Henry Plant Quotes

If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

What the hell is so funny?", He snapped. His hands now planted on his hips. Claire waved a dismissive hand, " I'm sorry", she giggled then took a deep breath to get herself under control. " It's fine Henry really, if it makes you feel any better, you have an amazing ass too", she said.Henry snorted and rolled his eyes. " Whatever

I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.

At the age of eight, I still dreamed of being granted plant status.

I was aware of Darwin's views fourteen years before I adopted them and I have done so solely and entirely from an independent study of the plants themselves. [Letter to W.H. Harvey]

The tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitted as a matter of fact; the selective influence of conditions, which no one could deny to be a matter of fact, when his attention was drawn to the evidence; and the occurrence of great geological changes which also was matter of fact; could be used as the only necessary postulates of a theory of the evolution of plants and animals which, even if not at once, competent to explain all the known facts of biological science, could not be shown to be inconsistent with any.

Henry Strauss wakes her with kisses. He plants them one by one, like flower bulbs, lets them blossom on her skin.

I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies - in great towns and great crowds. It's a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash", as we elegantly call it - an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.

I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to nature, it dies; and so a man.

I am the gorilla who feels his wings growing, a giddy gorilla in the centre of a satin-like emptiness; the night too grows like an electrical plant, shooting white-hot buds into velvet black space. I am the black space of the night in which the buds break with anguish, a starfish swimming on the frozen dew of the moon. I am the germ of a new insanity, a freak dressed in intelligible language, a sob that is buried like a splinter in the quick of the soul. I am dancing the very sane and lovely dance of the angelic gorilla. These are my brothers and sisters who are insane and unangelic. We are dancing in the hollow of the cup of nothingness. We are of one flesh, but separated like stars.

They're wood violets," she said. "I haven't seen them on the island since...." "They're very rare," Henry said, filling the void that Bee had left when her voice trailed off. "You can't plant them, for they won't grow. They have to choose you." Bee's eyes met Henry's, and she smiled, a gentle, forgiving smile. It warmed me to see it. "Evelyn has a theory about these flowers," she said, pausing as if to pull a dusty memory off a shelf in her mind, handling it with great care. "Yes," she said, the memory in plain view. "She used to say they grow where they are needed, that they signal healing, and hope.

And the ritual of Prayer embraces all these movements: (a) There is the ascending, vertical movement which corre- sponds to the faithful's erect stance. This is the movement of the growth of man, whose head rises toward the heavens. ( b ) There is the horizontal movement, which corresponds to the orant's state at the moment of the profound inclination. This is the direction in which animals grow. (c) There is the inverse, descending movement, corresponding to the prosternation. This is the movement of the plant , sinking its roots in depth. Thus Prayer reproduces the movements of the creatural universe; it is itself recurrence of Creation and new Creation.

Though I don't believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there and I am prepared to expect wonders.

Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed,

Certain plants, like certain friends, you enjoy having for a visit but do not care to see remain forever and a day.

Planting is not the end; it is only the beginning of planting.

Sometimes I feel like going down to the recycling plant. Turning myself in, jumping into the inferno, getting melted down, coming out again as someone else. Scrap metal man.

It does.” I scrunch my eyes tight. “It fucking sucks.” I didn’t know the power of those words. They fix nothing, do nothing, but just saying them feels like planting a stake into the ground, pinning us together at least for this moment. It sucks, and I can’t change that, but I’m here, with my sister, and somehow we’ll get through it. You can take the city person out of the city, but the city will always be in them. I think it’s the same for sisters. Anywhere we go, we won’t leave each other. We couldn’t even if we wanted to. And we don’t. We never will.

The Pilgrim Queen (A Song) There sat a Lady all on the ground, Rays of the morning circled her round, Save thee, and hail to thee, Gracious and Fair, In the chill twilight what wouldst thou there? 'Here I sit desolate,' sweetly said she, 'Though I'm a queen, and my name is Marie: Robbers have rifled my garden and store, Foes they have stolen my heir from my bower. 'They said they could keep Him far better than I, In a palace all His, planted deep and raised high. 'Twas a palace of ice, hard and cold as were they, And when summer came, it all melted away. 'Next would they barter Him, Him the Supreme, For the spice of the desert, and gold of the stream; And me they bid wander in weeds and alone, In this green merry land which once was my own.' I look'd on that Lady, and out from her eyes Came the deep glowing blue of Italy's skies; And she raised up her head and she smiled, as a Queen On the day of her crowning, so bland and serene. 'A moment,' she said, 'and the dead shall revive; The giants are failing, the Saints are alive; I am coming to rescue my home and my reign, And Peter and Philip are close in my train.

The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.

We hunt loads of wild turkeys in the spring,” Henry says sagely. “The trick is to get into the mind of the turkey.” “How the hell do I do that?” “So,” Henry instructs. “Do as I say. You have to get quite close to the turkey, like, physically.” Carefully, still cradling the phone close, Alex leans toward the wire bars. “Okay.” “Make eye contact with the turkey. Do you have it?” Alex follows Henry’s instructions in his ear, planting his feet and bending his knees so he’s at Cornbread’s eye level, a chill running down his spine when his own eyes lock on the beady, black little murder eyes. “Yeah.” “Right, now hold it,” Henry says. “Connect with the turkey, earn the turkey’s trust … befriend the turkey…” “Okay…” “Buy a summer home in Majorca with the turkey…” “Oh, I fucking hate you!” Alex shouts as Henry laughs at his own idiotic prank, and his indignant flailing startles a loud gobble out of Cornbread, which in turn startles a very unmanly scream out of Alex.

I was like Robinson Crusoe on the island of Tobago. For hours at a stretch I would lie in the sun doing nothing, thinking of nothing. To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish with their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven't the faintest idea what it's about or why people should enjoy killing one another; you look at a place like Albania—it was constantly staring me in the eyes—and you say to yourself, yesterday it was Greek, to-day it's Italian, to-morrow it may be German or Japanese, and you let it be anything it chooses to be. When you're right with yourself it doesn't matter which flag is flying over your head or who owns what or whether you speak English or Monongahela. The absence of newspapers, the absence of news about what men are doing in different parts of the world to make life more livable or unlivable is the greatest single boon. If we could just eliminate newspapers a great advance would be made, I am sure of it. Newspapers engender lies, hatred, greed, envy, suspicion, fear, malice. We don't need the truth as it is dished up to us in the daily papers. We need peace and solitude and idleness. If we could all go on strike and honestly disavow all interest in what our neighbor is doing we might get a new lease on life. We might learn to do without telephones and radios and newspapers, without machines of any kind, without factories, without mills, without mines, without explosives, without battleships, without politicians, without lawyers, without canned goods, without gadgets, without razor blades even or cellophane or cigarettes or money. This is a pipe dream, I know.

