Home Restoration Quotes

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home

For Equilibrium, a Blessing: Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore, May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul. As the wind loves to call things to dance, May your gravity by lightened by grace. Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth, May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect. As water takes whatever shape it is in, So free may you be about who you become. As silence smiles on the other side of what's said, May your sense of irony bring perspective. As time remains free of all that it frames, May your mind stay clear of all it names. May your prayer of listening deepen enough to hear in the depths the laughter of god.

Crippled in the mind, some can no longer bring home their soul in the mosaic of their thinking pattern. By changing the logic model of our mindset, becoming an apprentice of new matters, and turning our emotional approach upside down, we can bring dormant energy to life and restore mental balance. (The freedom of new thinking)

Never sever ties with a family member you once loved. Each of you might be on different spiritual paths, but both trails are leading you home.

Manon didn’t move as Glennis lifted the crown and set it again on Manon’s head. Then the ancient witch knelt in the snow. “What was stolen has been restored; what was lost has come home again. I hail thee, Manon Crochan, Queen of Witches.” Manon stood fast against the tremor that threatened to buckle her legs. Stood fast as the other Crochans, Bronwen with them, dropped to a knee. Dorian, standing amongst them, smiled, brighter and freer than she’d ever seen. And then the Thirteen knelt, two fingers going to their brows as they bowed their heads, fierce pride lighting their faces. “Queen of Witches,” Crochan and Blackbeak declared as one voice. As one people.

Guidance, like all God's acts of blessing under the covenant of grace, is a sovereign act. Not merely does God will to guide us in the sense of showing us his way, that we may tread it; he wills also to guide us in the more fundamental sense of ensuring that, whatever happens, whatever mistakes we may make, we shall come safely home. Slippings and strayings there will be, no doubt, but the everlasting arms are beneath us; we shall be caught, rescued, restored. This is God's promise; this is how good he is.

You restored me to the concept of home.

Alone. She realized how much she had missed the luxury of solitude, and knew that its occasional comfort would always be essential to her. The pleasure of being on one's own was not so much spiritual as sensuous, like wearing silk, or swimming without a bathing suit, or walking along a totally empty beach with the sun on your back. One was restored by solitude. Refreshed.

Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things — and going home is where that restoration occurs because that is where it matters most.

That’s why the Bible is not a book about going to heaven. The action is here. The life is here. The point is here. It’s a library of books about the healing and restoring and reconciling and renewing of this world. Our home.

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt...If the game runs sometime against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

A man worth being with is one… That never lies to you Is kind to people that have hurt him A person that respects another’s life That has manners and shows people respect That goes out of his way to help people That feels every person, no matter how difficult, deserves compassion Who believes you are the most beautiful person he has ever met Who brags about your accomplishments with pride Who talks to you about anything and everything because no bad news will make him love you less That is a peacemaker That will see you through illness Who keeps his promises Who doesn’t blame others, but finds the good in them That raises you up and motivates you to reach for the stars That doesn’t need fame, money or anything materialistic to be happy That is gentle and patient with children Who won’t let you lie to yourself; he tells you what you need to hear, in order to help you grow Who lives what he says he believes in Who doesn’t hold a grudge or hold onto the past Who doesn’t ask his family members to deliberately hurt people that have hurt him Who will run with your dreams That makes you laugh at the world and yourself Who forgives and is quick to apologize Who doesn’t betray you by having inappropriate conversations with other women Who doesn’t react when he is angry, decides when he is sad or keep promises he doesn’t plan to keep Who takes his children’s spiritual life very seriously and teaches by example Who never seeks revenge or would ever put another person down Who communicates to solve problems Who doesn’t play games or passive aggressively ignores people to hurt them Who is real and doesn’t pretend to be something he is not Who has the power to free you from yourself through his positive outlook Who has a deep respect for women and treats them like a daughter of God Who doesn’t have an ego or believes he is better than anyone Who is labeled constantly by people as the nicest person they have ever met Who works hard to provide for the family Who doesn’t feel the need to drink alcohol to have a good time, smoke or do drugs Who doesn't have to hang out a bar with his friends, but would rather spend his time with his family Who is morally free from sin Who sees your potential to be great Who doesn't think a woman's place has to be in the home; he supports your life mission, where ever that takes you Who is a gentleman Who is honest and lives with integrity Who never discusses your private business with anyone Who will protect his family Who forgives, forgets, repairs and restores When you find a man that possesses these traits then all the little things you don’t have in common don’t matter. This is the type of man worth being grateful for.

We need hearts with restored empathy And homes with restored hope

She yawned and stretched, and settled back again on her pillows and thought how perfect it would be if sleep could not only restore one but iron out all anxieties in the same process, so that one could wake with a totally clear and untroubled mind, as smooth and empty as a beach, washed and ironed by the outgoing tide.

I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me

...when a phone call competes for attention with a real-world conversation, it wins. Everyone knows the distinctive high-and-dry feeling of being abandoned for a phone call, and of having to compensate - with quite elaborate behaviours = for the sudden half-disappearance of the person we were just speaking to. 'Go ahead!' we say. 'Don't mind us! Oh look, here's a magazine I can read!' When the call is over, other rituals come into play, to minimise the disruption caused and to restore good feeling.

Warm are the still and lucky miles, White shores of longing stretch away, A light of recognition fills The whole great day, and bright The tiny world of lovers' arms. Silence invades the breathing wood Where drowsy limbs a treasure keep, Now greenly falls the learned shade Across the sleeping brows And stirs their secret to a smile. Restored! Returned! The lost are borne On seas of shipwreck home at last: See! In a fire of praising burns The dry dumb past, and we Our life-day long shall part no more.

That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.

If we're lucky, we find the one person who will hold our trust and keep it sacred and safe against all attackers. That one soul who will restore our belief that people are decent and kind, and that life, while messy, is still the most wondrous gift anyone can know. But until that day comes, we have to try and remember that home isn't a specific place or person. It's a feeling we carry inside ourselves. That touch of the divine that lights a fire inside us that burns out the past and consumes the pain until nothing is left but a warmth that allows us to love others more than ourselves. A warmth that only grows when we do right even while others seek to do us wrong. Peace is knowing that one life, no matter how trivial it seems, touches thousands of others, and learningto respect that about all people. While you may not mean much to the world, to those who know and love you, you are their entire world. And it is knowledge that no one can hurt you unless you allow them to. The only power they have isn't something they're taken or demanded. It's what we give them by choice. And while it is imperative that we value the lives of others, it is equally important to value our own.

But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him. The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind. Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.

Here's a rule of thumb for networking events: one new honest-to-goodness relationship is worth ten fistfuls of business cards. Rush home afterward and kick back on your sofa. Carve out restorative niches.

When you give up,' said a slim older man whose home we rebuilt, 'you might as well lay down and die.' It was obvious that we weren't just giving people back their homes, but also restoring a sense of dignity.

There are moments in history that seem like a mist, as if what really happens matters less that what should have happened. The mists lift suddenly and there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn't have to be earned and it can't be lost. Just for a moment I see us that way; I see us all. Restored and repaired. Reunited. Refulgent.

When you break something, is your first impulse to throw it away? Or do you repair it but feel a sadness because it is no longer "perfect"? Whatever the case, you might want to consider the way the Japanese treated the items used in their tea ceremony. Even though they were made from the simplest materials... these teacups and bowls were revered for their plain lines and spiritual qualities. There were treated with the utmost care, integrity and respect. For this reason, a cup from the tea ceremony was almost never broken. When an accident did occur and a cup was broken, there were certain instances in which the cup was repaired with gold. Rather than trying to restore it in a what they would cover the gace that it ahad been broken, the cracks were celebrated in a bold and spirited way. The thin paths of shining gold completely encircled the ceramic cup, announcing to the world that the cup was broken and repaired and vulnerable to change. And in this way, its value was even further enhanced.

