Grain Futures Quotes

You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves. After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. That’s what I believe. The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens. These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.

Through my blue fingers, pink grains are falling, haphazard, random, a disorganized stream of silicone that seems pregnant with the possibility of every conceivable shape… But this is illusion. Things have their shape in time, not space alone. Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future.

Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.

We all—adults and children, writers and readers—have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence.

...The real cause of hunger is a scarcity of justice, not a scarcity of food. Enough grain is squandered every day in raising American livestock for meat to provide every human being on earth with two loaves of bread.

I don’t think any of us expected it to look like it did! Most of the dry surface was ‘sand,’ grains of hydrocarbons like coffee grounds. It was piled in giant dunes that ran on for miles over the ice—like in the Sahara or Canada.

Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they’ll be more talkative in the future.

Henry liked to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition, still please him. Even as a child, and especially after Aberfan, he never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.

As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savours the past.

But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today. A tree’s most important means of staying connected to other trees is a “wood wide web” of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods. Scientific research aimed at understanding the astonishing abilities of this partnership between fungi and plant has only just begun. The reason trees share food and communicate is that they need each other. It takes a forest to create a microclimate suitable for tree growth and sustenance. So it’s not surprising that isolated trees have far shorter lives than those living connected together in forests. Perhaps the saddest plants of all are those we have enslaved in our agricultural systems. They seem to have lost the ability to communicate, and, as Wohlleben says, are thus rendered deaf and dumb. “Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes,” he advocates, “so that they’ll be more talkative in the future.” Opening

My main purpose in life is to do something useful for my fellow men, not to live my life in vain, to propel mankind forward, if only by a fraction. That is why I became interested in that which gave me neither bread nor power, but I am in hopes that my work, perhaps soon, perhaps only in the distant future, will yield society heaps of grain and vast power.

However, when we step into farm fields, the vegetation becomes very quiet. Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost the ability to communicate above or below ground-you could say they are deaf and dumb-and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests. That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they'll be more talkative in the future.

Time is like the ancient Ouroboros. Time is fleeting moments, grains of sand passing through an hourglass. Time is the moments and events we so readily try to measure. But the ancient Ouroboros reminds us that in every moment, in every instant, in every event, is hidden the past, the present and the future. Eternity is hidden in every moment. Every departure is at once a return, every farewell is a greeting, every return is a parting. Everything is simultaneously a beginning and an end.

What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end. On

It is not that there is no food,” one commissar insisted. “There is plenty of grain, but 90 percent of the people have ideological problems.

Most peasants did not miss the school. "What's the point?" they would say. "You pay fees and read for years, and in the end you are still a peasant, earning your food with your sweat. You don't get a grain of rice more for being able to read books. Why waste time and money? Might as well start earning your work points right away." The virtual absence of any chance of a better future and the near total immobility for anyone born a peasant took the incentive out of the pursuit of knowledge. Children of school age would stay at home to help their families with their work or look after younger brothers and sisters. They would be out in the fields when they were barely in their teens. As for girls, the peasants considered it a complete waste of time for them to go to school. "They get married and belong to other people. It's like pouring water on the ground." The Cultural Revolution was trumpeted as having brought education to the peasants through 'evening classes." One day my production team announced it was starting evening classes and asked Nana and me to be the teachers. I was delighted. However, as soon as the first 'class' began, I realized that this was no education. The classes invariably started with Nana and me being asked by the production team leader to read out articles by Mao or other items from the People's Daily. Then he would make an hour-long speech consisting of all the latest political jargon strung together in undigested and largely unintelligible hunks. Now and then he would give special orders, all solemnly delivered in the name of Mao.

Perhaps the saddest plants of all are those we have enslaved in our agricultural systems. They seem to have lost the ability to communicate, and, as Wohlle-ben says, are isolated by their silence. “Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes,” he advocates, “so that they’ll be more talkative in the future.

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you’d never find the end.

But clouds bellied out in the sultry heat, the sky cracked open with a crimson gash, spewed flame-and the ancient forest began to smoke. By morning there was a mass of booming, fiery tongues, a hissing, crashing, howling all around, half the sky black with smoke, and the bloodied sun just barely visible. And what can little men do with their spades, ditches, and pails? The forest is no more, it was devoured by fire: stumps and ash. Perhaps illimitable fields will be plowed here one day, perhaps some new, unheard-of wheat will ripen here and men from Arkansas with shaven faces will weigh in their palms the heavy golden grain. Or perhaps a city will grow up-alive with ringing sound and motion, all stone and crystal and iron-and winged men will come here flying over seas and mountains from all ends of the world. But never again the forest, never again the blue winter silence and the golden silence of summer. And only the tellers of tales will speak in many-colored patterned words about what had been, about wolves and bears and stately green-coated century-old grandfathers, about old Russia; they will speak about all this to us who have seen it with our own eyes ten years - a hundred years! - ago, and to those others, the winged ones, who will come in a hundred years to listen and to marvel at it all as at a fairy tale. ("In Old Russia")

Oh, it started very small. In 1959 and ’60 it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

All his life, time had been passing in the only way he knew time to pass: uncrushed and uncrushable, as sands running through an hourglass grain by grain. And if the hourglass had been real, then in the bottom and neck-the past and the present-the sands of Lazlo's life would be as gray as his robes, as gray as his eyes, but the top-the future-would hold a brilliant storm of color: azure and cinnamon, blinding white and yellow gold and the shell pink of svytagor blood. So he hoped, so he dreamed: that, in the course of time, grain by grain, the gray would give way to the dream and the sands of his life would run bright.

Cast the burden of the present, along with the sin of the past and the fear of the future, upon the Lord, who forsaketh not His saints. Live by the day--ay, by the hour. Put no trust in frames and feelings. Care more for a grain of faith than a ton of excitement. Trust in God alone, and lean not on the needs of human help.

Good acts grow upon a person. I have sometimes thought that many men, judging from their utter lack of kindness and of a disposition to aid others, imagined that if they were to say or do a kind thing, it would destroy their capacity to perform a kind act or say a kind word in the future. If you have a granary full of grain, and you give away a sack or two, there remain that many less in your granary, but if you perform a kind act or add words of encouragement to one in distress, who is struggling along in the battle of life, the greater is your capacity to do this in the future. Don’t go through life with your lips sealed against words of kindness and encouragement, nor your hearts sealed against performing labors for another. Make a motto in life: always try and assist someone else to carry his burden.

Once there was. Once there wasn't. A long, long time ago, in a land not so faraway, when the sieve was inside the straw, the donkey was the town crier,and the camel was the barber ... when I was older than my father so that I rocked his cradle upon hearing his cry ... when the world was upside down and time was a cycle that turned around and around so that the future was older than the past and the past was as pristine as newly sowed fields ... Once there was. Once there wasn't. God's creatures were as plentiful as grains and talking too much was a sin, for you could tell what you shouldn't remember and you could remember what you shouldn't tell....

It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Mathematically, IPv4 can only support about 232 or 4.3 billion connections. IPv6, on the other hand, can handle 2128 or 340,​282,​366,​920,​938,​463,​463,​374,​607,​431,​768,​211,​456 connections. The implications of a number this large are mind-boggling. There are only 1019 grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. That means IPv6 would allow each grain of sand to have a trillion IP addresses. In fact, there are so many possible addresses with IPv6 that every single atom on our planet could receive a unique address and we would “still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths.” It is in the wake of these changes that the Internet of Things will be born.

They passed a law. Oh, it started very small. In 1950 and '60 it was a grain of sand. They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

AS the falling rain prepares the earth for the future crops of grain and fruit, so the rains of many sorrows showering upon the heart prepare and mellow it for the coming of that wisdom that perfects the mind and gladdens the heart. As the clouds darken the earth but to cool and fructify it, so the clouds of grief cast a shadow over the heart to prepare it for nobler things. The hour of sorrow is the hour of reverence. It puts an end to the shallow sneer, the ribald jest, the cruel calumny; it softens the heart with sympathy, and enriches the mind with thoughtfulness. Wisdom is mainly recollection of all that was learned by sorrow. Do not think that your sorrow will remain; it will pass away like a cloud. Where self ends, grief passes away.

