Finally Visited This Place Quotes

It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” said Ito finally, who had been keeping very quiet
up to this point.
“Indeed. How much will it cost?” asked Brown
“About twenty million Interplanetary Credits,” said Demba. “A modest investment for
a man of your means.”
“Indeed,” said Brown again. That was all the money he had, which started to strike
him as strange, when his thoughts were interrupted.
“We’ll arrange a visit to the mine,” said Ito. “Show you the place itself.”
“Indeed,” said Brown. Or had he said that? The strange waking memory he had fallen
into started to become repetitive. Reality started to flow back in.
Diamonds, thought Brown. All those diamonds in that mine.

I picture it like Judgement Day,' he says finally, his eyes on the water. 'We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings. I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.

As my visits with Morrie go on, I begin to read about death, how different cultures view the final passage. There is a tribe in the North American Arctic, for example, who believe that all things on earth have a soul that exists in a miniature form of the body that hold it -so that a deer has a tiny deer inside it, and a man has a tiny man inside him. When the large being dies, that tiny form lives on. It can slide into something being born nearby, or it can go to a temporary resting place in the sky, in the belly of a great feminine spirit, where it waits until the moon can send it back to earth. Sometimes, they say, the moon is so busy with the new souls of the world that it disappears from the sky. That is why we have moonless nights. But in the end, the moon always returns, as do we all. That is what they believe.

Dear Jack: I have no idea who he was. But he saved me. From you. I watched from the doorway as he smacked, punched, and threw you against the wall. You fought back hard- I'll give you that- but you were no match for him. And when it was over- when you'd finally passed out- the boy made direct eye contact with me. He removed the rag from my mouth and asked me if I was okay. 'Yes. I mean, I think so,' I told him. But it was her that he was really interested in: the girl who was lying unconscious on the floor. Her eyes were swollen, and there looked to be a trail of blood running from her nose. The boy wiped her face with a rag. And then he kissed her, and held her, and ran his hand over her cheek, finally grabbing his cell to dial 911. He was wearing gloves, which I thought was weird. Maybe he was concerned about his fingerprints, from breaking in. But once he hung up, he removed the gloves, took the girl's hand, and placed it on the front of his leg- as if it were some magical hot spot that would make her better somehow. Tears welled up in his eyes as he apologized for not getting there sooner. 'I'm so sorry,' he just kept saying. And suddenly I felt sorry too. Apparently it was the anniversary of something tragic that'd happened. I couldn't really hear him clearly, but I was pretty sure he'd mentioned visiting an old girlfriend's grave. 'You deserve someone better,' he told her. 'Someone who'll be open and honest; who won't be afraid to share everything with you.' He draped his sweatshirt over her, kissed her behind the ear, and then promised to love her forever. A couple minutes later, another boy came in, all out of breath. 'Is she alright?' he asked. The boy who saved me stood up, wiped his tearful eyes, and told the other guy to sit with her until she woke up. And then he went to find scissors for me. He cut me free and brought me out to the sofa. 'My name's Ben,' he said. 'And help is on the way.' When the girl finally did wake up, Ben allowed the other guy to take credit for saving her life. I wanted to ask him why, but I haven't been able to speak. That's what this letter is for. My therapist says that I need to tell my side of things in order to regain my voice. She suggested that addressing my thoughts directly to you might help provide some closure. So far, it hasn't done the trick. Never your Jill, Rachael

It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as to my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying alcohol with dabs of a cotton ball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky. I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified. A few quick cuts and cunt becomes can't, cock turns into back, clit transforms to a very unlikely cat, the l and i turned into a teetering capital A. The last words I ever carved into myself, sixteen years after I started: vanish. Sometimes I can hear the words squabbling at each other across my body. Up on my shoulder, panty calling down to cherry on the inside of my right ankle. On the underside of a big toe, sew uttering muffled threats to baby, just under my left breast. I can quiet them down by thinking of vanish, always hushed and regal, lording over the other words from the safety of the nape of my neck. Also: At the center of my back, which was too difficult to reach, is a circle of perfect skin the size of a fist. Over the years I've made my own private jokes. You can really read me. Do you want me to spell it out for you? I've certainly given myself a life sentence. Funny, right? I can't stand to look myself without being completely covered. Someday I may visit a surgeon, see what can be done to smooth me, but now I couldn't bear the reaction. Instead I drink so I don't think too much about what I've done to my body and so I don't do any more. Yet most of the time that I'm awake, I want to cut. Not small words either. Equivocate. Inarticulate. Duplicitous. At my hospital back in Illinois they would not approve of this craving. For those who need a name, there's a gift basket of medical terms. All I know is that the cutting made me feel safe. It was proof. Thoughts and words, captured where I could see them and track them. The truth, stinging, on my skin, in a freakish shorthand. Tell me you're going to the doctor, and I'll want to cut worrisome on my arm. Say you've fallen in love and I buzz the outlines of tragic over my breast. I hadn't necessarily wanted to be cured. But I was out of places to write, slicing myself between my toes - bad, cry - like a junkie looking for one last vein. Vanish did it for me. I'd saved the neck, such a nice prime spot, for one final good cutting. Then I turned myself in.

...his favorite books, those he'd read over and over so he knew just the lurch his heart would make when he turned the page and encountered the illustration of the despondent dragon under a half-moon or the fervor with which he flipped the final pages of another, the story so vivid he felt his relationship with that book was less an act of reading than a visit, a place he went to.

My Dearest, I miss you, my darling, as I always do, but today is especially hard because the ocean has been singing to me, and the song is that of our life together. I can almost feel you beside me as I write this letter, and I can smell the scent of wildflowers that always reminds me of you. But at this moment, these things give me no pleasure. Your visits have been coming less often, and I feel sometimes as if the greatest part of who I am is slowly slipping away. I am trying, though. At night when I am alone, I call for you, and whenever my ache seems to be the greatest, you still seem to find a way to return to me. Last night, in my dreams, I saw you on the pier near Wrightsville Beach. The wind was blowing through your hair, and your eyes held the fading sunlight. I am struck as I see you leaning against the rail. You are beautiful, I think as I see you, a vision that I can never find in anyone else. I slowly begin to walk toward you, and when you finally turn to me, I notice that others have been watching you as well. “Do you know her?” they ask me in jealous whispers, and as you smile at me, I simply answer with the truth. “Better than my own heart.” I stop when I reach you and take you in my arms. I long for this moment more than any other. It is what I live for, and when you return my embrace, I give myself over to this moment, at peace once again. I raise my hand and gently touch your cheek and you tilt your head and close your eyes. My hands are hard and your skin is soft, and I wonder for a moment if you’ll pull back, but of course you don’t. You never have, and it is at times like this that I know what my purpose is in life. I am here to love you, to hold you in my arms, to protect you. I am here to learn from you and to receive your love in return. I am here because there is no other place to be. But then, as always, the mist starts to form as we stand close to one another. It is a distant fog that rises from the horizon, and I find that I grow fearful as it approaches. It slowly creeps in, enveloping the world around us, fencing us in as if to prevent escape. Like a rolling cloud, it blankets everything, closing, until there is nothing left but the two of us. I feel my throat begin to close and my eyes well up with tears because I know it is time for you to go. The look you give me at that moment haunts me. I feel your sadness and my own loneliness, and the ache in my heart that had been silent for only a short time grows stronger as you release me. And then you spread your arms and step back into the fog because it is your place and not mine. I long to go with you, but your only response is to shake your head because we both know that is impossible. And I watch with breaking heart as you slowly fade away. I find myself straining to remember everything about this moment, everything about you. But soon, always too soon, your image vanishes and the fog rolls back to its faraway place and I am alone on the pier and I do not care what others think as I bow my head and cry and cry and cry.

Twin Peaks – my first visit, charming place, as you’ve always told me, but to be honest, Chief, I’m a big-city girl and always will be.

Do not cling to the shore, but set sail for exotic lands and places no longer found on maps. Walk on hallowed grounds. Blaze new trails. The term synchronicity was coined in the 1950s by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, to describe uncanny coincidences that seem to be meaningful. The Greek roots are syn-, "together," and khronos, "time." Synchronicity is the effector of Gnosis. Explore the Bogomils and the Cathars not just through books but, if at all possible, by visiting their lands, cemeteries and descendants. Finally, explore the most contemporary manifestations of Gnosticism: the writings of C.G. Jung, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, René Guénon, Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick, and Albert Camus. Gradually, you will begin to understand the various thought currents and systems existing in Gnosticism, and you will have begun to understand what does and does not appeal to you in Gnostic thought.

New York, New York. The Big Apple. The City That Never Sleeps. Spider-Man's hometown. I assume it's a pretty cool place to visit, when you're not stuck in a fleabag motel for three days cramming for finals week in the psychopath exams.

On Turgenev: He knew from Lavrov that I was an enthusiastic admirer of his writings; and one day, as we were returning in a carriage from a visit to Antokolsky's studio, he asked me what I thought of Bazarov. I frankly replied, 'Bazaraov is an admirable painting of the nihilist, but one feels that you did not love him as mush as you did your other heroes.' 'On the contrary, I loved him, intensely loved him,' Turgenev replied, with an unexpected vigor. 'When we get home I will show you my diary, in which I have noted how I wept when I had ended the novel with Bazarov's death.' Turgenev certainly loved the intellectual aspect of Bazarov. He so identified himself with the nihilist philosophy of his hero that he even kept a diary in his name, appreciating the current events from Bazarov's point of view. But I think that he admired him more than he loved him. In a brilliant lecture on Hamlet and Don Quixote, he divided the history makers of mankind into two classes, represented by one or the other of these characters. 'Analysis first of all, and then egotism, and therefore no faith,--an egotist cannot even believe in himself:' so he characterized Hamlet. 'Therefore he is a skeptic, and never will achieve anything; while Don Quixote, who fights against windmills, and takes a barber's plate for the magic helmet of Mambrino (who of us has never made the same mistake?), is a leader of the masses, because the masses always follow those who, taking no heed of the sarcasms of the majority, or even of persecutions, march straight forward, keeping their eyes fixed upon a goal which is seen, perhaps, by no one but themselves. They search, they fall, but they rise again and find it,--and by right, too. Yet, although Hamlet is a skeptic, and disbelieves in Good, he does not disbelieve in Evil. He hates it; Evil and Deceit are his enemies; and his skepticism is not indifferentism, but only negation and doubt, which finally consume his will.' These thought of Turgenev give, I think, the true key for understanding his relations to his heroes. He himself and several of his best friends belonged more or less to the Hamlets. He loved Hamlet, and admired Don Quixote. So he admired also Bazarov. He represented his superiority admirably well, he understood the tragic character of his isolated position, but he could not surround him with that tender, poetical love which he bestowed as on a sick friend, when his heroes approached the Hamlet type. It would have been out of place.

When they returned on yet another visit and found the old body still as it had been, a mere passive addition to the complicated machines that kept it minimally alive, they saw finally that in their attempt to help they had not helped but only complicated his disease beyond their power to help. And they thought with regret of the time when the thing that was wrong with him had been simply unknown, and there had been only it and him and him and them in the place they had known together. Loving him, wanting to help him, they had given him over to “the best of modern medical care”—which meant, as they now saw, that they had abandoned him.

Christ, he was a cipher. For the first time, he worried if he could be worthy enough for Mariketa. Did he even deserve her? Yes, she was a witch, but she was also stunningly beautiful and brave and clever. “I like football, too,” he finally said. “You’ve already told me, so that doesn’t count.” “I love the color of your eyes.” She tucked a curl behind her pointed ear, sliding him the bewitching smile that made his heart punch the insides of his chest. “What’s your favorite place to visit?” He absently answered, “Wherever you are.” “Bowen, five things about you can’t all be about me.” But you’re the only good thing that I’ve got. “Why no’?

Joe stepped in front of them, blocking it from their view. "All of you listen to me." Three pairs of eyes locked on his face: hopeful, expectant, still dark with anger and fear. Protectiveness erupted , so strong Joe wanted to shout with it. He drew one breath, then another, but Jesus it didn't help. "You're mine now," he told them, and he knew his voice was hoarse, trembling with furious conviction. He hadn't meant to rush Luna, to spill his guts so soon. He'd meant to give himself time, to give her and the kids time. But he couldn't hold it in. "All of you. I protect what's mine. No one is going to hurt you, and no one is going to run us off. I'll find the son of a bitch, I swear it. And when I do, he'll pay." Luna's eyes, narrowed with rage only a moment ago, now softened with an expression far too close to concern. She gave a reluctant nod and spoke very softly. "All right, Joe." He had an awful suspicion she agreed more to soothe him than because she believed what he said. Willow swallowed, nodded, then gave him a trembling smile. "All right," she said, agreeing with Luna, and she, too, seemed to want to comfort him. Women. Austin launched himself forward, hugging himself around Joe's knees and hanging on tight. Joe almost fell over. He felt as though he'd been stomped on already, his muscles, his mind, his deepest emotions. Hell, he hadn't known he had deep emotions until the kids and Luna had dredged them from a dark, empty place. He wasn't all that steady on his feet, and Austin hit him with the impact of a small tank. But it was more the punch to his heart than the impetus against his legs that threw him off balance. Joe touched the tangled mop of blond hair. "Austin?" Austin squeezed him, then said against Joe's knees, "Okay." He finally tipped up his face to give Joe a crooked, admiring grin. "I sure like it when you're disrespectful." That ridiculous comment lightened Joe's mood, and he laughed. "Rodent.

And hey," Gabe added, "I don't even need the second bedroom, so we could set that up as a guest room, then you and Wade can stay when you visit." "You might want a roommate or something." "For what...you won't let me pay you any rent, so it's not like I need the financial assistance." "Well a boyfriend maybe?" "And he'd be sleeping in the second bedroom because?" "When he's mad 'cause you won't put out, for one." Gabe tried to shove me off him. "Don't be mean—like I wouldn't want to have sex with my boyfriend." "I'm just teasing Sally Sensitive, sheesh." "I do actually like having sex you know." Gabe frowned. I gasped, placing a hand on my chest. "Lordy mercy, my little Gabe's all growed up." Gabe laughed at me. "Finally ready to stuff his Italian sausage where the sun doesn't shine!

On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occur, there was once a crude little life-saving station. The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat. But the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea, and with no thought for themselves went out day and night tirelessly searching for the lost. Some of those who were saved, and various others in the surrounding area, wanted to become associated with the station and give their time and money and effort for the support of its work. New boats were bought and new crews trained. The little life-saving station grew. Some of the members of the life-saving were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea. They replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building. Now the life-saving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it as sort of a club. Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on life-saving missions, so they hired lifeboat crews to do this work. The life-saving motif still prevailed in this club`s decoration, and there was a liturgical lifeboat in the room where the club initiations were held. About this time a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet and half-drowned people. They were dirty and sick and some had black skin and some had yellow skin. The beautiful new club was in chaos. So the property committee immediately had a shower house built outside the club where victims of shipwrecks could be cleaned up before coming inside. At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club`s life-saving activities as being unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. Some members insisted upon life-saving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a life-saving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save lives of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own life-saving station down the coast. So they did just that. As the years went by, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old. It evolved into a club, and yet another `spin-off` life saving station was founded. History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit the sea coast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along the shore. Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the people drown.

