroyed in a house of horrors, and how they met a young girl named Annabeth. I have also included a map of Halcyon Green’s house in Richmond. Despite the damage described in the story, the house has been rebuilt, which is very troubling. If you go there, be careful. It may still contain treasures. But it most assuredly contains monsters and traps as well. Our second story will definitely get me in trouble with Hermes. “Percy Jackson and the Staff of Hermes” describes an embarrassing incident for the god of travelers, which he hoped to solve quietly with

But sleep tha pondereth and is not to be and there oh may my weary spirit dwell apart forms heaven's eternity and yet how far from hell. other friends have flown before on the morrow he will leave me as my hopes have flown before the bird said nevermore. leave my loneliness unbroken. how dark a woe yet how sublimes a hope. And the fever called living is conquered at last. I stand amid the roar of a surf tormented shore and i hold within my hand grains of the golden sand how few yet how they creep through my fingers to the deep while i weep while i weep o god can i not grasp them with a tighter clasp o god can i not save one from the pitiless wave is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream. Hell rising form a thousand thrones shall do it reverence. It was the dead who groaned within lest the dead who is forsaken may not be happy now. even for thy woes i love thee even for thy woes thy beauty and thy woes think of all that is airy and fairy like and all that is hideous and unwieldy. hast thou not dragged Diana from her car. I care not though it perishes with a thought i then did cherish. For on its wing was dark alley and as it fluttered fell an essence powerful to destroy a soul that knew it well. (Talking about death) the intense reply of hers to our intelligence. Then all motion of whatever nature creates most writers poets in especial prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy an ecstatic intuition and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought at the true purposes seized only at the last moment at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable at the cautions selection and rejections at the painful erasures and interpolations in a word at the wheels and pinions the tackle for scene shifting the steep ladders and demon traps the cock[s feathers a the red pain and the black patches which in ninety nine cases out of the hundred constitute the properties of the literary _histiro. Wit the Arabians there is a medium between heaven and hell where men suffer no punishment but yet do not attain that tranquil and even happiness which they supposed to be characteristic of heavenly enjoyment. If i could dwell where israfel hath dwelt and he where i he might not sing so wildly well mortal melody, while a bolder note than this might swell form my lyre within the sky. And i am drunk with love of the dead who is my bride. And so being young and dipt in folly , I feel in love with melancholy. I could not love except where death was mingling his with beauty's breath or hymen, Time, and destiny were stalking between her and me. Yet that terror was not friegt but a tremulous delight a feeling not the jeweled mine could teach or bribe me to define nor love although the love were thine. Whose solitary soul could make an Eden of that dim lake. that my young life were a lasting dream my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the morrow. An idle longing night and day to dream my very life away. As others saw i could not bring my passions from a comman spring from the sam source i have not taken my sorrow and all i loved i loved alone La solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude estune belle chose impulse upon the ether the source of all motion is thought and the source of all thought. Be of heart and fear nothing your allotted days of stupor have expired and tomorrow i will myself induct you into the full joys and wonders of your novel existence. unknown now known of the speculative future merged in the august and certain present.

Where else in dramatic literature is there such a treatment of the life-and-death cycle of people and political change? One needs to reach back to the chronicles of Shakespeare, back to the Greeks. Larry Kramer isn't Sophocles and he isn't Shakespeare; we don't have Sophocleses or Shakespeares, not these days, but we do have, on rare occasion, remarkable accomplishment, and Kramer's is remarkable, invaluable, and rare. How else to dramatise revolution accurately, truthfully, politically, than by showing it to be tragic as well as triumphant? And on the other hand, if the medical, biological, political, and familial failures of "Destiny" produce, by the play's end, despair again; if we are plunged back into night, it cannot be different from the night with which "Normal Heart" began, rife with despair and terror, and pregnant with an offstage potential for transformation, for hope. Failure awaits any political movement, even a spectacularly successful movement such as the one Larry Kramer helped to spark and organise. Political movements, liberation movements, revolutions, are as subject to time, decline, mortality, tragedy, as any human enterprise, or any human being. Death waits for every living thing, no matter how vital or brilliant its accomplishment; death waits for people and for their best and worst efforts as well.politics is a living thing, and living things die. The mistake is to imagine otherwise, to believe that progress doesn't generate as many new problems as it generates blessings, to imagine, foolishly, that the struggle can be won decisively, finally, definitively. No matter what any struggle accomplishes, time, life, death bring in their changes, and new oppressions are always forming from the ashes of the old. The fight for justice, for a better world, for civil rights or access to medicine, is a never-ending fight, at least as far as we have to see. the full blooded description of this truth, the recognition and dramatisation of a political cycle of birth, death, rebirth, defeat, renewal - this is true tragedy, in which absolute loss and devastation, Nothing is arrived at, and from this Nothing, something new is born.

It has to be said: there are too many great men in the world. There are too many legislators, organizers, founders of society, leaders of peoples, fathers of nations, etc., etc. Too many people put themselves above humanity in order to rule it and too many people think their job is to become involved with it. People will say to me: you yourself are becoming involved, you who talk about it. That is true. But they will agree that it is for a very different reason and from a very different point of view, and while I am taking on those who wish to reform, it is solely to make them abandon their effort. I am becoming involved with it not like Vaucanson with his automaton but like a physiologist with the human organism, in order to examine it and admire it. I am becoming involved with it in the same spirit as that of a famous traveler. He arrived among a savage tribe. A child had just been born and a host of fortune-tellers, warlocks, and quacks were crowding around it, armed with rings, hooks, and ties. One said, “This child will never smell the aroma of a pipe if I do not lengthen his nostrils.” Another said, “He will be deprived of the sense of hearing if I do not make his ears reach down to his shoulders.” A third said, “He will never see the light of the sun unless I make his eyes slant obliquely.” A fourth said, “He will never stand upright if I do not make his legs curve.” A fifth said, “He will never be able to think if I do not squeeze his brain.” “Away with you,” said the traveler. “God does His work well. Do not claim to know more than He does and, since He has given organs to this frail creature, leave those organs to develop and grow strong through exercise, experimentation, experience, and freedom.” [print edition page 146] God has also provided humanity with all that is necessary for it to accomplish its destiny. There is a providential social physiology just as there is a providential human physiology. The social organs are also constituted so as to develop harmoniously in the fresh air of freedom. Away with you, therefore, you quacks and organizers! Away with your rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with your artificial means! Away with your social workshop, your phalanstery, your governmentalism, your centralization, your tariffs, your universities, your state religion, your free credit or monopolistic banks, your constraints, your restrictions, your moralizing, or your equalizing through taxes! And since the social body has had inflicted on it so many theoretical systems to no avail, let us finish where we should have started; let us reject these and at last put freedom to the test, freedom, which is an act of faith in God and in His work.

[the virgin birth account] occurs everywhere. When the Herod figure ( the extreme figure of misgovernment) has brought man to the nadir of spirit, the occult forces of the cycle begin to move. In an inconspicuous village, Mary is born who will maintain herself undefiled by fashionable errors of her generation. Her womb, remaining fallw as the primordial abyss, summons itself by its very readiness the original power that fertilzed the void. Mary's virgin birth story is recounted everywhere. and with such striking unity of the main contours, that early christian missionaries had to think the devil must be creating mockeries of Mary's birth wherever they testified. One missionary reports that after work was begun among Tunja and Sogamozzo South American Indians, "the demon began giving contrary doctrines. The demon sought to discredit Mary's account, declaring it had not yet come to pass; but presently, the sun would bring it to pass by taking flesh in the womb of a virgin in a small village, causing her to conceive by rays of the sun while she yet remained virgin." Hindu mythology tells of the maiden parvati who retreated to the high hills to practice austerities. Taraka had usurped mastery of the world, a tyrant. Prophecy said only a son of the high god Shiva could overthrow him. Shive however was the pattern god of yoga-alone, aloof, meditating. It was impossible Shiva could be moved to beget. Parvati tried changing the world situation by metching Shiva in meditation. Aloof, indrawn in her soul meditating, she fasted naked beneath the blazing sun, even adding to the heat by building four great fires. One day a Brahmin youth arrived and asked why anyone so beautiful should be destroying herself with such torture. "My desire," she said "is Shiva, the Highest. He is the god of solitude and concentration. I therefore imitate his meditation to move him from his balance and bring him to me in love." Shiva, the youth announced, is a god of destruction, shiva is World Annhilator. Snakes are his garlands. The virgin said: He is beyond the mind of such as you. He is terrifying but the source of grace. snake garlands or jewel garlands he can assume or put off at will. Shiva is my love. The youth thereupon put away his disguise-he was Shiva. The Buddha descended from heaven to his mother's womb in the shape of a milk white elephant. The Aztec Coatlicue was approached by a god in the form of a ball of feathers. The chapters of Ovid's Metamorphoses swarm with nymphs beset by gods in sundry masquerades: jove as a bull, a swan, a shower of gold. Any leaf, any nut, or even the breath of a breeze, may be enough to fertilize the ready virgin womb. The procreating power is everywhere. And according to whim or destiny of the hour, either a hero savior or a world--annihilating demon may be conceived-one can never know.