The gold of her promise has never been mined Her borders of justice not clearly defined Her crops of abundance the fruit and the grain Have not fed the hungry nor eased that deep pain Her proud declarations are leaves on the wind Her southern exposure black death did befriend Discover this country dead centuries cry Erect noble tablets where none can decry "She kills her bright future and rapes for a sou Then entraps her children with legends untrue" I beg you Discover this country from America

it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present, and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.

Indeed, phage viruses are by far the most plentiful biological entity on earth. There are 1031 of them—a trillion phages for every grain of sand, and more than all organisms (including bacteria) combined. In one milliliter (0.03 ounces) of seawater there can be as many as 900 million of these viruses.7

Killing animals is the most destructive thing you can do in the fashion industry", she told me. "The tanneries, the chemicals, the deforestation, the use of landmass and grain and water, the cruelty - it's a nonstarter. The minute yo are not killing an animal to make a shoe or a bag you are ahead of the game

In life in general we get back what we put out, if we ever were to find ourselves in a situation where we get back less or even the opposite of what we put out, then we need to get out, take ourselves out of that situation, for it is futile to try to go against the grain of feelings, emotions, life... it is not only going to lead to nowhere but pain, it is also going to lead to loneliness, bitterness, sadness, despair and heartbreak. so for those of you who are going through this currently, brush that crap off of your plate and move on. Those of you that have not experienced this yet, keep your eyes and your ears open, because in most cases it takes a while to see what has been right in front of you hitting you with baseball bats. BE AWARE OF WHAT IS. be aware of what that other person is giving to you. ask yourselves a few questions, 1) am I getting back the love that I am putting out? 2) Do I always have to initiate the conversation? 3) When I do initiate the conversation, do I get a response? 4) if so, is it on par with what I put forth. 5) in most cases of conversation does it seem like I am being ignored? 6) If I reach out to hold his/her hand does it get held back? or am I doing all the holding? ~~ The more of these simple yet profound questions you can answer negatively too. the bigger the chance that you are in a hopeless, futureless, hated by the other person relationship. So, keep your eyes and your ears open, ask yourselves questions and always and I do mean always, Be Aware of everything. it will save you heartache in the future.

There was a man who was in Hell and about to be re-incarnated, and he said to the King of Re-incarnation, “If you want me to return to the earth as a human being, I will go only on my own conditions.” “And what are they?” asked the King. The man replied, “I must be born the son of a cabinet minister and father of a future ‘Literary Wrangler’ (the scholar who comes out first at the national examinations). I must have ten thousand acres of land surrounding my home and fish ponds and fruits of every kind and a beautiful wife and pretty concubines, all good and loving to me, and rooms stocked to the ceiling with gold and pearls and cellars stocked full of grain and trunks chockful of money, and I myself must be a Grand Councilor or a Duke of the First Rank and enjoy honor and prosperity and live until I am a hundred years old,” And the King of Re-incarnation replied, “If there was such a lot on earth, I would go and be re-incarnated myself, and not give it to you!

In the symbiotic community of the forest, not only trees but also shrubs and grasses—and possibly all plant species—exchange information this way. However, when we step into farm fields, the vegetation becomes very quiet. Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground—you could say they are deaf and dumb—and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests.12 That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they’ll be more talkative in the future. Communication

Because all such things are aspects of the holomovement, he feels it has no meaning to speak of consciousness and matter as interacting. In a sense, the observer is the observed. The observer is also the measuring device, the experimental results, the laboratory, and the breeze that blows outside the laboratory. In fact, Bohm believes that consciousness is a more subtle form of matter, and the basis for any relationship between the two lies not in our own level of reality, but deep in the implicate order. Consciousness is present in various degrees of enfoldment and unfoldment in all matter, which is perhaps why plasmas possess some of the traits of living things. As Bohm puts it, "The ability of form to be active is the most characteristic feature of mind, and we have something that is mindlike already with the electron. "11 Similarly, he believes that dividing the universe up into living and nonliving things also has no meaning. Animate and inanimate matter are inseparably interwoven, and life, too, is enfolded throughout the totality of the universe. Even a rock is in some way alive, says Bohm, for life and intelligence are present not only in all of matter, but in "energy, " "space, " "time, " "the fabric of the entire universe, " and everything else we abstract out of the holomovement and mistakenly view as separate things. The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left hand. We could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, and every dust mote, which gives new meaning to William Blake's famous poem: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.

Loving families are the basis of a humane society. As the poet Roberto Sosa writes, “Blessed are the lovers, for theirs is the grain of sand that sustains the center of the seas.” The widening circle of engagement with and responsiveness to others does not stop with our immediate loved ones or even with the future families they create. It continues to spread out, to help create more caring communities and, ultimately, a more caring world.

Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You

Weather patterns in the Pacific were not human-driven, but the futures market in Chicago was. The world had shifted so rapidly from subsistence agriculture to a market economy that price fluctuations sent ripples throughout the system, destabilizing entire regions. Traders could now set off starvation halfway across the world with the touch of a telegraph key, sucking up grain supplies in India or the Dakotas and sending them to Europe, where prices were high. It was the dawn of “price famines.”174

I stopped at a gas station/slot machine arcade/liquor store/fireworks emporium on an Indian reservation. A few hundred years ago, the fitness of Native Americans for the world they inhabited excited admiration in some European observers: here were natural aristocrats, disdainful of labor, dedicated to war. Unlike European peasants stooped to the grind of agriculture, anxiously accumulating grain against future want, the Indian appeared free because confident of his ability to bear hardship; leisured because tough.

Oh Devi, give me the food for jnana (knowledge) and vairagya. This means not to project my past into the future and destroy my life by quickly aging. Devi then gives the grain of the great truth, the knowledge of not projecting your past into the future. When the grains are offered into that skull, the skull was enjoying so much. So she purposely drops a little bit of grain outside the skull on the ground. The skull felt the taste of the food so much that it just jumped out to eat that food and Shiva was free of the skull. He was liberated.

Awakening is a bound, not weighted down with the past that inculpates the present and demands compensation from the future, a bound out of the drunkenness of remorse and resentment. Awakening is a commencement. It is a point of departure. We come alive; we become alive to the dragonfly, to the twisted grain of the porch railing. Awakening is a birth. Awakening is joyous. The innocence of awakening, the active disconnection from the past, make possible this joy. How good to be alive! How refreshing is this silence! How calm the morning is! How pungent it smells! In every joy there is an awakening.

[Aristotle] shows how currency serves as a measure...[I]f men always needed immediately the goods they have among themselves, they would have no need of any exchange except of thing for thing, e.g., wine for grain. But sometimes one man (who has a surplus of wine at present) does not need the grain that another man has (who is in need of wine), but perhaps later he will need the grain or some other product. In this way then for the necessity of future exchange, money or currency is, as it were, a surety that if a man has no present need but may want in the future, the thing he needs will be available when he presents the currency.

deeply into pile carpeting that threatens to swallow us whole. A burnished steel FTW logo stretches across the wall with the tagline Feeding the World just below it. Black-and-white photos of basic foodstuffs dot the walls—bushels of maize and soybeans, fields of grain. Feeding the world, my ass, I think as we’re shuttled toward a meeting room. I’ve done some reading up on these folks. FTW is a commodity-trading firm that works to manipulate the futures market to drive up prices. There seems to be nothing that the world’s bankers believe they shouldn’t be free to exploit, including food staples. I imagine that in their perfect world, bankers would pocket a penny or two with every bite.

There,” said the elf. “The ancient snake Ouroboros. Ouroboros symbolises eternity and is itself eternal. It is the eternal going away and the eternal return. It is something that has no beginning and no end. “Time is like the ancient Ouroboros. Time is fleeting moments, grains of sand passing through an hourglass. Time is the moments and events we so readily try to measure. But the ancient Ouroboros reminds us that in every moment, in every instant, in every event, is hidden the past, the present and the future. Eternity is hidden in every moment. Every departure is at once a return, every farewell is a greeting, every return is a parting. Everything is simultaneously a beginning and an end.

