Elderly Roots Quotes

We cannot play ostrich. Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work. In the chill climate in which we live, we must go against the prevailing wind. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust. We must dissent from a nation that has buried its head in the sand, waiting in vain for the needs of its poor, its elderly, and its sick to disappear and just blow away. We must dissent from a government that has left its young without jobs, education or hope. We must dissent from the poverty of vision and the absence of moral leadership. We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.

Elder Vara had managed, of course. The world could end and he would find a way to keep on reading.

I was an elder sister before I was a wife, and for longer, and that’s a shape I can’t easily shake.

I think James here has either just made a gorgeous friend or a sultry enemy,” Zane said, watching the swoop and drape of Tabitha’s robes as she turned the corner. “I can’t say for sure which I am rooting for.

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths. I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there. I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore. These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.

I never traded my humanity for my long life, Doctor. I've always remembered my roots....You worked so hard to be like your Elder master that you've forgotten what it is like to feel human - to be human. And we humans...have the capacity to feel another creature's pain. It is what lifted humani above the Elders, it is what made them great.

On Pleasure Pleasure is a freedom-song, But it is not freedom. It is the blossoming of your desires, But it is not their fruit. It is a depth calling unto a height, But it is not the deep nor the high. It is the caged taking wing, But it is not space encompassed. Aye, in very truth, pleasure is a freedom-song. And I fain would have you sing it with fullness of heart; yet I would not have you lose your hearts in the singing. Some of your youth seek pleasure as if it were all, and they are judged and rebuked. I would not judge nor rebuke them. I would have them seek. For they shall find pleasure, but not her alone; Seven are her sisters, and the least of them is more beautiful than pleasure. Have you not heard of the man who was digging in the earth for roots and found a treasure? And some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs committed in drunkenness. But regret is the beclouding of the mind and not its chastisement. They should remember their pleasures with gratitude, as they would the harvest of a summer. Yet if it comforts them to regret, let them be comforted. And there are among you those who are neither young to seek nor old to remember; And in their fear of seeking and remembering they shun all pleasures, lest they neglect the spirit or offend against it. But even in their foregoing is their pleasure. And thus they too find a treasure though they dig for roots with quivering hands. But tell me, who is he that can offend the spirit? Shall the nightingale offend the stillness of the night, or the firefly the stars? And shall your flame or your smoke burden the wind? Think you the spirit is a still pool which you can trouble with a staff? Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being. Who knows but that which seems omitted today, waits for tomorrow? Even your body knows its heritage and its rightful need and will not be deceived. And your body is the harp of your soul, And it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds. And now you ask in your heart, “How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?” Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower, But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee. For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life, And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love, And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.

We live in a country in which words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up; and therefore, it seems to me, the adulation so cruelly proffered our elders has nothing to do with their achievement—which, I repeat, was mighty—but has to do with our impulse to look back on what we now imagine to have been a happier time. It is an adulation which has panic at the root.

The more I reflect on the elder son in me, the more I realize how deeply rooted this form of lostness really is and how hard it is to return home from there. Returning home from a lustful escapade seems so much easier than returning home from a cold anger that has rooted itself in the deepest corners of my being. My resentment is not something that can be easily distinguished and dealt with rationally. It is far more pernicious: something that has attached itself to the underside of my virtue. Isn’t it good to be obedient, dutiful, law-abiding, hardworking, and self-sacrificing? And still it seems that my resentments and complaints are mysteriously tied to such praiseworthy attitudes. This connection often makes me despair. At the very moment I want to speak or act out of my most generous self, I get caught in anger or resentment. And it seems that just as I want to be most selfless, I find myself obsessed about being loved. Just when I do my utmost to accomplish a task well, I find myself questioning why others do not give themselves as I do. Just when I think I am capable of overcoming my temptations, I feel envy toward those who gave in to theirs. It seems that wherever my virtuous self is, there also is the resentful complainer.

Another sign of those with an “elder brother” spirit is joyless, fear-based compliance. The older son boasts of his obedience to his father, but lets his underlying motivation and attitude slip out when he says, “All these years I’ve been slaving for you.” To be sure, being faithful to any commitment involves a certain amount of dutifulness. Often we don’t feel like doing what we ought to do, but we do it anyway, for the sake of integrity. But the elder brother shows that his obedience to his father is nothing but duty all the way down. There is no joy or love, no reward in just seeing his father pleased. In the same way, elder brothers are fastidious in their compliance to ethical norms, and in fulfillment of all traditional family, community, and civic responsibilities. But it is a slavish, joyless drudgery. The word “slave” has strong overtones of being forced or pushed rather than drawn or attracted. A slave works out of fear—fear of consequences imposed by force. This gets to the root of what drives an elder brother. Ultimately, elder brothers live good lives out of fear, not out of joy and love.

A community needs it's elders to continue. Just as you could not grow culture out of a population of kindergarten children, a forest cannot realize its own natural potential without the seed-reservoirs, root-fungus threads, birdcalls and magical deposits of tiny feces that are the gift from the old to the young. Chris Maser says, "We need ancient forests for the survival of ancient forests.

Moss is 300m yrs old. Home on every continent. No roots. No towering trunks, yet it tasted the air before the first feather, before shrews stirred the leaf litter. When your mind hisses like a kettle, look to your elder, to the green lessons of soft, simple quiet beneath the sun.

Elders fall for green almonds when they’re raised on bruised stone root ginger though it winters on their heads as if auctumned round their waistbands.

I’ve got a plan,” Hollypaw announced. She and Cinderpaw had cleared the old bedding out of the elders’ den and were clawing fresh moss from around the roots of an oak tree. Shreds of mist drifted among the trees, while overhead the sun was struggling to break through a covering of cloud. Cinderpaw stopped with her claws deep in the soft green covering. “What plan?

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to be his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an aristocratic position. But intrinsically, he had slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter's Aeschylus, and dipping into Francis's Horace. To this negative view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with mining speculations; namely, that scientific education was the really useful training for a younger son. Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not fit to encounter the rough experience of a public school. Mr. Letherall had said so very decidedly. Mr. Letherall was a large man in spectacles, who one day took my small head between his large hands, and pressed it here and there in an exploratory, suspicious manner - then placed each of his great thumbs on my temples, and pushed me a little way from him, and stared at me with glittering spectacles. The contemplation appeared to displease him, for he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his thumbs across my eyebrows - 'The deficiency is there, sir-there; and here,' he added, touching the upper sides of my head, 'here is the excess. That must be brought out, sir, and this must be laid to sleep.' I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the object of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred - hatred of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to buy and cheapen it. ("The Lifted Veil")

An elderly woman says that she’s proud of me, and I’m a little surprised. What have I done for this woman who’s barely even known me for an hour to feel proud of me? Rivia tells me that she says, “You’re Brazilian, and you haven’t forgotten your roots, and now you’re here to see us. You haven’t forgotten us, your people.” I admit that she’s right. This is a part of me, and I haven’t forgotten or tried to deny this part of my life. I’ve just been in a different part of the world.

On an idyllic summer day, we walked through the meadows and hillsides, sitting in circles, laughing and filling sacks of cottongrass, salmonberries, crowberries, cranberries, mountain alder, northern golden rod, and rose hip roots. We collected cloudberry tea and Labrador tea, and wild celery. The Elders walked together, laughing, talking of the old days when they would travel to the Messenger Feasts, across the channel to Siberia, or south to trade in Qikiqtaġruk. We’d mix a dessert of fresh berries and lard, whipping and whipping the lard until fluffy.

For better or worse, defensive designs limit the range of activities people can engage in. They can also create real problems for the elderly or disabled. Some of the goals of unpleasant designs can seem noble, but they follow a potentially dangerous logic with respect to public spaces. When supposed solutions address symptoms of a problem rather than the root causes, that problem is not solved but only pushed down the street to the next block or neighborhood. Spikes beget spikes, and targeted individuals are just moved around without addressing the underlying issues.

