Feeling Saturated Quotes

There was a different smell in the hall. I knew it well enough. Festering death is pungent, but that says nothing about how bad it smells. It saturates the air you breathe with a sickening sweetness that makes you feel like retching until that sweetness is a faded memory. It is an entity that does not belong inside your body.

There is nothing so annoying as to be fairly rich, of a fairly good family, pleasing presence, average education, to be "not stupid," kindhearted, and yet to have no talent at all, no originality, not a single idea of one's own—to be, in fact, "just like everyone else." Of such people there are countless numbers in this world—far more even than appear. They can be divided into two classes as all men can—that is, those of limited intellect, and those who are much cleverer. The former of these classes is the happier. To a commonplace man of limited intellect, for instance, nothing is simpler than to imagine himself an original character, and to revel in that belief without the slightest misgiving. Many of our young women have thought fit to cut their hair short, put on blue spectacles, and call themselves Nihilists. By doing this they have been able to persuade themselves, without further trouble, that they have acquired new convictions of their own. Some men have but felt some little qualm of kindness towards their fellow-men, and the fact has been quite enough to persuade them that they stand alone in the van of enlightenment and that no one has such humanitarian feelings as they. Others have but to read an idea of somebody else's, and they can immediately assimilate it and believe that it was a child of their own brain. The "impudence of ignorance," if I may use the expression, is developed to a wonderful extent in such cases;—unlikely as it appears, it is met with at every turn. ... those belonged to the other class—to the "much cleverer" persons, though from head to foot permeated and saturated with the longing to be original. This class, as I have said above, is far less happy. For the "clever commonplace" person, though he may possibly imagine himself a man of genius and originality, none the less has within his heart the deathless worm of suspicion and doubt; and this doubt sometimes brings a clever man to despair. (As a rule, however, nothing tragic happens;—his liver becomes a little damaged in the course of time, nothing more serious. Such men do not give up their aspirations after originality without a severe struggle,—and there have been men who, though good fellows in themselves, and even benefactors to humanity, have sunk to the level of base criminals for the sake of originality)

Most of us know that the media tell us our bodies are imperfect - too fat, to smelly, too wrinkled, or too soft. And, even though we may know it’s horseshit, these messages still seep into our brains and mess with our self-esteem. In a media-saturated country where most images of women and men have been photoshopped to perfection, it’s hard to find a living supermodel (much less a computer programmer), who doesn’t wish she had sexier earlobes or a tighter ass. So, buck up, even the prettiest bombshell has body insecurities. You can spend your life thinking your butt’s too big (or your cock’s too small) or feeling sexy as hell. Make the choice to appreciate your body as it is.

her body feels different, no longer taut and sinewy but sponge-like fluid. Saturated. It has a different energy, a deep orangy-like pink, like the inside of a hibiscus.

Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—there’s something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann. My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? I’m only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Jacques Raverat...sent me a letter about Mrs Dalloway which gave me one of the happiest moments days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me & make out of temper with every sentence of my own.

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now. What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now?

I know I sound a little crazy when I say that, but really, you get a glimpse of these bugs as they go about their lives, almost mechanical in how they follow their instincts, you see them breeding, eating, building nests, and dying, and you see how they just saturate every aspect of our existence, in the air, the dark corners, the insides of the walls, they eat our dead. I can’t sense them, but there’re skin mites all over our bodies and in our eyelashes… I guess it takes me out of myself when I think about it, reminds me that we’re only one part of this vast system, we’re cogs in the universe, in our own way. Seeing the little details makes me feel like the big problems aren’t so personal, they aren’t as overwhelming.

If you don't allow yourself to love, to fully saturate yourself with someone else's life, someone else's feelings, if you don't allow your ego to disappear and your heart to beat for another person so that every breath you take is taken for them, that person, well, then I'm afraid you'll be missing out on one of life's only blessings.

if you struggle with being able to run hard after the Lord because you feel so unworthy, so unclean, so unsteady, listen up: “While [you] were still weak, at the right time,” God came to your rescue. And still does. And still is.

Then there was a hard brown lozenge called the Tonsil Tickler. The Tonsil Tickler tasted and smelled very strongly of chloroform. We had not the slightest doubt that these things were saturated in the dreaded anaesthetic which, as Thwaites had many times pointed out to us, could put you to sleep for hours at a stretch. "If my father has to saw off somebody's leg," he said, "he pours chloroform on to a pad and the person sniffs it and goes to sleep and my father saws his leg off without him even feeling it." "But why do they put it into sweets and sell them to us?" we asked him. You might think a question like this would have baffled Thwaites. But Thwaites was never baffled. "My father says Tonsil Ticklers were invented for dangerous prisoners in jail," he said. "They give them one with each meal and the chloroform makes them sleepy and stops them rioting." "Yes," we said, "but why sell them to children?" "It's a plot," Thwaites said. "A grown-up plot to keep us quiet.

The overwhelming noise we live with has made a fundamental pleasure like sex somehow less exciting, less satisfying, than it was for our libidinous forefathers and mothers. It seems to me that for sex and other pleasures to be enjoyed to the fullest, a certain contemplative quality to life must be present. If you doubt this imagine yourself for a moment having sex. Now imagine you wished to increase the pleasure you were feeling, feel it more intensely. What might you do? Well one of the things you'd probably do is close your eyes. What this does of course is shut out other stimuli. The visual quiet increases your sensual enjoyment and you concentrate more fully on the pleasure. The same is true for the removal of auditory noise as well. Well my feeling is that the average person has a much harder time doing this today than they would have decades ago. Today you close your eyes and shut off Television but the noise persists. It's part of our fabric now, our biology, and all other pleasures including sex are diminished as a result. We don't notice this derogation by the way and sex still feels great, don't get me wrong, but I think the difference is there nonetheless. Like the difference between seeing breasts when you're thirty as opposed to when you were thirteen.

Meditation begins now, right here. It can't begin someplace else or at some other time. To paraphrase the great Zen master Dogen, "If you want to practice awareness, then practice awareness without delay." If you wish to know a mind that is tranquil and clear, sane and peaceful, you must take it up now. If you wish to free yourself from the frantic television mind that runs our lives, begin with the intention to be present now. Nobody can bring awareness to your life but you. Meditation is not a self-help program--a way to better ourselves so we can get what we want. Nor is it a way to relax before jumping back into busyness. It's not something to do once in awhile, either, whenever you happen to feel like it. Instead, meditation is a practice that saturates your life and in time can be brought into every activity. It is the transformation of mind from bondage to freedom. In practicing meditation, we go nowhere other than right here where we now stand, where we now sit, where we now live and breathe. In meditation we return to where we already are--this shifting, changing ever-present now. If you wish to take up meditation, it must be now or never.

And then I feel it. It saturates the water around me, thrumming withoug rhythm. The pulse. Someone is close. Someone I don't reconize. Slowly, I tiptoe backward, careful not to splash or slosh. After a few seconds, tiptoeing doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If I can sense them, they can sense me. The pulse is getting stronger. They're heading straight toward me. Fast.

I have that old sinking feeling. I've been overly available, sickeningly sweet and forever enabling all in the name of being 'liked.' I've compromised myself. I've suffered fools, idiots and dullards. I've gone on far too many dates with men because I felt guilty that they liked me more than I liked them. I've fallen deeply and madly I'm love with men I've never met just because I thought they looked 'deep.' I've built whole futures with men I hardly knew; I've planned weddings and named invisible children based on a side glance. I've made chemistry where there was none. I've forced intimacy while building higher Walls. I've been alone in a two year relationship. I've faked more orgasms than I can count while being comfortable with no affection at all. I realise I have to make a decision right here and now. Do I go back to the sliver of a person I was before or do I, despite whatever bullshit happened tonight, hold on to this... This authenticity? If I go back to the the way I was before tonight, I'll have to compromise myself, follow rules with men who have none, hold my tongue, be quiet and laugh at shitty jokes. I have to never be challenged, yet be called challenging when I have an opinion or, really, speak at all. I'll never be torched by someone and get goosebumps again. I'll never be outside of myself. I'll never let go. I'll never lose myself. I'll never know what real love is - both for someone else and for me. I'll look back on this life and wish I could do it all over again. I finally see the consequences of that life. The path more travelled only led to someone else's life: an idealised, saturated world of White picket fences and gingham tablecloths. A life where the real me is locked away. Sure i had a plus-one but at what price? No. No matter how awkward and painful this gets, I can't go back.

A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point; when this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure, no matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all. In my case these insignificant birds with their subdued colourings have provided just sufficient distraction to keep me from total despair. Each day I find myself spending longer and longer at the window watching their flights, their quarrels, their mouse-quick flutterings, their miniature feuds and alliances. Curiously enough, it is only when I am standing in front of the window that I feel any sense of security. While I am watching the birds I believe that I am comparatively immune from the assaults of life. The very indifference to humanity of these wild creatures affords me a certain safeguard. Where all else is dangerous, hostile and liable to inflict pain, they alone can do me no injury because, probably, they are not even aware of my existence. The birds are at once my refuge and my relaxation.

I am happy now. Even if I were to hear the four walls all shriek in anguish, my feeling of happiness would still be at the saturation point. I am so happy I could sneeze.” Mr. Uehara laughed. “But it’s too late now. It’s dusk already.” “It’s morning!” That morning my brother Naoji committed suicide.

I surrender to the predator who has me trapped in his sights. Let him take me. Common sense tries to creep into my sex-saturated brain, but I slam the door in its face. I don’t want to think about what I’m doing. Thinking will spoil everything. I just want to feel. Without reason or motivation or guilt.

Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power—local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic—on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine. I waited for whatever cathartic feeling people hope to experience in such places, but I couldn’t make myself believe the pain of my tribe was uniquely gathered here, in this place, the pain was too obviously everywhere, this just happened to be where they’d placed the monument. I gave up and went in search of Lamin.