There,’ said the elf. ‘The ancient snake Ouroboros. Ouroboros symbolises eternity and is itself eternal. It is the eternal going away and the eternal return. It is something that has no beginning and no end. ‘Time is like the ancient Ouroboros. Time is fleeting moments, grains of sand passing through an hourglass. Time is the moments and events we so readily try to measure. But the ancient Ouroboros reminds us that in every moment, in every instant, in every event, is hidden the past, the present and the future. Eternity is hidden in every moment. Every departure is at once a return, every farewell is a greeting, every return is a parting. Everything is simultaneously a beginning and an end.

Silent remembering is a form of prayer. No fragrance is more enchanting to re-experience than the aromatic bouquet gleaned from inhaling the cherished memories of our pastimes. We regularly spot elderly citizens sitting alone gently rocking themselves while facing the glowing sun. Although these sun worshipers might appear lonely in their state of serene solitude, they are not alone at all, because they deeply enmesh themselves in recalling the glimmering memories of days gone by. Marcel Proust wrote “In Search of Time Lost,” “As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savors the past.” Test tasting the honeycombed memories of their bygone years, a delicate smile play out on their rose thin lips. The mellow tang of sweet tea memories – childhood adventures, coming of age rituals, wedding rites, recreational jaunts, wilderness explorations, viewing and creating art, literature, music, and poetry, sharing in the mystical experiences of life, and time spent with family – is the brew of irresistible intoxicants that we all long to sip as we grow old. The nectar mashed from a collection of choice memories produces a tray of digestible vignettes that each of us lovingly roll our silky tongues over. On the eve of lying down for the last time in the stillness of our cradled deathbeds, we will swaddle ourselves with a blanket of heartfelt love and whisper a crowning chaplet of affection for all of humanity. After all, we been heaven blessed to take with us to our final resting place an endless scroll amassing the kiss soft memories of time yore.

Most observers had overlooked the radical change in the relationship between the USSR and the world that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, the Soviet economy, formally still closed, had in fact become deeply integrated into the system of international trade and dependent on world markets (see table 4-19). This change, as a rule, was noticed only by researchers concerned with grain and oil markets. The majority of analysts studying the socialist system considered its foundation to be solid.99 Some publications spoke of risk factors that could undermine the stability of the Soviet regime. But they were exceptions, and their influence on the future image of the USSR was limited.100 In 1985 almost no one imagined that six years later there would be no Soviet Union, no ruling Communist Party, no Soviet economic system.

Events specially staged to demonstrate the reality of that which doesn’t exist stand out in the particular detail in which they are described. No one really knows, for example, whether the harvests reported in Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s Russia were ever actually reaped, but the fact that the number of tilled hectares or tons of milled grain was always reported down to the tenth of a percent gave these simulacra the character of hyperreality. [...] In this sense, the ideology was accurate—it was describing itself. And any reality that differed from the ideology simply ceased to exist—it was replaced by hyperreality, which trumpeted its existence by newspaper and loudspeaker and was much more tangible and reliable than anything else. In the Soviet land, “fairy tale became fact,” as in that American paragon of hyperreality, Disneyland, where reality itself is designed as a “land of imagination.

It can indeed be upsetting to think of ourselves as glorified gears and springs. Machines are insensate, built to be used, and disposable; humans are sentient, possessing of dignity and rights, and infinitely precious. A machine has some workaday purpose, such as grinding grain or sharpening pencils; a human being has higher purposes, such as love, worship, good works, and the creation of knowledge and beauty. The behavior of machines is determined by the ineluctable laws of physics and chemistry; the behavior of people is freely chosen. With choice comes freedom, and therefore optimism about our possibilities for the future. With choice also comes responsibility, which allows us to hold people accountable for their actions. And of course if the mind is separate from the body, it can continue to exist when the body breaks down, and our thoughts and pleasures will not someday be snuffed out forever.

Of the laws we can deduce from the external world, one stands above all: the Law of Transience. Nothing is intended to last. The trees fall year by year, the mountains tumble, the galaxies burn out like tall tallow candles. Nothing is intended to last — except time. The blanket of the universe wears thin, but time endures. Time is a tower, an endless mine; time is monstrous. Time is the hero. Human and inhuman characters are pinned to time like butterflies to a card; yes, though the wings stay bright, flight is forgotten. Time, like an element which can be solid, liquid or gas, has three states. In the present, it is a flux we cannot seize. In the future, it is a veiling mist. In the past, it has solidified and become glazed; then we call it history. Then it can show us nothing but our own solemn faces; it is a treacherous mirror, reflecting only our limited truths. So much is it a part of man that objectivity is impossible; so neutral is it that it appears hostile.

There were, to be sure, some grounds for the ranchers’ bitterness toward sheep. It was known that sheep cold be destructive to grass. Their small, sharp hoofs knifed deep into the sod, turning it up and cutting it so thoroughly that years were necessary for a new growth of grass to appear. In grazing also it could be held that they were harmful to the ranges because of their method of cropping down close to the roots and at times even below them. A sheep band allowed to graze too long on one range could utterly destroy it, reduce it to barren uselessness as quickly and completely as could a cloud of locusts swarm down and destroy a tract of grain. Bed grounds also were harmful to the pastures. Herders brought their sheep together at night to protect them from the ravages of roving wolves, coyotes, and bears, and should the band be permitted to occupy the same bed grounds for too long a period, the growth was soon worn off, exposing the bare earth, hopeless for future grass.

Ominously, food production is beginning to flatten out, both in world grain production and in food harvested from the oceans. The UK government’s chief scientist warned of a perfect storm of exploding population and falling food and energy supplies by 2030. The world will have to produce 70 percent more food by 2050 to feed an extra 2.3 billion people, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has said, or else face disaster. These projections may underestimate the true scope of the problem. With hundreds of millions of people from China and India entering the middle class, they will want to enjoy the same luxuries that they have seen in Hollywood movies—such as two cars, spacious suburban homes, hamburgers and French fries, etc.—and may strain the world’s resources. In fact, Lester Brown, one of the world’s leading environmentalists and founder of the World Watch Institute in Washington, D.C., confided to me that the world may not be able to handle the strain of providing a middle-class lifestyle to so many hundreds of millions of people.

I feel even more incapable of returning to Russia the same as when I left it. It's just one more of those legends in Russia, confirmed by Passek, Sleptsov and others, that one only has to come to the Caucasus to be showered with decorations. Everyone expects it of us, demands it of us. But I've been here two years, taken part in two expeditions and received nothing. For all that, I've so much pride that I won't leave this place until I'm a major, with an Anna or a Vladimir round my neck. I've reached the point where it really rankles when some Gnilokishkin is decorated and I'm not. What's more, how could I look my elder in the face again, or merchant Kotel'nikov to whom I sell grain, or my aunt in Moscow and all those fine gentlemen in Russia, if I return after two years in the Caucasus with nothing to show for it? No, I don't want to know those gentlemen and I'm sure that they couldn't care less about me. But such is man's nature that though I couldn't give a damn about them they're the reason why I'm ruining the best years of my life, my happiness and whole future.

He went away, bent double with the pains of remorse and regret and the inward biting of a love which had now no means of expression. He remembered now when it was useless how the Abbess had told him that the way was always forward. Nick had needed love, and he ought to have given him what he had to offer, without fears about its imperfection. If he had had more faith he would have done so, not calculating either Nick’s faults or his own. Michael recalled too how, with Toby; he had acted with more daring, and had probably acted wrong. Yet no serious harm had come to Toby; besides he had not loved Toby as he loved Nick, was not responsible for Toby as he had been for Nick. So great a love must have contained some grain of good, something at least which might have attached Nick to this world, given him some glimpse of hope. Wretchedly Michael forced himself to remember the occasions on which Nick had appealed to him since he came to Imber, and how on every occasion Michael had denied him. Michael had concerned himself with keeping his own hands clean, his own future secure, when instead he should have opened his heart: should impetuously and devotedly and beyond all reason have broken the alabaster cruse of very costly ointment.

These nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be found. Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the ground-nut (Apios tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort of fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug and eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had often since seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same. Cultivation has well-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste, much like that of a frost-bitten potato, and I found it better boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise of Nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some future period. In these days of fatted cattle and waving grain-fields this humble root, which was once the totem of an Indian tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine; but let wild Nature reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious English grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and without the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed of corn to the great cornfield of the Indian› s God in the southwest, whence he is said to have brought it; but the now almost exterminated ground-nut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe.

« Je connais son odeur. Ce petit grain de beauté dans son cou quand elle relève ses cheveux. Elle a la lèvre supérieure un peu plus charnue que l’inférieure. La courbe de son poignet, quand elle tient un stylo. C’est mal, c’est vraiment mal, mais je connais les contours de sa silhouette. J’y pense en me couchant, et puis je me lève, je vais bosser, et elle est là, et c’est insupportable. Je lui dis des trucs avec lesquels je sais qu’elle sera d’accord, juste pour l’entendre me répondre : « Hm-hm. » C’est sensuel comme la sensation de l’eau chaude sur mon dos, putain. Elle est mariée. Elle est brillante. Elle me fait confiance, et la seule chose que j’ai en tête c’est de l’amener dans mon bureau, la déshabiller, lui faire des choses inavouables. Et j’ai envie de le lui dire. J’ai envie de lui dire qu’elle est  lumineuse, elle brille d’un tel éclat dans mon esprit que ça m’empêche parfois de me concentrer. Parfois j’oublie pourquoi je suis entré dans la pièce. Je suis distrait. J’ai envie de la pousser contre un mur, et j’ai envie qu’elle se blottisse contre moi. J’ai envie de remonter le temps pour aller mettre un coup de poing à son stupide mari le jour où je l’ai rencontré, et ensuite repartir dans le futur pour lui en coller un autre. J’ai envie de lui acheter des fleurs, de la nourriture, des livres. J’ai envie de lui tenir la main, et de l’enfermer dans ma chambre. Elle est tout ce que j’ai toujours voulu, et je veux me l’injecter dans les veines, et à la fois ne plus jamais la revoir. Elle est unique, et ces sentiments, ils sont intolérables, putain. Ils étaient à moitié en sommeil tant qu’elle était absente, mais, maintenant elle est là, et je ne contrôle plus mon corps, comme un putain d’ado, et je ne sais pas quoi faire. Je ne sais pas quoi faire. Je ne peux rien faire, alors je vais juste… ne rien faire.  »

Sung was a land which was famous far and wide, simply because it was so often and so richly insulted. However, there was one visitor, more excitable than most, who developed a positive passion for criticizing the place. Unfortunately, the pursuit of this hobby soon lead him to take leave of the truth. This unkind traveler once claimed that the king of Sung, the notable Skan Askander, was a derelict glutton with a monster for a son and a slug for a daughter. This was unkind to the daughter. While she was no great beauty, she was definitely not a slug. After all, slugs do not have arms and legs - and besides, slugs do not grow to that size. There was a grain of truth in the traveler's statement, in as much as the son was a regrettable young man. However, soon afterwards, the son was accidentally drowned when he made the mistake of falling into a swamp with his hands and feet tied together and a knife sticking out of his back. This tragedy did not encourage the traveler to extend his sympathies to the family. Instead, he invented fresh accusations. This wayfarer, an ignorant tourist if ever there was one, claimed that the king had leprosy. This was false. The king merely had a well-developed case of boils. The man with the evil mouth was guilty of a further malignant slander when he stated that King Skan Askander was a cannibal. This was untrue. While it must be admitted that the king once ate one of his wives, he did not do it intentionally; the whole disgraceful episode was the fault of the chef, who was a drunkard, and who was subsequently severely reprimanded. .The question of the governance, and indeed, the very existence of the 'kingdom of Sung' is one that is worth pursuing in detail, before dealing with the traveler's other allegations. It is true that there was a king, his being Skan Askander, and that some of his ancestors had been absolute rulers of considerable power. It is also true that the king's chief swineherd, who doubled as royal cartographer, drew bold, confident maps proclaiming that borders of the realm. Furthermore, the king could pass laws, sign death warrants, issue currency, declare war or amuse himself by inventing new taxes. And what he could do, he did. "We are a king who knows how to be king," said the king. And certainly, anyone wishing to dispute his right to use of the imperial 'we' would have had to contend with the fact that there was enough of him, in girth, bulk, and substance, to provide the makings of four or five ordinary people, flesh, bones and all. He was an imposing figure, "very imposing", one of his brides is alleged to have said, shortly before the accident in which she suffocated. "We live in a palace," said the king. "Not in a tent like Khmar, the chief milkmaid of Tameran, or in a draughty pile of stones like Comedo of Estar." . . .From Prince Comedo came the following tart rejoinder: "Unlike yours, my floors are not made of milk-white marble. However, unlike yours, my floors are not knee-deep in pigsh*t." . . .Receiving that Note, Skan Askander placed it by his commode, where it would be handy for future royal use. Much later, and to his great surprise, he received a communication from the Lord Emperor Khmar, the undisputed master of most of the continent of Tameran. The fact that Sung had come to the attention of Khmar was, to say the least, ominous. Khmar had this to say: "Your words have been reported. In due course, they will be remembered against you." The king of Sung, terrified, endured the sudden onset of an attack of diarrhea that had nothing to do with the figs he had been eating. His latest bride, seeing his acute distress, made the most of her opportunity, and vigorously counselled him to commit suicide. Knowing Khmar's reputation, he was tempted - but finally, to her great disappointment, declined. Nevertheless, he lived in fear; he had no way of knowing that he was simply the victim of one of Khmar's little jokes.

OUR PAST BRINGS US TO OUR FUTURE “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.” —Joel 2:25 I believe in a very deep way that our past is what brings us to our future. I understand the temptation to draw an angry X through a whole season or a whole town or a whole relationship, to crumple it up and throw it away, to get it as far away as possible from a new life, a new future. In my worst moments, I want to slam the door on the hard parts of our life in Grand Rapids. Deadbolt it, forget it, move forward, happier without it. But I don’t want to lose six years of my own history behind a slammed door. These days I’m walking over and retrieving those years from the trash, erasing the X, unlocking the door. It’s the only way that darkness turns to light. I’m mining through, searching for light, and the more I look, the more I find all sorts of things Grand Rapids gave me. I see moments of heartbreak that led to honesty about myself I wouldn’t have been able to get to any other way. I am thankful for what I learned, what I became, what God gave me and what God took away during that season. WHAT HAVE the hard, dark seasons of your life yielded in light and insight and growth and gifts? Have you sifted through those times, looking for those gifts? Ask God to bring light out of that darkness. May 11 WHY WE WRITE Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth. —Psalm 100:1 A writer friend came over yesterday. She’s written a novel. She brought over a fat, beautiful binder full of story, and I can’t wait to read it. We talked about publication and agents and sharing your work, about marketing and the internet and a million other things. And we talked about why we write. You know those conversations when you think you’re helping someone, sharing from your vast well of knowledge, only to realize that this person is actually instructing you, reminding you of something fundamental that you’ve forgotten? My friend sat across the table from me, and it seemed like she could have combusted into flames, burning with sheer, clean passion about this story. After she left, I realized that some days I forget why we write, and she reminded me. I write because other writers’ words changed my life a million and one ways, and I want to be a part of that. I began writing because there were things I wanted to say with so much urgency and soul I would have climbed a tower and shouted them, would have written them in skywriting, would have spelled them out in grains of rice if I had to.

