Gnarly Quotes

People want the world to be simple. But gender isn’t simple, much as some might want it to be. The fact that it’s complicated—that there’s a whole spectrum of ways of being in the world—is what makes it a blessing. Surely nature—or god, or the universe—is full of miracles and wild invention and things way beyond our understanding, no matter how hard we try. We aren’t here on earth in order to bend over backwards to resemble everybody else. We are here to be ourselves, in our gnarly brilliance”.

There was no room for him to see her through the eyes of a man who liked what he saw. He could get women anywhere. He wasn’t called Prince Charming for nothing. Even with his gnarly scars, it still attracted the women. This one was off-fucking-limits.

I took a step back, shaking my head, wishing I could place a gnarly black hex on him. My daddy taught me better than that.

I ’ve often felt separate from other human beings. I have my moments of togetherness with others; I love all sentient beings with my heart and am wildly fortunate to have friends I can talk to, share joy and despair with; we loyally have each other’s back. I wordlessly communicate with other musicians, sometimes plumbing great depths. But I’m awkward with other people, sometimes even my closest friends. My mind wanders, seeing others hold hands in a circle, from my separate place. My earliest memories are rooted in an underlying sense that something’s wrong with me, that everyone else is clued into a group consciousness from which I’m excluded. Like something in me is broken. As time passes I become more comfortable with this strange sense of being apart, but it never leaves, and on occasion, I go through phases of intense and debilitating anxiety. Gnarly fucking panic attacks. Perhaps it is a form of self-loathing, that I’m often unable to find comfort in community. Am I the only one who’s fucked up like this? Can I get a witness?

Fix what? The timeline? The space-time continuum? Gnarly, unfillable plot holes?

The moon made horns, the sky was gnarly. The cults were skittish.

You don’t say ‘gams’ anymore?” She scowled. “It’s a good word. Humans are always tossing out the good words and making up stupid ones like ‘gnarly.’ How’s a dame supposed to keep track?

What I want to know is when does Lily get off her butt and do some chores?" Tristan said, panting, as he dragged a gnarly stump of bleached wood up the beach. "I feel like I've been stacking wood and stoking fire all damn day while she just sits there." Rowan gave Tristan a disapproving look. "It's a mechanic's privilege to serve his witch.

When a young tree is injured it grows around that injury. As the tree continues to develop, the wound becomes relatively small in proportion to the size of the tree. Gnarly burls and misshapen limbs speak of injuries and obstacles encountered through time and overcome. The way a tree grows around its past contributes to its exquisite individuality, character, and beauty. I certainly don't advocate for traumatization to build character, but since trauma is almost a given at some point in our lives, the image of the tree can be a valuable mirror.

Bare, gnarly trees scratched at the star-pricked sky, whispered to me of a thousand childhood fairy tales and adult horror movies.

I take her to the Tecopa house. I tell her about the now and the big gnar, about everybody doing the best they can with what they have, choosing darkness, choosing light.

The beauty ideal is always a youthful one. This is partly simple realism. The young are beautiful. The whole lot of ’em. The older I get, the more clearly I see that and enjoy it. But it gets harder and harder to enjoy facing the mirror. Who is that old lady? Where is her waist? I got resigned, sort of, to losing my dark hair and getting all this limp grey stuff instead, but now am I going to lose even that and end up all pink scalp? I mean, enough already. Is that another mole or am I turning into an Appaloosa? How large can a knuckle get before it becomes a kneejoint? I don’t want to see, I don’t want to know. And yet I look at men and women my age and older, and their scalps and knuckles and spots and bulges, though various and interesting, don’t affect what I think of them. Some of these people I consider to be very beautiful, and others I don’t. For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.

Long live transfinite mountains, the hollow earth, time machines, fractal writing, aliens, dada, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, teleportation, artificial reality, robots, pod people, hylozoism, endless shrinking, intelligent goo, antigravity, surrealism, software highs, two-dimensional time, gnarly computation, the art of photo composition, pleasure zappers, nanomachines, mind viruses, hyperspace, monsters from the deep and, of course, always and forever, the attack of the giant ants!

Nothing’s too gnarly.

He grinned. “Hmmm, now I’m hungry.” He opened his mouth wide, and then lightly bit me on the nose. “Gnar, gnarh.

We aren't here on earth in order to bend over backward to resemble everybody else. We're here to be ourselves, in all our gnarly brilliance.

