Messy House Quotes

A messy house is a must - it separates your true friends from other friends. Real friends are there to visit you not your house!

People truly engaged in life have messy houses.

I am an artist, my hair is rarely tamed & sometimes I sleep till noon, My house is messy and I speak to the moon. I care less about the materials that I share with my world and more about the passion inside myself. Im an artist, what more can you expect? i am full of soul, love and all the rest.

Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I am no authority on sane living.

Daughter, that's life: messy, confusing, heartbreaking, but wonderful.

A mother needs to be in the home even when the kids aren’t. A messy house sends a coded message to children: “I’m not loveable. Otherwise Mother would dust.

I don't know what I was thinking, coming out here. There are no silver bullets in life, there's just the long, messy climb out of the pit you've dug youself.

The woman who opens the door has a blue stain on her shirt and dark hair wound into a messy knot and the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. They're pale, like a lioness's, nearly golden, but they also look like they've done their fair share of crying, and we all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn't have any.

There are no silver bullets in life; there's just the long, messy climb out of the pit you've dug yourself.

Here is the thing about my grief: It’s like a very messy room in a house where the electricity has gone out.

She stands on the cliffs, near the old crumbling stone house. There's nothing left in the house but an upturned table, a ladle, and a clay bowl. She stands for more than an hour, goose-bumped and shivering. At these times, she won't confide in me. She runs her hands over her body, as if checking that it's still there, her heart pulsing and beating. The limbs are smooth and strong, thin and sinewy, her hair long and black and messy and gleaming despite her age. You wouldn't know it to look at her, that she's lived long enough to look for what's across the water. Eighty years later, and she is still fifteen.

People truly engaged with life have messy houses.

Lazier?” Lust supplied. “He is, trust me. All he does is lounge about with his books. His House is one giant, messy library. Not an orgy or sinful tableau to be found in the whole of his circle. I can’t tell you the last time he engaged in debauchery. I bet he hasn’t even stroked his own cock in a decade. Fucking insulting to demons everywhere.

If you were married to yourself could you stay with yourself? My house would be frightening and wild.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I'm no authority on sane living. Which is all true and no hep at all, because this form of love is like the pain of childbirth: so intense it's hard to remember afterwards, or what kind of screams and grimaces it pushed you into.

And don't think that has anything to do with this." He points to his eye. "I'm aware in the moments I lack emotion. You and Garrick don't need to share little oh no glances. I already feel it. It's like sliding over a frozen lake while a shrinking part of me screams that I'm supposed to be swimming in those pieces I've bartered away, and those feelings are right beneath the surface, but fuck is skating faster and a hell of a lot less messy. This shit?" He swings his finger back toward the house. "It's messy and painful and infuriating, and if I could choose to give this portion of myself away, so help me, Malek, I would. I get it now. It's not just the power that's addicting; it's the freedom to not feel this." "Xaden," I whisper, all but bleeding out by the time he finishes. [...] "Don't barter it away." I beg as he stares at the sea and the words spill out of me faster and faster as his eyes harden and he resurrects the defences it took me a year to break past. "The pain. The mess. Give it to me. I'll hold it. I know that sounds ludicrous, but I'll find a way." I lace our fingers. "I will hold everything you don't want to feel because I love every part of you." "You already hold my soul and now you want my pain? Getting greedy, Violence." He brings my hand to his mouth and brushes a kiss over my knuckles before letting go.

Daughter, that's life: messy, confusing, heartbreaking, but wonderful. All any of us can do is to try to be ur best, and to learn from our mistakes, as well as our victories

JOY CHOSE YOU Joy does not arrive with a fanfare on a red carpet strewn with the flowers of a perfect life joy sneaks in as you pour a cup of coffee watching the sun hit your favourite tree just right and you usher joy away because you are not ready for her your house is not as it should be for such a distinguished guest but joy, you see cares nothing for your messy home or your bank balance or your waistline joy is supposed to slither through the cracks of your imperfect life that’s how joy works you cannot truly invite her you can only be ready when she appears and hug her with meaning because in this very moment joy chose you.

A relationship is like a house. You continue letting everyone in, it will eventually get messy.

Messy love is better than none. I guess. I'm no authority on sane living.

A monk’s day begins with cleaning. We sweep the temple grounds and gardens and polish the main temple hall. We don’t do this because it’s dirty or messy. We do it to eliminate the suffering in our hearts.

I will say this about houses. Those perfect, neat colonials I'd passed earlier that evening on my way through X-ville are the death masks of normal people. Nobody is really so orderly, so perfect. To have a house like that says more about what's wrong with you than any decrepit dump. Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses.

Organization means having a place for everything in your home and having a system for getting it there. “Tidiness” and “messiness” describe how quickly things go back to their place. A tidy person typically returns things to their home immediately whereas a messy person does not.

My shoes were all muddy, so before I walked in my friend's house I sprinkled grass clippings all over my feet and said, “Excuse the mess—I just stepped in real estate.” While the value of my words wasn’t like 2007 prices, it was still worth enough for him to let me in without making me take off my shoes.

Unless you’re a recovering alcoholic or Mormon or have liver problems, you should always have booze in the house. We were once invited to an acquaintance’s place for brunch and they offered us green tea and salad and it was a fucking nightmare.

f you had slept in the same house or field with Jesus, awakened with him, eaten with him and helped him, what would you have observed? One thing we always think of is that Jesus gave himself almost entirely to what we would consider interruptions. Most of the teaching, healing and wonders we see in his life were responsive...seemingly unplanned. He trusted that what the Father allowed to cross his path was exactly that...from the Father. Jesus always seemed willing for things to get messy

The trousers were miles too long, even when Peter cuffed the legs. The socks bagged in the ankles, and the shirt and sweater were equally large. But when Peter finally managed to get the collars to lie right and glanced at the reflection he'd carved out of the dust on James's mirror, a shock went through him. This was the face which had haunted him all his life, the one he had looked in the eye on the day he left the Darling house for the last time. The hair, messy and short, enthusiastically curling without the weight of his old braid to drag it down. The stubborn chin. The clear, sharp, sullen eyes full of everything he had never been allowed to be. Peter ran his hands over himself slowly, breathing tentatively, feeling the weight of his chest under his shirt. He had given this body up. He had thought it belonged to Wendy, to the girl he wasn't. He had let his family make him believe that the only way he would ever be a boy was to be born again in a different shape, leaving everything of his body and history behind. He breathed out and settled in the feeling of being himself, of being something whole.

Why is Nana's house so messy?', she asked after an incongruous moment. Vicky smiled. Ah, well you see, your Nana is a very special lady. She's really quite magical, you know. And when she looks at the world, she sees it in a very special way, like it's a party bag or a toy shop, and she likes to keep bits of it, and she feels sad when she throws things away.

No matter how messy your house may be, tidying deals with physical objects. No matter how much stuff you may own, the amount is always finite.

When someone is walking beside us, we have more courage to walk into the unknown and to risk the dark and messy places in our journey.

From a raging fire that threatened to turn Hazel’s world to ash, the longing instead dampened to a small flame, a flickering candle visible only in the corner of her eyes. You can’t speak to him now, but he’s there if you need him, the candle said. He’s just there, only just out of view. That was the real way she survived losing Jack: by pretending that she hadn’t lost him at all, and that at any moment she might walk up to the big house and see him smiling up at her over tea, see the way his canine teeth extended past the others and overlapped, see his messy hair, which had always contained a hidden pocket of sawdust.