But sleep tha pondereth and is not to be and there oh may my weary spirit dwell apart forms heaven's eternity and yet how far from hell. other friends have flown before on the morrow he will leave me as my hopes have flown before the bird said nevermore. leave my loneliness unbroken. how dark a woe yet how sublimes a hope. And the fever called living is conquered at last. I stand amid the roar of a surf tormented shore and i hold within my hand grains of the golden sand how few yet how they creep through my fingers to the deep while i weep while i weep o god can i not grasp them with a tighter clasp o god can i not save one from the pitiless wave is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream. Hell rising form a thousand thrones shall do it reverence. It was the dead who groaned within lest the dead who is forsaken may not be happy now. even for thy woes i love thee even for thy woes thy beauty and thy woes think of all that is airy and fairy like and all that is hideous and unwieldy. hast thou not dragged Diana from her car. I care not though it perishes with a thought i then did cherish. For on its wing was dark alley and as it fluttered fell an essence powerful to destroy a soul that knew it well. (Talking about death) the intense reply of hers to our intelligence. Then all motion of whatever nature creates most writers poets in especial prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy an ecstatic intuition and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought at the true purposes seized only at the last moment at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable at the cautions selection and rejections at the painful erasures and interpolations in a word at the wheels and pinions the tackle for scene shifting the steep ladders and demon traps the cock[s feathers a the red pain and the black patches which in ninety nine cases out of the hundred constitute the properties of the literary _histiro. Wit the Arabians there is a medium between heaven and hell where men suffer no punishment but yet do not attain that tranquil and even happiness which they supposed to be characteristic of heavenly enjoyment. If i could dwell where israfel hath dwelt and he where i he might not sing so wildly well mortal melody, while a bolder note than this might swell form my lyre within the sky. And i am drunk with love of the dead who is my bride. And so being young and dipt in folly , I feel in love with melancholy. I could not love except where death was mingling his with beauty's breath or hymen, Time, and destiny were stalking between her and me. Yet that terror was not friegt but a tremulous delight a feeling not the jeweled mine could teach or bribe me to define nor love although the love were thine. Whose solitary soul could make an Eden of that dim lake. that my young life were a lasting dream my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the morrow. An idle longing night and day to dream my very life away. As others saw i could not bring my passions from a comman spring from the sam source i have not taken my sorrow and all i loved i loved alone La solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude estune belle chose impulse upon the ether the source of all motion is thought and the source of all thought. Be of heart and fear nothing your allotted days of stupor have expired and tomorrow i will myself induct you into the full joys and wonders of your novel existence. unknown now known of the speculative future merged in the august and certain present.

We are massively going against the grain of our culture by daring to give birth to ourselves anew as a way to recover from our childlessness. It is an act of colossal courage and given little regard, respect or credence by most others. There is very little support, hardly any recognition and no award ceremonies for remaking our lives around a new core of meaning.

Its like seed grain, at the end of a long winter if you have some of the grain left, you can use ir for seed, you have control over your life, you can use that grain and make plan for the future, but if you have no grain for seed in the spring you are helpless, no amount of hard work or good intentions will make crops grow if you don't have the seed to start with".

Take the guesswork and measuring out of cooking whole grains such as barley, rice, farro, and quinoa by boiling them as you would pasta, until they are completely tender. Drain and serve as a side dish, or spread them out to let them cool, then drizzle with olive oil and add them to soups, grain salads, or store them in the freezer for up to two months for future use.

I am rather amused that crab grass is millet, and I pass the fact along because it may come in handy in some doomsday future when those who have survived the nuclear war some of our politicians think is ‘winnable’ will be scratching around looking for a crop of edible grain whose ‘survivability’ is only too well known.

The last Melnibonean thinks of his people's history and legends, and he tells his human friends some of what he knows and one day a human scribe will write these remembered words which will become in turn the foundation for whole cycles of myths, whole volumes of legend and superstition, so that a grain of a grain of prehuman memory is carried over to us, blood to blood, life to life, And the cycles turn and spin and intersect at unpredictable points in an eternity of possibilities, paradoxes and conjunctions, and one tale feeds another and one anecdote provides others with entire epics. Thus we influence past, present and future and all their possibilities. Thus are we all responsible for one another, through all the myriad dimensions of time and space that make up the multiverse...

epigenetic marks are the remote control not only to your health and longevity but also to how you pass your genes on to future generations. Our

The past should never serve as an encumbrance, but we must exploit our experiences as learning assets. The only importance of any experience is to test oneself. Worthy challenges, fused with humility of spirit, enrich a person’s character. One must harvest the grain from their effort and discard the shaft. Before moving onward, it is critical for me to look back and remove any negative predilections that accumulated from days gone by that might mar, stunt, or otherwise arrest future personal development.

When we pray the Lord's Prayer, observed Luther, we ask God to give us this day our daily bread. And He does give us our daily bread. He does it by means of the farmer who planted and harvested the grain, the baker who made the flour into bread, the person who prepared our meal. We might today add the truck drivers who hauled the produce, the factory workers in the food processing plant, the warehouse men, the wholesale distributors, the stock boys, the lady at the checkout counter. Also playing their part are the bankers, futures investors, advertisers, lawyers, agricultural scientists, mechanical engineers, and every other player in the nation's economic system. All of these were instrumental in enabling you to eat your morning bagel.

He discovered the idea whilst looking at an egg timer on his desk one day. He noticed that even though the sand would pass from the top to the bottom of the hour glass over several minutes, it would still only pass one grain at a time. Our lives are no different in this respect. Our problems all line up in single file, and we deal with them one-by-one as they come at us. It can’t happen any other way. But we fret like we need to solve every potential issue, or cram all future activity into the hear and now.

Wedding Vow To you my dear husband: Today I come before all our family and friends to make the rest of my lifetime vow to you. I do not know what lies ahead of our lifetime together in our marriage. Our future together might be filled with happiness, sadness and/or misery. No matters what will happen tomorrow in our marriage down the longline, But one thing for sure I can promise you, I will always keep loving you in my heart all the way until the end of my time. To you my dear darling wife: I have loved you yesterday and I love you today and I will always love you for the rest of my days. Because I love you, I can promise you this. I will provide with all my strengths and abilities, to give you the loving care until the last breath of my mouth.

direction, and you really know how to get things done. The American people are fortunate that you’ve chosen to serve us in your current capacity. Gator speaks incessantly about seeking employment elsewhere, but I think it’s just talk. He loves this line of work, and we have a lot of fun together at DIA. We share a common view of our world. But remember, Gator: You can’t expect to find a spy under every rock or behind every tree. You simply have to believe that a spy is there, somewhere, and that if you look under every rock and behind every tree, you will eventually find him. I expect Gator to remain welded to my hip for another decade or so. Ana Montes will serve her time productively, I am sure. Knowing Ana, she’ll be running the place before too long. I understand that she remains unrepentant about providing information to the Cubans. She still believes that she did the right, just, and moral thing in supporting them, and I suspect that she will hold that view for the rest of her life. That’s fine. At least she’s no longer in a position to cause the rest of us any harm. Ana Montes is now incarcerated near Fort Worth, Texas. Ana’s boyfriend, Bill, has had a rough time of it. He requested and received permission to remain in contact with Ana after her arrest, up until she was convicted. He sensed, understandably, that she needed his support during an emotional time in her life. But he made clear to me, during one of several meetings on the subject, that his support for Ana would end if and when she was convicted of the crime. Bill was as good as his word. Part of him feels sorry for Ana, but he can never understand or condone what she did. He is torn, but Bill is moving forward with his life without her. As for me, I continue to march. There are some among my peers in this business who take exception to my having published a book about my experience on the job. It goes against their grain. Some may even avoid working with me in the future, for fear that their actions and words will end up in a book somewhere or because they feel that I’ve crossed an ethical line by publishing this story. I understand. So be it. I remain firmly focused on my mission. I am not a writer. I am a counterintelligence investigator. And my job is to detect and investigate espionage and suspected espionage within the Defense Intelligence Agency. I’ve performed that job for almost two decades now, and I expect to continue

Between 1800 and 2020, we reduced the labor needed to produce a kilogram of grain by more than 98 percent—and we reduced the share of the country’s population engaged in agriculture by the same large margin.50 This provides a useful guide to the profound economic transformations that would have to take place with any retreat of agricultural mechanization and reduction in the use of synthetic agrochemicals.