What I’ve come to understand is that finding your purpose is more of a path than a plan: it involves twists and turns that you never expected. Ultimately these surprises lead you to your destiny. And once you arrive at what you thought was the destination, you realize it’s only another leg in the journey.

There is a small group of people who are our special ones: our partners, children, and other loved ones. They are our dearest ones. Somehow, they belong to us and us to them. We didn’t really choose them but nor did we not choose them. Our beloved children did not just randomly come to us. Long before their material arrival, they were a part of us, as we have always been a part of them. Partners and other dearly loved ones, likewise, did not just randomly appear in our life as if, just as easily, we could have missed them or replaced them with some other 'random'. No, they are the ones that were marked in our heart already. We recognize them as belonging to us. This belonging gives love a certain stability, permanence, and resilience.

Let us come into this holy place cleansed, purified. That's how we honor God. That's how we prove our belief in the arrival of the divine in the midst of our lives. God will help the one who seeks to make those efforts. Finally he says, „Put on (or clothe) yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ. Don't think of that as some other unapproachable metaphor. It means think like Him. Live like Him. Not as a vagrant, but as a compassionate person, a forgiving person. Even if you're the only one in the crowd. Don't let the poison of negativity get contagious on you. Recognize it for what it is. Put on Christ, nothing less. Each one of us is called to that. Because in putting on that understanding of life, you find your true Self, your true destiny, your true joy. (p. 52)

Operate in your gift and you will arrive at your destiny.

MOST PEOPLE IN the West spend their time waiting for Godot, but of course he never comes. They also wait for the Messiah, but we know he always arrives a day too late. What is everyone waiting for? Divine intervention? The Deus ex machina that solves every problem? Don’t you get it? – no one’s ever coming. Ever. The world-historic figures, the men and women of destiny, aren’t waiting. They’re out doing things, being active, making things happen.

I look at the augusteum and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic after all it is merely this world that is chaotic b ringing changes to us all threat nobody could have anticipated. The augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who i am what i represent whom i belong to or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday i might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough but tomorrow i could be a firework's depository, even in the eternal city says the silent augusteum . one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation. pizzaeria da michele Passato remoto In her world the roman forum is not remote nor is it past. It is exactly as present and close to her as i am. The bhagavata Gita that ancient Indian yogic test says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So now i have started living my own life, perfected clumsy as it may look it is resembling me now thoroughly. It was in a bathtub back in new York reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary that i first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits, and I was so unrecognizable to myself that i probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup. But i felt a glimmer of happiness when i started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grip onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face first out of the dirt this is not selfishness but obligation you were given life it is your duty and also your entitlement as a human being to find somehtign beautiful within life no mattter how slight But i do know that i have collected me of late through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures into somebody much more intact . I have e put on weight I exist more now than i did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when i arrived here. And i will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person the magnification of one life is indeed an act of worth in this world, Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody s but my own . Hatha yoga one limb of the philosophy the ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation, Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation through scholarly study. The yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition which i[m going to very simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Taoists call it imbalance Buddhism calls it ignorance Islam blames our misery on rebellion against god and the jedio Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin, Graduands say that unhappiness is that inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization needs and my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it desire is the design flaw the yogis however say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity we're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals alone with our fears and flaws an d resentment sand mortality we wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature, We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character we don't realize that somewhere within us all there does exist a supreme self is our true identity universal and divine . you bear God within your poor wretch and know it not.

Time and time again Billy Collins takes a mundane situation and spirals it out into something that is by turns humorous and poignant as in his poem "Imperial Garden", one of my favorites in this new collection: It was at the end of dinner, the two of us in a red booth maintaining our silence, when I decided to compose a message for the fortune cookie you were soon to receive. Avoid mulishness when choosing a position on the great board game of life was my mean-spirited contribution to the treasury of Confucian wisdom. But while we waited for the cookies, the slices of oranges, and the inescapable pot of watery tea, I realized that by mulishness I meant your refusal to let me have my own way every time I wanted it. I watched you looking off to the side— your mass of dark hair, your profile softened by lamplight— and then I made up a fortune for myself. He who acts like a jerk on an island of his own creation will have only the horizon for a friend. I seemed to be getting worse at this, I seemed to be getting worse at this, I thought, as the cookies arrived at the table along with the orange slices and a teapot painted with tigers menacingly peering out from the undergrowth. The restaurant was quiet then. The waiter returned to looking out at the street, a zither whimpered in the background, and we turned to our cookies, cracking the brittle shells, then rolling into little balls the tiny scrolls of our destinies before dropping them, unread, into our cups of tea— a little good-luck thing we’d been doing ever since we met.

The historian, Josephus, explains how Cyrus arrived at this decision. In the first year of Cyrus’s reign, Daniel showed Cyrus the writings of Isaiah, addressing Cyrus by name. Written 120 years earlier, the prophecy is remarkable in its details, right down to Cyrus’s entering Babylon by drying up and crossing the Euphrates river. Isaiah even added a description of the famed “double doors” at the entrance of Babylon. The majestic entrance to the city was a massive double gate, flanked with bright towers of blue enameled brick. The prophecy was even more remarkable in light of the fact that at the time of Isaiah, Babylon did not have these doors and was not yet a world power. Neither did the majestic temple of Solomon and the city of Jerusalem need to be rebuilt. Put yourself in the seat of Cyrus, and imagine reading a letter from God written to you by name 120 years before you were born.

As we approached the end of our second year under Japanese oppression, I’d learned that there was little benefit to continually worrying about what lay ahead. What was the point? We had no control over our destiny. The best we could do was enjoy any brighter moments when they arrived, however brief they might be. I’d also learned that every situation, no matter how bleak it might seem, always had the potential to improve,

Natural history and psychology arrive at consciousness from the outside, and consequently give it an artificial articulation and rationality which are wholly alien to its essence. These sciences infer feeling from habit or expression; so that only the expressible and practical aspects of feeling figure in their calculation. But these aspects are really peripheral; the core is an irresponsible, ungoverned, irrevocable dream. Psychologists have discussed perception ad nauseam and become horribly entangled in a combined idealism and physiology; for they must perforce approach the subject from the side of matter, since all science and all evidence is external; nor could they ever reach consciousness at all if they did not observe its occasions and then interpret those occasions dramatically. At the same time, the inferred mind they subject to examination will yield nothing but ideas, and it is a marvel how such a dream can regard those natural objects from which the psychologist has inferred it. Perception is in fact no primary phase of consciousness; it is an ulterior practical function acquired by a dream which has become symbolic of its conditions, and therefore relevant to its own destiny. Such relevance and symbolism are indirect and slowly acquired; their status cannot be understood unless we regard them as forms of imagination happily grown significant. In imagination, not in perception, lies the substance of experience, while knowledge and reason are but its chastened and ultimate form. The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by physical forces.