It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment: it met him there--and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it--very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk.

If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. (I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a change to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man's doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night, so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself.

Well, dearest, what would you tell a farmer who had an over-abundant harvest? To plant less, of course!"... "I am not complaining about the frequency of the planting," she said. "I’d just rather not reap a crop every year.

Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster Mass, he walked through the woods one winter crunching through the shinycrusted snow stumbling into a little dell where a warm spring was and found the grass green and weeds sprouting and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb, He went home and sat by the stove and read Darwin Struggle for Existence Origin of Species Natural Selection that wasn't what they taught in church, so Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to Lunenburg, found a seedball in a potato plant sowed the seed and cashed in on Darwin’s Natural Selection on Spencer and Huxley with the Burbank potato. Young man go west; Luther Burbank went to Santa Rosa full of his dream of green grass in winter ever- blooming flowers ever- bearing berries; Luther Burbank could cash in on Natural Selection Luther Burbank carried his apocalyptic dream of green grass in winter and seedless berries and stoneless plums and thornless roses brambles cactus— winters were bleak in that bleak brick farmhouse in bleak Massachusetts— out to sunny Santa Rosa; and he was a sunny old man where roses bloomed all year everblooming everbearing hybrids. America was hybrid America could cash in on Natural Selection. He was an infidel he believed in Darwin and Natural Selection and the influence of the mighty dead and a good firm shipper’s fruit suitable for canning. He was one of the grand old men until the churches and the congregations got wind that he was an infidel and believed in Darwin. Luther Burbank had never a thought of evil, selected improved hybrids for America those sunny years in Santa Rosa. But he brushed down a wasp’s nest that time; he wouldn’t give up Darwin and Natural Selection and they stung him and he died puzzled. They buried him under a cedartree. His favorite photograph was of a little tot standing beside a bed of hybrid everblooming double Shasta daisies with never a thought of evil And Mount Shasta in the background, used to be a volcano but they don’t have volcanos any more.

Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above?—for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground,

Hey!" I crawl across the couch toward him and take his face in my hands, proof that the wine has hit my bloodstream. Miles looks up at me. "They," I say, "suck." "She's the love of my life," he says. "The love of your life sucks," I tell him. He fights a smile. There's something adorable about it, so puppyish that I find myself tempted to ruffle his already messy hair. When I do, his smile just barely plants up. The movement makes his dark eyes glimmer.

This afternoon, being on Fair Haven Hill, I heard the sound of a saw, and soon after from the Cliff saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath, about forty rods off. I resolved to watch it till it fell, the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut and for fifteen years have waved in solitary majesty over the sprout-land. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive manikins with their cross-cut saw which could scarcely span it. It towered up a hundred feet as I afterward found by measurement, one of the tallest probably in the township and straight as an arrow, but slanting a little toward the hillside, its top seen against the frozen river and the hills of Conantum. I watch closely to see when it begins to move. Now the sawers stop, and with an axe open it a little on the side toward which it leans, that it may break the faster. And now their saw goes again. Now surely it is going; it is inclined one quarter of the quadrant, and, breathless, I expect its crashing fall. But no, I was mistaken; it has not moved an inch; it stands at the same angle as at first. It is fifteen minutes yet to its fall. Still its branches wave in the wind, as it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore; it is still a forest tree, the most majestic tree that waves over Musketaquid. The silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles; it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squirrel’s nest; not a lichen has forsaken its mast-like stem, its raking mast,—the hill is the hulk. Now, now’s the moment! The manikins at its base are fleeing from their crime. They have dropped the guilty saw and axe. How slowly and majestic it starts! as it were only swayed by a summer breeze, and would return without a sigh to its location in the air. And now it fans the hillside with its fall, and it lies down to its bed in the valley, from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior, as if, tired of standing, it embraced the earth with silent joy, returning its elements to the dust again. But hark! there you only saw, but did not hear. There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks , advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushes to embrace the earth, and mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more and forever, both to eye and ear. I went down and measured it. It was about four feet in diameter where it was sawed, about one hundred feet long. Before I had reached it the axemen had already divested it of its branches. Its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hillside as if it had been made of glass, and the tender cones of one year’s growth upon its summit appealed in vain and too late to the mercy of the chopper. Already he has measured it with his axe, and marked off the mill-logs it will make. And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next two centuries. It is lumber. He has laid waste the air. When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen-hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing [to] lay his axe at the root of that also.

He had heard especially promising things about Philadelphia--the lively capital of that young nation. It was said to be a city with a good-enough shipping port, central to the eastern coast of the country, filled with pragmatic Quakers, pharmacists, and hardworking farmers. It was rumored to be a place without haughty aristocrats (unlike Boston), and without pleasure-fearing puritans (unlike Connecticut), and without troublesome self-minted feudal princes (unlike Virginia). The city had been founded on the sound principles of religious tolerance, a free press, and good landscaping, by William Penn--a man who grew tree saplings in bathtubs, and who had imagined his metropolis as a great nursery of both plants and ideas. Everyone was welcome in Philadelphia, absolutely everyone--except, of course, the Jews. Hearing all this, Henry suspected Philadelphia to be a vast landscape of unrealized profits, and he aimed to turn the place to his advantage.

The episcopal palace was a huge and beautiful house, built of stone at the beginning of the last century by M. Henri Puget, Doctor of Theology of the Faculty of Paris, Abbe of Simore, who had been Bishop of D—— in 1712. This palace was a genuine seignorial residence. Everything about it had a grand air,—the apartments of the Bishop, the drawing-rooms, the chambers, the principal courtyard, which was very large, with walks encircling it under arcades in the old Florentine fashion, and gardens planted with magnificent trees. In the dining-room, a long and superb gallery which was situated on the ground-floor and opened on the gardens, M. Henri Puget had entertained in state, on July 29, 1714, My Lords Charles Brulart de Genlis, archbishop; Prince

No delights can be agreeable nor satisfying to a soul but those that God himself has provided and appointed for it; no true paradise, but of God’s planting. The light of our own fires, and the sparks of our own kindling, will soon leave us in the dark,

I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.