The marriage of irony and sincerity helps us to take the perspectives of others: the racist, the exaggerated feminist, the conservative. Each ironic position you play with is simultaneously saturated with sincerity, which means that you can honestly be with their feelings and values while still being in opposition to them.

What I think is, no matter what someone’s beliefs may be, they should not treat anyone differently because of his or her life and/or religious choice.  There are too many battles waged over differences when everyone deserves be treated with respect.  We are all different.”    Breck glares at me.  I can feel his anger; it saturates

for in this feeling alone he still felt something like happiness, something like an intoxication, something like an elevated form of life in the midst of his saturated, lukewarm, dull life.

Our minds and hearts are like dry sponges. What we focus on is what will soak in and saturate us. If it is something foolish, we will make foolish decisions. If it is wise, we will make wise decisions.

For the past two weeks he's been feeling so superior and smart because of all the things he knows from the war, but forget it, they are the ones in charge, these saps, these innocents, their homeland dream is the dominant force. His reality is their reality's bitch; what they don't know is more powerful than all the things he knows, and yet he's lived what he's lived and knows what he knows, which means what, something terrible and possibly fatal, he suspects. To learn what you have to learn at the war, to do what you have to do, does this make you the enemy of all that sent you to the war? Their reality dominates, except for this: It can't save you. It won't stop any bombs or bullets. He wonders if there's a saturation point, a body count that will finally blow the homeland dream to smithereens. How much reality can unreality take?

the promise of sanctification is able to turn what may feel like a test today, like a trial by fire—like way more temptation or trouble than we can handle—into a muscle-building exercise that strengthens our spiritual core.

A lot of times, the reason we struggle to feel and receive the love of God—to see ourselves as His beloved, adopted children—is because we’re not pursuing in our everyday lives those things His Word describes as being valuable and significant.

By the time she’d run full circle, reaching her house, her T-shirt was saturated in sweat, and she felt relaxed from head to toe. It was the car in the driveway, and the man-boy perched on the hood waiting for her, that made her lose some of her newfound tranquility. He was grinning at her in a way that made her legs feel like they were made her legs feel like they were made of nothing more solid then gelatin. They might have even quivered from something other than her early-morning run. “What are you doing here?” she asked as she slowed from a jog to a walk and places her hands on her hips. It would take her a few minutes to get her breathing back to normal. Longer if he kept smiling at her like that. He shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep. What about you?” She opted for the obvious and filled her voice with as much sarcasm as she could. “I live here, actually.” “Ha-ha, smart-ass. I was asking if maybe you couldn’t sleep too.” He shook his head at her wisecrack. “You know, since you were running at six-thirty in the morning? I was gonna see if you wanted to go for a walk or something.” He eyes her up and down, looking a little disappointed as he hopped down from the car’s hood. “But it looks like you already went without me. That’s okay, it was a long shot anyway.” Violet didn’t like the way she was suddenly so eager to be near him. Even though they’d been nearly inseparable for the past ten years, it now felt urgent to keep him close. “All right, let’s go.

She felt a slight burn as he slipped a second finger inside her, stretching tenderly, and then he suckled the taut bud of her sex, licking slowly at first, increasing the pace as she twisted beneath him. He stayed with her, his long fingers working in controlled thrusts, his mouth compelling and demanding, until pleasure washed over her in faster and faster rushes, and suddenly she couldn't move at all. Arched tightly against his mouth, she cried out and gasped, and cried out again. His tongue gentled but continued its artful play, nursing her through the lingering peaks of sensation, bathing her sex with warm strokes as she began to shudder violently. A great weariness flooded her, and with it a physical euphoria that made her feel drunk. Unable to control her limbs, she squirmed tremulously beneath him, and she offered no resistance as St. Vincent turned her over to her stomach. His hand slipped between her thighs and his fingers entered her once more. The opening to her body was sore and, to her mortification, saturated with moisture. He seemed excited by the wetness, however, breathing against the sensitive nape of her neck in rapid pants. Keeping his fingers inside her, he kissed and nibbled his way down her back.

Taking both of my hands, he pulls me into the tide. Salt water deepens the lavender satin of my gown to almost black. The waves push into it, making it heavier and heavier. “Tell me when,” he says. I nod. When Galen is neck deep and I’m clinging to him to keep my head above water. When my saturated prom dress feels like an anchor grasping at my limbs. When the moon is directly overhead and makes the silver flecks in his eyes shimmer like gems. That’s when I’m ready. “Now,” I breathe. He brushes his lips against mine. Once Twice. So soft it barely feels like anything. But it also feels like everything. He pulls me under. One day, when Galen and I are mated, I’ll be a princess. But I’ll never feel more like a princess than right now, in his arms, dancing on the ocean floor. He pulls my from my trance with his lips against me ear. “Emma.” It’s silly how my own name can send tingles shooting everywhere. “Hmm?” “I’ve been thinking. About us.” He pulls away from me. “I think…I think I need a distraction.” “Um. A distraction? From me?” The words taste vinegary in my mouth. They turn sweet again when Galen throws his head back and laughs. “Emma,” he says, brushing his thumb across my bottom lip. “You are the one thing I’m sure of. Completely. Without thinking twice. But I want to get away from here for a little while. And I want you to come with me. I know you’re set on going to college in the fall. I’m only asking for the summer. Let’s go somewhere. Do something.” I float up until I’m eye level with him. “Let’s. Where will we go?” He shrugs. “I don’t care, as long as it’s away from any ocean.” “So…the desert?” He grimaces. “The mountains?” I laugh. “Deal. We’ll go to the mountains.” “You’re sure?” I pull him by the neck until our noses touch. “Completely. Without thinking twice.

We just have to remember that where we pay attention matters more than we know. Our minds and hearts are like dry sponges. What we focus on is what will soak in and saturate us. If it is something foolish, we will make foolish decisions. If it is wise, we will make wise decisions.

And so I make my way across the room steadily, carefully. Hands shaking, I pull the string, lifting my blinds. They rise slowly, drawing more moonlight into the room with every inch And there he is, crouched low on the roof. Same leather jacket. The hair is his, the cheekbones, the perfect nose . . . the eyes: dark and mysterious . . . full of secrets. . . . My heart flutters, body light. I reach out to touch him, thinking he might disappear, my fingers disrupted by the windowpane. On the other side, Parker lifts his hand and mouths: “Hi.” I mouth “Hi” back. He holds up a single finger, signalling me to hold on. He picks up a spiral-bound notebook and flips open the cover, turning the first page to me. I recognize his neat, block print instantly: bold, black Sharpie. I know this is unexpected . . . , I read. He flips the page. . . . and strange . . . I lift an eyebrow. . . . but please hear read me out. He flips to the next page. I know I told you I never lied . . . . . . but that was (obviously) the biggest lie of all. The truth is: I’m a liar. I lied. I lied to myself . . . . . . and to you. Parker watches as I read. Our eyes meet, and he flips the page. But only because I had to. I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with you, Jaden . . . . . . but it happened anyway. I clear my throat, and swallow hard, but it’s squeezed shut again, tight. And it gets worse. Not only am I a liar . . . I’m selfish. Selfish enough to want it all. And I know if I don’t have you . . . I hold my breath, waiting. . . . I don’t have anything. He turns another page, and I read: I’m not Parker . . . . . . and I’m not going to give up . . . . . . until I can prove to you . . . . . . that you are the only thing that matters. He flips to the next page. So keep sending me away . . . . . . but I’ll just keep coming back to you. Again . . . He flips to the next page. . . . and again . . . And the next: . . . and again. Goose bumps rise to the surface of my skin. I shiver, hugging myself tightly. And if you can ever find it in your (heart) to forgive me . . . There’s a big, black “heart” symbol where the word should be. I will do everything it takes to make it up to you. He closes the notebook and tosses it beside him. It lands on the roof with a dull thwack. Then, lifting his index finger, he draws an X across his chest. Cross my heart. I stifle the happy laugh welling inside, hiding the smile as I reach for the metal latch to unlock my window. I slowly, carefully, raise the sash. A burst of fresh honeysuckles saturates the balmy, midnight air, sickeningly sweet, filling the room. I close my eyes, breathing it in, as a thousand sleepless nights melt, slipping away. I gather the lavender satin of my dress in my hand, climb through the open window, and stand tall on the roof, feeling the height, the warmth of the shingles beneath my bare feet, facing Parker. He touches the length of the scar on my forehead with his cool finger, tucks my hair behind my ear, traces the edge of my face with the back of his hand. My eyes close. “You know you’re beautiful? Even when you cry?” He smiles, holding my face in his hands, smearing the tears away with his thumbs. I breathe in, lungs shuddering. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, black eyes sincere. I swallow. “I know why you had to.” “Doesn’t make it right.” “Doesn’t matter anymore,” I say, shaking my head. The moon hangs suspended in the sky, stars twinkling overhead, as he leans down and kisses me softly, lips meeting mine, familiar—lips I imagined, dreamed about, memorized a mil ion hours ago. Then he wraps his arms around me, pulling me into him, quelling every doubt and fear and uncertainty in this one, perfect moment.

There must be some kind of internal time distortion effect in here, because when I look at myself in the little mirror above my sink, what I see is my father's face, my face turning into his. I am beginning to feel how the man looked, especially how he looked on those nights he came home so tired he couldn't even make it through dinner without nodding off, sitting there with his bowl of soup cooling in front of him, a rich pork-and-winter-melon-saturated broth that, moment by moment, was losing - or giving up - its tiny quantum of heat into the vast average temperature of the universe.

