Mueller Quotes

Often the right path is the one that may be hardest for you to follow. But the hard path is also the one that will make you grow as a human being.

The first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day is to have my soul happy in the Lord.

The beginning of anxiety is the end of faith, and the beginning of true faith is the end of anxiety.

Be assured, if you walk with Him and look to Him, and expect help from Him, He will never fail you.

If you were negative or thought something couldn’t be done, you were not invited to the next meeting,” Mueller recalls. “He just wanted people who would make things happen.

I’m proud of you, son,” he said. “I guess it has finally sunk in that it’s important to stand up for yourself in this world.” Rocky shook his head. “It’s more important to stand up for someone who can’t stand up for herself,” he had answered. Rocky Ryan speaking with his father.

My mother says we’re supposed to make mistakes. That’s the way we learn.” Rocky Ryan in Bully At Ambush Corner.

How swiftly the strained honey of afternoon light flows into darkness and the closed bud shrugs off its special mystery in order to break into blossom: as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious

If we desire our faith to be strengthened, we should not shrink from opportunities where our faith may be tried, and therefore, through trial, be strengthened.

This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent;

The Christian should never worry about tomorrow or give sparingly because of a possible future need. Only the present moment is ours to serve the Lord, and tomorrow may never come...Life is worth as much as it is spent for the Lord's service.

The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone without the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, He will do it according to the Scriptures and never contrary to them.

Nine-tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be.

What luxury, to be so happy that we can grieve over imaginary lives.

Late Hours" On summer nights the world moves within earshot on the interstate with its swish and growl, and occasional siren that sends chills through us. Sometimes, on clear, still nights, voices float into our bedroom, lunar and fragmented, as if the sky had let them go long before our birth. In winter we close the windows and read Chekhov, nearly weeping for his world. What luxury, to be so happy that we can grieve over imaginary lives.

You shall not twist my bones into a star’s shape, nor plant my hair as roots for the dreams of the living; and if you open my heart and run your poet’s fingers over its walls and cushions you will find it is like yours, dark.

Life is a chain of choices. Making the correct one is never easy.” “That’s for sure,” agreed Rocky. “But if we didn’t make difficult choices, right or wrong,” said Mr. Veraldi, “we wouldn’t learn anything worth knowing." Rocky Ryan and his viola teacher, Mr. Veraldi, in Bully at Ambush Corner.

According to my judgement the most important point to be attended to is this: above all things see to it that your souls are happy in the Lord. Other things may press upon you, the Lord's work may even have urgent claims upon your attention, but I deliberately repeat, it is of supreme and paramount importance that you should seek above all things to have your souls truly happy in God Himself! Day by day seek to make this the most important business of your life. This has been my firm and settled condition for the last five and thirty years. For the first four years after my conversion I knew not its vast importance, but now after much experience I specially commend this point to the notice of my younger brethren and sisters in Christ: the secret of all true effectual service is joy in God, having experimental acquaintance and fellowship with God Himself.

No one ought to expect to see much good resulting from his labors in word, and doctrine, if he is not much given to prayer and meditation.

Someone was always leaving and never coming back. The wooden houses wait like old wives along this road; they are everywhere, abandoned, leaning, turning gray.

What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face, the chair a back, the table four stout legs which will never suffer fatigue.

The President slumped back in his chair and said, Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.

I search the language for a word to tell you how red is red.

My husband says spring will be early. He says this every year, And every year I disagree. He needs me, the dark side of the planetary equation. Together we make the equinox.

Men did not respect anger in a woman. They labeled it weakness.

Musk took an iterative approach to design. Rockets and engines would be quickly prototyped, tested, blown up, revised, and tried again, until finally something worked. Move fast, blow things up, repeat. “It’s not how well you avoid problems,” Mueller says. “It’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.

I thought if only we could go on and meet again, shy as strangers.

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

You’ll find that what you can bear increases a great deal when you are not offered any other choice.

How I would paint happiness Something hidden, a windfall, A meteor shower. No- A flowering tree releasing all its blossoms at once, and the one standing beneath it unexpectedly robed in bloom…

Whilst we are in the body, we need a change even in spiritual things; and this change the Lord has graciously provided in the great variety which is to be found in His word.