All we require is the will. The next few decades represent a final opportunity to build a stable home for ourselves and restore the rich, healthy and wonderful world that we inherited from our distant ancestors. Our future on the planet, the only place as far as we know where life of any kind exists, is at stake.

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.

There is really only one way to restore a world that is dying and in disrepair: to make beauty where ugliness has set in. By beauty, I don’t mean a superficial attractiveness, though the word is commonly used in this way. Beauty is a loveliness admired in its entirety, not just at face value. The beauty I’m referring to is metabolized grief. It includes brokenness and fallibility, and in so doing, conveys for us something deliciously real. Like kintsukuroi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold, what is normally seen as a fatal flaw is distinguished with value. When we come into contact with this kind of beauty, it serves as a medicine for the brokenness in ourselves, which then gives us the courage to live in greater intimacy with the world’s wounds.

Your comeback depends upon coming home to your Father. Accept His love and forgiveness. Allow Him to restore you, celebrate you, and transform you so that you won't have to go through this setback again. And remember, no matter what, He is there for you!

When my toes are sunk into warm sand and the ocean is lapping my feet, when I breathe in the scent of salt and hear the cry of a seagull, I know that I am returned to a place of restoration. I am home.I can heal here.

Take, for example, the problems of government. Marx and Engels would solve these problems by working for the day when they could eliminate government. Problems of morals would be solved by doing away with morals. Problems growing out of religion would be solved by doing away with religion. Problems of marriage, home and family would be eliminated by doing away with marriage, home and family. The problems arising out of property rights would be resolved by not allowing anyone to have any property rights.

Until modern times, we focused a great deal of the best of our thought upon rituals of return to the human condition. Seeking enlightenment or the Promised Land or the way home, a man would go or be forced to go into the wilderness, measure himself against the Creation, recognize finally his true place within it, and thus be saved both from pride and from despair. Seeing himself as a tiny member of a world he cannot comprehend or master or in any final sense possess, he cannot possibly think of himself as a god. And by the same token, since he shares in, depends upon, and is graced by all of which he is a part, neither can he become a fiend; he cannot descend into the final despair of destructiveness. Returning from the wilderness, he becomes a restorer of order, a preserver. He sees the truth, recognizes his true heir, honors his forebears and his heritage, and gives his blessing to his successors. He embodies the passing of human time, living and dying within the human limits of grief and joy. (pg.95, "The Body and the Earth")

A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed.

There is a story about the life of Buddha in which a mother carries her dead son to him draped in her arms. The woman has heard that he is a holy man who can restore life. Weeping, she appeals for mercy. Gently, Buddha tells her that he can help save her son’s life, but that first she has to bring him a mustard seed secured from a family that has never experienced death. Desperately she searches home after home. Many want to help, but everyone has already experienced a loss--a sister, a husband, a child. Finally the woman returns to Buddha. “What have you found?” he asks. “Where is your mustard seed and where is your son? You are not carrying him.” “I buried him,” she replies

We can either copy Him in that, and attempt to use our homes to testify to God’s abundant and overwhelming delight in beauty, or we can use our homes to say the opposite—that nothing matters and it’s all stupid and nobody cares anyway.

Then again, it's the whole Reagan program, isn't it -- dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can't you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity --

What they then wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at home would put an end to democratic “nonsense” and the power of the trade unions and in foreign affairs undo the verdict of 1918, tear off the shackles of Versailles, rebuild a great Army and with its military power restore the country to its place in the sun. These

For the girls the regular comings and goings restored their superior sense of self, a superiority they had received intact from Moran and which was little acknowledged by the wide world in which they had to work and live. That unexplained notion of superiority was often badly shaken and in need of restoration by the time they came home.

You live in fear that no one will hear your cries…I hear them. I’ll catch you when you fall, always. All of your broken dreams, I will make them fade away. When you’re lost, I will find you and bring you home. I will pick you up when your world shatters.

The old junky has found a vein... blood blossoms in the dropper like a Chinese flower... he push home the heroin and the boy who jacked off fifty years ago shine immaculate through the ravaged flesh, fill the outhouse with the sweet nutty smell of young male lust.

A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more producitve for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed.

When I look at a pumpkin muffin, I see the brilliant orange glow of a sugar maple in its full autumnal glory. I see the crisp blue sky of October, so clear and restorative and reassuring. I see hayrides, and I feel Halloween just around the corner, kids dressed up in homemade costumes, bobbing for apples and awaiting trick or treat. I think of children dressed as Pilgrims in a pre-school parade, or a Thanksgiving feast, the bounty of harvest foods burdening a table with its goodness. I picture pumpkins at a farmer's market, piled happy and high, awaiting a new home where children will carve them into scary faces or mothers will bake them into a pie or stew.

Now this girl was about twenty-one years old. A sweet little coed. Spends a night with a married man. Goes home the next day and tells her mama and daddy. Don’t ask me why. Maybe just to rub their faces in it. They decide she needs a lesson. Whole family drives out into the desert, right out to that spot we just passed. All three of them plus the girl’s pet dog. Papa tells the girl to dig a shallow grave. Mama gets down on her hands and knees and holds the dog by the collar. When the girl is all through digging, papa gives her a .22 caliber revolver and tells her to shoot the dog. A real touching family scene. Make a good calendar for some religious group to give away. The girl puts the weapon to her temple and kills herself. Now isn’t that a heartwarming story? Restores my faith in just about everything.

A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. (I was lucky to get there on my own, with the help of the women I met.) Instead, our system of “corrections” is about arm’s-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in.

Without the Gospel, I am only projecting behavioral modification. Changes of the heart must trump mere change of behavior. Therefore, the goodness of God through the gospel must trump all other philosophies in the home.

Nothing is more human than to resist loss, which is why cynical politicians can get pretty far by offering up the fantasy that a loss can be reversed rather than overcome the hard way. This is the deepest lie of our recent national politics, the core falsehood encoded in "Make America Great Again." Beneath the impossible promises -- that coal alone will fuel our future, that a big wall can be built around our status quo, that climate change isn't even real -- is the deeper fantasy that time itself can be reversed, all losses restored, and thus no new ways of life required.

Someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus, yes and a Secretary of Jesus.… Dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—“I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.

Under the banner headline WILLIAMS CHARGED IN SLAYING, the story was very brief. It said that at 3:00 A.M., police had been summoned to Mercer House, where they found Danny Hansford, twenty-one, lying dead on the floor in the study, his blood pouring out onto an oriental carpet. He had been shot in the head and chest. There were two pistols at the scene. Several objects in the house had been broken. Williams had been taken into custody, charged with murder, and held on $25,000 bond. Fifteen minutes later, a friend of Williams had arrived at police headquarters with a paper bag containing 250 one-hundred-dollar bills, and Williams was released. That was all the newspaper said about the shooting. Williams was identified as an antiques dealer, a restorer of historic houses, and a giver of elegant parties at his “showplace” home, which Jacqueline Onassis had visited and offered to buy for $2 million. About Danny Hansford, the paper gave no information other than his age

Several years before Maya [Angelou] went home to heaven, she penned the poem popularly known as 'When Great Trees Fall,' but properly titled 'Ailey, Baldwin, Floyd, Killens, and Mayfield,' a lyrical ode she ends this way: And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly.... Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. Her sentiments, so often repeated, powerfully sum up what loss does to the human heart, how it lowers our heads and deepens our sorrows, and yet how, in the end, it miraculously restores us. When great trees fall, we weep in unity with the forest--and we rejoice at the legacy that lingers.