Then, as in the middle of the bridge, in the middle of a walk, in the middle always, whether of a book, a conversation, or making love, it was borne in on me again that I had never done what I wanted and out of not doing what I wanted to do there grew up inside me this creation which was nothing but an obsessional plant, a sort of coral growth, which was expropriating everything, including life itself, until life itself became this which was denied but which constantly asserted itself, making life and killing life at the same time.

One of the greatest acts of faith is to believe that the few years we live on this earth are like a little seed planted in a very rich soil. For this seed to bear fruit, it must die. We often see or feel only the dying, but the harvest will be abundant even when we ourselves are not the harvesters.

principal courtyard, which was very large, with walks encircling it under arcades in the old Florentine fashion, and gardens planted with magnificent trees. In the dining-room, a long and superb gallery which was situated on the ground-floor and opened on the gardens, M. Henri Puget had entertained in state, on July 29, 1714, My Lords Charles Brulart de Genlis, archbishop; Prince d'Embrun; Antoine de Mesgrigny, the capuchin, Bishop of Grasse; Philippe de Vendome, Grand Prior of France, Abbe of Saint Honore de Lerins; Francois de Berton de Crillon, bishop, Baron de Vence; Cesar de Sabran de Forcalquier, bishop, Seignor of Glandeve; and Jean Soanen, Priest of the Oratory, preacher in ordinary to the king, bishop, Seignor of Senez. The portraits of these seven reverend personages decorated this apartment; and this memorable date, the 29th of July, 1714, was there engraved in letters of gold on a table of white marble.

Song When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain: And dreaming through the twilight That doth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget. Sir Thomas Wyatt has been credited with introducing the Petrarchan sonnet into the English language. Wyatt's father had been one of Henry VII's Privy Councilors and remained a trusted adviser when Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509. Wyatt followed his father to court, but it seems the young poet may have fallen in love with the king’s mistress, Anne Boleyn. Their acquaintance is certain, although whether or not the two actually shared a romantic relationship remains unknown. But in his poetry, Wyatt called his mistress Anna and there do seem to be correspondences. For instance, this poem might well have been written about the King’s claim on Anne Boleyn:

The United States is the most prosperous nation in the world, and yet our citizenship has been comprehensively reduced to consumerism... Buy and ye shall be happy. But what have we truly purchased? In the words of my favorite poet, Henry David Thoreau, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” our lives prostrate at the altar of the false gods of our instant-gratification society.

The simple truth is that there is an optimum rate of replacement, a best time for replacement. It would be an advantage for a manufacturer to have his factory and equipment destroyed by bombs only if the time had arrived when, through deterioration and obsolescence, his plant and equipment had already acquired a null or a negative value and the bombs fell just when he should have called in a wrecking crew or ordered new equipment anyway.

In the night the eyes are partly closed, or retire into the head. Other senses take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. Every plant and field and forest emits its odor now, —swamp-pink in the meadow, and tansy in the road; and there is the peculiar dry scent of corn which has begun to show its tassels. The senses both of hearing and smelling are more alert. We hear the tinkling of rills which we never detected before.

Asia is rising against me. I haven't got a chinaman's chance. I'd better consider my national resources. My national resources cousist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions. I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic. America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they're all different sexes. America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & V anzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys. America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy. America you don't really want to go to war. America it's them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Readers' Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? I'd better get right down to the job. It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Anglican convert Blessed John Henry Cardinal Neumann described Mary as our "happier world". By leading her children to her Son, the Blessed Mother helps "them to regain that which has been lost through the fall and sin. She rids us of false teaching. Far from a saccharine devotion, Mary burns through the vices of the cynic, the jaded, the angry, the agitated and the hopeless. In their place, she plants the gifts of peace, order, hope, strength, goodness, and creativity.

Any Justification that does not lead to Biblical sanctification and mortification of sinful desires is a false justification no matter how many Solas you attach to it”. “See that your chief study be about the heart, that there God’s image may be planted, and his interest advanced, and the interest of the world and flesh subdued, and the love of every sin cast out, and the love of holiness succeed; and that you content not yourselves with seeming to do good in outward acts, when you are bad yourselves, and strangers to the great internal duties. The first and great work of a Christian is about his heart.” ~ Richard Baxter Never forget that truth is more important to the church than peace ~ JC Ryle "Truth demands confrontation. It must be loving confrontation, but there must be confrontation nonetheless.” ~ Francis Schaeffer I am not permitted to let my love be so merciful as to tolerate and endure false doctrine. When faith and doctrine are concerned and endangered, neither love nor patience are in order...when these are concerned, (neither toleration nor mercy are in order, but only anger, dispute, and destruction - to be sure, only with the Word of God as our weapon. ~ Martin Luther “Truth must be spoken, however it be taken.” ~ John Trapp “Hard words, if they be true, are better than soft words if they be false.” – C.H. Spurgeon “Oh my brethren, Bold hearted men are always called mean-spirited by cowards” – CH Spurgeon “The Bible says Iron sharpens Iron, But if your words don't have any iron in them, you ain't sharpening anyone”. “Peace often comes as a result of conflict!” ~ Don P Mt 18:15-17 Rom 12:18 “Peace if possible, truth at all costs.” ~ Martin Luther “The Scriptures argue and debate and dispute; they are full of polemics… We should always regret the necessity; but though we regret it and bemoan it, when we feel that a vital matter is at stake we must engage in argument. We must earnestly contend for the truth, and we are all called upon to do that by the New Testament.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Romans – Atonement and Justification) “It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher “Truth bites and it stings and it has a blade on it.” ~ Paul Washer Soft words produce hard hearts. Show me a church where soft words are preached and I will show you a church of hard hearts. Jeremiah said that the word of God is a hammer that shatters. Hard Preaching produces soft hearts. ~ J. MacArthur Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified, prepare the soul for glory. ~ Richard Sibbes “Cowards never won heaven. Do not claim that you are begotten of God and have His royal blood running in your veins unless you can prove your lineage by this heroic spirit: to dare to be holy in spite of men and devils.” ~ William Gurnall

The only things in the room that she felt any connection to were half a dozen flower postcards pinned to the wall above her desk. The red and white tulip by Judith Leyster. The vase of white lilac by Manet. The bowl of blowsy roses by Henri Fantin-Latour. The vase of tumbling blooms by Brueghel- lilies and tulips, fritillaries and daffodils, carnations and snowdrops, cornflowers and peonies and anemones. Those flowers had all died four hundred years ago, but that first week back at work, they planted a seed in Lara's heart.

