Fertility Issue Quotes

Fertility is such a difficult feminist issue because our biology hasn't caught up with our politics.

The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future.

Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghost of souls who hadn't lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X's without Y's. Y's without X's. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn't go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome - yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity.

Thyme and oregano may help naturally increase progesterone. Both of these oils are in the GI cleansing formula I recommend as a cleanse when there is a fertility issue. Thyme is also included in the basic vitality supplements.

There, in the unconscious, we sleep upon the psyche's oceanic floor, together like some vast bed of kelp, each wavering strand an individual American, swaying in the currents of national suggestion. In the form of a giant Portuguese man-of-war, our government hovers, rippling above us, showering freshly produced national memory spores on the fertile bed of our forgetfulness. Schools of undulating corporate jellyfish pass over, sowing the brands of products and services ... followed by the octopi called media and marketing, issuing milky clouds of sperm to fertilise the seeds with the animating plasma of The Great Dream.

Mother inexhaustible and incorruptible, creatures, born the first, engendered by thyself and by thyself conceived, issue of thyself alone and seeking joy within thyself, Astarte! Oh! Perpetually fertilized, virgin and nurse of all that is, chaste and lascivious, pure and revelling, ineffable, nocturnal, sweet, breather of fire, foam of the sea! Thou who accordest grace in secret, thou who unites, thou who lovest, thou who seizes with furious desire the multiplied races of savage beasts and the couplets the sexes in the wood. Oh, irresistible Astarte! hear me, take me, possess me, oh, Moon! and thirteen times each year draw from my womb the sweet libation of my blood!

Our essential difficulty is that we are seeking in a mechanism, which is necessary, qualities it simply does not possess. The market does not lead, balance or encourage democracy. However, properly regulated it is the most effective way to conduct business. It cannot give leadership even on straight economic issues. The world-wide depletion of fish stocks is a recent example. The number of fish caught between 1950 and 1989 multiplied by five. The fishing fleet went from 585,000 boats in 1970 to 1.2 million in 1990 and on to 3.5 million today (1995). No one thought about the long- or even medium-term maintenance of stocks; not the fishermen, not the boat builders, not the fish wholesalers who found new uses for their product, including fertilizer and chicken feed; not the financiers. It wasn't their job. Their job was to worry about their own interests. (IV - From Managers and Speculators to Growth)

In choosing a man or men with whom to share her life, a woman has two major issues to consider. On the one hand, she needs a man who can help her raise her children. On the other, she needs genes that in combination with her own will produce attractive, fertile and successful children.

PCOS, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), fibroids, cystic ovaries, depression, thyroid issues, adrenal fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), amenorrhea, dysmenorrhea, unexplained infertility, low libido, acne/rosacea/eczema, weight problems, human papillomavirus (HPV)—a lot of weighty medical terms to describe a lot of serious and challenging conditions. How can one protocol prevent and treat so many different “castaway conditions”?

The other major hormonal player in your cycle is progesterone. It helps to prepare the uterus for implantation with a healthy fertilized egg and supports pregnancy. If no implantation occurs, progesterone levels drop, and another cycle begins. Progesterone receptors are highly concentrated in the brain. Progesterone can support GABA, the brain’s relaxation neurotransmitter; acts to protect your nerve cells; and supports the myelin sheath that covers neurons. I like to think of progesterone as the “feel-good hormone.” It makes you feel calm and peaceful and encourages sleep. It’s like nature’s Valium, but better, because instead of making your brain fuzzy, it sharpens your thinking. It has also been shown to help with brain injuries by reducing inflammation and counteracting damage. It is so much more than a sex hormone. Progesterone increases during pregnancy, which is why many pregnant women often feel great. Some women with hormonal issues, in fact, feel so much better during pregnancy that they will