And even though they fail us every bit as readily as we fail ourselves, even though they prove just as incapable of fulfilling us as all the other people do in our lives, we still keep pushing that gimme button like blasted morons, fully expecting that the next time we snag whatever comes out of it will be the time when the satisfaction finally takes hold, when the good feelings finally stick around and stay. And so like clockwork, we go down in flames again and again to our alcohol abuse or our sexual lust or our sweet tooth or our credit line—whatever particular desire is so powerful and predictable at deceiving us. We grab for things that have never failed to disappoint us in the past, thinking that what we must need more than anything is more of it . . . more of the same thing that’s never been able to satisfy us before. That’s the call of the world for you. And it’s madness.

the word abide is much more straightforward than that. The Greek word meno means literally “to make your home in.” When we “make our home in” His love—feeling it, saturating ourselves with it, reflecting on it, standing in awe of it—spiritual fruit begins to spring up naturally from us like roses on a rosebush.

I thought again about throwing language all over a scene, wondered if the emotional mystery of one's response to place doesn't lie in the inchoate play of possible words, of felt meanings and poetries, of the sublime, the romantic, the picturesque, Zen; even, perhaps, something new. And perhaps that twinge of disappointment one always feels at the words chosen - and thus also at the glorious scene-comes from the dream that in that instant of indecision and all-decision before your mind clarified its response to beauty, you just might have held within you language finally saturated with all the earth's meaning." Page 211

The streets of Paris had a way of making me stop in my tracks, my heart suspended. They seemed saturated with presence, even if there was no one there but me. These were places where something could happen, or had happened, or both; a feeling I could never have had at home in New York, where life is inflected with the future tense.

I’m Steve, and I’m an addict,” Steve said after raising his hand to share. Steve was in his seventies and always shared first. It was as if he prepared an amazing speech every morning to present to all of us and his words always had a way of putting everything into perspective for me. “I look at these young girls over here, man,” he said pointing to our row, “and I can’t help but feel a bit envious. I’m 71 years old. I’ve got five years clean. I used for fifty years. I missed so damn much. I missed everything.” His voice broke and I could tell he was getting emotional. “I lost my wife once she finally got sick enough of my shit. My kids are adults and haven’t spoken to me in over twenty years—hell—I got grandbabies I ain’t even met.” He stared down at the table for a moment, you could hear a pin drop in that room. When he finally looked up, he looked straight at me and stared into my eyes. “Man, I’ll tell you what…. I would give anything in this world, to go back in time, and enter these rooms when I was your fucking age. Then I might actually have something to look back on and be proud of. You girls are young enough now to get it right, to have a life and make something of yourself. Don’t do what I did. Get it now so that you aren’t my age looking back on your life and thinking damn…I wasted all of it.” It felt like I’d suddenly been struck by lightning. Tears began welling in my eyes as I processed what he’d just said. I imagined what it would be like to have waited until I was an old woman to get clean – if I made it that long. I imagined my children being adults and never speaking to me. The loneliness, the guilt… for what? A momentary high? Never in my life had anyone’s words saturated my skin and seeped into my soul like his just did. I could hear other members voices mumbling as they shared their own bits of wisdom, but all I could do was replay in my head what Steve had said. That was it. That was the moment. Steve’s words changed my life that day. The universe had carefully devised a grand plan to align our paths so we both ended up in the same room that day. Whatever higher power was out there, knew that I needed to hear what that man had just said.

So a deeper look at which verbs participate in the locative alternation has forced us to take a deeper look at what compels the mind to construe physical events in certain ways. And at that depth we have discovered a new layer of concepts that the mind uses to organize mundane experience: concepts about substance, space, time, and force. These concepts encourage the mind to unite events that have nothing in common in terms of what they look like, smell like, or feel like, yet they obviously matter to the mind a great deal. They are so pervasive that some philosophers consider them to be the very scaffolding that organizes mental life, and in chapter 4 I will show how they saturate our science, our storytelling, our morals, our law, even our humor.

In the moment all is dear to me, dear that in this logic there is no redemption, the city itself being the highest form of madness and each and every part, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel absurdly and humbly great, not as megalomaniac, but as human spore, as the dead sponge of life swollen to saturation. I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatever, just the still germination of events unbroken by night and day, by yesterday and tomorrow. The eye, accustomed to concentration on points in space, now concentrates on points in time; the eye sees forward and backward at will. The eye which was the I of the self no longer exists; this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates. It travels along the line of the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyager. Trying to retain the lost body I grew in logic as the city, a point digit in the anatomy of perfection. I grew beyond my own death, spiritually bright and hard. I was divided into endless yesterdays, endless tomorrows, resting only on the cusp of the event, a wall with many windows, but the house gone. I must shatter the walls and windows, the last shell of the lost body, if I am to rejoin the present. That is why I no longer look into the eyes or through the eyes, but by the legerdemain of will swim through the eyes, head and arms and legs to explore the curve of vision. I see around myself as the mother who bore me once saw round the comers of time. I have broken the wall created by birth and the line of voyage is round and unbroken, even as the navel. No form, no image, no architecture, only concentric flights of sheer madness. I am the arrow of the dream's substantiality. I verify by flight. I nullify by dropping to earth.

Listening can be particularly challenging for introverts because they have so much busyness going on in their own heads that it's hard to make room for additional input. Because they tend to be sensitive, they may also reach saturation sooner. Listening can feel like an onslaught, making it difficult to continue listening, particularly when the speech-thought differential gives their minds occasion to drift.

Focus is passé. In the modern world we want to feel everything all the time. There is no point in just taking a walk in the park when we can also listen to headphones, munch on a hot dog, crank up our vibrating soles to the maximum, and check out the passing carnival of humanity. Our choices about the creed of a new world order: stimulation! Thought and creativity have become subservient to the singular goal of saturating our senses.

Remember those cocaine addicts whose dopamine receptors (the tiny hands that grab neurochemicals) decreased after repeated drug use? Cocaine blasts the reward circuitry so that it pumps out massive amounts of exciting dopamine. This accounts for the high. Then two things happen simultaneously. First, the high begins to fade as the brain disposes of the extra dopamine. Second, because so much excess dopamine can damage or kill nerve cells, the cells protect themselves by reducing the number of dopamine receptors (little “hands”) on their surfaces. If a thunderstorm rolls in, you close all the windows and wait for it to pass. That’s what the cells do, except they assume that another storm is on the way, and stay closed up for a while. The addict has lowered her sensitivity to dopamine—a substance that helped give her the high. Now our addict feels rotten. She has two choices: Take more cocaine to jack up her mood artificially by saturating the remaining dopamine receptors, or suffer withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawal symptoms arise when the reward circuitry is starving for dopamine. Whether you have too few receptors for dopamine, or too little dopamine circulating around the nerve cells, you get the same result. Your reward circuitry batteries are low, leaving you with an acute desire to feel normal again.

At first, when you push beyond your perceived capability your mind won’t shut the fuck up about it. It wants you to stop so it sends you into a spin cycle of panic and doubt, which only amplifies your self-torture. But when you persist past that to the point that pain fully saturates the mind, you become single-pointed. The external world zeroes out. Boundaries dissolve and you feel connected to yourself, and to all things, in the depth of your soul.

All I know is that the fear I have been battling all night is breaking down the door of my ignorance. As my feet slam down I feel not the hard, wet asphalt but the soft Persian rug that led to the staircase in my father’s home. In the glow of lightning the dancing trees are illuminated but I see my mother in the glow of candlelight, spinning, twirling, her hair fanned out behind her. It is falling over me, saturating my thoughts, and I cannot. I cannot let it in.

Truth is, we’re a lot better off, and a lot closer to experiencing real, feel-good moments, when we’re wringing ourselves out for the glory of God and fulfilling our daily tasks—at work, at home, in ministry, anywhere. What did Vince Lombardi say in that famous speech: “I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour—his greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear—is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle—victorious.

Hyperventilation during a panic attack makes people feel like they don’t have enough oxygen, but actually they have plenty. Their red blood cells, carrying oxygen, remain fully loaded: 100 percent saturated. But all that heavy breathing lowers the concentration of carbon dioxide—the gas we exhale. We actually need a certain amount of carbon dioxide circulating in our blood; if the carbon dioxide is too low, the brain responds by squeezing and shrinking the small blood vessels.

I could feel Devon’s gaze on my face, reading my body language despite how hard I had tried to keep the irritation from showing. “They’d like you to move them to a tank they have set up. They’re going to trap them for this week and then let them go.” Of course they did. I managed to keep from rolling my eyes but between Devon’s presence and immediately being swarmed by otters the minute we got near the water, I end up wishing that I had. Otters are fast little mammals in the water; the fur keeps the water off their skin while making them slick and fast while in their preferred environment. The hard lesson I’d learned had been that they could scamper and bound pretty darn quickly on land. Nearly twenty of the brown friendly creatures swarmed up the banks of the tributary and made raucous sounds of greetings at me. Two vets stood nearby with nets and silly grins on their faces and a puny four otters ready to be transported to where ever in two tanks on trucks quietly humming with earth energy. Mags and Evan had backed up when I’d been swarmed but Devon had stuck by my side and seemed highly amused by the otters climbing over and around him to get to me. “They weren’t kidding about you and otters.” I shoot him a ‘no duh’ look and scoop up a pair to hand off to one of the Earth Elementals. We were saturating their habitat with majick, we’d been asked not to use majick on them, and so catching my willing victims by hand was the way I was going to do my task...