Things are natural or supernatural simply according to where one stands. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man. When a mineral is seized upon by the living plant and elevated to the organic kingdom, no trespass against Nature is committed. It merely enters a larger Environment, which before was supernatural to it, but which now is entirely natural. When the heart of a man, again, is seized upon by the quickening Spirit of God, no further violence is done to natural law. It is another case of the inorganic, so to speak, passing into the organic.

In April the pigeons were seen again flying express in small flocks, and in due time I heard the martins twittering over my clearing, though it had not seemed that the township contained so many that it could afford me any, and I fancied that they were peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white men came. In almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow, to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the equilibrium of nature.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. ALBERT EINSTEIN I am made to love the pond and the meadow, as the wind is made to ripple the water. HENRY DAVID THOREAU I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake. I believe that that mistake may be more serious than all the minor insanities that characterized those older epistemologies which agreed upon fundamental unity. GREGORY BATESON

Good writing is always a breaking of the soil, clearing away prejudices, pulling up of sour weeds of crooked thinking, stripping the turf so as to get at what is fertile beneath. It would be amusing to carry the simile further. Those bulbs that flower in the sand and wither! The gay fiction annual that has to be planted again every year! Those experimental plants from Russia, France, and Greenwich Village that are always getting winter killed—confound 'em!—is it worth while planting them again? The stocky perennial that keeps coming up and coming up—so easy to grow and so ugly. Scarlet sage that gives a touch of fiery sin to the edge of the suburbanite's concrete walk! And then the good flowers—as honest as they are beautiful! The well-ordered gar den! The climbing rose that escapes and is the most beautiful of all!

I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy.

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children's hands, in front-yard plots—now standing by wallsides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests;—the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died—blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful lilac colors.

The plight of Jews in German-occupied Europe, which many people thought was at the heart of the war against the Axis, was not a chief concern of Roosevelt. Henry Feingold's research (The Politics of Rescue) shows that, while the Jews were being put in camps and the process of annihilation was beginning that would end in the horrifying extermination of 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews, Roosevelt failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives. He did not see it as a high priority; he left it to the State Department, and in the State Department anti-Semitism and a cold bureaucracy became obstacles to action. Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races? The United States' armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old. The Red Cross, with government approval, separated the blood donations of black and white. It was, ironically, a black physician named Charles Drew who developed the blood bank system. He was put in charge of the wartime donations, and then fired when he tried to end blood segregation. Despite the urgent need for wartime labor, blacks were still being discriminated against for jobs. A spokesman for a West Coast aviation plant said: "The Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities.... Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them." Roosevelt never did anything to enforce the orders of the Fair Employment Practices Commission he had set up.

If you're still hungry, I have some apples for dessert." She held one out that was a mix of reds and greens with a hint of gold. "These are Red Fire apples." Henri took a bite. "That's heaven. What did you call it? A Red Fire? I've never had anything like it." "They're only grown in our kingdom. My mother was the one who created the hybrid," Snow said proudly. She used to beg her parents to tell her the story of their courtship over and over. She could picture her mother laughing. Snow, there must be something else you want to talk about! "It's what you get when you cross red apple seeds with some pears and green apple seeds," Snow told Henri now. "She came up with it at the apple orchard she helped tend when she was my age. My father loved them and had them planted all over the countryside." Snow picked up one and stared at it. "It was the Red Fire apple that endeared my mother to my father, actually. He adored her apples." Henri smirked. "So it was love at first bite?" She laughed. "I suppose so!

The whiff of Ben's parcel hovered under the delicious aroma of fish. Suddenly John felt hungry. The men, he saw, were sipping from a ladle which they passed between them. The tallest of the three slurped and smiled. 'Whether or not Miss Lucretia consumes it, the kitchen has discharged its duty,' he declared cheerfully. He towered a whole head over the others. 'A simple broth is most apt for a young stomach, especially a stomach which chooses privation over nourishment. Lampreys. Crab shells ground fine. Stockfish and...' He sniffed then frowned. 'Simple, Mister Underley?' jibed Vanian in a nasal voice. 'If it is simple, then how is it spiced?' 'Came in a parcel this morning,' Henry Palewick offered. 'Down from Soughton. Master Scovell had it out in a moment. Smelled like flowers to me. Whatever it was.' 'Which flowers?' demanded the fourth man of the quartet, in a foreign accent. He pointed a large-nostrilled nose at Henry. 'Saffron, agrimony and comfrey bound the cool-humored plants; meadowsweet, celandine and wormwood the hot.

Thomas A. Edison told his associates that "Carver is worth a fortune" and backed up his statement by offering to employ the black chemist at an astronomically high salary. Carver turned down the offer. Henry Ford, who thought Carver "the greatest scientist living," tried to get him to come to his River Rouge establishment, with an equal lack of success. Because of the strangely unaccountable source from which his magic with plant products sprang, his methods continued to be as wholly inscrutable as Burbank's to scientists and to the general public. Visitors finding Carver puttering at his workbench amid a confusing clutter of molds, soils, plants, and insects were baffled by the utter and, to many of them, meaningless simpFcity of his replies to their persistent pleas for him to reveal his secrets. To one puzzled interlocutor he said: "The secrets are in the plants. To elicit them you have to love them enough." "But why do so few people have your power?" the man persisted. "Who besides you can do these things?" "Everyone can," said Carver, "if only they believe it.

Suppose someone—say Mr. Henry Ford—finds out a way of making motor-cars so cheaply that no one else can compete, with the result that all the other firms engaged in making cars go bankrupt. In order to arrive at the cost to the community of one of the new cheap cars, one must add, to what Mr. Ford would have to pay, the proper proportion of all the now useless plant belonging to other firms, and of the cost of rearing and educating those workers and managers previously employed by other firms but now out of work. (Some will obtain employment with Mr. Ford, but probably not all, since the new process is cheaper, and therefore requires less labour.) There may well also be other expenses to the community —labour disputes, strikes, riots, extra police, trials and imprisonments. When all these items are taken into account, it may well be found that the cost of the new cars to the community is, at first, considerably greater than that of the old ones. Now it is the cost to the community which determines what is socially advantageous, while it is the cost to the individual manufacturer which determines, in our system, what takes place.