It didn’t look like a house they’d just moved into. There were LEGO robots on the stairs and two cats sleeping on the sofa in the living room. The coffee table was stacked with magazines, and a little kid’s winter coat was spread on the floor. The whole house smelled like fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies. There was jazz music coming from the kitchen. It seemed like a messy, happy kind of home—the kind of place that had been lived in forever.

And don't think that has anything to do with this." He points to his eye. "I'm aware in the moments I lack emotion. You and Garrick don't need to share little oh no glances. I already feel it. It's like sliding over a frozen lake while a shrinking part of me screams that I'm supposed to be swimming in those pieces I've bartered away, and those feelings are right beneath the surface, but fuck is skating faster and a hell of a lot less messy. This shit?" He swings his finger back toward the house. "It's messy and painful and infuriating, and if I could choose to give this portion of myself away, so help me, Malek, I would. I get it now. It's not just the power that's addicting; it's the freedom to not feel this." "Xaden," I whisper, all but bleeding out by the time he finishes. [...] "Don't barter it away." I beg as he stares at the sea and the words spill out of me faster and faster as his eyes harden and he resurrects the defences it took me a year to break past. "The pain. The mess. Give it to me. I'll hold it. I know that sounds ludicrous, but I'll find a way." I lace our fingers. "I will hold everything you don't want to feel because I love every part of you." "You already hold my soul and now you want my pain? Getting greedy, Violence." He brings my hand to his mouth and brushes a kiss over my knuckles before letting go.

A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses. I knew this implicitly at age twenty-four. Of course at twenty-four I was also obsessed with death.

It is a fact of life that oversimplified accounts of the development of science are often necessary in its teaching. Most scientific progress is a messy, complex and slow process; only with the hindsight of an overall understanding of a phenomenon can a story be told pedagogically rather than chronologically. This necessitates the distilling of certain events and personalities from the melee: those who are deemed to have made the most important contributions. It is inevitable therefore that the many smaller or less important advances scattered randomly across hundreds of years of scientific history tend to be swept up like autumn leaves into neat piles, on top of which sit larger-than-life personalities credited with taking a discipline forward in a single jump. Sometimes this is perfectly valid, and one cannot deny the genius of an Aristotle, a Newton, a Darwin or an Einstein. But it often leaves behind forgotten geniuses and unsung heroes.

Prior to the HD diagnosis, instances of hoarding have also been referred to as Collyer Brothers syndrome, chronic disorganization, pack rat syndrome, messy house syndrome, pathological collecting, clutter addiction, Diogenes syndrome, squalor syndrome, senile recluse syndrome, and syllogomania (stockpiling rubbish). Some of these terms remain in use.

When someone is walking beside us, we have more courage to walk into the unknown and to risk the dark and messy places in our journey.

A house is spotless, but a home is messy filled with people who live there.

There are no silver bullets in life, there's just the long, messy climb out of the pit you've dug yourself.

Maybe the truth is always messy that way.

In conclusion: being messy is not a moral failing, tidy is simply a preference, organization is functional, and you deserve to function.

room with you. Everything feels sexy to me now. Everything feels new. Four kids and a messy house and a thousand other things we women deal with had weighed me down. And now I feel lighter. All thanks to you. I guess this is just my way of saying thank you for our time together. I think I needed it. I know I should feel terrible about it all. And I suppose I do. But still, Ken, thank you.

As a nine-year-old, I was sorry for everything. "Sonie, you left the refrigerator open!" "Sorry." "Sonya, why is your coat on the couch?" "Sorry." "Sonya, did you get grape jelly on the white pantsuit I paid good money for?" "Sorry, sorry, sorry..." A litany of apologies for my ever clumsy, messy, forgetful self, who spilled evidence of such all over the house. "Sorry" was my way of gathering up the spill.

Create your own permission slip for joy. Write three words: Accept. Adapt. Depend. Carry this permission slip with you. Tell your friends you’re working on becoming more content, more joyful. Take a nap. Live with a messy house for a time. Order takeout. File an extension on your taxes. Stare out the window. Linger in the company of a friend. Breathe in the fullness of life. Use those words to fight back with joy.

Sometimes bad shit happens, and you have to protect the people you love,” Leon said. “It would be nice if you can do that and keep your hands clean but life doesn’t work that way. Life is messy, and sometimes you must do what needs to be done to keep your family safe. It doesn’t make you a bad person.” I’d have to thank Kurt. “One day some other Prime will threaten our House, and when that day comes, I’ll hill him.” What? “I’ll do it quiet and clean, and nobody will ever know.” Leon smiled. “I’m going to be a dark horse, House Baylor’s secret. I’ll be the best assassin. A legend. They’ll never see me coming.” I would kill Kurt. I would strangle him with my bare hands.

know what yer thinking: how can I not know if all day, every day I’m hearing every thought of the two men who run my house? That’s the thing, tho. Noise is noise. It’s crash and clatter and it usually adds up to one big mash of sound and thought and picture and half the time it’s impossible to make any sense of it at all. Men’s minds are messy places and Noise is like the active, breathing face of that mess. It’s what’s true and what’s believed and what’s imagined and what’s fantasized and it says one thing and a completely opposite thing at the same time and even tho the truth is definitely in there, how can you tell what’s true and what’s not when yer getting everything? The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.

In two weeks, our house will be empty. And then the stagers will descend with the trucks full of no one’s furniture and art and try to make it look like a different family lived there, an imaginary family with no photographs or mail or food in their refrigerator. In real life, we were sometimes messy. We didn’t always do the dishes. We left pots soaking. We let the papers pile up, and left too many pairs of shoes by the door, and didn’t vacuum as much as we should have. We were not always happy, but we were always us.

Social expectations about what men and women do play out in the housework realm. For example, a single man who lives alone and is a slob is commonplace. Anna Quindlen's statement that most men live like “bears with furniture”24 is an affectionate testimony to this. People aren’t surprised when single men are slobs, yet few blame a messy house on a husband once men get married. A woman who lives alone and keeps her apartment like a pigsty is more likely to be viewed in a critical way by both men and women. In fact, women do even more housework when they marry and men do even less.

Perfectionism is often context-specific. You might feel pressure to present perfectly in social situations, or you might have job-based perfectionism. In short, even if your house is messy or you haven’t been promoted in the last six months, you still might be struggling with perfectionist tendencies.

It never was about the musician or the instrument - it was about the laser notes in a hall of mirrors, the music itself. It was going to change the world for the better and it has. Maybe not as fast or as much as we wanted, but it has and it still will. Whether your name is Mozart, or Django Reinhardt, or Robert Johnson, or Jimi Hendrix, or whoever is next; who you are doesn't matter so long as you can open that conduit and let the music come through. It is the burning edge, whatever it sounds like and whoever is playing it. It is the noisy, messy, silly, invincible voice of life that comes through the LP on the turn-table, the transistor radio, or the Bose in your new Lexus that makes you want to get up out of whatever you are stuck in and dance. It is Dionysus and the Maenads all over again. No one can control it and I pity whoever tries. I am old now and only a house cat sunning herself in the window - but I was a tigress once, and I remember. I still remember.