Young lady, what you miscalled your ‘moral instinct’ was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival. Survival of your family, for example. Of your children, when you have them. Of your nation, if you struggle that high up the scale. And so on up. A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive—and nowhere else!—and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts. “We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race—

What must we do, then, to be saved? To find God we must repent of the things we have done wrong, but if that is all you do, you may remain just an elder brother. To truly become Christians we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right. Pharisees only repent of their sins, but Christians repent for the very roots of their righteousness, too. We must learn how to repent of the sin under all our other sins and under all our righteousness—the sin of seeking to be our own Savior and Lord. We must admit that we’ve put our ultimate hope and trust in things other than God, and that in both our wrongdoing and right doing we have been seeking to get around God or get control of God in order to get hold of those things.

People often have a romantic ideal of the forest, but if you sit under a tree, every insect within a ten-metre radius will make a beeline for you. It’s not romantic. It is, however, transformative. To feel its pulse, its rhythm, its life. To learn its ways, its regenerative power, its creative prowess. When we look at trees, we think of them as trucks, branches, and leaves. We forget that under the ground there is a vast and complex system of intertwined roots that is as large and fascinating as the system above the soil. It is through this underground system that the trees talk to each other, warn each other of danger, help the sick trees, support the elderly ones, and generally have an elaborate and purposeful way of communicating with the whole ecological community.

I see us as all sitting around naked, shivering, in a huge circle, looking up as the sky turns black and the stars flare out and somebody starts to tell a story, claims to see a pattern in the stars. And then someone else tells a story about the eye of the hurricane, the eye of the tiger. And the stories , the images, become the truth and we will kill each other rather than change one word of the story. But every once in a while, someone sees a new star, or claims to see it, a star in the north that changes the pattern, and that is devastating. People are outraged, they start up grunting in fury, they turn on the one who noticed it and club her to death. They sit back down, muttering. They take up smoking. They turn away from the north, not wanting it to be thought that they might be trying to catch sight of her hallucination. Some of them, however, are true believers, they can look straight north and never see even a glimpse of what she pointed to. The foresighted gather together and whisper. They already know that if that star is accepted, all the stories will have to be changed. They turn suspiciously to sniff out any of the others who might surreptitiously turn their heads to peer at the spot where this star is supposed to be. They catch a few they think are doing this; despite their protests, they are killed. The things must be stopped at the root. But the elders have to keep watching, and their watching convinces the others that there's really something there, so more and more people start to turn, and in time everyone sees it, or imagines they see it, and those that don't claim they do. So earth feels the wound, and Nature from her seat, sighting through all her Works, gives signs of woe, that all is lost. The stories all have to be changed: the whole world shudders. People sigh and weep and say how peaceful it was before in the happy golden times when everyone believed the old stories. But actually nothing whatever has changed except the stories.

What must we do, then, to be saved? To find God we must repent of the things we have done wrong, but if that is all you do, you may remain just an elder brother. To truly become Christians we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right. Pharisees only repent of their sins, but Christians repent for the very roots of their righteousness, too. We must learn how to repent of the sin under all our other sins and under all our righteousness—the sin of seeking to be our own Savior and Lord. We must admit that we’ve put our ultimate hope and trust in things other than God, and that in both our wrongdoing and right doing we have been seeking to get around God or get control of God in order to get hold of those things. It is only when you see the desire to be your own Savior and Lord—lying beneath both your sins and your moral goodness—that you are on the verge of understanding the gospel and becoming a Christian indeed. When you realize that the antidote to being bad is not just being good, you are on the brink.

We believe some people are more special, more beautiful, more capable, more influential, more intelligent, more gifted, and have a greater capacity for good than others, often based on material possessions and outer appearances. At the root, that is why we are engaged in a struggle now in the Congress led by one group of people who truly believes their role is to defend the privileges of the elite. They defend tax breaks for the rich and ask for trillions in cuts to the safety nets that protect the middle class, the elderly, the sick, and the poor, because, in essence, they believe one group is more important than the other, more deserving than the other, and one contributes more good than the other. This is actually an illusion that is blind to the interdependence of the entire creation, which unites the weak with the strong, the privileged with the poor, and the ugly with the beautiful. All the inequities of our world are basically attempts to actualize this erroneous belief. And that is why there is turmoil, because we are in conflict with the truth, working to manifest an idea that is false.

As she led them out onto the mud, Dovepaw glanced back to see Thornclaw pull a long stick out from under the roots of an elder bush at the edge of the bank. Before he could carry it off, Jayfeather erupted from the undergrowth, a bundle of herbs in his jaws. "Hey, that's mine!" he protested, spitting leaves everywhere. "Put it back!" "Are you mouse-brained?" Thornclaw mumbled around the stick. "I need it. It's only a stick." "It's my stick." Dovepaw was startled to see how worked up Jayfeather was, his eyes blazing and neck fur bristling, as if he was facing an enemy. "If you don't bring it back to me in one piece, I'll... I'll..." "Okay, I'll bring back your stupid stick," Thornclaw snarled. "Keep your fur on." He raced back across the mud with the stick in his jaws. Dovepaw and Ivypaw followed more slowly behind their mentors. Dovepaw was trying to lift each paw as soon as it touched the scorching ground. Her pads would be shriveled by the time she reached the water. "Do you think the heat is getting to Jayfeather?" Ivypaw whispered. "Thornclaw's right. It's only a stick." Dovepaw shrugged. "Maybe it's medicine cat stuff." "Yes, but what happens to us if our medicine cat gets bees in his brains?

The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past.

She hadn’t always been obsessed with babies. There was a time she believed she would change the world, lead a movement, follow Dolores Huerta and Sylvia Mendez, Ellen Ochoa and Sonia Sotomayor. Where her bisabuela had picked pecans and oranges in the orchards, climbing the tallest trees with her small girlbody, dropping the fruit to the baskets below where her tías and tíos and primos stooped to pick those that had fallen on the ground, where her abuela had sewn in the garment district in downtown Los Angeles with her bisabuela, both women taking the bus each morning and evening, making the beautiful dresses to be sold in Beverly Hills and maybe worn by a movie star, and where her mother had cared for the ill, had gone to their crumbling homes, those diabetic elderly dying in the heat in the Valley—Bianca would grow and tend to the broken world, would find where it ached and heal it, would locate its source of ugliness and make it beautiful. Only, since she’d met Gabe and become La Llorona, she’d been growing the ugliness inside her. She could sense it warping the roots from within. The cactus flower had dropped from her when she should have been having a quinceañera, blooming across the dance floor in a bright, sequined dress, not spending the night at her boyfriend’s nana’s across town so that her mama wouldn’t know what she’d done, not taking a Tylenol for the cramping and eating the caldo de rez they’d made for her. They’d taken such good care of her. Had they done it for her? Or for their son’s chance at a football scholarship? She’d never know. What she did know: She was blessed with a safe procedure. She was blessed with women to check her for bleeding. She was blessed with choice. Only, she hadn’t chosen for herself. She hadn’t. Awareness must come. And it did. Too late. If she’d chosen for herself, she would have chosen the cactus spines. She would’ve chosen the one night a year the night-blooming cereus uncoils its moon-white skirt, opens its opalescent throat, and allows the bats who’ve flown hundreds of miles with their young clutching to their fur as they swim through the air, half-starved from waiting, to drink their fill and feed their next generation of creatures who can see through the dark. She’d have been a Queen of the Night and taught her daughter to give her body to no Gabe. She knew that, deep inside. Where Anzaldúa and Castillo dwelled, where she fed on the nectar of their toughest blossoms. These truths would moonstone in her palm and she would grasp her hand shut, hold it tight to her heart, and try to carry it with her toward the front door, out onto the walkway, into the world. Until Gabe would bend her over. And call her gordita or cochina. Chubby girl. Dirty girl. She’d open her palm, and the stone had turned to dust. She swept it away on her jeans. A daughter doesn’t solve anything; she needed her mama to tell her this. But she makes the world a lot less lonely. A lot less ugly.  

