Fruit Shakes Quotes

It's not that I've suddenly become stronger or that something has changed. I'm still shaking. But... We don't have to let those fears stop us. What's most important is that we try to rise above our weakness.

Zach shoveled another spoonful of Fruit Loops cereal with milk into his mouth. “It is not possible!” “How do you know? Just because there’s no proof to prove it, there’s no proof to disprove it either.” “You’re trying to make me crazy, aren’t you?” “Not at all.” Sara put her bowl down. “I’m just saying there could be bunny shifters.” “There are no bunny shifters!” Shaking her head she accused, “You’re a bunny bigot.” Zach threw his spoon back in the near-empty bowl. “And there is no such thing as bunny bigots.

Ol' man Simon, planted a diamond. Grew hisself a garden the likes of none. Sprouts all growin' comin' up glowin' Fruit of jewels all shinin' in the sun. Colors of the rainbow. See the sun and the rain grow sapphires and rubies on ivory vines, Grapes of jade, just ripenin' in the shade, just ready for the squeezin' into green jade wine. Pure gold corn there, Blowin' in the warm air. Ol' crow nibblin' on the amnythyst seeds. In between the diamonds, Ol' man Simon crawls about pullin' out platinum weeds. Pink pearl berries, all you can carry, put 'em in a bushel and haul 'em into town. Up in the tree there's opal nuts and gold pears- Hurry quick, grab a stick and shake some down. Take a silver tater, emerald tomater, fresh plump coral melons. Hangin' in reach. Ol' man Simon, diggin' in his diamonds, stops and rests and dreams about one... real... peach.

BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee. There the Loves a circle go, The flaming circle of our days, Gyring, spiring to and fro In those great ignorant leafy ways; Remembering all that shaken hair And how the wingèd sandals dart, Thine eyes grow full of tender care: Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while; For there a fatal image grows That the stormy night receives, Roots half hidden under snows, Broken boughs and blackened leaves. For all things turn to barrenness In the dim glass the demons hold, The glass of outer weariness, Made when God slept in times of old. There, through the broken branches, go The ravens of unresting thought; Flying, crying, to and fro, Cruel claw and hungry throat, Or else they stand and sniff the wind, And shake their ragged wings; alas! Thy tender eyes grow all unkind: Gaze no more in the bitter glass. - The Two Trees

I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.

Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.

Fruit falls when you shake the tree. You have to keep making things happen.

I do not like Christians. They shake the tree of life, forbidding it to bear fruit, and they scatter to the wind it's fragrant blossoms.

Those who shake the State are easily the first to be engulfed in its destruction. The fruits of dissension are not gathered by the one who began it: he stirs and troubles the waters for other men to fish in.

Theft is punished by Your law, O Lord, and by the law written in men's hearts, which iniquity itself cannot blot out. For what thief will suffer a thief? Even a rich thief will not suffer him who is driven to it by want. Yet had I a desire to commit robbery, and did so, compelled neither by hunger, nor poverty through a distaste for well-doing, and a lustiness of iniquity. For I pilfered that of which I had already sufficient, and much better. Nor did I desire to enjoy what I pilfered, but the theft and sin itself. There was a pear-tree close to our vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was tempting neither for its colour nor its flavour. To shake and rob this some of us wanton young fellows went, late one night (having, according to our disgraceful habit, prolonged our games in the streets until then), and carried away great loads, not to eat ourselves, but to fling to the very swine, having only eaten some of them; and to do this pleased us all the more because it was not permitted.Behold my heart, O my God; behold my heart, which You had pity upon when in the bottomless pit. Behold, now, let my heart tell You what it was seeking there, that I should be gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved to perish. I loved my own error— not that for which I erred, but the error itself. Base soul, falling from Your firmament to utter destruction— not seeking anything through the shame but the shame itself!

I’ll deliberately order a jasmine tea and a fruit plate just to make a point to the client that I’m a serious and disciplined professional. I usually accompany that with a quick line about how shitty the hotel gym is. “The treadmill shakes too much at high speeds” is a fan favorite. The client is almost always impressed.

A police car went by with its siren going, a rotary slurping noise, it sounded like the blender in their kitchen—she made fruit shakes compulsively that they felt morally bound to drink.

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with merry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head

Jiminy," says the old woman. The mothballs gleam with excitement and she claps her hands. "A wolf!" "Gram!" Siobhan glares across the room. She turns to me. "You'll have to excuse her. She's real old. Wasn't a lot integrating between the species back in her day." I pad over and put out a paw. "Pleased to meet you, madam." She blushes, the varicose veins in her cheeks swelling with blood. Instead of taking my paw to shake, however, she turns it over as if it's a piece of bruised fruit in a market. "Hmmm..." She pores over my palm, nodding like a fortune-teller. Her spectacles slide comically down the bridge of her nose, and when she looks up at me, her face is full of mock astonishment. "Oh, my! What big teeth you have!" She giggles and kicks her slippered feet. "Gram!! The old elf claps her tiny hands. "I always wanted to say that!

The river of his youth had been diverted and poured out broadly across the land to seep through dirt to the roots of crops instead of running in its bed. The river was no longer a river, and the desert was no longer a desert. Nothing was as it had been. He knew what had happened to the sagelands. He himself had helped burn them. Then men like his father had seized the river without a trace of evil in their hearts, sure of themselves but ignorant, and children of their time entirely, with no other bearings to rely on. Irrigators and fruit-tree growers, they believed the river to be theirs. His own life spanned that time and this, and so he believed in the old fast river as much as he believed in apple orchards, and yet he saw that the two were at odds, the river defeated that apples might grow as far as Royal Slope. It made no more sense to love the river and at the same time kill it growing apples than it made sense to love small birds on the wing and shoot them over pointing dogs. But he'd come into the world in another time, a time immune to these contradictions and in the end he couldn't shake old ways any more than he could shake his name.

Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted For my sake the fruit forbidden? Must your light like mine be hidden, Your young life like mine be wasted, Undone in mine undoing, And ruined in my ruin, Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?'— She clung about her sister, Kissed and kissed and kissed her: Tears once again Refreshed her shrunken eyes, Dropping like rain After long sultry drouth; Shaking with aguish fear, and pain, She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth. Her lips began to scorch, That juice was wormwood to her tongue, She loathed the feast: Writhing as one possessed she leaped and sung, Rent all her robe, and wrung Her hands in lamentable haste...

[He] seemed to possess, beneath it all, an immutable sense of self-assurance, but in addition to that, the look of a man ensnared by what he perceived to be his own Duty. A Duty that effervesced inside of him impatiently, dry at the mouth, shaking feverishly, and holding its breath in anticipation for—not his action, but in fact—the fruits of his actions, however distant these may have been. The goal was to satiate its thirst in as few moves as possible, instilling each action with an almost implied necessity for having a motive by which it must exist, which is to say that no action was to be wasted for anything, but only for that which was rooted in some definable and clear-cut purpose...Every action had to be a step in some direction and there could be no dillydallying, for Duty bubbling in the bloodstream for too long brought with it a kind of sickness...from which it was difficult to recover. Neither could there be any reconsideration, for the values to which one has sworn were unassailable and beyond the powers of one individual to reassess. And so, Duty, once instilled, must be allowed to carry on unabated, diverting sustenance away from other aspects of one’s character—driving them to a weakened state, brow-beaten by circumstances beyond their immediate control and relegated to their own downtrodden acquiescence to the bravado of the Parasitic Superego, and, as such, cognizant of their growing superfluity.

To get fruits from the tree branches, shake them with hands; to get fruits from men, shake them with clever ideas!

It's like this, Bunny Boy, if you walk up to an oak tree or a bloody elm or something - you know, one of those big bastards - one with a thick, heavy trunk with giant roots that grow deep in the soil and great branches that are covered in leaves, right, and you walk up to it and give the tree a shake, well, what happens?' (...) 'I really don't know, Dad,' (...) 'Well, nothing bloody happens, of course!' (...) 'You can stand there shaking it till the cows come home and all that will happen is your arms will get tired. Right?' (...) 'Right, Dad,' he says. (...) 'But if you go up to a skinny, dry, fucked-up little tree, with a withered trunk and a few leaves clinging on for dear life, and you put your hands around it and shake the shit out of it - as we say in the trade - those bloody leaves will come flying off! Yeah?' 'OK, Dad,' says the boy (...) 'Now, the big oak tree is the rich bastard, right, and the skinny tree is the poor cunt who hasn't got any money. Are you with me?' Bunny Junior nods. 'Now, that sounds easier than it actually is, Bunny Boy. Do you want to know why?' 'OK, Dad.' 'Because every fucking bastard and his dog has got hold of the little tree and is shaking it for all that it's worth - the government, the bloody landlord, the lottery they don't have a chance in hell of winning, the council, their bloody exes, their hundred snotty-nosed brats running around because they are too bloody stupid to exercise a bit of self-control, all the useless shit they see on TV, fucking Tesco, parking fines, insurance on this and insurance on that, the boozer, the fruit machines, the bookies - every bastard and his three-legged, one-eyed, pox-riden dog are shaking this little tree,' says Bunny, clamping his hands together and making like he is throttling someone. 'So what do you go and do, Dad?' says Bunny Junior. 'Well, you've got to have something they think they need, you know, above all else.' 'And what's that, Dad?' 'Hope... you know... the dream. You've got to sell them the dream.

Renly offered me a peach. At our parley. Mocked me, defied me, threatened me, and offered me a peach. I thought he was drawing a blade and went for mine own. Was that his purpose, to make me show fear? Or was it one of his pointless jests? When he spoke of how sweet the peach was, did his words have some hidden meaning?" The king gave a shake of his head, like a dog shaking a rabbit to snap its neck. "Only Renly could vex me so with a piece of fruit. He brought his doom on himself with his treason, but I did love him, Davos. I know that now. I swear, I will go to my grave thinking of my brother's peach.

It's not that I've suddenly become stronger or that something has changed. I'm still shaking. But...we don't have to let those fears stop us. What's more important is that we try to rise above our weakness.