The establishment of what would become the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1908—led from 1924 until 1972 by J. Edgar Hoover—was a direct response to the revolutionary wave that gripped the American working class. FBI agents, often little more than state-employed goons and thugs, ruthlessly hunted down those on the left. The FBI spied on and infiltrated labor unions, political parties, radical groups—especially those led by African Americans—antiwar groups, and later the civil rights movement in order to discredit anyone, including politicians such as Henry Wallace, who questioned the power of the state and big business. Agents burglarized homes and offices. They illegally opened mail and planted unlawful wiretaps, created blacklists, and demanded loyalty oaths. They destroyed careers and sometimes lives. By the time they were done, America’s progressive and radical movements, which had given the country the middle class and opened up our political system, did not exist. It was upon the corpses of these radical movements, which had fought for the working class, that the corporate state was erected in the late twentieth century.

Unlike babies, phenomena are typically born long before humans give them names. Zurara did not call Black people a race. French poet Jacques de Brézé first used the term “race” in a 1481 hunting poem. In 1606, the same diplomat who brought the addictive tobacco plant to France formally defined race for the first time in a major European dictionary, “Race…means descent,” Jean Nicot wrote in the Trésor de la langue française. “Therefore, it is said that a man, a hors, a dog or another animal is from a good or bad race.” From the beginning, to make races was to make racial hierarchy. Gomes de Zurara grouped all those peoples from Africa into a single race for that very reason: to create hierarchy, the first racist idea. Race making is an essential ingredient in the making of racist ideas, the crust that holds the pie. Once a race has been created it must be filled in-and Zurara filled it with negative qualities that would justify Prince Henry’s evangelical mission to the world. This Black race of people was lost, living “like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings, “ Zurara wrote. “They had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in a bestial sloth.

In one department of his [Joseph Black's] lecture he exceeded any I have ever known, the neatness and unvarying success with which all the manipulations of his experiments were performed. His correct eye and steady hand contributed to the one; his admirable precautions, foreseeing and providing for every emergency, secured the other. I have seen him pour boiling water or boiling acid from a vessel that had no spout into a tube, holding it at such a distance as made the stream's diameter small, and so vertical that not a drop was spilt. While he poured he would mention this adaptation of the height to the diameter as a necessary condition of success. I have seen him mix two substances in a receiver into which a gas, as chlorine, had been introduced, the effect of the combustion being perhaps to produce a compound inflammable in its nascent state, and the mixture being effected by drawing some string or wire working through the receiver's sides in an air-tight socket. The long table on which the different processes had been carried on was as clean at the end of the lecture as it had been before the apparatus was planted upon it. Not a drop of liquid, not a grain of dust remained.

Indeed, for those in the West inclined to be critical of China, here are few cautionary facts. With its absolutely massive population (1.33 billion or one-fifth of the world's population) it's obvious that China should have a massive impact on the world. Yet, it's one-child policy, for all the uncomfortable ethical questions it raises and the painful sacrifice made by millions of Chinese families, means that China's annual percentage growth rate is low relative to the global average (0.49 per cent versus 1.13 per cent). Even with a population more than four times that of the United States (1.3 billion versus 0.3 billion), China's ecological footprint is still less than that of the US (2456 million global hectares versus 2730 million global hectares). In 2009, China invested far more than any other country in the clean energy industry – $34.6 billion or 0.39 per cent of its gross domestic product compared to United States' $18.6 billion or 0.13 per cent of GDP. When it comes to reforestation, China punches way above its numerical and geographical weight, with massive initiatives like the NFPP and SLCP helping seed some 4 million hectares of forest every year, which is probably more tree planting than the rest of the world put together.

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.

That great portion of what is generally received as Christian truth is, in its rudiments or in its separate parts, to be found in heathen philosophies and religions. For instance, the doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian; the connection of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean; and honours to the dead are a polytheism. Such is the general nature of the fact before us; Mr. Milman argues from it,—'These things are in heathenism, therefore they are not Christian:' we, on the contrary, prefer to say, 'these things are in Christianity, therefore they are not heathen.' That is, we prefer to say, and we think that Scripture bears us out in saying, that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent; that these have variously taken root, and grown up as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living; and hence that, as the inferior animals have tokens of an immaterial principle in them, yet have not souls, so the philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas, though they are not directly divine. What man is amid the brute creation, such is the Church among the schools of the world; and as Adam gave names to the animals about him, so has the Church from the first looked round upon the earth, noting and visiting the doctrines she found there.

This Padre Antonio doubted, probably after his training in modern theology or as a practitioner of Catholicism. He argued that those practices were spurious; they did not derive from a true belief in earth-beings. “They do it for money, it’s not real,” he repeated stubbornly. But for Nazario, beliefs are a requirement with Jesus and the Virgin. They are part of faith, or iñi, a Quechua word (and a sixteenth-century neologism).6 Faith, he explained, is not necessary with earth-beings; they require despachos, coca leaves, and words and are present when respectfully invited to participate in runakuna lives—always. They are different, always there and acting with plants, water, animals. Their being does not need to be mediated by faith, but Jesus’s does. And just as Padre Antonio and I talked about Nazario, Nazario and I commented about how our dear Padre thought practices with earth-beings were like religion, like belief or kriyihina—another combination of a Spanish verb (kriyi is the Quechua form of the Spanish creer, to believe) and a Quechua suffix (hina, or like) used to express a condition that Quechua alone cannot convey. Nazario thought earth-beings and Jesus were different, but he was not sure that Antonio was wrong: could they be the same? And finally, neither Nazario nor I were sure that Padre Antonio’s relationship with earth-beings was only like his relationship with Jesus. We speculated that having been in the region for so long, and having been a close friend of Mariano, Padre Antonio must have learned from Mariano’s relations with earth-beings. I still think so; Padre Antonio is a complex religious man, and so are the other Jesuits who live in the region. Some of their Catholic practices may have become partially connected with despachos, and thus less than many and still different. I liked, and still do like, having these priests as friends.