Both women were mothers of children caught up in mind control cover-up, one of which paralleled Kelly’s and my case. She, too, had volumes of documents and evidences whereby it was inexcusable that justice had not prevailed. The other mother conveyed a story that touched me so deeply it undoubtedly will continue to motivate me with reverberating passion forever. This mother was very weak from the final stages of cancer and chemotherapy, and tears slid down her pale gray cheeks as she told me her story. When she reported sexual abuse of her three daughters, the local court system took custody of them. The children appeared dissociative identity disordered from their ordeal, yet were reportedly denied therapy and placed in Foster care “since the mother was dying anyway.” When she finally was granted brief visitation with her precious daughters, they looked dazed and robotic with no memory of her or their sexual abuse. Mind control was apparent to this mother, and she struggled to give voice to their plight to no avail. She explained how love and concern for her children had kept her alive far longer than her doctors thought possible. She embraced me and said, “Now I can die in peace knowing that you are out there talking, raising awareness with the same passion for justice and love for children that I have. Thank you. Please keep talking. Please remember my daughters.

St. Clair tucks the tips of his fingers into his pockets and kicks the cobblestones with the toe of his boots. "Well?" he finally asks. "Thank you." I'm stunned. "It was really sweet of you to bring me here." "Ah,well." He straightens up and shrugs-that full-bodied French shrug he does so well-and reassumes his usual, assured state of being. "Have to start somewhere. Now make a wish." "Huh?" I have such a way with words. I should write epic poetry or jingles for cat food commercials. He smiles. "Place your feet on the star, and make a wish." "Oh.Okay,sure." I slide my feet together so I'm standing in the center. "I wish-" "Don't say it aloud!" St. Clair rushes forward, as if to stop my words with his body,and my stomach flips violently. "Don't you know anything about making wishes? You only get a limited number in life. Falling stars, eyelashes,dandelions-" "Birthday candles." He ignores the dig. "Exactly. So you ought to take advantage of them when they arise,and superstition says if you make a wish on that star, it'll come true." He pauses before continuing. "Which is better than the other one I've heard." "That I'll die a painful death of poisoning, shooting,beating, and drowning?" "Hypothermia,not drowning." St. Clair laughs. He has a wonderful, boyish laugh. "But no. I've heard anyone who stands here is destined to return to Paris someday. And as I understand it,one year for you is one year to many. Am I right?" I close my eyes. Mom and Seany appear before me. Bridge.Toph.I nod. "All right,then.So keep your eyes closed.And make a wish." I take a deep breath. The cool dampness of the nearby trees fills my lungs. What do I want? It's a difficult quesiton. I want to go home,but I have to admit I've enjoyed tonight. And what if this is the only time in my entire life I visit Paris? I know I just told St. Clair that I don't want to be here, but there's a part of me-a teeny, tiny part-that's curious. If my father called tomorrow and ordered me home,I might be disappointed. I still haven't seen the Mona Lisa. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower.Walked beneath the Arc de Triomphe. So what else do I want? I want to feel Toph's lips again.I want him to wait.But there's another part of me,a part I really,really hate,that knows even if we do make it,I'd still move away for college next year.So I'd see him this Christmas and next summer,and then...would that be it? And then there's the other thing. The thing I'm trying to ignore. The thing I shouldn't want,the thing I can't have. And he's standing in front of me right now. So what do I wish for? Something I'm not sure I want? Someone I'm not sure I need? Or someone I know I can't have? Screw it.Let the fates decide. I wish for the thing that is best for me. How's that for a generalization? I open my eyes,and the wind is blowing harder. St. Clair pushes a strand of hair from his eyes. "Must have been a good one," he says.

You were born with your head in the clouds, your future wide open, feeling almost weightless. Almost. Kudoclasm. You had dreams even before you had memories: a cloud of fantasies and ambitions of secret plans and hidden potential, visions of who you are, and what your life will be. They keep your spirits high, floating somewhere above your life, where the world looks faintly hypothetical, almost translucent. But every time you reach for the sky and come away with nothing, you start to wonder what’s holding them up. “Surely it would have happened by now?!” You feel time starting to slip, pulling you back down to earth. even as you tell yourself, don’t look down. You don’t have the luxury of floating through life, because you may not have the time. The future is already rushing toward you, and it’s not as far away as you think. It feels like your life is flashing before your eyes, but it’s actually just the opposite: you’re thinking forward, to everything you still haven’t done, the places you had intended to visit, the life goals you’d eventually get around to, some day in the future. You start dropping your delusions one by one, like tossing ballast overboard. And soon the fog lifts, and everything becomes clear— right until the moment your feet touch the ground. And there it is, “the real world.” As if you’ve finally grown up, steeped in reality, your eyes adjusting to the darkness, seeing the world for what it is. But in truth, you don’t belong there. We dream to survive— no more optional than breathing. Maybe “the real world” is just another fantasy, something heavy to push back against, and launch ourselves still higher. We’re all afraid to let go, of falling into a bottomless future. But maybe we belong in the air, tumbling in the wind. Maybe it’s only when you dive in that you pick up enough speed to shape the flow of reality, and choose your own course, flying not too high, and not too low, but gliding from one to the other in long playful loops. To dream big, and bounce ideas against the world and rise again. Moving so fast, you can’t tell where the dream ends and where the world begins.

Growing up where she did, Beatrix had developed a romantic and adventurous nature, and she had no outlet for it any more. The happiest times I can remember spending with them were when we drove out - twice, I think - to the Long Mynd for a picnic. Roger had long since traded in his motorbike and scraped together enough money to buy a second-hand Morris Minor. Somehow we all squeezed into this (I seem to recall sitting in the front passenger seat, Beatrix sitting behind me with the baby on her lap) and drove out for the afternoon to those wonderful Shropshire hills. I wonder if you have ever walked on them yourself, Imogen. They are part of your story, you know. So many things have changed, changed beyond recognition, in the almost sixty years since the time I'm now recalling, but the Long Mynd is not one of them. In the last few months I have been too ill to walk there, but I did manage to visit in the last spring, to offer what I already sensed would be my final farewells. Places like this are important to me - to all of us - because they exist outside the normal timespan. You can stand on the backbone of the Long Mynd and not know if you are in the 1940s, the 2000s, the tenth or eleventh century... It is all immaterial, all irrelevant. The gorse and the purple heather are unchanging, and so are the sheeptracks which cut through them and criss-cross them, the twisted rocky outcrops which surprise you at every turn, the warm browns of the bracken, the distant greys of the conifer plantations, tucked far away down in secretive valleys. You cannot put a price on the sense of freedom and timelessness that is granted to you there, as you stand on the high ridge beneath a flawless sky of April blue and look across at the tame beauties of the English countryside, to the east, and to the west a hint of something stranger - the beginnings of the Welsh mountains

Ms. Mori offered me her cheek to kiss and Sonny offered me his hand to shake. He showed me the door and I slid home through the cool sheets of night and into my own bed, Bon asleep and hovering above me in his rack. I closed my eyes and, after a spell of darkness, floated on my mattress across a black river to the foreign country that needed no passport to visit. Of its many gnomic features and shady denizens I now recall only one, my mind wiped clean except for this fatal fingerprint, an ancient kapok tree that was my final resting place and on whose arthritic bark I laid my cheek. I was almost asleep within my sleep when I gradually understood that the knot of gnarled wood on which my ear rested was actually an ear itself, curled and stiff, the wax of its auditory history encrusted in the green moss of its twisted canal. Half of the kapok tree towered above me, half was invisible below me in the rooted earth, and when I looked up I saw not just one ear but many ears swelling from the bark of its thick trunk, hundreds of ears listening and having listened to things I could not hear, the sight of those ears so horrible it hurled me back into the black river. I woke drenched and gasping, clutching the sides of my head. Only after I kicked off the damp sheets and looked under the pillow could I lie down again, trembling. My heart still beat with the force of a savage drummer, but at least my bed was not littered with amputated ears.

hospice. If she is going to take it, she must move today. The doctors still don’t understand what is wrong with her, only that her self and her strength are ebbing away, and there seems no stopping it. Wilson’s afternoon will be spent getting his wife, with whom he’s traveled the world, ready for her final journey. He is making plans himself to move from their large, beautiful home, with its huge kitchen with tiles around the stove and many bedrooms for visiting guests and grandchildren and Debbie’s home office. Preparing to move to a smaller place, Wilson is giving away treasures—he has given Christa and Marion and me coral and shells and books, and donated large specimens to the aquarium. And yet, in the face of looming tragedy, Wilson has chosen to be with us this morning, celebrating the birthdays of these two young,

Grandma? I did it, Grandma. I finally stood up for myself. I got real mean and I beat the shnot outta Dr. Oz. I can't lie, it felt kind of good. At first. But since then all I have is just... a kind of dark, empty feeling. Then I realized... that's how you must feel. All the time. Poor old Grandma. You know, I-I've been gettin' lots of advice how to deal with you. Stand up to you, tell on you... But I kind of realize there's just people like you out there. All over the place. When you're a kid, things seem like they're gonna last forever. But they're not. Life changes. Why you won't always be around. Someday you're gonna die. Someday pretty soon. And when you're layin' in that hospital bed, with tubes up your nose, and that little pan under your butt to pee in, well I'll come visit ya. I'll come just to show you that, that I'm still alive and I'm still happy. And you'll die. Bein' nothin' but you. 'Night Grandma.

Don’t act like you know the first thing about the continent,” I snapped. “It isn’t as though you’ve ever visited.” He flinched, silent for a moment. “Have you?” “No,” I admitted. “But I very likely would have if you hadn’t kidnapped me.” “I didn’t kidnap you,” Tristan said, his voice filled with irritation. “Your friend Luc did.” “He wouldn’t have done so, if not for you. And he isn’t my friend.” “That might be the case, but I don’t doubt that he’d have substituted an equivalently dastardly deed in its place.” He pointed a finger at me. “Mark my words, the boy was of a vile sort.” “Then you are two of a kind,” I snapped. “Ha ha,” Tristan snorted. “How dreadfully clever. And speaking of clever, is this to be your bid for escape?” He contemplated my clothing. “In a dressing gown and bare feet? Now tell me, if I go put on nightclothes and slippers, might I join you, or is this a solo adventure?” My eyes stung. “You think this is all exceedingly funny, don’t you? I’m nothing but a joke to you.” His brow creased in a frown. “If you’re a joke, it isn’t an especially humorous one.” I threw up my hands in frustration. “You are the most intolerable individual I’ve ever met.” He bowed. “Why, thank you, Cécile. Always a pleasure to have one’s accomplishments recognized.” “You are the last person in the world I’d choose to marry,” I hissed. “I don’t entirely relish the idea myself,” Tristan said, “but sometimes we must do the unthinkable.” “Why must I?” Tristan tipped his head slightly, expression considering. “Because you have no choice,” he finally said. “Just as I have no choice. There is no way for you to escape Trollus, Cécile, and if you were caught in the attempt…” His eyes closed, black lashes resting against his cheeks. “My father’s anger is a formidable thing, and I do not wish to see you harmed for aggravating him.

During the course of these chats, Raymond asked again about Mummy—why I hadn’t told her I’d been unwell, why she never visited me, or I her, until finally I gave in and provided him with a potted biography. He already knew about the fire, of course, and that I’d been brought up in care afterward. That, I told him, was because it wasn’t possible for me to live with Mummy afterward, not where she was. It was, I’d hoped, enough to keep him quiet, but no. “Where is she, then? Hospital, nursing home?” he guessed. I shook my head. “It’s a bad place, for bad people,” I said. He thought for a moment. “Not prison?” He looked shocked. I held his gaze but said nothing. After another short pause he asked, not unreasonably, what crime she had committed. “I can’t remember,” I said. He stared at me, then snorted. “Bullshit,” he said. “Come on, Eleanor. You can tell me. It won’t change anything between us, I promise. It’s not like you did it, whatever it was.” I felt a hot flush streak right up the front of my body and then down my back, a sensation I can only liken to being given a sedative prior to a general anesthetic. My pulse was pounding. “It’s true,” I said. “I honestly don’t know. I think I must have been told at the time, but I can’t remember. I was only ten. Everyone was really careful never to mention it around me . . .

Three years later he had another opportunity to see the little girl. Helmert had been tearing through the keep, bellowing like a mad bull as he searched for his sister. “Josephine , I swear I’ll rip yer head off when I find ye!” ’Twas eerily similar to Graeme’s first visit. Remembering his first encounter with the tree sprite, Graeme went in search of Josephine. The first place he looked was the auld oak tree, but she was not there. After a careful search out of doors, he went inside. She was not in the larder or the kitchen. It took more than half an hour before he finally located her in her father’s study, hiding under the large desk. Graeme crouched low so he could see her better. It didn’t appear she had grown much in three years, though she had lost the cherubic face. This time she wore a dark green dress and matching slippers. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been quite terrified of her brother. Now, she looked quite angry. “I’ll nae tell, Josephine,” he whispered, offering her a kind smile. A scrunched brow said she didn’t believe him. “Pray tell, what did ye hide this time?” he asked, hoping his amused tone would help lighten the mood. Reluctantly, she finally confessed. “His strop.” Graeme raised a confused brow. “Why would ye hide his strop?” The little girl looked at him as though he were quite daft. “So he will not beat me with it.