Fuck / Our Future When our scorching planet ignites the last evacuating airship to cook its soft cargo of human flesh in an expanding fireball and fragments of its propeller blades thunk inches deep into tree trunks in the straggling forest beneath / What I want to know is which will survive / which strain / which wood grain will hold encoded / like a fingerprint pushed into wet clay / that final day of reckoning when this cerulean blue ordained world we have corroded a toxic grey / begins its self-reclamation starting with that tree / a lone lieutenant / a desperate sentinel / erect / through the falling ball of fire / het fuel and smouldering meat / its face of leaves weighed with dust / its waist of branches noosed in plastic bags / yet standing stubborn in its shaggy majesty / admist the ship’s carnage / like a righteous middle finger thrust at all humanity / proud in the snarling sky

The poem "Fuck / Our Future" (p. 49): When our scorching planet ignites the last evacuating airship to cook its soft cargo of human flesh in an expanding fireball and fragments of its propeller blades thunk inches deep into tree trunks in the straggling forest beneath / What I want to know is which will survive / which strain / which wood grain will hold encoded / like a fingerprint pushed into wet clay / that final day of reckoning when this cerulean blue ordained world we have corroded a toxic grey / begins its self-reclamation starting with that tree / a lone lieutenant / a desperate sentinel / erect / through the falling ball of fire / jet fuel and smouldering meat / its face of leaves weighed with dust / its waist of branches noosed in plastic bags / yet standing stubborn in its shaggy majesty / amidst the ship’s carnage / like a righteous middle finger thrust at all humanity / proud in the snarling sky

In the futures markets, they bought and sold paper contracts. Futures contracts had been around for more than a century and were an integral part of the food system. Corn, pork, and soybean futures were traded on the Chicago Board of Trade. The NYMEX specialized in eggs and butter. The futures market wasn’t big—traders in the market tended to be farmers and big grain millers. They used futures contracts to limit their risk. The owners of the NYMEX weren’t content with their sleepy corner of the financial world, and they decided to expand their business and sell contracts for new kinds of products. The NYMEX introduced the first futures contract for crude oil in 1983. At first, the birth of oil futures contracts looked like a threat to Koch’s business model. Howell and his team spent years figuring out how to be the smartest blind men in the dark cave of the physical oil business and making the best guess as to the real price of oil. Koch Industries had gained an expertise in exploiting the opacity of oil markets and wringing the best price out of its counterparties. The new oil futures contract created something that was anathema to this business model: transparency. When the NYMEX debuted its oil futures contract, it created a very visible price for crude oil that changed by the minute on a public exchange. Again, this wasn’t the price of real crude; it was the price for a futures contract on crude, reflecting the best guess of all market participants as to what a barrel of oil would be worth in the future. Even though the futures price wasn’t the real price, it provided everybody with a common reference point. Now, when Koch called up someone to buy oil from Koch’s tank farm in St. James, that customer could look at a screen and start haggling based on what the markets in New York were saying the price of oil was worth. “It was the first time that there was a common, visible market signal,” Howell said. “It just kind of sucked the oxygen out of the room for that physical trading.

This Land is Our Home [Verse] From the rolling plains to the mountain high, Our fathers bled and fought, they didn't die for a lie. Now the ghost of our past whispers in the wind, Saying "Son, don't let the dream die, fight to the end." [Verse 2] The city folks in their ivory towers, Selling out our lands for their fleeting powers. But out here in the country, we'll make a stand, With calloused hands we'll take back this land. [Chorus] This land is our home, and we're not backing down, We stand for our God and the small-town crowd. Proud to be American, we ain't selling our soul, There'll be hell to pay, we're taking back control. [Verse 3] From the chapel bells to the fields of grain, The spirit of this country runs deep in our veins. Mama's prayers, Daddy's hardened hands, We fight for the future, we take a stand. [Verse 4] In the quiet dawn, we hear the land's lament, Sold to the highest bidder, they don't repent. But we're the heartland, the rock of this earth, We'll reclaim our pride, know what it's worth. [Chorus] This land is our home, and we're not backing down, We stand for our God and the small-town crowd. Proud to be American, we ain't selling our soul, There'll be hell to pay, we're taking back control.

This book makes the case that the future of food lies in the past, including such lost, forgotten, or nearly vanished foods as emmer wheat. The fact that bread, the age-old staff of life, has lately come to stand for all the ills of civilization is a basic mistake and an indication of how much we need to learn – or relearn. Don't blame the grain, in other words, blame what we've done with it.

It is vitally important not to confuse the is of what is in Christ with as if. That we have been raised with Christ presents us with an eschatological indicative: something that states what is already but not yet fully the case. Disciples really do enjoy union with Christ already, thanks to the indwelling Holy Spirit, even though they have not yet attained to the full measure of Christlikeness. Doctrine that sets forth what is in Christ requires a robust eschatological imagining, a faith-based seeing that perceives what is not yet complete—our salvation—as already finished, because of our union with Christ. It is a matter of seeing what is present-partial as future-perfect. Theologians minister this eschatological reality, the truth of being-in-Christ. Everything depends on getting this point right. We can attain wisdom only if we live along the created and re-created grain of reality. Theologians set forth in speech what is in Christ and therefore say how things are. The eschatological is raises the question of the nature of reality. Indicative statements in the past and present refer to what was and is. That works well for most kinds of ordinary things and events (I’m not sure about quantum physics). However, the gospel concerns not ousia (being in general) but parousia (the new reality that is coming into being in the person of Christ). The ministry of the reality of what is in Christ requires the further ministry of helping people grasp that reality. It is to that aspect of ministering the gospel that we now turn.

I’m looking at flour like you would a carton of milk or a bag of peaches. Because it’s a fresh product. It’s alive.” “Versus everyone else?” I asked. “Everyone else pursues shelf life. Most flour preservation is done by toasting it slightly—it’s called kilning—and what you’re doing is drying out the grain further so there’s absolutely no moisture. That’s what we eat. Wheat picked long past ripeness, then broken apart, and then mummified. Mills are abattoirs for wheat.

The domestication of grain was accompanied by an equally radical innovation in the preparation of food: the invention of bread. In an endless variety of forms, from the unleavened wheat or barley of the Near East to the corn tortillas of the Mexicans and the yeast-risen bread of later cultures, bread has been up to now the center of every diet. No other form of food is so acceptable, so transportable, or so universal. "Give us this day our daily bread" became a universal prayer, and so venerated was this food, as the very flesh of God, that to cut it with a knife is still, in some cultures, a sacrilege. Daily bread brought a security in the food supply that had never before been possible. Despite seasonal fluctuations in yield due to floods or droughts, the cultivation of grains made man assured of his daily nourishment, provided he worked steadily and consecutively, as he had never been certain of the supply of game or his luck in killing it. With bread and oil, bread and butter, or bread and bacon, neolithic cultures had the backbone of a balanced diet, rich in energy, needing only fresh garden produce to be entirely adequate. With this security, it was possible to look ahead and plan ahead with confidence. Except in the tropical areas, where soil regeneration was not mastered, groups could now remain rooted in one spot, surrounded by fields under permanent cultivation, slowly making improvements in the landscape, digging ditches and irrigation canals, making terraces, planting trees, which later generations would be grateful for. Capital accumulation begins at this point: the end of hand-to-mouth living. With the domestication of grains, the future became predictable as never before; and the cultivator not merely sought to retain the ancestral past, but to expand all his present possibilities: once the daily bread was assured, those wider migrations and transplantations of men, which made the country town and the city possible, speedily followed.

God continually shows us in nature that there will be a resurrection Let us consider, beloved, how the Lord continually proves to us that there shall be a future resurrection, of which He has rendered the Lord Jesus Christ the first-fruits by raising Him from the dead. Let us contemplate, beloved, the resurrection which is at all times taking place. Day and night declare to us a resurrection. The night sinks to sleep, and the day arises; the day [again] departs, and the night comes on. Let us behold the fruits [of the earth], how the sowing of grain takes place. The sower goes forth, and casts it into the ground; and the seed being thus scattered, though dry and naked when it fell upon the earth, is gradually dissolved. Then out of its dissolution the mighty power of the providence of the Lord raises it up again, and from one seed many arise and bring forth fruit.