Few chemicals confer maleness, but many take it away. Which, if any, are responsible for our own troubles is hard to say. The Pill changed men's lives in more ways than one. It caused reproductive hormones to leak into tap water and has been blamed both for the sex changes in freshwater fish and for the drop in our own sperm count. The jury is still out on the issue, but other hormones have had a disastrous effect. A drug called diethylstilbestrol was once thought - in error - to prevent miscarriage. Five million mothers took it and for a time it was even used as a chicken food supplement. A third of the boys exposed to the drug in the womb suffer from small testes or a reduced penis. In rats, the chemical causes prostate and testicular cancer (although there is as yet no sign of those problems in ourselves). To give a powerful steroid to pregnant women was at best unwise, but the effects of other chemicals were harder to foresee. The 1950s saw a wonderful new chemical treatment for banana pests. Soon the substance was much used. Twenty years later the workers noticed something odd: they had almost no children. Their sperm count had dropped by five hundred times.

I have not attempted to cover all aspects of the ethics of in vitro fertilization and embryo experimentation. To do that, it would be necessary to investigate several other issues, including the appropriateness of allocating scarce medical resources to this area at a time when the world has a serious problem of overpopulation. Further uses of IVF, such as donating or selling embryos to others, employing a surrogate to bear the child, using IVF to enable older women to have children (in 2008, a 70-year-old Indian woman used the technique to become the oldest woman reliably recorded as having had a child), or selecting from among a number of embryos for the one that meets some criteria of genetic desirability, raise separate ethical issues.

Those of us who have so-called normal lives without undue stress and fear and worry and pain rarely know how fortunate we are. Then we see a man like Adam who’s famous even if unemployed and who lives at his sister’s house and struggles to manage, and we’re tempted to think he should snap out of it. He’s obviously intelligent, and he has no apparent disabilities. So we think, you’re smart, go out and get a job, and make yourself a normal life. Then we learn that the man has Traumatic Brain Injury and medical issues that can rip normalcy in two, and we realize that one of the main problems is in ourselves for failing to consider that not all other people have our good fortune of functioning bodies and brains, with emotional and psychological landscapes that are level and fertile and stable and predictable.

The two issues, population control and cybernation, produce the same nervous superficial response because in both cases the underlying problem is one for which there is no precedent: qualitative change in humanity's basic relationships to both its production and its reproduction. We will need almost overnight, in order to deal with the profound effects of fertility control and cybernation, a new culture based on a radical redefinition of human relationships and leisure for the masses. To so radically redefine our relationship to production and reproduction requires the destruction at once of the class system as well as the family. We will be beyond arguments about who is “bringing home the bacon” — no one will be bringing it home, because no one will be “working”. Job discrimination would no longer have any basis in a society where machines do the work better than human beings of any size or skill could. Machines thus could act as the perfect equalizer, obliterating the class system based on exploitation of labor.

Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft-cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.

Between 1970 and 1971, the feminist movement made significant strides. In 1970, the Equal Rights Amendment was forced out of the House Judiciary Committee, where it had been stuck since 1948; the following year, it passed in the House of Representatives. In response to a sit-in led by Susan Brownmiller, Ladies' Home Journal published a feminist supplement on issues of concern to women. Time featured Sexual Politics author Kate Millett on its cover, and Ms., a feminist monthly, debuted as an insert in New York magazine. Even twelve members of a group with which Barbie had much in common—Transworld Airlines stewardesses—rose up, filing a multimillion-dollar sex discrimination suit against the airline. Surprisingly, Barbie didn't ignore these events as she had the Vietnam War; she responded. Her 1970 "Living" incarnation had jointed ankles, permitting her feet to flatten out. If one views the doll as a stylized fertility icon, Barbie's arched feet are a source of strength; but if one views her as a literal representation of a modern woman—an equally valid interpretation— her arched feet are a hindrance. Historically, men have hobbled women to prevent them from running away. Women of Old China had their feet bound in childhood; Arab women wore sandals on stilts; Palestinian women were secured at the ankles with chains to which bells were attached; Japanese women were wound up in heavy kimonos; and Western women were hampered by long, restrictive skirts and precarious heels. Given this precedent, Barbie's flattened feet were revolutionary. Mattel did not, however, promote them that way. Her feet were just one more "poseable" element of her "poseable" body. It was almost poignant. Barbie was at last able to march with her sisters; but her sisters misunderstood her and pushed her away.