We aren’t here on earth in order to bend over backward to resemble everybody else. We’re here to be ourselves, in all our gnarly brilliance.

her own marriage had been arranged, would things have turned out any worse than they did? Is it fair, to send inexperienced young girls out into the wild forest to fend for themselves? Girls with big bones and maybe not the smallest of feet. What would help would be a wise woman, some gnarly old crone who would step out from behind a tree, who would give advice, who would say No, not this one, who would say Beauty is only skin deep, in men as well as women, who would see down as far as the heart. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? An older woman knows. But how much older do you have to get before you acquire that kind of wisdom?

Lost Love I found you, hidden by crooked fingers of gnarly wood and leafy green, a pale ghost, drifting like morning mist, through haunted trees and forest birdsong. You come to me in waning moonlight, your story told on icy skin, the pages pale, with purple kisses, walking barefoot and breathless, toward my heart. You found me, buried deep beneath this earthly blanket, of thorny twigs and weeping mud, two lovers torn now bound together, in joyful death we make our bed.

Everywhere was filled with painful, jarring reminders of what I'd lost: an elderly couple sitting on a bench, gnarly, arthritic fingers interlaced; a handsome young man in a baseball cap whispering something in his pregnant wife's ear, his arm draped protectively around her shoulders.

But that tree that grew up between them was just a gnarly old thing with thick roots that ran deep and wild and tore at the ground until it opened up, and, once it did, Julie found herself clear across a great divide from Ben, so far apart that they couldn’t even see each other from where they stood.

As I got older, I thought about aging more, as we all do. I came to think of old age as a fallibility akin to illness, something that left a person weak and in some way less than themselves. But I never used to think of my grandmother that way. Her hands with veins running across them like vines, the lines that criss-crossed her forehead, the full softness of her belly, the solidity of her arthritic shoulders, and those ancient, timeless eyes - to me these things spoke not of fallibility but of permanence. Of implacable strength, like an old gnarly tree that had been battered by wind and weather, but remained stubbornly set into the soil.

Caesar set his legion’s All Day speed at exactly “twenty Roman miles in five summer hours,” or 15:00 minutes a mile. The next faster gear was double-time, a 13:30 clip that covered twenty-two Roman miles in five hours. When you factor in the gnarly terrain and 45-pound packs on their backs, that’s a churn rate any ultrarunner would envy.

I have zero dollars,’ I said confidently.

But gender isn’t simple, much as some might want it to be. The fact that it’s complicated—that there’s a whole spectrum of ways of being in the world—is what makes it a blessing. Surely nature—or god, or the universe—is full of miracles and wild invention and things way beyond our understanding, no matter how hard we try. We aren’t here on earth in order to bend over backward to resemble everybody else. We’re here to be ourselves, in all our gnarly brilliance.

I believe that most of the people in our communities have the same thirst. Too often in our society people either don't engage at all with gnarly issues or they only talk to people who already agree with them. This problem is particularly severe online, where many of us find ourselves being "in the middle of the road" in territory that is ever more extreme. The only way out of this contentious trap is to do just what the library did - find knowledgeable and reputable sources of information. serve as a model in setting some ground rules to allow for true intellectual exploration. Connect people and ideas. Have a meaningful conversation.

We need smart people with huge hearts and creative minds to manifest all the wealth, resources, and support they need to make their difference in the world. We need people to feel happy and fulfilled and loved so they don’t take their shit out on themselves and other people and the planet and our animal friends. We need to be surrounded by people who radiate self-love and abundance so we don’t program future generations with gnarly beliefs like money is bad and I’m not good-enough and I can’t live the way I want to live. We need kickass people to be out of struggle and living large and on purpose so they can be an inspiration to others who want to rise up, too. The

I don’t think it’s an invisible chromosome, or the inability to get pregnant, or anything else, that makes people so cruel to transgender folks. I think what they hate is difference. What they hate is that the world is complicated in ways they can’t understand. People want the world to be simple. But gender isn’t simple, much as some might want it to be. The fact that it’s complicated—that there’s a whole spectrum of ways of being in the world—is what makes it a blessing. Surely nature—or god, or the universe—is full of miracles and wild invention and things way beyond our understanding, no matter how hard we try. We aren’t here on earth in order to bend over backward to resemble everybody else. We’re here to be ourselves, in all our gnarly brilliance.

Ah-there's our boy!" Bill pointed at the head of the crowd as they neared the stadium. A lean,muscular boy was running, faster than the others,his back to Luce. His hair was dark brown and shiny, his shoulders deeply tanned and painted with intersecting red-and-black bands. When he turned his head slightly to the left,Luce caught a quick glimpse of his profile.He was nothing like the Daniel she had left in her parents' backyard. And yet- "Daniel!" Luce said. "He looks-" "Different and also precisely the same?" Bill asked. "Yes." "That's his soul you recognize. Regardless of how you two may look on the outside,you'll always know each other's souls." It hadn't occured to Luce until now how remarkable it was that the recognized Daniel in every life. Her soul found his. "That's...beautiful." Bill scratched at a scab on his arm with a gnarly claw. "If you say so.