She stared at him, at his face. Simply stared as the scales fell from her eyes. "Oh, my God," she whispered, the exclamation so quiet not even he would hear. She suddenly saw-saw it all-all that she'd simply taken for granted. Men like him protected those they loved, selflessly, unswervingly, even unto death. The realization rocked her. Pieces of the jigsaw of her understanding of him fell into place. He was hanging to consciousness by a thread. She had to be sure-and his shields, his defenses were at their weakest now. Looking down at her hands, pressed over the nearly saturated pad, she hunted for the words, the right tone. Softly said, "My death, even my serious injury, would have freed you from any obligation to marry me. Society would have accepted that outcome, too." He shifted, clearly in pain. She sucked in a breath-feeling his pain as her own-then he clamped the long fingers of his right hand about her wrist, held tight. So tight she felt he was using her as an anchor to consciousness, to the world. His tone, when he spoke, was harsh. "Oh, yes-after I'd expended so much effort keeping you safe all these years, safe even from me, I was suddenly going to stand by and let you be gored by some mangy bull." He snorted, soft, low. Weakly. He drew in a slow, shallow breath, lips thin with pain, but determined, went on, "You think I'd let you get injured when finally after all these long years I at last understand that the reason you've always made me itch is because you are the only woman I actually want to marry? And you think I would stand back and let you be harmed?" A peevish frown crossed his face. "I ask you, is that likely? Is it even vaguely rational?" He went on, his words increasingly slurred, his tongue tripping over some, his voice fading. She listened, strained to catch every word as he slid into semi delirium, into rambling, disjointed sentences that she drank in, held to her heart. He gave her dreams back to her, reshaped and refined. "Not French Imperial-good, sound, English oak. You can use whatever colors you like, but no gilt-I forbid it." Eventually he ventured further than she had. "And I want at least three children-not just an heir and a spare. At least three-if you're agreeable. We'll have to have two boys, of course-my evil ugly sisters will found us to make good on that. But thereafter...as many girls as you like...as long as they look like you. Or perhaps Cordelia-she's the handsomer of the two uglies." He loved his sisters, his evil ugly sisters. Heather listened with tears in her eyes as his mind drifted and his voice gradually faded, weakened. She'd finally got her declaration, not in anything like the words she'd expected, but in a stronger, impossible-to-doubt exposition. He'd been her protector, unswerving, unflinching, always there; from a man like him, focused on a lady like her, such actions were tantamount to a declaration from the rooftops. The love she'd wanted him to admit to had been there all along, demonstrated daily right before her eyes, but she hadn't seen. Hadn't seen because she'd been focusing elsewhere, and because, conditioned as she was to resisting the same style of possessive protectiveness from her brothers, from her cousins, she hadn't appreciated his, hadn't realized that that quality had to be an expression of his feelings for her. Until now. Until now that he'd all but given his life for hers. He loved her-he'd always loved her. She saw that now, looking back down the years. He'd loved her from the time she'd fallen in love with him-the instant they'd laid eyes on each other at Michael and Caro's wedding in Hampshire four years ago. He'd held aloof, held away-held her at bay, too-believing, wrongly, that he wasn't an appropriate husband for her. In that, he'd been wrong, too. She saw it all. And as the tears overflowed and tracked down her cheeks, she knew to her soul how right he was for her. Knew, embraced, and rejoiced.

enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself. And even when we build disinterested fantasies, they are saturated with, and limited by, our own psychology. To acquiesce in this particularity on the sensuous level—in other words, not to discount perspective—would be lunacy. We should then believe that the railway line really grew narrower as it receded into the distance. But we want to escape the illusions of perspective on higher levels too. We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.      [138] We are not content to be Leibnitzian monads. We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors. One of the things we feel after reading a great work is ‘I have got out’. Or from another point of view, ‘I have got in’; pierced the shell of some other monad and discovered what it is like inside. Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three. In love we escape from our self into one other. In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are. The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandise himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; ‘he that loseth his life shall save it’. We therefore delight to enter into other

Why didn't you come to me last night?” she whispered. The question took him by surprise and he wasn't prepared to provide her with an answer while he was caught by the sapphire of her eyes. She lifted a finger to his face, and every muscle in him relaxed as she traced it over his cheek. It was as though his body was reminded of when she had healed him—that perfect moment when her eyes came back to him and after he had shared the memory of his weakest moment. “It's not enough,” she mumbled. “The time that you spend with me isn't enough, Malloron. I feel…” Her palm pressed against his cheek and Malloron didn't need to wait for her to continue, he could feel it in the bond. He simply drew her into his arms. The moment their bodies touched, the bond trembled inside his chest, stirring deep within him, a strange hope blooming. He pulled her against him and began to purr for her, his deep satisfaction of touching and holding her saturating every single vibration that rocked through his chest.

I’m producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told.

[from an entry by her daughter Camille] On the other hand, if cattle remain on pasture right to the end, that kind of beef is called "grass finished." The difference between this and CAFO beef are not just relevant to how kindly you feel about animals: meat and eggs of pastured animals also have a measurably different nutrient composition. A lot of recent research has been published on this subject, which is slowly reaching the public. USDA studies found much lower levels of saturated fats and higher vitamin E, beta-carotene, and omega-3 levels in meat from cattle fattened on pasture grasses (their natural diet), compared with CAFO animals ... Free-range beef also has less danger of bacterial contamination because feeding on grass maintains normal levels of acidity in the animal's stomach. At the risk of making you not want to sit at my table, I should tell you that the high-acid stomachs of grain-fed cattle commonly harbor acid-resistant strains of E. coli that are very dangerous to humans ... Free-range grazing is not just kinder to the animals and the surrounding environment; it produces an entirely different product.

Thus he gambled with high stakes and mercilessly, hating himself, mocking himself, won thousands, threw away thousands, lost money, lost jewelry, lost a house in the country, won again, lost again. That fear, that terrible and petrifying fear, which he felt while he was rolling the dice, while he was worried about losing high stakes, that fear he loved and sought to always renew it, always increase it, always get it to a slightly higher level, for in this feeling alone he still felt something like happiness, something like an intoxication, something like an elevated form of life in the midst of his saturated, lukewarm, dull life.

But our Edenic tent–God doesn’t just want to save us. He actually wants to be with us. He doesn’t just love us. God actually likes us. So God removes His royal robes and steps down from His throne to experience—for the first time—what it is like to be human. God is omniscient, which means that He is all-knowing. There’s nothing in the universe, no piece of information, no fact, no statistic that He doesn’t know. The hairs on your head, the zits on your face—He knows about every one. But until the incarnation, God hadn’t experienced human nature. Since zits aren’t a sin, perhaps Jesus had them too. God knows every hair on your head, but through the incarnation, God knows what it feels like to have hair ripped out. God knows about tiredness, but through the incarnation, He experiences exhaustion. God knows how many molecules it takes to shoot a hunger pain from your stomach to your brain. But through the incarnation, God knows what it feels like to starve to the point of death. Through the incarnation, God has enjoyed the same warm wave of sunlight that splashes across your face on the first day of spring. When you bathe in it, God smiles because He’s bathed in it too. He’s been refreshed by a night’s sleep after a long day of work. Warmed by a toasty bed on a cold winter night. Enjoyed a rich glass of wine while celebrating among friends. God authored creation. But through the incarnation, God experienced creation. And He encountered joy under the bridge. He also experienced pain. Relational, psychological, emotional, and physical agony. God has suffered the misery and brokenness of the same sin-saturated world that oppresses us every day. The pain of being rejected, beaten, abused, unloved, uncared for, mocked, shamed, spat upon, and disrespected as an image bearer of the Creator. Jesus knows all of this. He’s experienced all of this. And He willingly endured it to bring you back to Eden.

The eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant described how we love flowers “freely and on their own account.” Kant used flowers to illustrate his concept of “free” beauty, that is a form of beauty which we respond to regardless of utility or cultural value. Certainly, we know beauty when we see it. We recognize it as if something in us has been lying in wait for it. Beauty holds our gaze and saturates our awareness. Somehow the boundary between our self and the world shifts and we feel more alive in the moment of flourishing that it offers. Although the experience may be fleeting, beauty leaves a trace in the mind that survives its passing.

This life we’re given is so short. It’ll be gone before you know it and, son, you’re a good man. You’re a loving, kind, generous man with so much more to give than flashy resorts. Always have been. Just because you allow yourself to love doesn’t mean that some higher power will steal that person away from you—or steal you away from her. If you don’t allow yourself to love, to fully saturate yourself with someone else’s life, someone else’s feelings, if you don’t allow your ego to disappear and your heart to beat for another person, so that every breath you take is taken for that person, well, then, I’m afraid you’ll be missing out on one of life’s only blessings.

Bad, angry decisions left behind a huge cost in life and suffering for the entire nation. And utter loss of wealth for the South. But not for the North. Plenty made fortunes off the war. Give a real Yankee one little dried pea and three thimbles and he can buy groceries. Give him a boxful of cheap, shiny pocketknives and pistols to trade and he will turn it into a career. But give him a war, and he’ll make a fortune to last centuries. It’s not something they learn. They’re saturated in it from birth. End result—we lose everything and they create thousands of new millionaires. —Bitter feelings still, ma’am? —No. The people who beat you get to take you apart however they wish.

There was another inspiring moment: a rough, choppy, moonlit night on the water, and the Dreadnaught's manager looked out the window suddenly to spy thousands of tiny baitfish breaking the surface, rushing frantically toward shore. He knew what that meant, as did everyone else in town with a boat, a gaff and a loaf of Wonder bread to use as bait: the stripers were running! Thousands of the highly prized, relatively expensive striped bass were, in a rare feeding frenzy, suddenly there for the taking. You had literally only to throw bread on the water, bash the tasty fish on the head with a gaff and then haul them in. They were taking them by the hundreds of pounds. Every restaurant in town was loading up on them, their parking lots, like ours, suddenly a Coleman-lit staging area for scaling, gutting and wrapping operations. The Dreadnaught lot, like every other lot in town, was suddenly filled with gore-covered cooks and dishwashers, laboring under flickering gaslamps and naked bulbs to clean, wrap and freeze the valuable white meat. We worked for hours with our knives, our hair sparkling with snowflake-like fish scales, scraping, tearing, filleting. At the end of the night's work, I took home a 35-pound monster, still twisted with rigor. My room-mates were smoking weed when I got back to our little place on the beach and, as often happens on such occasions, were hungry. We had only the bass, some butter and a lemon to work with, but we cooked that sucker up under the tiny home broiler and served it on aluminum foil, tearing at it with our fingers. It was a bright, moonlit sky now, a mean high tide was lapping at the edges of our house, and as the windows began to shake in their frames, a smell of white spindrift and salt saturated the air as we ate. It was the freshest piece of fish I'd ever eaten, and I don't know if it was due to the dramatic quality the weather was beginning to take on, but it hit me right in the brainpan, a meal that made me feel better about things, made me better for eating it, somehow even smarter, somehow . . . It was a protein rush to the cortex, a clean, three-ingredient ingredient high, eaten with the hands. Could anything be better than that?