A widely quoted study from the Oxford Martin School predicts that technology threatens to replace 47 percent of all US jobs within 20 years. One of Pew experts even foresees the advent of “robotic sex partners.’’ The world’s oldest profession may be no more. When all this happens, what, exactly, will people do? Half of those in the Pew report are relatively unconcerned, believing — as has happened in the past — that even as technology destroys jobs, it creates more new ones. But half are deeply worried, fearing burgeoning unemployment, a growing schism between the highly educated and everyone else, and potentially massive social dislocation. (The fact that Pew’s experts are evenly split also exposes one of the truths of prognostication: A coin flip might work just as well.) Much of this debate over more or fewer jobs misses a key element, one brought up by some of those surveyed by Pew: These are primarily political issues; what happens is up to us. If lower-skilled jobs are no more, the solution, quite obviously, is training and education. Moreover, the coming world of increasingly ubiquitous robotics has the potential for significant increases in productivity. Picture, for instance, an entirely automated farm, with self-replicating and self-repairing machines planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and delivering. Food wouldn’t be free, but it could become so cheap that, like water (Detroit excepted), it’s essentially available to everyone for an almost nominal cost. It’s a welfare state, of course, but at some point, with machines able to produce the basic necessities of life, why not? We’d have a world of less drudgery and more leisure. People would spend more time doing what they want to do rather than what they have to do. It might even cause us to rethink what it means to be human. Robots will allow us to use our “intelligence in new ways, freeing us up from menial tasks,’’ says Tiffany Shlain, host of AOL’s “The Future Starts Here.’’ Just as Lennon hoped and Star Trek predicted.

Over twenty million women suffer from polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), fibroids, endometriosis, painful/difficult/heavy periods, and thyroid and adrenal issues.

Spreading straw might be considered rather unimportant, but it is fundamental to my method of growing rice and winter grain. It is connected with everything, with fertility, with germination, with weeds, with keeping away sparrows, with water management. In actual practice and in theory, the use of straw in farming is a crucial issue. This is something that I cannot seem to get people to understand.

First, national standards and national curriculum, enforced by high-stakes testing, can at best teach students what is prescribed by the curriculum and expected by the standards. This system fails to expose students to content and skills in other areas. As a result, students talented in other areas never have the opportunity to discover those talents. Students with broader interests are discouraged, not rewarded. The system results in a population with similar skills in a narrow spectrum of talents. But especially in today's society, innovation and creativity are needed in many areas, some as yet undiscovered. Innovation and creativity come from cross-fertilization across different disciplines. A narrow educational experience hardly provides children opportunities to examine an issue from multiple disciplines.

First, after going in for a checkup, the doctors told me that I had fertility issues. Since I was a kid, my periods came and went whenever the hell they wanted to.

It is at times like these that I have a powerful perceptual shift about luck and fate and the chaotic randomness of life. Those of us who have so-called normal lives without undue stress and fear and worry and pain rarely know how fortunate we are. Then we see a man like Adam who’s famous even if unemployed and who lives at his sister’s house and struggles to manage, and we’re tempted to think he should snap out of it. He’s obviously intelligent, and he has no apparent disabilities. So we think, you’re smart, go out and get a job, and make yourself a normal life. Then we learn that the man has Traumatic Brain Injury and medical issues that can rip normalcy in two, and we realize that one of the main problems is in ourselves for failing to consider that not all other people have our good fortune of functioning bodies and brains, with emotional and psychological landscapes that are level and fertile and stable and predictable.