Finally, he allowed me to turn the key in the lock and the front door, with its porthole-shaped window, swung open. I don’t know what I’d expected. I’d tried not to conjure up fantasies of any kind, but what I saw left me inarticulate. The entire apartment had the feel of a ship’s interior. The walls were highly polished teak and oak, with shelves and cubbyholes on every side. The kitchenette was still located to the right where the old one had been, a galley-style arrangement with a pint-size stove and refrigerator. A microwave oven and trash compactor had been added. Tucked in beside the kitchen was a stacking washer-dryer, and next to that was a tiny bathroom. In the living area, a sofa had been built into a window bay, with two royal blue canvas director’s chairs arranged to form a “conversational grouping.” Henry did a quick demonstration of how the sofa could be extended into sleeping accommodations for company, a trundle bed in effect. The dimensions of the main room were still roughly fifteen feet on a side, but now there was a sleeping loft above, accessible by way of a tiny spiral staircase where my former storage space had been. In the old place, I’d usually slept naked on the couch in an envelope of folded quilt. Now, I was going to have an actual bedroom of my own. I wound my way up, staring in amazement at the double-size platform bed with drawers underneath. In the ceiling above the bed, there was a round shaft extending through the roof, capped by a clear Plexiglas skylight that seemed to fling light down on the blue-and-white patchwork coverlet. Loft windows looked out to the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other. Along the back wall, there was an expanse of cedar-lined closet space with a rod for hanging clothes, pegs for miscellaneous items, shoe racks, and floor-to-ceiling drawers. Just off the loft, there was a small bathroom. The tub was sunken with a built-in shower and a window right at tub level, the wooden sill lined with plants. I could bathe among the treetops, looking out at the ocean where the clouds were piling up like bubbles. The towels were the same royal blue as the cotton shag carpeting. Even the eggs of milled soap were blue, arranged in a white china dish on the edge of the round brass sink.

The Earth Speaks, clearly, distinctly, and, in many of the realms of Nature, loudly, to William Jennings Bryan, but he fails to hear a single sound. The earth speaks from the remotest periods in its wonderful life history in the Archaeozoic Age, when it reveals only a few tissues of its primitive plants. Fifty million years ago it begins to speak as 'the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life.' In successive eons of time the various kinds of animals leave their remains in the rocks which compose the deeper layers of the earth, and when the rocks are laid bare by wind, frost, and storm we find wondrous lines of ascent invariably following the principles of creative evolution, whereby the simpler and more lowly forms always precede the higher and more specialized forms. The earth speaks not of a succession of distinct creations but of a continuous ascent, in which, as the millions of years roll by, increasing perfection of structure and beauty of form are found; out of the water-breathing fish arises the air-breathing amphibian; out of the land-living amphibian arises the land-living, air-breathing reptile, these two kinds of creeping things resembling each other closely. The earth speaks loudly and clearly of the ascent of the bird from one kind of reptile and of the mammal from another kind of reptile.

Shun artificial rocks like the plague.

Psalm 1, which compares us to trees planted by streams of water, suggests that our growth has different “seasons.” Some seasons are for planting (spring), some for nourishing (summer), some for harvesting (fall), and some for dying (winter). Some Christians want every day to be harvest time. Therapists are often asked, “Why does it take so long for someone to get better?

Fucking daylight!” I grabbed him and planted a kiss on his lips. Tasting sand, I spit in the dirt and slapped him on the ass. “You and the damn spankings,” Henry muttered. “I think you have an issue.” “I have a lot of fucking issues.

You…” I eased back. “Are a fucking bad, bad submissive.” Henry blushed. “Lucky you’re kind of nice looking.” “Kind of!” he blurted. I grinned and planted my lips on his. Yeah, this was really fucking nice. Too nice. I should walk away right now. Cause telling myself that was going to force my cock down. I slid my hands up the backside of his shirt and trailed my palms along his spine, to his shoulder and maneuvered the shirt off him. It was slightly damp from sweat. The heat in here was so bad that the sheer material we just put up was fogged. “Take your pants off.” I watched patiently as he removed his pants, leaving him standing there in his undershorts. “Really?” I arched an eyebrow. They had flowers on them. Henry blushed in embarrassment.

It was as Frank said: the Sparrow Sisters Nursery had quite a reputation. Sally told Henry about the Nursery that was now a landmark in the town. The plants that grew in tidy rows, the orchids that swayed delicately in the beautiful glass greenhouses, and the herbs and vegetables sown in knot gardens around the land were much in demand. Sorrel had planted a dense little Shakespeare garden as a tribute to her reading habits. The lavender, rosemary, roses and honeysuckle, clematis and pansies, creeping thyme and sage were not for sale in that garden, but Sorrel would re-create versions of it for clients whose big houses on the water needed the stamp of culture, even if their owners had little idea what their lovely gardens meant.

The joy of Loretta’s homecoming was overshadowed by Henry’s rage. Friends with a murderin’ savage, was she? A Comanche slut, that’s what, kissin’ on him in broad daylight, comin’ home to shame them all with her Injun horse and heathen necklace. His land looked like a bloomin’ pincushion with all them heathen lances pokin’ up. He was gonna get shut of ’em, just like he had those horses. Half of ’em stole from white folks! Some trade that was! Loretta listened to his tirade in stony silence. When he wound down she said, “Are you quite finished?” “No, I ain’t!” He leveled a finger at her. “Just you understand this, young lady. If that bastard planted his seed in that belly of yours, it’ll be hell to pay. The second you throw an Injun brat, I’ll bash its head on a rock!” Loretta flinched. “And we call them animals?” Henry backhanded her, catching her on the cheek with stunning force. Loretta reeled and grabbed the table to keep from falling. Rachel screamed and threw herself between them. Amy’s muffled sobs could be heard coming up through the floor. “For the love of God, Henry, please…” Rachel wrung her hands in her apron. “Get a hold on your temper.” Henry swept Rachel aside. Leveling a finger at Loretta again, he snarled, “Don’t you sass me, girl, or I’ll tan your hide till next Sunday. You’ll show respect, by gawd.” Loretta pressed her fingers to her jaw, staring at him. Respect? Suddenly it struck her as hysterically funny. She had been captured by savages and dragged halfway across Texas. Never once, not even when he had just cause, had Hunter hit her with enough force to hurt her, and never in the face. She’d had to come home to receive that kind of abuse. She sank onto the planked bench and started to laugh, a high-pitched, half-mad laughter. Aunt Rachel crossed herself, and that only made her laugh harder. Henry stormed outside to get “those dad-blamed Indian lances” pulled up before a passing neighbor spied them and started calling them Injun lovers. Loretta laughed harder yet. Maybe she had gone mad. Stark, raving mad.

The idea of living a purposeful life and a successful life are of the same vein. Both emphasize thriving where you’re planted and achieving a sense of fulfillment. I define success as the realization and execution of our purposes. It’s more than material excess or external validation; success is being able to die knowing you lived a life worth having.