Our cultured men of today, our ‘good’ men, do not lie - that is true; but this hardly aggrandizes them. The real lie, the genuine, determined, ‘honest’ lie would prove too tough and strong an article to them by far; it would demand something of them that must not be demanded, to open their eyes to their own selves, and to learn to distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false’ in their own selves. The ignoble lie alone befits them; everyone who feels himself a good man treats all matters with hypocrisy, as a dishonorable liar, an absolute liar, but nonetheless an innocent liar, a naive liar, a virtuous liar. These ‘good men’, they are all now saturated with morality through and through, and as far as honor is concerned they are corrupted and disgraced forever.

We had only the bass, some butter and a lemon to work with, but we cooked that sucker up under the tiny home broiler and served it on aluminum foil, tearing at it with our fingers. It was a bright, moonlit sky now, a mean high tide was lapping at the edges of our house, and as the windows began to shake in their frames, a smell of white spindrift and salt saturated the air as we ate. It was the freshest piece of fish I'd ever eaten, and I don't know if it was due “to the dramatic quality the weather was beginning to take on, but it hit me right in the brainpan, a meal that made me feel better about things, made me better for eating it, somehow even smarter, somehow . . . It was a protein rush to the cortex, a clean, three-ingredient ingredient high, eaten with the hands. Could anything be better than that?

Some Christians mistrust or de-emphasize the role of the senses in spirituality, considering them to be inferior to reason and cognition. Such a view fails to appreciate the indispensable part of human personhood the senses actually form. It falls into the gnostic error of denying human embodiment. Because Christians affirm the goodness of the physical body and believe in the physicality of the incarnation, we should also affirm the importance of encountering God through our senses. God gave us senses to enrich our lives. They are channels that can be spiritually tuned so as to register the traces of the divine that saturate the world . . . it could be the sight of a child, the sound of birds singing, the smell of flowers or freshly cut grass, or the feeling of warmth. Any of these things-and many more-can serve as a call to pause and, even if just for a moment, turn our heart toward God.

In conjunction with his colleagues, Frantisek Baluska from the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany at the University of Bonn is of the opinion that brain-like structures can be found at root tips. In addition to signaling pathways, there are also numerous systems and molecules similar to those found in animals. When a root feels its way forward in the ground, it is aware of stimuli. The researchers measured electrical signals that led to changes in behavior after they were processed in a "transition zone." If the root encounters toxic substances, impenetrable stones, or saturated soil, it analyzes the situation and transmits the necessary adjustments to the growing tip. The root tip changes direction as a result of this communication and steers the growing root around the critical areas. Right now, the majority of plant researchers are skeptical about whether such behavior points to a repository for intelligence, the faculty of memory, and emotions. Among other things, they get worked up about carrying over findings in similar situations with animals and, at the end of the day, about how this threatens to blur the boundary between plants and animals. And so what? What would be so awful about that? The distinction between plant and animal is, after all, arbitrary and depends on the way an organism feeds itself: the former photosynthesizes and the latter eats other living beings. Finally, the only other big difference is in the amount of time it takes to process information and translate it into action. Does that mean that beings that live life in the slow lane are automatically worth less than ones on the fast track? Sometimes I suspect we would pay more attention to trees and other vegetation if we could establish beyond a doubt just how similar they are in many ways to animals.

I know, your profession is hard and full of things that contradict you, and I foresaw your lament and knew that it would come. Now that it has come, there is nothing I can say to reassure you, I can only suggest that perhaps all professions are like that, filled with demands, filled with hostility toward the individual, saturated as it were with the hatred of those who find themselves mute and sullen in an insipid duty. The situation you must live in now is not more heavily burdened with conventions, prejudices, and false ideas than all the other situations, and if there are some that pretend to offer a greater freedom, there is nevertheless note that is, in itself, vast and spacious and connected to the important Things that the truest kind of life consists of. Only the individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest laws like a Thing, and when he walks out into the rising dawn or looks out into the event-filled evening and when he feels what is happening there, all situations drop from him as if from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of pure life.

There is some quite trivial, distant noise; a sound, moreover, which has nothin to do with me, to which there is not the slightest need for me to pay any attention; yet it suffices to wake me, and in no gentle way, either, but savagely, violently, shockingly, like an air raid alarm. The wheels, my masters, are already vibrating with incipient motion; the whole mechanism is preparing to begin the monotonous, hateful functioning of which I am the dispirited slave. I began to feel that if I did not succeed in breaking out of the loathsome circle I should suddenly become mad, scream, perpetrate some shocking act of violence in the open street. But worst of all was the knowledge that the laws of my temperament would forbid me even a relief of this kind. I was inexorably imprisoned behind my own determination to display no emotion whatever. Now I saw that I was in a street which I did not know very well. Night had fallen, the lights glowed mistily through a thin haze. It was as though, in some mysterious way, I had become the central point around which the night scene revolved. People walking on the pavement looked at me as they passed. Some with pity, some with detached interest, some with more morbid curiosity. Some appeared to make small, concealed sights, but whether these were intended for warning or encouragement I could not be sure. The windows lighted or unlighted, were like eyes more or less piercing, but all focused upon me. The houses, the traffic, everything in sight, seemed to be watching to see what I would do. To wait — with no living soul in whom to confide one's doubt, one's fears, one's relentless hope. Some secret court must have tried and condemned me, unheard, to this heavy sentence. Coiling itself round me it knows I cannot escape. Imprisoned in its very fabric, I am like a small worm, a parasite, which the host harbors not altogether unwillingly. A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point. When this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure. No matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all.

Separated from everyone, in the fifteenth dungeon, was a small man with fiery brown eyes and wet towels wrapped around his head. For several days his legs had been black, and his gums were bleeding. Fifty-nine years old and exhausted beyond measure, he paced silently up and down, always the same five steps, back and forth. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . an interminable shuffle between the wall and door of his cell. He had no work, no books, nothing to write on. And so he walked. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . His dungeon was next door to La Fortaleza, the governor’s mansion in Old San Juan, less than two hundred feet away. The governor had been his friend and had even voted for him for the Puerto Rican legislature in 1932. This didn’t help much now. The governor had ordered his arrest. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Life had turned him into a pendulum; it had all been mathematically worked out. This shuttle back and forth in his cell comprised his entire universe. He had no other choice. His transformation into a living corpse suited his captors perfectly. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Fourteen hours of walking: to master this art of endless movement, he’d learned to keep his head down, hands behind his back, stepping neither too fast nor too slow, every stride the same length. He’d also learned to chew tobacco and smear the nicotined saliva on his face and neck to keep the mosquitoes away. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . The heat was so stifling, he needed to take off his clothes, but he couldn’t. He wrapped even more towels around his head and looked up as the guard’s shadow hit the wall. He felt like an animal in a pit, watched by the hunter who had just ensnared him. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Far away, he could hear the ocean breaking on the rocks of San Juan’s harbor and the screams of demented inmates as they cried and howled in the quarantine gallery. A tropical rain splashed the iron roof nearly every day. The dungeons dripped with a stifling humidity that saturated everything, and mosquitoes invaded during every rainfall. Green mold crept along the cracks of his cell, and scarab beetles marched single file, along the mold lines, and into his bathroom bucket. The murderer started screaming. The lunatic in dungeon seven had flung his own feces over the ceiling rail. It landed in dungeon five and frightened the Puerto Rico Upland gecko. The murderer, of course, was threatening to kill the lunatic. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . The man started walking again. It was his only world. The grass had grown thick over the grave of his youth. He was no longer a human being, no longer a man. Prison had entered him, and he had become the prison. He fought this feeling every day. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . He was a lawyer, journalist, chemical engineer, and president of the Nationalist Party. He was the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard College and Harvard Law School and spoke six languages. He had served as a first lieutenant in World War I and led a company of two hundred men. He had served as president of the Cosmopolitan Club at Harvard and helped Éamon de Valera draft the constitution of the Free State of Ireland.5 One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . He would spend twenty-five years in prison—many of them in this dungeon, in the belly of La Princesa. He walked back and forth for decades, with wet towels wrapped around his head. The guards all laughed, declared him insane, and called him El Rey de las Toallas. The King of the Towels. His name was Pedro Albizu Campos.

Here’s how to do it: First, sit down, get comfortable, and close your eyes. Make sure you’re in a position where you can freely expand your lungs. Wim suggests doing this practice right after waking up since your stomach is still empty. Warm up by inhaling deeply and drawing the breath in until you feel a slight pressure. Hold the breath for a moment before exhaling completely, pushing the air out as much as you can. Hold the exhalation for as long as you can, and then repeat this fifteen times. Next, inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth in short, powerful bursts, as if you’re blowing up a balloon. Pull in your belly when you’re exhaling and let it expand when you inhale. Do this about thirty times, using a steady pace, until you feel that your body is saturated with oxygen. You may feel light-headed or tingly, or you may experience a surge of energy that’s literally electric. Try to get a sense of which parts of your body are overflowing with energy and which ones are lacking it—and where there are blockages between these two extremes. As you continue breathing, send the breath to those blockages. When you’re done, take one more big breath in, filling your lungs to maximum capacity, and then push all of the air out. Hold this for as long as you can and try to feel the oxygen spreading around your body. When you can’t hold it anymore, inhale fully and feel your chest expanding. Hold it again, sending energy where your body needs it. Bonus points if you do what Wim had me do when we demonstrated this technique onstage at our Bulletproof conference—as you are holding your lungs empty, count how many push-ups you can do before you have to breathe again. I got to twenty! It seems impossible, but you can do it, and that short bit of low oxygen forces your body to better deal with lower-oxygen environments. I recommend you research Wim’s work and watch one of his many videos online demonstrating his breathing technique. I don’t think it works as well as mechanically filtering oxygen out of the air you breathe, but the Wim Hof technique is absolutely free, totally portable, and Wim is capable of things I could never do! His breathing method helps your body adapt to bursts of oxygen and puts you more in tune with the way your body uses your breath to create energy. It also makes you more resilient to cold temperatures, but there is evidence that cold temperatures themselves are good for your mitochondria.