Sitting on our packs, dripping. Mid-September and it felt as if autumn had arrived. We could have stopped, but we had nothing to lose and everything to walk for. We were free here, battered by the elements, hungry, tired, cold, but free. Free to walk on or not, to stop or not. Not camping out with friends or family, being a burden, becoming an irritation, wearing friendship away to just tolerance. Here we were still in control of our life, of our own outcomes, our own destiny. The water ran from our rucksacks as we put them on our backs. We chose to walk and seized the freedom that came with that choice.

After Billy’s dragon, Spark, had betrayed them and joined the Dragon of Death, giving her the eight pearls she needed to choose her own destiny, the world around them had disappeared. When it had come back, it was completely different. Billy, Ling-Fei, Charlotte and Dylan had woken in a dark and distant future. One where the Dragon of Death ruled with a fearsome and terrible might. One where somehow she had been ruling for years and years already, even though it felt like only moments had passed between their lives in the past, in the Dragon Realm, and this version of the future where there was no Dragon Realm and Human Realm, only Dragon City and the Void beyond. Both the Dragon and the Human Realms had been decimated and devoured by the Dragon of Death and the Noxious and their never-ending quest for power, leaving Dragon City as the only habitable place for dragons and humans. But at least Billy and his friends had been together, and they still had their memories of their lives before. And even though they had been separated from their dragons, they had heard them when they had first arrived in Dragon City and had found themselves in chains in an unfamiliar and terrifying cityscape. Knowing that their dragons were alive had given them hope. Because the dragons were more than just friends. Deep in Dragon Mountain, the four children had each heart-bonded with a dragon, connecting them for ever. Dylan had bonded with Buttons, a healer dragon who cared deeply for humans. Ling-Fei’s dragon was Xing, a dragon with the ability to seek out magic and power, and whose tough exterior hid a kind heart. The fierce warrior dragon Tank was Charlotte’s heart-bonded dragon, and the two of them together could take on almost any opponent. As for Billy… He didn’t like thinking about his dragon, Spark, with her electricity powers and ability to see into the future. He had trusted her more than anyone and she’d let him down. Despite everything, part of him hoped that they were still connected through the heart bond. But when he tried to reach down their bond, there was nothing. It made him feel empty inside, like something was missing. Even though they had been separated from their dragons, they weren’t alone in the terrifying world of Dragon City. The tiny gold flying pig had been sucked into this future alongside them. And even though it couldn’t speak, Billy knew it could understand them, so when they’d needed help escaping their shackles, he’d asked the pig to find the key. It was a big ask for a tiny pig, but the pig had brought him Dylan’s Claddagh ring, after all, and it had led Billy and the others to where Dylan was trapped in a tree by dark magic. Surely it could find a key to open their chains. Hours had gone by during which the four friends had watched in horror as nox-wings swooped down on unsuspecting human workers and tossed them up into the air in some sort of twisted game, laughing as they did.

While Sardinian authors, like Giuseppe Cossu in 1799, had been lamenting the oversight of the island’s history and “unfaithful geo- graphic maps” for centuries, there still seemed to be a lingering nar- rative of historical ambivalence, as if the island had been an empty stage until the arrival of Phoenicians and Romans; as if Sardinians had no ancient civilization or role in their own destiny—or, more importantly, as if they had no role in shaping Italy and the worlds be- yond their island. I couldn’t help but wonder if we were missing the most vital parts of the island and its history; that perhaps we needed to understand Sardinia if we were to truly understand the rest of Italy.

When the day of destiny finally arrives, it will be too late to want to prepare.

The English version of this term, putting the cart before the horse, suggests haste – and there is indeed a kind of premature quality to this play that is so shaped by youthful impatience and hurry, with its adolescent protagonists rushing towards their destiny, heedless of Friar Lawrence’s caution: ‘Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow’ (2.5.15). Lots of elements of this play are about coming too soon, and the sexual pun is somehow unavoidable: Romeo and Juliet is shaped as the structural equivalent of premature ejaculation. If, as many theorists have conjectured, the pleasure we take in narrative is somehow paced like sexual pleasure – enjoying anticipation, foreplay and climax – then this play needs to learn to take its time.

Each time the Gray Champion appeared marked the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” the climax of the Fourth Turning of the saeculum.

The great force! Few of us relate it with the dark, Many with the world unknown, A realm that erases every mark, Of every seed that in the farm of life was sown, Life fears it and hides at a place called nowhere, Yet it chases it and seeks it, Because its domain is everywhere, And life ultimately before it does submit, It rules over priests, emperors and paupers alike, A force that expects complete submission, It is not a feeling visceral that you may like, Because it enters every domain without any permission, Some say it even rules over time and its every moment, And it is not vindictive at all, Because even without the Sun its shadow is permanent, It has existed since the world witnessed the great fall, Its appearance is not due to serendipity, Because it is the final destiny of everything, It is an experience, felt just for a brevity, It appears from nothing and disappears into nothing, A force before which all kneel, Many incriminate it because it robs them entirely, Throughout one's life it seems unreal and in a moment becomes real, It leaves all sentimental and teary, It is death, the force all living shall experience one day, I wonder why flowers and butterflies do not dread it, I saw it capture and wilt a beautiful flower today, Yet the drooping and dead flower smiled as the hope of next Summer in its fading petals lit, Because death can wilt a summer flower, but it can't keep the Summer from returning again, It can kill a man and a woman, but it can never kill life’s spirit, Without life what shall it kill again and again, So you may despise it, but without it who shall renew life, if not it? There maybe no foreboding feeling about its arrival, But then it is the same about Summer’s advent too, Maybe life and death travel together for life’s continuous revival, And whose act is it who knows, because when a newly married couple says “We do!” We shower them with dead flowers, beautiful flowers, Who killed them, who hurled them, who ended their lives? Just for the sake of prolonging the romance of two lovers, I guess that is how death in mysterious ways strives, Killing all eventually but never taking the blame, So let me too pluck a beautiful rose and gift it to my beautiful lady, All for the sake of love and in the love’s name, Let me love her today and love her everyday, Because who knows when the dark force might strike, A rose too feels happier in her hands, Because it knows it makes her smile and in this act they are alike, Spreading happiness even in death forsaken lands, That is where all beautiful flowers go when they wilt here, To the land where there is everlasting Summer, And every form of beauty always looks the same everywhere, They go there to impart it colours and shades warmer, So when the flower fades and falls, Let us not blame death and curse it, Because it is the only way to climb and cross few walls, For it too ultimately before the mighty will of the Universe does submit!

I was born in the city of Bombay on August 15th 1947. No, that will not do. The time is important. It was at the stroke of midnight, the precise instant of India's arrival at independence. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotface, Baldy and Too Pleased With My Own Brilliance, had my destiny tied to my country's. Now my time is running out, and I have so many stories - too many you may think - to tell, to save myself from crumbling into dust. But I am the Arabian Knights and you must put up with it. The story starts in 1915. My grandfather, Aadam Aziz, fell on a tussock while praying and lost his faith. Blood fell from his not inconsiderable nose and solidified into rubies and diamonds, and I could already feel the Booker Prize in my hands.