There's a special madness strikes travellers from the North when they reach the lovely land where the lemon trees grow. We come from countries of cold weather; at home, we are at war with nature but here, ah! you think you've come to the blessed plot where the lion lies down with the lamb. Everything flowers; no harsh wind stirs the voluptuous air. The sun spills fruit for you. And the deathly, sensual lethargy of the sweet South infects the starved brain; it gasps: 'Luxury! more luxury!' But then the snow comes, you cannot escape it, it followed us from Russia as if it ran behind our carriage, and in this dark, bitter city has caught up with us at last, flocking against the windowpanes to mock my father's expectations of perpetual pleasure as the veins in his forehead stand out and throb, his hands shake as he deals the Devil's picture books.

Those who shake the State are easily the first to be engulfed in its destruction. The fruits of dissension are not gathered by the one who began it: he stirs and troubles the waters for other men to fish in   – Montaigne (I: 23)  

When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me. A rabbi was once asked the following question: ‘When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?’ The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, ‘No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!’ Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl… For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my famished soul by feeding it with abstract concepts. I said that my body was a slave and that its duty was to gather raw material and bring it to the orchard of the mind to flower and bear fruit and become ideas. The more fleshless, odorless, soundless the world was that filtered into me, the more I felt I was ascending the highest peak of human endeavor. And I rejoiced. And Buddha came to be my greatest god, whom I loved and revered as an example. Deny your five senses. Empty your guts. Love nothing, hate nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing. Breathe out and the world will be extinguished. But one night I had a dream. A hunger, a thirst, the influence of a barbarous race that had not yet become tired of the world had been secretly working within me. My mind pretended to be tired. You felt it had known everything, had become satiated, and was now smiling ironically at the cries of my peasant heart. But my guts – praised be God! – were full of blood and mud and craving. And one night I had a dream. I saw two lips without a face – large, scimitar-shaped woman’s lips. They moved. I heard a voice ask, ‘Who if your God?’ Unhesitatingly I answered, ‘Buddha!’ But the lips moved again and said: ‘No, Epaphus.’ I sprang up out of my sleep. Suddenly a great sense of joy and certainty flooded my heart. What I had been unable to find in the noisy, temptation-filled, confused world of wakefulness I had found now in the primeval, motherly embrace of the night. Since that night I have not strayed. I follow my own path and try to make up for the years of my youth that were lost in the worship of fleshless gods, alien to me and my race. Now I transubstantiate the abstract concepts into flesh and am nourished. I have learned that Epaphus, the god of touch, is my god. All the countries I have known since then I have known with my sense of touch. I feel my memories tingling, not in my head but in my fingertips and my whole skin. And as I bring back Japan to my mind, my hands tremble as if they were touching the breast of a beloved woman.

THE FORTRESS Under the pink quilted covers I hold the pulse that counts your blood. I think the woods outdoors are half asleep, left over from summer like a stack of books after a flood, left over like those promises I never keep. On the right, the scrub pine tree waits like a fruit store holding up bunches of tufted broccoli. We watch the wind from our square bed. I press down my index finger -- half in jest, half in dread -- on the brown mole under your left eye, inherited from my right cheek: a spot of danger where a bewitched worm ate its way through our soul in search of beauty. My child, since July the leaves have been fed secretly from a pool of beet-red dye. And sometimes they are battle green with trunks as wet as hunters' boots, smacked hard by the wind, clean as oilskins. No, the wind's not off the ocean. Yes, it cried in your room like a wolf and your pony tail hurt you. That was a long time ago. The wind rolled the tide like a dying woman. She wouldn't sleep, she rolled there all night, grunting and sighing. Darling, life is not in my hands; life with its terrible changes will take you, bombs or glands, your own child at your breast, your own house on your own land. Outside the bittersweet turns orange. Before she died, my mother and I picked those fat branches, finding orange nipples on the gray wire strands. We weeded the forest, curing trees like cripples. Your feet thump-thump against my back and you whisper to yourself. Child, what are you wishing? What pact are you making? What mouse runs between your eyes? What ark can I fill for you when the world goes wild? The woods are underwater, their weeds are shaking in the tide; birches like zebra fish flash by in a pack. Child, I cannot promise that you will get your wish. I cannot promise very much. I give you the images I know. Lie still with me and watch. A pheasant moves by like a seal, pulled through the mulch by his thick white collar. He's on show like a clown. He drags a beige feather that he removed, one time, from an old lady's hat. We laugh and we touch. I promise you love. Time will not take away that.

And you told us: the storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth, from which there is no shelter in isolation or armament and you told us: the storm will not abate until a just distribution of the fruits of the earth enables men (and women) everywhere to live in dignity and human decency.

We can take things as slowly as you want, but you know it’s too late now to change your mind, Pierce,” he said, in a warning tone. “Of course,” I said. I could see I had approached this all wrong. Where, when you actually needed one, was one of those annoying women’s magazines with advice on how to handle your man? Although that advice probably didn’t apply to death deities. “Because the Furies are after me. And I promised you that I wouldn’t try to escape. That isn’t what I was-“ “No,” he said, with an abrupt shake of his head. “The Furies have no part in this. It doesn’t matter anymore whether or not you try to escape.” He was pacing the length of the room. A muscle had begun to twitch wildly in the side of his jaw. “I thought you knew. I thought you understood. Haven’t you read Homer?” Not again. Mr. Smith was obsessed with this Homer person, too. “No, John,” I said, with forced patience. “I’m afraid we don’t have time to study the ancient Greek poets in school anymore because we have so much stuff to learn that happened since you died, such as the Civil War and the Holocaust and making files in Excel-“ “Well, considering what they had to say about the Fates,” John interrupted, impatiently, “Homer might possibly have been of more use to you.” “The Fates?” The Fates were something I dimly remembered having been mentioned in the section we’d studied on Greek mythology. They were busybodies who presided over everyone’s destiny. “What did Homer have to say about them?” John dragged a hand through his hair. For some reason, he wouldn’t meet my gaze. “The Fates decreed that anyone who ate or drank in the realm of the dead had to remain there for all eternity.” I stared at him. “Right,” I said. “Only if they are pomegranate seeds, like Persephone. The fruit of the dead.” He stopped pacing suddenly and lifted his gaze to mine. His eyes seemed to burn through to my soul. “Pomegranate seeds are what Persephone happened to eat while she was in the Underworld,” he said. “That’s why they call them the fruit of the dead. But the rule is any food or drink.” A strange feeling of numbness had begun to spread across my body. My mouth became too dry for me to speak. “However you feel about me, Pierce,” he went on, relentlessly, “you’re stuck here with me for the rest of eternity.

I had lain quiet and still, but I remembered the ravening hunger that was in me always: to climb into my father’s lap, to rise and run and shout, snatch the draughts from the board and batter them against the walls. To stare at the logs until they burst into flame, to shake him for every secret, as fruits are shaken from a tree. But if I had done even one of those things there would have been no mercy. He would have burnt me down to ash. The moon lay on my son’s forehead. I saw the smudges that water and cloth had not quite scrubbed away. Why should he be peaceful? I never was, nor his father either, when I knew him. The difference was that he was not afraid to be burnt.

Aware she’d likely never tasted such a thing before, she took a cautious sip. Nothing came up. “The straw’s defective.” Dev shot her a quick grin. It altered his face, turning him strikingly beautiful. But that wasn’t the odd part. The odd part was that seeing him smile made her heart change its rhythm. She lifted her hand a fraction, compelled to trace the curve of his lips, the crease in his cheek. Would he let her, she thought, this man who moved with the liquid grace of a soldier . . . or a beast of prey? “Did I say milk shake?” he said, withheld laughter in his voice. “I meant ice cream smoothie—with enough fresh fruit blended into it to turn it solid.” Glancing at her when she didn’t move, he raised an eyebrow. She felt a wave of heat across her face, and the sensation was so strange, it broke through her fascination. Looking down, she took off the lid after removing the straw and stared at the swirls of pink and white that dominated the delicious-smelling concoction. Intrigued, she poked at it with the tip of her straw. “I can see pieces of strawberry, and what’s that?” She looked more closely at the pink-coated black seeds. “Passion fruit?” “Try it and see.” Handing her his water bottle, he started the car and got them on their way. “How would I know?” She put his water in the holder next to the unopened bottle. “And I need a spoon for this.” Reaching into a pocket, he pulled out a plastic-wrapped piece of cutlery. “Here.” “You did that on purpose,” she accused. “Did you want to see how hard I’d try to suck the mixture up?” Another smile, this one a bare shadow. “Would I do that?” It startled her to realize he was teasing her. Devraj Santos, she thought, wasn’t supposed to have a sense of humor. That was something she just knew. And, it was wrong. That meant the shadow-man didn’t know everything, that he wasn’t omnipotent. A cascade of bubbles sparkled through her veins, bright and effervescent. “I think you’re capable of almost anything.” Dipping in the spoon, she brought the decadent mixture to her lips. Oh! The crisp sting of ice, the cream rich and sweet, the fruit a tart burst of sensation. It was impossible not to take a second bite. And a third.

Injustice governs the universe. Everything which is done and undone there bears the stamp of a filthy fragility, as if matter were the fruit of a scandal at the core of nothingness. Each being feeds on the agony of some other; the moments rush like vampires upon time’s anaemia; the world is a receptacle of sobs… In this slaughterhouse, to fold one’s arms or to draw one’s sword are equally vain gestures. No proud frenzy can shake space to its foundations or ennoble men’s souls.

Come on, kiddo,” Grady said, shaking bits of dried fruit out of his hair and hooking his arm around her. “Let’s get you inside—oh, and let’s not mention how long you’ve been home, okay? If Edaline finds out I didn’t bring you straight in to see her, she’s going to conjure up a pile of mastodon droppings and plop them on my head.” He was teasing, of course. But Edaline actually had threatened a manure attack once—and she was definitely a talented enough Conjurer to make it happen.

My youth an unripe plum. Your teeth have left their marks on it. The tooth marks still vibrate. I remember always, remember always. Since I learned how to love you, the door of my soul has been left wide open to the winds of the four directions. Reality calls for change. The fruit of awareness is already ripe, and the door can never be closed again. Fire consumes this century, and mountains and forests bear its mark. The wind howls across my ears, while the whole sky shakes violently in the snowstorm. Winter’s wounds lie still, Missing the frozen blade, Restless, tossing and turning in agony all night.