The house was once magical, once filled with love and joy and plans for the future. It was entirely too big for the young newlyweds who purchased it, both eager to fill the spare bedrooms with babies, to fill the expansive kitchen with little footprints and messy high chairs, to fill the walls with memories captured in sepia-tone photographs.

when you look at very messy space, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Take a few minutes to speak some compassionate words to yourself and take a deep breath. Although it looks like a lot, there are actually only five things in any room: (1) trash, (2) dishes, (3) laundry, (4) things that have a place and are not in their place, and (5) things that do not have a place.

So walk across the street, or drive across town, or fly across the country, but don’t let really intimate loving friendships become the last item on a long to-do list. Good friendships are like breakfast. You think you’re too busy to eat breakfast, but then you find yourself exhausted and cranky halfway through the day, and discover that your attempt to save time totally backfired. In the same way, you can try to go it alone because you don’t have time or because your house is too messy to have people over, or because making new friends is like the very worst parts of dating. But halfway through a hard day or a hard week, you’ll realize in a flash that you’re breathtakingly lonely, and that the Christmas cards aren’t much company.

Jack Thornton expected Jacob to be a math savant when that's not always part of Asperger's in spite of what Hollywood seems to think. Instead, he's been frustrated by a student whose handwriting is messy, who transposes numbers when doing calculations and who is far too literal to understand some of the theoretical concepts of math like imaginary numbers and matrices.

Get Inspired: Most of us are trying to live an authentic life. Deep down, we want to take off our game face and be real and imperfect. There is a line from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” that serves as a reminder to me when I get into that place where I’m trying to control everything and make it perfect.6 The line is, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” So many of us run around spackling all of the cracks, trying to make everything look just right. This line helps me remember the beauty of the cracks (and the messy house and the imperfect manuscript and the too-tight jeans). It reminds me that our imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together. Imperfectly, but together.

Let’s imagine a cluttered room. It does not get messy all by itself. You, the person who lives in it, makes the mess. There is a saying that “a messy room equals a messy mind.” I look at it this way. When a room becomes cluttered, the cause is more than just physical. Visible mess helps distract us from the true source of the disorder. The act of cluttering is really an instinctive reflex that draws our attention away from the heart of an issue. If you can’t feel relaxed in a clean and tidy room, try confronting your feeling of anxiety. It may shed light on what is really bothering you. When your room is clean and uncluttered, you have no choice but to examine your inner state. You can see any issues you have been avoiding and are forced to deal with them. From the moment you start tidying, you will be compelled to reset your life. As a result, your life will start to change. That’s why the task of putting your house in order should be done quickly. It allows you to confront the issues that are really important. Tidying is just a tool, not the final destination. The true goal should be to establish the lifestyle you want most once your house has been put in order. Storage

Lots of decisions are moral decisions, but cleaning your car regularly is not one of them. You can be a fully functioning, fully successful, happy, kind, generous adult and never be very good at cleaning your dishes in a timely manner or have an organized home. How you relate to care tasks—whether you are clean or dirty, messy or tidy, organized or unorganized—has absolutely no bearing on whether you are a good enough person.

Truth? Sometimes I question every last thing I’m doing. Truth? Right now, those questions swirl every damn day. Is this also true for you? Still, we keep moving forward, you and I. We try new things. We doggedly keep on doing the old things because though they may not have worked in the past it doesn’t feel like crazy to continue, it feels like the space of trusting some wild sort of knowing. We love, good and hard. We show up for life. In the midst of depression, insanely messy houses, and bank accounts sliding closer and closer to that fine red line, and panic attacks, and kids who won’t listen but who damn well know how to question and love. And we make stuff. My god, the way we keep on making stuff. Because we can and we have to. Because it’s the only damn thing that feels right when everything else feels a hundred kinds of wrong. We create. Defiant and determined and true. Weary hearts brought to blazing life if only for those wild moments we dance with the muse.

I love you,” he starts with the phrase he loves to repeat at least a hundred times a day. “I love you so much, and I know it’s soon, but fuck, Ollie, I just really love you. When I’m gone, all I can think about is cuddling you on the couch, or falling asleep with you in my arms, or you walking around the house in the morning wearing nothing but my T-shirt with your sleepy smile, your curls trying to escape from your messy bun. When I get off the plane, you’re the first person I want to see. And when I’m home…I want you to be home too. I want us to be home together.

In the twenty-first century, the visions of J.C. Nichols and Walt Disney have come full circle and joined. “Neighborhoods” are increasingly “developments,” corporate theme parks. But corporations aren’t interested in the messy ebb and flow of humanity. They want stability and predictable rates of return. And although racial discrimination is no longer a stated policy for real estate brokers and developers, racial and social homogeneity are still firmly embedded in America’s collective idea of stability; that’s what our new landlords are thinking even if they are not saying it.

After he's gone Greer sits for a long time. She rests her head on her knees and weeps - not because she loved Blake and not because she's lost him. But because she did not care of herself. She knew Blake's nature the moment she met him, just as she knew the philandering fiancé. She knew them and she knew herself. Greer thinks of the story of the scorpion and the frog, and she knows she cannot blame these men for her messy life, they only did what she always knew they would do. No, this is not about crushed hopes and broken dreams. This is about trusting her own heart. Hope doesn't even enter into it.

I didn't do well at school. I cleaned houses and offices for a living. Some people looked down on me. Yet, Essie never did. She had her demands, liked her carpets cleaned a certain way, and hated the smell of grapefruit in her bathroom. But she treated me with respect, like I was a human being. If she asked me a question, she listened to my answer and considered it. Even a small gap in a door can let in a lot of light. And it made me feel special. I'm proud to be one of the few people she let into her life. The other people were you. Our relationships with her weren't smooth. Maybe Essie could have treated people better. Maybe they could have treated her better too...