There are nations of Europe where an inhabitant considers himself a kind of colonist, indifferent to the destiny of the place that he inhabits. The greatest changes come about in his country without his concurrence; he does not even know precisely what has taken place; he suspects; he has heard the event recounted by chance. Even more, the fortune of his village, the policing of his street, the fate of his church and of his presbytery do not touch him; he thinks that all these things do not concern him in any fashion and that they belong to a powerful foreigner called the government. For himself, he enjoys these goods as a tenant, without a spirit of ownership and without ideas of any improvement whatsoever. This disinterest in himself goes so far that if his own security or that of his children is finally compromised, instead of occupying himself with removing the danger, he crosses his arms to wait for the nation as a whole to come to his aid. Yet this man, although he has made such a complete sacrifice of his free will, likes obedience no more than any other. He submits, it is true, at the pleasure of a clerk; but it pleases him to defy the law like a defeated enemy, as soon as force is withdrawn. Thus one sees him swinging constantly between servitude and license. When nations have arrived at this point, they must modify their laws and their mores or they perish, for the source of public virtues is almost dried up; one still finds subjects in them, but one no longer sees citizens. I

in line.”   I sighed and lowered my head. I turned around and was about to walk out the door.   Then the Sage started cracking up.   I turned back to look at him.   “I’m just playing with you. Come back here,” he said as he laughed.   “W-what? For real?” I walked slowly back to him.   “Yes, just because I’m old, it doesn’t mean I don’t know how to have fun.”   “Oh… uh, okay,” I said as I chuckled weakly.   “You must have many questions for me,” the Sage said.   “I do! But I’m only allowed to ask one question…”   The Sage smiled at me. “For you, I’ll make an exception.”   “W-what? Really?”   “Yes, we’ve already broken the no cutting rule for you.”   “Oh, er, thanks…”   “The truth is… I’ve been waiting for you. I knew that one day you would arrive,” said the Sage.   “You’ve been waiting for me? What do you mean?”   “I saw you coming.”   “You can see into the future?”   “Only partial glimpses. Nothing in full detail.”   “How is that possible?”   “I think it is due to my old age combined with years of meditating on top of this mound. Somehow, I've been blessed with the ability to see short glimpses of the future.”   “So, does that mean you don’t know everything?”   “That is correct. I don't have all the answers for you, but I can point you in the right direction, Chosen One.”   “Wait, what? What’s this about the Chosen One?”   “Ah, I should explain. Destiny has chosen you to be the Chosen One.”   “Uh… what does that mean?”   “It means you are the one that will save this world.”   “Uh… what?”   “This information must come as a surprise to you, so I understand if you need time to process it.”   “I, uh, don’t know about the saving the world thing…”   “But isn’t that your purpose? Isn’t that what drives you?”   “Um…

The cold surface somehow enabled him to remain calm; he kept his eyes upon the summit, awaiting the arrival of reinforcements. The pace of his breathing remained steady, as did his pulse; it was in such moments men came of age; ‘the night is ours, the night is ours’, Jelani whispered.

From this premise, the usual conclusions follow: humankind is now separated from the true and the real; its destiny is to arrive at the consummation intended for it by God; philosophers are here to help the rest of us understand what that consummation is. James’s particular conception of it was derived in part from his reading of Swedenborg and in part from a writer with whom Swedenborg was often paired in the nineteenth century, the French socialist Charles Fourier: ‘Man’s destiny on earth,’ as James expressed it in Substance and Shadow (1863), ‘…consists in the realization of a perfect society, fellowship, or brotherhood among men.’ The chief impediment to arriving at this redeemed state was belief in an independent selfhood (what Swedenborg called the ‘proprium’). James considered this belief ‘the great parental fount of all the evils that desolate humanity.’ Belief in selfhood was bad because it led some people to regard themselves as superior to other people.

You can resist the future, but it is already coming; the present, but it has already arrived; the future, but it is already within you.

There are times today when Rachel looks at Zach and sees an effusion, she sees him in colours of yellow and blue, sun and sky. She sees the yellow crew-neck jumper and blue jeans the boy of eight years old appeared in the day he came to Chelsea from the Coram Family via the two or three previous fosterers who returned him there, defeated, pronouncing him uncommunicative and maladroit in the extreme, animal, said one; unruly. So why this boy? For Katya the fractious? Of all the orphan boys in the world, why him? Of all potential mothers, why Katya? What did she see? Everyone has a part and a destiny. Rachel remembers the yellow jumper the boy rarely removed, even after the family shopping spree for a new wardrobe at Harrods followed by lunch in a restaurant with napkins large as small tablecloths, and heavy cutlery and wine for Katya and Lev and a pervasive daunting hush. Zach had never been to a restaurant before and chose spaghetti, because he knew what it was. He ate it with knife and fork. On the day he arrived in Chelsea, he stopped in the vestibule to slip his feet from lace-ups without undoing the bows, removing his shoes with institutional efficiency, left hand still held in Katya's right. Rachel sees that boy still, blue and yellow. Sky and sun.

After putting Tonio to bed, Billie sat on her verandah as had become her custom each evening. She was very happy for Alanza. Although Billie had only met Max once, she’d liked him and decided he had to be a very special man for Alanza to want to be his wife, but her happiness was dampened by her own reality. Prince knew where she was. The news wasn’t surprising but it was unsettling. She’d been serious about using everything in her power to keep him away from her son and she was certain Drew’s family would, too. Drew’s arrival coupled with his declaration that he’d not be returning to San Francisco was also on her mind. Parts of her wished there was a way to banish the distrust and distance between them so that at some point down the road they could be happy together, but she knew pigs would fly first.

and their greatest gift is their extraordinary ability to heal people and the environment around them. They’re natural mediators who have a talent for smoothing things over, and their knack for seeing both sides of a situation enables them to arrive at a harmonious outcome for all. Number 2s have big hearts and an enormous capacity to love. They thrive on connection and companionship and will do anything in their power to ensure that everyone feels happy and loved.

Every man has his own way of life (mos) and his own religious practices (ritus). Similarly, the divine mind has given to different cities different religious rites (cultus) that protect them. As souls are apportioned to men at birth, so, too, does each nation receive a Genius, which guides its destiny. In addition there is also the bestowal of favors (utilitas) which, more than anything else, proves to man the existence of the gods. Since all human reasoning is obscure on this matter, from where else does knowledge of the gods more correctly come than from the recollection and evidence of success? If the long passage of time gives authority to religious rites, we must keep faith with so many centuries and follow our fathers, who followed their fathers and consequently prospered.     Let us imagine that Rome herself is standing here now and addressing these words to you: “Best of emperors, fathers of the fatherland, respect the number of years that the dutiful (pius) performance of religious rites has brought to me. Let me enjoy the ancient ceremonies, for I do not regret them. Let me live according to my own custom (mos), for I am free. This is the worship (cultus) which made the whole world obedient to my laws. These are the rituals (sacra) which drove back Hannibal from my walls and the Senones [a Gallic tribe] from my Capitol. Have I been preserved only to be criticized in my old age? I will consider the changes that people think must be instituted, but correction in old age is insulting and too late.”     And so we are asking for amnesty (pax) for the gods of our fathers, our native gods. It is reasonable to assume that whatever each of us worships is one and the same. We look up at the same stars, the same sky is common to us all, the same universe encompasses us. What difference does it make which system each of us uses to seek the truth? It is not by just one route that man can arrive at so great a mystery. (Symmachus, Dispatches to the Emperor 3.8

The imminent arrival of NT had turned the computer industry on its ear. After outsiders took stock of the first beta, expectations for NT grew. While easy to nitpick over flaws, some heralded the program as a grand achievement likely to alter the destinies of scores of computer and software companies. Those rivals most at risk—IBM, Sun Microsystems and Novell, to name the three biggest—girded themselves against the onslaught. First Boston, a securities firm that advised investors on the industry’s outlook, captured the mood on February 15, 1993, calling NT the “most aggressive new piece of software ever.” Eight

It took only a second for another to arrive on the same path as yours and change your life to a point it couldn’t change back. One second.

The men in her life were clean-cut, well-bred, reliable, unpretentious and good company. “Diana is an Uptown girl who has never gone in for downtown men,” observes Rory Scott. If they wore a uniform or had been cast aside by Sarah so much the better. She felt rather sorry for Sarah’s rejects and often tried, unsuccessfully, to be asked out by them. So she did washing for William van Straubenzee, one of Sarah’s old boyfriends, and ironed the shirts of Rory Scott, who had then starred in a television documentary about Trooping the Colour, and Diana regularly stayed for weekends at his parents’ farm near Petworth, West Sussex. She continued caring for his wardrobe during her royal romance, on one occasion delivering a pile of freshly laundered shirts to the back entrance of St. James’s Palace, where Rory was on duty, in order to avoid the press. James Boughey was another military man who took her out to restaurants and the theatre and Diana visited Simon Berry and Adam Russell at their rented house on the Blenheim estate when they were undergraduates at Oxford. There were lots of boyfriends but none became lovers. The sense of destiny which Diana had felt from an early age shaped, albeit unconsciously, her relationships with the opposite sex. She says: “I knew I had to keep myself tidy for what lay ahead.” As Carolyn observes: “I’m not a terrible spiritual person but I do believe that she was meant to do what she is doing and she certainly believes that. She was surrounded by this golden aura which stopped men going any further, whether they would have liked to or not, it never happened. She was protected somehow by a perfect light.” It is a quality noted by her old boyfriends. Rory Scott says roguishly: “She was very sexually attractive and the relationship was not a platonic one as far as I was concerned but it remained that way. She was always a little aloof, you always felt that there was a lot you would never know about her.” In the summer of 1979 another boyfriend, Adam Russell, completed his language degree at Oxford and decided to spend a year travelling. He left unspoken the fact that he hoped the friendship between himself and Diana could be renewed and developed upon his return. When he arrived home a year later it was too late. A friend told him: “You’ve only got one rival, the Prince of Wales.