Enormous hydrangeas with vibrant pink sponge-like blooms, rhododendrons and impatiens, tall spears of flowering oyster plants jostled together with Jurassic-looking philodendron leaves and tree ferns, a mixed bag all tied by a wild creeper with bell-shaped blue flowers. The damp smell of the garden reminded Jess of places she'd visited in Cornwall, like St. Just in Roseland, where fertile ground spoke of layers of different generations, civilizations past. At last, beyond the tangled greenery, Jess glimpsed the jutting white chimneys of a large roof. She realized she was holding her breath. She turned a final corner, just like Daniel Miller had done on his way to meet Nora, and there it was. Grand and magnificent, yet even from a distance she could see that the house was in a state of disrepair. It was perched upon a stone plinth that rose about a meter off the ground. A clinging ficus with tiny leaves had grown to cover most of the stones and moss stained the rest, so that the house appeared to sit upon an ocean of greenery. Jess was reminded of the houses in fairy tales, hidden and then forgotten, ignored by the human world only to be reclaimed by nature. Protruding from one corner of the plinth was a lion's head, its mouth open to reveal a void from which a stream of spring water must once have flowed. On the ground beneath sat a stone bowl, half-filled with stale rainwater. As Jess watched, a blue-breasted fairy wren flew down to perch upon the edge of the bowl; after observing Jess for a moment, the little bird made a graceful dive across the surface of the water, skimming himself clean before disappearing once more into the folds of the garden.

saw nothing finer or more moving in Russia than Tolstoy’s grave. That illustrious place of pilgrimage lies out of the way, alone in the middle of the woods. A narrow footpath leads to the mound, nothing but a rectangle of soil raised above ground level, with no one guarding or keeping watch on it, only two huge trees casting their shade. Leo Tolstoy planted those trees himself, so his granddaughter told me beside his grave. When he and his brother Nikolai were boys, they had heard one of the village women say that a place where you planted trees would be a happy one. So they planted two saplings, partly as a kind of game. Only later did the old man remember that promise of happiness, and then he expressed a wish to be buried under the trees he had planted. And his wish was carried out. In its heart-rending simplicity, his grave is the most impressive place of burial in the world. Just a small rectangular mound in the woods with trees overhead, no cross, no tombstone, no inscription. The great man who suffered more than anyone from his own famous name and reputation lies buried there, nameless, like a vagabond who happened to be found nearby or an unknown soldier. No one is forbidden to visit his last resting place; the flimsy wooden fence around it is not kept locked. Nothing guards that restless man’s final rest but human respect for him. While curious sightseers usually throng around the magnificence of a tomb, the compelling simplicity of this place banishes any desire to gape. The wind rushes like the word of God over the nameless grave, and no other voice is heard. You could pass the place without knowing any more than that someone is buried here, a Russian lying in Russian earth. Napoleon’s tomb beneath the marble dome of Les Invalides, Goethe’s in the grand-ducal vault at Weimar, the tombs in Westminster Abbey are none of them as moving as this silent and movingly anonymous grave somewhere in the woods, with only the wind whispering around it, uttering no word or message of its own.

When people start the journey towards wholeness, the pilgrimage to the promised land, there is a moment when their deepest being is touched. They have a fundamental experience, as if the stone of their egoism has been struck by Moses' staff and water starts to spring from it, or as if the stone which was over the tomb has been lifted and the deep self is able to emerge. It is an experience - and perhaps only a very faint one - of rebirth, of liberation, of forgiveness, of wonder. It is a time of betrothal with the universe, with the light, with others and with God. It is an experience of life in which we realize that we are fundamentally one with the universe and with God, while at the same time entirely ourselves in the most alive, light-filled and profound sense. It is the discovery that we are a spring of eternal life. This experience at the start of our pilgrimage is like a foretaste of the end, like the kiss which is the foretaste of marriage. This is the call. It guides our steps in revealing our final destiny. There is nothing more deeply personal than this moment of wonder. But it happens very often in a given context. It may be a meeting with a poor person, whose call awakens a response in us; we discover that there is a living spring hidden deep within us. It may be during a visit to a community when we meet people who become models for us; in watching them and listening to them, we discover what we want to be - they reflect our own deepest self and we are mysteriously attracted to them. Or again, the call may be more secret, hidden in the depths of our heart, awakened perhaps by the Gospel or some other writing. It is hidden in our secret part; it makes us feel that we have glimpsed the promised land, found ourselves 'at home', found 'our place'. The experience is often such as to take someone into a community or change the orientation of their life. The experience can be like an explosion of life, a luminous moment, flooded with peace, tranquility and light. Or it can be more humble - a touch of peace, a feeling of well-being, of being in 'one's place' and with people for whom one was made. The experience gives a new hope; it is possible to keep walking because we have glimpsed something beyond the material world and beyond human limitations. We have glimpsed the possibility of happiness. We have glimpsed 'heaven'. The experience has opened our deepest being. Later, once we are in community and on our journey, clouds can obscure the sun and that deepest self can seem to be shut away again. But, nevertheless, the first experience stays hidden in the heart's memory. We know from then on that our deepest life is light and love, and that we must go on walking through the desert and the night of faith because we have had, at one moment, the revelation of our vocation.

The name is somewhat familiar, but I can’t recall a face to go with it.” Obviously disappointed in her reaction, her uncle said irritably, “You apparently have a poor memory. If you can’t recall a knight or an earl,” he added sarcastically, “I doubt you’ll remember a mere mister.” Stung by his unprovoked remark, she said stiffly, “Who is the third?” “Mr. Ian Thornton. He’s-“ That name sent Elizabeth jolting to her feet while a blaze of animosity and a sock of terror erupted through her entire body. “Ian Thornton!” she cried, leaning her palms on the desk to steady herself. “Ian Thornton!” she repeated, her voice rising with a mixture of anger and hysterical laughter. “Uncle, if Ian Thornton discussed marrying me, it was at the point of Robert’s gun! His interest in me was never marriage, and Robert dueled with him over his behavior. In fact, Robert shot him!” Instead of relenting or being upset, her uncle merely regarded her with blank indifference, and Elizabeth said fiercely, “Don’t you understand?” “What I understand,” he said, glowering, “is that he replied to my message in the affirmative and was very cordial. Perhaps he regrets his earlier behavior and wishes to make amends.” “Amends!” she cried. “I’ve no idea whether he feels loathing for me or merely contempt, but I can assure you he does not and has never wished to wed me! He’s the reason I can’t show my face in society!” “In my opinion, you’re better off away from that decadent London influence; however, that’s not to the point. He has accepted my terms.” “What terms?” Inured to Elizabeth’s quaking alarm, Julius stated matter-of-factly, “Each of the three candidates has agreed that you will come to visit him briefly in order to allow you to decide if you suit. Lucinda will accompany you as chaperon. You’re to leave in five days. Belhaven is first, then Marchman, then Thornton.” The room swam before Elizabeth’s eyes. “I can’t believe this!” she burst out, and in her misery she seized on the least of her problems. “Lucinda has taken her first holiday in years! She’s in Devon visiting her sister.” “Then take Berta instead and have Lucinda join you later when you go to visit Thornton in Scotland.” “Berta! Berta is a maid. My reputation will be in shreds if I spend a week in the home of a man with no one but a maid for a chaperon.” “Then don’t say she’s a maid,” he snapped. “Since I already referred to Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones as your chaperon in my letters, you can say that Berta is your aunt No more objections, miss,” he finished, “the matter is settled. That will be all for now. You may go.” “It’s not settled! There’s been some sort of horrible mistake, I tell you. Ian Thornton would never want to see me, any more than I wish to see him!” “There’s no mistake,” Julius said with completely finality. “Ian Thornton received my letter and accepted our offer. He even sent directions to his place in Scotland.” “Your offer,” Elizabeth cried, “not mine!” “I’ll not debate technicalities any further with you, Elizabeth. This discussion is at an end.

But peace, too, is a living thing and like all life it must wax and wane, accommodate, withstand trials, and undergo changes. Such was the case with the peace Josephus Famulus enjoyed. It was unstable, visible one moment, gone the next, sometimes near as a candle carried in the hand, sometimes as remote as a star in the wintry sky. And in time a new and special kind of sin and temptation more and more often made life difficult for him. It was not a strong, passionate emotion such as indignation or a sudden rush of instinctual urges. Rather, it seemed to be the opposite. It was a feeling very easy to bear in its initial stages, for it was scarcely perceptible; a condition without any real pain or deprivation, a slack, luke-warm, tedious state of the soul which could only be described in negative terms as a vanishing, a waning, and finally a complete absence of joy. There are days when the sun does not shine and the rain does not pour, but the sky sinks quietly into itself, wraps itself up, is gray but not black, sultry, but not with the tension of an imminent thunderstorm. Gradually, Joseph's days became like this as he approached old age. Less and less could he distinguish the mornings from the evenings, feast days from ordinary days, hours of rapture from hours of dejection. Everything ran sluggishly long in limp tedium and joylessness. This is old age, he thought sadly. He was sad because he had expected aging and the gradual extinction of his passions to bring a brightening and easing of his life, to take him a step nearer to harmony and mature peace of soul, and now age seemed to be disappointing and cheating him by offering nothing but this weary, gray, joyless emptiness, this feeling of chronic satiation. Above all he felt sated: by sheer existence, by breathing, by sleep at night, by life in his cave on the edge of the little oasis, by the eternal round of evenings and mornings, by the passing of travelers and pilgrims, camel riders and donkey riders, and most of all by the people who came to visit him, by those foolish, anxious, and childishly credulous people who had this craving to tell him about their lives, their sins and their fears, their temptations and self-accusations. Sometimes it all seemed to him like the small spring of water that collected in its stone basin in the oasis, flowed through grass for a while, forming a small brook, and then flowed on out into the desert sands, where after a brief course it dried up and vanished. Similarly, all these confessions, these inventories of sins, these lives, these torments of conscience, big and small, serious and vain, all of them came pouring into his ear, by the dozens, by the hundreds, more and more of them. But his ear was not dead like the desert sands. His ear was alive and could not drink, swallow, and absorb forever. It felt fatigued, abused, glutted. It longed for the flow and splashing of words, confessions, anxieties, charges, self-condemnations to cease; it longed for peace, death, and stillness to take the place of this endless flow.

Gray burst into the galley. “Miss Turner is not eating.” The cramped, boxed-in nature of the space, the oppressive heat-it seemed an appropriate place to take this irrational surge of resentment. If only his emotion could dissipate through the ventilation slats as quickly as steam. “And good morning to you, too.” Gabriel wiped his hands on his apron without glancing up. “She’s not eating,” Gray repeated evenly. “She’s wasting away.” He didn’t even realize his knuckled cracked. He flexed his fingers impatiently. “Wasting away?” Gabriel’s face split in a grin as he picked up a mallet and attacked a hunk of salted pork. “Now what makes you say that?” “Her dress no longer fits properly. The neckline of her bodice is too loose.” Gabriel stopped pounding and looked up, meeting Gray’s eyes for the first time since he’d entered the galley. The mocking arch of the old man’s eyebrows had Gray clenching his teeth. They stared at each other for a second. Then Gray blew out his breath and looked away, and Gabriel broke into peals of laughter. “Never thought I’d live to see the day,” the old cook finally said, “when you would complain that a beautiful lady’s bodice was too loose.” “It’s not that she’s a beautiful lady-“ Gabriel looked up sharply. “It’s not merely that she’s a beautiful lady,” Gray amended. “She’s a passenger, and I have a duty to look out for her welfare.” “Wouldn’t that be the captain’s duty?” Gray narrowed his eyes. “And I know my duty well enough,” Gabriel continued. “It’s not as though I’m denying her food, now is it? I’m thinking Miss Turner just isn’t accustomed to the rough living aboard a ship. Used to finer fare, that one.” Gray scowled at the hunk of cured pork under Gabriel’s mallet and the shriveled, sprouted potatoes rolling back and forth with each tilt of the ship. “Is this the noon meal?” “This, and biscuit.” “I’ll order the men to trawl for a fish.” “Wouldn’t that be the captain’s duty?” Gabriel’s tone was sly. Gray wasn’t sure whether the plume of steam swirling through the galley originated for the stove or his ears. He didn’t care for Gabriel’s flippant tone. Neither did he care for the possibility of Miss Turner’s lush curves disappearing when he’d never had any chance to appreciate them. Frustrated beyond all reason, Gray turned to leave, wrenching open the galley door with such force, the hinges creaked in protest. He took a deep breath to compose himself, resolving not to slam the door shut behind him. Gabriel stopped pounding. “Sit down, Gray. Rest your bones.” With another rough sigh, Gray complied. He backed up two paces, slung himself onto a stool, and watched as the cook grabbed a tin cup from a hook on the wall and filled it, drawing a dipper of liquid from a small leather bucket. Then Gabriel set the cup on the table before him. Milk. Gabriel stared it. “For God’s sake, Gabriel. I’m not six years old anymore.” The old man raised his eyebrows. “Well, seeing as how you haven’t outgrown a visit to the kitchen when you’re in a sulk, I thought maybe you’d have a taste for milk yet, too. You did buy the goats.

We went to dinner that night and ordered steak and talked our usual dreamy talk, intentionally avoiding the larger, looming subject. When he brought me home, it was late, and the air was so perfect that I was unaware of the temperature. We stood outside my parents’ house, the same place we’d stood two weeks earlier, before the Linguine with Clam Sauce and J’s surprise visit; before the overcooked flank steak and my realization that I was hopelessly in love. The same place I’d almost wiped out on the sidewalk; the same place he’d kissed me for the first time and set my heart afire. Marlboro Man moved in for the kill. We stood there and kissed as if it was our last chance ever. Then we hugged tightly, burying our faces in each other’s necks. “What are you trying to do to me?” I asked rhetorically. He chuckled and touched his forehead to mine. “What do you mean?” Of course, I wasn’t able to answer. Marlboro Man took my hand. Then he took the reins. “So, what about Chicago?” I hugged him tighter. “Ugh,” I groaned. “I don’t know.” “Well…when are you going?” He hugged me tighter. “Are you going?” I hugged him even tighter, wondering how long we could keep this up and continue breathing. “I…I…ugh, I don’t know,” I said. Ms. Eloquence again. “I just don’t know.” He reached behind my head, cradling it in his hands. “Don’t…,” he whispered in my ear. He wasn’t beating around the bush. Don’t. What did that mean? How did this work? It was too early for plans, too early for promises. Way too early for a lasting commitment from either of us. Too early for anything but a plaintive, emotional appeal: Don’t. Don’t go. Don’t leave. Don’t let it end. Don’t move to Chicago. I didn’t know what to say. We’d been together every single day for the past two weeks. I’d fallen completely and unexpectedly in love with a cowboy. I’d ended a long-term relationship. I’d eaten beef. And I’d begun rethinking my months-long plans to move to Chicago. I was a little speechless. We kissed one more time, and when our lips finally parted, he said, softly, “Good night.” “Good night,” I answered as I opened the door and went inside. I walked into my bedroom, eyeing the mound of boxes and suitcases that sat by the door, and plopped down on my bed. Sleep eluded me that night. What if I just postponed my move to Chicago by, say, a month or so? Postponed, not canceled. A month surely wouldn’t hurt, would it? By then, I reasoned, I’d surely have him out of my system; I’d surely have gotten my fill. A month would give me all the time I needed to wrap up this whole silly business. I laughed out loud. Getting my fill of Marlboro Man? I couldn’t go five minutes after he dropped me off at night before smelling my shirt, searching for more of his scent. How much worse would my affliction be a month from now? Shaking my head in frustration, I stood up, walked to my closet, and began removing more clothes from their hangers. I folded sweaters and jackets and pajamas with one thing pulsating through my mind: no man--least of all some country bumpkin--was going to derail my move to the big city. And as I folded and placed each item in the open cardboard boxes by my door, I tried with all my might to beat back destiny with both hands. I had no idea how futile my efforts would be.