Ode to the Beloved’s Hips" Bells are they—shaped on the eighth day—silvered percussion in the morning—are the morning. Swing switch sway. Hold the day away a little longer, a little slower, a little easy. Call to me— I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock right now—so to them I come—struck-dumb chime-blind, tolling with a throat full of Hosanna. How many hours bowed against this Infinity of Blessed Trinity? Communion of Pelvis, Sacrum, Femur. My mouth—terrible angel, ever-lasting novena, ecstatic devourer. O, the places I have laid them, knelt and scooped the amber—fast honey—from their openness— Ah Muzen Cab’s hidden Temple of Tulúm—licked smooth the sticky of her hip—heat-thrummed ossa coxae. Lambent slave to ilium and ischium—I never tire to shake this wild hive, split with thumb the sweet- dripped comb—hot hexagonal hole—dark diamond— to its nectar-dervished queen. Meanad tongue— come-drunk hum-tranced honey-puller—for her hips, I am—strummed-song and succubus. They are the sign: hip. And the cosign: a great book— the body’s Bible opened up to its Good News Gospel. Alleluias, Ave Marías, madre mías, ay yay yays, Ay Dios míos, and hip-hip-hooray. Cult of Coccyx. Culto de cadera. Oracle of Orgasm. Rorschach’s riddle: What do I see? Hips: Innominate bone. Wish bone. Orpheus bone. Transubstantiation bone—hips of bread, wine-whet thighs. Say the word and healed I shall be: Bone butterfly. Bone wings. Bone Ferris wheel. Bone basin bone throne bone lamp. Apparition in the bone grotto—6th mystery— slick rosary bead—Déme la gracia of a decade in this garden of carmine flower. Exile me to the enormous orchard of Alcinous—spiced fruit, laden-tree—Imparadise me. Because, God, I am guilty. I am sin-frenzied and full of teeth for pear upon apple upon fig. More than all that are your hips. They are a city. They are Kingdom— Troy, the hollowed horse, an army of desire— thirty soldiers in the belly, two in the mouth. Beloved, your hips are the war. At night your legs, love, are boulevards leading me beggared and hungry to your candy house, your baroque mansion. Even when I am late and the tables have been cleared, in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake. O, constellation of pelvic glide—every curve, a luster, a star. More infinite still, your hips are kosmic, are universe—galactic carousel of burning comets and Big Big Bangs. Millennium Falcon, let me be your Solo. O, hot planet, let me circumambulate. O, spiral galaxy, I am coming for your dark matter. Along las calles de tus muslos I wander— follow the parade of pulse like a drum line— descend into your Plaza del Toros— hands throbbing Miura bulls, dark Isleros. Your arched hips—ay, mi torera. Down the long corridor, your wet walls lead me like a traje de luces—all glitter, glowed. I am the animal born to rush your rich red muletas—each breath, each sigh, each groan, a hooked horn of want. My mouth at your inner thigh—here I must enter you—mi pobre Manolete—press and part you like a wound— make the crowd pounding in the grandstand of your iliac crest rise up in you and cheer.

She set butter and sugar to warm in a sauté pan, and then turned to core, peel, and slice the apples, the sluicing sound of the knife against the crisp flesh of the fruit giving her whirling mind finally something to clutch. She dropped the apples into the pan, shaking it gently by the handle to coat the apples until they were slightly caramelized. Then she added a splash of cider and let the buttery, sweet liquid reduce before seasoning with cinnamon and pouring the softened apples into a serving bowl. She leaned over the bowl as she customarily did when making cinnamon apples to breathe the earthy-sweet aroma.

Already it is twilight down in the Laredito. Bats fly forth from their roostings in courthouse and tower and circle the quarter. The air is full of the smell of burning charcoal. Children and dogs squat by the mud stoops and gamecocks flap and settle in the branches of the fruit trees. They go afoot, these comrades, down along a bare adobe wall. Band music carries dimly from the square. They pass a watercart in the street and they pass a hole in the wall where by the light of a small forgefire an old man beats out shapes of metal. They pass in a doorway a young girl whose beauty becomes the flowers about. They arrive at last before a wooden door. It is hinged into a larger door or gate and all must step over the foot-high sill where a thousand boots have scuffled away the wood, where fools in their hundreds have tripped or fallen or tottered drunkenly into the street. They pass along a ramada in a courtyard by an old grape arbor where small fowl nod in the dusk among the gnarled and barren vines and they enter a cantina where the lamps are lit and they cross stooping under a low beam to a bar and belly up one two three. There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink and mutters. They'll stop you at the river, he says. The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talking to me? At the river. Be told. They'll jail you to a man. Who will? The United States Army. General Worth. They hell they will. Pray that they will. He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. What does that mean, old man? Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster armed ye'll not cross it back. Don't aim to cross it back. We goin to Sonora. What's it to you, old man? The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making into a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs. But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering, and how else could it be? How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call. There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? - Ode to a Nightingale

A legal noose still encircled their necks and they couldn’t seem to shake it off. Lacey assured the couple he would treat them kindly while they served out the final years of their contract. However, on the trip to St. Louis, they quickly saw that they had, once again, stumbled into a trap. Lacey treated them so badly that the couple decided they had only one move left—they would run. In 1804, they fled into Kentucky, Antoine taking the name Ben. No doubt they hoped to reach Ohio or some other free territory. However, Antoine’s wife, drained and exhausted, collapsed by the roadside. While cradled in the arms of the man she loved, she died.

Hunter was superstitious about his actions. He called himself a Road Man for the Lords of Karma. He used that expression several times, most recently the night before he died. I don’t know exactly what he meant by that, but I know he wasn’t joking. He took seriously the idea that evil actions bear evil fruit, and that this is not a matter of psychology, but is a universal law. How he reconciled this with the harm that he inflicted on people around him, on my mother, on me, on countless women, on cabbies, bartenders, waiters, editors, hotel maids, journalists, audience members, and anyone else who encountered his rage, I don’t know. Maybe it all balanced out, the good he did and the harm he did, because he did a tremendous amount of good. He also spoke and wrote of reincarnation. Maybe he was serious about this. Maybe he feared he would be reincarnated as a three-legged dog with the mange in a garbage slum in Brazil, as he once wrote. Or maybe knew he would return as a crazy bodhisattva, to tell the truth and shake us out of our complacency. It is said that when the Tibetan Dalai Lama dies, he is reincarnated not long afterward somewhere else in Tibet. A group of high lamas goes in search of him, based on visions received during meditation, and when they find a candidate, they present him with things owned by the previous Dalai Lama mixed in with other objects. The true reincarnation identifies unerringly those objects that had once belonged to him. Perhaps someday I will encounter a young boy who will recognize this medallion as his, and then I will tell him all about who he had been and all that he did.

Your Eve was wise, John. She knew that Paradise would make her mad, if she were to live forever with Adam and know no other thing but strawberries and tigers and rivers of milk. She knew they would tire of these things, and each other. They would grow to hate every fruit, every stone, every creature they touched. Yet where could they go to find any new thing? It takes strength to live in Paradise and not collapse under the weight of it. It is every day a trial. And so Eve gave her lover the gift of time, time to the timeless, so that they could grasp at happiness. ... And this is what Queen Abir gave to us, her apple in the garden, her wisdom--without which we might all have leapt into the Rimal in a century. The rite bears her name still. For she knew the alchemy of demarcation far better than any clock, and decreed that every third century husbands and wives should separate, customs should shift and parchmenters become architects, architects farmers of geese and monkeys, Kings should become fishermen, and fishermen become players of scenes. Mothers and fathers should leave their children and go forth to get other sons and daughters, or to get none if that was their wish. On the roads of Pentexore folk might meet who were once famous lovers, or a mother and child of uncommon devotion--and they would laugh, and remember, but call each other by new names, and begin again as friends, or sisters, or lovers, or enemies. And some time hence all things would be tossed up into the air once more and land in some other pattern. If not for this, how fastened, how frozen we would be, bound to one self, forever a mother, forever a child. We anticipate this refurbishing of the world like children at a holiday. We never know what we will be, who we will love in our new, brave life, how deeply we will wish and yearn and hope for who knows what impossible thing! Well, we anticipate it. There is fear too, and grief. There is shaking, and a worry deep in the bone. Only the Oinokha remains herself for all time--that is her sacrifice for us. There is sadness in all this, of course--and poets with long elegant noses have sung ballads full of tears that break at one blow the hearts of a flock of passing crows! But even the most ardent lover or doting father has only two hundred years to wait until he may try again at the wheel of the world, and perhaps the wheel will return his wife or his son to him. Perhaps not. Wheels, and worlds, are cruel. Time to the timeless, apples to those who live without hunger. There is nothing so sweet and so bitter, nothing so fine and so sharp.

Seed Leaves Homage to R. F. Here something stubborn comes, Dislodging the earth crumbs And making crusty rubble. it comes up bending double, And looks like a green staple. It could be seedling maple, Or artichoke, or bean. That remains to be seen. Forced to make choice of ends, The stalk in time unbends, Shakes off the seed-case, heaves Aloft, and spreads two leaves Which still display no sure And special signature. Toothless and fat, they keep The oval form of sleep. This plant would like to grow And yet be embryo; In crease, and yet escape The doom of taking shape; Be vaguely vast, and climb To the tip end of time With all of space to fill, Like boundless Igdrasil That has the stars for fruit. But something at the root More urgent that the urge Bids two true leaves emerge; And now the plant, resigned To being self-defined Before it can commerce With the great universe, Takes aim at all the sky And starts to ramify.

He woke each dawn at 5:30, without need for an alarm, though he set one anyway just to be sure. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, he lifted. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he jogged. Down along the Charles. Beneath the sagging boughs of honey locusts fat with fruit. Following his workout, he prepared a shake. After, he showered beneath the rainwater showerhead in the third-story bath-room, water beating down his back, the radio blaring classical music from its place on the marble vanity. Classical, not rock or country or top forty, because he'd been raised on Handel and Tchaikovsky and because sometimes, when he was very tightly wound, the instrumentals were the only things that eased the tension in his chest. When that was done, he dressed, made his bed--tucking his corners in with the militaristic precision his nanny had demanded of him when he was still small and belligerent and went downstairs to make eggs. Over easy, paired with whole-grain toast and a glass of orange juice. He had his routine down to a science, and he did the same thing every morning.