I want to sleep with people, steal, get run out of town, leave my fingerprints on every scene. We have a name for it, our generation. It’s our Baghdad.” “Your what?” “My Baghdad,” Tommy said laughing, knowing it was dumb, savoring the dumbness, and maybe also its truth. “The situation you get into knowing it’s fucked-up but you keep doing it anyway, making it an even bigger disaster. Everyone gets one, but that’s how you learn. It builds character, makes you dirty and real. You know you’re a superpower when you can lose every war and still be a superpower. Maybe you’re a superpower because you can afford to lose them. Same here. There should be a Web site that records all the risks a person has taken, all the famous people they’ve met, all their gnarly trips and bad decisions. Like a Web site that ranks who’s lived the most.” “Isn’t that called Facebook?” Mills asked.

As we enter our fifties, if we get “it” right, we gain access to a suite of legitimate superpowers. Over the course of that decade, there are fundamental shifts in how the brain processes information. In simple terms, our ego starts to quiet and our perspective starts to widen. Whole new levels of intelligence, creativity, empathy, and wisdom open up. As a result, key downstream skills like critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, communication, cooperation, and collaboration all have the potential—if properly cultivated—to skyrocket in our later years.

Flour on the floor makes my sandals slip and I tumble into your arms. Too hot to bake this morning but blueberries begged me to fold them into moist muffins. Sticks of rhubarb plotted a whole pie. The windows are blown open and a thickfruit tang sneaks through the wire screen and into the home of the scowly lady who lives next door. Yesterday, a man in the city was rescued from his apartment which was filled with a thousand rats. Something about being angry because his pet python refused to eat. He let the bloom of fur rise, rise over the little gnarly blue rug, over the coffee table, the kitchen countertops and pip through each cabinet, snip at the stumpy bags of sugar, the cylinders of salt. Our kitchen is a riot of pots, wooden spoons, melted butter. So be it. Maybe all this baking will quiet the angry voices next door, if only for a brief whiff. I want our summers to always be like this—a kitchen wrecked with love, a table overflowing with baked goods warming the already warm air. After all the pots are stacked, the goodies cooled, and all the counters wiped clean—let us never be rescued from this mess.

Hang on,” Keefe interrupted, sliding off his bed and tiptoeing across his room. He paused near the door, pressing his finger to his lips in the universal shhhhh sign before he grabbed the handle and shoved his shoulder against the wood as hard as he could. A startled yelp echoed from the hallway, followed by a thud that could only be the sound of a body hitting the floor. “You have ten seconds before I let Ro unleash some of her new little bacteria buddies on you,” Keefe warned as he slammed the door hard enough to rattle the wall. “I hear they leave a gnarly rash!” He waited until the sound of footsteps had retreated down the hall before he turned back to Sophie and lowered his voice. “That won’t keep him away for long, so better spill it quick, Foster. Tell me why you have that cute little crease between your eyebrows. And why I’m feeling”—he waved his hands through the air—“hmm. Feels like the usual mix of worry, anger, and panic—though there’s something underneath that’s a little… I can’t figure out how to describe it. Fluttery?” “Oooh, let’s focus on that one!” Ro jumped in. “It’ll be much more interesting than all the blah-blah-blah-the-Neverseen-are-trying-to-kill-everybody-blah-blah.

One morning, a young Taoist priest named Silent Thunder Ghost ran up mount Mianshan to see a Taoist Immortal. The trail was long and arduous, and along the way many perilous paths were obscured by the morning mists. Arriving at the mountain peak he found the one called He Who Hides in Clouds, trying to balance a twisted, gnarly wooden staff on top of his finger. 'Dry me a wooden mountain…' said the Immortal who then threw his staff at least a mile high into the sky, whereupon the sun seemingly appeared from nowhere sending golden beams of sunlight onto his face. 'If it was me, and that was my go at life, I don’t think I’d want to do it again,' he said laughing, then he looked at his visitor. 'You are here to tell me you are making progress no doubt, have you found the Tao?' Unable to conceal his excitement Silent Thunder Ghost replied, 'I am no longer blind. I know the Tao and its ten thousand gifts. I live, I breathe, I see, I am life, I am the mountains, the morning dew on the trees, the moonlight reflecting in the lake, the starlight in my eyes, all these things are mine. My awareness is within me but reaches out to the furthest reaches of space.' As soon as he said this the gnarly old staff fell back to Earth, whereupon He Who Hides in Clouds caught it deftly with one hand and went on to press the tip against Silent Thunder Ghost’s chest. The Immortal said, 'All things are yours except your heart… the Tao keeps that part all to itself.' And then he vanished quite slowly and as he disappeared Silent Thunder Ghost was left holding the gnarly old staff, wondering if the conversation had ever really happened at all.

