Distance Increases Love Quotes

I smiled sweetly at his embarressment, beginning to walk again, kicking up golden leaves. I heard him scuffling leaves behind me. "And what was the point of this again?" Forget it!" Sam said. "Do you you like this place or not?" I stoped in my tracks, spinning to face him. "Hey." I pointed at him; he raised his eyebrows and stopped in his tracks. "You didn't think Jack would be here at all, did you?" His thick black eyebrows went up even farther. Did you evan intend to look for him at all?" He held his hands up as if a surrender. "What do you want me to say?" You were trying to see if I would reconize it, wern't you?" I took anouther step, colsing the distance between us. I could feel the heat of his body, even without touching him, in the increasing cold of the day. "YOU told me about this wood somehow. How did you show it to me?" I keep trying to tell you. You wont listen. Because you're stubbon. It's how we speek- it's the only words we have. Just pictures. Just simple little picters. You HAVE changed Grace. Just not your skin. I want you to believe me." His hands were still raise, but he was starting to grin at me in the failing light. So you brought me here to see this." I stepped forward again, and he stepped back. Do you like it?" Under false pretence." Anouther step forward; anouther back. The grine widened So do you like it?" When you knew we wouldn't come across anybody else." His teeth flashed in his grin. "Do you like it?" I punched my hands into his chest. "You know I love it. You knew I would." I went to punch him, and he grabed my wrists. For a moment we stood there like that, him looking down at me with a grin half-caught on his face, and me lookingup at him: Still Life with Boy and Girl. It would've been the perfect moment to kiss me, but he didn't. He just looked at me and looked at me, and by the time I relizeed I could just as easily kiss him, I noticed that his grin was slipping away. Sam slowly lowered my wrists and relesed them. "I'm glad." he said very quietly. My arms still hung by my sides, right where Sam had put them. I frowned at him. "You were supposed to kiss me." I thought about it." I just kept looking at the soft, sad shape of his lips, looking just like his voice sounded. I was probably staring, but I couldn't stop thinking about how much I wanted him to kiss me and how stupide it was to want it so badly. "Why don't you?" He leaned over and gave mr the lightest of kisses. His lips, cool and dry, ever so polite and incredibly maddening. "I have to get inside soon," he whispered "It's getting cold

Distance increases love but severe distances permanently vanish it.

Jesus Christ is not a cosmic errand boy. I mean no disrespect or irreverence in so saying, but I do intend to convey the idea that while he loves us deeply and dearly, Christ the Lord is not perched on the edge of heaven, anxiously anticipating our next wish. When we speak of God being good to us, we generally mean that he is kind to us. In the words of the inimitable C. S. Lewis, "What would really satisfy us would be a god who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven--a senile benevolence who as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves,' and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.'" You know and I know that our Lord is much, much more than that. One writer observed: "When we so emphasize Christ's benefits that he becomes nothing more than what his significance is 'for me' we are in danger. . . . Evangelism that says 'come on, it's good for you'; discipleship that concentrates on the benefits package; sermons that 'use' Jesus as the means to a better life or marriage or job or attitude--these all turn Jesus into an expression of that nice god who always meets my spiritual needs. And this is why I am increasingly hesitant to speak of Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. As Ken Woodward put it in a 1994 essay, 'Now I think we all need to be converted--over and over again, but having a personal Savior has always struck me as, well, elitist, like having a personal tailor. I'm satisfied to have the same Lord and Savior as everyone else.' Jesus is not a personal Savior who only seeks to meet my needs. He is the risen, crucified Lord of all creation who seeks to guide me back into the truth." . . . His infinity does not preclude either his immediacy or his intimacy. One man stated that "I want neither a terrorist spirituality that keeps me in a perpetual state of fright about being in right relationship with my heavenly Father nor a sappy spirituality that portrays God as such a benign teddy bear that there is no aberrant behavior or desire of mine that he will not condone." . . . Christ is not "my buddy." There is a natural tendency, and it is a dangerous one, to seek to bring Jesus down to our level in an effort to draw closer to him. This is a problem among people both in and outside the LDS faith. Of course we should seek with all our hearts to draw near to him. Of course we should strive to set aside all barriers that would prevent us from closer fellowship with him. And of course we should pray and labor and serve in an effort to close the gap between what we are and what we should be. But drawing close to the Lord is serious business; we nudge our way into intimacy at the peril of our souls. . . . Another gospel irony is that the way to get close to the Lord is not by attempting in any way to shrink the distance between us, to emphasize more of his humanity than his divinity, or to speak to him or of him in casual, colloquial language. . . . Those who have come to know the Lord best--the prophets or covenant spokesmen--are also those who speak of him in reverent tones, who, like Isaiah, find themselves crying out, "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts" (Isaiah 6:5). Coming into the presence of the Almighty is no light thing; we feel to respond soberly to God's command to Moses: "Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (Exodus 3:5). Elder Bruce R. McConkie explained, "Those who truly love the Lord and who worship the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit, according to the approved patterns, maintain a reverential barrier between themselves and all the members of the Godhead.