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Nitrogen fertilizer is a significant contributor to the world’s carbon footprint. Its production is energy intensive because the chemical process involved requires both heat and pressure. Depending on the efficiency of the factory, making 1 ton of fertilizer creates between 1 and 4 tons CO2e. When the fertilizer is actually applied, between 1 and 5 percent of the nitrogen it contains is released as nitrous oxide, which is around 300 times more potent than CO2. This adds between 1.7 and 8.3 tons CO2e to the total footprint,11 depending on a variety of factors.12 Here’s how the science of it goes. All plants contain nitrogen, so if you’re growing a crop, it has to be replaced into the soil somehow or it will eventually run out. Nitrogen fertilizer is one way of doing this. Manure is another. Up to a point there can be big benefits. For some crops in some situations, the amount of produce can even be proportional to the amount of nitrogen that is used. However, there is a cut-off point after which applying more does nothing at all to the yield, or even decreases it. Timing matters, too. It is inefficient to apply fertilizer before a seed has had a chance to develop into a rapidly growing plant. Currently these messages are frequently not understood by small farmers in rural China, especially, where fertilizer is as cheap as chips and the farmers believe that the more they put on the bigger and better the crop will be. Many have a visceral understanding of the needs for high yields, having experienced hunger in their own lifetime, so it is easy to understand the instinct to spread a bit more fertilizer. After all, China has 22 percent of the world’s population to feed from 9 percent of the world’s arable land. There are other countries in which the same issues apply, although typically the developed world is more careful. Meanwhile in parts of Africa there is a scarcity of nitrogen in the soil and there would be real benefits in applying a bit more fertilizer to increase the yield and get people properly fed. One-third of all nitrogen fertilizer is applied to fields in China—about 26 million tons per year. The Chinese government believes there is scope for a 30 to 60 percent reduction without any decrease in yields. In other words, emissions savings on the order of 100 million tons are possible just by cutting out stuff that does nothing whatsoever to help the yield. There are other benefits, too. It’s much better for the environment generally, and it’s cheaper and easier for the farmers. It boils down to an education exercise... and perhaps dealing with the interests of a fertilizer industry.

Professor Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster conducted a study in which he found that despite lengthy sojourns in prison, London criminals still managed to produce more children on average than ordinary, law-abiding citizens (Lynn, 1995). Lynn calculated the increase in crime that would be expected, given the degree to which criminal behavior is a function of heredity, and estimated the increase in crime which should result (other factors being equal) by the excess fertility of criminals. His excellent book, Dysgenics (reviewed here) is the most comprehensive and authoritative work on the issue of eugenics and dysgenics to date.

Black: fertility, protection against malevolent forces, healing of chronic illnesses • Blue: peace, tranquility, protection, healing of addictions, psychic and emotional pain • Brown: justice, legal issues, healing fatigue and wasting illnesses • Green: growth, prosperity, abundance, employment, physical healing, especially cancer • Purple: sex, power, lust, spiritual growth and ecstasy • Red: luck, love, good fortune, fertility, banishment of negative entities, protection, healing blood ailments and female reproductive disorders • Pink: love, romance, requests for healing children • White: creativity, forgiveness, new projects* • Yellow: romance, love, sex, growth, prosperity, good fortune, abundance (See also: Maximon.)

Should I also be glad of our unwanted guest?" "Unwanted?" Her eyes widened as her voice rose. "She's the goddess of love, fertility, beauty, and desire. Who could be more perfect for a wedding? Although..." She tapped her lush lips, considering. "She does have a bad side, but you can't blame her. Who wouldn't have issues if you'd been born from the sea foam created from Uranus's blood after his youngest son, Cronus, castrated him and threw his genitals into the sea?" The woman in pink choked on her food. The man with the goatee barked a laugh. Jay crossed his legs, although his family jewels weren't under threat. "She also had many adulterous affairs," Zara continued to her now rapt audience of singles. "Most notable with Ares. So maybe cutting off her head is a good thing." She lifted a forkful of biryani. "Did you know her name gave us the word aphrodisiac? Or that her Latin name, Venus, gave us the word venereal for venereal dis----" Jay cut her off with a raised hand. "Not something I really wanted to think about over a meal.