There should be a Web site that records all the risks a person has taken, all the famous people they’ve met, all their gnarly trips and bad decisions. Like a Web site that ranks who’s lived the most.” “Isn’t that called Facebook?

It will produce branches and bear fruit and become a splendid cedar….” —Ezekiel 17:23 (NIV) I e-mailed my siblings: “Prayers appreciated for a talk I’m giving on Thursday afternoon.” Several responded, relaying the sentiment “God is with you, and so are we.” At the appointed hour, I encouraged participants to compare their prayers to trees. I displayed photographs and artists’ renderings of gnarly olive trees, weeping willows, deserted palms, orange-laden orchards…. I handed out colored pencils and suggested they draw a tree that represented their recent prayers. “Imagine Jesus as the trunk—the core ‘vine’—and your prayers as the branches. Then consider the big picture: Whom is your prayer tree shading or protecting? Where is it in the seasonal cycles—producing hopeful spring blossoms or mature fruit? Do your prayer-branches reach for the sky in praise or bend close to the ground with requests? Is your tree in a solitary setting, or do you prefer praying when you’re surrounded by peers, as in a grove?” Eventually I asked them to explain their pictures. A husband had sketched two leafy trees side by side, representing his prayers with his wife. A mother had envisioned a passel of umbrella-shaped twigs, symbolizing parental prayers of protection. When I was packing up, a woman who’d held back earlier showed me a nearly hidden detail of her flourishing tree. At the base of the trunk, underneath grassy cover, she’d outlined deep roots. “They represent the grounding of my family, my upbringing.” “Oh my!” I smiled. “You introduced a whole new dimension.” I drove home with a revitalized prayer—like limbs stretching upward with thanksgiving—for my natal family and many others who have enriched my relationship with God. Lord, thank You for the grounding of my faith through my family and the family of God. —Evelyn Bence Digging Deeper: Ps 103:17–18; Prv 22:6

Engineers, at heart, are problem solvers. They thrive on digging their way out of sinkholes, especially the gnarly kind with no clear path forward.

The angels came up to Jesus carrying Gabriel and Uriel. Raphael said, “Mikael is on his way to Tartarus with Ba’al.” Saraqael and Raguel approached from out of the black. Saraqael said, “Pan got away. He is a slippery scoundrel, that one.” Mary smiled broadly. “I know where he went.” They looked to her for more. She said, “He went to Gaia, the Mother Earth Goddess.” Gabriel said, “Well, isn’t that convenient. That old gnarly tree was next on our list. We can kill two gods with one battle axe.” He still had his wit through his wounds. Uriel croaked through his migraine headache. “Wrong, Gabriel. Three gods.” They all remembered that the Earth Goddess carried within her tangled roots of evil another demoness long worthy of punishment. Gabriel gave a lighthearted laugh, “Well, Uriel, I do defer. You have bested me verbally while suffering a worse handicap.” They both looked to Jesus for approval and they got it in the form of a very subtle smirk of acceptance. Uriel was not done. “Jesus, would you say that ‘little buddy’ remark from Gabriel constituted a putdown?” “That was a term of affection,” complained Gabriel. Jesus broke into a broad smile. “Do not start again, or I won’t bring you to find Gaia.” The two angels groaned simultaneously through their pains. Uriel said, “Our tongues will heal as quick as our wounds.” Jesus smiled. Mary said to Jesus, “I know where she hides.

Yo, Uncle D," said Derek's nephew Barry, coming over to join him on the prow of the ship. "How's it cheesin'?" "You think I'm cool, don't you?" Derek asked. "Yo, Unc, you're the coolest dude on the flippity flop," said Barry. "Yeah, Unc," said Larry, coming over to join them, "you're the raddest cat around. You're totally cowabunga." "Yeah, tubular," said Gary, walking over as well. "You're totally gnarly, one-hundred per-cent mondo and outrageously funky.

gnarly.