To his surprise, Sorasa moved with him. She looked straight ahead, refusing to meet his eye. Instead, she fussed with the chain mail beneath her jacket, trying to adjust the metal rings. Clearly she despised it, her usually fluid motions slower and more stilted. He opened his mouth to taunt her, to say anything, to grasp one more second at her side. “Thank you for wearing armor,” he growled. It was the only thing left to say. He expected a quick, poisonous retort. Instead, Sorasa looked up at him. Her copper eyes wavered, filled with all the emotion she no longer cared to hide. “Iron and steel won’t save us from dragon fire,” she said, all regret, her mouth barely moving. Again, Dom wanted to stay, lingering one last moment, his eyes locked on her own. “I know you don't believe in ghosts,” Sorasa murmured, holding her ground. She did not move closer, or move at all, letting the crowd of Elders break around her. A Vedera who falls in this realm falls forever, Dom thought, the old belief a sudden curse. Sorasa’s eyes shimmered, swimming with tears she would never allow herself to shed. She looked like she did on the beach after the shipwreck, torn apart by grief. “But I do,” she said. His chest filled with an unfamiliar feeling, an ache he could not name. “Sorasa,” he began, but the crowd surged around them, his Vederan soldiers too many to ignore. Every part of him wanted to stay rooted, though he knew he could not. She would not reach chin, her hands pressed to her sides, her chin raised and jaw set. Whatever tears she carried faded, pushed down into the unfeeling well of an Amhara heart. “Haunt me, Domacridhan.” The tide of the army swelled before he could muster an answer. While Sorasa stood against it, Dom let himself be carried. While his body marched, his heart stayed behind, broken as it was, already burning. Her last words followed him all the way down to the city gates.

I don’t know what it was about menopause, specifically, that caused me all of a sudden to become a gatherer of “found objects.” But now, wherever I went in this bleakly untamed and often inhospitable landscape in the wild western extremes of Ireland, I seemed to hear things calling out to me. I was rooting for something — I didn’t know what. For fragments of myself, perhaps; my life, my loves. For fragments which reflected something of myself back at me — whatever I might be becoming now, at this turbulent, shapeshifting time of my life. And all the fragments I seemed to need came from this new place, from the ancient, uncompromising earth around me: that land which I walked compulsively, day after day after day. I would come home from the woods reverently carrying strangely shaped sticks, from the lough with pebbles and water-bird feathers, from the beach with seashells and mermaid’s purses — as if I were reassembling myself from elements of the land itself. After the deep dissolutions of menopause, I was refashioning myself from those calcinated ashes; I was growing new bones. It’s something we all have to do at this time in our lives; somehow, with whatever tools are available to us, we have to begin to curate the vision of the elder we will become. It’s an act of bricolage. And so now I had become like the bright-eyed, cackling magpies which regularly ransacked our garden: a collector — though not of trinkets, but of clues. I was gathering them together in the safety of my new nest. The clues were there in the pieces; those clues are threaded through this book. Scattered in shadowy corners and brightly lit windows, these objects I’ve selected are so much more than random gatherings of whatever it was that I happened to come across in my wanderings. They’re so much more than mere clutter. They are active choices, carefully selected objects that mirror my sense of myself as a shapeshifting, storied creature. Because the clues to our re-memberings are in the stories, and the stories are always born from the land.

Scrupling to do writings relative to keeping slaves has been a means of sundry small trials to me, in which I have so evidently felt my own will set aside that I think it good to mention a few of them. Tradesmen and retailers of goods, who depend on their business for a living, are naturally inclined to keep the good-will of their customers; nor is it a pleasant thing for young men to be under any necessity to question the judgment or honesty of elderly men, and more especially of such as have a fair reputation. Deep-rooted customs, though wrong, are not easily altered; but it is the duty of all to be firm in that which they certainly know is right for them. A charitable, benevolent man, well acquainted with a negro, may, I believe, under some circumstances, keep him in his family as a servant, on no other motives than the negro's good; but man, as man, knows not what shall be after him, nor hath he any assurance that his children will attain to that perfection in wisdom and goodness necessary rightly to exercise such power; hence it is clear to me, that I ought not to be the scribe where wills are drawn in which some children are made ales masters over others during life. About this time an ancient man of good esteem in the neighborhood came to my house to get his will written. He had young negroes, and I asked him privately how he purposed to dispose of them. He told me; I then said, "I cannot write thy will without breaking my own peace," and respectfully gave him my reasons for it. He signified that he had a choice that I should have written it, but as I could not, consistently with my conscience, he did not desire it, and so he got it written by some other person. A few years after, there being great alterations in his family, he came again to get me to write his will. His negroes were yet young, and his son, to whom he intended to give them, was, since he first spoke to me, from a libertine become a sober young man, and he supposed that I would have been free on that account to write it. We had much friendly talk on the subject, and then deferred it. A few days after he came again and directed their freedom, and I then wrote his will.

The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past. So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself? How do you make veterans feel that they are returning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place? I put that question to Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Yehuda has seen, up close, the effect of such antisocial divisions on traumatized vets. “If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity,” she told me. “I’m appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?” The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America’s ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn’t acting competitively—that should be encouraged—but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn’t, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves.

If the claims of the papacy cannot be proven from what we know of the historical Peter, there are, on the other hand, several undoubted facts in the real history of Peter which bear heavily upon those claims, namely: 1. That Peter was married, Matt. 8:14, took his wife with him on his missionary tours, 1 Cor. 9:5, and, according to a possible interpretation of the "coëlect" (sister), mentions her in 1 Pet. 5:13. Patristic tradition ascribes to him children, or at least a daughter (Petronilla). His wife is said to have suffered martyrdom in Rome before him. What right have the popes, in view of this example, to forbid clerical marriage?  We pass by the equally striking contrast between the poverty of Peter, who had no silver nor gold (Acts 3:6) and the gorgeous display of the triple-crowned papacy in the middle ages and down to the recent collapse of the temporal power. 2. That in the Council at Jerusalem (Acts 15:1–11), Peter appears simply as the first speaker and debater, not as president and judge (James presided), and assumes no special prerogative, least of all an infallibility of judgment. According to the Vatican theory the whole question of circumcision ought to have been submitted to Peter rather than to a Council, and the decision ought to have gone out from him rather than from "the apostles and elders, brethren" (or "the elder brethren," 15:23). 3. That Peter was openly rebuked for inconsistency by a younger apostle at Antioch (Gal. 2:11–14). Peter’s conduct on that occasion is irreconcilable with his infallibility as to discipline; Paul’s conduct is irreconcilable with Peter’s alleged supremacy; and the whole scene, though perfectly plain, is so inconvenient to Roman and Romanizing views, that it has been variously distorted by patristic and Jesuit commentators, even into a theatrical farce gotten up by the apostles for the more effectual refutation of the Judaizers! 4. That, while the greatest of popes, from Leo I. down to Leo XIII. never cease to speak of their authority over all the bishops and all the churches, Peter, in his speeches in the Acts, never does so. And his Epistles, far from assuming any superiority over his "fellow-elders" and over "the clergy" (by which he means the Christian people), breathe the spirit of the sincerest humility and contain a prophetic warning against the besetting sins of the papacy, filthy avarice and lordly ambition (1 Pet. 5:1–3). Love of money and love of power are twin-sisters, and either of them is "a root of all evil." It is certainly very significant that the weaknesses even more than the virtues of the natural Peter—his boldness and presumption, his dread of the cross, his love for secular glory, his carnal zeal, his use of the sword, his sleepiness in Gethsemane—are faithfully reproduced in the history of the papacy; while the addresses and epistles of the converted and inspired Peter contain the most emphatic protest against the hierarchical pretensions and worldly vices of the papacy, and enjoin truly evangelical principles—the general priesthood and royalty of believers, apostolic poverty before the rich temple, obedience to God rather than man, yet with proper regard for the civil authorities, honorable marriage, condemnation of mental reservation in Ananias and Sapphira, and of simony in Simon Magus, liberal appreciation of heathen piety in Cornelius, opposition to the yoke of legal bondage, salvation in no other name but that of Jesus Christ.