I shoot up out of my chair. “It’s Bree. Hide the board!” Everyone hops out of their chairs and starts scrambling around and bumping into each other like a classic cartoon. We hear the door shut behind her, and the whiteboard is still standing in the middle of the kitchen like a lit-up marquee. I hiss at Jamal, “Get rid of it!” His eyes are wide orbs, head whipping around in all directions. “Where? In the utensil drawer? Up my shirt?! There’s nowhere! That thing is huge!” “LADY IN THE HOUSE!” Bree shouts from the entryway. The sound of her tennis shoes getting kicked off echoes around the room, and my heart races up my throat. Her name is pasted all over that whiteboard along with phrases like “first kiss—keep it light” and “entwined hand-holding” and “dirty talk about her hair”. Yeah…I’m not sure about that last one, but we’ll see. Basically, it’s all laid out there—the most incriminating board in the world. If Bree sees this thing, it’s all over for me. “Erase it!” Price whispers frantically. “No, we didn’t write it down anywhere else! We’ll lose all the ideas.” I can hear Bree’s footsteps getting closer. “Nathan? Are you home?” “Uh—yeah! In the kitchen.” Jamal tosses me a look like I’m an idiot for announcing our location, but what am I supposed to do? Stand very still and pretend we’re not all huddled in here having a Baby-Sitter’s Club re-enactment? She would find us, and that would look even worse after keeping quiet. “Just flip it over!” I tell anyone who’s not running in a circle chasing his tail. As Lawrence flips the whiteboard, Price tells us all to act natural. So of course, the second Bree rounds the corner, I hop up on the table, Jamal rests his elbow on the wall and leans his head on his hand, and Lawrence just plops down on the floor and pretends to stretch. Derek can’t decide what to do so he’s caught mid-circle. We all have fake smiles plastered on. Our acting is shit. Bree freezes, blinking at the sight of each of us not acting at all natural. “Whatcha guys doing?” Her hair is a cute messy bun of curls on the top of her head and she’s wearing her favorite joggers with one of my old LA Sharks hoodies, which she stole from my closet a long time ago. It swallows her whole, but since she just came from the studio, I know there is a tight leotard under it. I can barely find her in all that material, and yet she’s still the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen. Just her presence in this room feels like finally getting hooked up to oxygen after days of not being able to breathe deeply. We all respond to Bree’s question at the same time but with different answers. It’s highly suspicious and likely what makes her eyes dart to the whiteboard. Sweat gathers on my spine. “What’s with the whiteboard?” she asks, taking a step toward it. I hop off the table and get in her path. “Huh? Oh, it’s…nothing.” She laughs and tries to look around me. I pretend to stretch so she can’t see. “It doesn’t look like nothing. What? Are you guys drawing boobies on that board or something? You look so guilty.” “Ah—you caught us! Lots of illustrated boobs drawn on that board. You don’t want to see it.” She pauses, a fading smile hovering on her lips, and her eyes look up to meet mine. “For real—what’s going on? Why can’t I see it?” She doesn’t believe my boob explanation. I guess we should take that as a compliment? My eyes catch over Bree’s shoulder as Price puts himself out of her line of sight and begins miming the action of getting his phone out and taking a picture of the whiteboard. This little show is directed at Derek, who is standing somewhere behind me. Bree sees me watching Price and whips her head around to catch him. He freezes—hands extended looking like he’s holding an imaginary camera. He then transforms that into a forearm stretch. “So tight after our workout today.” Her eyes narrow.

Jack took two steps towards the couch and then heard his daughter’s distressed wails, wincing. “Oh, right. The munchkin.” He instead turned and headed for the stairs, yawning and scratching his messy brown hair, calling out, “Hang on, chubby monkey, Daddy’s coming.” Jack reached the top of the stairs. And stopped dead. There was a dragon standing in the darkened hallway. At first, Jack swore he was still asleep. He had to be. He couldn’t possibly be seeing correctly. And yet the icy fear slipping down his spine said differently. The dragon stood at roughly five feet tall once its head rose upon sighting Jack at the other end of the hallway. It was lean and had dirty brown scales with an off-white belly. Its black, hooked claws kneaded the carpet as its yellow eyes stared out at Jack, its pupils dilating to drink him in from head to toe. Its wings rustled along its back on either side of the sharp spines protruding down its body to the thin, whip-like tail. A single horn glinted sharp and deadly under the small, motion-activated hallway light. The only thing more noticeable than that were the many long, jagged scars scored across the creature’s stomach, limbs, and neck. It had been hunted recently. Judging from the depth and extent of the scars, it had certainly killed a hunter or two to have survived with so many marks. “Okay,” Jack whispered hoarsely. “Five bucks says you’re not the Easter Bunny.” The dragon’s nostrils flared. It adjusted its body, feet apart, lips sliding away from sharp, gleaming white teeth in a warning hiss. Mercifully, Naila had quieted and no longer drew the creature’s attention. Jack swallowed hard and held out one hand, bending slightly so his six-foot-two-inch frame was less threatening. “Look at me, buddy. Just keep looking at me. It’s alright. I’m not going to hurt you. Why don’t you just come this way, huh?” He took a single step down and the creature crept forward towards him, hissing louder. “That’s right. This way. Come on.” Jack eased backwards one stair at a time. The dragon let out a warning bark and followed him, its saliva leaving damp patches on the cream-colored carpet. Along the way, Jack had slipped his phone out of his pocket and dialed 9-1-1, hoping he had just enough seconds left in the reptile’s waning patience. “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?” “Listen to me carefully,” Jack said, not letting his eyes stray from the dragon as he fumbled behind him for the handle to the sliding glass door. He then quickly gave her his address before continuing. “There is an Appalachian forest dragon in my house. Get someone over here as fast as you can.” “We’re contacting a retrieval team now, sir. Please stay calm and try not to make any loud noises or sudden movements–“ Jack had one barefoot on the cool stone of his patio when his daughter Naila cried for him again. The dragon’s head turned towards the direction of upstairs. Jack dropped his cell phone, grabbed a patio chair, and slammed it down on top of the dragon’s head as hard as he could.

The doorbell rings again, and I thank God for small miracles. "Hold again," I say as I hold against my shoulder. I walk over, smiling because I know that Nicole must be going out of her mind. "Did you for--" "Hello, Officer Covey." Eli grins as he leans against the doorframe. "I was hoping you were home. We didn't get a chance to finish our conversation." Not even thinking, I close the door and stand there. Holy shit. What the hell? "Heather?" Nicole's voice is a buzzing in my ear. Or is that my suddenly frantic pulse? "Hmm?" I can't speak. Eli Walsh is at my freaking house. "Is that whole I think it is?" I rise onto my tiptoes and peek out the peephole. Sure enough, he's right there, smiling as if he has not a care in the world. "Yup." "Are you fucking kidding?" Nicole screams. "Holy shit, Nic. What the hell do I do?" My heart continues to race, and I'm completely freaking out. Nicole chuckles and then proceeds to yell again. "Open the goddamn door!" I look in the mirror and groan. I have on shorts and an oversized sweatshirt, which now has a beautiful pizza stain on the front. My hair is in a messy bun, I'm not wearing any makeup, and I have my glasses on instead of my contacts. I can't believe this. Eli knocks again. "Heather, I can hear you on the other side." My hand presses against the wood and I close my eyes, "What do you want, Eli?" "Heather! Open the fucking door right now!" Nicole's voice raises in my ear. "Shut up!" I yell at my jackass best friend. "I didn't say anything," Eli answers.

Sometimes our need clouds our ability to develop perspective. Being needy is kind of like losing your keys. You become desperate and search everywhere. You search in places you know damn well what you are looking for could never be. The more frantic you become in trying to find them the less rational you are in your search. The less rational you become the more likely you'll be searching in a way that actually makes finding what you want more difficult. You go back again and again to where you want them to be, knowing that there is no way in hell that they are there. There is a lot of wasted effort. You lose perspective of your real goal, let's say it's go to the grocery store, and instead of getting what you need -nourishment, you frantically chase your tail growing more and more confused and angry and desperate. You are mad at your keys, you are mad at your coat pockets for not doing their job. You are irrational. You could just grab the spare set, run to the grocery store and get what you need, have a sandwich, calm down and search at your leisure. But you don't. Where ARE your keys?! Your desperation is skewing your judgement. But you need to face it, YOUR keys are not in HIS pocket. You know your keys are not there. You have checked several times. They are not there. He is not responsible for your keys. You are. He doesn't want to be responsible for your keys. Here's the secret: YOU don't want to be responsible for your keys. If you did you would be searching for them in places they actually have a chance of being. Straight boys don't have your keys. You have tried this before. They may have acted like they did because they wanted you to get them somewhere or you may have hoped they did because you didn't want to go alone but straight boys don't have your keys. Straight boys will never have your keys. Where do you really want to go? It sounds like not far. If going somewhere was of importance you would have hung your keys on the nail by the door. Sometimes it's pretty comfortable at home. Lonely but familiar. Messy enough to lose your keys in but not messy enough to actually bother to clean house and let things go. Not so messy that you can't forget about really going somewhere and sit down awhile and think about taking a trip with that cute guy from work. Just a little while longer, you tell yourself. His girlfriend can sit in the backseat as long as she stays quiet. It will be fun. Just what you need. And really isn't it much safer to sit there and think about taking a trip than accepting all the responsibility of planning one and servicing the car so that it's ready and capable? Having a relationship consists of exposing yourself to someone else over and over, doing the work and sometimes failing. It entails being wrong in front of someone else and being right for someone too. Even if you do find a relationship that other guy doesn't want to be your chauffeur. He wants to take turns riding together. He may occasionally drive but you'll have to do some too. You will have to do some solo driving to keep up your end of the relationship. Boyfriends aren't meant to take you where you want to go. Sometimes they want to take a left when you want to go right. Being in a relationship is embarking on an uncertain adventure. It's not a commitment to a destination it is just a commitment to going together. Maybe it's time to stop telling yourself that you are a starcrossed traveler and admit you're an armchair adventurer. You don't really want to go anywhere or you would venture out. If you really wanted to know where your keys were you'd search in the most likely spot, down underneath the cushion of that chair you've gotten so comfortable in.

Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults. Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other. All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness. In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education. Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they want me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.

To be honest? I'd thought myself above them. What a nasty little counter-culture snob I was. There they were, doing their fucking best, trying to have a life, trying to bring up their children decently, struggling to make the payments on the little house, wondering where their youth had gone, where love had gone, what was to become of them and all I could do was be a snotty, judgmental cow. But it was no good. I couldn't be like them. I'd seen too much, done too much that was outside anything they knew. I wasn't better than them, but I was different. We had no point of contact other than work. Even then, they disapproved of my attitude, my ways of dealing with the clients. Many's the time I'd ground my teeth as Andrea or Fran had taken the piss out of some hapless, useless, illiterate get they were assigned to; being funny at the expense of their stupidity, their complete inability to deal with straight society. Sure, I knew it was partly a defence mechanism; they did it because it was laugh or scream, and we were always told it wasn't good to let the clients get too close. But all too often - not always, but enough times to make me seethe with irritation - there was an ingrained, self-serving elitism in there too. Who'd see it better than me? They sealed themselves up in their white-collar world like chrysalides and waited for some kind of reward for being good girls and boys, for playing the game, being a bit of a cut above the messy rest - a reward that didn't exist, would never come and that they would only realise was a lie when it was far too late. Now I would be one of the Others, the clients, the ones who stood outside in the cold and, shivering, looked in at the lighted windows of reason and middle-class respectability. I would be another colossal fuck-up, another dinner party story. But my sin was all the greater because I'd wilfully defected from the right side to the hopelessly, eternally wrong side. I was not only a screw-up, I was a traitor.

Lesson one: Pack light unless you want to hump the eight around the mountains all day and night. By the time we reached Snowdonia National Park on Friday night it was dark, and with one young teacher as our escort, we all headed up into the mist. And in true Welsh fashion, it soon started to rain. When we reached where we were going to camp, by the edge of a small lake halfway up, it was past midnight and raining hard. We were all tired (from dragging the ridiculously overweight packs), and we put up the tents as quickly as we could. They were the old-style A-frame pegged tents, not known for their robustness in a Welsh winter gale, and sure enough by 3:00 A.M. the inevitable happened. Pop. One of the A-frame pegs supporting the apex of my tent broke, and half the tent sagged down onto us. Hmm, I thought. But both Watty and I were just too tired to get out and repair the first break, and instead we blindly hoped it would somehow just sort itself out. Lesson two: Tents don’t repair themselves, however tired you are, however much you wish they just would. Inevitably, the next peg broke, and before we knew it we were lying in a wet puddle of canvas, drenched to the skin, shivering, and truly miserable. The final key lesson learned that night was that when it comes to camping, a stitch in time saves nine; and time spent preparing a good camp is never wasted. The next day, we reached the top of Snowdon, wet, cold but exhilarated. My best memory was of lighting a pipe that I had borrowed off my grandfather, and smoking it with Watty, in a gale, behind the summit cairn, with the teacher joining in as well. It is part of what I learned from a young age to love about the mountains: They are great levelers. For me to be able to smoke a pipe with a teacher was priceless in my book, and was a firm indicator that mountains, and the bonds you create with people in the wild, are great things to seek in life. (Even better was the fact that the tobacco was homemade by Watty, and soaked in apple juice for aroma. This same apple juice was later brewed into cider by us, and it subsequently sent Chipper, one of the guys in our house, blind for twenty-four hours. Oops.) If people ask me today what I love about climbing mountains, the real answer isn’t adrenaline or personal achievement. Mountains are all about experiencing a shared bond that is hard to find in normal life. I love the fact that mountains make everyone’s clothes and hair go messy; I love the fact that they demand that you give of yourself, that they make you fight and struggle. They also induce people to loosen up, to belly laugh at silly things, and to be able to sit and be content staring at a sunset or a log fire. That sort of camaraderie creates wonderful bonds between people, and where there are bonds I have found that there is almost always strength.

Sam was about to travel to Asia with her boyfriend and she was fretting about what her backers would think if she released some of her new songs while she was 'on vacation'. She was worried that posting pictures of herself sipping a Mai Tai was going to make her look like an asshole. What does it matter? I asked her, where you are whether you're drinking a coffee, a Mai Tai or a bottle of water? I mean, aren't they paying for your songs so that you can... live? Doesn't living include wandering and collecting emotions and drinking a Mai Tai, not just sitting in a room writing songs without ever leaving the house? I told Sam about another songwriter friend of mine, Kim Boekbinder, who runs her own direct support website through which her fans pay her monthly at levels from $5 to $1,000. She also has a running online wishlist of musical gear and costumes kindof like a wedding registry, to which her fans can contribute money anytime they want. Kim had told me a few days before that she doesn't mind charging her backers during what she calls her 'staring at the wall time'. She thinks this is essential before she can write a new batch of songs. And her fans don't complain, they trust her process. These are new forms of patronage, there are no rules and it's messy, the artists and the patrons they are making the rules as they go along, but whether these artists are using crowdfunding (which is basically, front me some money so I can make a thing) or subscription services (which is more like pay me some money every month so that I can make things) or Patreon, which is like pay per piece of content pledge service (that basically means pay me some money every time I make a thing). It doesn't matter, the fundamental building block of all of these relationships boils down to the same simple thing: trust. If you're asking your fans to support you, the artist, it shouldn't matter what your choices are, as long as you're delivering your side of the bargain. You may be spending the money on guitar picks, Mai Tais, baby formula, college loans, gas for the car or coffee to fuel your all-night writing sessions. As long as art is coming out the other side, and you're making your patrons happy, the money you need to live (and need to live is hard to define) is almost indistinguishable from the money you need to make art. ... (6:06:57) ... When she posts a photo of herself in a vintage dress that she just bought, no one scolds her for spending money on something other than effects pedals. It's not like her fan's money is an allowance with nosy and critical strings attached, it's a gift in the form of money in exchange for her gift, in the form of music. The relative values are... messy. But if we accept the messiness we're all okay. If Beck needs to moisturize his cuticles with truffle oil in order to play guitar tracks on his crowdfunded record, I don't care that the money I fronted him isn't going towards two turntables or a microphone; just as long as the art gets made, I get the album and Beck doesn't die in the process.