Dear Valentine, The solution to my odd problem is simplified to equal one person, you. You are always positive. With you, my semi-circle is complete. My feelings for you are always increasing, like the digits of Pi. It never ends. You fill the hole in the center of my heart. No distance can keep us apart. Love,

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought, this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs, and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news, and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. It was a crisis, I felt it in every fiber of my body, something saturating was spreading through my consciousness like lard, not the least because the nucleus of all this fiction, whether true or not, was verisimilitude and the distance it held to reality was constant. In other words, it saw the same. This sameness, which was our world, was being mass-produced. The uniqueness, which they all talked about, was thereby invalidated, it didn’t exist, it was a lie. Living like this, with the certainty that everything could equally well have been different, drove you to despair.

[S]he realized quite abruptly that this thing which took him off, which kept him out so many hours day after day, this thing that was against her own little will and instincts—was enormous as the sea. It was no mere prettiness of single Trees, but something massed and mountainous. About her rose the wall of its huge opposition to the sky, its scale gigantic, its power utterly prodigious. What she knew of it hitherto as green and delicate forms waving and rustling in the winds was but, as it were the spray of foam that broke into sight upon the nearer edge of viewless depths far, far away. The trees, indeed, were sentinels set visibly about the limits of a camp that itself remained invisible. The awful hum and murmur of the main body in the distance passed into that still room about her with the firelight and hissing kettle. Out yonder—in the Forest further out—the thing that was ever roaring at the center was dreadfully increasing.

It is not a war, it is a lesson of life (the second part) ......... We believed, in our ignorance and arrogance, that we can be invincible, that we are superior to any other living being on the face of the earth. Is it nature? I broke it down and raped her, in the name of the god of money, convinced that Mother Earth did not suffer the blow, to exploit it forever. I took, stole, with outstretched hands, torn, cut, shattered, breaking down everything that appeared in our path. We have sickened the Earth and now its screams of pain are resounding in the global reach of a pandemic that, for us, people have the taste of catastrophe. And now we find ourselves stopped, beaten by a life lesson that we did not expect, we consider ourselves unjust, we consider ourselves at war. Existence is like this, first it launches small signals like bells, signals that we have always ignored and then finds a way to be heard with its increasingly loud sirens. She tells us that, at any price, she will be able to convince you that good and evil are not the case, that the time has come to realize that, as a living species, we are close to self-destruction. The time has come to realize that the countdown has begun, the safety is almost completely consumed, and this is the last call. For you, for me, for all the creatures that populate the Earth. And for this tormented planet, whose very life depends on our survival. .. New forms of subjectivity must be promoted if we are to aspire to social and epochal changes. It must be understood that freedom is not the choice of car color, that a hug is never ensured, (a doctor told me a phrase that "stuck" in my mind during the senior specialization in a certain medical field. He told me, "You see, there are people coming to us and they wouldn't need three pills a day, but three hugs a day." and distances are not measured in kilometers. We are removed even when we are close in this society where we talk without listening, we eat without tasting, we make love without feeling, we walk without seeing, a society in which we breathe sniffing, darkened by our blind beliefs. Nature has its rules and follows an unknown and sometimes violent design. The world continues and we, the ordinary mortals, have only the power to try to understand, to change our approach, our beliefs, our system. Although it is difficult, very difficult, but we have no other option. The truth, dear gentlemen, is that nothing will be the same as before unless we learn the lesson, otherwise everything will return exactly as before, with our bad ancestral practices and with the awareness that, again, humanity will miss an opportunity to to improve.