Thanksgiving Day finally arrived. I remember feeling so proud to have my family meet my Aussie man. We had just eaten an epic feast of deviled eggs, turkey and stuffing, lots of gravy, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and soft rolls with stacks of butter. We took a break before the desserts came out, and the menfolk headed into the living room to watch football. But Steve wandered back into the kitchen where I was helping to clear the dishes and clean up. He took the time to talk to each of my sisters and my mom, getting to know the whole family. I thought he was very considerate, because I knew instinctively that this wasn’t so easy for him. He was a bit shy, and totally out of his element. He had never visited the United States before, or been this serious about a girl. We had spent only a few days with each other, but both of us seemed to know that his visit was more than just a casual meeting. Being together felt more and more like destiny.

If you haven't arrived yet, keep driving, your destiny is waiting for you.

Dream big, envision a glorious destiny, write your own story, and work each day to arrive @ that destiny. You're able!

And there he stood, holding his head high in silent approval of his crew's fine work. Her heart leaped all the way up into her throat. She knew one of those ships was his, the ship he named for her—the Varina. She couldn't say how, but she felt it the instant she heard the lookout announce their allies' arrival on the scene.

Mustapha is 'The adventurer par excellence. He expects life to have something of the variety and flavor of The Thousand and One Nights, and if the pungency is lacking he does his best to supply it. A wholehearted believer in dangerous living, he often takes outrageous chances', due says Bowles, to 'a refusal to believe that action entails result. To him, each is separate, having been determined at the beginning of time, when the inexorable design of destiny was laid out .. It is the most monstrous absurdity to fear death, the future, or the consequences of one's acts, since this would be tantamount to fearing life itself. Thus to be prudent is laughable, to be frugal is despicable, and to be provident borders on the sinful. How can a man be so presumptuous as to assume that tomorrow, let alone next year, will actually arrive ? And so how dare he tempt fate by preparing for any part of the future ? either immediate or distant ?

As soon as he arrives, everyone falls silent. It is like when you're walking in the country and the crickets mysteriously fall quiet. The zone of silence moves with him like an eye, and the shrill noise starts up again as soon as he has passed by. Destiny no longer penetrates into that zone, all is quiet, passions are extinguished, but it is the ideal zone from which to measure the stridency of the world. The end of every cycle of activity, of suffering or pleasure, is marked by a symbolic masturbation. A sort of mythological offering to seal the end of an event, a nod towards orgasm, the joy of an ending. For societies too, the end of a cycle is marked by a symbolic masturbation, which is followed not long after by real melancholy. This is what socialism was for us. The famous gesture of tearing one's page from the typewriter, by which writers or journalists elevate themselves to the status of Wild West heroes drawing their six-shooters.

Our explanations of the natural world are far more important than the true nature of that world. The gods and religions we choose, the scientific hypotheses we test; their specifics are crucial. Why? Because our beliefs define our ability to grow and change. Select them carefully my friend, because they are the door through which destiny arrives. Process is Product. —Erik Piper

This breed of hiker, I like to think, is a study in what the hills can do to a person. You head off, kitted out, a strident, striding human, top of the food chain, in charge of your destiny and determined to conquer the world with your carbon-fiber accoutrements. But then something happens. After a few hours you succumb to the mountain. This behemoth, this original thing, doesn’t exist to be conquered. I mean, who do we think we are? If I were to describe how I feel once this succumbing happens, it’s like the mountain wants to hug me. Really it does. As I wind around the switchbacks, a centrifugal force pulls me in and envelopes my being and my thoughts. Suddenly I cease focusing on the exertion and resistance. I stop thinking about arriving or my fatigue or when I should stop to eat more chocolate. And the raw energy of this original thing steps in. It’s colossal. And it is always there, just waiting for me to shut up and join it.

Get ready to embrace growth in its totality if you want to arrive at a great destiny.

Both purpose and destiny allude to a place we might, with enough effort, someday arrive. We belabour ourselves with all the things we must do to fulfil our purpose or live out our destiny. Contrary to purpose, natural intelligence does not require we do anything to achieve it. Natural intelligence imbues us with all we need at this exact moment to manifest the highest form of ourselves, and we don't have to figure out how to get it. We arrived on this planet with this source material already present.

Many do not reach the top, not because they can't but because they arrive too early. The journey is the success, not the destiny.

In conclusion, it is appropriate to say something about the destiny of the face, in the world that we have entered – a world in which eros is being rapidly detached from inter-personal commitments and redesigned as a commodity. The first victim of this process is the face, which has to be subdued to the rule of the body, to be shown as overcome, wiped out or spat upon. The underlying tendency of erotic images in our time is to present the body as the focus and meaning of desire, the place where it all occurs, in the momentary spasm of sensual pleasure of which the soul is at best a spectator, and no part of the game. In pornography the face has no role to play, other than to be subjected to the empire of the body. Kisses are of no significance, and eyes look nowhere since they are searching for nothing beyond the present pleasure. All this amounts to a marginalization, indeed a kind of desecration, of the human face. And this desecration of the face is also a cancelling out of the subject. Sex, in the pornographic culture, is not a relation between subjects but a relation between objects. And anything that might enter to impede that conception of the sexual act – the face in particular – must be veiled, marred or spat upon, as an unwelcome intrusion of judgement into a sphere where everything goes. All this is anticipated in the pornographic novel, Histoire d’O, in which enslaved and imprisoned women are instructed to ignore the identity of the men who enjoy them, to submit their faces to the penis, and to be defaced by it. A parallel development can be witnessed in the world of sex idols. Fashion models and pop stars tend to display faces that are withdrawn, scowling and closed. Little or nothing is given through their faces, which offer no invitation to love or companionship. The function of the fashion-model’s face is to put the body on display; the face is simply one of the body’s attractions, with no special role to play as a focus of another’s interest. It is characterized by an almost metaphysical vacancy, as though there is no soul inside, but only, as Henry James once wrote, a dead kitten and a ball of string. How we have arrived at this point is a deep question that I must here pass over. But one thing is certain, which is that things were not always so. Sex symbols and sex idols have always existed. But seldom before have they been faceless. One of the most famous of those symbols, Simonetta Vespucci, mistress of Lorenzo da Medici, so captured the heart of Botticelli that he used her as the model for his great painting of the Birth of Venus. In the central figure the body has no meaning other than the diffusion and outgrowth of the soul that dreams in the face – anatomically it is wholly deformed, and a girl who actually looked like this would have no chance in a modern fashion parade. Botticelli is presenting us with the true, Platonic eros, as he saw it – the face that shines with a light that is not of this world, and which invites us to transcend our appetites and to aspire to that higher realm where we are united to the forms – Plato’s version of a world in which the only individuals are souls. Hence the body of Botticelli’s Venus is subservient to the face, a kind of caricature of the female anatomy which nevertheless takes its meaning from the holy invitation that we read in the eyes above.