Not that is was her job, but she took a few minutes to tidy up while she waited for Aimee. She knew how depressing it could be to wake up in a messy house, how it could make you feel like the new day was already old.

Why are clowns so creepy?” “You’re afraid of clowns?” “I didn’t say that. I just said they’re creepy.” Miranda watched him, amused. The best defense was an even better offense. “You’re staring,” Gage mumbled. “I can’t help it.” “Why? Do I have a messy face, too?” “No.” Miranda couldn’t resist. “You have dimples.” He squirmed self-consciously. “I guess.” “I bet you get teased a lot.” “Is there some relevant point to this?” Miranda did her best to keep a straight face. “Just that they’re so cute.” “Stop it.” “Are you blushing?” “Shut up.” Oh, Gage, you have no idea…if Marge and Joanie were here right now, they’d jump all over you. Still flustered, Gage signaled the waitress. But it was someone else who walked over instead. “Private conversation?” Etienne greeted them. “No,” Gage answered, a little too quickly. “Intimate conversation?” “I was just telling him about his…” Miranda began, but Gage looked so trapped, she didn’t have the heart to bring Etienne into it. “Just telling him about--” “We were talking about the gallery,” Gage broke in. “That building she was wondering about.” Etienne glanced purposefully from Gage to Miranda and back again. “I don’t know, from where I was standing over there, you were looking a little embarrassed.” “The opera house. I was telling her what I found out.” “Okay, if you say so.” “It’s true!” “And I said okay. I believe you. You gonna eat the rest of those fries?” Gage slid his plate across the table as Etienne slid in beside Miranda. Etienne shot her a secret wink. “It’s not the thing with the dimples again, is it?” he asked innocently. “I don’t know what it is with girls, the way y’all love his--” “Why are you here?” Gage asked. Getting to his feet, he pointed toward the restrooms. “I’ll be right back. You can leave the tip.” “I was going to anyway.

Sometimes I wondered if my mother's unconventional choices were her billboard to a cruel world: I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK OF ME. Had she chosen to walk away, or did she withdraw early to avoid failure? Were my mother's eccentricities a strength or just the way she covered up her own vulnerabilities? I knew from my own life that it's easier to pretend you don't want the thing you cannot have. I feared rejection as well. The isolation and lack of communication I had been raised with made me feel—not that I was doing things wrong, but that I was wrong. I feared opening up by home would reveal all my messy, broken bits, all the ways I continually failed. If anyone got close enough to see, I was sure they wouldn't want to know me. After years of shutting people out, how could I possibly let them in?

It's still home, Cager, and there's something about home, no matter how untidy we've left it.

When I was a little older, about twelve, I went to work at a nearby house. It was owned by old Mrs. Cromby and oh, I was so homesick! I cried myself to sleep for a fortnight it seemed, until it was my day off and I could go home to see Mam." He frowned at this, not liking to think of his infant housekeeper in tears. "Why did they send you then if you were so upset?" She gave him a look. "Because I needed to learn a trade, naturally. And it was a good position. Mrs. Cromby was very strict but I learned so much from her and her housekeeper, Mrs. Little. How to keep records and how to make wood polish and brass polish and silver polish. When to turn linen and how to store cheese. What cuts of beef are the cheapest and how to bargain down the butcher. How to judge when a fish is fresh and when to buy shellfish and when not to. How to keep moths from woolen and mice from the pantry. How to get wine stains out of white linen and how to dye faded cloth black again. All that and so much more." She drew breath and he looked at her, deeply appalled. "That all sounds frightfully boring." "And yet without that knowledge you'd live in dirty, messy, vermin-infested chaos," she said sweetly. "Mm.

Often times we are what we attract and if you don’t want messiness keep a clean house. Love,

George Malcolm: half white, half black, with messy tousled hair, rumpled and tugged between kind of curly and extremely curly. Once, a year or so before, he'd been at our house and he'd pulled out a lock of his hair and used it to teach me about eddies and helixes. It's a circular current into a central station, he'd explained, giving me one to hold. I pulled on the spring. Nature is full of the same shapes, he said, taking me to the bathroom sink and spinning on the top and pointing out the way the water swirled down the drain. Taking me to the bookshelf and flipping open a book on weather and showing me a cyclone. Then a spiral galaxy. Pulling me back to the bathroom sink, to my glass jar of collected seashells, and pointing out the same curl in a miniature conch. See? he said, holding the seashell up to his hair. Yes! I clapped. His eyes were warm with teaching pleasure. It's galactic hair, he said, smiling. At school, George was legendary already. He was so natural at physics that one afternoon the eighth-grade science teacher had asked him to do a preview of the basics of relativity, really fast, for the class. George had stood up and done such a fine job, using a paperweight and a yardstick and the standard-issue school clock, that the teacher had pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. I'd like to be the first person to pay you for your clarity of mind, the teacher had said. George used the cash to order pizza for the class. Double pepperoni, he told me later, when I'd asked.

and delivered a front kick to Mr. J’s abdomen so powerful, it lifted him off the ground and sent him stumbling back at least six or seven feet. As Mr. J crashed on to the messy front lawn, he heard the front door slam shut. ‘Motherfu . . .’ He coughed frantically, trying to breathe in. The kick had knocked the air out of Mr. J’s lungs. He tried to get up, but pain forced him to sit back down for a couple more seconds. He brought his right hand to his stomach and squeezed his eyes tight. Finally. He was able to breathe life back into his limbs. ‘You sonofabitch.’ He got back on to his feet and ran towards the door. Locked. ‘Arghhhh . . .’ Mr. J let out a full-of-frustration cry. He stepped back and, using all the power he had in his muscles, threw his whole body, shoulder first, against the door. It rattled but that was about it. ‘Shit!’ He stepped back again and this time used his right leg to deliver a kick into the door handle. The door shook again, but it still didn’t open. He tried again. Nothing. One more time. Almost. Again, and this time Mr. J gave it everything he had. If this failed, he would use his gun. SLAM! The door finally flew open, cracking the doorframe and throwing splinters up in the air. As he cautiously stepped into the house, Mr. J pulled out a Sig Sauer P226 Legion from his lower-back holster. The pistol was equipped with a silencer. The front door took him straight into a sparsely furnished living room. Empty. Mr. J looked left, then right. Nothing. ‘Jeffery?’ Mr. J called in a loud and angry voice, while taking in the room. No reply. ‘Jeffery? C’mon, let’s talk.’ Silence. Across the room from him there was a shut door. ‘The kitchen,’ he thought. To his right, a corridor would take him deeper into the house. There was no one there either. Mr. J decided to go for the kitchen door. If he went for the corridor that would mean that he would have his back to the shut door. Never a good idea. He crossed the room and threw his back against the wall to the side of the door. He was about to try its handle

One of the best ways to do that is to cultivate the morning ritual of ignoring your phone until after you have found the gaze of God in Scripture. Going to Scripture before we go to our smartphones is another small way to pattern the morning in the reality of God’s love. But given the black-hole allure of the smartphone, it is probably one of the most radical habits of the household you can cling to. In turning our gaze to Scripture, we turn our gaze to the face of God, and find him looking back at us. In a house full of children, this will look as messy as everything else does. Ideally, the pattern of Scripture before smartphone means I’m up before them, having a few minutes to read and reflect before they wake. But of course that is not always the reality, and it is important to know that that is fine. Sometimes, that is even better, because one of the ways we teach the habits of the household is by letting children observe our habits and inviting them into them. Some mornings this looks like listening to a psalm while holding a kid who is holding a sippy cup of milk on my lap.8 He is invited into the routine. Occasionally it means reading a Bible story out loud to one of them. Many, many mornings it means they also get a book, or a coloring page, and we have some minutes of quiet before we start breakfast.