In many ways, turnips are the unsung heroes of the root crop universe. They don't have the ad budget potatoes have, or the glamorous appearance of carrots, but they shouldn't be underestimated. They're high in vitamins and minerals, low in sugar, and taste delicious roasted, caramelized, or mashed with a pound of butter. Pliny the Elder considered the turnip the most important vegetable of his day, because "its utility surpasses that of any other plant's." Say what you want about Pliny the Elder... he was a man who knew his vegetables.

.. Long before the lizards, before the dinosaurs, two spores set out on an incredible journey. They came to a valley bathed in the placid glow of sunset. My elder sister, said the little spore to the bigger spore, let us see what lies beyond. This valley is green, replied the bigger spore, I shall journey no farther. I want to journey, said the little spore, I want to discover. She gazed in wonder at the path before her. Will you forget your sister? asked the bigger spore. Never, said the little spore. You will, little one, for this is the loveless tale of karma; in it there is only parting and sorrow. The little spore journeyed on. The bigger spore stayed back in the valley. Her roots pierced the damp earth and sought the nutrients of death and memory. She sprouted over the earth, green and contented ... A girl with silver anklets and eyes prettied with surma came to Chetali’s valley to gather flowers. The Champaka tree stood alone—efflorescent, serene. The flower-gatherer reached out and held down a soft twig to pluck the flowers. As the twig broke the Champaka said, My little sister, you have forgotten me!

But there was no one, in heaven or on the earth or under the earth, who was able to open the scroll and read it. 4 I wept bitterly because there was nobody fit to open the scroll and read it, 5 but one of the elders said to me, "There is no need to cry : the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed, and he will open the scroll and the seven seals of it.

Nonetheless, Floyd was elevated as a hero in black America, while David Dorn, an elderly man who had lived his live admirably, was being cast aside. I was disgusted, because I knew at the root of this injustice was politics and watering that root, was a toxic culture. My video rebuttal shocked the world. It garnered more than 100 million views in a matter of four days, and people all around the world reached out to me

Lava crust," he said, voice hushed in wonder. "It's lava crust. The fire is burning within the creature's skin." "No wonder it's in pain," Machiavelli muttered. "You sound almost sorry for it," Dee snapped. "I never traded my humanity for my long life, Doctor. I've always remembered my roots." His voice hardened, turning contemptous. "You worked so hard to be like your Elder master that you've forgotten what it is like to feel human—to be human. And we humans"—he stressed the last word—"have the capacity to feel another creature's pain. It is what lifted the humani above the Elders, it is what made them great." —Michael Scott, The Magician

Lava crust," he said, voice hushed in wonder. "It's lava crust. The fire is burning within the creature's skin." "No wonder it's in pain," Machiavelli muttered. "You sound almost sorry for it," Dee snapped. "I never traded my humanity for my long life, Doctor. I've always remembered my roots." His voice hardened, turning contemptous. "You worked so hard to be like your Elder master that you've forgotten what it is like to feel human—to be human. And we humans"—he stressed the last word—"have the capacity to feel another creature's pain. It is what lifted the humani above the Elders, it is what made them great.

Why do Southerners eat Black Eyed Peas on New Year’s Day? The story of the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas as the first meal on New Year's Day is generally believed to date back to the winter of 1864 - 1865. When Union General William T. Sherman led his invading troops on their destructive march through Georgia, the fields of black-eyed peas were largely left untouched because they were deemed fit only for animals. The Union foragers took everything, plundered the land, and left what they could not take, burning or in shambles. But two things did remain, the lowly peas and good Ol’ Southern salted pork. As a result, the humble yet nourishing black-eyed peas saved surviving Southerners - mainly women, children, elderly and the disabled veterans of the Confederate army - from mass starvation and were thereafter regarded as a symbol of good luck. The peas are said to represent good fortune. Certainly the starving Southern families and soldiers were fortunate to have those meager supplies. According to the tradition and folklore, the peas are served with several other dishes that symbolically represent good fortune, health, wealth, and prosperity in the coming year. Some folks still traditionally cook the black-eyed peas with a silver dime in the pot as a symbol of good fortune. Greens represent wealth and paper money. Any greens will do, but in the South the most popular are collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, and cabbage. Cornbread - a regular staple among Southerners in the absence of wheat - symbolizes gold and is very good for soaking up the juice from the greens on the plate. You should always have some cornbread on hand in your kitchen anyway. Good for dinner and in the morning with syrup. Pork symbolizes bountiful prosperity, and then progressing into the year ahead. Ham and hog jowls are typical with the New Year meal, though sometimes bacon will be used, too. Pigs root forward, so it’s the symbolic moving forward for the New Year. Tomatoes are often eaten with this meal as well. They represent health and wealth. So reflect on those stories when you sit down at your family table and enjoy this humble, uniquely Southern meal every New Year’s Day. Be thankful for what this year did give you in spite of the bad, and hope and pray for better days that are coming ahead for you.

Our enemies are not made of flesh and blood, because if they were, we could hide from them or flee from them, but our spiritual enemies are everywhere. They suggest thoughts that are not rooted in love, chastity, goodness, and kindness. These noetic powers, or demons, who have different characters just as we humans do, are constantly putting impure thoughts into our heads, telling us to abandon ourselves to bodily passions, to thievery, malice, and envy. And if we listen to their suggestions and carry them out, these passions will become second nature to us.

Even some ten years ago when there used to be heavy snowfalls, you could see whole families of rabbits playing in the clearings among the trees at night in the moonlight. They would run around in circles, chasing one another and playing, hundreds of them, turning cartwheels in the snow, playing joyfully. This was joy, the joy of living! The animals have it. Man takes this joy away from them. They have the joy of living, while we have all kinds of material things, yet we are never happy, never satisfied. The animals do not worry about tomorrow, they do not gather wheat into their granaries, yet the Lord feeds them all. They nibble on a root here, find a place to sleep there, and they are grateful to God. Not so we men ...

We are in Calidon,” she muttered, eyeing the mountains again. It was not yet spring, but purple flowers clung between shore and rising cliff. “Your country.” Dom shook his head. “Hardly mine. Most Calidonians do not believe my people exist anymore, and the ones who do wish they could forget us entirely.” I share the sentiment,” Sorasa answered dryly. Next to her, Dom grinned. “Mortal humor. I know it too well by now.” Sorasa tried to smile but failed, squinting at the landscape. His face wiped clean. “What?” “I know little of this place,” she answered, grinding her teeth. It made her temple throb again. Dom’s smirk felt worse. He eyed her with a rare look, mischievous, like a child with a secret. “Are you asking for help, Sorasa Sarn?” the Elder teased. Sorasa wanted to stand up, but doubted she could with any grace. Instead, she stayed rooted, her fists curling in the sand until tiny stones pressed between her fingers. “I will deny it if you tell anyone,” she hissed, regretting the words as soon as they left her mouth. To her horror, Dom’s smirk only widened and Sorasa realized she had made a terrible error. A grace miscalculation. Don understood more than she realized. And knew the Amhara better than she ever thought possible. Then his hand found her wrist. She jumped in her skin, almost yelping as he helped her to her feet. Thankfully, she did not falter. “I thought you hated it,” he said, the smirk still curling. It made her want to hit him again. “What?” Sorasa snapped. Dom let her wrist drop. “Hope.

A tree often stands right next to the main house in the Scandinavian countries. This tree is frequently a birch and is reputedly the home of the land spirit. The most common name for this spirit is gardvord, formed from gard, meaning “wall, boundary,” and later “estate”; and vord, meaning “guardian.” The tree is called boträ (bosträd), vårdträd (the “vord-tree”), as well as tomteträd and tuntré. This tree can be an oak, birch, elder, or elm and is considered to be the totem tree on which the family fortunes depend (Sweden), and the dwelling place of the tomtegubbe, another name for the land spirit. Offerings of food were placed at its feet and its roots were sometimes watered with milk.