And yet erewhile, when thou wert in the ear, Even as a (golden) glittering grain, even then The fireflies came to cast on thee their light ^ And aid thy growth, because without their help Thou couldsl not grow nor beautiful become; Therefore thou dost belong unto the race Of witches or of fairies, and because The fireflies do belong unto the sun. . , , Queen of the Fireflies ! hurry apace,-Come to me now as if running a race, Bridle the horse as you hear me now sing! Bridle, O bridle the son of the king ! Come in a hurry and bring him to me! The son of the king will ere long set thee free; ' Theie is an evident association here of [he body of the firefly which much resembles a grain of wheat) wilh the latter. ' The six lines followiDg are oilen heard as 3. nursery rhyme. And because thou for ever art brilliant and fair, Under a glass I will keep thee; while there, With a lens I will study thy secrets concealed, Till all their bright mysteries are fully revealed. Yea, all the wondrous lore perplexed Of this life of our cross and of the next. Thus to all mysteries I shall attain, Yea, even to that at last of the grain; And when this at last I shall truly know. Firefly, freely I'll let thee go! When Earth's dark secrets are known to me. My blessing at last I will give to thee! Here follows the Conjuration of the Salt. Conjuration of the Salt. I do conjure thee, salt, lo! here at noon, Exactly in the middle of a stream I take my place and see the water round, Likewise the sun, and think of nothing else White here besides the water and the sun: For all my soul is turned in truth to them; I do indeed desire no other thought, I yearn to learn the very truth of truths. For I have suffered long with the desire To know my future or my coming fate. If good or evil will prevail in it. Water and sun, be gracious unto me ! Here follows the Conjuration of Cain. AMDU Scongiurasione di Caino. Tuo Caino, tu non possa aver Ne pace e ne bene fino che Dal sole' andaCe non sarai coi piedi Correndo, le mani battendo, E pregarlo per me che mi faccia sapere, II mio destino, se cattiva fosse, Allora me lo faccia cambiare, Se questa grazia mi farete, L' acqua al lo splendor del sol la guardero: E tu Caino colla tua bocca mi diiai II mio destino quale sark: Se questa grazia o Caino non mi farai, Pace e bene non avrai! The

Some species-like spruce-rely on timing. Male and female blossoms open a few days apart so that, most of the time, the latter will be dusted with the foreign pollen of other spruce. This is not an option for trees like bird cherries, which rely on insects. Bird cherries produce male and female sex organs int he same blossom, and they are one of the few species of true forest trees that allow themselves to be pollinated by bees. As the bees make their way through the whole crown, they cannot help but spread the tree's own pollen. But the bird cherry is alert and senses when the danger of inbreeding looms. When a pollen grain lands on a stigma, its genes are activated and it grows a delicate tube down to the ovary in search of an egg. As it is doing this, the tree tests the genetic makeup of the pollen and, if it matches its own, blocks the tube, which then dries up. Only foreign genes, that is to say, genes that promise future success, are allowed entry to form seeds and fruit. How does the bird cherry distinguish between "mine" and "yours"? We don't know exactly. What we do know is that the genes must be activated, and they must pass the tree's test. You could say, the tree can "feel" them. You might say that we, too, experience the physical act of love as more than just the secretions of neurotransmitters that activate our bodies' secrets, though what mating feels like for trees is something that will remain in the realm of speculation for a long time to come.

The Big Five extinctions are simply slightly more intense than the sixth- or seventh-largest declines, and you could just as easily discuss the Big Seven or Big Ten, depending on how you sliced up the data. This tally refers only to extinctions since the “Cambrian explosion,” the sudden proliferation of complex animal life 542 million years ago, and it neglects extinction events that happened earlier, during several billion years of evolution dominated by simpler organisms. So, though the changes occurring right now are often referred to as the beginning of a possible “sixth extinction,” take this with a grain of salt. It’s good to focus attention on the dramatic loss of species currently under way and how this fits into the history of extinction events on Earth, but this also reinforces an incomplete picture of Earth’s dynamic history. Post-Alvarez,

Historian Donald Worster argues that by the time the war effort ended, the Midwest’s grain economy had become inseparable from the industrial economy. “The War integrated the plains farmers more thoroughly than ever before into the national economy—into its networks of banks, railroads, mills, implement manufacturers, energy companies—and, moreover, integrated them into an international market system.” The grasslands were remade. There was no turning back.

Yuguo fell apart, into a thousand little pieces. He felt it happen, fragments of his mind detaching from the rest, splitting off, becoming their own, being mapped by Nexus. Here was Yuguo’s knowledge of coding, his comprehension of data structures, of objects and methods, of intents and game players, of threads and loops and conditions. Here was football Yuguo, the precise way his left foot grounded into the grass and his hips swiveled and his arm balanced as his right foot shot forward to kick the checked ball at the goal. Here was Yuguo’s shy lust for girls, the patterns his eyes drew over their curves when he saw them, the anxiety that struck him dumb when they were near. Here was Yuguo’s despair that had led him to this room, his quiet dread that his country and the world were getting worse instead of better, that the future was one of slow strangulation at the electronic hands of smiling tame AIs with famous faces, their forked tongues lapping out of the viewscreens to feed saccharine to the masses, the old men who’d always ruled China laughing and holding their leashes. Here were the words a young woman had said to him just minutes ago. “Critical mass. Weak apart, strong together.” Here were her eyes, fiery eyes, hanging in space. Here was her name: Lifen. Then those pieces fell apart, into smaller pieces, which fell apart into fragments even smaller: Yuguo’s sensation of red. Yuguo’s concept of 1 and 0. Yuguo’s left thumb. The sound in Yuguo’s head when he heard the third note of his favorite pop song. Yuguo’s yes. Yuguo’s no. Yuguo’s and. Yuguo’s or. Yuguo’s xor. Yuguo’s now. Yuguo’s future. Yuguo’s past. He could see himself now. He was a golden statue of Yuguo, immobile, one foot in front of the other, standing in a space of white light. But the statue wasn’t solid, it was made of grains, millions of grains, flecks of gold dust, millions of parts of him. And as he watched they were separating, pulling gradually apart, so that he was no longer a single entity but a cloud, a fog, a fog of Yuguo, and if a strong wind came, he would just blow away, and if the pieces split any more he knew there wouldn’t be any such thing as Yuguo left at all. Yuguo’s fear. Yuguo’s end. And then the pieces rushed together, and he was inside that statue, he was that statue, and he was all of it, 1 and 0, yes and no, future and past, sound and sight, football and coding. He was all of it. He was whole. He was a mind. I’m Yuguo, he realized. I’m him. I’m me. I’m Yuguo! His eyes snapped open. He was in his body. His body made of molten gold. No, not gold, flesh and blood.

The future belongs to nations who have grains not guns.

I write these words in May of 2011, the week after a huge outbreak of tornadoes killed hundreds across the American South; it was the second recent wave of twisters of unprecedented size and intensity. In Texas, a drought worse than the Dust Bowl has set huge parts of the state ablaze. Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers is moving explosives into place to blow up a levee along the Mississippi River, swollen by the the third “100-year-flood” in the last twenty years—though as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration noted at the end of 2010, “the term ‘100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year.” That’s because 2010 was the warmest year recorded, a year when 19 nations set new all-time high temperature records. The Arctic melted apace; Russia suffered a heat wave so epic that the Kremlin stopped all grain exports to the rest of the world; and nations from Australia to Pakistan suffered flooding so astonishing that by year’s end the world’s biggest insurance company, Munich Re, issued this statement: “The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change. The view that weather extremes are more frequent and intense due to global warming coincides with the current state of scientific knowledge.” And that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that on April 6, the U.S. House of Representatives was presented with the following resolution: “Congress accepts the scientific findings of the Environmental Protection Agency that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” The final vote on the resolution? 184 in favor, 240 against. When some future Gibbon limns the decline and fall of our particular civilization, this may be one of the moments he cites.