But life’s not perfect. It’s messy. We make bad decisions, our bodies aren’t perfect, our skin’s not perfect, our houses aren’t perfect, and nothing is perfect. And we just have to live anyway. And be happy. Choose to be happy. And choose to make the best out of everything we have. I guess that’s a lesson that God needed to teach me. He taught me by the longing he gave me for a child and family and making me realize that I can’t wait until everything is perfect before I move forward. I have to just keep moving, choosing the best way that I can, and when I make a mistake, I don’t go back to square one and start again, I learn from it and keep on going.

It is strange that when one is remodeling a portion of his house, he expects visitors to be tolerant of improvements that are so obviously underway. Ye while one is remodeling his character, we often feel obligated to call attention to the messy signs of remodeling, or feel called upon to remember aloud things as they were. Forgetting is such a necessary part of forgiving.

I don’t know how many years had passed that I hadn’t thought about her. It was a few months after the death of my mother that her name came to me again. I was cleaning out her closet and dresser to donate some of her clothes to the Church. They always had clothes drives to give to some of the poorer people in the area. Better for someone else to have them than just hanging in a closet or in a drawer. At the bottom of one of her drawers, my eyes saw an envelope with my name on. Immediately, I recognized the handwriting on the envelope and for the first time in a long time, I could feel the tears flowing out of my eyes. This wasn’t no single tear drop cry. This was the big, fat, messy tears that come from memories flashing through your mind. Tiffany did write something to me and it was kept from me. I almost unintentionally crumpled the letter in my hand as the combination of hurt and rage took over me for a few moments. I went back to my bedroom and sat down on the edge of my bed. The letter had her North Carolina address on it. That letter would have been a way for us to stay in touch. For almost eight years, I had believed that she didn’t want to stay in contact with me. In that moment, I realized that the hurt I felt for being disregarded was unfounded and she was the one who had the right to feel forgotten. She must have believed that she meant little to me, like I thought she did of me. It’s weird how quickly your perspective can change when given new information. I held that letter in my shaking hands for a few minutes. I didn’t know what to do. Opening it seemed pointless to me. All it would do was rekindle feelings that I once had and couldn’t do anything about. After all those years, I couldn’t try and reconnect to her life. We both moved past each other and it wouldn’t be fair to her to come back. It wouldn’t make her feel good about herself to know that my parents hid that letter from me, like she was some horrible person that I needed to avoid. She may not even live at that address anymore. She undoubtedly moved away for college. I wasn’t in love with her anymore and I don’t know if she ever loved me, but if she did, I’m sure she didn’t anymore. I did the only thing that I felt was right. I went outside and lit a cigarette in the backyard. I took a deep inhale from my Camel full flavored filtered cigarette. I hadn’t converted to menthols, yet. I re-lit my lighter and put a corner of the letter into the flame until I was certain that it had caught fire. I held it in my hand watching the white of the envelope turn black under the blue and yellow flame. Once the envelope was about three quarters burned, I let it fall out of my hand and watched it float for a few moments before it hit the bottom concrete step where it continued to burn. It had all turned black and the carbonized paper started to break away from each other as I stamped out the embers with my sneaker. The wind carried away the pieces of carbon and the memory of her floated away from me. Watching those small burned pieces of paper scatter across my backyard made me realize that my childhood was over. I had nothing to show for it. All I had was myself. I didn’t even know why I was still living in my parent’s house after my mother died. There was nothing there for me. Life would only begin for me once I found something that mattered to me. Unfortunately for me, the only thing that mattered to me was words.

Chores → care tasks Chores are obligations. Care tasks are kindness to self. Cleaning → resetting the space Cleaning is endless. Resetting the space has a goal. It’s so messy in here! → this space has reached the end of its functional cycle It’s so messy in here feels like failure. This space has reached the end of its functional cycle is morally neutral. Good enough is good enough → good enough is perfect Good enough is good enough sounds like settling for less. Good enough is perfect means having boundaries and reasonable expectations. Shortcut:

tidy things up not because it’s bad that it’s messy but because it has reached the end of that cycle of functionality and I need to reset it so it can have another twenty-four hours of it serving me.

Hunt asked, “You really have to moderate petty fights like that?” Ruhn ran a hand down the hilt of the Starsword. “Why not?” “You’re a prince.” “I don’t understand why you make that sound like an insult,” Ruhn growled. Hunt said, “Why not do … bigger shit?” Bryce answered for him. “Because his daddy is scared of him.” Ruhn shot her a warning look. “He outranks me power-wise and title-wise.” “And yet he made sure to get you under his thumb as early as possible—as if you were some sort of animal to be tamed.” She said the words mildly, but Ruhn tensed. “It was going well,” Ruhn said tightly, “until you came along.” Hunt braced himself for the brewing storm. Bryce said, “He was alive the last time a Starborn Prince appeared, you know. You ever ask what happened to him? Why he died before he made the Drop?” Ruhn paled. “Don’t be stupid. That was an accident during his Ordeal.” Hunt kept his face neutral, but Bryce just leaned back in her chair. “If you say so.” “You still believe this shit you tried to sell me as a kid?” She crossed her arms. “I wanted your eyes open to what he really is before it was too late for you, too.” Ruhn blinked, but straightened, shaking his head as he rose from the table. “Trust me, Bryce, I’ve known for a while what he is. I had to fucking live with him.” Ruhn nodded toward the messy table. “If I hear anything new about the Horn or this synthetic healing magic, I’ll let you know.” He met Hunt’s stare and added, “Be careful.” Hunt gave him a half smile that told the prince he knew exactly what that be careful was about. And didn’t give a shit.

The house was two stories in height. It was of buff brick, with white trim about the windows and the doorway. It was not large, but it occupied an extremely advantageous position. It sat on a corner plot, so that it faced both ways at once, without obstruction. Moreover, the ground-plot itself extended beyond the house, if not lavishly at least amply, so that it touched none of its neighbors. There was room left for strips of sod in the front, and for a garden in the back. It was not, of course, strictly presentable yet. There were several small messy piles of broken, discarded bricks left out before it, the sod was not in place, and the window glass was smirched with streaks of paint. But something almost reverent came into the man’s face as he looked at it. His lips parted slightly and his eyes softened. He hadn’t known there could be such a beautiful house. It was the most beautiful house he had ever seen. It was his.

This was what she imagined love should be. Messy and convoluted and silent and loud, but when shit hit the fan, when the house was on fire, you still danced.