From the beginning, Judeo-Christian principles have been the foundation for American public dialogue and government policy. They serve as the solid basis for political activism in support of a better socioeconomic environment. Found in American homes, truth from the Hebrew Christian Bible has enabled individual liberty to prevail over secular empires because it is a practical message about reality from man’s Creator. In their quest for liberty, Americans focused upon the conspicuously self-evident “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It is the governing character of these principles (laws), such as humility, the Golden Rule, and the Ten Commandments, that leads to success. This is the sure foundation upon which man’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” rests. Called “virtue” by America’s Founding Fathers, the impartial and divine element frees man to do what is right. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3:17).

This tub is for washing your courage...When you are born your courage is new and clean. You are brave enough for anything: crawling off of staircases, saying your first words without fearing that someone will think you are foolish, putting strange things in your mouth. But as you get older, your courage attracts gunk and crusty things and dirt and fear and knowing how bad things can get and what pain feels like. By the time you're half-grown, your courage barely moves at all, it's so grunged up with living. So every once in awhile, you have to scrub it up and get the works going or else you'll never be brave again. Unfortunately, there are not many facilities in your world that provide the kind of services we do. So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of a spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true. ... This tub is for washing your wishes...For the wishes of one's old life wither and shrivel like old leaves if they are not replaced with new wishes when the world changes. And the world always changes. Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, and soon they are just mud, like all the rest of the mud, and not wishes at all, but regrets. The trouble is, not everyone can tell when they ought to launder their wishes. Even when one finds oneself in Fairyland and not at home at all, it is not always so easy to catch the world in its changing and change with it. ... Lastly, we must wash your luck. When souls queue up to be born, they all leap up at just the last moment, touching the lintel of the world for luck. Some jump high and can seize a great measure of luck; some jump only a bit and snatch a few loose strands. Everyone manages to catch some. If one did not have at least a little luck, one would never survive childhood. But luck can be spent, like money, and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life. If you know how to look, you can examine the kneecaps of a human and tell how much luck they have left. No bath can replenish luck that has been spent on avoiding an early death by automobile accident or winning too many raffles in a row. No bath can restore luck lost through absentmindedness and overconfidence. But luck withered by conservative, tired, riskless living can be pumped up again--after all, it is only a bit thirsty for something to do.

7 ALL ELECTRIC J. B. STRAUBEL HAS A TWO-INCH-LONG SCAR that cuts across the middle of his left cheek. He earned it in high school, during a chemistry class experiment. Straubel whipped up the wrong concoction of chemicals, and the beaker he was holding exploded, throwing off shards of glass, one of which sliced through his face. The wound lingers as a tinkerer’s badge of honor. It arrived near the end of a childhood full of experimentation with chemicals and machines. Born in Wisconsin, Straubel constructed a large chemistry lab in the basement of his family’s home that included fume hoods and chemicals ordered, borrowed, or pilfered. At thirteen, Straubel found an old golf cart at the dump. He brought it back home and restored it to working

We’ll come home and eat here and we’ll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we’ll read and then go to bed and make love.” “And we’ll never love anyone else but each other.” “No. Never.

If we deny the wishes of the soul, then soul will become disgusted and withdraw vital energy from our lives. We'll become prone to illness and misfortune. Following the secret wishes of the soul, on the other hand, can return us to the natural path of our energies and restore vitality, good health and good fortune. The process can begin right away, in a round of dream- sharing, when we make room to move with the energy of a dream instead of just talking about it.

Do you know the first thing Jesus did with that meager offering? He looked up to heaven and gave thanks to God for the little he was given by the boy. I wonder what it was like for that boy to see his meager meal held up to the heavens by the hands of a grateful Jesus. Jesus, of course, knew it wasn’t going to remain little, that it was about to be multiplied into great abundance. But let’s not miss this moment. The Son of God, holding our offering up to Almighty God and blessing it with his thanks! Remember Kalli, unable to imagine what she could possibly do to help but volunteering anyway? We need to be like her. We don’t need to know how God is going to use our meager offering. We only need to know that he wants to use it. Always remember that God celebrates our gifts to him and blesses them. Next, Jesus broke the bread and the fish. When he blessed it, there were five and two. But when he broke it, we lose count. The more Jesus broke the bread and fish, the more there was to feed and nourish. The disciples started distributing the food, and soon what was broken was feeding thousands. The miracle is in the breaking. It is in the breaking that God multiplies not enough into more than enough. Are there broken places in your life so painful that you fear the breaking will destroy you? Do you come from a broken home? Did you have a broken marriage? Did you have a broken past? Have you experienced brokenness in your body? Have your finances been broken? You may think your brokenness has disqualified you from being able to run in the divine relay, but as with my own life and Kalli’s, when we give God our brokenness, it qualifies us to be used by God to carry a baton of hope, restoration, and grace to others on the sidelines who are broken.

Pretending as a matter of law that men and women are interchangeable, that “monogamish” relationships work just as well as monogamous relationships, that “throuples” are the same as couples, and that “wedlease” is preferable to wedlock will only lead to more broken homes, more broken hearts, and more intrusive government. Americans should reject such revisionism and work to restore the essentials that make marriage so important for societal welfare: sexual complementarity, monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence.

I get the sense that many in the contemporary biblical womanhood movement feel that the tasks associated with homemaking have been so marginalized in our culture that it’s up to them to restore the sacredness of keeping the home. This is a noble goal indeed, and one around which all people of faith can rally. But in our efforts to celebrate and affirm God’s presence in the home, we should be wary of elevating the vocation of homemaking above all others by insinuating that for women, God’s presence is somehow restricted to that sphere. If God is the God of all pots and pans, then He is also the God of all shovels and computers and paints and assembly lines and executive offices and classrooms. Peace and joy belong not to the woman who finds the right vocation, but to the woman who finds God in any vocation, who looks for the divine around every corner.

Anne, judging from her own temperament, would have deemed such a domestic hurricane a bad restorative of the nerves... but Mrs. Musgrove... concluded a short recapitulation of what she had suffered herself, by observing, with a happy glance round the room, that after all she had gone through, nothing was so likely to do her good as a little quiet cheerfulness at home.

If one has been absent for decades from a place that one once held dear, the wise would generally counsel that one should never return there again. History abounds with sobering examples: After decades of wandering the seas and overcoming all manner of deadly hazards, Odysseus finally returned to Ithaca, only to leave it again a few years later. Robinson Crusoe, having made it back to England after years of isolation, shortly thereafter set sail for that very same island from which he had so fervently prayed for deliverance. Why after so many years of longing for home did these sojourners abandon it so shortly upon their return? It is hard to say. But perhaps for those returning after a long absence, the combination of heartfelt sentiments and the ruthless influence of time can only spawn disappointments. The landscape is not as beautiful as one remembered it. The local cider is not as sweet. Quaint buildings have been restored beyond recognition, while fine old traditions have lapsed to make way for mystifying new entertainments. And having imagined at one time that one resided at the very center of this little universe, one is barely recognized, if recognized at all. Thus do the wise counsel that one should steer far and wide of the old homestead. But no counsel, however well grounded in history, is suitable for all. Like bottles of wine, two men will differ radically from each other for being born a year apart or on neighboring hills. By way of example, as this traveler stood before the ruins of his old home, he was not overcome by shock, indignation, or despair. Rather, he exhibited the same smile, at once wistful and serene, that he had exhibited upon seeing the overgrown road. For as it turns out, one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.