ahead of ICAO audit By Tarun Shukla | 527 words New Delhi: India's civil aviation regulator has decided to restructure its safety board and hire airline safety professionals ahead of an audit by the UN's aviation watchdog ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced its intent, and advertised the positions on its website. ICAO told the Indian regulator recently that it would come down to India to conduct an audit, its third in just over a decade, Mint reported on 12 February. Previous ICAO audits had highlighted the paucity of safety inspectors in DGCA. After its 2006 and 2012 audits, ICAO had placed the country in its list of 13 worst-performing nations. US regulator Federal Aviation Authority followed ICAO's 2012 audit with its own and downgraded India, effectively barring new flights to the US by Indian airlines. FAA is expected to visit India in the summer to review its downgrade. The result of the ICAO and FAA audits will have a bearing on the ability of existing Indian airlines to operate more flights to the US and some international destinations and on new airlines' ability to start flights to these destinations. The regulator plans to hire three directors of safety on short-term contracts to be part of the accident investigation board, according to the information on DGCA's website. This is first time the DGCA is hiring external staff for this board, which is critical to ascertain the reasoning for any crashes, misses or other safety related events in the country. These officers, the DGCA said on its website, must have at least 12 years of experience in aviation, specifically on the technical aspects, and have a degree in aeronautical engineering. DGCA has been asked by international regulators to hire at least 75 flight inspectors. It has only 51. India's private airlines offer better pay and perks to inspectors compared with DGCA. The aviation ministry told DGCA in January to speed up the recruitment and do whatever was necessary to get more inspectors on board, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. DGCA has also announced it will hire flight operations inspectors as consultants on a short-term basis for a period of one year with a fixed remuneration of `1.25 lakh per month. "There will be a review after six months and subsequent continuation will be decided on the basis of outcome of the review," DGCA said in its advertisement. The remuneration of `1.25 lakh is higher than the salary of many existing DGCA officers. In its 2006 audit, ICAO said it found that "a number of final reports of accident and serious incident investigations carried out by the DGCA were not sent to the (member) states concerned or to ICAO when it was applicable". DGCA had also "not established a voluntary incident reporting system to facilitate the collection of safety information that may not otherwise be captured by the state's mandatory incident reporting system". In response, DGCA "submitted a corrective action plan which was never implemented", said Mohan Ranganthan, an aviation safety analyst and former member of government appointed safety council, said of DGCA. He added that the regulator will be caught out this time. Restructuring DGCA is the key to better air safety, said former director general of civil aviation M.R. Sivaraman. Hotel industry growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16: Icra By P.R. Sanjai | 304 words Mumbai: Rating agency Icra Ltd on Monday said Indian hotel industry revenue growth is expected to strengthen to 9-11% in 2015-16, driven by a modest increase in occupancy and small increase in rates. "Industry wide revenues are expected to grow by 5-8% in 2014-15. Over the next 12 months, Icra expects RevPAR (revenue per available room) to improve by 7-8% driven by up to 5% pickup in occupancies and 2-3% growth in average room rates (ARR)," Icra said. Further, margins are expected to remain largely flat for 2014-15 while

Steldor was sitting up on the bed across the room, his legs swung over the side, pulling a shirt carefully over his head. “Should you be doing that so soon?” I asked, for it had only been a week since the lashing. The garment fell over his muscular chest, and he ran a hand through his dark hair. He came to his feet with the hint of a wince. “Making sure I’m cared for is no longer your worry. I’m not certain it ever was.” His mood was a bit dark, and I wondered if I should have given him more time to recover before paying him this visit. “Perhaps what you need is someone to keep you from coming to harm in the first place.” He smirked, turning his back to me to idly straighten his bed coverings. “What is it--did you come here to coddle me or lecture me?” “Both, I suppose.” I was frowning, amazed at how swiftly we had fallen into our old patterns. “I’ve come to talk--and to give you this.” He swiveled to face me as I removed his silver wolf’s head talisman from the pocket of my cloak. “I never expected to see that again,” he said, sounding awed. “Did you face the bitch yourself or get it from Narian?” I smiled at his word choice. “I approached Rava myself--I’ve been known to face down a bitch or two.” He stepped forward to take the pendant from my hand and immediately slipped the chain over his head. “Thank you. I feel better already.” “If you don’t mind my asking, what is the significance of the talisman? When I reclaimed it from Rava, she remarked that it might provide power and protection, and that started me thinking about its purpose.” He chuckled ruefully. “I hate to admit it, but Rava’s right. The wolf brings strength and protection. Depending on the mix of herbs and flowers put inside the talisman, other properties can be added, such as health and healing. The captain gave the pendant to me when I was four, following the death of Terek, at the time I was sent to live with Baelic and Lania. He didn’t want me to think he’d abandoned me or that I was in danger. It was originally his, and his father’s before him. I’ve worn it ever since.” “Then I’m very glad I was able to secure its return.” His eyes met mine, and the color rose in my cheeks, for I was still affected to some degree by his handsome features and soldier’s build. “I suppose that concludes the coddling,” he finally said, crossing his arms and watching me expectantly. “Yes, I suppose it does.” “Then let the lecture begin.” He spread his hands, giving me a slight nod.

Narian was outside, leaning on the railing and gazing out over the city and the rolling hills beyond. I walked up behind him and placed my hands on his shoulders, resting my head upon his back. “Will you miss the mountains?” I asked, and he twisted to face me, lightly holding me around the waist, my hands upon his chest. “I can still see them, Alera, just from a different perspective. And I imagine I will eventually return for a visit.” I nodded and gave him a light kiss. “I want to show you something.” He looked curiously at me, and I removed my betrothal ring from the chain around my neck, placing it on my finger. “I am no longer going to hide that we are in love.” He smiled and took me into his embrace, then we went to the King’s Dining Hall on the second floor together. We entered at the perfect moment, holding hands, for everyone else had already arrived. All conversation stopped, but we calmly took chairs next to each other, ignoring the astounded expressions on the faces around us. With our attitudes unassailable, our guests glanced curiously at one another, hardly daring to ask. It was my effervescent sister who finally spoke. “When is the wedding?” At her candid question, our guests burst into animated conversation, and I leaned close to kiss Narian--entirely inappropriately--full on the lips. Much was unknown to me in that moment--when the treaty with the High Priestess would be signed, when the citizenry would accept Narian, when our wedding would take place, what life would bring to me from here--but for once I was not hiding, from anyone or anything. Instead, I was staring into deep blue eyes filled with love, acceptance and hope. Deep blue eyes that would be mine to gaze into forever.

The lord of the house is not at home, Your Majesty,” she informed me. “Is there anything I can do for you?” “I actually came to see Lord Steldor, if you would escort me to his room.” Now she seemed intrigued, for the reasons behind the annulment of my marriage to the former King had been kept quiet. I could read on her face her desire to eavesdrop. “Certainly, although I don’t know if His Majesty has risen.” “He has,” I said without thought. Not once during our marriage had I woken before him, and I doubted his sleep patterns had changed. With a puzzled glance, she led me up the stairs and into a hallway, stopping before the second door. She knocked on my behalf, and gave another small curtsey when Steldor’s voice invited entry. I opened the door, waiting for her to return to the first floor before entering, catching her regretful glance that she could not dally. Steldor was sitting up on the bed across the room, his legs swung over the side, pulling a shirt carefully over his head. “Should you be doing that so soon?” I asked, for it had only been a week since the lashing. The garment fell over his muscular chest, and he ran a hand through his dark hair. He came to his feet with the hint of a wince. “Making sure I’m cared for is no longer your worry. I’m not certain it ever was.” His mood was a bit dark, and I wondered if I should have given him more time to recover before paying him this visit. “Perhaps what you need is someone to keep you from coming to harm in the first place.” He smirked, turning his back to me to idly straighten his bed coverings. “What is it--did you come here to coddle me or lecture me?” “Both, I suppose.” I was frowning, amazed at how swiftly we had fallen into our old patterns. “I’ve come to talk--and to give you this.” He swiveled to face me as I removed his silver wolf’s head talisman from the pocket of my cloak. “I never expected to see that again,” he said, sounding awed. “Did you face the bitch yourself or get it from Narian?” I smiled at his word choice. “I approached Rava myself--I’ve been known to face down a bitch or two.” He stepped forward to take the pendant from my hand and immediately slipped the chain over his head. “Thank you. I feel better already.” “If you don’t mind my asking, what is the significance of the talisman? When I reclaimed it from Rava, she remarked that it might provide power and protection, and that started me thinking about its purpose.” He chuckled ruefully. “I hate to admit it, but Rava’s right. The wolf brings strength and protection. Depending on the mix of herbs and flowers put inside the talisman, other properties can be added, such as health and healing. The captain gave the pendant to me when I was four, following the death of Terek, at the time I was sent to live with Baelic and Lania. He didn’t want me to think he’d abandoned me or that I was in danger. It was originally his, and his father’s before him. I’ve worn it ever since.” “Then I’m very glad I was able to secure its return.” His eyes met mine, and the color rose in my cheeks, for I was still affected to some degree by his handsome features and soldier’s build. “I suppose that concludes the coddling,” he finally said, crossing his arms and watching me expectantly. “Yes, I suppose it does.

You can get a rough idea of what a school values by how it presents itself, by how it seeks to attract prospective students. A final way is to query the students themselves to see what they value. You’re only getting a snapshot, so take it with a grain of salt, but ask them about their study habits, what their professors are like, and what support systems are in place to help students succeed academically and professionally. Observe students in a class during a campus visit and try to get a sense of the overall culture. Is academics important, or is the social scene front and center?

Here I stand now, with a sweet tingling feeling all over, recalling the last time I was here, and I am glad that I am here again, while wondering why I didn’t recognize it earlier. But now I have got the chance to recognize and deal with it more effectively and I know that I can visit this place as many times as I want, and take as many chances as I want, because I finally realize that I, am in total control of my life.

Here I stand now, with a sweet tingling feeling all over, recalling the last time I was here, and I am glad that I am here again, while wondering why I didn’t recognize it earlier. But now I have got the chance to recognize and deal with it more effectively and I know that I can visit this place as many times as I want, and take as many chances as I want, because I finally realize that I, am in total control of my life.

IT’S 1996; MY father is eighty-eight. I arrive for a visit at their Westchester condo. My mother greets me at the door. After we’ve hugged and kissed, my father appears at the end of the hallway. It’s taken him longer to rise from his chair. He isn’t carrying the cane he finally agreed to use after his last fall. He stumbles, but the wall catches him. Something inside me rebels: who stole my father and put this old man in his place?

What is Happiness? Happiness is a myth. It doesn't exist. What we call happiness is merely a temporary sensation of excitement that we receive upon the fulfillment of our expectations. It's not happiness, it's addiction. And since we have made a society out of this insane pursuit of addiction, our brain is never at a healthy state to actually fathom and more importantly produce true happiness. And what is true happiness? Contentment. You've been working for hours. You haven't had the time to even have some water. Finally you finish your work and drink a glass of water. The sheer feeling of joy that you receive at that moment - that's happiness, that's contentment. You haven't been near your loved ones for days, for you've been away for work. Finally you get home and take them in your arms - that's happiness, that's contentment. Now let me tell you what is not happiness, what is in fact an unhealthy addiction which only ruins a person's life both mentally and physically. You've been using the same smartphone for over a year now. Suddenly the brand announces the release of a new model. And you get all hyped up to buy that model, despite the fact that you don't really need it. That's addiction - that's an illness. You visit a new place on vacation. But instead of experiencing that place with your heart, you bring your phone out and waste the entire vacation on taking pictures to post on social media. That's addiction, that's illness. You know why? Because when you get home, you realize, you have plenty of pictures of the vacation on your phone alright, but you have no meaningful memory of that place in your heart. In usual circumstances, our brain doesn't distinguish between addiction and true joy. It can only do that, when we stop running and start living. Because at the end of the day, joy is not about fulfilling expectations, joy is about learning to live beyond expectations.

Donald was stunned. They must be making a sensaysh out of it, to sacrifice so much time from even their ten-minute condensed-news cycle! His Mark II confidence evaporated. Euphoric from his recent eptification, he had thought he was a new person, immeasurably better equipped to affect the world. But the implications of that expensive plug stabbed deep into his mind. If State were willing to go to these lengths to maintain his cover identity, that meant he was only the visible tip of a scheme involving perhaps thousands of people. State just didn’t issue fiats to a powerful corporation like English Language Relay Satellite Service without good reason. Meaningless phrases drifted up, dissociated, and presented themselves to his awareness, all seeming to have relevance to his situation and yet not cohering. My name is Legion. I fear the Greeks, even bearing gifts. The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children. Say can you look into the seeds of time? Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Struggling to make sense of these fragments, he finally arrived at what his subconscious might be trying to convey. The prize, these days, is not in finding a beautiful mistress. It’s in having presentable prodgies. Helen the unattainable is in the womb, and every mother dreams of bearing her. Now her whereabouts is known. She lives in Yatakang and I’ve been sent in search of her, ordered to bring her back or say her beauty is a lie—if necessary to make it a lie, with vitriol. Odysseus the cunning lurked inside the belly of the horse and the Trojans breached the wall and took it in while Laocoön and his sons were killed by snakes. A snake is cramped around my forehead and if it squeezes any tighter it will crack my skull. When the purser next passed, he said, “Get me something for a headache, will you?” He knew that was the right medicine to ask for, yet it also seemed he should have asked for a cure for bellyache, because everything was confused: the men in the belly of the wooden horse waiting to be born and wreak destruction, and the pain of parturition, and Athena was born of the head of Zeus, and Time ate his children, as though he were not only in the wooden horse of the express but was it about to deliver the city to its enemy and its enemy to the city, a spiralling wild-rose branch of pain with every thorn a spiky image pricking him into other times and other places. Ahead, the walls. Approaching them, the helpless stupid Odysseus of the twenty-first century, who must also be Odin blind in one eye so as not to let his right hand know what his left was doing. Odinzeus, wielder of thunderbolts, how could he aim correctly without parallax? “No individual has the whole picture, or even enough of it to make trustworthy judgments on his own initiative.” Shalmaneser, master of infinite knowledge, lead me through the valley of the shadow of death and I shall fear no evil … The purser brought a white capsule and he gulped it down. But the headache was only a symptom, and could be fixed.