In a report that brought together findings from studies over the past forty years of more than 100,000 employed women, those working irregular nighttime hours resulting in poor-quality sleep, such as nurses who performed shift work (a profession occupied almost exclusively by woman at the time of these earlier studies), had a 33 percent higher rate of abnormal menstrual cycles than those working regular daytime hours. Moreover, the woman working erratic hours were 80 percent more likely to suffer from issues of sub-fertility that reduced the ability to get pregnant. Woman who do become pregnant and routinely sleep less than eight hours a night are also significantly more likely to suffer a miscarriage in the first trimester, relative to those consistently sleeping eight hours or more a night.

[...] two issues of the new ecology that particularly pertain to the new feminism: reproduction and its control, including the seriousness of the population explosion and new methods of fertility control, and cybernation, the future takeover by machines of increasingly complex functions, altering man's age-old relation to work and wages.

Societally, we will need to see shifts in how we—including the medical community—approach wellness. Instead of hospitals being repositories for the sick, they will need to become wellness centers after recovery or treatment reverses major issues. That is, they will need to focus on prevention, on health optimization, on opportunities to reboot our bodies. Many more people will recover from illness at home, as hospitals will bring those facilities and services to you, and less expensively. Note: With a decrease in fertility we expect more stabilization of pediatric and delivery centers, and with an increase in longevity we will see growth of plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures.

I also like to call this category "hypersuck," because women tend to get "sucked" into believing that our bodies are wild, scary, shameful places that need to be managed by an outside source, medicated, controlled, and sterilized. (We have the media and other social influences to thank for that.) We are rewarded for acting/speaking/looking like young girls versus confident women. We have too few powerful, healthy role models, but plenty of exhausted moms and emaciated models front and center on our cultural stage. We have a hard time appreciating our grown-up female bodies. We're made to feel that feminine intuition is fickle. We suspect that our energy is unstable. We're conditioned to think that our periods are shameful and disgusting. We look for ways to fix what's broken. We discipline the highs and lows of our female essence. We disconnect from our own bodies and, often, our deepest sense of knowing. Ultimately, our mind-body conversation tips the scales in a negative direction, and this too affects hormone balance. And since hypersuck (that old cultural conditioning) tricks us into thinking our bodies are supposed to be acting this way, we allow serious hormonal issues - and all the symptoms that tag along - to linger for years before seeking out any kind of sustainable action to help heal ourselves. Sadly, many women lose faith long before reaching the point of action.

A related issue to the Anthropic Principle is the so-called “god-of-the-gaps” in which theists argue that the (shrinking) number of issues that science has not yet explained require the existence of a god. For example, science has not (yet) been able to demonstrate the creation of a primitive life-form in the laboratory from non-living material (though US geneticist Craig Venter’s recent demonstration lays claim to having created such a laboratory synthetic life-form, the “Mycoplasma Laboratorium”). It is therefore concluded that a god is necessary to account for this step because of the “gap” in scientific knowledge. The issue of creating life in the laboratory (and other similar “gap” issues such as those in the fossil record) is reminiscent of other such “gaps” in the history of science that have since been bridged. For example, the laboratory synthesis of urea from inorganic materials by Friedrich Wöhler in 1828 at that time had nearly as much impact on religious believers as Copernicus’s heliocentric universe proposal. From the time of the Ancient Egyptians, the doctrine of vitalism had been dominant. Vitalism argued that the functions of living organisms included a “vital force” and therefore were beyond the laws of physics and chemistry. Urea (carbamide) is a natural metabolite found in the urine of animals that had been widely used in agriculture as a fertilizer and in the production of phosphorus. However, Friedrich Wöhler was the first to demonstrate that a natural organic material could be synthesized from inorganic materials (a combination of silver isocyanate and ammonium chloride leads to urea as one of its products). The experiment led Wöhler famously to write to a fellow chemist that it was “the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact,” that is, the slaying of vitalism by urea in a Petri dish. In practice, it took more than just Wöhler’s demonstration to slay vitalism as a scientific doctrine, but the synthesis of urea in the laboratory is one of the key advances in science in which the “gap” between the inorganic and the organic was finally bridged. And Wöhler certainly pissed on the doctrine of vitalism, if you will excuse a very bad joke.