As Bevis and Randal, touched by its stillness as though it were a great wing that brushed over them, walked slower, and stopped, out of the darkness of the river woods below them rose one clear, perfect note of birdsong, long drawn and insistent, repeated again and again, then breaking into a shining spray of notes, a cascade of runs and phrases that seemed to shimmer on the ear. It was a song that the two young men standing up there among the bramble domes had heard often enough before; but surely it had never sounded quite like this, so that it was one with the white flood of moonlight and the smell of the elder flowers. ‘Oh, listen!’ Randal whispered, stupidly, for the whole night was already holding its breath to listen. ‘Listen, Bevis, it’s the nightingale.’ Bevis stood as though he were rooted, like the brambles and the elder scrub, into the hill beneath his feet. His head was up, his gaze not turned down to the dark woods below from which came the song but going out up the curving length of the dearly familiar valley to the long, low huddle of the Hall that he had been born in, under the steep stride of Long Down, and the Manor Mill by the ford. His thin face was remote and far off, as Randal glanced aside at him, as though he were hearing something else, something that was beyond the singing. In a little, he shook his head. ‘It’s a song spun from the moonlight. But if it were me up here in the hollow hill, and I were to wake tonight, it would not be the nightingale but the speckle-breasted thrush or our Wealden blackbird I’d be listening for, to tell me I was home again.

But the forest elder lifted me higher still, and I saw the road not as a single stripe of death, but as a feeler reaching out from a foreign organism. The road was to that system, not a stripe of death but a root, securing it in new soil. And just as I had imagined the pathways and byways that would spread out from it as small rootlets, so they were. And if I followed that root back to its source, I saw the Kingdom of Gernia, growing and spreading just as organically as a vine crawling up a tree. The vine that used a tree to reach the sunlight did not intend evil to the tree; it was incidental that it sucked all life from the tree as it climbed and spread, shading the tree’s leaves with its own tendrils and foliage. The roads fed Gernia, and were focused only on sustaining their own organism. For Gernia to live, the road must grow. It could not survive without its growing, spreading roots. My civilization and the forest were two organisms, competing for resources. One would shade out the other.

SO I WEPT much, because no one was found worthy to open and read the scroll, or to look at it. But one of the elders said to me, ‘Do not weep. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open the scroll and to loose its seven seals.” - Revelations 5:4-5

The more I reflect on the elder son in me, the more I realize how deeply rooted this form of lostness really is and how hard it is to return home from there...My resentment is not something that can be easily distinguished and dealt with rationally. It is far more pernicious: something that has attached itself to the underside of my virtue. Isn't it good to be obedient, dutiful, law-abiding, hardworking and self-sacrificing? And still it seems that my resentments and complaints are mysteriously tied to such praiseworthy attitudes. This connection often makes me despair.

Booker Lipton, a black man, back when race still mattered in the world, had made many enemies, but he owed that more to his ruthlessness as a businessman and a clear distrust for the government. He often said he knew corruption had existed everywhere because he’d bribed half the officials in the world. But the elder Lipton was also a paradox, whose deep spiritual beliefs drove him much more than a greedy pursuit of wealth. Booker had funded a group called the Inner Movement that, prior to the Banoff, sought to change the world from a materialistic, personality-based society to one rooted in love and lived from the soul. Then

Keir will not die. Leave us." I was of half a mind to scream out, to attract attention. But what would they think of a Warprize cowering before him? I grit my teeth. Iften opened his arms, as if making a peaceful gesture. "It is you that should leave. Ride out now, return to your people. All will be as it was." His voice was smooth and sure, as if offering the friendliest of advice. "No need to place yourself in jeopardy. No need to face attacks, such as in your own marketplace. No need to face the Elders or the warrior-priests." His face changed, and I had to stop myself from taking a step back. "Go, Xyian. Prepare your people for the army that will come in the spring, to ravage—" Something broke the fear inside me. With swift steps, I moved toward him, my fist raised in anger, swearing at the top of my lungs. "I curse you, bracnect. May the skies deny you breath!" Iften's eyes went wide, and his breath caught. His hand went to his sword hilt. I glared at him, took another step forward and shook my fist in his face. "May the earth sink below your feet." There was a gasp from outside, I wasn't sure who, but I didn't let it stop me. "May the fire deny you heat, and the very waters of the land dry in your hand." Iften didn't draw his sword. His face went pale and he stepped back quickly, stumbling out into the meeting room, heading for the main exit. As he retreated through the flap, I followed right behind. "May the very elements reject you and all that you are!" Marcus and Joden were outside, their eyes wide as plates. Others within hearing distance turned horrified faces toward us. I just kept my eyes on Iften, and took another step to jab my finger into his chest. "May your balls rot like fruit in the sun, and your manhood wither at the root!" I spit in the earth in front of Iften's toe. Without another word, I stomped back into the tent. By the time Marcus and Joden stepped into the tent, I was sitting calmly by Keir, wiping his chest down with water that I had added herbs to. Marcus spoke first, softly. "Warprize? How did you know such a curse?" "She overheard it?" Joden said. "How? When? None would say it in her presence without my knowledge. And none have cursed so in this army that I have heard word of." I responded calmly. "I didn't know it. I made it up. He was standing there, prating about the elements and bragging about what he was going to do and I just got so very angry." "A strong curse, Warprize." Marcus's voice carried a note of pride. "I don't care, so long as he stays away from me and Keir." Joden's tone was dry. "No fear of that, Lara.

193. The lack of historical memory is a serious shortcoming in our society. A mentality that can only say, “Then was then, now is now”, is ultimately immature. Knowing and judging past events is the only way to build a meaningful future. Memory is necessary for growth: “Recall the former days” (Heb 10:32). Listening to the elderly tell their stories is good for children and young people; it makes them feel connected to the living history of their families, their neighborhoods and their country. A family that fails to respect and cherish its grandparents, who are its living memory, is already in decline, whereas a family that remembers has a future. “A society that has no room for the elderly or discards them because they create problems, has a deadly virus”;43 “it is torn from its roots”.44 Our contemporary experience of being orphans as a result of cultural discontinuity, uprootedness and the collapse of the certainties that shape our lives, challenges us to make our families places where children can sink roots in the rich soil of a collective history.

He refilled his cup with wine and felt himself fill up with a warm rush of pride for all of his people. It had been hard being literally ripped up from the roots and expelled into the limbo of Artemis’ wild north. Nobody had been properly prepared, but they’d had the vitality to survive and enjoy their survival. Perhaps the Elders of the marsh had wandered, bewildered, behind their children into the wilderness. It had certainly been the children who had sustained them. In Vangery, Meonel had never taken much notice of his son. Now they had discovered almost to mutual surprise, that they had a relationship. Meonel was young enough to be a friend to Orbin as well as a father. It gave him a start that was almost chilling when the boy caught his eye and smiled at him, offering a window onto the pile of maturing emotion to be held within. It was still difficult to look upon Orbin as part of his flesh. The boy had bloomed free of the marsh. Obviously, he was a plant that did not need roots.

David was one of nine children, and Sydney was one of four. Their respective siblings produced, between 1910 and 1927, twenty-one children with the surnames Mitford, Farrer, Kearsey, Bowyer, Bowles and Bailey, and many of these first cousins were to play major parts in the lives of the Mitford children as they grew up and visited each other’s homes. But the network of kinsmen who were to people the lives of the Mitford children were rooted further back in the family tree. Both of David’s parents – ‘Bertie’ Mitford (Bertram, 1st Lord Redesdale) and Lady Clementine Ogilvy – came from large families, and he remained close to many of them and to their numerous offspring.* ---- In addressing this question, one of Clementine Churchill’s daughters stated that her mother never learned the identity of her natural father though she knew he was not Henry Hozier.14 Bertie Mitford is the most likely suspect, even though the poet and writer Wilfred Scawen Blunt claimed that Natty confessed to him that her two elder daughters were fathered by Captain George ‘Bay’ Middleton, known by his foxhunting contemporaries as ‘the bravest of the brave’, and to history as the dashing lover of the sporting Empress, Elizabeth of Austria.15 This, however, must be set against the fact that Natty told a close friend, just before the birth of Clementine, that the child she was carrying was ‘Lord Redesdale’s’.