Even here, it is only the evening that I love. The dawn gladdens me for a moment; I fancy I could fell the charm of it if the day that is to follow were not bound to be so long! I certainly have a free domain to wander in, but it is not wild and impressive enough. its features are tame, its rocks small and uninteresting, the vegetation as a rule lacks the luxuriance and profusion I like to see; one never catches here the murmur of a torrent far down in the depths; it is a land of plains. Nothing burdens me here; nothing satisfies me. I fancy, if anything, my boredom increases; simply because I have not enough to suffer. I am happier then, you think? Not a bit of it; to suffer and to be unhappy are not at all the same thing, no more than enjoyment is identical with happiness. I am delightfully circumstanced, and yet I live a melancholy life. I could not be better off than I am here: free, undistracted, well in health, unyoked from business, unconcerned about a future from which I expect nothing, and leaving behind without regret a past I have not enjoyed. But here is within me a persistent unrest, a yearning I cannot define, imperative and absorbing, which takes me out of the sphere of perishable creatures... No, it is not the yearning to love; you are mistaken there, as I once was mistaken myself. The interval is wide enough between the emptiness of my heart and the love it has so eagerly desired, but the distance between what I am and what I want to be is infinite. I do not want to enjoy possession; I want hope, I should like to know. I need limitless illusions, receding before me to keep me always under their spell. What use to me is anything that can end? The hour which will arrive in sixty years' time is already close at hand. I have no liking for anything that takes its rise, draws near, arrives and is no more. I want a good, a dream, in fact a hope that is ever in advance, ever beyond me, greater than my expectation itself, greater than the things which pass away. I would like to be pure intelligence, I would like the eternal order of the world... And yet, thirty years ago, that order was, and I had no existence. worthless and accidental creature of a day, I used not to exist, and soon I shall exist no more. I discover with surprise that my thought is greater than my being, and when I consider that my life is absurd in my own eyes, I lose my way in hopeless darkness. Truly, happier is he who fells trees and burns charcoal, and flies to holy water when the thunder peals. He lives like the brute. Nay; for he sings at his work. I shall never know his peace, and yet I shall pass like him. His life will glide along with time, but mine is led astray and hurried on by excitement and unrest, and by the phantoms of an unknown greatness.

One cannot examine the actions of the Secret Service on November 22, 1963, without concluding that the Service stood down on protecting President Kennedy. Indeed, the 120-degree turn into Dealey Plaza violates Secret Service procedures, because it required the presidential limousine to come to a virtual stop. The reduction of the president’s motorcycle escort from six police motorcycles to two and the order for those two officers to ride behind the presidential limousine also violates standard Secret Service procedure. The failure to empty and secure the tall buildings on either side of the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza likewise violates formal procedure, as does the lack of any agents dispersed through the crowd gathered in Dealey Plaza. Readers who are interested in a comprehensive analysis of the Secret Service’s multiple failures and the conspicuous violation of longstanding Secret Service policies regarding the movement and protection of the president on November 22, 1963, should read Vince Palamara’s Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect. The difference in JFK Secret Service protection and its adherence to the services standard required procedures in Chicago and Miami would be starkly different from the arrangements for Dallas. Palamara established that Agent Emory Roberts worked overtime to help both orchestrate the assassination and cover up the unusual actions of the Secret Service in the aftermath. Roberts was commander of the follow-up car trailing the presidential limousine. Roberts covered up the escapades of his fellow secret servicemen at The Cellar, a club in downtown Ft. Worth, where agents, some directly responsible for the safety of President Kennedy during the motorcade, drank until dawn on November 22. He also ordered a perplexed agent Donald Lawton off the back of the presidential limousine while at Love Field, thus giving the assassins clearer, more direct shots and more time to get them off. Also, although Roberts recognized rifle fire being discharged in Dealey Plaza, he neglected to mobilize any of the agents under his watch to act. To mask the inactivity of his agents, Roberts, in sworn testimony, falsely increased the speed of the cars (from 9–11 mph to 20–25 mph) and the distance between them (from five feet to 20–25 feet).85 No analysis of the Secret Service’s actions on the day of the assassination can be complete without mentioning that Secret Service director James Rowley was a former FBI agent and close ally of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as well as a crony of Lyndon Johnson. Hoover was one of Johnson’s closest associates. The FBI Director would take the unusual step of flying to Dallas for a victory celebration in 1948 when Johnson illegally stole his Senate seat through election fraud. Johnson and Hoover were neighbors in the Foxhall Road area of the District of Columbia. Hoover’s budget would virtually triple during the years LBJ dominated the appropriations process as Senate Majority Leader. Rowley was a protégé of the director and one of the few men who left the FBI on good terms with Hoover. Rowley’s first public service job in the Roosevelt administration was arranged for him by LBJ. The neglect of assigning even one Secret Service agent to secure Dealey Plaza, as well as cleaning blood and other relatable pieces of evidence from the presidential limousine immediately following the assassination, seizing Kennedy’s body from Parkland Hospital to prevent a proper, well-documented autopsy, failing to record Oswald’s interrogation—all were important pieces of the assassination deftly executed by Rowley.