One morning, a young Taoist priest named Silent Thunder Ghost ran up mount Mianshan to see a Taoist Immortal. The trail was long and arduous, and along the way many perilous paths were obscured by the morning mists. Arriving at the mountain peak he found the one called He Who Hides in Clouds, trying to balance a twisted, gnarly wooden staff on top of his finger. “Dry me a wooden mountain…” said the Immortal who then threw his staff at least a mile high into the sky, whereupon the sun seemingly appeared from nowhere sending golden beams of sunlight onto his face. “If it was me, and that was my go at life, I don’t think I’d want to do it again,” he said laughing, then he looked at his visitor. “You are here to tell me you are making progress no doubt, have you found the Tao?” Unable to conceal his excitement Silent Thunder Ghost replied, “I am no longer blind. I know the Tao and its ten thousand gifts. I live, I breathe, I see, I am life, I am the mountains, the morning dew on the trees, the moonlight reflecting in the lake, the starlight in my eyes, all these things are mine. My awareness is within me but reaches out to the furthest reaches of space.” As soon as he said this the gnarly old staff fell back to Earth, whereupon He Who Hides in Clouds caught it deftly with one hand and went on to press the tip against Silent Thunder Ghost’s chest. The Immortal said, “All things are yours except your heart… the Tao keeps that part all to itself.” And then he vanished quite slowly and as he disappeared Silent Thunder Ghost was left holding the gnarly old staff, wondering if the conversation had ever really happened at all.

Back when he was forced to ride herd over the Detroit Pistons and all their gnarly egos, coach Chuck Daly used to have a saying: The game is simple, but the people are complicated.

The truth hurts less than fibs and fakers,” Brax repeated. “That’s always stayed with me because it’s so honest and raw. It told me so much about you and made me fall in love. So many people lied to me about my parent’s death. Glossing over the darkness, and hiding the gnarly truth.” His arms latched tighter, pressing me hard against him. “Not having the chance to say goodbye will haunt me forever. And not knowing the truth about why they crashed eats at my soul.

Gnarly, man,” the billionaire remarked. “Now that’s faith and confidence in one’s potential.

Unholy by Stewart Stafford Horrors walk from out a dream, Apparitions dare reality’s seam, Gnarly fingers excavate blame, Sanity stolen in a hellish flame. No way to think or even breathe, Or kind worldly goods bequeath, For Time’s skeletal fingers snap, Catching souls in a fiendish trap. Visions boxed, then assail again, A phantom grin is no one’s friend, Gasp out awakening perspiration, Sun falls in creeping desperation. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Steinway made its soundboards with eastern white spruce until the 1920s. Today the remaining spruce trees in the East cannot provide boards long enough, or wide enough, for pianos. “That’s all logged out,” Albrecht says flatly. And, while Steinway can glue boards together vertically (with the grain), as it does for the rims, it cannot do so horizontally (against the grain). So, long before Albrecht came on the job, Steinway had gone west and found the Tebbs. Steinway adopted the northwestern spruce from twenty-five hundred miles away, where gnarly roots serve as an anchor in soil so wet that logging is often an amphibious proposition.

Because if you imagine yourself truly alone, islanded off from everybody else, you end up facing, whether you want to or not, a lot of gnarly, unsettling questions.

We aren't here on earth in order to bend over backwards to resemble everyone else. We're here to be ourselves, in all our gnarly brilliance.

Most of us arrive in our fifties feeling that the cage has gotten smaller. What’s actually shrunk is our mindset. We’re in a prison of our own making. Once we discover we can keep on learning later in life, that mindset shifts. The cage vanishes. This changes everything.

What’s there to think about? I say we make a choice here and now on this crusty shell-patterned couch. Will we live the lives they want us to live? Or will we blaze our own trails and set sail? Let’s at least give it a shot before we can only wish we had. We can always come back and get a real job and start again.

The possibility of anything happening amplified the feeling of freedom, not knowing what might happen next.

I have zero dollars, I said confidently.

Week before last, cold shooed warmth into a wish and a memory, then rattled tree limbs to leaflessness with one gnarly hand, while gripping the earth with the other.

From my experience, I knew that if I could make it to a flight nurse in a flight-for-life helicopter, I would have the chance. I have seen flight nurses do incredible things in really bloody, gnarly situations. That became my goal…make it to the helicopter.

People with C-PTSD might have an outsized, gnarly freak-out about a cockroach in the house or a flash of anger on someone’s face. But in times of real danger—when someone furious is coming toward us with an actual machete in their hand, ready to kill—we face the problem head-on, while everyone else is cowering. A lot of the time, we’re the ones getting shit done.

I thought early motherhood would be gentle, beatific, pacific, tranquil: bathed in a soft light. But actually it was hard-core, edgy, gnarly. It wasn't pale pink; it was brown of shit and red of blood. And it was the most political experience of my life, rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle, and power.