If you raise your children to be victims, they’ll be victims as adult. Who do they attack? The elderly, the poor at the bus stops, immigrants, weak yuppies, the Woody Allen crowd, pencil neck geeks on their iPhones. Why? Because they won’t fight back. They’re looking for an easy victim. The root of the problem, in my opinion, father’s not raising their children.7

Crossing the threshold of faith means that we keep our eyes filled with wonder and do not let our hearts grow accustomed to laziness. It means that we are able to recognize that each time a woman gives birth to a child it is yet another bet placed for life and for the future; that, when we show concern for the innocence of children, we guarantee the truth of tomorrow; and that, when we esteem an unselfish elderly person, we are performing an act of justice and embracing our own roots.

Honesty born of fear does nothing to root out the fundamental cause of evil in the world—the radical self-centeredness of the human heart. If anything, fear-based morality strengthens it, since ultimately elder brothers are being moral only for their own benefit. They may be kind to others and helpful to the poor, but at a deeper level they are doing it either so God will bless them, in the religious version of elder brotherness, or so they can think of themselves as virtuous, charitable persons, in the secular version of it.

En un sens, le titre d’ancien, utilisé à son adresse par l’homme des bois, le ravit. C’est la reconnaissance implicite du peuple des bois à son égard, l’offre respectueuse de partager une existence en ces terres. Opinant du chef, Gibbie soutient : - J’ai les paumes pleines de farine. - Mes doigts sont percés d’échardes, agrée simplement Kardys. Les bruits reprennent dans le moulin, chacun revenant à ce qu’il faisait. Le grand forestier poursuit : - Alors, c’en était bien un… - Un Pâle-de-la-Nuit, réaffirme lugubrement le meunier. Et d’ajouter à la cantonade, avant de se replonger dans sa chope : - Je l’ai vu et entendu comme je vous vois.

Sociologist Robert Wuthnow argues that churches (and American institutions in general) have abandoned this age group, who must consequently make the most important decisions of their lives-decisions with long-lasting consequences about love, work and ideology-without the benefit of traditions or elders to guide them.22

And now that mulch of dead imaginings beneath the feet of Temperance ladies, union-affiliated Vaudevillians and maimed men home from Europe has contaminated the groundwater of the upstart country's nightmares. Immigrants in their illimitable difference come to seem a separate species, taciturn and fish-eyed as though risen from the ocean waves that bore them in their transport, monstrous in their self-contained communities with bitter scents and indecipherable ululations, names, unsettlingly unpronounceable ensconced at isolated farms where beaten track is naught save idle rumour stagnant families nurse grievance, dreadful secrets and deformity in solitude; pools of declined humanity entirely unconnected to society by any tributary where ancestral prejudice or misconception may become the plaint of generations. Fabled and forbidden works of Arab alchemy are handed down across years cruel and volatile, trafficked between austere and colonial homes by charitable fellowships with ancient affectations or conveyed by fevered sea-captains, fugitive Huguenots or elderly hysterics formally accused of witchcraft. Young America, a sapling power grown suddenly so tall upon its diet of nickelodeons and motorcars, has sunk unwitting roots into an underworld of grotesque notions and archaic creeds, their feaful pull discernible below the weed-cracked sidewalk. Buried and forgotten, ominous philosophies await their day with hideous patience. Well! I think that's pretty darned good for a first attempt. A little over-wrought, perhaps, and I'm not sure about the style - I can't decide if its too modern of it's too old fashioned, but perhaps that's a good sign. Of course, I guess I'll have to introduce a plot and characters at some point, but I'll wrestle with that minor nuisance when I get to it. Perhaps I could contrive to have some hobo, maybe literally a hoe-boy or travelling itinerant farm labourer who's wandering from place to place around New England in the search for work; somebody who might reasonably become involved with all the various characters I'm hoping to investigate. Being a labourer, while it would lend a feasibility to any action or exertion that I wanted in the story, wouldn't mean that my protagonist was lacking in intelligence of education: this is often economically a far from certain country for a lot of people, and there's plenty of smart fellows - maybe even an aspiring writer like myself - who've found themselves leaving their homes and families to mooch around from farm to farm in hope of some hay-baling or fruit-picking that's unlikely to materialise. Perhaps a character like that, a rugged man who is sufficiently well read to justifiably allow me a few literary flourishes (and I can't help thinking that I'll probably end up casting some imagined variant of Tom Malone) would be the kind of of sympathetic hero and the kind of voice I'm looking for. Meanwhile I yawned a moment or two back, and while I'm not yet quite exhausted to the point where I can guarantee a deep and dreamless sleep, perhaps another six or seven vague ideas for stories might just do the soporific job.

And now that mulch of dead imaginings beneath the feet of Temperance ladies, union-affiliated Vaudevillians and maimed men home from Europe has contaminated the groundwater of the upstart country's nightmares. Immigrants in their illimitable difference come to seem a separate species, taciturn and fish-eyed as though risen from the ocean waves that bore them in their transport, monstrous in their self-contained communities with bitter scents and indecipherable ululations, names, unsettlingly unpronounceable ensconced at isolated farms where beaten track is naught save idle rumour stagnant families nurse grievance, dreadful secrets and deformity in solitude; pools of declined humanity entirely unconnected to society by any tributary where ancestral prejudice or misconception may become the plaint of generations. Fabled and forbidden works of Arab alchemy are handed down across years cruel and volatile, trafficked between austere and colonial homes by charitable fellowships with ancient affectations or conveyed by fevered sea-captains, fugitive Huguenots or elderly hysterics formally accused of witchcraft. Young America, a sapling power grown suddenly so tall upon its diet of nickelodeons and motorcars, has sunk unwitting roots into an underworld of grotesque notions and archaic creeds, their feaful pull discernible below the weed-cracked sidewalk. Buried and forgotten, ominous philosophies await their day with hideous patience. Well! I think that's pretty darned good for a first attempt. A little over-wrought, perhaps, and I'm not sure about the style - I can't decide if its too modern of it's too old-fashioned, but perhaps that's a good sign. Of course, I guess I'll have to introduce a plot and characters at some point, but I'll wrestle with that minor nuisance when I get to it. Perhaps I could contrive to have some hobo, maybe literally a hoe-boy or travelling itinerant farm labourer who's wandering from place to place around New England in the search for work; somebody who might reasonably become involved with all the various characters I'm hoping to investigate. Being a labourer, while it would lend a feasibility to any action or exertion that I wanted in the story, wouldn't mean that my protagonist was lacking in intelligence or education: this is often economically a far from certain country for a lot of people, and there's plenty of smart fellows - maybe even an aspiring writer like myself - who've found themselves leaving their homes and families to mooch around from farm to farm in hope of some hay-baling or fruit-picking that's unlikely to materialise. Perhaps a character like that, a rugged man who is sufficiently well read to justifiably allow me a few literary flourishes (and I can't help thinking that I'll probably end up casting some imagined variant of Tom Malone) would be the kind of of sympathetic hero and the kind of voice I'm looking for. Meanwhile I yawned a moment or two back, and while I'm not yet quite exhausted to the point where I can guarantee a deep and dreamless sleep, perhaps another six or seven vague ideas for stories might just do the soporific job.

A slave works out of fear--fear of consequences imposed by force. This gets to the root of what drives an elder brother. Ultimately, elder brothers live good lives out of fear, not out of joy and love.