The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year’s, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience. In his opinion, the explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of weather or new epidemics. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naïve hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died. As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal. Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners.

Classifieds" WHOEVER’S found out what location compassion (heart’s imagination) can be contacted at these days, is herewith urged to name the place; and sing about it in full voice, and dance like crazy and rejoice beneath the frail birch that appears to be upon the verge of tears. I TEACH silence in all languages through intensive examination of: the starry sky, the Sinanthropus’ jaws, a grasshopper’s hop, an infant’s fingernails, plankton, a snowflake. I RESTORE lost love. Act now! Special offer! You lie on last year’s grass bathed in sunlight to the chin while winds of summers past caress your hair and seem to lead you in a dance. For further details, write: “Dream.” WANTED: someone to mourn the elderly who die alone in old folks’ homes. Applicants, don’t send forms or birth certificates. All papers will be torn, no receipts will be issued at this or later dates. FOR PROMISES made by my spouse, who’s tricked so many with his sweet colors and fragrances and sounds– dogs barking, guitars in the street– into believing that they still might conquer loneliness and fright, I cannot be responsible. Mr. Day’s widow, Mrs. Night.

Yet for the first time I really understood how my choices made me complicit in their suffering. I was the accomplice to their addiction. A lengthy term of community service working with addicts on the outside would probably have driven the same truth home and been a hell of a lot more productive for the community. But our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right to the people they have harmed. (I was lucky to get there on my own, with the help of the women I met.) Instead, our system of “corrections” is about arm’s-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in.

And now, restored to the status of daughter in her own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people's food seeping into her - because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes imbued with the personality of their creator; Amina ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination. And, although Mary's pickles had a partially counteractive effect - since she had stirred into them the guilt of her heart, and the fear of discovery, so that, good as they tasted, they had the power of making those who ate them subject to nameless uncertainties and dreams of accusing fingers - the diet provided by Reverend Mother filled Amina with a kind of rage, and even produced slight signs of improvements in her defeated husband.

Jesus didn’t talk about a God who wants to burn this place down and take us somewhere else; he talked about the renewing of this place, the only home we’ve ever had. Central to the story of the Bible is the affirmation of trees and seas and rocks and air and soil and blood and sweat and skin and all the materiality and diversity and creativity that we know to be central to our life in this world. Jesus talked about a coming time when God would restore and renew and reconcile and redeem and make things right, and he invites us to anticipate that day by doing our part to bring heaven to earth, here, now, today.

At its core, Jesus’s teaching about the kingdom is summed up in the Lord’s Prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). The prayer is that God’s kingdom will come to earth and that God’s will be done on earth as is the case in heaven. Earth is spoiled by sin, but the question is whether it is spoiled beyond restoration. Jesus’s prayer clearly implies that there is hope.

As the family is restored, the ministry of the household becomes stronger and stronger. Strong families mean effective evangelism. A powerful context for evangelism that is readily accessible to every family is the ministry of hospitality. Hospitality provides an opportunity to show that faith produces more than just talk. It produces works- expressions of love from the very place where love is learned- the Christian home.

I called it the San Clemente Syndrome. Today's Basilica of San Clemente is built on the site of what once was a refuge for persecuted Christians. The home of the Roman consul Titus Flavius Clemens, it was burnt down during Emperor Nero's reign. Next to its charred remains, in what must have been a large, cavernous vault, the Romans built an underground pagan temple dedicated to Mithras, God of the Morning, Light of the World, over whose temple the early Christians built another church, dedicated -coincidentally or not, this is a matter to be further excavated to another Clement, Pope St. Clement, on top of which came yet another church that burnt down and on the site of which stands today's basilica. And the digging could go on and on. Like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like every single one of us, the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations, there is no rock bottom, there is no first anything, no last anything, just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers, like the Christian Catacombs, and right along these, even a Jewish Catacomb.

Often hell is portrayed as a place of punishment and heaven as a place of reward. But this concept easily leads us to think about God as either a policeman, who tries to catch us when we make a mistake and send us to prison when our mistakes become too big, or a Santa Claus, who counts up all our good deeds and puts rewards in our stockings at the end of the year. God, however, is neither a policeman nor a Santa Claus. God does not send us to heaven or hell depending on how often we obey or disobey. God is love and only love. In God there is no hatred, desire for revenge, or pleasure in seeing us punished. God wants to forgive, heal, restore, show us endless mercy, and see us come home. But just as the father of the prodigal son let his son make his own decision, God gives us the freedom to refuse God’s love, even at the risk of destroying ourselves. Hell is not God’s choice. It is ours.

The hospital, by necessity, may send a man home with one leg less: but it will not (in a creative rapture) send him home with one leg extra. Medical science is content with the normal human body, and only seeks to restore it.

In the former Austrian vagabond the conservative classes thought they had found a man who, while remaining their prisoner, would help them attain their goals. The destruction of the Republic was only the first step. What they then wanted was an authoritarian Germany which at home would put an end to democratic “nonsense” and the power of the trade unions and in foreign affairs undo the verdict of 1918, tear off the shackles of Versailles, rebuild a great Army and with its military power restore the country to its place in the sun. These were Hitler’s aims too. And though he brought what the conservatives had lacked, a mass following, the Right was sure that he would remain in its pocket—was he not outnumbered eight to three in the Reich cabinet? Such a commanding position also would allow the conservatives, or so they thought, to achieve their ends without the barbarism of unadulterated Nazism. Admittedly they were decent, God-fearing men, according to their lights.

A pair of swans above the lock, the waters pouring down into the pool below: the rightness of things restored me to my own proper desiring. I got up and walked back home very slowly, putting the right motives back in the right bodies. This is what Duggan did, this is what I did. This is what he wanted and knew, this is what I wanted. This is what I did not want. This is what I did not know. Also, the difference between what happens in your head and what happens in the room. The big difference.

Christianity, therefore, is perhaps the most materialistic of the world’s faiths. Jesus’s miracles were not so much violations of the natural order, but a restoration of the natural order. God did not create a world with blindness, leprosy, hunger, and death in it. Jesus’s miracles were signs that someday all these corruptions of his creation would be abolished. Christians therefore can talk of saving the soul and of building social systems that deliver safe streets and warm homes in the same sentence. With integrity.

Nothing brings home the fragility of the banking system or the potency of a financial crisis more vividly than writing about these issues from the eye of the storm. Watching the world’s central bankers and finance officials grappling with the current situation—trying one thing after another to restore confidence, throwing everything they can at the problem, coping daily with unexpected and startling shifts in market sentiment—reinforces the lesson that there is no magic bullet or simple formula for dealing with financial panics.

In nature, we find so may things. At the water's edge, atop a mountain, or in the middle of a park, I watch my children flourish in who they are. With all the distractions, toys, and walls out of the way, the essence of who they are just shines. When I remember to pay attention, I see it radiating so strongly that I can't help but be brought right into it myself. My children are experts on breathing, on living; they know how to do it. And the open air? Why, that's breath itself. When I find myself in the midst of unsettling chaos-full of more commitments and expectations that we can really handle-I need to look no further than my little ones for the answer to what I've forgotten: Stop. Breathe. Listen. Then we head straight to the beach, or right to the woods, and play until we find ourselves restored.

sweetness on the tongue and a promise of scent on the night air. It was sensual in the best meaning of that word, saturating every sense at once, so that the flesh was known, finally, as a thing of such goodness that man blessed his Creator from morning to night for having made him. Here in this medieval town where once an extraordinary little fellow had burst forth with songs to God, as a passionate lover speaks to his bride, here the restoration of man to his own true home was no longer the dream of saints. It was the wedding feast. It was a word made flesh.