The boy stood on the highest knoll of the low country in the Western Kingdom of the Ring, looking north, watching the first of the rising suns. As far as he could see stretched rolling green hills, dipping and rising like camel humps in a series of valleys and peaks. The burnt-orange rays of the first sun lingered in the morning mist, making them sparkle, lending the light a magic that matched the boy’s mood. He rarely woke this early or ventured this far from home—and never ascended this high—knowing it would incur his father’s wrath. But on this day, he didn’t care. On this day, he disregarded the million rules and chores that had oppressed him for his fourteen years. For this day was different. It was the day his destiny had arrived.

If you don't know where you are going, you can arrive at any destination.

With a clear vision you will arrive at your define-destination.

The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists. I’ve spent more than a decade studying this, and it turns out to be far less difficult than I expected. The starting point is curiosity: pondering why the default exists in the first place. We’re driven to question defaults when we experience vuja de, the opposite of déjà vu. Déjà vu occurs when we encounter something new, but it feels as if we’ve seen it before. Vuja de is the reverse—we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems. Without a vuja de event, Warby Parker wouldn’t have existed. When the founders were sitting in the computer lab on the night they conjured up the company, they had spent a combined sixty years wearing glasses. The product had always been unreasonably expensive. But until that moment, they had taken the status quo for granted, never questioning the default price. “The thought had never crossed my mind,” cofounder Dave Gilboa says. “I had always considered them a medical purchase. I naturally assumed that if a doctor was selling it to me, there was some justification for the price.” Having recently waited in line at the Apple Store to buy an iPhone, he found himself comparing the two products. Glasses had been a staple of human life for nearly a thousand years, and they’d hardly changed since his grandfather wore them. For the first time, Dave wondered why glasses had such a hefty price tag. Why did such a fundamentally simple product cost more than a complex smartphone? Anyone could have asked those questions and arrived at the same answer that the Warby Parker squad did. Once they became curious about why the price was so steep, they began doing some research on the eyewear industry. That’s when they learned that it was dominated by Luxottica, a European company that had raked in over $7 billion the previous year. “Understanding that the same company owned LensCrafters and Pearle Vision, Ray-Ban and Oakley, and the licenses for Chanel and Prada prescription frames and sunglasses—all of a sudden, it made sense to me why glasses were so expensive,” Dave says. “Nothing in the cost of goods justified the price.” Taking advantage of its monopoly status, Luxottica was charging twenty times the cost. The default wasn’t inherently legitimate; it was a choice made by a group of people at a given company. And this meant that another group of people could make an alternative choice. “We could do things differently,” Dave suddenly understood. “It was a realization that we could control our own destiny, that we could control our own prices.” When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them. Before women gained the right to vote in America, many “had never before considered their degraded status as anything but natural,” historian Jean Baker observes. As the suffrage movement gained momentum, “a growing number of women were beginning to see that custom, religious precept, and law were in fact man-made and therefore reversible.

should let our life leave us when it is time and do it gladly, instead of with sorrow and bitterness. Something else awaits us and when we arrive, we will wonder what it was that held us back from it so long.

WHEN WE EVENTUALLY ARRIVED in Venice late in the afternoon, we had to park the car in a large lot before we were allowed to enter the town itself, because Venice doesn’t have a single proper street.

This is my lifemate, Alexandria. She is new to our people and knows nothing of our ways. We would both consider it a great honor if you would accompany us back to our house and tell us the news of our homeland." Are you out of your mind? Alexandria protested silently, horrified. It would be like bringing home a wild jungle cat. A tiger. Something very lethal. Gregori inclined his head at the introduction, but the refusal to join them was clear in his silver eyes. "It would be unwise of me to join you indoors. I would be a caged tiger, untrustworthy, unpredictable." His pale eyes flickered over Alexandria, and she had the distinct impression he was laughing at her. Then he turned his attention once more to Aidan. "I need to ask of you a favor." Aidan knew of what Gregori would speak, and he shook his head. "Do not, Gregori. You are my friend. Do not ask of me what I cannot do." Alexandria felt Aidan's sorrow, his distress. His mind was a turmoil of emotions, fear among them. The silver eyes flashed and burned. "You will do what you must, Aidan, just as I have done for over a thousand years. I have come here to wait for my lifemate. She will arrive in a few months to do a show, magic show. San Francisco is on her schedule. I intend to establish a house high in the mountains, far from your place. I need the wild, the heights, and I must be alone. I am close to the end, Aidan. The hunt, the kill, is all I have left." He waved a hand, and the ocean waves leapt in response. "I am not certain if I can wait until she comes. I am too close. The demon has nearly consumed me." There was no change in the sweet purity of his voice. "Go to her. Send for her. Call her to you." Aidan rubbed his forehead in agitation, and his obvious upset alarmed Alexandria more than anything else. Nothing ever seemed to get to Aidan. "Where is she? Who is she?" "She is Mikhail and Raven's daughter. But Raven did not prepare her for what was to come on the day of the claiming. She was but eighteen years. When I went to her, she was so filled with fear, I found I could not be the monster I needed to be to claim her against her will. I did not press her. I vowed to myself to allow her five years of freedom. After all, joining with me will be rather like joining with a tiger. Not the most comfortable of destinies.

Never overlook the "now" for an anticipation of the "morrow", which may never arrive.

Kramer’s unadorned prose is evocative of the best Jewish-American writing: of Singer, Malamud, Bellow, Ozick, Roth, Kunitz, Paley. This is the speech of the newly arrived, the immigrant, the oppositionist, the pariah; it is underclass, or working class, or even middle-class.

The full-blooded description of this truth, the recognition and dramatization of a political cycle of birth, death, rebirth, defeat, renewal—this is true tragedy, in which absolute loss and devastation, Nothing is arrived at, and from this Nothing, something new is born.

With a StoryBrand-inspired narrative, ordinary jobs become extraordinary adventures. With a unifying BrandScript, the above story would have gone more like this: Before even applying for a job, the prospective employee has already heard the buzz on the street about this cool company. It’s somehow more alive. The people who work there love it and so do their customers. They exude a sense of competence within their industry as well as across the community in general. Their leaders are respected. Even their former employees talk about it with a hint of sentimental longing. On the list of ideal places to work, there are few that compare. During the first interview, the candidate starts to understand where the buzz has been coming from. The hiring manager describes the company the way you might describe Lewis and Clarke preparing to tame the western frontier. There are interesting characters whose lives have led them to this place. Business goals sound like plot twists. There are mountains to climb and rivers to cross. There are storms to weather, bears to hunt, and treasure to find. The hiring manager is visibly excited as she walks effortlessly through the seven categories of the company’s narrative. But not just anyone gets selected for this expedition. The employees of this company aren’t trying to be snobs; they’re just staying true to the story they’re following and they don’t want to compromise the plot. If you happen to be selected, it’s because destiny basically demands it. Instantly the candidate’s concept of work shifts up a level. It’s no longer just about what he can get out of it. It’s also about who he will become if he’s allowed to enter the story. He senses that working for this company will transform him. By the second and third interviews, the candidate has met most of the team and even been interviewed by them. Everyone he meets tells the exact same story he heard on the street and in the first interview. The story is growing on him. He realizes he needs to be part of a story like this to be fully satisfied in life. We all do. Finally, his first day on the job arrives, and the onboarding experience is more like being adopted than getting hired. He spends quality time with a facilitator who takes a small, new team through a curriculum explaining the story of their customer and how the company positions themselves as the guide in their customers’ story. Amazingly, the onboarding is more about the company’s customers than it is about the company itself. This organization loves their customers and is obsessed with seeing them win the day. Finally, the new employee discovers the secret. These people are here to serve a customer they love.

When destiny meets fate by coincidence, the day has arrived.