Honesty born of fear does nothing to root out the fundamental cause of evil in the world--the radical self-centeredness of the human heart. If anything, fear-based morality strengthens it, since ultimately elder brothers are being moral only for their own benefit.

Jean’s resplendent tree wasn’t shaking like mine; either Jean was more courageous than I was—of which I had little doubt—or the tree was stouter. A true elder. Leading, commanding, dignified. Its crown deeper and more imposing than those of its neighbors. Providing shade for the younger trees below. Shedding seed evolved over centuries. Stretching its prodigious limbs where songbirds roosted and nested. And where wolf lichens and mistletoes found crevices in which to root. Letting—needing—squirrels to run up and down its trunk in search of cones to store in middens for later meals. And to hang mushrooms in the crooks of branches to dry and eat. This tree alone was a scaffold for diversity, fueling the cycles of the forest.

The Old Hurt. A noble thing, highly prized, the root of all functioning ritual. And that hurt is something no Celt would dream of being without, it’s the very weft and weave of true culture. It’s nothing to do with clinging to grievance, rather wearing certain hard-earned melancholies like a cloak. To those with eyes to behold it, it’s the essential markings of an elder. And we are drowning in its deficit. After twenty years of initiatory work in the wilds of Snowdonia, I recognize its cadence immediately. Its gorgeous and unusual scent.

Who or what gave May its name is unclear. Ovid’s poet admits being at a loss even after the Muses, Polyhymnia, Urania, and Calliope, offered him explanations (Fast. 5.1–5.110). Maiestas (majesty), sings Polyhymnia, lays behind the month’s name, for after the creation of the world and all the species, no god was more supreme than Maiestas. She then yielded supremacy to Jupiter. Urania’s focus is on the history of early Rome, the elders (maiores), and the Fathers (patres), on whom Romulus conferred his city’s government. Calliope points to the nymph Maia, the mother of Hermes, worshiped by the Arcadians. The Arcadian Evander, who founded a city on the spot where Rome eventually would stand, brought his gods, among them Maia, to Latium. If May can be linked to the linguistic root mag-, in a sense of increase, then one could further speculate that May was the month of growth.

Faeries are twilight creatures, and I have become one, too. We rise when the shadows grow long and head to our beds before the sun rises. It is well after midnight when we arrive at the great hill at the palace of Elfhame. To go inside, we must ride between two trees, an oak and a thorn, and then straight in to what appears to be the stone wall of an abandoned folly. I've done it hundreds of times, but I flinch anyway. My whole body braces, I grip the reins hard, and my eyes mash shut. When I open them, I am inside the hill. We ride on through a cavern, between pillars of roots, over packed earth. Then are dozens of the Folk here, crowding around the entrance to the vast throne room, where Court is being held- long-nosed pixies with tattered wings; elegant, green-skinned ladies in long gowns with goblins holding up their trains; tricksy boggans; laughing foxkin; a boy in an owl mask and a golden headdress; an elderly woman with crowns crowding her shoulders; a gaggle of girls with wild roses in their hair; a bark-skinned boy with feathers around his neck; a group of knights all in scarab-green armour. Many I've seen before; a few I have spoken with. Too many for my eyes to drink them all in, yet I cannot look away. I never get tired of this- of the spectacle, of the pageantry. Maybe Oriana isn't entirely wrong to worry that we might one day get caught up in it, be carried away by it, and forget to take care. I can see why humans succumb to the beautiful nightmare of the Court, why they willingly drown in it. I know I shouldn't love it as I do, stolen as I am from the mortal world, my parents murdered. But I love it all the same.

Well, I have had some luck. I cross-referenced some of the other articles in the issue and got a few hits, one of which led me to a man’s personal website. I sent him an email.” I stare at Henri. “Don’t worry,” he says. “They can’t track emails. At least not the way I send them.” “How do you send them?” “I reroute them through various servers in cities across the world, so that the original location is lost along the way.” “Impressive.” Bernie Kosar scratches at the door and I let him in. The clock on the microwave reads 5:59. I have two hours before I have to be at school. “Do you really think we want to go digging around in all this?” I ask. “I mean, what if it’s all a trap? What if they are simply trying to root us out of hiding?” Henri nods. “You know, if the article had mentioned anything about us, that might have given me pause. But it didn’t. It was about their invading Earth, much the same way they did Lorien. There is so much about it that we don’t understand. You were right a few weeks ago when you said we were defeated so easily. We were. It doesn’t make sense. The entire situation with the disappearance of the Elders also doesn’t make sense. Even getting you and the other children off of Lorien, which I have never questioned, seems odd. And

tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High

In their own ways, the Christian and rabbinic siblings continued to honor the same unrejected tradition and their common elders while they taunt each other with having betrayed the family.

Haya', in Arabic, conveys the meaning of shame, though the root word of haya ’ is closely associated with life and living. The Prophet stated, “Every religion has a quality that is characteristic of that religion. And the characteristic of my religion is haya, an internal sense of shame, which includes bashfulness and modesty. Most adults alive today have heard it said when they were children, “Shame on you!” Unfortunately, shame has come to be viewed as a negative word, as if it were a pejorative. Parents are now advised never to “shame a child,” never correct a child’s behavior by causing an emotional response. Instead, the current wisdom suggests that people always make the child feel good regardless of his or her behavior. Eventually, what this does is disable naturally occurring deterrents to misbehavior. Some anthropologists divide cultures into shame and guilt cultures. They say that guilt is an inward mechanism and shame an outward one. With regard to this discussion, guilt alludes to a human mechanism that produces strong feelings of remorse when someone has done something wrong, to the point that he or she needs to rectify the matter. Most primitive cultures are not guilt-based, but shame-based, which is rooted in the fear of bringing shame upon oneself and the larger family. What Islam does is honor the concept of shame and take it to another level altogether—to a rank in which one feels a sense of shame before God. When a person acknowledges and realizes that God is fully aware of all that one does, says, or thinks, shame is elevated to a higher plane, to the unseen world from which there is no cover. In fact, one feels a sense of shame even before the angels. So while Muslims comprise a shame-based culture, this notion transcends shame before one’s family—whether one’s elders or parents— and admits a mechanism that is not subject to the changing norms of human cultures. It is associated with the knowledge and active awareness that God is all-seeing of what one does—a reality that is permanent. The nurturing of this realization deters one from engaging in acts that are displeasing and vulgar. This is the essence of the noble prophetic teachings.

What have you been given? How might you best use it? Some have extra time on their hands. Shall it be used in recreation only? Some recreation is good for re-creating one's energy and focus, as the root of the word recreation indicates. However, extra time can also mean opportunities for prayer, for contemplation, and for service to others. What talents have you been given? Are there ways you can use those talents not only to generate income but also to bless others and show God's love and compassion? If you can cook, do you cook for those who need a show of kindness? If you can fix a car, do you find chances to help the elderly or those in need of car care and without the resources to get it? If you can mentor, have you found someone to mentor? If you can encourage, are you looking for those in need of encouragement? All of us have been given much. Sometimes the biggest obstacle to our meeting expectations is our failure to see ourselves properly. We all need to ask the question "What have I been given?" so that we can better answer "What can I do with it?" Examine yourself in terms of your talents as well as your resources. Then prayerfully consider how to best use them for God.

The first essay in this chapter, “The Music of Mentoring,” comes from my own experience of being a mentor. But its roots reach back to the years when I was mentored, to the elders who graced my life and helped me find my path when I was young. Mentors kept showing up for me until I was in my mid-thirties—then they stopped coming. I grieved that fact for a while, until I saw the secret hidden in plain sight: it was my turn to pay it forward by serving as a mentor for members of the rising generation. Then I found another secret hidden behind the first one: when I help young people flourish, they return the favor.