Dear Diary, THERE WAS STILL ANOTHER DAY of the conference, so we stayed in DC. While Dad attended panels and lectures, George, Bess, and I finally took in the sights. It was hard to keep up with George at the National Air and Space Museum. She raced from one exhibit to the next. Bess led us more calmly through the National Portrait Gallery, giving us time to appreciate the paintings. When it was my turn, I picked visiting the Supreme Court. With all our talk about justice the night before, I wanted to see the highest court in the land—the place where nine people get to decide exactly what the law means. Walking up the marble steps gave me goose bumps. I’d heard the building referred to as the Temple of Justice before, and now I understand why. But then I remembered Walker was still behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, and the goose bumps faded.

At the fair each summer when I was a kid, we visited the Fun House, with its creepy grinning plaster face, two stories high. You walked through its mouth, between its giant teeth, along its hot-pink tongue. Just from that face, you should have known. It was supposed to be a lark, but it was terrifying. (...) The Fun House was scarier by far than the Haunted House, not least because I was supposed to enjoy it. I just wanted to find the way out. But the doors makes EXIT led only to further crazy rooms, to endless moving corridors. There was one route through the Fun House, relentless to the very end. I've finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it.

Finally, Diana had worked her way down to the Abbey, an upscale restaurant with a small but lush courtyard that featured a tinkling fountain, a pair of wooden benches, flowering bushes and stands of tall grasses, and a statue resembling Rodin's The Thinker (one of the few things she did remember from the art history class she'd taken). She'd never eaten there, but she remembered Dr. Levy mentioning it as one of the places she and her husband visited for date night at least once every summer. She sat on the bench for a minute to rest her feet and peruse the menu. Tuna sushi tempura (eighteen dollars for an appetizer). Almond-crusted cod with a mandarin-citrus beurre blanc (twenty-eight dollars) and butter-poached lobster (market price). The list of cocktails and special martinis ran two pages, and when she walked up the curved stone steps and stepped into the dining room, the views of the bay were gorgeous.

He kept his eye open for other events that looked like the place to be and became drawn to them, looking for any opening to create news and enhance his value further. One such event was the Arnold Classic, held on March 2nd in Columbus, Ohio. The Arnold Classic was an annual bodybuilding event traditionally held at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. It served as something of a melting pot, luring agents, pornstars, hustlers, fans and wannabe stars to one venue with its gravitational pull. “If you like fake tits that’s the place to go”, jokes Kim Wood. “It’s a cesspool, there’s drug dealers…you just wallow in the sleaze.” Pillman’s visit was dual-purpose – in addition to hanging out at the expo, he was filming a commercial to plug his hotline to air on Hardcore TV. ECW’s television crew Stonecutter Productions, headed by Steve Karel, put it together with Brian. In what would become an unfortunate, ironic twist of fate, it was Karel, the same man who told Kim Wood about the WCW-ECW connection which led to Pillman becoming the talk of the industry, that took Brian to the Arnold Classic. Of course, a lot of the attendees were wrestling fans and with Brian in character, he was getting almost as much attention as Arnold himself. Brian and Karel took the sleaze a step further, going back and forth between strip shows and nude woman contests, when Pillman came across a model that caught his eye. In this case, however, it wasn’t a female. One of the sponsors of the Arnold Classic was Hummer. Schwarzenegger fell in love seeing a fleet of military Humvees roll past the set of Kindergarten Cop in 1990 and wanted one of his own. Arnie finally convinced AM General to produce them, and it was Schwarzenegger himself who purchased the first Hummer off the assembly line. Since then he was linked with them and with the bodybuilding expo bearing his name, it was only natural to have a number of floor models on display. Pillman loved the look of one of the Hummers in particular and since the ones being showcased had to be gotten rid of, Karel, with his connections, was able to get Brian a pretty good deal if he wanted to purchase it there and then. Despite all his hard work being with the goal of cashing in and making it out on the other end financially better off, Pillman’s focus lapsed amidst the intoxicating vibe of working everybody and living his character. Against his prior instincts, he bought the vehicle.

My grandmother swaddled her baby, as they did two thousand years ago, and let him swing on a tree branch so she could do backbreaking work for fifteen cents a day. Lizzie talked about working, herself, too, starting when she was eight or nine years old, long before the era of child labor laws, at the Milford Shoe Company. “My first day, they put me at a sewing machine and give me two pieces a leathuh. They told me how to stitch the pieces togethuh—paht of a man’s shoe. Each time I did that, they told me, drop it inna drawa. I thought, this is easy. Zip, zip, zip, one afta anuthuh. End of the day comes, my drawa is full. Lady next to me, olda woman—she didn’t have so many done. The boss fired her right then. They gave me her job afta that.” From that day on, my aunt worked in factories all her life. Like my mother, she was heavy set but solid, as sturdy and muscled as the men who worked beside her, first at Milford Shoe and later at William Lapworth & Sons, a manufacturer of elastic fabrics, whose British-born owner berated her whenever a needle broke on her sewing machine. Later she worked at Archer Rubber, where a chemical spray left a small scar on her cheek. Her final employer was the Stylon Tile Company, known for making pink and black bathroom tiles, which were hard to handle without cutting her hands. She always called her place of work “the shop.” She was “working down at the shop.” Before I left her house, she always gave me something to take with me, like a bag of her hand-made swiss-chard ravioli, or if it was close to Christmas, a plate of her own Italian cookies. My favorites were the ceci, little fried cookies that looked like ravioli but were stuffed with sweet chestnut and honey filling, or the ones that looked like bowties, called cenci, dusted with powdered sugar. No matter how busy she was, she never let anyone leave her house hungry or empty-handed. Once I accompanied Lizzie to the Sacred Heart Cemetery to help her with all the flower baskets she wanted to lay on the gravestones of lost family members. There’s something about Italians and cemeteries. I was never attracted to cemeteries, never finding any comfort in visiting the dead, but for most of my family, it was like attending a family reunion. Seeing Lizzie moving

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There are other downsides to synthetic fertilizer. To make it, we have to produce ammonia, a process that requires heat, which we get by burning natural gas, which produces greenhouse gases. Then, to move it from the facility where it’s made to the warehouse where it’s stored (like the place I visited in Tanzania) and eventually the farm where it’s used, we load it on trucks that are powered by gasoline. Finally, after the fertilizer is applied to soil, much of the nitrogen that it contains never gets absorbed by the plant. In fact, worldwide, crops take up less than half the nitrogen applied to farm fields. The rest runs off into ground or surface waters, causing pollution, or escapes into the air in the form of nitrous oxide—which, you may recall, has 265 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide.

-Do you sleep well? -Yes, if I sleep, I do not wake up until after my body needs sleep, but the problem lies in reaching the stage of sleep. As soon as I put my body to bed, bouts of terror and fear begin. -Fear of what? -From losing consciousness, for my senses to stop, and I lose my sense of time, and the world around me, it becomes like I am nothing, the world around me moves, things change, and I do not know anything about them, this idea makes me crazy, to the point of crying, then I fall asleep or faint Perhaps, out of concern. He was silent for a moment, then added: I wish this world were without sleep, but my mind, my body, needs it, but I see no need for it. His last psychological evaluation session was over. The doctor approached him and began removing the polygraph sensors from his body. Now he has to wait for his final result. Until that time, many places on the island of Malta are worth a visit, especially accompanied by a beautiful Ukrainian girl like Katrina. So far from Adana, and back in time on the imaginary timeline. But for Baibars, everything happens in one moment.

Japanese lilies and her beautiful face In a crowded market place, People walked, moved; and quite a few preferred to amble, While I searched for my known space, Where she sells beauty’s earthly samples without too much too gamble, I walked past the busy spaces and the bustling market views, People haggling, a few arguing, It was like life was tasked to seek reviews, In ways pleasing and many a time annoying, Finally I reached there where I wanted to be, And there she was this beautiful maiden, And as she prospected every face, her eyes finally rested on me, For a while nothing existed, as if time its pace had forgotten, Only to be revived back to life, When the maiden at the flower shop said, “Hello, and welcome to the shop of beautiful life,” My eyes moved, my lips shivered and in response I only shook my head, I looked at flowers with different colours, And her eyes followed mine to every spot where they rested, I could be there, with the flowers and the maiden, for many hours, Because at this flower shop, all the flowers only of her beauty attested, She knew it too because the sparkle in her eyes was brewing with confidence, She knew she was like the most beautiful summer rose that ever existed, And I only visited the shop to feel surrounded by this beauty’s appeal so dense, Her beauty was not just a visual act but an experience, where a new appeared as soon as the old exited, She was pure beauty, and maybe my only and my wilful addiction, While I was soaking in this experience of charm and beauty, She tenderly felt my hand trembling with love’s affliction, “Here, look at these new samples of eternal beauty,” She said this with a professional tone and demand, They were small clusters of white charm, Beautiful as anything beautiful can be resting peacefully in beauty’s eternal wand, Peaceful to look at that always kindled feelings warm, It was such a delight to witness and see, Then she silently quoth this, “They are called the Japanese lilies that sparkle like the pearls from the deepest sea, They look like joys suspended on the branches of bliss, These beautiful Japanese lilies bearing the sparkle of the pearl from the deepest sea.” I again nodded my head with a smile, As I looked at them closely, They indeed were clusters of white joy hanging there with a beautiful smile, And I said hurriedly, “certainly!” Then I realised something strange, They were bending downwards, as if gravity pulled them harder, It was nothing like flowers at other shops, so it indeed was very strange, I looked at all the flowers and then I looked at her, And there it was, in her eyes, her beautiful face her overall grace, That the flowers in her shop felt so inferior, Because all Japanese lilies and every Summer flower was but a reflection of her face, And it was difficult to tell whether they were her lovers or she was there lover, But to me, they all shone as the brilliance in her eyes, The rose had offered her its blush, The lies had granted her the twinkling miracle of the night skies, And all other flowers had rendered her eternally beautiful and lush, And whenever they looked at her, The flowers drooped a bit, And maybe that is why I buy all my flowers from her, Because like these helpless flowers I too love her every bit, and thus my love affair with her and her flowers has matured bit by bit! And now neither the flowers nor I can quit, So it is an affair that shall last till eternity and this is how I prefer it, She loving the flowers, I loving her, and as soon as my memory amidst her beautiful memories is lit, Then I am sure, like these flowers, and like me; now she too cannot quit, not even a bit!

When time bends There, placed adjacent to each other, Stood everything and nothing, There was everywhere and nowhere together, And even forever and never existed as one thing, And fate asked me to choose one combination, Whatever I chose, I chose and didn't choose as well, Because with everything there was nothing too as its destination, With everywhere there was nowhere, similar to heaven and hell, And forever was accompanied by never, So what to choose I did not know, Although it was not an experience newer, But it was a new realization, about which something all your life you know, It was then I said “everything and nothing!” And fate laughed and said, “very wisely chosen! Because now with everything I shall offer you everything, Everything, everywhere, forever, life, joy, beauty and a height where your heart has never risen, But everything is followed by nothing, nowhere, never, sorrow, All that you may seek not so often, But at least you will experience darkness after having experienced the brightest glow, Because without knowing nine one can never arrive at ten, So, well chosen because had you chosen forever, It might have been that darkness visited you first, And then it would have been so forever, And if you had chosen everywhere it too may have been an unpleasant burst!” I wondered what it meant, But as I grew old I realised in everything lies true eternity, So this wish still pays my every rent, For all my desires and wishes of joy and beauty, Because everything is never ending, By the time it shall reach its end and become nothing, I shall be long gone, a summer flower already fading, Then it does not matter whether it is something, everything or nothing, And every life should be about everything, Only then we get to experience joy and beauty that never ends, To be our companions beyond that unseen world of that malign feeling, Where everything becomes nothing, everywhere becomes nowhere, and forever becomes never, where time bends, So choose everything whenever life offers you a chance, Because one day it will surely end, So when you get the chance, perform your dance, Because there shall be enough time later, to repair and mend, All nothings, all nevers, all nowheres and all ends, Therefore, the day sun shines, assume it shines just for you, Because when time finally bends, It bends for all of us, not just for me, but you too!

He visited several towns in the United Provinces, before moving on to the Punjab. Then he moved south, where, in the first week of April, the AICC met at Vijayawada. In attendance was an Andhra Congressman named P. Venkayya, who for several years had been pressing Gandhi to adopt a ‘national’ flag for the nation-in-the-making. This time too Venkayya made the same proposal, but in the design he offered, Gandhi ‘saw nothing to stir the nation to its depths’. Then Lala Hansraj of Jullundur suggested that the spinning wheel should find a place on the Swaraj Flag. Gandhi was struck by the suggestion, and asked Venkayya to give him a design containing a spinning wheel on a background of saffron (denoting Hindu) and green (denoting Muslim). The enthusiastic Venkayya produced a design in three hours. Gandhi looked at it, and realized that a colour was also needed for the other religions of India. He suggested white be added to the saffron and the green. For, ‘Hindu-Muslim unity is not an exclusive term; it is an inclusive term, symbolic of the unity of all faiths domiciled in India. If Hindus and Muslims can tolerate each other, they are bound to tolerate all other faiths.’ Gandhi further suggested the order in which the colours should be placed: white first, next green, finally saffron, in progressive order of numerical importance, ‘the idea being that the strongest should act as a shield to the weakest’. Eventually, the white was placed in the middle, between the saffron and the green, the two major religions symbolically surrounding and protecting the others.

Bryce slowed her retreat as she winced in pain, “And the apartment building? I thought it was Hunt, but it wasn’t, was it? It was you.” “Yes. Your landlord’s request went to all of my triarii. And to me. I knew Danika had left nothing there. But by that time, Bryce Quinlan, I was enjoying watching you squirm. I knew Athalar’s plan to acquire the synth would soon be exposed—and I took a guess that you’d be willing to believe the worst of him. That he’d used the lightning in his veins to endanger innocent people. He’s a killer. I thought you might need a reminder. That it played into Athalar’s guilt was an unexpected boon.” Hunt ignored the eyes that glanced his way. The fucking asshole had never planned to honor his bargain. If he’d solved the case, Micah would have killed him. Killed them both. He’d been played like a fucking fool. Bryce asked, voice raw, “When did you start to think it was me?” “That night it attacked Athalar in the garden. I realized only later that he’d probably come into contact with one of Danika’s personal items, which must have come into contact with the Horn.” Hunt had touched Danika’s leather jacket that day. Gotten its scent on him. “Once I got Athalar off the streets, I summoned the kristallos again—and it went right to you. The only thing that had changed was that you finally, finally took that amulet off. And then …” He chuckled. “I looked at Hunt Athalar’s photos of your time together. Including that one of your back. The tattoo you had inked there, days before Danika’s death, according to the list of Danika’s last locations Ruhn Danaan sent to you and Athalar—whose account is easily accessible to me.” Bryce’s fingers curled into the carpet, as if she’d sprout claws. “How do you know the Horn will even work now that it’s in my back?” “The Horn’s physical shape doesn’t matter. Whether it is fashioned as a horn or a necklace or a powder mixed with witch-ink, its power remains.” Hunt silently swore. He and Bryce had never visited the tattoo parlor. Bryce had said she knew why Danika was there. Micah went on, “Danika knew the Archesian amulet would hide you from any detection, magical or demonic. With that amulet, you were invisible to the kristallos, bred to hunt the Horn. I suspect she knew that Jesiba Roga has similar enchantments upon this gallery, and perhaps Danika placed some upon your apartments—your old one and the one she left to you—to make sure you would be even more veiled from it.