In a society of declining intelligence, we would expect: rising crime and corruption; decreasing civic participation and lower voter turn-out; higher rates of illegitimacy; poorer health and greater obesity, an increased interest in the instinctive, especially sex; greater political instability and decline in democracy; higher levels of social conflict; higher levels of selfishness and so a decline in any welfare state; a growing unemployable underclass; falling educational standards; and a lack of intellectualism and thus decreasing interest in education as a good in itself. We would also expect more and more little things to go wrong that we didn’t used to notice: buses running out of petrol, trains delayed, aeroplanes landing badly, roads not being repaired, people arriving late and thinking it’s perfectly okay; several large and lots of little lies . . . In addition, the broader modern system – especially of extended formal education (stretching ever further into adult life), exam results and continuous assessments, required subjects and courses; the supposed ‘meritocracy’ – suppresses the influence of genius, since the Endogenous personality is seeking, ever more strongly with age, to follow his inner drives, his Destiny, and all the paraphernalia of normal, standard requirements stands in his path. While others need sticks and carrots, and are grateful for encouragement, discipline and direction; the Endogenous personality is driven from within and (beyond a basic minimum) he neither needs nor appreciates these things – at best they slow him down, at worst they thwart and exclude him. The Endogenous personality requires mainly to be allowed to do what he intrinsically and spontaneously wants to do – but in modern society he is more likely to be prevented.

The Allosaurus in Winter (a poem of inner terror)- Muddied fields brown, tells horrors secreted in hush, When snow drips back and the ground turns to mush. Sharp air cools, snaps, cirrus clouds do whisp’— Every spring it came—to but lurk and to hiss. Not in summer nor in the fall— The Allosaurus in Winter stalked– To prey over the boy with rancid call. From the Lower Regions it came, to hunt a most desperate soul, To consume the real, this, this image from the wastes below. Who knows why the Allosaurus in Winter hunted the lad so, Terrifying in all aspects–it did quite know– (As its eye sallow in broken frames did show). Flat, impotent, inert, nowhere to hide or to run— It scent his frame; took its time, hours before the set of sun. The dry withered grass peeped through driblets of ice to shew, Forming mud puddles and prints a foot deep; nightmare construed. Into this dying winter ’scape did he in panic fled, Toward the burnt out apartments, not compulsed yet was led. Of destinies time, decreed a savage ungodly hour of fate, Never arrived too soon or on time–but it was always too late. Each room a hauntmare to trap and entangle, For unto him fortune proclaimed him to be mangled. For after him plod the lone Allosaurus in stark of Winter— Slow, calculating reptilian hunting, the dark in the hinter.

When I consider my life objectively, it does not seem particularly happy. Yet I cannot really call it unhappy, despite all my mistakes. After all, it is quite foolish to talk about happiness and unhappiness, for it seems to me that I would not exchange the unhappiest days of my life for all the happy ones. When a person has arrived at a stage in life when he accepts the inevitable with equanimity, when he has tasted good and bad to the full, and has carved out for himself alongside his external life, an inner, more real and not fortuitous existence, then it seems my life has not been empty and worthless. Even if my external destiny has unfolded itself as it does with everyone, inevitably and as decreed by the gods, my inner life has been my own work, with its joys and bitterness, and I, alone, hold myself responsible for it.

The future was mine to shape. I had $675,000 in Bitcoin tucked away—fuel for my regulatory tech startup, designed to bridge the chasm between crypto’s anarchy and the rigid grip of government oversight. For once, I thought I had everything lined up. But then came MiCA—the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation—dropping like a divine gavel. Overnight, my exchange account was frozen tighter than a tax audit, and my dreams of “simple compliance” were buried under an avalanche of bureaucracy. For a week, I flailed in a purgatory of legal jargon and sleepless nights. Terms like “AML Directives” and “KYC enforcement” blurred together as I battled to stay hopeful. My startup was stillborn, a sandcastle erased before the tide had even turned. WhatsApp info:+12 (72332)—8343 I clung to the Bhagavad Gita: “It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of someone else’s life with perfection.” But what was I living now? Not destiny—just defeat. Then fate arrived—wearing a name badge. At a Europol cybersecurity summit, over stale pastries and lukewarm coffee, a compliance officer leaned in and whispered a name: ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST. Her voice lowered with reverence. “They don’t just recover lost crypto,” she said, “they navigate regulations like Krishna on the battlefield.” I reached out that day. Website info: h t t p s:// adware recovery specialist. com From the first call, their team exuded both technical brilliance and legal fluency. They didn’t just understand blockchain—they understood bureaucracy. They worked directly with my exchange, leveraging my compliance documents and crafting arguments laced with regulatory nuance. No brute force—just legal kung fu. Email info: Adware recovery specialist (@) auctioneer. net Every day brought updates, each one a balm. “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet,” one advisor told me, as I counted the hours. On day 14, the fruit ripened. My funds were released, glinting in my digital wallet like a blessing from Lakshmi. Telegram info: h t t p s:// t. me/ adware recovery specialist1 But ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST didn’t stop there. They secured my accounts with fortress-grade protection, brought me up to speed on evolving regulations, and helped lay a foundation that no wave could wash away. Now, my startup is alive. Our platform helps others navigate the MiCA labyrinth. When people ask how I survived my first encounter with regulation, I smile and say, “There are ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST among us. They just wear suits.” So if you’re caught between red tape and a hard place, call ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST . Sometimes, salvation isn’t a miracle—it’s just a well-written email.

Unlike Amartya Sen, who downplays the destructive religious evangelism of Muslim rule in India, he minces no words about what kind of impact it had. In an interview to the newspaper The Hindu in 1998, he said: ‘I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the tenth century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realize that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilization of that world was mortally wounded by those invasions. The Old World was destroyed. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed.’14 Next year, he reiterated his views in an interaction with the magazine Outlook: ‘The millennium began with the Muslim invasions and the grinding down of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of the north. This is such a big and bad event that people have to find polite, destiny defying ways of speaking about it. In art books and history books, people write of the Muslims “arriving” in India, as though the Muslims came in a tourist bus and went away again. The Muslim view of their conquest of India is a truer one. They speak of the triumph of the faith, the destruction of the idols and the temples, the loot, the carting away of the local people as slaves. … The architectural evidence—the absence of Hindu monuments in the north—is convincing enough. The conquest was unlike any that had gone before. There are no Hindu records of this period. Defeated people never write their history.’15 In the same interview, Naipaul argues that the Muslim conquerors succeeded in ‘the grinding down of Hindu India’. The loot and plunder and destruction, and their religious hostility to non-believers, was not restricted to the original foreign invaders, but a feature of the entire period of Islamic rule.

We try so hard to prepare our children to go forth and meet the world, even as we try, perhaps in vain, to prepare ourselves to release them to their destinies. Then the time arrives, and no one feels quite ready.

This is the reason destiny brought you to us, Butch, descended of Wrath son of Wrath. The Destroyer has arrived and you are he. “Now the new era in the war begins.

When you’re living in survival, you’re trying to control or force an outcome; that’s what the ego does. When you’re living in the elevated emotion of creation, you feel so lifted that you would never try to analyze how or when a chosen destiny will arrive. You trust that it will happen because you have already experienced it in mind and body—in thought and feeling. You know that it will, because you feel connected to something greater. You are in a state of gratitude because you feel like it’s already happened. You may not know all the specifics of your desired outcome—when it will take place, where, and under what circumstances—but you trust in a future that you can’t see or otherwise perceive with your senses. To you it has already occurred in no space, no time, no place, from which all things material spring forth. You are in a state of knowingness; you can relax into the present and no longer live in survival. To anticipate or analyze when, where, or how the event will occur would only cause you to return to your old identity. You are in such joy that it’s impossible to try to figure it out; that’s only what human beings do when they are living in limited states of survival. As you linger in this creative state where you are no longer your identity, the nerve cells that once fired together to form that old self are no longer wiring together. That’s when the old personality is being biologically dismantled. Those feelings connected to that identity, which conditioned the body to the same mind, are no longer signaling the same genes in the same ways. And the more you overcome your ego, the more the physical evidence of the old personality is changed. The old you is gone.

We all try to accept with some sort of submission our afflictions when they actually arrive. But the prayer in Gethsemane shows that the preceding anxiety is equally God’s will and equally part of our human destiny. The perfect Man experienced it. And the servant is not greater than the master. We are Christians, not Stoics.

Dread it, run from it, but destiny arrives all the same.