The researchers obtained genetic data from the most well-known migration routes in North America, South America, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe. When they analyzed the data, a clear pattern emerged. Among populations that remained near their origins, fewer people had a long DRD4 allele compared to those who migrated farther away. One of the migration routes they evaluated began in Africa, went through East Asia, across the Bering Strait to North America, then down to South America. That’s a long way—and the researchers found that the group that made it all the way, indigenous South Americans, had the highest proportion of long dopamine alleles, 69 percent. Among those who migrated a shorter distance and settled in North America, only 32 percent had the long allele. Indigenous populations in Central America were right in between at 42 percent. On average, it was estimated that the proportion of long alleles increased by 4.3 percentage points for every 1,000 miles of migration.

When I saw you I knew it was for you, and I understood that you were for me. Your charm is not lost with distance, the madness perceived in the letters increases.

Argument in Isolation" Premise: one exists alone, Within a system of increasingly mild ideals —The good of love, the greater good of dreams— Abstracted from the musings of the grown-up child That somewhere, in a scene above the sky, Lies smiling. Anxious to begin Before the will can answer and its passions fly away Like sparrows, he lays aside his cares and Lets the world come, lets its shapes return, Its mirrors answer and its angels roam across the narrow Confines of the page. Like friends Estranged by distance and the inwardness of age, The spaces between letters become spaces between lives, The fact of pain begins to seem unreal, the trees Begin to seem too distant; the imaginary self, Concealed from the world, begins its cry Yet remains empty—as though it could contain No tenderness beyond its own, and no other love Than that concealed in its own reflection, hovering On the threshold of age, between two lives. Premise: the world and the mind are one, With a single splendor. And to By the way a Street looked, or the way the light fell in a canyon, Is to realize the way time feels in passing, as The will to change becomes the effort to remember, And then a passive sigh. An eidolon Constructed out of air, grown out of nothing, Planted at the center of a space shaped like the heart

If a man is straying away from God, every step he takes increases his distance from Him. But if his face is toward the Lord, he might only be capable of a child’s tottering step, but he is still moving nearer and nearer every moment.

A Far Country Leslie Pinckney Hill - 1880-1960 Beyond the cities I have seen, Beyond the wrack and din, There is a wide and fair demesne Where I have never been. Away from desert wastes of greed, Over the peaks of pride, Across the seas of mortal need Its citizens abide. And through the distance though I see How stern must be the fare, My feet are ever fain to be Upon the journey there. In that far land the only school The dwellers all attend Is built upon the Golden Rule, And man to man is friend. No war is there nor war’s distress, But truth and love increase— It is a realm of pleasantness, And all her paths are peace.

If you feel the distance between you and your loved one is increasing, maybe it’s time for you to stop moving.

exhausted. Don't do that to others; it disempowers you. A little unemotional leaning in some circumstances can be okay—others may feel pleasure in supporting you or assisting you. But too much leaning, and they will vote “no.” It does not mean that you can't ask for help—sometimes you can—but there's a difference between asking dispassionately for help and constantly leaning on others emotionally, demanding that they ameliorate your inadequacy or insecurity. Thus, an important first step in silent power is don't lean. It's obvious, but most don't know it. When you're frantic for people, your needs have an air of desperation—they weaken you and push things away from you. Have you ever had a romantic relationship where the other person was all over you like a hot rash, desperate for you? What did you do? For the first few days you probably enjoyed the attention, but on day three you gave this man or woman a hard time, and you started to tow him or her around by the nose. You enjoyed that for a bit, but in the end, this desperation and insecurity bugged you; eventually you tossed this person out. When you're in love and you crave someone, if this individual keeps his or her distance or retreats from you, then your desire increases. If this person advances too far forward, your desire lessens, or may dissipate completely. When you're desperate for a deal and you lean into it, you push it away and/or you wind up paying more. It's called “wanting-it” tax. Before every deal, take a moment in the hallway to remind yourself that you don't need it. If you don't get it, it doesn't borner you. If you do get it, it will be under your terms, and you won't pay too much. Even if your natural tendency is to lean into people—because, let's say, you're a very social person—don't lean. Make that a discipline. You can be social without leaning in. Put a sign on your refrigerator door: “When in doubt, lean out!