Let’s imagine a cluttered room. It does not get messy all by itself. You, the person who lives in it, makes the mess. There is a saying that “a messy room equals a messy mind.” I look at it this way. When a room becomes cluttered, the cause is more than just physical. Visible mess helps distract us from the true source of the disorder. The act of cluttering is really an instinctive reflex that draws our attention away from the heart of an issue. If you can’t feel relaxed in a clean and tidy room, try confronting your feeling of anxiety. It may shed light on what is really bothering you. When your room is clean and uncluttered, you have no choice but to examine your inner state. You can see any issues you have been avoiding and are forced to deal with them. From the moment you start tidying, you will be compelled to reset your life. As a result, your life will start to change. That’s why the task of putting your house in order should be done quickly. It allows you to confront the issues that are really important. Tidying is just a tool, not the final destination. The true goal should be to establish the lifestyle you want most once your house has been put in order. Storage experts are hoarders What is the first problem that comes to mind when you think of tidying?

A person suffering dementia often chooses one person as the scapegoat for whatever is bothering them. It’s how they funnel their fear. When my mother couldn’t find something, which was often in a house so messy, she was sure he’d taken it.

Are you all right?” he asked, pushing away from the wall and coming towards her. “I’m fine.” Lucien frowned and cupped her chin in one hand, turning her to face him. “I can always tell when you lie,” he said, as if the knowledge of this surprised him. “Yes. I hate that.” She needed to get away from him. She needed room to breathe. He dogged her steps as she left and picked a room at random to try and hide from him. She shut the door and slid the lock into place, relaxing when he tried the knob and couldn’t get inside. Leaning back against the door, she listened to him walk away. Her heartbeat slowed in her chest. Suddenly one of the study bookshelves swung open. Lucien emerged and eased the bookshelf back into its place, grinning. Horatia gaped. Rochester Hall had secret passageways? How had she not known about them? She truly ought to have been nosier as a child. “Why do you hate that I can read you so easily?” he asked. Horatia studied the room with a slight frown. This was Lucien’s study. His scent filled the air and a messy pile of letters littered his large desk. She couldn’t have picked a worse room to try and escape from him. He was everywhere. And she would not be able to hide from him anywhere on the estate. There were likely passageways all through the house connecting all the rooms. “Lucien, could you please just leave me alone? You’ve made your peace with me, and I with you. Can we not leave it at that?” She turned her back to him but he chuckled, coming closer. “My dear Horatia, I fear you and I are England and France. We quarrel and battle and therein lies the pleasure of our relationship.” -Lucien & Horatia

the messy papers, she spied a note that stopped her cold. It was written in baby talk in bright red crayon. Ya, ya, da, da, if you’re good enough, I’ll save you, it said. Next to the note was a crinkly map leading somewhere underground. Tracy knew she shouldn’t stay here another minute alone. She needed backup. She’d call in a second, but first Tracy grabbed the map and scoured it. The map seemed to point to the basement of this house. My God! thought Tracy, trembling, could Albert be down there now? Is that where he’s holding

First things first: A clean house simply looks better than a messy house. A room where everything has its place is nicer than a room filled with chaotic stacks and clutter. If you want your house to look nicer and have a better ambiance, the first and simplest thing you can do is to clean.

Do you want to be safe, or do you really want to change the world? The conflict is that we want to be brave, we want to take risks . . .but we also want to be safe. The problem is, we can't have it both ways. We want the American dream: to graduate from high school, go college, get a degree, and then what? Find the love of your life and get married. Then what? Get a job. Then what? Buy a car, buy a house, buy life insurance. Then what? Grow old and retire. Then what? ls that it? ls that all there is? In fact, couldn't we just sum up the entire American dream in the single word "safety"? That's what it's all about. No matter what you want out of life, you can achieve it in America in comfort, style, and in the end, safety. But there is a problem. We cannot be safe and take risks at the same time. Eleanor Roosevelt said, 'You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do' and 'Do something every day that scares you.' This can get messy. It gets uncomfortable. It means touching people who are dying of diseases. It means going to the filthy slums, the garbage dumps, the places we would never normally go . . . just to reach that one hurting person. So we must answer the question: Do we want to stay safe, or do we want to change the world? We can't have it both ways.

We are, to varying degrees, foolish, weak, and often just plain inexplicable — and always will be. As Kant put it: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” People with a crooked timber mentality tend to see life as full of ironies. Intellectual life is ironic because really smart people often do the dumbest things precisely because they are carried away by their own brilliance. Politics is ironic because powerful people make themselves vulnerable because they think they can achieve more than they can. Marriage is ironic because you are trying to build a pure relationship out of people who are ramshackle and messy. There’s an awesome incongruity between the purity you glimpse in the love and the fact that he leaves used tissues around the house and it drives you crazy.

Anxious to defend his adopted city—especially his side of town, the less fashionable west end—Eli considered giving Veronica a condensed lecture on the history of Asheville, North Carolina. 1880: the Western North Carolina Railroad completed a line from Salisbury to Asheville, which later enabled George Washington Vanderbilt to construct the Biltmore Estate, the largest private residence in America. Over time, that 179,000 square foot house transitioned into a multi- million dollar company. Which lured in tourists. Who created thousands of jobs. Which caused the sprawl flashing by Eli’s window at fifty-five miles per hour. But Eli refrained from being the Local Know-It-All, remembering all the times he’d traveled to new cities and some cabbie wanted to play docent, wanted to tell him about the real Cleveland or the hidden Miami. Instead, he let the air conditioner chase away the remnants of his jet lag and thought about Almario “Go Go” Gato. He waited for Veronica to say something about the Blue Ridge Mountains, which stood alongside the highway, hovering over the valley below like stoic parents waiting for their kids to clean up their messy bedrooms. Eli gave her points for her silence. And for ditching the phone, even if she kept glancing anxiously toward the glove compartment every time it buzzed. The car rode smooth, hardly a bump. For a resident of Los Angeles, she drove cautiously, obeying all traffic laws. Eli had a perfect driving record. Well, almost perfect. There was that time he drove the Durham Bulls’ chartered Greyhound into the right field fence during the seventh inning stretch. But that was history. Almost ancient.

After we become Christians, we have let him, so to speak, into our house. But there are all sorts of messes in our house, and while we might maintain the front room for “company”, the problem with our Lord is that he is never content just to stay in the front room. He wants nothing less than all of us, every closet, every messy room, and even our cluttered junk drawers. He is always poking around, letting us know that we are not right yet, and that there is yet another mess for us to begin cleaning up.

youngest child entered first grade. During the next few years, she joined Romance Writers of America, learned a few things about writing a book, and decided the process was way more fun than analyzing financial statements. Melinda’s debut novel, She Can Run, was nominated for Best First Novel by the International Thriller Writers. Melinda’s bestselling books have garnered three Daphne du Maurier Award nominations and a Golden Leaf Award. When she isn’t writing, she is an avid martial artist: she holds a second-degree black belt in Kenpo karate and teaches women’s self-defense. She lives in a messy house with her husband, two teenagers, a couple

And then there's the snow ... on the roof of the house. You see, I grew up in a desert. I don't understand this snow stuff. At home, in New Mexico, water knew its place. It stayed in reservoirs and pipes and and sinks and such. It didn't do anything MESSY ... like fall from the God-deleted sky. I mean, the SKY! for crying out. What the halibut is it doing falling from the SKY? That's where you keep airplanes. And birds. And stuff. Not water. I mean, come on. Let's get with the program, here.

Like He did with Joshua, the Lord will meet your needs and cover your inadequacies with His power. There is no obstacle so big God can’t help you overcome it. Not your finances. Not your schedule. Not your messy house. Not your unruly kids. Not your singleness.