When life gives us challenges, they are opportunities to grow, just like storms feed the plants and give us rainbows.

for the same carbon is forever passing from atmosphere to plant, from plant to animal, and from animal to atmosphere, this last being the common storehouse

Called by the fattoria committee, the unemployed braccianti arrive in force on the lands that the owners refuse to improve. In spite of the presence of the owners, the superintendents, or their agents, the workers carry out the work; they then demand their salary (pay ble to the legal investment fund). In the backwards strike, the workers work against the wishes of the boss, and their work increases the productivity of the soil. This is doubly paradoxical when compared to the conventional notion of the strike. Thus, at Empoli, between Florence and Sienna, 70,000 cubic meters of grading, ditches, and other work has been carried out by the "strikers" under the direction of the fattorie committees. The latter paid the workers directly, withdrawing 4% from the money deposited by them into the bank and representing the sale of farm products. in all the areas of Tuscany where the committees are active, they have organized the planting of vines, the work of drainage or irrigation, the repair of buildings, and whatever else might be required. They even established, in individual locations, nascent production cooperatives for clearing the land and improving uncultivated or poorly cultivated soil, which assumes their presence on these lands notwithstanding the will of the owner.

Frequently, if not disturbed by the startling human voice, they make a raid on the rich corn-stalks of the native cultivators, and a dozen of them will in a few minutes make a frightful havoc in a large field of this plant. Consequently, we were not surprised, while delayed at the ferry, to hear the owners of the corn venting loud halloos, like the rosy-cheeked farmer boys in England when scaring the crows away from the young wheat.

This does not mean (as is so often thought) that primitive man, in order to explain natural phenomena, imparts human characteristics to an inanimate world. Primitive man simply does not know an inanimate world. For this very reason he does not 'personify' inanimate phenomena nor does he fill an empty world with the ghosts of the dead, as 'animism' would have us believe. The world appears to primitive man neither inanimate nor empty but redundant with life; and life has individuality, in man and beast and plant, and in every phenomenon which confronts man — the thunderclap, the sudden shadow, the eerie and unknown clearing in the wood, the stone which suddenly hurts him when he stumbles while on a hunting trip. Any phenomenon may at any time face him, not as 'It', but as 'Thou'. In this confrontation, 'Thou' reveals its individuality, its qualities, its will. 'Thou' is not contemplated with intellectual detachment; it is experienced as life confronting life, involving every faculty of man in a reciprocal relationship. Thoughts, no less than acts and feelings, are subordinated to this experience.

seeds of tomorrow’s brilliance are planted in the soil of today’s activity.

Henry Ford learned of a process for turning wood scraps from the production of Model T’s into charcoal briquets. He built a charcoal plant and Ford Charcoal was created (later renamed Kingsford Charcoal). Today, Kingsford is still the leading manufacturer of charcoal in America.

An apostle is a prime-minister in the kingdom of Christ, immediately called by Christ, and extraordinarily qualified; his work was peculiarly to plant the Christian church, and confirm the Christian doctrine.

The Christian religion isn’t an ideology, like socialism or libertarianism, tracked by self-identification. The Christian religion is a Body. A lot of people saying to a pollster that they identify as Christians hardly represents a movement. The question is, “Who goes to church?” And, congregationally speaking, Protestant liberalism is deader than Henry VIII. If adapting to the culture were the key to ecclesial success, then where are the Presbyterian Church (USA) church-planting movements, the Unitarian megachurches?

Psalm 37a Of David. 1Do not fret because of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong; 2for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away. 3Trust in the LORD and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. 4Take delight in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. 5Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him and he will do this: 6He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn, your vindication like the noonday sun.

Readers are encouraged to believe that millipedes swallowed whole are a convenient laxative, that bookbinders have traditionally used aqua fortis (nitric acid) to marble the covers of their books, and that at least one person has suffered as a result of assuming that ‘aqua fortis’ is ‘strong water’. The calyx of the plant known as ‘skullcap’ looks like the heel of a slipper. Russian potash is stronger than Swedish. Windmills are twice as effective as watermills. Candied sea holly—also known as ‘eryngo’—was once ‘sent to London for medicinal use’. In Italy, the usual method for finding truffles or ‘subterraneous mushrooms’ involves tying a cord to the hind leg of a pig, taking him out into the fields, and observing where he rootles. Sugar cane in Tobago has been known to grow twenty-four feet high. The American frog ‘brings forth young from her back’. Criminals in Turkey are dropped from high places ‘upon hooks’. The backstaff, ‘useful in taking the sun’s altitude at sea’, was invented by a Captain Davies.

A little science is something that they must have. I should like my nephews to know what air is, and water; why we breathe, and why wood burns; the nutritive elements essential to plant life, and the constituents of the soil. And it is no vague and imperfect knowledge from hearsay I would have them gain of these fundamental truths, on which depend agriculture and the industrial arts and our health itself; I would have them know these things thoroughly from their own observation and experience. Books here are insufficient, and can serve merely as aids to scientific experiment.

Acquiring new skills and adapting to complex, uncertain environments isn’t easy, though. It requires persistent attention and near-constant effort to maintain a trajectory of growth. As such, it’s easy to grow tired or lose your drive. However, when you stop growing, you start dying. In much the same way that an organization needs to be persistently innovative in order to maintain market share, individuals must make a personal commitment to lifelong personal innovation through skill development, risk-taking, and experimentation in order to avoid stagnation. The seeds of tomorrow’s brilliance are planted in the soil of today’s activity.

nothing tends to weaken the resources of the mind so much as a miscellaneous course of reading unaccompanied (as it usually is, I may remark) by reflection.

What is this?" "Plankton, basically," Henry says. "A plant. A bio luminescent plankton called dinoflagellates." Oh, Henry. He's so romantic.