THE POWER OF FIVE These portions contain roughly 5 grams of carbohydrates. Food groups are arranged in the general order in which they should be added. Vegetables 3/4 cup cooked spinach 1/2 cup red peppers 1 medium tomato 2/3 cup cooked broccoli 8 medium asparagus 1 cup cauliflower 1/3 cup chopped onions 1/2 California avocado 2/3 cup summer squash Dairy 5 ounces farmer's cheese or pot cheese 5 ounces mozzarella cheese 1/2 cup cottage cheese 2/3 cup ricotta cheese 1/2 cup heavy cream Nuts and Seeds 1 ounce of: macadamias (approximately ten to twelve nuts) walnuts (approximately fourteen halves) almonds (approximately twenty-four nuts) pecans (approximately thirty-one nuts) hulled sunflower seeds (three tablespoons) roasted shelled peanuts (approximately twenty-six nuts) 1/2 ounce of cashews (approximately nine nuts) Fruits 1/4 cup blueberries 1/4 cup raspberries 1/2 cup strawberries 1/4 cup cantaloupe, honeydew Juices 1/4 cup lemon juice 1/4 cup lime juice 1/2 cup tomato juice Convenience Foods You can select from the variety of convenience foods (bars and shakes are the two most available), but be sure to determine the actual number of digestible carbohydrate in any particular product (see Chapter 8, page 68).

Eat either three regular-size meals a day or four or five smaller meals. Do not skip meals or go more than six waking hours without eating. 2. Eat liberally of combinations of fat and protein in the form of poultry, fish, shellfish, eggs and red meat, as well as of pure, natural fat in the form of butter, mayonnaise, olive oil, safflower, sunflower and other vegetable oils (preferably expeller-pressed or cold-pressed). 3. Eat no more than 20 grams a day of carbohydrate, most of which must come in the form of salad greens and other vegetables. You can eat approximately three cups-loosely packed-of salad, or two cups of salad plus one cup of other vegetables (see the list of acceptable vegetables on page 110). 4. Eat absolutely no fruit, bread, pasta, grains, starchy vegetables or dairy products other than cheese, cream or butter. Do not eat nuts or seeds in the first two weeks. Foods that combine protein and carbohydrates, such as chickpeas, kidney beans and other legumes, are not permitted at this time. 5. Eat nothing that is not on the acceptable foods list. And that means absolutely nothing! Your "just this one taste won't hurt" rationalization is the kiss of failure during this phase of Atkins. 6. Adjust the quantity you eat to suit your appetite, especially as it decreases. When hungry, eat the amount that makes you feel satisfied but not stuffed. When not hungry, eat a small controlled carbohydrate snack to accompany your nutritional supplements. 7. Don't assume any food is low in carbohydrate-instead read labels! Check the carb count (it's on every package) or use the carbohydrate gram counter in this book. 8. Eat out as often as you wish but be on guard for hidden carbs in gravies, sauces and dressings. Gravy is often made with flour or cornstarch, and sugar is sometimes an ingredient in salad dressing. 9. Avoid foods or drinks sweetened with aspartame. Instead, use sucralose or saccharin. Be sure to count each packet of any of these as 1 gram of carbs. 10. Avoid coffee, tea and soft drinks that contain caffeine. Excessive caffeine has been shown to cause low blood sugar, which can make you crave sugar. 11. Drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water each day to hydrate your body, avoid constipation and flush out the by-products of burning fat. 12. If you are constipated, mix a tablespoon or more of psyllium husks in a cup or more of water and drink daily. Or mix ground flaxseed into a shake or sprinkle wheat bran on a salad or vegetables.

And how to describe a London party? Candles in lustres of cut-glass are placed everywhere about the house in dazzling profusion; elegant mirrors triple and quadruple the light until night outshines day; many-coloured hot-house fruits are piled up in stately pyramids upon white-clothed tables; divine creatures, resplendent with jewels, go about the room in pairs, arm in arm, admired by all who see them. Yet the heat is over-powering, the pressure and noise almost as bad; there is nowhere to sit and scarce anywhere to stand. You may see your dearest friend in another part of the room; you may have a world of things to tell him – but how in the world will you ever reach him? If you are fortunate then perhaps you will discover him later in the crush and shake his hand as you are both hurried past each other. Surrounded by cross, hot strangers, your chance of rational conversation is equal to what it would be in an African desert. Your only wish is to preserve your favourite gown from the worst ravages of the crowd. Every body complains of the heat and the suffocation. Every body declares it to be entirely insufferable. But if it is all misery for the guests, then what of the wretchedness of those who have not been invited? Our sufferings are nothing to theirs! And we may tell each other tomorrow that it was a delightful party.

I am in my twenty-seventh year. This event keeps thrusting itself before my mind ⎯ nothing else seems to have happened of late. But to reach twenty-seven ⎯ is that a trifling thing? ⎯ To pass the meridian of the twenties on one's progress towards thirty? ⎯ Thirty ⎯ that is to say maturity ⎯ the age at which people expect fruit rather than fresh foliage. But, alas, where is the promise of fruit? As I shake my head, it still feels brimful of luscious frivolity, with not a trace of philosophy. Folk are beginning to complain: "Where is that which we expected of you ⎯ that in hope of which we admired the soft green of the shoot? Are we to put up with immaturity for ever? It is high time for us to know what we shall gain from you. We want an estimate of the proportion of oil which the blindfold, mill turning, unbiased critic can squeeze out of you." It has ceased to be possible to delude these people into waiting expectantly any longer. While I was under age they trustfully gave me credit; it is sad to disappoint them now that I am on the verge of thirty. But what am I to do? Words of wisdom will not come! I am utterly incompetent to provide things that may profit the multitude. Beyond a snatch of song, some tittle-tattle, a little merry fooling, I have been unable to advance. And as the result, those who held high hopes will turn their wrath on me; but did any one ever beg them to nurse these expectations? Such are the thoughts which assail me since one fine Bysakh morning I awoke amidst fresh breeze and light, new leaf and flower, to find that I had stepped into my twenty-seventh year.

Toward an Organic Philosophy SPRING, COAST RANGE The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless, The circle of white ash widens around it. I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller. Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw; The moon has come before them, the light Like a choir of children in the young laurel trees. It is April; the shad, the hot headed fish, Climbs the rivers; there is trillium in the damp canyons; The foetid adder’s tongue lolls by the waterfall. There was a farm at this campsite once, it is almost gone now. There were sheep here after the farm, and fire Long ago burned the redwoods out of the gulch, The Douglas fir off the ridge; today the soil Is stony and incoherent, the small stones lie flat And plate the surface like scales. Twenty years ago the spreading gully Toppled the big oak over onto the house. Now there is nothing left but the foundations Hidden in poison oak, and above on the ridge, Six lonely, ominous fenceposts; The redwood beams of the barn make a footbridge Over the deep waterless creek bed; The hills are covered with wild oats Dry and white by midsummer. I walk in the random survivals of the orchard. In a patch of moonlight a mole Shakes his tunnel like an angry vein; Orion walks waist deep in the fog coming in from the ocean; Leo crouches under the zenith. There are tiny hard fruits already on the plum trees. The purity of the apple blossoms is incredible. As the wind dies down their fragrance Clusters around them like thick smoke. All the day they roared with bees, in the moonlight They are silent and immaculate. SPRING, SIERRA NEVADA Once more golden Scorpio glows over the col Above Deadman Canyon, orderly and brilliant, Like an inspiration in the brain of Archimedes. I have seen its light over the warm sea, Over the coconut beaches, phosphorescent and pulsing; And the living light in the water Shivering away from the swimming hand, Creeping against the lips, filling the floating hair. Here where the glaciers have been and the snow stays late, The stone is clean as light, the light steady as stone. The relationship of stone, ice and stars is systematic and enduring: Novelty emerges after centuries, a rock spalls from the cliffs, The glacier contracts and turns grayer, The stream cuts new sinuosities in the meadow, The sun moves through space and the earth with it, The stars change places. The snow has lasted longer this year, Than anyone can remember. The lowest meadow is a lake, The next two are snowfields, the pass is covered with snow, Only the steepest rocks are bare. Between the pass And the last meadow the snowfield gapes for a hundred feet, In a narrow blue chasm through which a waterfall drops, Spangled with sunset at the top, black and muscular Where it disappears again in the snow. The world is filled with hidden running water That pounds in the ears like ether; The granite needles rise from the snow, pale as steel; Above the copper mine the cliff is blood red, The white snow breaks at the edge of it; The sky comes close to my eyes like the blue eyes Of someone kissed in sleep. I descend to camp, To the young, sticky, wrinkled aspen leaves, To the first violets and wild cyclamen, And cook supper in the blue twilight. All night deer pass over the snow on sharp hooves, In the darkness their cold muzzles find the new grass At the edge of the snow.

The menu is spectacular. Passed hors d'oeuvres include caramelized shallot tartlets topped with Gorgonzola, cubes of crispy pork belly skewered with fresh fig, espresso cups of chilled corn soup topped with spicy popcorn, mini arepas filled with rare skirt steak and chimichurri and pickle onions, and prawn dumplings with a mango serrano salsa. There is a raw bar set up with three kinds of oysters, and a raclette station where we have a whole wheel of the nutty cheese being melted to order, with baby potatoes, chunks of garlic sausage, spears of fresh fennel, lightly pickled Brussels sprouts, and hunks of sourdough bread to pour it over. When we head up for dinner, we will start with a classic Dover sole amandine with a featherlight spinach flan, followed by a choice of seared veal chops or duck breast, both served with creamy polenta, roasted mushrooms, and lacinato kale. Next is a light salad of butter lettuce with a sharp lemon Dijon vinaigrette, then a cheese course with each table receiving a platter of five cheeses with dried fruits and nuts and three kinds of bread, followed by the panna cottas. Then the cake, and coffee and sweets. And at midnight, chorizo tamales served with scrambled eggs, waffle sticks with chicken fingers and spicy maple butter, candied bacon strips, sausage biscuit sandwiches, and vanilla Greek yogurt parfaits with granola and berries on the "breakfast" buffet, plus cheeseburger sliders, mini Chicago hot dogs, little Chinese take-out containers of pork fried rice and spicy sesame noodles, a macaroni-and-cheese bar, and little stuffed pizzas on the "snack food" buffet. There will also be tiny four-ounce milk bottles filled with either vanilla malted milk shakes, root beer floats made with hard root beer, Bloody Marys, or mimosas.