Drawing in a lung-packing breath, I press the start button. And then I feel it. It saturates the water around me, thrumming without rhythm. The pulse. Someone is close. Someone I don't recognize. Slowly, I tiptoe backward, careful not to splash or slosh. After a few seconds, tiptoeing doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If I can sense them, they can sense me. The pulse is getting stronger. They're heading straight toward me. Fast. Leaving caution, etiquette, and Dad's stopwatch behind, I scramble like a lunatic to shallower water. Suddenly, Galen's order to stay on dry land doesn't seem so unreasonable. What was I thinking? The little I know about Syrena is what we crammed into the last twenty-four hours at his house. They have a social structure like humans. Government, laws, family, friendship. Do they have outcasts, too? The same way humans have rapists and serial killers? If so, I've just done the human equivalent of wandering into a dark parking lot alone. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Gasping into a wave lets me know my lungs aren't prepped for water just yet. Sputtering and coughing slows me down a little, but the shore is close, and I've got my eye on a stick thicker than my arm just beyond the wet sand. That it will break like a twig over the head of any Syrena is not important.

If we are absorbed in a movie it may seem at first that the screen lies behind the image. Likewise, if we are so captivated by experience that we overlook the simple experience of being aware or awareness itself, we may first locate it in the background of experience. In this first step, being aware or awareness itself is recognised as the subjective witness of all objective experience. Looking more closely we see that the screen is not just in the background of the image but entirely pervades it. Likewise, all experience is permeated with the knowing with which it is known. It is saturated with the experience of being aware or awareness itself. There is no part of a thought, feeling, sensation or perception that is not infused with the knowing of it. This second realisation collapses, at least to a degree, the distinction between awareness and its objects. In the third step, we understand that it is not even legitimate to claim that knowing, being aware or awareness itself pervades all experience, as if experience were one thing and awareness another. Just as the screen is all there is to an image, so pure knowing, being aware or awareness itself is all there is to experience. All there is to a thought is thinking, and all there is to thinking is knowing. All there is to an emotion is feeling, and all there is to feeling is knowing. All there is to a sensation is sensing, and all there is to sensing is knowing. All there is to a perception is perceiving, and all there is to perceiving is knowing. Thus, all there is to experience is knowing, and it is knowing that knows this knowing. Being all alone, with nothing in itself other than itself with which it could be limited or divided, knowing or pure awareness is whole, perfect, complete, indivisible and without limits. This absence of duality, separation or otherness is the experience of love or beauty, in which any distinction between a self and an object, other or world has dissolved. Thus, love and beauty are the nature of awareness. In the familiar experience of love or beauty, awareness is tasting its own eternal, infinite reality. It is in this context that the painter Paul Cézanne said that art gives us the ‘taste of nature’s eternity’.

Glaring, I snarled, “Kiss me. Give me one fracture of human company, and I’ll never say another word to you again. I’ll be whatever you want. Just kiss me!” His eyes narrowed. “You’re an idiot.” “So you keep telling me.” “You’re wasting your time.” “So you keep telling me.” “I don’t want to kiss you!” I lashed out. My arms came up. I opened my palm. And I slapped the self-righteous, egotistical arsehole on the cheek. The moment went from lust-heavy to stagnant with violence. We stared, caught dead centre in war. “You’re a fucking nightmare,” he snapped. “Kiss me.” “You’re ruining my life.” “Kiss me.” “You’re—” “Kiss me, Jethro. Kiss me. Just fucking kiss me and give me—” His body crashed against mine. His hands flew up, grabbing my cheeks and holding me firm. His lips, oh his lips, they bruised mine as his head tilted, and with pure anger, he gave me what I’d wanted for weeks. He kissed me. My lungs were empty—he’d stolen all my air, but I no longer survived on oxygen. I survived on his mouth, his taste, his unbridled energy pouring down my throat. His tongue tore past my lips, taking me savage and hungry. There was nothing sweet or gentle. This was a punishment. A reminder that I hadn’t won. He wasn’t kissing me. He was fighting me in every underhanded way. His hands dropped from my cheeks, cupping my breasts. The violence in his touch throbbed instantly. I arched my back, opening my mouth wider to scream, but he swallowed my cries, kissing me deeper, harder, stealing every inch of sanity I had left. I thought a kiss would put me on even ground—show him that he did care. That he was human—just like me. I hadn’t gambled on being detonated into a billion tiny pieces that had no notion of who I’d been before he’d stolen my soul. He backed me up, faster and faster to the bed. His breath saturated my lungs. His touch skated from my cheeks, to my breasts, to my waist, to my arse. Jerking me hard against the huge length of arousal in his jeans. The bed stopped our motion, tumbling us onto the sheets, but nothing, absolutely nothing could unweld our lips. We were joined, kissing, frantic, desperate. He groaned as I slid my hands beneath his t-shirt, needing to feel his skin against mine. He was blood and fire and heat. So different to the glacier he pretended to be. “Fuck,” he grunted

unless we’re missing our guess, your life and the gospel probably haven’t always felt in sync on a lot of days, in most of the years since. After the emotional scene with the trembling chin and the wadded-up Kleenexes, where you truly felt the weight of your own sin and the Spirit’s conviction, you’ve had a hard time consistently enjoying and experiencing what God’s supposedly done to remedy this self-defeating situation. Even on those repeat occasions when you’ve crashed and burned and resolved to do better, you’ve typically only been able, for a little while, to sit on your hands, trying to stay in control of yourself by rugged determination and brute sacrifice (which you sure hope God is noticing and adding to your score). But you’ll admit, it’s not exactly a feeling of freedom and victory. And anytime the wheels come off again, as they often do, it just feels like the same old condemnation as before. Devastating that you can’t crack the code on this thing, huh? You were pretty sure that being a Christian was supposed to change you—and it has. Some. But man, there’s still so much more that needs changing. Drastic things. Daily things. Changes in your habits, your routines, in your choices and decisions, changes to the stuff you just never stop hating about yourself, changes in what you do and don’t do . . . and don’t ever want to do again! Changes in how you think, how you cope, how you ride out the guilt and shame when you’ve blown it again. How you shoot down those old trigger responses—the ones you can’t seem to keep from reacting badly to, even after you keep telling yourself to be extra careful, knowing how predictably they set you off. Changes in your closest relationships, changes in your work habits, changes that have just never happened for you before, the kind of changes that—if you can ever get it together—might finally start piling up, you think, rolling forward, fueling some fresh momentum for you, keeping you moving in the right direction. But then—stop us if you’ve heard this one before . . . You barely if ever change. And come on, shouldn’t you be more transformed by now? This is around the point where, when what you’ve always thought or expected of God is no longer squaring with what you’re feeling, that you start creating your own cover versions of the gospel, piecing together things you’ve heard and believed and experimented with—some from the past, some from the present. You lay down new tracks with a gospel feel but, sadly, not always a lot of gospel truth.

Movie. What's my favorite kind of movie?” “Is there a point to this?” “Please, Lucy. What's my favorite movie?” “Horror. Why?” “No reason,” I sighed as I slouched back in the chair. “And would you stop that! Please? It's distracting,” she said as she slammed her hand down on top of mine to stop me from twirling my ring. I jerked my hand out from under hers so I could cross my arms over my chest. “What's with you today?” Her tone was saturated with distaste. “Nothing.” “Well, you're being awfully annoying for nothing to be wrong,” she retorted. “Go ahead, Josh. I'm listening now.” I could feel the cold emanating from her and flowing in my direction. It had been this way for a while I just didn't want to see it. Danny and Josh looked at me and then awkwardly focused on other things.

Being out in big surf is dreamlike. Terror and ecstasy ebb and flow around the edges of things, each threatening to overwhelm the dreamer. An unearthly beauty saturates an enormous arena of moving water, latent violence, too-real explosions, and sky. Scenes feel mythic even as they unfold. I always feel a ferocious ambivalence: I want to be nowhere else; I want to be anywhere else.

She wanted to feel his hands and his mouth all over her, wanted him inside her, wanted to be so close she couldn’t tell where one of them ended and the other began. She felt as if she had morphed into someone else, some wild creature she didn’t even know. As if her body were some alien, newly unearthed part of her that she could no longer control. She didn’t notice when he slid her jeans and pink satin panties down over her hips, but roused a little when he dragged a small foil packet out of the wallet in his hip pocket and tore it open. She caught the sound of his zipper sliding down. A hand she didn’t recognize as her own reached out for him, wrapped around the thick, heavy weight of his sex, held him while he slid on the condom, then guided him between her parted legs. “God, Charity…” With a single deep thrust, Call buried himself inside her. The moment he did, she started to come. “Christ.” His muscles went rigid. In some vague corner of her mind, she realized he was fighting for control. Charity cried out his name and clung to his neck, unable to believe how quickly she had reached her peak. She knew the moment he gave up his struggle to hold himself back, felt him begin to move, felt the deep thrust and drag of his shaft against the walls of her passage. She felt the power of the man above her and the deep, saturating pleasure as a second climax shook her. Beneath her hands, hard muscle tightened and Call groaned. The sinews in his hips flexed and moved as he pumped himself inside her, then came with incredible force, his body going rigid, his shoulders glowing with a sheen of perspiration. For long seconds, neither of them moved. The only sound in the forest was the wind luffing through the trees, their labored breathing, and the soft thud of their heartbeats.