the fear of fertility

Maybe Sloan would agree to a deal. I’d talk to someone about some of my issues if she would agree to go to grief counseling. It wasn’t me giving in to Josh like she wanted, but Sloan knew how much I hated therapists, and she’d always wanted me to see someone. I was debating how to pitch this to her when I glanced into the living room and saw it—a single purple carnation on my coffee table. I looked around the kitchen like I might suddenly find someone in my house. But Stuntman was calm, plopped under my chair. I went in to investigate and saw that the flower sat on top of a binder with the words “just say okay” written on the outside in Josh’s writing. He’d been here? My heart began to pound. I looked again around the living room like I might see him, but it was just the binder. I sat on the sofa, my hands on my knees, staring at the binder for what felt like ages before I drew the courage to pull the book into my lap. I tucked my hair behind my ear and licked my lips, took a breath, and opened it up. The front page read “SoCal Fertility Specialists.” My breath stilled in my lungs. What? He’d had a consultation with Dr. Mason Montgomery from SoCal Fertility. A certified subspecialist in reproductive endocrinology and infertility with the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He’d talked to them about in vitro and surrogacy, and he’d had fertility testing done. I put a shaky hand to my mouth, and tears began to blur my eyes. I pored over his test results. Josh was a breeding machine. Strong swimmers and an impressive sperm count. He’d circled this and put a winking smiley face next to it and I snorted. He’d outlined the clinic’s high success rates—higher than the national average—and he had gotten signed personal testimonials from previous patients, women like me who used a surrogate. Letter after letter of encouragement, addressed to me. The next page was a complete breakdown on the cost of in vitro and information on Josh’s health insurance and what it covered. His insurance was good. It covered the first round of IVF at 100 percent. He even had a small business plan. He proposed selling doghouses that he would build. The extra income would raise enough money for the second round of in vitro in about three months. The next section was filled with printouts from the Department of International Adoptions. Notes scrawled in Josh’s handwriting said Brazil just opened up. He broke down the process, timeline, and costs right down to travel expenses and court fees. I flipped past a sleeve full of brochures to a page on getting licensed for foster care. He’d already gone through the background check, and he enclosed a form for me, along with a series of available dates for foster care orientation classes and in-home inspections. Was this what he’d been doing? This must have taken him weeks. My chin quivered. Somehow, seeing it all down on paper, knowing we’d be in it together, it didn’t feel so hopeless. It felt like something that we could do. Something that might actually work. Something possible. The last page had an envelope taped to it. I pried it open with trembling hands, my throat getting tight. I know what the journey will look like, Kristen. I’m ready to take this on. I love you and I can’t wait to tell you the best part…Just say okay. I dropped the letter and put my face into my hands and sobbed like I’d never sobbed in my life. He’d done all this for me. Josh looked infertility dead in the eye, and his choice was still me. He never gave up. All this time, no matter how hard I rejected him or how difficult I made it, he never walked away from me. He just changed strategies. And I knew if this one didn’t work he’d try another. And another. And another. He’d never stop trying until I gave in. And Sloan—she knew. She knew this was here, waiting for me. That’s why she’d made me leave. They’d conspired to do this.

At this stage of our evolution, it seems to have become part of the human condition for many of us to opt out of using the smartest part of our brain (the frontal lobe) to address life-changing issues and, instead, choose to do much of our thinking from other, less enlightened parts of the brain, which may simply be fertile breeding grounds for fear, prejudice, and unhealthy addictions.

Nomadic tribesman that inhabited ancient Iraq hadn’t known of the tribesmen of Australia, the Indians of Northern America, or the ancient civilizations of Greece. Both Christian and Judaic scripture maintain that human life originated in the Fertile Crescent, a section of land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern day Iraq, which makes perfect sense since this was the area where such myths had begun.

What makes this natural process a fertile source of problems is that we apply these nonrational cues to words that also denote rational concepts, and then confuse the two. Watch the way people talk about a political concept central to their society’s self-image: for example, the concept of democracy. The social self, that unruly horse, insists that democracy – real democracy – ought to live up to standards that no real political system can achieve. What ought to be called real democracy is the cumbersome, corrupt, flawed, but functional system that emerges when real human beings have the right to elect officials and vote on issues. Still, that’s not how the horse sees it; to the horse, democracy is an emotionally charged symbol rich with warm feelings, and real democracy means that symbol in some impossibly perfect manifestation on the plane of everyday life.