Creativity is alive And thriving in my body. The energy you bring out in me Is within me infinitely. My power is overflowing. My lips are soft and welcoming To the exhale, The new Braille, The silence that persists After our moans die away, I look at myself and say, "Root down so you can burn. Beautiful girl, it's your turn To create magic within yourself. This time, without his help. Find your roots and find your fire, Be mindful of what you desire, Persist in what you know is true, Stay focused on the endless route Toward your own potential. Allow the existential Void to swallow you whole. Take on your old role: The lone seeker. Become quieter. Become meeker. Become the beauty that you seek. Embody strength if you feel weak. Find love within the walls Of this sacred temple. Let yourself shake and tremble, But keep your eyes ever fixed On the horizon Where it's rising, No revising, Fears capsizing As you sail, sail, sail Toward the wail Of your siren spirit Beckoning you to bloom The flower in your womb, The seed of creativity, Your triumphant legacy." These words, I will carry Within me as I bury Grains of wisdom In the whispers of the wind. And when I arrive To the altar of our origin, I'll be dressed in white and black, And I'll cradle that exact Feeling left on our sheets. And you'll be on your knees, Ready to receive The wholeness of my broken mind, Pried open by The sparkle gleaming in your eyes. And your hands will be full Of supple fruit and you'll Smile at me, and I will see That you have fed your hunger. You'll ooze with courage and wonder. And then, we will know That we've already lost each other A thousand times before. And I have found you As clear water after mud settles. And you have found me As a bee deep in a flower's petals. We have danced before, Pulled art out of each other's spines. We have died and birthed and died. We've already kissed a million times. This wasn't our first five act play, And it will not be the last. So when I thirst for your hands, I will sit and chant. We will meet again. We will meet again.

Mowbray! Been a while since you bothered with the season. What brings you to town?” Lord Adrian Montfort, Earl of Mowbray, shifted his gaze from the couples whirling past on the dance floor and to the man who approached: the tall, fair, eminently good-looking Reginald Greville. He and Greville, his cousin, had once been the best of friends. However, time and distance had weakened the bond—with a little help from the war with France, Adrian thought bitterly. Ignoring Reginald’s question, he offered a somewhat rusty smile in greeting, then turned his gaze back to the men and women swinging elegantly about the dance floor. He replied instead, “Enjoying the season, Greville?” “Certainly, certainly. Fresh blood. Fresh faces.” “Fresh victims,” Mowbray said dryly, and Reginald laughed. “That too.” Reginald was well-known for his success in seducing young innocents. Only his title and money kept him from being forced out of town. Shaking his head, Adrian gave that rusty smile again. “I wonder you never tire of the chase, Reg. They all look sadly similar to me. I would swear these were the very same young women who were entering their first season the last time I attended…and the time before that, and the time before that.” His cousin smiled easily, but shook his head. “It has been ten years since you bothered to come to town, Adrian. Those women are all married and bearing fruit, or well on their way to spinsterhood.” “Different faces, same ladies,” Adrian said with a shrug. “Such cynicism!” Reg chided. “You sound old, old man.” “Older,” Adrian corrected. “Older and wiser.” “No. Just old,” Reg insisted with a laugh, his own gaze turning to the mass of people moving before them. “Besides, there are a couple of real lovelies this year. That blonde, for instance, or that brunette with Chalmsly.” “Hmmm.” Adrian looked the two women over. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but my guess is that the brunette—lovely as she is—doesn’t have a thought in her head. Rather like that Lady Penelope you seduced when last I was here.” Reg’s eyes widened in surprise at the observation. “And the blonde…” Adrian continued, his gaze raking the woman in question and taking in her calculating look. “Born of parents in trade, lots of money, and looking for a title to go with it. Rather like Lily Ainsley. Another of your conquests.” “Dead-on,” Reginald admitted, looking a bit incredulous. His gaze moved between the two women and then he gave a harsh laugh. “Now you have quite ruined it for me. I was considering favoring one or both of them with my attentions. But now you have made them quite boring.” -Reg & Adrian

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 1965 My fellow countrymen, on this occasion, the oath I have taken before you and before God is not mine alone, but ours together. We are one nation and one people. Our fate as a nation and our future as a people rest not upon one citizen, but upon all citizens. This is the majesty and the meaning of this moment. For every generation, there is a destiny. For some, history decides. For this generation, the choice must be our own. Even now, a rocket moves toward Mars. It reminds us that the world will not be the same for our children, or even for ourselves m a short span of years. The next man to stand here will look out on a scene different from our own, because ours is a time of change-- rapid and fantastic change bearing the secrets of nature, multiplying the nations, placing in uncertain hands new weapons for mastery and destruction, shaking old values, and uprooting old ways. Our destiny in the midst of change will rest on the unchanged character of our people, and on their faith. THE AMERICAN COVENANT They came here--the exile and the stranger, brave but frightened-- to find a place where a man could be his own man. They made a covenant with this land. Conceived in justice, written in liberty, bound in union, it was meant one day to inspire the hopes of all mankind; and it binds us still. If we keep its terms, we shall flourish. JUSTICE AND CHANGE First, justice was the promise that all who made the journey would share in the fruits of the land. In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty. In a land rich in harvest, children just must not go hungry. In a land of healing miracles, neighbors must not suffer and die unattended. In a great land of learning and scholars, young people must be taught to read and write. For the more than 30 years that I have served this Nation, I have believed that this injustice to our people, this waste of our resources, was our real enemy. For 30 years or more, with the resources I have had, I have vigilantly fought against it. I have learned, and I know, that it will not surrender easily. But change has given us new weapons. Before this generation of Americans is finished, this enemy will not only retreat--it will be conquered. Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, "His color is not mine," or "His beliefs are strange and different," in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this Nation. LIBERTY AND CHANGE Liberty was the second article of our covenant. It was self- government. It was our Bill of Rights. But it was more. America would be a place where each man could be proud to be himself: stretching his talents, rejoicing in his work, important in the life of his neighbors and his nation. This has become more difficult in a world where change and growth seem to tower beyond the control and even the judgment of men. We must work to provide the knowledge and the surroundings which can enlarge the possibilities of every citizen. The American covenant called on us to help show the way for the liberation of man. And that is today our goal. Thus, if as a nation there is much outside our control, as a people no stranger is outside our hope.

Ula thought that unicorns might sleep in grassy glades with ferns for covering. In summer they might lie on a lawn. We walked round quietly on hands and feet, shaking imaginary horns. Ula pawed the air looking solemn; she made little humming sounds. Being fond of moonlight it was probable that they sang at night. They would eat rose petals with jam, and a little fruit in the summer months.

Piña Colada Cheesecake This tropical twist on my mother’s old-fashioned cheesecake was a hit at cruiser gatherings. For the crust 1 cup graham cracker crumbs 1⁄2 cup sweetened shredded coconut 1⁄3 cup melted butter For the filling 11⁄2 pounds cream cheese, softened 2⁄3 cup sugar 4 eggs 3 tablespoons dark rum 1 cup sour cream 3⁄4 cup cream of coconut (see Tips, below) 2⁄3 cup well-drained crushed pineapple (about 1 19-oz can) 1. Preheat oven to 350°F. 2. To make the crust, combine graham cracker crumbs and coconut with melted butter. Press into the bottom of a 10-inch springform pan. Bake for 10 minutes until lightly browned. Set aside to cool while you make the filling. 3. To make the filling, beat cream cheese and sugar until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, beating until blended. Mix in rum, sour cream, cream of coconut, and well-drained pineapple. 4. Spread evenly on prepared crust and bake about 50–60 minutes on middle rack of preheated oven, until edges are set and center moves just slightly when you shake the pan. 5. Run a knife around the inside of pan to loosen cheesecake. Allow cake to cool completely on a wire rack. Cover and refrigerate until well chilled or overnight. Remove from springform pan before serving. Serves 16 Tips • Garnish the cheesecake with slices of tropical fruit, such as fresh pineapple or mango. • Don’t confuse cream of coconut with coconut milk or coconut cream. Used to make drinks (such as piña coladas) and desserts, cream of coconut is thick, syrupy, heavily sweetened coconut milk. Coco Lopez is one popular brand.

Know each agent being used and relevant nutrient interactions and contraindications, especially when combinations of drugs are used. Selection of appropriate nutrients and botanicals is complex and based on many factors. General recommendations are safe for all types of chemotherapy. • Multiple vitamin: — Vitamin A: 5000 IU — Mixed natural carotenoids: 10,000-25,000 IU — B complex: 25-50 mg — Folic acid: 400-800 μg — Vitamin B12: 200-1000 μg — Vitamin E succinate: 400 IU — Vitamin C: 500-1000 mg — Vitamin D 400-800 IU — Trace minerals: full complement • Melatonin: 20 mg at bedtime • Vitamin C: 3000-10,000 mg q.d. in divided doses according to bowel tolerance • Fish oils: to provide 2 g total combined eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid daily • Mushroom extracts/immune support: use a variety of immune modulators, switching them regularly to avoid downregulation of receptors. Standard doses for Coreolis versicolor mushroom is 3 g of the extract daily. Suggested dosage for maitake D fraction is 0.5-1.0 mg of extract per kilogram body weight. Other botanical immune modulators may be used as desired. • Enzymes: use pancreatic enzymes with meals and mixed enteric-coated enzymes between meals. • Green tea: capsules and beverages to total the equivalent of 5-10 cups daily. Caffeinated form is preferred if patient tolerates caffeine. • Whey protein shake: administer with fruit daily as a source of easily assimilated protein and amino acids, particularly glutamine.