¨Around then I feel it. It saturates the water around me, thrumming without rhythm. The pulse. Someone is close. Someone I don´t recognize. Slowly, I tiptoe backward, careful not to splash or slosh. After a few seconds, tiptoeing doesn´t make a whole lot of sense. If I can sense them, they can sense me. The pulse is getting stronger. They´re heading straight toward me. Fast.¨

This I am not enough idea is not unique to people who are shy or socially anxious. In fact, most people in our culture struggle with feelings of inadequacy. This is part of growing up in a media-saturated environment full of messages implying we are somehow insufficient. The difference between someone who has social anxiety and someone who does not can be distilled down to one thing: those with the anxiety believe more completely, and more frequently, that they are not enough. That is the crux of social anxiety.

that when you feel tried, you become tired, you can also feel energized and be energized. This is reminiscent to Phineas’ first clue to the power of the Law. When felt excited during his horse ride, he was able to ignore the feeling of pain. The solution then is to saturate your mind with states that directly address any health issue that you have or prefer to avoid.

There's no need to play the villain from the opera." "You'll endure my distasteful caresses but won't let me take your cloak? Seems a little silly." She stopped backing away, purely because she bumped into the stone wall behind her. Her eyes flared gold with anger. "Don't mock me." "Why not?" he asked lazily. He reached to release the ties at her throat. She pressed into the wall in a futile attempt to escape. "I don't like it." "You'll get used to it." His hands brushed along her shoulders, feeling trembling tension beneath the saturated wool.

You’re not going to find any magazines on the newsstands with articles encouraging you to show humility. Instead, we are saturated with messages about power, independence, and control. We are bombarded with advice telling us to listen to our own hearts, to do whatever we feel like doing. The constant affirmation of the world and the pull of our own hearts make it so easy to believe that we deserve to be treated in a certain way. We should not have to listen to anyone telling us what to do; after all, we are strong and independent.

How old are you?” “Seventeen.” Suddenly I feel insecure, like he’ll think I’m too young to bother with now. I shake the thought away and rescue another bite of gelato from the heat. “You seem older than that,” he says, somehow finished with his monster cup. He wads his napkin into a ball before plopping it in. I smile and watch as the melted remains saturate the entire napkin. “Yeah, I’ve been told that before, actually.” Mom says it’s the way I handle myself, especially around adults and strangers. I’ve been forced into more than my share of social situations where I was often the only child, so I learned to fit in to my surroundings. “How old are you?” I ask. “Eighteen. Just turned.” “Really, you seem…younger than that.” I did not just flirt with him.

Song For Adam" Though Adam was a friend of mine, I did not know him well He was alone into his distance He was deep into his well I could guess what he was laughing at, but I couldn't really tell Now the story's told that Adam jumped, but I've been thinking that he fell Together we went traveling, as we received the call His destination India, and I had none at all Well, I still remember laughing with our backs against the wall So free of fear, we never thought that one of us might fall I sit before my only candle, but it's so little light to find my way Now this story unfolds before my candle Which is shorter every hour as it reaches for the day But I feel just like a candle in the way I guess I'll get there, but I wouldn't say for sure When we parted we were laughing still, as our goodbyes were said And I never heard from him again as each our lives we led Except for once in someone else's letter that I read Until I heard the sudden word that a friend of mine was dead I sit before my only candle, like a pilgrim sits beside the way Now this journey appears before my candle As a song that's growing fainter the harder that I play But I fear before I end I'll fade away But I guess I'll get there, though I wouldn't say for sure Though Adam was a friend of mine, I did not know him long And when I stood myself beside him, I never thought I was as strong Still it seems he stopped his singing in the middle of his song Well I'm not the one to say I know, but I'm hoping he was wrong I'm holding out my only candle, though it's so little light to find my way Now this story's been laid beneath my candle And it's shorter every hour as it reaches for the day Yes, I feel just like a candle in the way I hope I'll get there, but I never pray Jackson Browne, Saturate Before Using (1972)

The healthiest carbohydrates come from whole grains, legumes, vegetables and whole fruits. The least healthy carbohydrates come from white bread, white rice, past and other refined grains, sugary foods and drinks and potatoes. There is an easy way to tell healthy fats from unhealthy fats. Most of the healthy fats - the monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats - come from plants and are liquid at room temperature. Rich green olive oil, golden sunflower oil, the oil that rises to the top of a jar of natural nut butter and the oils that come from fatty fish and all examples of healthy unsaturated fats. The unhealthy fats ( saturated fats ) and the very unhealthy fats ( trans fats ) tend to be solid at room temperature, such as the fat that marbles a steak or that is found in a stick of butter. Meat and full fat dairy products are the biggest sources of saturated fat in the western diet. So for good health, enjoy healthy fats, limit saturated fat and avoid trans fat. Mindfulness practice touches the stillness in ourselves. It allows us to calm down and reflect so that we can reconnect with our true self. When we are free from our automatic responses, we can see more clearly things as they are, from moment to moment, without judgment, preconceived notions or bias. We get to know ourselves better. We become more more in tune with our own feelings, actions and thoughts as well as with the feelings, actions and thoughts of others. You need to ask yourself what is it that you really want. Often our habit energy and fear prevent us from identifying what we want and from living healthily. The essential point is that we do not try to repress our afflictions, our negative energies, because the more we resist or fight them, the stronger they will grow in us. We need only to learn to recognize them, embrace them and bathe them in the energy of mindfulness. Once you can be in the present, you will recognize that your fears, anger and despair are all projections from the past. They are not the present reality. Don't just sit there and wait for your negative feelings to pass. Complaining will not change your life. Change your thinking and you can let go of limitations you imposed on yourself. Explore and be proactive. I am aware that happiness depends on my mental attitude and not on external conditions and that I can live happily in the present moment simply by remembering that I already have more than enough conditions to be happy. Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech and the inability to listen to others, I am committed to cultivating loving speech and compassionate listening in order to relieve suffering and to promote reconciliation and peace in myself and among other people. I am determined not to try to cover up loneliness, anxiety or other suffering by losing myself in consumption.

I feel so saturated with Maine, but am so separate from its people.

When you start to make a habit of blessing God, you will discover that daily life can begin to feel like Christmas morning. As your prayer life becomes saturated with kavanah, that deep awareness of God’s presence and his overwhelming love, you may feel as though you are wading knee-deep through shards of wrapping paper and mountains of bows to enjoy a pile of shiny new gifts.

Beauty holds our gaze and saturates our awareness. Somehow the boundary between our self and the world shifts and we feel more alive in the moment of flourishing that it offers. Although the experience may be fleeting, beauty leaves a trace in the mind that survives its passing.

Like when you don't realise it's raining. And it doesn't feel sudden, not like the sky was blue and you turn around and then it's pouring–but like, it's been overcast the whole time, and then it's one drip, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then you're saturated and you can't really tell which drip saturated you, but it happened slowly and snuck right past you.

I’ve heard what Rapskal says. That we have to plunge ourselves into the city’s memories if we are to learn how to live here as Elderlings. But I also remember all the warnings I heard in Trehaug. What Leftrin told us before he left, that lingering too long near memory stone can drown you. That you can lose your own life in remembering someone else’s.” Thymara was silent for moment. Tats had put a precise finger on her own fear, the one she didn’t like to admit. “But we are Elderlings. It’s different for us.” “Is it? I know Rapskal says that, but is it? Did the Elderlings prize having their own lives, or did they grow up so saturated in other people’s experiences that they didn’t realize what was theirs and what they’d absorbed? I like being me, Thymara. I want to still be Tats, no matter how long I live and tend my dragon. And I want to share those years with Thymara. I don’t need to soak you in someone’s else’s life when I’m with you.” He paused, letting her feel the sting of that little barb. Then he added, “My turn for a question. Are you living your life, Thymara? Or avoiding it by living someone else’s?” He knew. She hadn’t confided in him about the memory columns and her visits there with Rapskal. But somehow he knew. A deep blush heated her face. As her silence became longer, the hurt in his eyes deepened. She tried to tell herself that she’d done nothing wrong, that his hurt was not her fault. He spoke while she struggled to find words. “It’s pretending, Thymara.” His voice was low but not gentle. “It’s not plunging into this life in Kelsingra. It’s letting go of now, and living the past, a past that will never return. It’s not even really living. You don’t make decisions there, and if the consequences become too dark, you can run away. You take on a style of thinking, and when you come back to this world, it sways you. But worst of all is, while you are swimming in memories, what are you not doing here? What experiences are you missing, what chances pass you by? A year from now, what will you say about these seasons, what will you remember?” She was moving from embarrassed to angry. Tats had no right to rebuke her. He might think she was doing something foolish, but she hadn’t hurt anyone with it. Well, only him, and only his feelings. And wasn’t that partially his own fault, for caring about such things? He knew she was getting angry. She saw how he tightened his shoulders and heard his voice deepen a notch. “When you’re with me, Thymara…if you ever decide to be with me… I won’t be thinking of anyone else except you. I won’t call you by someone else’s name, or do something to you because it’s what someone else liked a long, long time ago.

In the same principle, one of these working laws will permeate our will. Whether our will is naturally stubborn or submissive makes no difference, for neither is useful for the life of Christ. In the past I have seen some very stubborn wills and some submissive wills. While most of the elders in the churches love the submissive wills, I am just as bothered by the submissive wills as by the stubborn wills. According to our human feeling, we all love a submissive will, but as long as a submissive will is a natural will, it is not adequate. It does not matter whether our will is stubborn, submissive, or neutral. As long as it is our will, it is useless for the life of [425] Christ. The working of the law of the divine life must permeate our will. Although I have heard many people say, “I hate my stubborn will,” I have never heard anyone say, “I hate my submissive will.” We all must learn to say, “I hate my stubborn will, my submissive will, and my neutral will. I just hate my will. I don’t care whether my will is stubborn, submissive, or neutral. As long as it is my will, I hate it because it is natural.” As the law of the divine life works in us, one of its functions will saturate our will with the will of Christ, making His will ours. In this way our will is remade with the very element of Christ’s will. This means that Christ’s life will grow into our will. Eventually, in our mind, emotion, and will there will be the growth of the life of Christ.