Circumcision is well-known in the ancient Near East from as early as the fourth millennium BC, though the details of its practice and its significance vary from culture to culture. Circumcision was practiced in the ancient Near East by many peoples. The Egyptians practiced circumcision as early as the third millennium BC. West Semitic peoples, Israelites, Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites performed circumcision. Eastern Semitic peoples did not (e.g., Assyrians, Babylonians, Akkadians)—nor did the Philistines, an Aegean or Greek people. Anthropological studies have suggested that the rite always has to do with at least one of four basic themes: fertility, virility, maturity and genealogy. Study of Egyptian mummies demonstrates that the surgical technique in Egypt differed from that used by the Israelites; while the Hebrews amputated the prepuce of the penis, the Egyptians merely incised the foreskin and so exposed the glans penis. Egyptians were not circumcised as children, but in either prenuptial or puberty rites. The common denominator, however, is that it appears to be a rite of passage, giving new identity to the one circumcised and incorporating him into a particular group. Evidence from the Levant comes as early as bronze figurines from the Amuq Valley (Tell el-Judeideh) from the early third millennium BC. An ivory figurine from Megiddo from the mid-second millennium BC shows Canaanite prisoners who are circumcised. Southern Mesopotamia shows no evidence of the practice, nor is any Akkadian term known for the practice. The absence of such evidence is significant since Assyrian and Babylonian medical texts are available in abundance. Abraham is therefore aware of the practice from living in Canaan and visiting Egypt rather than from his roots in Mesopotamia. Since Ishmael is 13 years old at this time, Abraham may even have been wondering whether it was a practice that would characterize this new family of his. In Ge 17 circumcision is retained as a rite of passage, but one associated with identity in the covenant. In light of today’s concerns with gender issues, some have wondered why the sign of the covenant should be something that marks only males. Two cultural issues may offer an explanation: patrilineal descent and identity in the community. (1) The concept of patrilineal descent resulted in males being considered the representatives of the clan and the ones through whom clan identity was preserved (as, e.g., the wife took on the tribal and clan identity of her husband). (2) Individuals found their identity more in the clan and the community than in a concept of self. Decisions and commitments were made by the family and clan more than by the individual. The rite of passage represented in circumcision marked each male as entering a clan committed to the covenant, a commitment that he would then have the responsibility to maintain. If this logic holds, circumcision would not focus on individual participation in the covenant as much as on continuing communal participation. The community is structured around patrilineal descent, so the sign on the males marks the corporate commitment of the clan from generation to generation. ◆

Catholicism’s greatest concern regarding the poor in the sixties was the issue of fertile ground that could give rise to any kind of ideology.  This could detract from what the Church asked of the Second Vatican Council and has maintained ever since; to espouse the right path in responding to an absolutely inescapable demand, one that is central, such as concern from the poor, and which, in my view, appears fully formed in the bishop’s conference in Aparecida….[Yes,] there were missteps.  But there were also thousands of pastors, be they priests, religious men or women, young, adult or old laypeople, who committed themselves to the Church and are the honor of our work, the source of our joy…It’s a matter of concerning oneself not with partisan politics, but with the great politics born of the commandments and the Gospel.