Davy was just thinking like a Youtuber. All he cared about was making videos and crushing that gnarly view count, but still… I had to admit that it’d be pretty sick if I found the thief, returned the egg, and then was like,

You will have a much harder time dealing with a gnarly challenge if you have not distilled it down to a crux. No one solves a problem they cannot comprehend and hold in their mind.

The next day after work, we took the bumboat to Pulau Ubin. The tree was located after the Chek Jawa Quarry, where we cut through a dirt path to arrive at a clearing. The tree reminded me of a witch's fingers, upturned towards the sky. Its branches were gnarly and skinny, its trunk about the size of my waist. It looked like a severed hand, sticking out of its grave for one last snatch. 'It's as good as dead,' I said, patting it with my hand and feeling the dry bark. The sun had set, lending the remote island an eerie feel at dusk. We were only twenty minutes out of Singapore, yet Pulau Ubin with its small wooden homes and backyards filled with chicken coops felt like a different country altogether.

My eldest grandson even brought me a red kemboja today. He was on a school trip, and I hear they have planted many more of those trees on the island with buds from the original tree. I hold the flower in my hands, my fingers skinny and gnarly, upturned towards the sky. I lean over and smile at him. 'Let me tell you a secret,' I say.

That is a winner’s mentality. Winners in life see everything they experience and everything they hear, see, and feel as pure energy. They train their minds to find it. They drop into the gnarly crevices to mine golden nuggets of trauma, doubt, and hate. They do not live disposable, single-use lives. They discard nothing and refurbish everything. They find strength in the bullying and heartbreak, in their defeats and failures. They harvest it from the people who hate them personally and from the online trolls too.

There are tektites: glassy pebbles created by meteorites or comets smashing into the earth’s surface, bits of which then fuse into shiny stones. There are fulgurites: gnarly, hollow tubes you sometimes find on a beach or dune after a lightning strike.

There, in front of Highbell’s wall, hang a dozen bodies, strung up on a row of gnarly, weather-beaten branches. The bodies are…wrong. Abhorrent. They aren’t just corpses. They aren’t gilded heads on spikes, warning people of Midas’s wrath if one should break the law. No, these...these are... “Rotted,” Sail says grimly beside me, as if he were hearing my thoughts. “That’s what the smell is. We’ve been getting these little gifts from King Rot all week.

Dancing,” replied the homeless man, moving gloriously. “Keep bringing me this beautiful knowledge. Socrates said, ‘Education is the kindling of a flame.’ And Isaac Asimov wrote ‘Self-education is, I believe, the only kind of education there is.’ So, keep playing the old guru’s words, dude. It’s all so gnarly.” The artist

By the time I started down off the ridge, I felt absolutely gluttonous with natural beauty. How rich the Nepalis are for all their lack of western wealth. I try not to overly romanticize the pastoral scene, because the elimination of the health problems in these villages would certainly add to the comfort of life for the Nepalis. But I am having a crises of confidence about anything the developed nations have to "give" or teach Nepal about the quality of life. I think of one of the villages where I rested. Saturday is a bidhaa, holiday, in Nepal, and little clusters of men gathered lazily under the chautaara, the resting tree, with its gnarly roots. Little boys tossed a ball made from old socks back and forth to each other. The women at the water tap, in their wonderful wildflower shades of clothes, stood talking with their golden water urns glowing in the sun. Four little girls played a complicated jump rope game. Could I honestly say these people's lives would have been improved if they had spent their bidhaa at the mall?

Gnarly,

Right then is when I realized Day Grissom had a chunk of a doughnut stuck in his beard. I figured it’d be rude to mention it, but I couldn’t help but stare. A beard is a gnarly place for a pastry to reside.

Or they might, like, glue them onto a stick and make a gnarly weapon,” Elise suggested.

The songs transported her backwards in time, to when she first wrote them. As each one melted into the next, as her voice sang lyrics and melodies from her past, memories burst like colors across a blank canvas. Because inside each and every one of these songs---songs she'd written before she ever left Edgewood---memories were hidden. Emeline choked on them. Hot tears burned in her eyes as she tapped the next file, and the next, racing through songs and, with them, memories that had been stolen from her. Images of a younger Sable flashed before her eyes, interwoven with a younger Rooke. And someone else. Hawthorne. He was everywhere, with his dark hair and strange eyes. Her songs were so full of him, Emeline felt like she was drowning in him. Hawthorne, sitting next to the fire, reading a book. Hawthorne, shucking off his shirt and diving into a moonlit pond. Hawthorne, climbing in through her bedroom window. Kissing her in the dark. She'd embedded him inside her music. Because songs were never just songs for Emeline. They were capsules, each one containing a moment trapped inside it. As the next one started to play through her headphones, an image of a tree rose up in her mind. Emeline could see its thirsty roots; the twisting, twirling gray-brown bark; the gnarly branches stretching towards the sky. A silent sentinel, standing guard at the edge of the woods. Her tree.