Sour Cherry Shout when you wanna get off the ride Shout when you wanna get off the ride Shout when you wanna get off the ride 'Cause you crossed my mind You crossed my mind Made my blood thump 7-8-9. Make my heart beat double time Now I'm only sour cherry on your fruit stand, right? Am I the only sour cherry on the fruit stand? Shout when you wanna get off the ride Shout when you wanna get off the ride 'Cause you crossed my mind You crossed my mind I'm a penny in a diamond mine We could be movers, We could be shakers If we could just shake something out of the blue And get off the ride Now I'm the only sour cherry on your fruit stand, right? Am I the only sour cherry on your fruit stand? If I'm the only sour cherry on your fruit stand, right Am I the only sour cherry on your fruit stand? G-g-g-go home, go home it's over G-g-g-go home it's over G-g-g-go home, go home it's over Go go home it's over G-g-g-go home, go home it's over Go go home it's over G-g-g-go home, go home it's over Go go home it's over

Life does not always yield its fruit easily, and when we cannot get to the top branches where the best and juiciest pieces cling, we must shake the tree. Shake it hard,

He tells us, for no particular reason, that the only fruit he likes is melon, that he prefers to have sex lying down rather than standing up, that he cannot sing, and that he loves vivacious company and often gets carried away by the spark of repartee. But he also describes sensations that are harder to capture in words, or even to be aware of: what it feels like to be lazy, or courageous, or indecisive; or to indulge a moment of vanity, or to try to shake off an obsessive fear. He even writes about the sheer feeling of being alive.

consider a young Tunisian man pushing a wooden handcart loaded with fruits and vegetables down a dusty road to a market in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When the man was three, his father died. He supports his family by borrowing money to fill his cart, hoping to earn enough selling the produce to pay off the debt and have a little left over. It’s the same grind every day. But this morning, the police approach the man and say they’re going to take his scales because he has violated some regulation. He knows it’s a lie. They’re shaking him down. But he has no money. A policewoman slaps him and insults his dead father. They take his scales and his cart. The man goes to a town office to complain. He is told the official is busy in a meeting. Humiliated, furious, powerless, the man leaves. He returns with fuel. Outside the town office he douses himself, lights a match, and burns. Only the conclusion of this story is unusual. There are countless poor street vendors in Tunisia and across the Arab world. Police corruption is rife, and humiliations like those inflicted on this man are a daily occurrence. They matter to no one aside from the police and their victims. But this particular humiliation, on December 17, 2010, caused Mohamed Bouazizi, aged twenty-six, to set himself on fire, and Bouazizi’s self-immolation sparked protests. The police responded with typical brutality. The protests spread. Hoping to assuage the public, the dictator of Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, visited Bouazizi in the hospital. Bouazizi died on January 4, 2011. The unrest grew. On January 14, Ben Ali fled to a cushy exile in Saudi Arabia, ending his twenty-three-year kleptocracy. The Arab world watched, stunned. Then protests erupted in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. After three decades in power, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. Elsewhere, protests swelled into rebellions, rebellions into civil wars. This was the Arab Spring—and it started with one poor man, no different from countless others, being harassed by police, as so many have been, before and since, with no apparent ripple effects. It is one thing to look backward and sketch a narrative arc, as I did here, connecting Mohamed Bouazizi to all the events that flowed out of his lonely protest. Tom Friedman, like many elite pundits, is skilled at that sort of reconstruction, particularly in the Middle East, which he knows so well, having made his name in journalism as a New York Times correspondent in Lebanon. But could even Tom Friedman, if he had been present that fatal morning, have peered into the future and foreseen the self-immolation, the unrest, the toppling of the Tunisian dictator, and all that followed? Of course not. No one could. Maybe, given how much Friedman knew about the region, he would have mused that poverty and unemployment were high, the number of desperate young people was growing, corruption was rampant, repression was relentless, and therefore Tunisia and other Arab countries were powder kegs waiting to blow. But an observer could have drawn exactly the same conclusion the year before. And the year before that. Indeed, you could have said that about Tunisia, Egypt, and several other countries for decades. They may have been powder kegs but they never blew—until December 17, 2010, when the police pushed that one poor man too far.

Joy. In every breath. In every moment. In every turn of the blossom to face the sun. In every stream of juice that trails my chin from fruit so sweet. In Him. In the coolness of the evening when He walks beside us and His laughter lifts across the river as He delights in our wonder over this place He has given us. In silence. In starlight. In shouting an anthem of gladness that shakes the earth and hails birds into flight.

What are you eating?” “I don’t know,” she admitted. “She gave it to me.” She pointed at the tall woman who had been standing at the sink and watching their conversation with a worried look on her face. Lock turned to her. “Mumzell? Chara vena Kat Kala ala noosh?” She nodded her head rapidly. “Ja, ja! Shiba ava Kala ala noosh.” Then she hugged Lock and stood on tiptoes to kiss his forehead. “What? What is she saying?” Kat demanded. Deep frowned. “She’s saying you asked for it. She thinks you wanted it because…” He broke off, shaking his head. “Because what? What does it do?” Kat asked, worried. Had she poisoned herself with the strange fruit? Or had she somehow eaten something she wasn’t supposed to eat for religious reasons? Damn it, she didn’t know anything about this stupid planet. She had to get herself some translation bacteria! Lock finally finished speaking to the older woman. He turned back to Kat and spoke in a low voice. “What you ate are Kala fruit—what we call bonding fruit. They have uh…a special significance to our people.” Deep snorted. “That’s an understatement.” “Deep, please.” Lock gave him a warning look. “Will you just let me explain?” “They’re not poisonous or anything, right?” Kat asked. “I mean, I’m sure the nice lady wouldn’t have let me eat them if they were but—” “That ‘nice lady’ is our mother,” Deep said harshly. “And she now believes that you intend to mate with Lock and myself. Immediately. Because why else would anyone eat an entire bowl of bonding fruit in one sitting?” “What?” Kat felt a sudden rush of panic. “No, no,” she said to the woman, shaking her head rapidly. “It’s not like that with us. Really, it’s not.

The story runs that, on one warm summer day, he dozed off under an apple tree and was awakened when an apple fell on his head. A lesser man, as his biographer put it, would have seen nothing untoward about this, but Woolsthorpe surmised that, since apples and practically everything else always fell down, then the world would eventually become dangerously unbalanced … unless there was another agency involved that natural philosophy had yet to discover. He lost no time in dragging one of the footmen to the orchard and ordering him, on pain of dismissal, to lie under the tree until an apple hit him on the head! The possibility of this happening was increased by another footman who had been told by Woolsthorpe to shake the tree vigorously until the required apple fell. Woolsthorpe was ready to observe this from a distance. ‘Who can imagine his joy when the inevitable apple fell and a second apple was seen rising from the tree and disappearing at speed into the vaults of heaven, proving the hypothesis that what goes up must come down, provided that what goes down must come up, thus safeguarding the equilibrium of the universe. Regrettably, this only works with apples and, amazingly, only the apples on this one tree, Malus equilibria! I hear someone has worked out that the apples at the top of the tree fill with gas and fly up when the tree is disturbed so that it can set its seeds some way off. Wonderful thing, nature, shame the fruit tastes like dog’s business,

Sure you don't want another helping?" I made a classic French blanquette de veau, an old-school veal stew with a white wine sauce, served over wide pappardelle noodles that I tossed with butter, lemon zest, and chives, and some steamed green beans. I also made a loaf of crusty bread using the no-knead recipe that everyone is doing these days and is so simple and so delicious. "I think three plates is plenty!" Glenn laughs. "Besides, I'm pretty sure I saw some dessert in there, so I had better leave a sliver of room." "You got me there." I made a fallen chocolate soufflé cake filled with chocolate mousse. Mrs. O'Connor always talked about being married to a chocoholic: apparently Glenn believes that if it isn't chocolate, it isn't dessert. While he will happily eat any dessert placed in front of him, from fruit pies to vanilla ice cream, if there is no chocolate, he will literally stop on the way home for a Hershey bar or a drive-through chocolate milk shake.

Portuguese peasants made them,” replied Miss Morrison, shaking her head. “Once I had six. Now the set numbers five. A Pioneer of Female Education, who came to lecture to the Institute, ate one. She was very old and noble-looking and, I suppose, shortsighted. I was just thinking how well the green plums matched the rest of the effect, when to my horror I perceived her cutting up plum and mat together with a good sharp fruit-knife. Her niece noticed presently, and said, ‘Aunt Harriott, you cannot eat Miss Morrison’s mat!’ The dear old thing was frightfully distressed, and started tearing shreds from her jaws

The fruit that can fall without shaking indeed is too mellow for me.

than she was deep. Her shallow draft let her go up rivers or right onto beaches without damage, but her passage over deeper water left a lot to be desired. She sidled along, with here a dip and there a curtsy, like a bundle-laden farm wife making her way through a crowded market. We seemed to be the sole cargo. A deckhand gave me a couple of apples to share with the horses, but little talk. So after I had parceled out the fruit, I settled myself near them on their straw and took Chade’s advice about resting. The winds were kind to us, and the captain took us in closer to the looming cliffs than I’d have thought possible, but unloading the horses from the vessel was still an unpleasant task. All of Chade’s lecturing and warnings had not prepared me for the blackness of night on the water. The lanterns on the deck seemed pathetic efforts, confusing me more with the shadows they threw than aiding me with their feeble light. In the end, a deckhand rowed Chade to shore in the ship’s dory. I went overboard with the reluctant horses, for I knew Sooty would fight a lead rope and probably swamp the dory. I clung to Sooty and encouraged her, trusting her common sense to take us toward the dim lantern on shore. I had a long line on Chade’s horse, for I didn’t want his thrashing too close to us in the water. The sea was cold, the night was black, and if I’d had any sense, I’d have wished myself elsewhere, but there is something in a boy that takes the mundanely difficult and unpleasant and turns it into a personal challenge and an adventure. I came out of the water dripping, chilled, and completely exhilarated. I kept Sooty’s reins and coaxed Chade’s horse in. By the time I had them both under control, Chade was beside me, lantern in hand, laughing exultantly. The dory man was already away and pulling for the ship. Chade gave me my dry things, but they did little good pulled on over my dripping clothes. “Where’s the path?” I asked, my voice shaking with my shivering. Chade gave a derisive snort. “Path? I had a quick look while you were pulling in my horse. It’s no path, it’s no more than the course the water takes when it runs off down the cliffs. But it will have to do.” It was a little better than he had reported, but not much. It was narrow and steep and the gravel on it was loose underfoot. Chade went before with the lantern. I followed, with the horses in tandem.