Where is your wife Sarah? It could be inferred from the angel’s question that it was unusual for Sarah not to be there—either in a serving capacity or joining them in the meal (there is no evidence of women eating separately in the ancient world). It could also be inferred from Abraham’s curt response (“there, in the tent”) that this was not just the circumstance of the moment and that she could be sent for. These are not necessary inferences, but there is a possibility that something is indicated here that was transparent to the Israelite reader, yet elusive to us. That is, it is possible that Sarah has had to retreat to the tent and is now confined there—that she has suddenly, much to her shock and consternation, become “indisposed.” Menstruation rendered a woman unclean in the ancient world and would have prohibited her from social contact and from food preparation and serving. The text specifically indicates that she had already gone through menopause (v. 11), but if she were to bear a child, her period would need to restart. The timing would have to be precise here. In v. 6 Abraham asked Sarah to bake some bread, an activity often forbidden to menstruating women in Abraham’s time, so at that point her period had not begun. Yet she would not be confined to her tent unless she actually had her period. If this is the issue, she experienced the onset of her period as dinner is being served. We know even from the Biblical narratives that menstruating women were at times confined to their tents (cf. 31:34–35). This view is also attested in the ancient Near East. Though somewhat speculative, this line of thinking would explain why the announcement that Sarah would bear a child is introduced by a question concerning Sarah’s whereabouts, leading the somewhat embarrassed Abraham to offer the euphemistic explanation that she is “in the tent” as a way of explaining that she is indisposed (note our modern euphemism, “it’s that time of the month”). One could almost imagine a transitional, “Indeed, and that is just the beginning . . .” It would have constituted a remarkable sign of the resumption of her fertility.

• Black: fertility, protection against malevolent forces, healing of chronic illnesses • Blue: peace, tranquility, protection, healing of addictions, psychic and emotional pain • Brown: justice, legal issues, healing fatigue and wasting illnesses • Green: growth, prosperity, abundance, employment, physical healing, especially cancer • Purple: sex, power, lust, spiritual growth and ecstasy • Red: luck, love, good fortune, fertility, banishment of negative entities, protection, healing blood ailments and female reproductive disorders • Pink: love, romance, requests for healing children • White: creativity, forgiveness, new projects* • Yellow: romance, love, sex, growth, prosperity, good fortune, abundance

27 Nakshatra and their Lords in Astrology As per Vedic astrology and Indian mythology, the planets, earth, and stars all affect human life. The same goes for the nakshatras, as they can tell everything from a person’s present life to their future. That’s why astrologers use the word nakshatra to predict someone’s life. Actually, the nakshatras help in dealing with life issues and also help you know about the life of an individual. Nakshatra and their lords Ashwini - Ketu - Aswini is the first among the nakshatras and their lords. It is under the rule of Ketu. You might have heard of the Ashwani twins, who are also part of the Aswini Nakshatra. Well, the people born in this nakshatra and their lords are adventurous and full of life. They always try to bring new changes and also use words carefully that can heal others. Bharani – Venus. These kinds of people are usually born under the Bharani Nakshatra. Bharani is ruled by Venus. This nakshatra tells about the cycle of birth, fertility, and many other related things. Babies born under Bharani are usually responsible in the future and love to care for others. Krittika – Sun. Krittika, is ruled by God Sun. Yes, the sun is known for its fiery determination to burn and shine. People born under this nakshatra are full of determination and willpower. Rohini -Moon Such people who love peace and want harmony everywhere are usually born under Rohini Nakshatra. It is under Shree Krishna (Vishnu Ji). People born under this Nakshatra are emotional, have artistic abilities, and have a lovely nature too. Mrigasira – Mars This deer-shaped Mrigashira is ruled by Sri Chandra Sudeshwar (Lord Shiva) and Mars. People born under this have intelligence, good nature, and love exploring knowledge. Ardra – Rahu Adra is ruled by Rahu. An Ardra Nakshtra-born individual can break their limitations and adapt to changes. Punarvasu –Jupiter Yes if you see leadership qualities in people around you then it’s sure that the person is born in Punarvasu and ruled by Jupiter. Jyestha – Mercury Jyestha locals frequently demonstrate superior intellectual abilities, a perceptive disposition, and a knack for solving problems. Moola – Ketu Those who are from Moola frequently have an air of mystery, a strong sense of purpose, and a desire to solve life’s riddles. Revati – Mercury Revati babies have a kind and compassionate disposition, a great desire to help others, and a creative spirit. Natives of Revati frequently succeed in careers that let them use their creativity to express themselves and help others, such as counseling, writing, performing arts, or any other line of work involving the arts. For more details about this articles: Click Here