Nothing is too gnarly.

An old man hobbled by, his prescription bag death-gripped between his gnarly hand and the top of his walker. He glared at Adam, or maybe that was just the way he looked at the world now. Adam

Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl the fatherhood of God lies behind everything. This apparent chaotic world is not chaotic at all; if we step back and take it all in with the right perspective, we see that it is an intricately designed carnival ride. There is a fatherly purpose in it: it turns out that we thought we were being born into a world full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, but what was happening is that our Father was taking us to a particularly spectacular fair with some really gnarly rides. In

have striking memories of the first microbiology class I took. The instructor asked me and my classmates to place our hands on the agar gel in petri dishes that had been placed on our lab benches. A week later we returned to the lab to find our petri dishes contained gnarly black, yellow, white, and green furry monstrosities growing in the precise shape of our hands. That petri dish was easily the most vivid demonstration of the importance of hand washing I’ve ever seen. We

2. E-mail Signature. Your e-mail signature is an opportunity to create another branding impression. But be careful. If you include too much information, it just becomes a big, gnarly ad.

Ryan sat on a big, gnarly, half-buried root under the naked oak tree that stood in front of school. When his bus pulled up, he didn’t try to make eye contact with anyone. He knew the other kids were too afraid to look his way. A long-haired boy from the sixth grade made the mistake of sitting in the seat in front of him. Ryan kept pulling stray hairs from the back of his head, only stopping when tears streamed down the boy’s face. It was his own fault for having a mullet, Ryan told himself. He got off the bus and waited for Alyssa Abbot. She’d made him swear not to speak to her until the bus was out of sight. Ryan knew she wouldn’t even walk home with him if her parents didn’t force her to. “I guess you’re not going to bother writing a letter to Santa. Seeing how you want him dead and all,” Alyssa said, eyes fixed ahead on the black smoke billowing from the underside of the bus. “You’re the only dork in our class still writing letters to

I’ve come to find that traveling the multiverse produces the same effect as a gnarly hangover induced by tequila, very distinct from one brought on by wine or whiskey. I have some experience with the former, more with the latter

Jacob!” I call, not minding when my voice echoes off the library building, so loud he and his friends turn to me. For once, Jacob doesn’t look sure what he wants to do, whether he wants to stop or keep going. But I do. I know. I shut the car door behind me and venture into the Unknown. His walls are up, fortified by days and days of silence. To my relief, while his face is carefully blank, he doesn’t turn away when I near. I feel his friends, both guys and girls, watching me. And I realize this might be a colossal mistake, a public humiliation. Maybe Jacob is seeing someone else now. Maybe he’ll never forgive me. His friends draw behind him like bodyguards. I have no words, just myself and this piece of used paper, which I hold out to him. Jacob takes my note silently and reads the two coordinates. “What’s this?” he asks gruffly. This is what I want, I tell myself. He, of all people, is worth this risk of being transparent, of letting him know how I feel, what I want. So despite his friends who are watching, I straighten, throw my hair over my shoulder, and stand before him, utterly vulnerable. “A geocache,” I say. “A geocache.” “If you’ve got the guts to find it.” For the first time, his eyes glint with something like amusement, something like curiosity. “Well,” he drawls, “that depends on the cache.” I shrug and shake my head. “It’s a new one. No one has ever found it.” “So tell me more.” “It’d take . . . oh, gosh, an entire day at least to tell you all about it.” “I’ve got time,” he says easily. “Give me a clue.” “You?” I ask in mock horror. “You, an expert geocacher, are asking for a clue?” “For especially gnarly caches, I make exceptions.” “Gnarly?” I frown. “Complicated,” he amends. The beginning of his crooked smile begins to form, and the murky Unknown solidifies into familiar terrain. “So what’s the cache called?” That, I hadn’t prepped for. So I improvise: “I’m a Moron and I’m So Sorry. But then really good geocachers know it by its nickname: I’ve Missed You So Much.” A breeze tangles my hair, and when Jacob reaches out to brush a strand off my cheek, the tension releases in me.

Once Marcelino reached the river, he wheeled around and drilled the ball to a little six-year-old who’d lost one sandal and was struggling with his belt. For a few glorious moments, Little One-Shoe was leading his team and loving it, hopping on one bare foot while grappling to keep his skirt from falling off. That’s when I began to glimpse the real genius of the rarájipari. Because of gnarly trails and back-and-forth laps, the game is endlessly and instantly self-handicapping; the ball ricocheted around as if it were coming off a pinball paddle, allowing the slower kids to catch up whenever Marcelino had to root it out of a crevice. The playing field levels the playing field, so everyone is challenged and no one is left out.