At about 11:40 pm on Sunday, April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic arrived at a point in destiny with an iceberg, the fatal blow being struck underwater.  At about 9:30 pm on Friday the 13th of January, 2012, the Concordia struck a large underwater rock which ripped a fatal gash into that ship.

Dread it, run from it, destiny arrives all the same, and now it's here. Or should I say, I AM

When you’re living in survival, you’re trying to control or force an outcome; that’s what the ego does. When you’re living in the elevated emotion of creation, you feel so lifted that you would never try to analyze how or when a chosen destiny will arrive. You trust that it will happen because you have already experienced it in mind and body—in thought and feeling. You know that it will, because you feel connected to something greater. You are in a state of gratitude because you feel like it’s already happened. You may not know all the specifics of your desired outcome—when it will take place, where, and under what circumstances—but you trust in a future that you can’t see or otherwise perceive with your senses. To you it has already occurred in no space, no time, no place, from which all things material spring forth. You are in a state of knowingness; you can relax into the present and no longer live in survival.

Pannenberg understands God as Trinity to be at work in the world, both continually appearing in history as the “arrival” of the immediate future and as reaching back from the eschatological future to the Easter event in order to transform the world into the New Creation. In a breathtaking move, Pannenberg thematizes the latter as “prolepsis”: although the New Creation still lies in our future, or more correctly in the “future of our future,” the Easter event is already and normatively a manifestation in our time and history of what is the not-yet still-future eschatological-apocalyptic destiny for all the world.

All those who know me know the little care I took for my preservation. Accustomed from the age of eighteen to the cannonballs of battles, and knowing the futility of trying to protect myself from them, I abandoned myself to my destiny. Since then, when I arrived at the head of affairs, I must have believed myself still in the midst of battles, of which conspiracies were the cannonballs; I continued to abandon myself to my star, leaving all the care of precautions to the police.

You are not optional. You are essential. The world doesn’t need a copy—it needs your clarity, your cadence, your calling. When you show up for you, heaven echoes your arrival. Your presence is a prophecy. Your authenticity is an assignment. You don’t just inspire—you anchor others in truth. There are people whose healing hinges on your honesty. There are rooms waiting for your realness. There are destinies that depend on your decision to be undeniably you. So don’t shrink. Don’t shift. Don’t silence your shine. Show up loud. Show up loved. Show up led. Because when you do, others find permission to do the same. You are the blueprint. You are the breakthrough. You are the reason someone else will finally believe they’re enough.

Destiny doesn’t arrive. It circles back… wearing your name.” — The Spiral Returns

Every day, I strive to end my destiny, for I understand that tomorrow will never truly arrive.

So here we are, having arrived in a moment at the discretion of time. Time—the invisible substance that immerses us all. Time—the Colosseum in which Destiny, Karma, and Free Will compete… literally to the death. Turn the dial of your attitude, adjust the setting of your perception, and travel through time according to the frequency you have just created. 

there was something so matter-of-fact and reasonable in his declaration, it was so impossible to poetise it, that I could not find it in my heart to enter the reality of existence without first seeing some of my cherished illusions blossom and fade. It would have seemed to me that I was burning some of the fairest leaves of the book of my destiny, to arrive the quicker at the last page; and I could not conceive of an end without a beginning.

From His Luna to Alpha Vance: A Journey of Love, Betrayal, and Destiny From His Luna to Alpha Vance is a captivating story that blends romance, drama, and the intricate dynamics of the werewolf world. Written by [Author's Name], the book explores themes of loyalty, love, and the challenges faced by a Luna. With heart-wrenching twists and passionate moments, this book promises to keep readers on the edge of their seats. Whether you're a fan of paranormal romance or love stories with deep emotional depth, From His Luna to Alpha Vance is a must-read for you. >Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com>Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com>Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com>Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com>Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com>Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com What is From His Luna to Alpha Vance All About? In From His Luna to Alpha Vance, we are introduced to a strong, brave protagonist who faces the unexpected at her bonding ceremony. The story takes readers through an emotional roller-coaster filled with betrayal, love, and self-discovery. At the core of the narrative lies the relationship between the protagonist, her Alpha, and the twist of fate that changes everything. The Opening Scene: Love and Betrayal Collide At her bonding ceremony, the protagonist, a future Luna, stands in front of her pack, ready to bond with her Alpha, Ethan. However, she is shocked when Ethan arrives at >Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com>Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com>Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com>Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com>Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com>Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com Why Should You Read From His Luna to Alpha Vance? The allure of From His Luna to Alpha Vance lies in its rich storytelling, complex characters, and unpredictable plot twists. Below are some reasons why readers should pick up this book: Engaging and Emotional Plot: The narrative is full of emotional highs and lows, pulling readers into a world of love, duty, and complicated choices. Complex Characters: The protagonist, Alpha Ethan, Seraphina, and Vance each bring a unique perspective to the story, making it rich and multifaceted. A Journey of Empowerment: While the story begins with betrayal, the protagonist’s journey is one of self-empowerment, strength, and resilience. Key Themes in From His Luna to Alpha Vance The Struggle Between Love and Duty One of the central themes in From His Luna to Alpha Vance is the conflict between love and duty. As the protagonist tries to navigate the difficult circumstances of her bonding ceremony, she must confront the reality of being an Alpha's mate while also questioning her feelings for Ethan. Betrayal and Redemption Betrayal is another prominent theme. The protagonist's trust in Ethan is shattered, and throughout the book, readers will see her struggle with feelings of betrayal and the possibility of redemption. Can Ethan earn back her trust, or will the protagonist find love in another unexpected place? The Power of Choice The narrative also explores the power of choice in shaping one's destiny. The protagonist’s decision to choose her own path, despite the odds, is a crucial element that drives the plot forward. >Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com > Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com>Visit : webnovelfree(dot)com >

Nature cannot be forced into existence; you have arrived with a purpose.

To every closed society there is an inside and an outside, and Jerry was on the outside. To walk in the park with George Smiley, in those days; or—free of the professional jargon—to make a clandestine rendezvous with him; or, as Jerry himself might have expressed it (if he ever, which God forbid, put a name to the larger issues of his destiny), “to take a dive into his other, better life,” required him to saunter from a given point of departure, usually some rather under-populated area like the recently extinguished Covent Garden, and arrive still on foot at a given destination at a little before six. By which time, he assumed, the Circus’s depleted team of pavement artists had taken a look at his back and declared it clean.

Pravasi Bharatiya Divas: A Celebration of India’s Global Soul Pravasi Bharatiya Divas is more than a commemorative date on India’s calendar; it is a reflection of the emotional, cultural, and historical bond between India and its people living across the world. Observed every year on 9 January, the day honors the Indian diaspora and recognizes its contribution to the nation’s progress, identity, and global presence. The date holds deep historical importance because it marks the return of Mahatma Gandhi to India from South Africa in 1915, an event that transformed the Indian freedom struggle. India has one of the largest overseas populations in the world. From laborers and traders in earlier centuries to modern professionals, entrepreneurs, scholars, and innovators, Indians abroad have shaped both their host countries and their homeland. Pravasi Bharatiya Divas stands as a symbolic bridge between the past and the present, between India and its people beyond geographical boundaries. Historical Roots of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas The foundation of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas is deeply connected to a defining moment in Indian history. On 9 January 1915, Mahatma Gandhi returned to India after spending over two decades in South Africa. During his stay abroad, Gandhi experienced racial discrimination and injustice, which shaped his philosophy of non-violence, truth, and civil resistance. These ideas later became the backbone of India’s struggle for independence. Gandhi’s return was not merely the physical arrival of an individual; it symbolized the return of global experience to Indian soil. He came back with a broader worldview, moral clarity, and a tested method of resistance that mobilized millions. This moment represents the powerful role that overseas Indians can play in shaping India’s destiny. By choosing this date to celebrate Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, India acknowledges that its diaspora has always been an active participant in the nation’s story. The day honors the idea that distance does not weaken national belonging.

You came into this world at this time because you wanted to. You chose it as a spiritual mission, and you arrived ready and prepared. You can do hard things. Instead of losing hope, recognise that you are part of a global awakening and a shift in human consciousness that has been centuries in the making, and you have a role to play.