So could a woman be faithfully keeping her house, in exactly the way Paul tells her to, but also have “a job”? Well, the Proverbs 31 woman was doing it—so it would be ludicrous of us to say that women may not engage in any business ventures. Of course the Bible doesn’t prohibit a woman making money. On the other hand, as I’ve written before, that’s not really the problem of our generation. We’ve got bigger questions to answer. We are a generation that needs to recover a sense of the importance of the home, and the importance of wives and mothers who are invested in their people.

Our efforts to ‘re-connect’ William all fail – even increase his confabulatory pressure. But when we abdicate our efforts, and let him be, he sometimes wanders out into the quiet and undemanding garden which surrounds the Home, and there, in his quietness, he recovers his own quiet. The presence of others, other people, excites and rattles him, forces him into an endless, frenzied, social chatter, a veritable delirium of identity-making and -seeking; the presence of plants, a quiet garden, the non-human order, making no social or human demands upon him, allows this identity-delirium to relax, to subside; and by its quiet, non-human self-sufficiency and completeness allows him a rare quietness and self-sufficiency of his own, by offering (beneath, or beyond, all merely human identities and relations) a deep wordless communion with Nature itself, and with this the restored sense of being in the world, being real.

When I describe for my far-away friends the Northwest’s subtle shades of weather — from gloaming skies of ‘high-gray’ to ‘low-gray’ with violet streaks like the water’s delicate aura — they wonder if my brain and body have, indeed, become water-logged. Yet still, I find myself praising the solace and privacy of fine, silver drizzle, the comforting cloaks of salt, mold, moss, and fog, the secretive shelter of cedar and clouds. Whether it’s in the Florida Keys, along the rocky Maine coast, within the Gulf of Mexico’s warm curves, on the brave Outer Banks; or, for those who nestle near inland seas, such as the brine-steeped Great Salk Lake or the Midwest’s Great Lakes — water is alive and in relationship with those of us who are blessed with such a world-shaping, yet abiding, intimate ally. Every day I am moved by the double life of water — her power and her humility. But most of all, I am grateful for the partnership of this great body of inland sea. Living by water, I am never alone. Just as water has sculpted soil and canyon, it also molds my own living space, and every story I tell. …Living by water restores my sense of balance and natural rhythm — the ebb and flow of high tides and low tides, so like the rise and fall of everyday life. Wind, water, waves are not simply a backdrop to my life, they are steady companions. And that is the grace, the gift of inviting nature to live inside my home. Like a Chambered Nautilus I spin out my days, drifting and dreaming, nurtured by marine mists, like another bright shell on the beach, balancing on the back of a greater body.

But someday, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us, the redeeming man, of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality — while it is only his absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality; it's redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it. The man of the future who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and anti-nihilist; this victor over God and nothingness — he must come one day.

With new friendships had come visits to the philosophers and teachers of rhetoric; and, presently, the chance to learn from experts the art of war. He had longed for home and had returned with gladness; but by then he had been received into the mystery of Hellas, forever her initiate. Athens was her altar, almost her self. All he asked of Athens was to restore her glories; her present leaders seemed to him like the Phokians at Delphi, unworthy men who had seized a holy shrine. Deep in his mind moved a knowledge that for Athenians freedom and glory went together; but he was like a man in love, who thinks the strongest trait of the loved one’s nature will be easily changed, as soon as they are married.

It is hypocritical to exhort the Brazilians to conserve their rainforest after we have already destroyed the grassland ecosystem that occupied half the continent when we found it. A large-scale grassland restoration project would give us some moral authority when we seek conservation abroad. I must admit that I also like the idea because it would mean a better home for pronghorn, currently pushed by agriculture into marginal habitats-The high sagebrush deserts of the West. I would love to return the speedsters to their evolutionary home, the Floor of the Sky. Imagine a huge national reserve where anyone could see what caused Lewis and Clark to write with such enthusiasm in their journals-the sea of grass and flowers dotted with massive herds of bison, accompanied by the dainty speedsters and by great herds of elk. Grizzly bears and wolves would patrol the margins of the herds and coyotes would at last be reduced to their proper place. The song of the meadowlarks would pervade the prairie and near water the spring air would ring with the eerie tremolos of snipe.

Eventually every woman who stays away from her soul-home for too long, tires. This is as it should be. Then she seeks her skin again in order to revive her sense of self and soul, in order to restore her deep-eyed and oceanic knowing. This great cycle of going and returning, going and returning, is reflexive within the instinctual nature of women and is innate to all women for all their lives, from throughout girlhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, through being a lover, through motherhood, through being a craftswoman, a wisdom-holder, an elderwoman, and beyond. These phases are not necessarily chronological, for mid-age women are often newborn, old women are intense lovers, and little girls know a good deal about cronish enchantment.

A woman once approached the Buddha in tears. She presented him with her dead child and said, “Lord Buddha, I have heard that you can bring the dead back to life. This is my son who died only this morning. I beg you, Lord Buddha, restore him to me.” The Buddha agreed, provided that the woman bring him a single mustard seed from a home in the village that had not experienced death. The woman ran to the village and went door to door to find even one household that had not been touched by death. She failed. When she returned to the Buddha, her grief was no less but her attitude toward it had changed. She knew the inevitability of suffering and the futility of seeking to make things other than they are. She could now mourn her child and move on.

Girls don’t learn the difference between personal victory and team victory or personal loss and team loss. Girls learned that if you don’t do it yourself, it doesn’t get done. Girls were never asked to fight the war in Vietnam or any other war. But if they had been, girls would have won. Girls would have felt guilty for not winning it sooner, and girls would have restored all of the roads, rebuilt all of the bombed homes, adopted all of the orphans, established daycare centers, domestic violence shelters and homeless shelters, and girls would have processed endlessly about what we could have done to have prevented the war and what we still can do to prevent it from ever happening again. Because girls believe, in the end, everything that happens is our own personal fault.

The Ancestral Trail was split into two-halves of 26 issues each. The first half takes place in the Ancestral World and describes Richard's struggle to restore good to the world. After the initial international run, which sold over 30 million copies worldwide, Marshall Cavendish omitted the second part of the trilogy and used the third part (future) for the second series that followed. This part of the series, written up by Ian Probert and published in 1994, takes place in the Cyber Dimension. It deals with Richard's attempts to return home. Each issue centered on an adventure against a particular adversary, and each issue ended on a cliffhanger. The Ancestral Trail was illustrated by Julek and Adam Heller. Computer-generated graphics were provided by Mehau Kulyk for issues #27 through #52.

Unfortunately the hostility that the European displayed toward the native cultures he encountered he carried even further into his relations with the land. The immense open spaces of the American continents, with all their unexploited or thinly utilized resources, were treated as a challenge to unrelenting war, destruction, and conquest. The forests were there to be cut down, the prairie to be plowed up, the marshes to be filled, the wildlife to be killed for empty sport, even if not utilized for food or clothing. In the act of 'conquering nature' our ancestors too often treated the earth as contemptuously and as brutally as they treated its original inhabitants, wiping out great animal species like the bison and the passenger pigeon, mining the soils instead of annually replenishing them, and even, in the present day, invading the last wilderness areas, precious just because they are still wildernesses, homes for wildlife and solitary human souls. Instead we are surrendering them to six-lane highways, gas stations, amusement parks, and the lumber interests, as in the redwood groves, or Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe-though these primeval areas, once desecrated, can never be fully restored or replaced.