IV. THE INNER SENSE OF LIFE While the law of life is working within us, we have a deeper consciousness of life. His intercession very effectively motivates our inner seed. How do we know that our inner seed has been motivated? By our inner sense, our inner consciousness. Although you may feel too tired to attend a particular church meeting, the seed within will not let you sleep. By the inward “pum, pum, pum,” the energizing of the heavenly intercession, you realize that you must go to that meeting. Sometimes, when we are attracted to the worldly things, the inward “pum, pum, pum” gives us no rest, and we find ourselves doing what the Lord desires. What a mercy this is! I have the full assurance that in the coming years the heavenly “pum, pum, pum” will accomplish a great deal in the Lord’s recovery. We will never be satisfied with what we have seen in the past. This ministry will be higher and richer. The Lord will use the churches and the messages to gather together His true seekers to be His testimony to the whole earth. Everything in the Bible concerning the church will be fulfilled before the Lord comes back. Deep within, we [433] all have the sense that nothing but this standard model can satisfy us. We cannot be happy unless we are saturated with Him. This is a strong proof that He is interceding for us to be glorified, to be brought into His perfection.

September 13 “His heavens shall drop down dew.” Deuteronomy 33:28 WHAT the dew in the East is to the world of nature, that is the influence of the Spirit in the realm of grace. How greatly do I need it! Without the Spirit of God I am a dry and withered thing. I droop, I fade, I die. How sweetly does this dew refresh me! When once favoured with it I feel happy, lively, vigorous, elevated. I want nothing more. The Holy Spirit brings me life, and all that life requires. All else without the dew of the Spirit is less than nothing to me: I hear, I read, I pray, I sing, I go to the table of communion, and I find no blessing there until the Holy Ghost visits me. But when he bedews me, every means of grace is sweet and profitable. What a promise is this for me! “His heavens shall drop down dew.” I shall be visited with grace. I shall not be left to my natural drought, or to the world’s burning heat, or to the sirocco of Satanic temptation. Oh, that I may at this very hour feel the gentle, silent, saturating dew of the Lord! Why should I not? He who has made me to live as the grass lives in the meadow, will treat me as he treats the grass: he will refresh me from above. Grass cannot call for dew as I do. Surely, the Lord who visits the unpraying plant will answer to his pleading child.

In such a life, he thinks, there is a truth. You can be so cold that you can’t get colder, so wet you can’t become wetter. You can feel so deeply that you are saturated, numb but still intensely alert—beyond fear—as if living a memory. Beyond living, he thinks. Surviving.

The person that I am slowly becomes the girl I used to be, until eventually I surrender, saturated in my days gone by, feeling every moment for the first time . . . all over again.

Anytime we’re not converting to others the same glorious realities that sealed our own redemption in Christ, we’re always an inch or less away from doing something wicked to somebody else—from not listening to them, not caring about them, not working hard for them, not valuing them, and all the various, ugly expressions that our lack of real love can embody. We won’t give people the benefit of the doubt. We won’t feel inclined to be gracious. We’ll all too quickly assume our attack positions, establishing ourselves on a war footing. We’ll flare up at perceived injustices and fight back with counterstrikes. We’ll turn against people. We’ll do it all. And know we’re doing it. And sometimes, we won’t even care.

Whenever we feel the absence of peace—whenever our unmet longing for joy expresses itself as anxiety, or depression, or fear, or anger, or enslavement to any number of defeating sin patterns or addictions—the emptiness we’re feeling and trying to fill is for what our relationship with God, by His loving choice, was always meant to be. Our angst comes from the underlying implications of Ecclesiastes 3:11, where the Scripture says God “has put eternity into man’s heart.

Everything happened too fast for Daisy to comprehend. She gripped the ribbons as Hubert jerked forward with a panicked whinny, the cart rattling and bouncing as if it were a child’s toy. Daisy tried in vain to keep her seat, but as the cart hit a deep rut she was thrown clear of the vehicle. Hubert continued racing pell-mell down the lane while Daisy landed on the hard-packed earth with stunning force. The breath was knocked from her, and she choked and wheezed. She had the impression of a massive creature, a monster rushing toward her, but the sound of a gunshot rent the air and caused her ears to ring. A bone-chilling animal squeal… then nothing. Daisy tried to sit up, then flopped weakly on her stomach as her lungs spasmed. Her chest felt as if it had been caught in a vise. There was a good chance she was going to cast up her crumpets, but the thought of how much that would hurt was enough to keep her gorge down. In a moment the thundering of hooves— several sets— vibrated the ground beneath Daisy’s cheek. Finally able to draw a shallow breath, she pushed up on her elbows and lifted her chin. Three riders— no, four— were galloping toward her, hooves thrasing up clouds of dust in the lane. One of the men swung off his horse before it had even stopped and rushed to her in a few ground-eating strides. Daisy blinked in surprise as he dropped to his knees and gathered her up in the same motion. Her head fell back on his arm, and she found herself staring hazily up into Matthew Swift’s dark face. “Daisy.” It was a tone she had never heard from him before, rough and urgent. Cradling her in one arm, he ran his free hand over her body in a rapid search for injuries. “Are you hurt?” Daisy tried to explain that she’d just gotten the wind knocked out of her, and he seemed to understand her incoherent sounds. “All right,” he said. “Don’t try to talk. Breathe slowly.” Feeling her stir against him, he resettled her in his arms. “Rest against me.” His hand passed over her hair, smoothing it back from her face. Tiny shivers of reaction ran through her limbs, and he gathered her closer. “Slowly, sweetheart. Easy. You’re safe now.” Daisy closed her eyes to hide her astonishment. Matthew Swift was murmuring endearments and holding her in hard, strong arms, and her bones seemed to have melted like boiling sugar. Years of uncivilized rough-and-tumble with her siblings had taught Daisy to recover quickly from a fall. In any other circumstances she would have sprung up and dusted herself off by now. But every pleasure-saturated cell in her body sought to preserve the moment for as long as possible.

Why do lazy, minimum effort employees always seem to find places where they feel "underappreciated"?

That fear, that terrible and petrifying fear, which he felt while he was rolling the dice, while he was worried about losing high stakes, that fear he loved and sought to always renew it, always increase it, always get it to a slightly higher level, for in this feeling alone he still felt something like happiness, something like an intoxication, something like an elevated form of life in the midst of his saturated, lukewarm, dull life.

He describes sailing across mountainous seas, lashed to the wheel the bare rigging overhead dancing with blue electricity, St Elmo's fire the sailors called it. His clothes so saturated with the salt water he can barely stand, would fall if he weren’t tied up. The ship heaves in the heavy swells and the waves crash endlessly over the deck. Anything that wasn't tied down has long slid into the churning maelstrom including three crewmembers that didn’t lash themselves up in time. He holds the wheel and steers so the prow is climbing the huge wave that has blotted out the storm clouds, so tall the ship is almost vertical as it crests the wave and slides down into the next tumultuous surge. He tells how he screams into the storm knowing that the sound will be snatched away almost before it escapes his mouth and will become lost in the turmoil. ‘There is no skill in manning your ship through seas that can smash it as though it were nothing but brittle planks of wood.’ Andre says, ‘Captains will boast of their prowess in a storm but you survive purely by the capricious will of the sea. She decides if you live or die, and in that situation all you can do is hold on for the ride and feel privileged that she has allowed you to see her at her most powerful.

One icy winter morning he called for me at a hotel in a Midwestern city to take me about thirty-five miles to another town to fill a lecture engagement. We got into his car and started off at a rather high rate of speed on the slippery road. He was going a little faster than I thought reasonable, and I reminded him that we had plenty of time and suggested that we take it easy. “Don’t let my driving worry you,” he replied. “I used to be filled with all kinds of insecurities myself, but I got over them. I was afraid of everything. I feared an automobile trip or an airplane flight; and if any of my family went away I worried until they returned. I always went around with a feeling that something was going to happen, and it made my life miserable. I was saturated with inferiority and lacked confidence. This state of mind reflected itself in my business and I wasn’t doing very well. But I hit upon a wonderful plan which knocked all these insecurity feelings out of my mind, and now I live with a feeling of confidence, not only in myself but in life generally.

JOE’S MEAN GREEN (GREEN JUICE) Makes 2 servings Nutrition per serving: 251 kCal; 1049 kJ; 6 g protein; 54 g carbohydrates; 1 g fat; 0 g saturated fat; 2 g fiber; 30 g sugar; 128 mg salt Ingredients: 16 kale leaves 2 cucumbers 8 celery sticks 4 apples 1 lemon 2-inch (5 cm) piece of fresh root ginger

Your grandparents may have eaten these foods, but chances are you don’t. This has happened in large part because of the misguided campaigns against saturated fat, cholesterol, and red meat. But it’s also a consequence of our love for all things modern and our tendency to discount the knowledge of the past. The problem is that these now-unpopular foods provide nutrients that work synergistically with those found in more commonly eaten foods and are difficult to obtain elsewhere in the diet. In other words, we may be well fed, but we’re undernourished. The solution is to return to the practice of our ancestors and “eat from nose to tail.” This means eating not only the lean muscle meat (like steak or chicken breast) of animals but also the organs, skin, cartilage, bones, and fattier cuts. These parts of the animal contain

The person suffering from depression feels guilty because s/he is unable to compete and to win, in an environment saturated with incitements to act, to mobilize energies. A violent break from the thread of depressive paralysis can sometimes seem to be the only way out – an action separated from reflection, an action that does not imply any future, a visible sign of existence, of mobilization, of energy. A violent acting out, as disconnected from a conscious elaboration: just do it.