Seeing the Worm Instead of the Apple Another thought pattern that makes you keep your partner at a distance is “seeing the worm instead of the apple.” Carole had been with Bob for nine months and had been feeling increasingly unhappy. She felt Bob was the wrong guy for her, and gave a multitude of reasons: He wasn’t her intellectual equal, he lacked sophistication, he was too needy, and she didn’t like the way he dressed or interacted with people. Yet, at the same time, there was a tenderness about him that she’d never experienced with another man. He made her feel safe and accepted, he lavished gifts on her, and he had endless patience to deal with her silences, moods, and scorn. Still, Carole was adamant about her need to leave Bob. “It will never work,” she said time and again. Finally, she broke up with him. Months later she was surprised by just how difficult she was finding things without him. Lonely, depressed, and heartbroken, she mourned their lost relationship as the best she’d ever had. Carole’s experience is typical of people with an avoidant attachment style. They tend to see the glass half-empty instead of half-full when it comes to their partner. In fact, in one study, Mario Mikulincer, dean of the New School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel and one of the leading researchers in the field of adult attachment, together with colleagues Victor Florian and Gilad Hirschberger, from the department of psychology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, asked couples to recount their daily experiences in a diary. They found that people with an avoidant attachment style rated their partner less positively than did non-avoidants. What’s more, they found they did so even on days in which their accounts of their partners’ behavior indicated supportiveness, warmth, and caring. Dr. Mikulincer explains that this pattern of behavior is driven by avoidants’ generally dismissive attitude toward connectedness. When something occurs that contradicts this perspective—such as their spouse behaving in a genuinely caring and loving manner—they are prone to ignoring the behavior, or at least diminishing its value. When they were together, Carole used many deactivating strategies, tending to focus on Bob’s negative attributes. Although she was aware of her boyfriend’s strengths, she couldn’t keep her mind off what she perceived to be his countless flaws. Only after they broke up, and she no longer felt threatened by the high level of intimacy, did her defense strategies lift. She was then able to get in touch with the underlying feelings of attachment that were there all along and to accurately assess Bob’s pluses.

We discovered that existential authenticity has traditionally often been conceived as a matter of resisting collective complacency and of assuming responsibility for one’s beliefs, passions, and unique perspective. I would propose that the line of reasoning that Lacan advances regarding unconscious desire represents a specifically psychoanalytic answer to the question of authenticity. In other words, I would like to highlight the similarity between the philosophical conception of authenticity and the Lacanian conviction that actively listening to, and taking responsibility for, the “truth” of one’s desire—even (or particularly) when this “truth” seems alien or uncomfortable—allows one to distance oneself from the dominant dictates of the symbolic Other. Lacan in fact implies that only the subject who has been able to liberate itself from the Other’s desire retains the capacity for satisfaction. The flipside of this “unfettered” subject position is that the subject is less likely to expect the Other to compensate for the catastrophes of its desire. If the subject under the sway of fantasies tends to repeatedly re-create the same relationship—of being punished, suffocated, persecuted, loved, or admired, for instance—to the collective world of the Other, the shattering of fantasies allows it to gain a measure of self-sufficiency in relation to the Other. It grows to be less afraid of the world’s judgments, which suggests that it becomes increasingly capable of independent deliberation and action. As Bruce Fink underscores, one of the aspirations of Lacanian analysis is to facilitate the subject’s departure from ideals and configurations of thought that have been inculcated within its psyche by the various authority figures that surround it from birth; the goal of Lacanian analysis is to allow the subject to think and act without being overly dependent on the views and opinions of others.

After what seemed like acres of endless white, Horatia spotted a dark shape in the distance. As she drew closer she realized with horror that it was Lucien’s body. “Oh God!” she gasped. “Faster, damn you!” she shouted at the draft horse and it increased its pace. When she was within a few yards she slid from the saddle and ran to Lucien. He was face down in the snow, cloak wrapped about him. Horatia rolled him onto his back and paled when she saw the bloody gash above his forehead. His eyes were closed and his pale lips parted. She couldn’t lose him now, not after everything that had passed between them. Memories flashed across her eyes— the way he’d twist his lips up in a wicked smile, the brush of his lips against hers, the sweetly whispered words he’d spoken to her when they’d shared the room at the Midnight Garden. “Lucien!” She bent her ear to his lips, praying to feel the warmth of his breath. It was there, but barely. Horatia put her palms on either side of his cheek, letting her warmth seep into his cold skin. Once her hands grew too cold she dragged his body into her lap and held him close, rubbing him, praying her body heat would have some effect. After what felt like an eternity, Lucien’s dark lashes fluttered. When his hazel eyes focused at last, it was not on her face but on her bosom, which was mere inches from him. He managed a weak smile. “Heaven looks quite lovely from this angle.” The smile changed into a playful leer, even as Horatia’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll ignore that because you are alive.” She cupped his cheek and pressed her trembling lips to his forehead in a thankful kiss.