The miracle is in the breaking. It is in the breaking that God multiplies not enough into more than enough. Are there broken places in your life so painful that you fear the breaking will destroy you? Do you come from a broken home? Did you have a broken marriage? Did you have a broken past? Have you experienced brokenness in your body? Have your finances been broken? You may think your brokenness has disqualified you from being able to run in the divine relay, but as with my own life and Kalli’s, when we give God our brokenness, it qualifies us to be used by God to carry a baton of hope, restoration, and grace to others on the sidelines who are broken. What should have disqualified Kalli from the race was the very thing that qualified her for it. Put your broken pieces into God’s hands and watch him use them to work his wonders.

Such was the bridal-hour of Genius and Humanity. Who shall rehearse the tale of their after-union? Who shall depict its bliss and bale? Who shall tell how He, between whom and the Woman God put enmity, forged deadly plots to break the bond or defile its purity? Who shall record the long strife between Serpent and Seraph? How still the Father of Lies insinuated evil into good - pride into wisdom - grossness into glory - pain into bliss - poison into passion? How the 'dreadless Angel' defied, resisted, and repelled? How, again and again, he refined the polluted cup, exalted the debased emotion, rectified the perverted impulse, detected the lurking venom, baffled the frontless temptation - purified, justified, watched, and withstood? How, by his patience, by his strength, by that unutterable excellence he held from God - his Origin - this faithful Seraph fought for Humanity a good fight through time; and, when Time's course closed, and Death was encountered at the end, barring with fleshless arms the portals of Eternity, how Genius still held close his dying bride, sustained her through the agony of the passage, bore her triumphant into his own home - Heaven; restored her, redeemed, to Jehovah - her Maker; and at last, before Angel and Archangel, crowned her with the crown of Immortality. Who shall, of these things, write the chronicle?

Restorative nostalgics don’t just look at old photographs and piece together family stories. They are mythmakers and architects, builders of monuments and founders of nationalist political projects. They do not merely want to contemplate or learn from the past. They want, as Boym puts it, to “rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.” Many of them don’t recognize their own fictions about the past for what they are: “They believe their project is about truth.” They are not interested in a nuanced past, in a world in which great leaders were flawed men, in which famous military victories had lethal side effects. They don’t acknowledge that the past might have had its drawbacks. They want the cartoon version of history, and more importantly, they want to live in it, right now. They don’t want to act out roles from the past because it amuses them: they want to behave as they think their ancestors did, without irony.

Is the sky painted?” Isidore asked. “Are there really brush strokes that show up under magnification?” “Yes,” Mercer said. “I can’t see them.” “You’re too close,” Mercer said. “You have to be a long way off, the way the androids are. They have better perspective.” “Is that why they claim you’re a fraud?” “I am a fraud,” Mercer said. “They’re sincere; their research is genuine. From their standpoint I am an elderly retired bit player named Al Jarry. All of it, their disclosure, is true. They interviewed me at my home, as they claim; I told them whatever they wanted to know, which was everything.” “Including about the whisky?” Mercer smiled. “It was true. They did a good job and from their standpoint Buster Friendly’s disclosure was convincing. They will have trouble understanding why nothing has changed. Because you’re still here and I’m still here.” Mercer indicated with a sweep of his hand the barren, rising hillside, the familiar place. “I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I will never stop searching for you.” “I didn’t like that about the whisky,” Isidore said. “That’s lowering.” “That’s because you’re a highly moral person. I’m not. I don’t judge, not even myself.” Mercer held out a closed hand, palm up. “Before I forget it, I have something of yours here.” He opened his fingers. On his hand rested the mutilated spider, but with its snipped-off legs restored. “Thanks.” Isidore accepted the spider.

Darkness my beloved home, I return! I return, not whole, but damaged. Fatigued by quixotic tendencies, The prodigal has come back famished. An outer world, so hostile and strange Filled immensely with ignorant natives The land where all good is forgotten Where hatred itself is life’s matrix. Though I’ve brought an odd mystery, An enigma that requires my genius A phenomenon, in foreign land; A veiled embodiment of Venus. Since, I’ve craved for my sanctuary, I have returned to you, oh darkness! Now I will restore my lost vigor to Unravel demeanors of this goddess. But..... Why am I estranged to this darkness? Maybe I’ve been away for too long, But shouldn’t home always feel home? Why am I in dire need to belong? As if this soul is deprived of life As if this body is in swift decay As if this mind screams for peace As if this heart calls to be lured ‘way Unwise, to have brought the goddess, When she is of a different realm Unfortunate, to have fallen in love, As she leaves to retain her helm Perhaps, this home lies deep within For everything is, but mere illusion Hence, I’ll reside her in my heart; To feel her, even in seclusion.

My father," said the young man, bending his knee, "bless me!" Morrel took the head of his son between his two hands, drew him forward, and kissing his forehead several times said, "Oh, yes, yes, I bless you in my own name, and in the name of three generations of irreproachable men, who say through me, 'The edifice which misfortune has destroyed, providence may build up again. 'On seeing me die such a death, the most inexorable will have pity on you. To you, perhaps, they will accord the time they have refused to me. Then do your best to keep our name free from dishonor. Go to work, labor, young man, struggle ardently and courageously; live, yourself, your mother and sister, with the most rigid economy, so that from day to day the property of those whom I leave in your hands may augment and fructify. Reflect how glorious a day it will be, how grand, how solemn, that day of complete restoration, on which you will say in this very office, 'My father died because he could not do what I have done; but he died calmly and peaceably, because in dying he knew what I should do.'" "My father!" cried the young man, "why should you not live?" "If I live, all would be changed; if I live, interest would be converted into doubt, pity into hostility; if I live I am only a man who has broken his word, failed in his engagements - in fact, only a bankrupt. If, on the contrary, I die, remember, Maximilian, my corpse is that of an honest but unfortunate man. Living, my best friends would avoid my house; dead, all Marseilles will follow me in tears to my last home. Living, you would feel shame at my name; dead, you may raise your head and say, 'I am the son of him you killed, because, for the first time, he has been compelled to break his word.

great. This is a good description of Rovio, which was around for six years and underwent layoffs before the “instant” success of the Angry Birds video game franchise. In the case of the Five Guys restaurant chain, the founders spent fifteen years tweaking their original handful of restaurants in Virginia, finding the right bun bakery, the right number of times to shake the french fries before serving, how best to assemble a burger, and where to source their potatoes before expanding nationwide. Most businesses require a complex network of relationships to function, and these relationships take time to build. In many instances you have to be around for a few years to receive consistent recognition. It takes time to develop connections with investors, suppliers, and vendors. And it takes time for staff and founders to gain effectiveness in their roles and become a strong team.* So, yes, the bar is high when you want to start a company. You’ll have the chance to work on something you own and care about from day to day. You’ll be 100 percent engaged and motivated, and doing something you believe in. You can lead an integrated life, as opposed to a compartmentalized one in which you play a role in an office and then try to forget about it when you get home. You can define an organization, not the other way around. But even if you quit your job, hunker down for years, work hard for uncertain reward, and ask everyone you know for help, there’s still a great chance that your new business will not succeed. Over 50 percent of companies fail within their first three years.2 There’s a quote I like from an unknown source: “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.