Andie leaned in a bit more and whispered conspiratorially, “I don’t know if you’ve seen the Barbur twins serve up drinks, but they not only know how to mix a great cocktail, they can make some really stiff ones that taste like fruit juice.” “Let me guess.” I grinned as I watched Eric snore, each one rustling his blonde-and-blue-streaked hair more and more. “Somebody got a hold of a Barbur special and got carried away?” Kara, who was sitting on the other side of me, looked up from her tablet with an amused shake of her head. “No. Somebody got a hold of two of them and chugged them like a maniac.

I don’t know how it began, but I know how it ended. It occurred in the month of Av, the sign for which is Arieh, the lion. It is a month that signifies destruction for our people, a season when the stones in the desert are so hot you cannot touch them without burning your fingers, when fruit withers on the trees before it ripens and the seeds inside shake like a rattle, when the sky is white and rain will not fall. The first Temple had been destroyed in that month. Tools signified weapons and could not be used in constructing the holiest of holy places; therefore the great warrior king David had been prohibited from building the Temple because he had known the evils of war. Instead, the honor fell to his son King Solomon, who called upon the shamir, a worm who could cut through stone, thereby creating glory to God without the use of metal tools.

If you shake a tree, fruit must fall, no matter how reluctant it is.

If you can't climb a tree, shake it, and its fruit will fall.

Christstollen. I can shake away thoughts of favorite gifts and trips to Oma's house and building snowmen with Santa hats every Christmas Eve, as long as enough snow covered the ground. But my mother's stollen won't fall off as easily. She made it for my father; he ate the first piece with cream cheese at breakfast while I had bacon and chocolate chip pancakes and my mother drank her special amaretto tea. The recipe is there, tucked in her recipe box, the index card translucent in places from butter stains. I hold it in my hand, considering, reading the ingredients and pawing through the cupboards and pantry. We have raisins and a bag of dried cranberries from last year's Christmas baking. There's a wrinkled orange in the fruit bin, a couple plastic packets of lemon juice that came with one of my father's fish and chips take-out orders. No marzipan, almonds, candied fruit, or mace. I'll be up all night. It's too much effort. But the card won't seem to leave my hand. So I start, soaking the fruit and preparing the sponge.

I glance over my shoulder, staggering a little when I see the horseman standing in front of me, his gaze fixed to my mouth. “So that’s music,” he says wondrously, as though he only just put a name to the sound. I guess that’s the irony of Thanatos. He’s existed for forever, and he seems to be a well of wisdom when it comes to humans, but the horseman has only been a man for a short while. Giving him a hesitant look, I nod. His gaze scours my face. “Don’t stop,” he whispers. Heat creeps up into my cheeks. I don’t really want to sing now that I have an audience. “Please,” Death adds. He’s still staring at my lips. I want to tell him that people don’t ask these sorts of things, but he knows that. And he seems genuinely … moved by the music. So, I clear my throat, and after only wavering for another moment or two, I begin to sing again, turning back to the tree so that I can resume picking fruit and pretend I don’t have an avid audience. Only, I’m not left alone for long. Thanatos rounds the tree, his gaze moving over my eyes, my lips, my hair. He’s looking at me like I’m the Eighth Wonder of the World and I have no defense for the blatant longing on his face. My song ends, and it’s silent for a long moment. Death shakes his head, still looking possessed. “That was … opodanao.” The foreign word draws out an instant reaction. I feel bathed in light, as though it were stroking my skin and running its fingers through my hair. I think I understand the word’s meaning, but the horseman translates for me anyway. “Beautiful.

But the fruit that can fall without shaking, Indeed is too mellow for me.

Talk runs far afield tonight. The bends in the alders speak of long-ago disasters. Spikes of pale chinquapin flowers shake down their pollen; soon they will turn into spiny fruits. Poplars repeat the wind’s gossip. Persimmons and walnuts set out their bribes and rowans their blood-red clusters. Ancient oaks wave prophecies of future weather. The several hundred kinds of hawthorn laugh at the single name they’re forced to share. Laurels insist that even death is nothing to lose sleep over.

Today on two legs stood and reached to the right spot as I saw it choosing among the twisting branches and multifaceted changing shades, and greens, and shades of greens, lobed, and lashing sun, the fig that seemed to me the perfect one, Shhh say the spreading sails of cicadas as the winch of noon takes hold and we are wrapped in day and hoisted up, all the ribs of time showing through in the growing in the lengthening harness of sound— white powder in the confetti of light all up the branches, truth, sweetness of blood-scent and hauled-in light, withers of the wild carnival of tree shaking once as the fruit... Iwant to sit under it full of secrecy insight immensity vigor bursting complexity swarm. Oh great forwards and backwards.

And it was at this very moment that some obscure enemy crouching inside me—since when?—chose to twist around and shake my nerves, to force me to vent anger that I didn’t feel, that I didn’t want to feel, to make me yell and dance and then convulse like the two Agitated in the brown brick building! I had been completely honest, sincere and frank—and now it was no longer true! I hated Bid’homme and Roffieux! I wanted to bleed them, to do them in—and I shouted this out as clear as day! And I didn’t want to hate them and I didn’t want to shout out—and I clamored more loudly than ever!... I was sure that a terribly hostile being haunted me, a cruel being that had settled in me, a dreadful being that tortured me to force me to roar and writhe around like someone possessed… There was a moment of semi-calm and I begged (so absurd it was disturbing!): “Doctor! Doctor! Save me! I’m inhabited like a wormy fruit!

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows — then let your heart say in silence, “God rests in reason.” And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, — then let your heart say in awe, “God moves in passion.” And since you are a breath in God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion. Chapter 16 — Pain And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain. And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief. Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears. Chapter 17 — Self-Knowledge And a man said, Speak to us of Self-Knowledge.

But there are elements of each of us so particular, unwieldy, so without cliché, that it is necessary for each poet to invent his own language. It is necessary for us all to do so; owning one’s own language is not an optional extra. The human soul is so ruthlessly original; the only way to express the distinctive pitch of one’s own heart is for each of us to build our own way of using our voice. To read Donne is to be told: kill the desire to keep the accent and tone of the time. It is necessary to shake language until it will express our own distinctive hesitations, peculiarities, our own uncertain and never-quite-successful yearning towards beauty. Donne saves his most ruthless scorn for those who chew other wits’ fruit, and shit out platitudes. Language, his poetry tells us, is a set, not of rules, but of possibilities.

Suppose that boom shaking in our body can be a physical reminder that we are all connected-- that if the cassowary population decreases, so does the proliferation of fruit trees, and with that hundreds of animals and insects then become endangered. Boom, I want to tell the people at Siesta Key, whom I see dumping empty poptato chip bags into the shrubs of sea grapes from my blanket on the beach. Boom to the man in the truck in front of me of Highway 5, who tossed a whole empty fast food sack out his window and then, later, a couple of still-lit cigarettes. Boom, I want to say the family who left their empty plastic water bottles on a bench at Niagara Falls State Park, only to have two of them blow over and plummet into the falls. Don't you see? We are all connected. Boom.

On no occasion did any of the writers of the epistles tell believers to go back to the synagogue and shake it up one more time. Nor were they told to preach in the town square. They were not told to go door to door. Not that these things would have been wrong. It’s that they would not have proven fruitful. The combine had just passed through the city, reaping those who were prepared. To run the combine over the same field a second time would not be productive.

That's your solution? To stay? For money?" She shakes her head, as if I don't understand. "It's not just the money. What you said is protection; she can never hurt us again. Any time she tries to piss us off, sublet our flats, refuse to pay our tuition fees, we just mention the shed." Here eyes are luminous. "Don't you see? This is our inheritance.

The four guys were just staring at me—or Rome—their mouths a little unhinged. “Did she say that she set a building on fire?” Yael rasped. “And knocked someone out and stuffed them into a cupboard?” Aros, this time. “And set a bunch of panteras free.” Coen was scratching his head. “That’s my girl.” Siret was the only one who seemed pleased by my overload of information. “Rome is messing with us.” Yael was shaking his head. “This is too fucked-up.” “I’m not.” I tried to sound as convincing as possible, but Yael only shook his head and stepped closer to Rome, his fists clenched. “Cut this shit out right now,” he seethed, “or I’ll hit you so hard she’ll have to start calling you Crushed.” “That’s not very nice—” I started to say, but apparently Yael wasn’t in the mood for pacifications. He pulled his arm back and slammed it into the side of Rome’s face. I couldn’t feel the actual blow, but my vision swam to the side, and then suddenly I was staring at the sky—I hadn’t paid much attention to where we were, but the sky was bluer than blue, the clouds all happy and perfect. They were still in Topia. “You hit me!” I yelled at the sky, and it was almost humorous to hear Rome’s deep voice so full of feminine outrage. “Oh.” Yael sounded genuinely shocked. “It really is her. Rome just dropped like a bag of rocks.” “He’s still not moving,” Coen noted, his head appearing in my field of vision. “You okay in there, dweller-baby?” “He hit me!” I repeated. “I think she’s fine.” Yael’s head appeared beside Coen’s. “Rome’s head is too damn thick for any of the pain to reach her—right, Willa-toy?” “You still hit me!” This time, it was a growl, and Siret’s head popped up beside Yael’s. “You should get revenge,” he suggested helpfully. “You have so many muscles right now. You’re the God of Strength right now. The possibilities are endless.” “No they aren’t,” I said, “Rome is going to wake up soon. I don’t always black out for long. But you have a point.” I struggled to get back to my feet, but controlling Rome wasn’t so easy. His limbs were bigger than expected, and I accidently knocked over a low wooden table, up-ending a bowl of fruit and sending apples and oranges scattering over the marble floor. When I was finally standing, I focussed on Yael, and tried to swing a punch at him. Unfortunately, I miscalculated the distance to his face, and Rome’s fist connected with the pillar just to the right of Yael’s head. I watched in fascination as the stone cracked beneath Rome’s fist, caving in around his hand. I was so fascinated that I didn’t even realise I was stuck until I tried to pull his fist back again and it wouldn’t budge. “Well … this is awkward.” Yael was smirking, turned to the side so that he could see the fist I had embedded into the pillar.