My earliest memories are rooted in an underlying sense that something’s wrong with me, that everyone else is clued into a group consciousness from which I’m excluded. Like something in me is broken. As time passes I become more comfortable with this strange sense of being apart, but it never leaves, and on occasion, I go through phases of intense and debilitating anxiety. Gnarly fucking panic attacks. Perhaps it is a form of self-loathing, that I’m often unable to find comfort in community. Am I the only one who’s fucked up like this? Can I get a witness?

The only sounds at the late hour were the faint jingle of a phone ringing in the nurses’ station, the ping of an elevator, the faraway sound of the wheels of a cart, and the gentle beep of Brandon’s vital signs monitor. They wouldn’t allow any flowers or personal items in the ICU, but Sloan had snuck in an engagement photo. It sat on the table next to the bed. Her and Brandon on the beach, the surf crashing around their feet, her tattooed arm over his shoulder, them looking at each other. Both of them laughing. I looked back at him and sighed. “You’re going to have some gnarly scars, buddy.” They’d started the skin grafts for the road rash on his arm. “But you’ll get to do everything you planned to do with your life. One of us is going to get the girl. I’ll help you any way I can. Even if I have to wheel your ass to the altar.” I could picture his smile. With any luck I’d see it in a few hours. A knock on the door frame turned me around in my chair. “Hey, cutie.” Valerie came into the room for her vitals check. She turned the lights up, and I stood and stretched. As if sleeping in a chair wasn’t hard enough, the activity every two hours was the final kicker. I wouldn’t call anything I did on these overnight shifts sleeping. Maybe napping, but not sleeping. Every two hours Brandon was moved. They checked his airways, changed out bags, looked at his vitals. I don’t know how Sloan was handling doing this almost nightly for the last three weeks. Sloan was a good woman. I’d always liked her, but now she’d earned my respect, and I was grateful Brandon and Kristen had her. “Did you decide what day you want to bring the kids to the station?” I asked Valerie, yawning. She cycled the blood pressure cuff on Brandon’s arm and smiled. “I’m thinking Tuesday. You on shift Tuesday?” “Yup.” She wrote down some notes on Brandon’s chart and then gave me a raised eyebrow. “Any updates with your lady friend?” I laughed a little. “No.” The whole nursing staff knew about my depressing love life. I’d gotten hit on a few too many times by some of the younger nurses. I couldn’t claim to have a girlfriend, and I wasn’t married, so it was either “I’m gay” or “I’m in love with that girl over there.” I’d gone with the latter, and now I wished I’d said I was gay. They didn’t know why Kristen wouldn’t date me, just that she wouldn’t. It had turned into the favorite topic of the ICU. A real-life episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I rarely got through a Brandon visit without it coming up. The drama escalated when Kristen had been hit on by the nurses’ favorite single orthopedic surgeon. According to the nurses’ gossip circuit, Kristen told him to go fuck himself. And apparently she’d actually said, “Go fuck yourself.” After that everyone was sure she was holding out for me. Only I knew better.

Horty relished the gnar. To him, true adventure should be steeped with elements of failure, risk, and even death, preferably all three. He was especially fond of the Shackleton quote "I love the fight and when things are easy I hate it.

Ted Berner asked me, “What is a good strategic goal?” The answer is that good strategic goals are an outcome of working the gnarly problem of strategy, not an antecedent. When organizational leaders face the issue of strategy, they are building a bridge between general desires and ambitions and the specifics of action in the here and now. If they do their job well, one outcome will be good strategic objectives.

I know people say that talking to yourself is something highly intelligent people do,” her boss, who was only three years older than her daughter, began, “But I’m pretty sure given your age, and all, that could be the first sign of Alzheimer’s or something. Maybe you should take a mental health day to get screened.

it was as if the ghosts of their youth had risen from their graves, strutting and preening in skintight leather and overly teased hair.

Time travel ain’t no Michael J. Fox movie. You mess with timelines, you might end up with butterfly effects that’ll make Chernobyl look like a spilled Slurpee.

Hello, love. Pleased to hear it. I hope you’re enjoying yourself. I’m so sorry your boyfriend is a gnarled pecker. I know as your supportive best friend, I’m not supposed to tell you that, and I do apologize, but in the interest of brutal honesty, he is a gnarly, deformed, gonorrhea-riddled, puss-dripping knob.