Thoreau could speculate that even a slight shift in natural processes—a little colder winter, a little higher flood—might put an end to humanity, so dependent are we on a wild nature that gives us no guarantees. Hence he emphasized living "deliberately"; that is, living so as to perceive and weigh the moral consequence of our choices. "Civil Disobedience" insists that the choices we make create our environment, both political and natural—all the choices, even the least and most seemingly trivial. The sum of those choices is weighed on the scales of the planet itself, a planet that is, like Walden Pond, sensitive and alive, quick to measure the least change and register it in sound and form. To Thoreau this was cause for tremendous optimism: as the village expanded and the old trees fell, he planted new ones and reveled in the young forest. If the English settlers had wiped out many of New England's animals—beaver, wolf, bear and cougar, moose and deer, wild turkey—still there was much remaining, enough to assure him the wild was everywhere, ready to reseed and reclaim what it had lost. His last, unfinished works, Wild Fruits and The Dispersion of Seeds, emphasize how the smallest of seeds, let loose on the winds or carried by the least of beings, could transform the world. All humans need to do is learn to work with instead of against the vital currents of life. The Books Thoreau didn't live to finish are about building a community of life, and he died in the faith his words, like seeds, would take root and grow. Exactly insofar as we, today, share his belief in the future of life and act on it, will he continue to speak to us.

It does.” I scrunch my eyes tight. “It fucking sucks.” I didn’t know the power of those words. They fix nothing, do nothing, but just saying them feels like planting a stake into the ground, pinning us together at least for this moment.

lived for Concord very effectually, and by his remarkable genius for the observation of the phenomena of woods and streams, of plants and trees, and beasts and fishes, and for flinging a kind of spiritual interest over these things, he did more than he perhaps intended toward consolidating the fame of his accidental human sojourn. He was as shy and ungregarious as Hawthorne; but he and the latter appear to have been sociably disposed towards each other, and there are some charming touches in the preface to the _Mosses_ in regard to the hours they spent in boating together on the large, quiet Concord river.

Don’t fix it. Just be here with me, and say it fucking sucks.” “It does.” I scrunch my eyes tight. “It fucking sucks.” I didn’t know the power of those words. They fix nothing, do nothing, but just saying them feels like planting a stake into the ground, pinning us together at least for this moment. It sucks, and I can’t change that, but I’m here, with my sister, and somehow we’ll get through it.

We recently heard Prof. Joseph Henry, in a brief address, say substantially: "If I take brass, glass, and other materials, and fuse them, the product is a slag. This is what physical laws do. If I take those same materials, and form them into a telescope, that is what mind does." This is the whole question in a nutshell. That design implies an intelligent designer, is a self evident truth. Every man believes it; and no man can practically disbelieve it. Even those naturalists who theoretically deny it, if they find in a cave so simple a thing as a flint arrow-head, are as sure that it was made by a man as they are of their own existence. And yet they want us to believe that an eagle's eye is the product of blind natural causes. No combination of physical forces ever made a ship or a locomotive. It may, indeed, be said that they are dead matter, whereas plants and animals live. But what is life but one form of the organizing efficiency of God?

Mr. Williams observes, that the attempts for a reformation in England, by the power of the magistrate, filled their country with blood and confusion for a hundred years. For, says he, “Henry the Seventh leaves England under the slavish bondage of the Pope’s yoke. Henry the Eighth reforms all England to a new fashion, half Papist, half Protestant. King Edward the Sixth turns about the wheels of state, and works the whole land to absolute Protestantism. Queen Mary, succeeding to the helm, steers a direct contrary course, breaks in pieces all that Edward wrought, and brings forth an old edition of England’s reformation, all Popish. Mary not living out half her days, (as the prophet speaks of bloody persons), Elizabeth (like Joseph) is advanced from the prison to the palace, and from the irons to the crown; she plucks up all her sister Mary’s plants, and sounds a trumpet, all Protestant. What sober man is not amazed at these revolutions!” [Bloody tenet, p. 197.]

That was the basis of his interest in the Nazis. They had shown how to do it; they had no walking delegates in their shops and no Reds on soapboxes outside their plants; they had law and order, organization and mass-production, the things that Henry lived by and for. So, when friends of Germany came to tell him how it was done, he listened gladly, and when they asked him for jobs he made room for them. He had a grandson of the Kaiser on his staff, and one of his engineers was Fritz Kuhn, founder and head of the German-American Bund. As a result his plants swarmed with Nazis, and so did the city of Detroit and its surrounding towns.

We'd hardly stepped three feet outside when Bee gasped, pointing to the garden to our right. "Henry!" she exclaimed, surveying hundreds of delicate light green leaves that had pushed up from the soil in grand formation, showcasing a carpet of tiny lavender-colored flowers, with dark purple centers. Bee looked astonished. "How did they... where did they come from?" Henry shook his head. "I noticed them two weeks ago. They just appeared." Bee turned to me, and upon seeing my confused face, she offered an explanation. "They're wood violets," she said. "I haven't seen them on the island since..." "They're very rare," Henry said, filling the void that Bee had left when her voice trailed off. "You can't plant them, for they won't grow. They have to choose you." Bee's eyes met Henry's, and she smiled, a gentle, forgiving smile. It warmed me to see it. "Evelyn has a theory about these flowers," she said, pausing as if to pull a dusty memory off a shelf in her mind, handling it with great care. "Yes," she said, the memory in plain view. "She used to say they grow where they are needed, that they signal healing, and hope. It's ridiculous, isn't it, Henry, to think that violets can know," Bee continued. Henry nodded. "Harebrained," he said in agreement. Bee shook her head in disbelief. "And to see them in bloom, in March of all months..." Henry nodded. "I know." Neither took their eyes off the petals before them, so fragile, yet in great numbers stalwart and determined.

In classical times, there was a plant called silphium that grew in a narrow coastal strip of Cyrenaica, modern-day Libya. Its resin was used as a contraceptive and abortifacient. The resin appears to have been very effective, preventing pregnancy with a once-a-month pea-sized dose. Silphium eventually became too popular for its own good. Never domesticated, it was overharvested as demand grew. As it became scarcer, the price rose until it was worth its weight in silver, which drove further overharvesting and eventually led to one of the first human-caused extinctions in recorded history. However, during the centuries in which it was routinely used by the Greco-Roman upper classes, it must have noticeably depressed fertility, unless they were throwing money out the window.

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One sees what he wants to see or allows to be planted in his mind. It’s like a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat that isn’t there — and finding it.” - UNCLE HENRY

When we cease to sympathize with and to be personally related to men, and begin to be universally related, then we are capable of inspiring others with the sentiment of love for us. . . . We hug the earth—how rare we mount! how rarely, we climb a tree! We might get a little higher methinks. . . . Shall not a man have his spring as well as the plants? The halo around the shadow is visible both morning and evening.” Thoreau knew that the human being is always divine, no matter how fully he might forget it.207

Model Ts were also utilitarian—fancy body styles, pots for plants, and other gewgaws that traditionally prettified automobiles (and drove up the price) were conspicuously absent.