Presumably, it won’t be only one way. Even before the age of climate change, the literature of conservation furnished many metaphors to choose from. James Lovelock gave us the Gaia hypothesis, which conjured an image of the world as a single, evolving quasi-biological entity. Buckminster Fuller popularized “spaceship earth,” which presents the planet as a kind of desperate life raft in what Archibald MacLeish called “the enormous, empty night”; today, the phrase suggests a vivid picture of a world spinning through the solar system barnacled with enough carbon capture plants to actually stall out warming, or even reverse it, restoring as if by magic the breathability of the air between the machines. The Voyager 1 space probe gave us the “Pale Blue Dot”—the inescapable smallness, and fragility, of the entire experiment we’re engaged in, together, whether we like it or not. Personally, I think that climate change itself offers the most invigorating picture, in that even its cruelty flatters our sense of power, and in so doing calls the world, as one, to action. At least I hope it does. But that is another meaning of the climate kaleidoscope. You can choose your metaphor. You can’t choose the planet, which is the only one any of us will ever call home.

American cold war culture represented an age of anxiety. The anxiety was so severe that it sought relief in an insistent, assertive optimism. Much of American popular culture aided this quest for apathetic security. The expanding white middle class sought to escape their worries in the burgeoning consumer culture. Driving on the new highway system in gigantic showboat cars to malls and shopping centers that accepted a new form of payment known as credit cards, Americans could forget about Jim Crow, communism, and the possibility of Armageddon. At night in their suburban homes, television allowed middle class families to enjoy light domestic comedies like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver. Somnolently they watched representations of settled family life, stories where lost baseball gloves and dinnertime hijinks represented the only conflicts. In the glow of a new Zenith television, it became easy to believe that the American dream had been fully realized by the sacrifice and hard work of the war generation. American monsters in pop culture came to the aid of this great American sleep. Although a handful of science fiction films made explicit political messages that unsettled an apathetic America, the vast majority of 'creature features' proffered parables of American righteousness and power. These narratives ended, not with world apocalypse, but with a full restoration of a secure, consumer-oriented status quo. Invaders in flying saucers, radioactive mutations, and giant creatures born of the atomic age wreaked havoc but were soon destroyed by brainy teams of civilian scientists in cooperation with the American military. These films encouraged a certain degree of paranoia but also offered quick and easy relief to this anxiety... Such films did not so much teach Americans to 'stop worrying and love the bomb' as to 'keep worrying and love the state.

AUTHOR’S NOTE Dear reader: This story was inspired by an event that happened when I was eight years old. At the time, I was living in upstate New York. It was winter, and my dad and his best friend, “Uncle Bob,” decided to take my older brother, me, and Uncle Bob’s two boys for a hike in the Adirondacks. When we left that morning, the weather was crisp and clear, but somewhere near the top of the trail, the temperature dropped abruptly, the sky opened, and we found ourselves caught in a torrential, freezing blizzard. My dad and Uncle Bob were worried we wouldn’t make it down. We weren’t dressed for that kind of cold, and we were hours from the base. Using a rock, Uncle Bob broke the window of an abandoned hunting cabin to get us out of the storm. My dad volunteered to run down for help, leaving my brother Jeff and me to wait with Uncle Bob and his boys. My recollection of the hours we spent waiting for help to arrive is somewhat vague except for my visceral memory of the cold: my body shivering uncontrollably and my mind unable to think straight. The four of us kids sat on a wooden bench that stretched the length of the small cabin, and Uncle Bob knelt on the floor in front of us. I remember his boys being scared and crying and Uncle Bob talking a lot, telling them it was going to be okay and that “Uncle Jerry” would be back soon. As he soothed their fear, he moved back and forth between them, removing their gloves and boots and rubbing each of their hands and feet in turn. Jeff and I sat beside them, silent. I took my cue from my brother. He didn’t complain, so neither did I. Perhaps this is why Uncle Bob never thought to rub our fingers and toes. Perhaps he didn’t realize we, too, were suffering. It’s a generous view, one that as an adult with children of my own I have a hard time accepting. Had the situation been reversed, my dad never would have ignored Uncle Bob’s sons. He might even have tended to them more than he did his own kids, knowing how scared they would have been being there without their parents. Near dusk, a rescue jeep arrived, and we were shuttled down the mountain to waiting paramedics. Uncle Bob’s boys were fine—cold and exhausted, hungry and thirsty, but otherwise unharmed. I was diagnosed with frostnip on my fingers, which it turned out was not so bad. It hurt as my hands were warmed back to life, but as soon as the circulation was restored, I was fine. Jeff, on the other hand, had first-degree frostbite. His gloves needed to be cut from his fingers, and the skin beneath was chafed, white, and blistered. It was horrible to see, and I remember thinking how much it must have hurt, the damage so much worse than my own. No one, including my parents, ever asked Jeff or me what happened in the cabin or questioned why we were injured and Uncle Bob’s boys were not, and Uncle Bob and Aunt Karen continued to be my parents’ best friends. This past winter, I went skiing with my two children, and as we rode the chairlift, my memory of that day returned. I was struck by how callous and uncaring Uncle Bob, a man I’d known my whole life and who I believed loved us, had been and also how unashamed he was after. I remember him laughing with the sheriff, like the whole thing was this great big adventure that had fortunately turned out okay. I think he even viewed himself as sort of a hero, boasting about how he’d broken the window and about his smart thinking to lead us to the cabin in the first place. When he got home, he probably told Karen about rubbing their sons’ hands and feet and about how he’d consoled them and never let them get scared. I looked at my own children beside me, and a shudder ran down my spine as I thought about all the times I had entrusted them to other people in the same way my dad had entrusted us to Uncle Bob, counting on the same naive presumption that a tacit agreement existed for my children to be cared for equally to their own.

Heavenly Father, I (we) ask You to camp Your angels around us, our homes, and our properties, to guard us and protect us, and to destroy any evil spirits, demonic spirits, strongmen or messengers of satan, witchcraft, acts of witchcraft, or curse, that try to come against us, against our homes, or against our properties. In the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, I (we) plead the Blood of Jesus Christ over us, over our sleep, over our thoughts, over everything in our rooms, over our homes, and over everything in our homes. I (we) plead the precious Blood of Jesus Christ as our protection. Heavenly Father, I (we) ask You to loose into each of us a Spirit of love, peace, joy, and restoration. Lord Jesus, I (we) ask You to give us sweet sleep tonight, give us peaceful sleep tonight and keep us safe according  to Psalms 4:8; and according to Psalms 127:2, I (we) ask that You give us Your beloved sleep tonight. I (we) ask You to keep Your hands on us while we sleep tonight and speak to our hearts tonight. I (we) ask You to do this in the Name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Heavenly Father, fill us with Your Holy Ghost anointing and power, fill us with Your presence, in the Holy Name of Jesus Christ, I (we) pray with thanksgiving. Lord Jesus, I (we) ask you to do all of these things according to John 14:14; and Heavenly Father I (we) ask You to give us these things according to John 16:23. In the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, I (we) pray with thanksgiving. Amen.