The food pyramid that told us to eat low fat and enormous amounts of grains was probably more a product of lobbying by Big Food than real science; its chief impact has been to aggravate our obesity epidemic.

Yet a small number continued to believe that the Amur held future promise—no longer as a land of furs and gold and grain, but as a waterborne supply route conveying provisions from the relatively fertile lands of western Siberia to the Russian fur colonies, or as an outlet for trade more broadly on the vast Pacific Ocean.

The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking. Most people think only in terms of what they’ve been taught; schooling itself aims to impart conventional wisdom. So you might ask: are there any fields that matter but haven’t been standardized and institutionalized? Physics, for example, is a real major at all major universities, and it’s set in its ways. The opposite of physics might be astrology, but astrology doesn’t matter. What about something like nutrition? Nutrition matters for everybody, but you can’t major in it at Harvard. Most top scientists go into other fields. Most of the big studies were done 30 or 40 years ago, and most are seriously flawed. The food pyramid that told us to eat low fat and enormous amounts of grains was probably more a product of lobbying by Big Food than real science; its chief impact has been to aggravate our obesity epidemic. There’s plenty more to learn: we know more about the physics of faraway stars than we know about human nutrition. It won’t be easy, but it’s not obviously impossible: exactly the kind of field that could yield secrets.

There is a vast difference between having some coin and no coin. There is a feeling of helplessness that comes from having an empty purse. It's like seed grain. At the end of a long winter if you have some grain left you can use it for seed. You have control over your life. You can use that grain and make plans for the future. But if you have no grain for seed in the spring, you are helpless. No amount of hard work or good intention will make crops grow if you don't have the seed to start with.

sometimes first he would shout at her, in English it seemed but we couldn’t understand it, and besides we were too scared to listen, we ran from the room at those times. It was so shocking at first; then it became something that could happen, something we were watchful for, so that when he was friendly, or contrite and remorseful, we would take it with a grain of salt, not knowing if he might turn on us in a second. Volatile people, you can’t trust them, that’s the thing; and they know it. So that even if they feel remorse, it does no good, and they know that too. So they get lonely. And they feel the remorse less and less, maybe. They give up. In any case, he left. One day Mother woke us, she was crying as she told us that he wouldn’t be coming back, that we would have to move again. We all sat on the stairs and cried.

Who, in examining a grain of wheat, could infer intrinsically from it what it will be? And they say now (whoever 'they' are) that even a grain of sand contains the coding from which the whole universe, if it blew up, could be reconstructed, and maybe better." (Which is the plot of my next book after the SCANNER one I described to you on the phone: a girl, crossing a national frontier, is detained by suspicious police; she is "pregnant," but what she contains in her womb is not organic but is in fact the "electronic, technological" seed of the entire future world, which, without her knowing it, is to be blown apart; she is a simple girl, my Kathy again, who genuinely imagines herself to be pregnant, and being Catholic, must bear the "child." And that "child"—can you imagine it? Not the universe, with stars and planets, but the new and better society, of Freedom which the enslavers have tried, and thought to have successfully wiped out, to obliterate. And there it is, in microsize, in her womb, as she placidly waits to be allowed to leave the "U.S.," it could be any "Rome," to enter a small nation. On, as she thinks of it, a Party-time trip.

Our metaphorical awareness of time is complicated by the fact that our lives seem to extend backward against its grain. We naturally associate the past- the old - with our youth, and the young future with our old age. Thus we have trouble integrating psychological identity with the encompassing process of nature and history.

Author Paul Graham puts it like this: The Web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it. That’s why their success seems so effortless. They’re sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels. Google doesn’t try to force things to happen their way. They try to figure out what’s going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does.

They reminded me that it matters what stories we use to make sense of the world. The story you hear about grain determines whether you end up with bread or beer. The story you hear about milk determines whether you end up with yogurt or cheese. The story you hear about apples determines whether you end up with sauce or cider.

In the long term,” wrote the English economist John Maynard Keynes, “we are all dead.” The Scottish Enlightenment learned a different lesson from the changes brought by union with England. Its greatest thinkers, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, understood that change constantly involves trade-offs, and that short-term costs are often compensated by long-term benefits. “Over time,” “on balance,” “on the whole”—these are favorite sentiments, if not expressions, of the eighteenth-century enlightened Scot. More than any other, they capture the complex nature of modern society. And the proof came with the Act of Union. Here was a treaty, a legislative act inspired not by some great political vision or careful calculation of the needs of the future, or even by patriotism. Most if not all of those who signed it were thinking about urgent and immediate circumstances; they were in fact thinking largely about themselves, often in the most venal terms. Yet this act—which in the short term destroyed an independent kingdom, created huge political uncertainties both north and south, and sent Scotland’s economy into a tailspin—turned out, in the long term, to be the making of modern Scotland Nor did Scots have to wait that long. Already by the 1720s, as the smoke and tumult of the Fifteen was clearing, there were signs of momentous changes in the economy. Grain exports more than doubled, as Scottish agriculture recovered from the horrors of the Lean Years and learned to become more commercial in its outlook. Lowland farmers would be faced now not with starvation, but with falling prices due to grain surpluses. Glasgow merchants entered the Atlantic trade with English colonies in America, which had always been closed to them before. By 1725 they were taking more than 15 percent of the tobacco trade. Inside of two decades, they would be running it. A wide range of goods, not just tobacco but also molasses, sugar, cotton, and tea, flooded into Scotland. Finished goods, particularly linen textiles and cotton products, began to flood out, despite the excise tax. William Mackintosh of Borlum saw even in 1729 that Scotland’s landed gentry were living better than they ever had, “more handsomely now in dress, table, and house furniture.” Glasgow, the first hub of Scotland’s transatlantic trade, would soon be joined by Ayr, Greenock, Paisley, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. By the 1730s the Scottish economy had turned the corner. By 1755 the value of Scottish exports had more than doubled. And it was due almost entirely to the effect of overseas trade, “the golden ball” as Andrew Fletcher had contemptuously called it, which the Union of 1707 had opened.

The earth which we tread. The fire which does not go out within it. The water from which all life is born and without which life is not possible. The air we breathe. It is enough to stretch out one’s hand to master them, to subjugate them. Magic is everywhere. It is in air, in water, in earth and in fire. And it is behind the door which the Conjunction of the Spheres has closed on us. From there, from behind the closed door, magic sometimes extends its hand to us. For us. You know that, don’t you? You have already felt the touch of that magic, the touch of the hand from behind that door. That touch filled you with fear. Such a touch fills everyone with fear. Because there is Chaos and Order, Good and Evil in all of us. But it is possible and necessary to control it. This has to be learnt. And you will learn it, Ciri. That is why I brought you here, to this stone which, from time immemorial, has stood at the crossing of veins of power pulsating with force. Touch it.” The boulder shook, vibrated, and with it the entire hill vibrated and shook. “Magic is extending its hand towards you, Ciri. To you, strange girl, Surprise, Child of the Elder Blood, the Blood of Elves. Strange girl, woven into Movement and Change, into Annihilation and Rebirth. Destined and destiny. Magic extends its hand towards you from behind the closed door, towards you, a tiny grain of sand in the workings of the Clock of Fate. Chaos extends its talons towards you, still uncertain if you will be its tool or an obstacle in its design. That which Chaos shows you in your dreams is this very uncertainty. Chaos is afraid of you, Child of Destiny. But it wants you to be the one who feels fear.” There was a flash of lightning and a long rumble of thunder. Ciri trembled with cold and dread. “Chaos cannot show you what it really is. So it is showing you the future, showing you what is going to happen. It wants you to be afraid of the coming days, so that fear of what is going to happen to you and those closest to you will start to guide you, take you over completely. That is why Chaos is sending you those dreams. Now, you are going to show me what you see in your dreams. And you are going to be frightened. And then you will forget and master your fear. Look at my star, Ciri. Don’t take your eyes from it!