Let’s assume that MI (the Man I) loves Ws (the Woman she) if her prosperity contributes to his utility function and perhaps also if MI values emotional and physical contact with Ws. Then, it is clear that MI can benefit from a partnership with Ws. If they were together, it would have a greater impact on her prosperity (nuzzle her neck on a whim, reach the tins on the high shelf in the kitchen and hold her tight at night). Thereby, he’d also contribute to his own gain. The goods that measure ‘contact’ with Ws could indeed be produced more cheaply in a relationship than if MI and Ws lived each on their own. Even if Ws didn’t love MI she’d benefit from being in a relationship with him. Because he loves her, her well-being is part of his utility function, and he can therefore be expected to transfer resources to her, which increases her profits, even if she doesn’t love him back. Economists describe romantic relationships like a rational calculation between two independent individuals. They do away with everything that has any bearing on the actual romantic relationship. Then they say that they have found the solution. Rational solutions for irrational problems. A chaos of specific ideas. Even our romantic relationships must conform to the cold, hard logic of the market. Both man and woman become economic man. We always have the full picture, we always keep a distance and stand a bit outside ourselves. Total control. And total security.

I've learned that love outlives death. It holds steady through despair. It won't fade, even as time elapses and distance increases and your world shifts.

In Laurus we experience the Christian ideal in all its difficulty. The novel transmits knowledge by the experience of reading it, such that one cannot say Laurus is “about” any certain plotline or reduce the novelistic truth to a sound bite. Instead, reading the novel introduces you to holiness; it becomes palpable in the life of this fictional character. His extreme sanctity increases our desire for holiness. The story is set in fifteenth-century Russia, where the realities of sin and faith permeate all of life. Because the plague has killed both of his parents, our protagonist Arseny is raised by his grandfather Christofer, an elderly and devout healer who resides beside a graveyard so that it will be easy to carry his dead body a short distance for burial. Christofer trains Arseny in the art of healing. When Christofer dies, Arseny takes over as the medicine man for his village, Rukina Quarter. He falls in love with an abandoned woman Ustina, and she becomes pregnant. Ashamed of their unholy union, Arseny refuses to allow her to go to confession or to have a midwife at her birth, and thus she dies without forgiveness of her sins, and the baby dies as well. Arseny thereafter surrenders his life for the one he feels that he robbed from her, traveling the country to heal others, risking his life during the plague, spending time as a holy fool, pilgrimaging to Jerusalem, and finally dying back in Rukina Quarter as a different man than the one who left. Some might even say a saint.

In my mind’s eye I saw my soul group again and felt their deep caring and love. Concentrating on the feeling, I was able to shake off the blanketing anxiety and to amplify my energy in increments until finally I began to open up inside. Immediately the environment shifted to lighter shades of gray and the town disappeared. As my energy increased, I was able to image Wil’s face, and instantly he was beside me. “Are you okay?” he asked, turning to embrace me. His expression showed immense relief. “Those illusions were strong, and you willed yourself right into them.” “I know. I couldn’t think, couldn’t remember what to do.” “You were gone a long time; all we could do was send you energy.” “Who do you mean by we?” “All these souls.” Wil’s hand gestured outwardly. When I looked fully, I could see hundreds of souls stretching as far as I could see. Some were looking directly at us, but most appeared to be focused in another direction. I looked to see where they were staring, following their gaze to several large swirls of energy far in the distance. When I concentrated my focus, I realized that one of the swirls was in fact the town from which I had just escaped. “What are those places?” I asked Wil. “Mental constructions,” he replied, “set up by souls who in life lived very restrictive control dramas and could not wake up after death. Many thousands of them exist out there.

I've learned that love outlives death. It holds steady through despair. It won't fade, even as time elapses and distance increases and your world shifts.