From outside the shelter came children's voices. The shrill squeals brought the excitement of their unseen game into the opaque quiet of Setsuko's world and made her smile. "No war can go on forever. And human beings are the toughest creatures on earth, you know. There's no sense in being in a hurry to die. You MUST LIVE, whatever happens." Shoichi Wakui had squeezed her hand and told her this with an almost violent urgency, though his grasp was weak and his voice halting. Were those the Sugiwaras' children she could hear? The barber had had the presence of mind to rescue his kit when he fled through the flames of his burning shop, and now he was doing a brisk trade, seating his customers on cushions atop piled stones from the foundations. To house his family he'd put a lean-to against the railway embankment, barely enough to keep out the weather, but at least the children were no longer starving. Even in defeat the locally garrisoned soldiers all had some supplies of food, and while waiting to board trains for their hometowns from Yokohama Station they'd sit on the stone seat of the Sugawara Barbershop and have a good shave, leaving the children something to eat as payment. Setsuko no longer felt the rage that had overwhelmed her at the disbanding ceremony. If they had fought on home ground, one hundred million Japanese sworn to die before they would surrender, those children would have had to die too. Those young lives and spirits would have been extinguished in terror and pain and they wouldn't even have understood why. They have a right to go on living, and the strength to do it, Setsuko thought. For their sakes, if no one else's, I should rejoice that the war ended before an invasion reached the home front. Shoichi Wakui's words came back clearly: "Even when a war is lost, people's lives still go on." And Naomis, in the gray notebook: "Every war comes to an end, and when peace is restored Paris rises like a phoenix." But what about those who'd already died? It was agony to think of those who would not rise: the dead would be left where they fell at the ends of the earth while the living would come home with their knapsacks of clothing and food. Whether they had gone to the front or stayed at home, the people had staked their lives for country and Emperor, and after they had lost, the country and the Emperor were still there. Then what had it all meant? Adrift and floundering in despair, Setsuko slipped back into a restless sleep.

We must also know for ourselves that the Lord restored His Church and the priesthood keys through the Prophet Joseph Smith. And we must have an assurance through the Holy Ghost, refreshed often, that those keys have been passed without interruption to the living prophet and that the Lord blesses and directs His people through the line of priesthood keys that reaches down through presidents of stakes and of districts and through bishops and branch presidents to us, wherever we are and no matter how far from the prophet and the Apostles. That is not easy today. It was not easy in the days of Paul. It has always been hard to recognize in fallible human beings the authorized servants of God. Paul must have seemed an ordinary man to many. Joseph Smith's cheerful disposition was seen by some as not fitting their expectations for a prophet of God. Satan will always work on the Saints of God to undermine their faith in priesthood keys. One way he does it is to point out the humanity of those who hold them. He can in that way weaken our testimony and so cut us loose from the line of keys by which the Lord ties us to Him and can take us and our families home to Him and to our Heavenly Father. Satan succeeded in undermining the testimony of men who had, with Joseph Smith, seen the heavens opened and heard the voices of angels. The evidence of their physical eyes and ears was not enough when they no longer could feel the testimony that the priesthood keys were still in place with Joseph. The warning for us is plain. If we look for human frailty in humans, we will always find it. When we focus on finding the frailties of those who hold priesthood keys, we run risks for ourselves. When we speak or write to others of such frailties, we put them at risk. We live in a world where finding fault in others seems to be the favorite blood sport. It has long been the basis of political campaign strategy. It is the theme of much television programming across the world. Whenever we meet anyone, our first, almost unconscious reaction may be to look for imperfections. To keep ourselves grounded in the Lord's Church, we can and must train our eyes to recognize the power of the Lord in the service of those He has called. We must be worthy of the companionship of the Holy Ghost. And we need to pray for the Holy Ghost to help us know that men who lead us hold this power. For me, such prayers are most often answered when I am fully engaged in the Lord's service myself.

Thank you for coming with me.” She knew it was no small thing. Dom was Monarch of Iona now, the leader of an enclave shattered by war and betrayal. He should have been at home with his people, helping them restore what was nearly lost forever. Instead, he looked grimly down a sand dune, his clothes poorly suited to the climate, his appearance sticking sticking out of the desert like the sorest of thumbs. While so many things had changed, Dom’s ability to look out of place never did. He even wore his usual cloak, a twin to the one he lost months ago. The gray green had become a comfort like nothing else, just like the silhouette of his familiar form. He loomed always, never far from her side. It was enough to make Sorasa’s eyes sting, and turn her face to hide in her hood for a long moment. Dom paid it no notice, letting her recover. Instead, he fished an apple from his saddlebags and took a noisy bite. “I saved the realm,” he said, shrugging. The least I can do is try to see some of it.” Sorasa was used to Elder manners by now. Their distant ways, their inability to understand subtle hints. The side of her mouth raised against her hood, and she turned back to face him, smirking. “Thank you for coming with me,” she said again. “Oh,” he answered, shifting to look at her. The green of his eyes danced, bright against the desert. “Where else would I go?” Then he passed the rest of the apple over to her. She finished the rest without a thought. His hand lingered, though, scarred knuckles on a tattooed arm. She did not push him away. Instead, Sorasa leaned, so that her shoulder brushed his own, putting some of her weight on him. “Am I still a waste of arsenic?” he said, his eyes never moving from her face. Sorasa stopped short, blinking in confusion. “What?” “When we first met.” His own smirk unfurled. “You called me a waste of arsenic.” In a tavern in Byllskos, after I dumped poison in his cup, and watched him drink it all. Sorasa laughed at the memory, her voice echoing over the empty dunes. In that moment, she thought Domacridhan was her death, another assassin sent to kill her. Now she knew he was the opposite entirely. Slowly, she raised her arm and he did not flinch. It felt strange still, terrifying and thrilling in equal measure. His cheek was cool under under her hand, his scars familiar against her palm. Elders were less affected by the desert heat, a fact that Sorasa used to her full advantage. “No,” she answered, pulling his face down to her own. “I would waste all the arsenic in the world on you.” “Is that a compliment, Amhara?” Dom muttered against her lips. No, she tried to reply. On the golden sand, their shadows met, grain by grain, until there was no space left at all.

Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London … “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” … The word that offends against realism here is “enjoy.” I’m sorry—enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion … Only sometimes, when you’re being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what’s happening to you where you’ll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you’ll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion … This really is a bizarre category error. But not necessarily an innocent one … The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren’t being “worried” by us believer … Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What’s so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? … Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on your heart would be to tell the funniest, sharpest-tongued person you know about it: but that person no longer inhabits the creature who will meet you when you unlock the door. Respite care would help, but nothing will restore your sweetheart, your true love, your darling, your joy. Or suppose you’re that boy in the wheelchair, the one with the spasming corkscrew limbs and the funny-looking head. You’ve never been able to talk, but one of your hands has been enough under your control to tap out messages. Now the electrical storm in your nervous system is spreading there too, and your fingers tap more errors than readable words. Soon your narrow channel to the world will close altogether, and you’ll be left all alone in the hulk of your body. Research into the genetics of your disease may abolish it altogether in later generations, but it won’t rescue you. Or suppose you’re that skanky-looking woman in the doorway, the one with the rat’s nest of dreadlocks. Two days ago you skedaddled from rehab. The first couple of hits were great: your tolerance had gone right down, over two weeks of abstinence and square meals, and the rush of bliss was the way it used to be when you began. But now you’re back in the grind, and the news is trickling through you that you’ve fucked up big time. Always before you’ve had this story you tell yourself about getting clean, but now you see it isn’t true, now you know you haven’t the strength. Social services will be keeping your little boy. And in about half an hour you’ll be giving someone a blowjob for a fiver behind the bus station. Better drugs policy might help, but it won’t ease the need, and the shame over the need, and the need to wipe away the shame. So when the atheist bus comes by, and tells you that there’s probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it’s true, is that anyone who isn’t enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. The three of you are, for instance; you’re all three locked in your unshareable situations, banged up for good in cells no other human being can enter. What the atheist bus says is: there’s no help coming … But let’s be clear about the emotional logic of the bus’s message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation, on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation. St Augustine called this kind of thing “cruel optimism” fifteen hundred years ago, and it’s still cruel.