I believe that we shocked each other by how swiftly we went from being the people who knew each other best in the world to being a pair of the most mutually incomprehensible strangers who ever lived. But it was vital to my survival to have a one bedroom of my own i saw the aprtment almost as a sanatorium a hospice clinci for my own recovery I painted the walls in the warmest colors i could find and bought myself flowers every week as if i were visiting myself in the hospital is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty why are you studying Italian so that just in case Italy ever invades Ethiopia again and is actually successful this time? ciao comes from if you must know it's an abbreviation of a phrase used by medieval venetians as an intimate salutation Sono il Suo Schiavo meaning i am your slave. om Naamah Shivaya meaning I honor the divinity that resides whin me. I wanted to experience both , I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence the dual glories of a human life I wanted what the Greeks called kalos kai agathos the singular balance of the good and he beautiful I'd been missing both during these last hard years because both pleasure and devotion require a stress free space in which to flourish and I'd been living in a giant trash compactor of nonstop anxiety , As for how to balance the urge for pleasure against the longing for devotion. four feet on the ground a head full of foliage looking at the world through the heart. it was more than I wanted to toughly explore one aspect of myself set against the backdrop of each country in a place that has traditionally done that one thing very well. same guatemalan musicians are always playing id rather be a sparrow than a snail on their bamboo windpipes oh how i want italian to open itself up to me i havent felt so starved for comprehension since then dal centro della mia vita venne una grande fontanana dolce sitl nuovo Dante wrote his divine comedy in terza rima triple rhyme a chain of rhymes with each rhyme repeating here times every five lines. lamor che move il sole e laltre stelle we are the masters of bel far niente larte darrangiarsi The reply in italy to you deserve a break today would probably be yeah no duh that's why I'm planning on taking a break at noon to go over to your house and sleep with your wife, I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch i peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn't need to be cooked at all,)I put some olives on the plate too and the four knobs of goat cheese I'd picked up yesterday from the fromagerie down the street tend two slices of pink oily salmon for dessert a lovely peach which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm form the roman sunlight for the longest time I couldn't even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing finally when i had fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal i went and sat in apatch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bit of it with my fingers while reading my daily newspaper article in Italian happiness inhabited my every molecule. I am inspired by the regal self assurance of this town so grounded and rounded so amused and monumental knowing that she is held securely in the palm of history i would like to be like rome when i am an old lady. I linger over my food and wine for many hours because nobody in

As we continued to watch, the scenes accelerated forward, and we could see individuals remembering their spiritual missions at increasingly younger ages. Here we could see the precise understanding that would soon embody the new spiritual world-view. Individuals would come of age and remember themselves as souls born from one dimension of existence into another. Although memory loss during the transition would be expected, recapturing pre-life memory would become an important early goal of education. As youths, our teachers would first guide us through the early experience of synchronicity; urge us to identify our intuitions to study certain subjects, to visit particular places, always looking for higher answers as to why we were pursuing these particular paths. As the full memory of the Insights emerged, we would find ourselves involved with certain groups, working on particular projects, bringing in our full vision of what we had wanted to do. And finally we would recover the underlying intention behind our lives. We would know that we came here to raise the vibratory level of this planet, to discover and protect the beauty and energy of its natural sites, and to ensure that all humans had access to these special locations, so that we could continue to increase our energy, ultimately instituting the Afterlife culture here in the physical. Such a worldview would especially shift the way we looked at other people. No longer would we see human beings merely in the racial dress or national origin of one particular lifetime. Instead, we would see others as brother or sister souls, engaged, like us, in a process of coming awake and of spiritualizing the planet. It would become known that the settling of certain souls into various geographical locations on the planet had occurred with great meaning. Each nation was, in fact, an enclave of specific spiritual information, shared and modeled by its citizens, information waiting to be learned and integrated. As I watched the future unfold, I could see that a world political unity, envisioned by so many, was finally being achieved— not by forcing all nations into subservience to one political body, but rather through a grassroots acknowledgment of our spiritual similarities while treasuring our local autonomy and cultural differences. As with individuals interacting in a group, each member of the family of nations was being recognized for this culture truth represented to the world at large. Before us, we saw Earth’s political struggles, so often violent, shifting into a war of words. As the tide of remembrance continued to sweep the planet, all humans began to understand that our destiny was to discuss and compare the perspectives of our relative religions and, while honoring the best of their individual doctrines at the personal level, ultimately to see that each religion supplemented the others and to integrate them into a synthesized global spirituality.

Simone Simmons Simone Simmons works as an energy healer, helping her patients through empowering them rather than creating a dependency on the healer. She specializes in absent healing, mainly with sufferers of cancer and AIDS. She met Diana four years before her death when the Princess came to her for healing, and they became close friends. In 2005, Simone wrote a book titled Diana: The Last Word. I realized Diana had been born with an extraordinary ability, which had only been waiting to be released. By 1996, when she was fully in control of her life for the first time, she was able to give a great deal of consolation and encouragement to so many people. She received scant attention for this at the time. Everyone seemed to concentrate on the negative aspects. Instead of seeing how genuinely caring she was, they accused her of doing it for the publicity. That was utterly untrue. I often joined her when she returned from a day’s work, and she would be so exhausted, she found relief in crying. She was anxious about what she had seen and experienced and was determined to find something she could do to help. Her late-night visits to hospitals were supposed to be private. She knew how frustrating it is to be alone in a hospital; the staff and patients were always very surprised and pleased to see her. She used to make light of it and say, “I just came round to see if anyone else couldn’t sleep!” Although Diana saw the benefits of the formal visits she also made, and she did get excited when money poured in for her charities, she much preferred these unofficial occasions. They allowed her to talk to people and find out more about their illness and how they were feeling about themselves, in a down-to-earth way without a horde of people noting her every word. She wasn’t trying to fill a void or to make herself feel better. To her, it was not a therapy to help other people: It was a commitment born of selflessness. Diana was forever on the lookout for new projects that might benefit from her involvement. Her attention was caught by child abuse and forced prostitution in Asia. We had both seen a television program showing how little children were being kidnapped and then forced to sell themselves for sex. Diana told me she wanted to do everything she could to eradicate this wicked exploitation taking place in India, Pakistan, and most prevalently in Thailand. As it turned out, it was one of her final wishes. She didn’t have any idea of exactly how she was going to do it, and hadn’t got as far as formulating a plan, but she would have found a way. When Diana put her mind to something, nothing was allowed to stand in her way. As she said, “Because I’ve been given the gift to shine a light into the dark corners of this world, and get the media to follow me there, I have to use it,” and use it she did--to draw attention to a problem and in a very practical way to apply her incredible healing gifts to the victims. In her fight against land mines, she did exactly that. If anyone ever doubted her heartfelt concern for the welfare of others, this cause must surely have dispelled it. It needed someone of her fame and celebrity to bring the matter to the world’s attention, and her work required an immense amount of personal bravery. She faced physical peril and endured public ridicule, but Diana would have seen the campaign to get land mines banned as her greatest legacy. Helping others was her calling in life--right to the very end.

Finally, live your life as an exploration. Explore the world by doing what you have never done before, by visiting places you have never been to before, by meeting people you haven’t known before. The biggest breakthroughs in life happen when you expand your comfort zone and explore the world beyond the border of what you are familiar with. Often

Liberated from fear, the Americans live with confidence, and therefore with enhanced vitality. A generous extravagance, undreamed of in other parts of the world, is the American rule. Men and women earn largely and spend what they have on the national pleasures, which are all social and stimulative of vitality. Modernity also tends to heighten vitality – or to be more exact, it affects the expression of vitality, externalising it in the form of vehement action. The joyful acceptance of change, which so profoundly influences American industry, business methods and domestic architecture, reacts on the affairs of daily, personal life. Pleasure is associated with a change of place and environment, finally with mere movement for its own sake. People leave their homes if they want entertainment. They externalise their vitality in visiting places of public amusement, in dancing and motoring – in doing anything that is not quietly sitting by their own fireside (or rather by their own radiator). What is known as 'night life' flourishes in America as nowhere else in the world. And nowhere, perhaps, is there so little conversation. In America vitality is given its most obviously vital expression. Hence there appears to be even more vitality in the Americans than perhaps there really is. A man may have plenty of vitality and yet keep still; his motionless calm may be mistaken for listlessness. There can be no mistake about people who dance and rush about. American vitality is always obviously manifested. It expresses itself vigorously to the music of the drum and saxophone, to the ringing of telephone bells and the roar of street cars. It expresses itself in terms of hastening automobiles, of huge and yelling crowds, of speeches, banquets, 'drives,' slogans, sky signs. It is all movement and noise, like the water gurgling out of a bath down the waste. Yes, down the waste.

When summer began, I headed out west. My parents had told me I needed a rest. “Your imagination,” they said, “is getting too wild. It will do you some good to relax for a while.” So they put me aboard a westbound train. To visit Aunt Fern in her house on the plains. But I was captured by cowboys, A wild-looking crowd. Their manners were rough and their voices were loud. “I’m trying to get to my aunt’s house,” I said. But they carried me off to their cow camp instead. The Cattle Boss growled, as he told me to sit, “We need a new cowboy. Our old cowboy quit. We could sure use your help. So what do you say?” I thought for a minute, then I told him, “Okay.” Then I wrote to Aunt Fern, so she’d know where I’d gone. I said not to worry, I wouldn’t be long. That night I was given a new set of clothes. Soon I looked like a wrangler from my head to my toes. But there’s more to a cowboy than boots and a hat, I found out the next day And the day after that Each day I discovered some new cowboy tricks. From roping And riding To making fire with sticks. Slowly the word spread all over the land. “That wrangler ‘Kid Bleff’ is a first-rate cowhand!” The day finally came when the roundup was through. Aunt Fern called: “Come on over. Bring your cowboys with you.” She was cooking a barbecue that very same day. So we cleaned up (a little) and we headed her way. The food was delicious. There was plenty to eat. And the band that was playing just couldn’t be beat. But suddenly I noticed a terrible sight. The cattle were stirring and stamping with fright. It’s a scene I’ll remember till my very last day. “They’re gonna stampede!” I heard somebody say. Just then they came charging. They charged right at me! I looked for a hiding place-- A rock, or a tree. What I found was a tablecloth spread out on the ground. So I turned like a matador And spun it around. It was a new kind of cowboying, a fantastic display! The cattle were frightened and stampeded…away! Then the cowboys all cheered, “Bleff’s a true buckaroo!” They shook my hand and slapped my back, And Aunt Fern hugged me, too. And that’s how I spent my summer vacation. I can hardly wait for show-and-tell!

Well, that’s everyone,” Nigel said, “although we do have one extra basket. Perhaps I could interest you in taking it, Miss Easton. Surely you deserve a Christmas treat as well.” His eyes gleamed with a teasing light, and Amelia could feel her cheeks flushing hot. Having finally acknowledged her feelings for him, it was difficult to meet his gaze. “I think I’ve eaten too many treats already,” she said with a forced chuckle. “I’ve been terribly self-indulgent tonight.” “I cannot agree with you, Miss Easton. To my mind, you aren’t spoiled nearly enough.” His smile fueled her blush. Amelia suspected her cheeks were now as red as his waistcoat. “I am in complete agreement,” Aunt Lucy chimed in. “Amelia is always thinking of others, never of herself. But as much as she deserves additional treats, that extra basket is for her sister, Gwen.” “Ah, the youngest Easton,” Nigel said. “She didn’t join us tonight.” “She’s confined to the nursery with an earache, poor thing,” Amelia explained, “and she’s very sad to be missing all the fun.” She paused to watch Nigel gingerly extract the mistletoe wreath from his hair. “I know it’s a great deal to ask, Mr. Dash, but do you think…” She trailed off, hating to impose on him yet again. Nigel placed the crown back on his head with a rueful smile. “Why not? It’s not as if I could look any more of a fool that I already do.” “I wouldn’t bet on that,” Broadmore said, barging in to the conversation. “You’ve outdone yourself this time, Dash. Wait till everyone around town hears how you played the fool.” Aunt Lucy gave his lordship her most imperial glare as she rose. “I am vastly grateful to Mr. Dash for his generosity and kindness. His charitable spirit is certainly a great deal more admirable than yours, Lord Broadmore, and entirely in keeping with the holiday season.” She turned her back on him to speak with Thomas. In the face of that forceful snub, Broadmore could do nothing but silently fume. Nigel gave him a bland smile but saved a wink for Amelia. Choking back a laugh, she came to her feet. “I’ll escort you to the nursery, Mr. Dash. I promised to visit Gwen before her bedtime, and I know she’ll be thrilled to have a visit from Father Christmas.” She plucked the ornate basket of sweets from the footman’s tray. “I’ll take that, Thomas.” Broadmore

I fetched my bag, tucked the folded newspaper inside, and grabbed the house keys. Clay beat me to the door.  I scowled down at him.  He stared back at me.  After a moment, he shook his neck, jangling his tags.  Defeated, I clipped on his leash.  He negotiated well without using a single word. I used my cell to call the number for the first ad.  The man sounded a bit brusque as if my planned visit inconvenienced him.  Shrugging it off, I led Clay to the address.  A rusty car parked on the front lawn with a “for sale” sign affirmed I had the right place.  Clay and I walked toward the car. A man called hello from the open garage and made his way toward us.  As he neared, his demeanor changed, and I inwardly groaned.  He introduced himself as Howard and looked me over with interest.  Clay moved to stand between us, his stoic presence a good deterrent. Howard talked about the car for a bit, going through the laundry list of its deficiencies.  Then he popped the hood so I could look at the engine.  In the middle of Howard’s attempt to impress me with his vast mechanical knowledge, Clay sprang up between us.  Howard yelped at Clay’s sudden move and edged away as Clay placed his paws on the front of the car to get a good look at the engine, too.  I fought not to smile at the man’s stunned expression.  At Clay’s discreet nod, I bought the car, not bothering with the second ad. No matter what errand I wanted to run during the week before classes started, Clay insisted on tagging along.  On Friday, when I drove to the bookstore, Clay rode a very cramped shotgun and waited in the car while I made my purchases.  Later, he sat in the hot car again while I bought some basic school supplies. However, Monday, when I tried leaving for my first class, I put my foot down.  He bristled and growled and tried to follow me. “Your license only wins you so much freedom.  Dogs aren’t allowed on campus and definitely not in the classroom.” Thankfully, Rachel had left first and didn’t hear me scold him. I tried to leave again, but he stubbornly persisted.  Finally, exasperated, I reminded him that he slept on my bed because of my good grace.  He resentfully stepped away from the door. *

For us on the East Coast of the United States the systematic change in the calendar begins on December 31, 2017. It starts in the South Pacific nation of Samoa, which is always the first country to welcome in the New Year. Just 101 miles to the east is American Samoa, which will have to wait for an entire day to pass, before they can celebrate the New Year in…. Around the globe there are 39 different local time zones, which cause this phenomenon to take place over a period of 26 hours, before everyone on Earth enters the New Year. The year of 2018 is first celebrated at 5 a.m. on December 31, 2017, in Samoa and on Christmas Island in Kiribati. I have actually been on that small island, located in the figurative center of the largest ocean in the world. Only fifteen minutes later, the New Year arrives on Chatham Island in New Zealand. It isn’t until 8 a.m. that larger land masses are affected and then by 9 a.m., much of Australia and parts of Russia can ring in the New Year. In rapid succession North & South Korea, China and the Philippines fall to the moving clock. By noon Indonesia, Thailand and 10 more countries enter into the New Year. Having been in Malaysia and Thailand, I personally know what it’s like, hanging from your heels, on the opposite side of the Earth from where we are now. The ever moving midnight hour visits our troops in Afghanistan, at 2:30 p.m. and washes over Europe, starting at 4 p.m. It continues to flow over the continent until leaving the United Kingdom three hours later. Entering the Atlantic Ocean it does not reappear in America, until it reaches parts of Brazil at 9 p.m. Midnight finally comes to us on the east coast of North America where we celebrate the New Year with more gusto than anywhere else on Earth. In the United States and Canada we celebrate for three hours, before handing the baton over to Alaska, Hawaii and the United States owned Pacific Islands. By 7 a.m. the last of the American Islands in the Pacific Ocean can finally herald in 1918. I have heard it said that if you had the resources and time, you could fly from Sydney to Honolulu and celebrate the New Year twice. I can imagine that this little bit of fun could be quite expensive!