Blood Orange Liqueur 4 blood oranges 1 lemon Fresh ginger, about 2" long, peeled and sliced 2 cups vodka 1 cup water 1 cup sugar Wash and dry the oranges and lemon. Peel the skin, leaving as much of the pith on the fruit as possible. Put peels in a quart jar. Remove the pith from two of the oranges, reserving the other two oranges and the lemon for another use. Cut the de-pithed oranges into pieces, place in a quart jar, and smash the orange with the back of a spoon against the sides of the jar. Add ginger and stir. Pour the vodka into the jar. To make simple syrup, combine water and sugar in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil and stir until the sugar has dissolved. Cool. Pour the syrup into the fruit-alcohol mixture and cover tightly. Store in cool, dark place for at least one month, shaking occasionally. Strain the liqueur through a double layer of cheesecloth into a pitcher. Strain a second time through a new double layer of cheesecloth into bottles. Cap and store or use immediately.

No man thinks of asking himself what reason he has to believe that his neighbor is a living creature. He would be not a little surprised if another person should ask him so absurd a question: arid perhaps could not give any reason which would not equally prove a watch or a puppet to be a living creature. But, though you should satisfy him of the weakness of the reasons he gives for his belief, you cannot make him in the least doubtful. This belief stands upon another foundation than that of reasoning and therefore, whether a man can give good reasons for it or not, it is not in his power to shake it off.That many operations of the mind have their natural signs in the countenance, voice and gesture, I suppose every man will admit. . . . The only question is, whether we understand the signification of those signs, by the constitution of our nature, by a kind of natural perception similar to the perceptions of sense; or whether we gradually learn the signification of such signs from experience, as we learn that smoke is a sign of fire... It seems to me incredible, that the notions men have of the expressions of features, voice, and gesture, are entirely the fruit of experience.

as a generalization, drinks containing eggs; fruit juices; cream liqueurs, such as Baileys; or dairy products (cream, half-and-half, or milk) should be shaken, while clear drinks, such as the classic Martini or Manhattan, are usually stirred. It’s fairly easy to determine why some drinks should be shaken: It’s far easier, for instance, to thoroughly combine a spirit with heavy cream or a fruit juice by shaking rather than stirring, whereas the Martini and the Manhattan, made with a spirit and vermouth, are easily mixed when stirred.

[A]s a generalization, drinks containing eggs; fruit juices; cream liqueurs, such as Baileys; or dairy products (cream, half-and-half, or milk) should be shaken, while clear drinks, such as the classic Martini or Manhattan, are usually stirred. It’s fairly easy to determine why some drinks should be shaken: It’s far easier, for instance, to thoroughly combine a spirit with heavy cream or a fruit juice by shaking rather than stirring, whereas the Martini and the Manhattan, made with a spirit and vermouth, are easily mixed when stirred.

To eight cups of water, add a handful of bulk dried hibiscus or four bags of tea in which hibiscus is the first ingredient. Then add the juice of one lemon and three tablespoons of erythritol, and leave it in your fridge to cold-brew overnight. In the morning, strain out the hibiscus or take out the tea bags, shake well, and drink throughout the day. That’s something I try to do every day I’m home. For extra credit, add green foam: Pour a cup of the tea into a blender with a bunch of fresh mint leaves, blend on high, and enjoy. You end up with dark-green leafies blended into what may be the highest antioxidant beverage in the world, and it tastes like fruit punch.

An ancient fruit tree of some kind, an apple or cherry, grows in the park a little way from here. Every March, it blooms. Ten thousand pink and white flowers bloom and shake for a week. Then, all the flowers fall, and for a while the tree stands in its own memories.

I am very pleased to meet you, Mister True,” said the man as he reached out to shake True’s hand. He was careful to look the angel in the eye, as he hooked his cane handle into his trousers pocket so as to free up his left hand, which he also used to shake True’s hand. “Thank you for coming over to me, sir. As you can see, I am far from agile these days.” His speech was slow, but quite deliberate and poised. “My name is Ernest Mansfield, and I came out here to tell you that I realized tonight, during your speech, that I have been a fool all of my life. I thank you for the many rebukes in your speech. You pegged me well for the fool that I am. I got caught up early in the idea that my party is better than the other, and I never stopped to realize—like you said tonight—that the party I chose is itself corrupt enough to ruin this nation on its own.” True continued to listen patiently as the man spoke, still holding True’s hand in both of his own. “I am ninety-eight years old, and I have been a sucker for this partisan trap all my life.” Those last three words got to the old man as he spoke them. He began to sob, dropping his head forward. Benjamin True put his left hand on the man’s shoulder and remained quiet, trusting that the man needed no help to express himself. “I don’t know how long I have left on this planet, but obviously, my days are short,” Ernest Mansfield continued, gaining more control over his emotions. On my way over here, I laughed at myself that it should take me ninety-eight years to learn such a simple lesson. But at least I’ve learned it now, and I can correct myself from here forward.” The angel smiled at him and said, “Yes, you can!” “Well,” continued the man, “I won’t keep you any longer, as I’m sure you have many more people to see. I came out here to pay my respects to a man who dared to tell me the truth, and I’ve done it. And so I bid you good night, sir.” “I am very glad to have met you, and I thank you for coming to find me. May your time from now on be more fruitful than you would imagine! Good night to you, as well, Ernest Mansfield.

She looked at the city streets coated in rain, the early light illuminating their inky blackness, their darkness beautifully framed by the lighter concrete gutters and sidewalks. Broadway looks just like a big blackberry galette, Sam thought, before shaking her head at the terrible analogy. That would have earned a C minus in English lit, she thought, but my instructors at culinary school would be proud. Sam slowed for a second and considered the streets. So would my family, she added. New York had its own otherworldly beauty, stunning in its own sensory-overload sort of way, but a jarring juxtaposition to where Sam had grown up: on a family orchard in northern Michigan. Our skyscrapers were apple and peach trees, Sam thought, seeing dancing fruit in her mind once again. She smiled as she approached Union Square Park and stopped to touch an iridescent green leaf, still wet and dripping rain, her heart leaping at its incredible tenderness in the midst of the city. She leaned in and lifted the leaf to her nose, inhaling, the scents of summer and smells of her past- fresh fruit, fragrant pine, baking pies, lake water- flooding her mind.

Chapter 29 Alma desires to cry repentance with angelic zeal—The Lord grants teachers for all nations—Alma glories in the Lord’s work and in the success of Ammon and his brethren. About 76 B.C. 1 O that I were an angel, and could have the wish of mine heart, that I might go forth and speak with the trump of God, with a voice to shake the earth, and cry repentance unto every people! 2 Yea, I would declare unto every soul, as with the voice of thunder, repentance and the plan of redemption, that they should repent and come unto our God, that there might not be more sorrow upon all the face of the earth. 3 But behold, I am a man, and do sin in my wish; for I ought to be content with the things which the Lord hath allotted unto me. 4 I ought not to harrow up in my desires the firm decree of a just God, for I know that he granteth unto men according to their desire, whether it be unto death or unto life; yea, I know that he allotteth unto men, yea, decreeth unto them decrees which are unalterable, according to their wills, whether they be unto salvation or unto destruction. 5 Yea, and I know that good and evil have come before all men; he that knoweth not good from evil is blameless; but he that knoweth good and evil, to him it is given according to his desires, whether he desireth good or evil, life or death, joy or remorse of conscience. 6 Now, seeing that I know these things, why should I desire more than to perform the work to which I have been called? 7 Why should I desire that I were an angel, that I could speak unto all the ends of the earth? 8 For behold, the Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own nation and tongue, to teach his word, yea, in wisdom, all that he seeth fit that they should have; therefore we see that the Lord doth counsel in wisdom, according to that which is just and true. 9 I know that which the Lord hath commanded me, and I glory in it. I do not glory of myself, but I glory in that which the Lord hath commanded me; yea, and this is my glory, that perhaps I may be an instrument in the hands of God to bring some soul to repentance; and this is my joy. 10 And behold, when I see many of my brethren truly penitent, and coming to the Lord their God, then is my soul filled with joy; then do I remember what the Lord has done for me, yea, even that he hath heard my prayer; yea, then do I remember his merciful arm which he extended towards me. 11 Yea, and I also remember the captivity of my fathers; for I surely do know that the Lord did deliver them out of bondage, and by this did establish his church; yea, the Lord God, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, did deliver them out of bondage. 12 Yea, I have always remembered the captivity of my fathers; and that same God who delivered them out of the hands of the Egyptians did deliver them out of bondage. 13 Yea, and that same God did establish his church among them; yea, and that same God hath called me by a holy calling, to preach the word unto this people, and hath given me much success, in the which my joy is full. 14 But I do not joy in my own success alone, but my joy is more full because of the success of my brethren, who have been up to the land of Nephi. 15 Behold, they have labored exceedingly, and have brought forth much fruit; and how great shall be their reward! 16 Now, when I think of the success of these my brethren my soul is carried away, even to the separation of it from the body, as it were, so great is my joy. 17 And now may God grant unto these, my brethren, that they may sit down in the kingdom of God; yea, and also all those who are the fruit of their labors that they may go no more out, but that they may praise him forever. And may God grant that it may be done according to my words, even as I have spoken. Amen.

If you want the fruit to fall, you have to give the tree a shake.

...when I became pregnant with my third kid, these seemingly small moments of nonconsent replayed in my mind—the obligatory pelvic exam, the needle in my arm, the bruise like rotten fruit, the lithotomy position someone put me in both times. Sure, both births were beautiful, vaginal, natural—tick, tick, tick on the boxes of imaginary birth "success." But these were the moments I couldn't shake, that wedged themselves in and made me angry, ill.

Life is a wild orchard, bursting with possibility. It will test you, shake you to your core, and leave you bruised. But just as solitude hungers for connection, isolation can't extinguish the inherent desire to love and be loved. So, take a bite. Savor the sweetness, the tang, the unexpected worm. Because even the fallen fruit, bruised and forgotten, hints a promise: new growth, new chances.