He either denounced the two of them to his father and the Elders of York or he stood for the words he'd been taught and believed in since he'd first picked up a sword - to live an honorable life as befitted a Rose of York. Edward

Under Two Windows" I. AUBADE The dawn is here—and the long night through I have never seen thy face, Though my feet have worn the patient grass at the gate of thy dwelling-place. While the white moon sailed till, red in the west, it found the far world edge, No leaflet stirred of the leaves that climb to garland thy window ledge. Yet the vine had quivered from root to tip, and opened its flowers again, If only the low moon's light had glanced on a moving casement pane. Warm was the wind that entered in where the barrier stood ajar, And the curtain shook with its gentle breath, white as young lilies are; But there came no hand all the slow night through to draw the folds aside, (I longed as the moon and the vine-leaves longed!) or to set the casement wide. Three times in a low-hung nest there dreamed his five sweet notes a bird, And thrice my heart leaped up at the sound I thought thou hadst surely heard. But now that thy praise is caroled aloud by a thousand throats awake, Shall I watch from afar and silently, as under the moon, for thy sake? Nay—bold in the sun I speak thy name, I too, and I wait no more Thy hand, thy face, in the window niche, but thy kiss at the open door! II. NOCTURNE My darling, come!—The wings of the dark have wafted the sunset away, And there's room for much in a summer night, but no room for delay. A still moon looketh down from the sky, and a wavering moon looks up From every hollow in the green hills that holds a pool in its cup. The woodland borders are wreathed with bloom—elder, viburnum, rose; The young trees yearn on the breast of the wind that sighs of love as it goes. The small stars drown in the moon-washed blue but the greater ones abide, With Vega high in the midmost place, Altair not far aside. The glades are dusk, and soft the grass, where the flower of the elder gleams, Mist-white, moth-like, a spirit awake in the dark of forest dreams. Arcturus beckons into the east, Antares toward the south, That sendeth a zephyr sweet with thyme to seek for thy sweeter mouth. Shall the blossom wake, the star look down, all night and have naught to see? Shall the reeds that sing by the wind-brushed pool say nothing of thee and me? —My darling comes! My arms are content, my feet are guiding her way; There is room for much in a summer night, but no room for delay! Petry. (November 1912)

Having a having way about you-that is, wanting too hard-can make you do terrible things. Certainly, blue is beautiful. And so is yearning for beauty. But greed is ugly, as is any obsession over possession. And that, along with everything one might want to say about gunpowder, empire, and political economy, is at the root of how Black people became Black, as such, that is to say blue-black. Oral storytelling is improvisational. Like poetry, it explodes the difference between nonfiction and fiction. Imagination, details, and knowledge are all flexible tools in service of the lesson. People, especially elders, repeat stories over and over again with purpose. In the arrogance of youth, we often think they do it because they are absentminded. Now I know they repeat themselves because they've whittled life down into observations that should not be forgotten. They are authoring scriptures of their own. But once a story is published, and not just spoken, it qualifies as something else: a document. And it stands alongside other documents, including the official ones that make laws and judgments, punishment and property. Some of these supplements, alternatives to official documents, are necessary to add flesh and blood, heart and soul, to what we know. They might even expose the lies of the official tales.

Then I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne a scroll written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals. And I saw a mighty angel proclaiming with a loud voice, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?” And no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it, and I began to weep loudly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it. And one of the elders said to me, “Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.” And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. And he went and took the scroll from the right hand of him who was seated on the throne. And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.  Revelation 5:1-8

### A Journey Through Famous Books: Discovering the Treasures of Kannada Literature Kannada literature boasts a rich legacy, spanning over centuries and marked by diverse narratives, styles, and themes. As we delve into the world of famous books in Kannada, we find a melting pot of cultural insights, emotional depth, and intellectual vigor. A platform like Veeraloka Books, which not only highlights these treasures but also encourages a new generation of readers to connect with their roots, is at the forefront of this literary exploration. One of the most renowned classics in Kannada literature is "Mookajjiya Kanasugalu," written by the legendary author K. Krishnam Karanth This novel tells the poignant story of an elderly woman, Mookajji, who is gifted with the ability to dream profoundly. Through her dreams, readers are transported into a narrative that unfolds the struggles and joys of rural life in India. Karanth’s vivid characterizations and rich descriptions make this an essential read, encapsulating the spirit of Kannadiga culture and social realities. The works of well-known authors like S, in addition to timeless classics, significantly enrich the contemporary literary landscape. L. Bhyrappa and Kuvempu. S. L. In his novels, Bhyrappa frequently delves into profound philosophical topics like identity, existence, and social issues. His storytelling prowess and narrative style make his books not just stories, but explorations of human consciousness. Among his remarkable works, "Aavarana" stands out, dissecting historical narratives while inviting readers to reflect on perspective and belief. Kuvempu, on the other hand, is revered for his poetic prowess alongside his contributions to novels and essays. His work embodies the essence of nature, humanity, and spirituality, reflecting a deep reverence for life. His celebrated poem, "Sri Ramakrishna Hegde," is an excellent representation of his ability to express complex emotions and thoughts in simple yet profound terms. Kuvempu was an advocate for Kannada literature and the language, making him a role model for writers and readers alike. Da. Ra. Bendre, another gem in the Kannada literary crown, made his mark through poetry that resonates across generations. His lyricality and ability to depict the beauty of nature and the essence of human experiences truly set his work apart. Bendre's poetry evokes imagery that transports readers to the very heart of his themes, making his words linger long after they've been read. Veeraloka Books is more than just a bookstore; it is also a doorway into the extensive literature of Kannada. Its collection spans from the literary giants of the past to contemporary authors who are redefining storytelling today. This platform serves as a valuable resource for readers seeking to immerse themselves in Kannada literature, fostering a deeper understanding and appreciation of regional narratives and voices. In conclusion, the exploration of famous books in Kannada—from the timeless classics of Karanth to the modern narratives of Bhyrappa, Kuvempu, and Bendre—offers a glimpse into the cultural and intellectual fabric of Karnataka. It's essential to recognize and celebrate these literary masterpieces that reflect the diversity and vibrancy of the Kannada language. Engaging with these works on platforms like Veeraloka Books promises an enriching journey into the world of Kannada writing, whether you've been reading literature all your life or are just starting out.

At its root, Elder’s “white supremacy” seems to be reducible to his rejection of modern Wokeist ideology: he “just fundamentally doesn’t believe” in modern critical theory or in concepts like univariate white privilege or systemic racism.

Whenever it occurs, the Plutonian trine is an invitation to wisdom. To claim the wisdom, three tests must be passed. The first test lies in choosing to face a demon that guards a gate. Beyond the gate lies a treasure, but at first all we see is the demon itself: a fear, based on an old Plutonian wound. A critical observation is that there is absolutely no pressure on us to face that demon; it is a purely voluntary act undertaken utterly for the sake of the principle of personal growth. If we do not subscribe to that principle, the process goes no further. The second test, with the demon integrated and understood, is to claim the treasure. What might stop us? Old enemies: inertia, habit, the still-memorized patterns of thought and self-imagery which the “demon” engendered in us. And what is the treasure? Heat, passionate intensity, the energizing experience of high Plutonian consciousness. And how do we claim it? By recognizing a desire so deep that its roots lie in the soul itself, and then going forth unabashedly to claim it. The third test is only available to us if we have passed the second one. Claiming that desire will make a visible difference in our lives. We are, for example, now living in another state. Maybe we’ve started our own business or written a book or left a marriage or entered one. Whatever the changes, they have allowed our true wisdom and maturity to flower. That flowering makes available to us a set of perceptions characteristic of a true elder. To pass the third test, we must now make an effort to realize where we are in the life cycle, to claim the wisdom and authority of our years, and to integrate into our “philosophy” the perceptions such a perspective makes available to us. What about the low path? In truth, it means very little. An opportunity passes, unused and unheeded. We get older, and duller, by degrees.

Onwé clutched Luke’s cross and mumbled prayers to his father and to Christ for help. The longer he held it, the more he felt imbued with an inner fire that could protect him from the elder spirits. He wondered if this magic truly came from the god of the Christians, or if it was just the power of his own desire for divine intervention.