But they were realists, and had long stopped hoping for the dream conclusion to their nightmare. They longed now just to know what had happened to Megan, to have a final resting place to visit, a place to lay flowers – somewhere their beautiful daughter could rest in peace. Their lives had ended the day Megan disappeared and finding her was their only desire while they were still breathing. Like so many others who’d made contact since the public appeal about the tattooed girls, the Dignams were compelled to come here, to have somebody listen to their story and to maybe find some truth – even if that truth meant hearing the worst news any parent could ever hear.

resembled photographs she had seen of Rudyard Kipling, when the newspapers published photographs of the author and his wife visiting the battlefields of northern France in search of their only son’s final resting place.

Offer A Treat. For confident kittens that like exploring in the car, make meal time car time. After he's calm in the car, feed some of his meals in the car for a week, or offer very high-value treats that kitty gets at no other time. If your cat is more motivated by play or catnip, indulge him with favorites during the car times. He should learn that only these good things in life happen when you're near or inside the car. Add the Crate. You should be combining the crate training with car visits. Once kitty accepts the car as his territory, place him in his carrier, set it on the back seat (away from air bag danger), and start the car. Then turn off the motor and take him out without going anywhere. Do this three or four times during the day until the cat takes it as a matter of course. Each time, you'll give him lots of play or other rewards once he's released from the crate. Start The Car. Finally, after you start the car, open the garage door (if that’s where your car is), and back the car to the end of the driveway and stop. Do this two or three times in a day, always letting the pet out after you return. If the pet cries or shows stress, you may be moving too fast for him. The garage door is noisy, after all, and the movement of the car feels odd. The process takes forever, but it works. Increase The Time. Continue increasing the car-time by increments:  a trip around the block and then home, then a trip down the street and back, and so on. Cat calming music CDs may also help during the trip. Make every car trip upbeat and positive so the experience makes the cat look forward to the next trip. Visit The Vet. As mentioned earlier, it’s ideal for your kitten to have visits to the vet that are FUN and result in playing, petting and treats, with no scary or unpleasant experiences. That prepares kitty for the times when a veterinary exam is necessary.

Here,” he says, removing my camera from its dry home and handing it to me to turn on. “I want to take a picture of you.” I spin all the way around to fully face him, my back to the village, and smile. He takes way more than one, zooming in and out, aiming up and down, every possible angle and frame width. He mumbles a few things in Italian between shots, and judging by the look on his face, he’s up to no good. Is this why he wanted me to wear my sundress? The temperature is suddenly roasting, my cheeks blazing. There’s a reason I like being on the other side of the camera. Finally I put my hand out in front of my face. “Okay, okay. I think you got enough.” He sets it down in his lap and cocks his head to the side, studying me. “You could belong here,” he says, his tone surprisingly serious. I turn from him and look back at the cluster of buildings, one on top of the other. A beautiful and unique place to visit, but to live long term? “I don’t know about that,” I say. “This could be your life.” He spreads his arms out as if to encompass the whole of Cinque Terre. And him.

The ultimate symbol of our religious devotion isn’t our churches, though it’s often beside them. In the South, we understand cemeteries as our final reward, and as Grits, we understand the importance of keeping them in shape. We visit the graves of our ancestors often, especially on a Sunday, and pray for their souls. We picnic in Confederate cemeteries, with their weather-worn memorials, and remember the sacrifices and sins of our past. Cemeteries are sacred ground in the South. They are the place where faith, family, history, and community meet. We can’t think of a better definition of the true power of Southern religion.

A gentleman I met while I was here for Luke’s wedding happens to be visiting again and we ran into each other at that little Virgin River bar. I pretended I couldn’t remember meeting him. I don’t know why I did that. Probably because he was coming on a little strong.” “Strong?” Viv asked. “Did he make a pass?” “God, no, I’d have had a coronary! He hadn’t even started flirting, thank goodness. But I could tell he was happy to run into me again and I thought it best to just discourage him right away rather than have to reject him later. Turned out he wasn’t nearly discouraged enough and asked me out to dinner.” Viv was silent for a long moment. Her brows drew together and her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “And the problem is?” she finally asked. “I don’t want to go out to dinner with him.” “Ah,” she said, sitting back on the couch. “He’s not your type?” “Vivian,” Maureen said with surprise. “I don’t have a type!” Again Viv was silent. “I don’t think I understand, Maureen. We all have pretty basic likes and dislikes. Are you put off by his looks?” “That’s not it—he’s actually handsome. Probably a little older than me, but still handsome.” “Bad manners?” Viv asked. “Bad breath? Slippery dentures? What puts you off?” “Nothing, he’s nice. Attractive and charming. But I don’t go out to dinner with men.” “Why ever not?” she asked, completely baffled. “I’m a single woman. A widow of a certain age. An older woman!” “Maureen, you must draw the interest of men regularly. You’re a very attractive woman!” “No, never,” she said. “Not at all. But then, I’m never in places where something like that might happen. I pretty much keep to church things or pastimes with women who live in the condos. Golf, tennis, bridge, the occasional potluck. If I do run into men, they’re with their wives.” “But don’t you have friends your age who date? Friends who are divorced or widowed who have men friends or boyfriends?” Maureen made a sound of annoyance. “Yes, and some of them act downright ridiculous! I’ve seen some of these women I play golf and tennis with, chasing men as if they’re…they’re…” “Horny?” Viv asked with a smile. Maureen was shocked. “Really, that’s an awful word!” “Oh, brother,” Viv said with a laugh.

End of May 2012               Hi Andy, I guess we were too arrogant to admit we missed each other after our separation. There were moments when I felt lost and did not know which direction to turn, because my Valet wasn’t there to guide me. I descended into an abyss, looking for love in all the wrong places. I was too inexperienced to understand the spiritual love we shared. I mistook sex for love. A major mistake! I was lonely and I missed your presence. To fill the void, I visited the London underground sex club dungeons and back rooms. These places offered me nothing, except a temporary sexual fix that became a habit and an addiction. Nine months passed before I finally picked up the broken pieces of my life. Lucky to be accepted into the Belfast College of Art and Design, I took this opportunity to start fresh. I left London in the autumn of 1971 for Ireland. My departure proved to be my saving grace. There was nothing to do in the evenings in war-torn Belfast. I plunged myself into my art studies, which I enjoyed tremendously. You’ll never guess what transpired in Belfast that year.

Well, the following are my own so they probably "don't already exist in the data base". ------------------------------------------------------ Never visit a place where you have to count your change. When your carrier bags exceed the number of your teeth it's time to check out. What is an opinion but an ersatz fact? Things are nearly always better from a distance [aka The Expectation Is Better Than The Event] There's no such thing as a free 0800 number. The court scene at the end of Alice In Wonderland is a microcosm of the UK justice system. With respect to heterogeneity of shape & size, no other species approaches Homo Sapiens's level. Darwinism relaxes its hold with Western Man's tolerance of its current state of corporeal deviation. [I think this may be a reference to our overweight brethren. Ed.] Много людей - живы,только потому что нeзаконно них убить. The poncier the restaurant the smaller the portion. Remember that although the government may have the backing of the whole army, without the backing of the people tho' they be armed only with sticks, it will not be able to stay in power. An ill-defined border it is 'twixt arrogance and shyness. There are 2 types of people in the world. Those who want to part with as few of their resources as possible, and those aiming to relieve the rest of us of said resources. So if you need facts, you have to go to the news, history books, or your own kith-&-kin. This is why i term our society a "99% bullshit" society. And since the majority of folk are evidently ignorant of this, the state of affairs will endure. Finally, if you are intrigued as to what the future holds for you - take your life up to now, and extend it. Not very exciting I'm afraid.

(Well, the following are my own so they probably 'don`t already exist in the data base'). ---------------------------------------------- Never visit a place where you have to count your change. When your carrier bags exceed the number of your teeth it's time to check out. What is an opinion but an ersatz fact? Things are nearly always better from a distance [aka The Expectation Is Better Than The Event] There's no such thing as a free 0800 number. The court scene at the end of Alice In Wonderland is a microcosm of the UK justice system. With respect to heterogeneity of shape & size, no other species approaches Homo Sapiens's level. Darwinism relaxes its hold with Western Man's tolerance of its current state of corporeal deviation. [I think this may be a reference to our overweight brethren. Ed.] Много людей - живы,только потому что нeзаконно них убить. The poncier the restaurant the smaller the portion. Remember that although the government may have the backing of the whole army, without the backing of the people tho' they be armed only with sticks, it will not be able to stay in power. An ill-defined border it is 'twixt arrogance and shyness. There are 2 types of people in the world. Those who want to part with as few of their resources as possible, and those aiming to relieve the rest of us of said resources. So if you need facts, you have to go to the news, history books, or your own kith-&-kin. This is why i term our society a "99% bullshit" society. And since the majority of folk are evidently ignorant of this, the state of affairs will endure. Finally, if you are intrigued as to what the future holds for you - take your life up to now, and extend it. Not very exciting I'm afraid.

(Well, the following are my own so they probably 'don`t already exist in the data base'). -------------------------------------------- Never visit a place where you have to count your change. When your carrier bags exceed the number of your teeth it's time to check out. What is an opinion but an ersatz fact? Things are nearly always better from a distance [aka The Expectation Is Better Than The Event] There's no such thing as a free 0800 number. The court scene at the end of Alice In Wonderland is a microcosm of the UK justice system. With respect to heterogeneity of shape & size, no other species approaches Homo Sapiens's level. Darwinism relaxes its hold with Western Man's tolerance of its current state of corporeal deviation. [I think this may be a reference to our overweight brethren. Ed.] Много людей - живы,только потому что нeзаконно них убить. The poncier the restaurant the smaller the portion. Remember that although the government may have the backing of the whole army, without the backing of the people tho' they be armed only with sticks, it will not be able to stay in power. An ill-defined border it is 'twixt arrogance and shyness. There are 2 types of people in the world. Those who want to part with as few of their resources as possible, and those aiming to relieve the rest of us of said resources. So if you need facts, you have to go to the news, history books, or your own kith-&-kin. This is why i term our society a "99% bullshit" society. And since the majority of folk are evidently ignorant of this, the state of affairs will endure. Finally, if you are intrigued as to what the future holds for you - take your life up to now, and extend it. Not very exciting I'm afraid.

(Well, the following are my own so they probably 'don`t already exist in the data base'). -------------------------------------------- Never visit a place where you have to count your change. When your carrier bags exceed the number of your teeth it's time to check out. What is an opinion but an ersatz fact? Things are nearly always better from a distance [aka The Expectation Is Better Than The Event] There's no such thing as a free 0800 number. The court scene at the end of Alice In Wonderland is a microcosm of the UK justice system. With respect to heterogeneity of shape & size, no other species approaches Homo Sapiens's level. Darwinism relaxes its hold with Western Man's tolerance of its current state of corporeal deviation. [I think this may be a reference to our overweight brethren. Ed.] Много людей - живы,только потому что нeзаконно них убить. The poncier the restaurant the smaller the portion. Remember that although the government may have the backing of the whole army, without the backing of the people tho' they be armed only with sticks, it will not be able to stay in power. An ill-defined border it is 'twixt arrogance and shyness. There are 2 types of people in the world. Those who want to part with as few of their resources as possible, and those aiming to relieve the rest of us of said resources. So if you need facts, you have to go to the news, history books, or your own kith-&-kin. This is why i term our society a "99% bullshit" society. And since the majority of folk are evidently ignorant of this, the state of affairs will endure. Finally, if you are intrigued as to what the future holds for you, take your life up to now and extend it. Not very exciting I'm afraid.

(Well, the following are my own so they probably 'don`t already exist in the data base'.) -------------------------------------------- Never visit a place where you have to count your change. When your carrier bags exceed the number of your teeth it's time to check out. What is an opinion but an ersatz fact? Things are nearly always better from a distance [aka The Expectation Is Better Than The Event] There's no such thing as a free 0800 number. The court scene at the end of Alice In Wonderland is a microcosm of the UK justice system. With respect to heterogeneity of shape & size, no other species approaches Homo Sapiens's level. Darwinism relaxes its hold with Western Man's tolerance of its current state of corporeal deviation. [I think this may be a reference to our overweight brethren. Ed.] Много людей - живы,только потому что нeзаконно них убить. The poncier the restaurant the smaller the portion. Remember that although the government may have the backing of the whole army, without the backing of the people tho' they be armed only with sticks, it will not be able to stay in power. An ill-defined border it is 'twixt arrogance and shyness. There are 2 types of people in the world. Those who want to part with as few of their resources as possible, and those aiming to relieve the rest of us of said resources. So if you need facts, you have to go to the news, history books, or your own kith-&-kin. This is why i term our society a "99% bullshit" society. And since the majority of folk are evidently ignorant of this, the state of affairs will endure. Finally, if you are intrigued as to what the future holds for you - take your life up to now, and extend it. Not very exciting I'm afraid.

ROZ: My sister and I became guarded with each other in the weeks and months after our mother died. I don’t think either of us had a handle on what it was about, but I, in my characteristic way, was eager to roll up my sleeves and iron out some issues with her. She, less given to argument, preferred to keep her distance. Many is the time I drove through the streets of Boston presenting my case in the most cogent terms to a full courtroom just beyond the dashboard, while she was safely closeted a state away. My birthday came and went and still we had not managed to get together; of course I felt all the more put upon. Finally I had the grace to ask myself, “What’s happening here?” and I caught a glimpse of the in-between. All the energy I had been expending to shape a persuasive argument was actually propelling us apart. And I missed her—acutely. I thought that if I could just see her we surely could find some solutions. So I called her, and invited myself to her house for breakfast, and got up in the dark and was down in Connecticut by seven. There in the kitchen in her nightgown I found her, looking like my favorite sister in all the world. We talked gaily while we drank black Italian coffee, and then we took a long morning walk down the leafy dirt roads of Ashford, Connecticut, while her chocolate Lab, Chloe, ran ahead and came back, ran ahead and came back, in long arcs of perpetual motion. What did we talk about? The architecture, and the countryside, and the cats that Chloe was eager to visit at the farm ahead. We revisited scenes featuring our hilarious mother. We talked about my work, and about a paper she was about to present. My “case” never came up; it must have gotten lost somewhere along that wooded road because by the time I got in the car—my courtroom, my favorable jury—it was no longer on the docket. Did we resolve the issues? Obviously not, but the issues themselves are rarely what they seem, no matter what pains are taken to verify the scoreboard. We walked together, moved our arms, became joyous in the sunlight, and breathed in the morning. At that moment there were no barriers between us. And from that place, I felt our differences could easily be spoken. My disagreements with my sister were but blips on our screen compared to the hostilities individuals and nations are capable of when anger, fear, and the sense of injustice are allowed to develop unchecked. “Putting things aside” then becomes quite a different matter. At the apex of desperation and rage, we need a new invention to see us through.

bumped into someone on Bleecker who was beyond the pale. I felt like talking to him so I did. As we talked I kept thinking, But you’re beyond the pale, yet instead of that stopping us from talking we started to talk more and more frantically, babbling like a couple of maniacs about a whole load of things: shame, ruin, public humiliation, the destruction of reputation—that immortal part of oneself—the contempt of one’s wife, one’s children, one’s colleagues, personal pathology, exposure, suicidal ideation, and all that jazz. I thought, Maybe if I am one day totally and finally placed beyond the pale, I, too, might feel curiously free. Of expectation. Of the opinions of others. Of a lot of things. “It’s like prison,” he said, not uncheerfully. “You don’t see anybody and you get a lot of writing done.” If you’re wondering where he would be placed on a badness scale of one to ten, as I understand it he is, by general admission, hovering between a two and a three. He did not have “victims” so much as “annoyed parties.” What if he had had victims? Would I have talked to him then? But surely in that case, in an ideal world—after a trial in court—he would have been sent to a prison, or, if you have more enlightened ideas about both crime and punishment, to a therapeutic facility that helps people not to make victims of their fellow humans. Would I have visited him in prison? Probably not. I can’t drive, and besides I have never volunteered for one of those programs in which sentimental people, under the influence of the Gospels, consider all humans to be essentially victims of one another and of themselves and so go to visit even the worst offenders, bringing them copies of the Gospels and also sweaters they’ve knitted. But that wasn’t the case here. He was beyond the pale, I wasn’t. We said our good-byes and I returned to my tower, keeping away from the window for the afternoon, not being in the mood for either signs or arrows. I didn’t know where I was on the scale back then (last week). I was soon to find out. Boy, was I soon to find out. But right now, in the present I’m telling you about, I saw through a glass, darkly. Like you, probably. Like a lot of people.

I bumped into someone on Bleecker who was beyond the pale. I felt like talking to him so I did. As we talked I kept thinking, But you’re beyond the pale, yet instead of that stopping us from talking we started to talk more and more frantically, babbling like a couple of maniacs about a whole load of things: shame, ruin, public humiliation, the destruction of reputation—that immortal part of oneself—the contempt of one’s wife, one’s children, one’s colleagues, personal pathology, exposure, suicidal ideation, and all that jazz. I thought, Maybe if I am one day totally and finally placed beyond the pale, I, too, might feel curiously free. Of expectation. Of the opinions of others. Of a lot of things. “It’s like prison,” he said, not uncheerfully. “You don’t see anybody and you get a lot of writing done.” If you’re wondering where he would be placed on a badness scale of one to ten, as I understand it he is, by general admission, hovering between a two and a three. He did not have “victims” so much as “annoyed parties.” What if he had had victims? Would I have talked to him then? But surely in that case, in an ideal world—after a trial in court—he would have been sent to a prison, or, if you have more enlightened ideas about both crime and punishment, to a therapeutic facility that helps people not to make victims of their fellow humans. Would I have visited him in prison? Probably not. I can’t drive, and besides I have never volunteered for one of those programs in which sentimental people, under the influence of the Gospels, consider all humans to be essentially victims of one another and of themselves and so go to visit even the worst offenders, bringing them copies of the Gospels and also sweaters they’ve knitted. But that wasn’t the case here. He was beyond the pale, I wasn’t. We said our good-byes and I returned to my tower, keeping away from the window for the afternoon, not being in the mood for either signs or arrows. I didn’t know where I was on the scale back then (last week). I was soon to find out. Boy, was I soon to find out. But right now, in the present I’m telling you about, I saw through a glass, darkly. Like you, probably. Like a lot of people.

The final reason we want to know the will of God is because we are cowardly. It’s true. Sometimes when we pray to know the will of God, we are praying a coward’s prayer: “Lord, tell me what to do so nothing bad will happen to me and I won’t have to face danger or the unknown.” We want to know everything is going to be fine for us or for those we love. But that’s not how God spoke to Esther. As a Jewish woman who won an unusual beauty contest to become Xerxe’s queen (see Esther 2:2-17), Esther would learn that God’ plans can include risk—and an opportunity to show courage. The king’s right-hand man, Haman, was the enemy of the Jews and devised a plot to kill all the Jewish people, and Xerxes, king of Persia, unwittingly signed this decree. When Mordecai, Esther’s older cousin and guardian, learned of this plot, he told Esther, knowing she was the only one in a position to save the Jewish people—her people. But she refused, telling him that if she visited King Xerxes without being summoned, she would, by Persian law, be killed—unless the king extended the golden scepter and spared her life. Entering the throne room on her own was very risky, which is why Esther sent people to Mordecai to say that she wouldn’t do it. The Scriptures give us Mordecai’s response to the words of Esther’s emissaries: Then Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, “Do not think to yourself that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:13-14) So what would you do at this point? Pray for some sign from heaven? Wait for God’s will to be revealed? Question why God would put you in such a predicament? Do nothing, figuring that anything involving suffering and possible death must not be His plan for your life? Look at what Esther did: Then Esther told them to reply to Mordecai, “Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my young women will also fast as you do. Then I will go to the king, though it is against the Law, and if I perish, I perish.” (vv. 15-16).

Oh, we’ll know each other forever,” Bix says. “The days of losing touch are almost gone.” "What does that mean?" Drew asks. "We're going to meet again in a different place," Bix says. "Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us." "Where? How?" Drew asks. Bix hesitates, like he's held this secret so long he's afraid of what will happen when he releases it into the air. "I picture it like Judgment Day," he says finally, his eyes on the water. "We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.

I KNOW HOW THIS is going to sound, but Anthony Bourdain was the one who hooked me on Laos. Over the previous year, I had slipped further into insomnia—the accumulated effect of Benghazi stress and a hungry newborn keeping me awake for long stretches of each night. I’d fill that time lying on my couch in a darkened living room plowing through every episode of Bourdain’s various travel shows, over and over. I felt a sense of recognition in this guy wandering around the world, trying to find some temporary connection with other human beings living within their own histories. I’d been vaguely familiar with the story of Laos. Hillary had visited in 2012, and I remembered that we cobbled together some money for UXO clearance—a few numbers on a budget sheet. But the Bourdain episode that showed human beings on a television screen in the middle of the night, struggling in a place that was still a war zone, forty years after a war that I’d never learned about in school, woke my interest. I added two items to the bucket list for my final year in the job: Get more money for Laos, and get Obama to tape an episode of Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain.

There was this new minister who went to the cemetery sorry, cemetery and he got his PhD and his DD and he’s got assign to his first church. I’ll never forget this. When he got there the church was a little lively but he was dead and he told the people now that am your new pastor we gonna do things a little different around here. He said, no more shouting, we’re going to do things in order. And theres going to be a quietness. He said I want you to follow my lead. He said I’ve graduated from the seminary and I’ve been educated and we’re going to do things in order and we’re going to take away this noise. It took him about 6 months to get things all tone down, he thought. He never even bothered to write his sermons out because some of the people were still shouting. But after 6 months he had everything under control and everything was dead. Dead quite. I mean quite. And finally he worked on his message all week long, had it all type written out on 15 pages, double space. Had everything perfect and now he is going to demonstrate his educational powers. Ready to wax eloquent and have them know they have an educated preacher/minister. He got into his message that he was reading. And he got to page 5, there was an ooooooooooooold fashion deacon in the back and let out one of them big old weeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllll gloryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy !!!!!. that was like an atom bomb that struck. And he became frustrated and all 15 pages of notes fell on the ground and he lost his place. He was never been so humiliated in all of his life. He could not finish his sermon. The only thing he could do is stop and pray and put the benediction on. He became so aggravated at the brother at the back. He said I did not know what I said to make him shout but he said am going to visit him in the morning and am going to found out what I said. And whatever I said am going to cut it out of my mind and I’ll never say it again so he won’t shout. Monday morning he headed out and he went to this brother who was a farmer. He didn’t even bother to go to the house. He wanted to handle this man to man. The brother offered a cup of coffee but the pastor refused it. He said I came out here to talk man to man sir. Do you remember when I first came to the church I said we were going to do things differently. He said yes sir I do remember. You remember I said nobody was going to make some noice. He said yes sir I remember that. He said yesterday you embarrassed me. I only got half way through my sermon. He said I want you to be honest with me brother. What was it that I said that made you shout because whatever it is am not going to say it no more. The brother breathed and said let get one thing straight pastor, you’ve been here six months. aint nothing you ever said made me shout. Nothing at all. But when I get to thinking how deep I was in sin and Jesus brought me out and cleaned me and wrote my name the book of life. How so good He’s been to me. When I was thinking of what He done for me, I couldn’t help but shoouuuuuuuuuuuuuuut to His gloryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. I don’t just shout in church, here with my mules thinking of Jesus, I feel another shouuuuuuuuuuuuut coming up.

The Aftermath A lot of time has passed since that fateful day in August of 1965. I visited Oak Island a few months ago. Surprisingly, it felt really good to be there. Parts of the island, untouched by the lust for gold, are still beautiful. As I walked, I thought to myself, This is a good place. More than good. It is a wonderful place. But at the far end of the island--the Money Pit end--everything is different. The beaches have been scraped bare. The clearing, no longer a high, flat expanse, has been gouged out and re-formed into lopsided, jagged terrain. The Money Pit, once part of a 32-foot-high plateau, now sits on misshapen, uneven land, almost down to sea level. That end of the island is ugly, ruined. At home I pull out old photographs and letters and journals. I want to remember a time before the accident, before the deaths, a time when all of Oak Island was a beautiful and happy place; the time when my father, mother, and brothers first came to the island. They had been brimming with enthusiasm. They were embarking on a wonderful adventure, and the Restalls just might be the ones to solve this baffling, centuries-old puzzle. Here was a shot at fortune and fame. They lived in a bubble of good wishes, good cheer, and boundless expectations. It was an extraordinary time, when anything seemed possible. Of course, there was also the back-breaking labour and the endless frustration, but after all, what’s an adventure without adversity? I try to hang on to the good memories of Oak Island, but darker images keep creeping in--the disappointments and obstacles, one-by-one, year after year, that gradually wore the family down. In time, the hunt for treasure crowded out all else in their lives. Nothing mattered but Oak Island and its treasure--at least for my dad. Oak Island does that. Men go there seeking riches and fame, and forget who they are. During my family’s final year, only my father was still steadfast in his belief in the Restall hunt for treasure. By that time, conversations among the four of them were strained. Doubts, disagreements, and long silences had settled in. The hunt for treasure was like a job that took every thought, every bit of energy, every cent. Day after day, nothing but drab, drone-like hark work--no glamour here. It seemed to my mother and brothers that this job was one that would never be finished. Until it was finished--but with such a horrible ending.

There is a place called 'heaven' where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet... 55 Cecil Roth...himself came and called me at 10 to 7; so that I could go to Communion! It seemed like a fleeting glimpse of an unfallen world...the incursion of this gentle Jew, and his sombre glance at my rosary by my bed, settled it. 67 How stupid everything is!, and war multiplies the stupidity by 3 and its power by itself: so one's precious days are days are ruled by (3x)^2 when x=normal human crassitude (and that's bad enough). 73 Do 'ramble on'. Letters need not be only about exterior events (though all details are welcome). What you are thinking is just as important. 96 [H]e [Frodo] had... reached the conclusion that physical fighting is actually less ultimately good than most (good) men think it! Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat'-though it contains... some samples or glimpses of final victory. 255 I do not feel quite 'real' or whole, and in a sense there is no one to talk to...we had shared all joys and griefs, and all opinions (in agreement or otherwise), so that I still often find myself thinking 'I must tell E. about this'-then suddenly I feel like a castaway left on a barren island under a heedless sky... 416 The... Fellowes' Garden looks like the foreground of a pre-Raphaelite picture: blazing green starred like the Milky Way with blue anemones, purple/white/yellow crocuses, and final surprise, clouded-yellow, peacock, and tortoiseshell butterflies flitting about...I have a faint hope that perhaps you and your wife could soon pick a fine day and visit me. Excuse scrawl. 417 [I]f lit. teaches us anything at all, it is this: that we have in us an eternal element, free from care and fear, which can survey things that in 'life' we call evil with serenity (that is not...appreciating their quality, but without any disturbance of our spiritual equilibrium)...in some such way, we shall doubtless survey our own story when we know it (and a great deal more of the Whole Story). 126-127.

In August 2014, I became an American citizen, twenty years after I first came to live in the United States. My first trip out of the country was to Mexico. It was a very emotional trip. I was finally back in the country of my birth. Mama Silvia had also passed away, and she and my dad are buried in the same place. I visited their graves and gave them thanks for all the sacrifices they made for me. As