The beginning of anxiety is the end of faith, and the beginning of true faith is the end of anxiety. George Mueller

There are Mornings" Even now, when the plot calls for me to turn to stone, the sun intervenes. Some mornings in summer, I step outside and the sky opens and pours itself into me as if I were a saint about to die. But the plot calls for me to live, be ordinary, say nothing to anyone. Inside the house, the mirrors burn when I pass.

. . .because we had survived sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, we discovered bones that rose from the dark earth and sang as white birds in the trees Because the story of our life becomes our life Because each of us tells the same story but tells it differently and none of us tells it the same way twice . . (from, Why We Tell Stories)

The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.

Tears The first woman who ever wept was appalled at what stung her eyes and ran down her cheeks. Saltwater. Seawater. How was it possible? Hadn't she and the man spent many days moving upland to where the grass flourished, where the stream quenched their thirst with sweet water? How could she have carried these sea drops as if they were precious seeds; where could she have stowed them? She looked at the watchful gazelles and the heavy-lidded frogs; she looked at glass-eyed birds and nervous, black-eyed mice. None of them wept, not even the fish that dripped in her hands when she caught them. Not even the man. Only she carried the sea inside her body.

For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout’s gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Mueller’s property, whose mouth, her mouth, opened and closed in yearning and who never made a sound. As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not. And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death — but kindness?

Now in the thriving season of love when the bud relents into flower, your love turned absence has turned once more, and if my comforts fall soft as rain on her flutters, it is because love grows by what it remembers of love

Strategy for a Marathon I will start when the gun goes off. I will run for five miles. Feeling good, I will run to the tenth mile. At the tenth I will say, Only three more to the halfway." At the halfway mark, 13.1 miles, I will know fifteen is in reach. At fifteen miles I will say, You've run twenty before, keep going." At twenty I will say, Run home.

In winter we close the windows and read Chekhov, nearly weeping for his world. What luxury, to be so happy that we can grieve over imaginary lives.

To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.”—Robert Mueller

For I will yet praise him” (Ps. 43:5). More prayer, more exercising of our faith, and more patient waiting leads to blessings—abundant blessings. I have found it to be true many hundreds of times, and therefore I continually say to myself, “Put your hope in God.” George Mueller

The difficulty is that our bodies, once they have experienced trauma or overwhelm, no longer recognize or see themselves as a cohesive consciousness; they are fractured and no longer recognize the whole.

I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the word of God, and to meditation on it. . . . What is the food of the inner man? Not prayer, but the word of God; and . . . not the simple reading of the word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts.

A brother with small earnings may ask,''Should I also give? My earning are already so small that my family can barely make ends meet.'' My reply is, ''Have you ever considered that the very reason your earnings remain so small may be because you spend everything on yourself? If God gave you more, you would only use it to increase your own comfort instead of looking to see who is sick or who has no work at all that you might help them.

But in what way shall we attain to this settled happiness of soul? How shall we learn to enjoy God? How obtain such an all-sufficient soul-satisfying portion in him as shall enable us to let go the things of this world as vain and worthless in comparison? I answer, This happiness is to be obtained through the study of the Holy Scriptures. God has therein revealed Himself unto us in the face of Jesus Christ.

Some individuals invoked their Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination and were not, in the Office's judgment, appropriate candidates for grants of immunity.

they sometimes provided information that was false or incomplete,

Trump Campaign—deleted relevant communications

God's way leads always into trial, so far as sight and sense are concerned. Nature always will be tried in God's ways.

By the time I arrive at evening, / they have just settled down to rest; / already invisible, they are turning / into the dreamwork of the trees….

To change any of this, we need to live.

The investigation also identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.

Whatever was bound to happen in my story did not happen. But I know there are rules that cannot be broken. Perhaps a name was changed. A small mistake. Perhaps a woman I do not know is facing the day with the heavy heart that, by all rights, should have been mine.

The determined attempt to discredit Robert Mueller, the FBI and the Justice Department is an endeavor to protect the fervent saber rattlers themselves. You see, all this commotion kicked into overdrive once the Special Counsel sought information from Deutsche Bank.

Once someone tries a real extra virgin -- an adult or a child, anybody with taste buds -- they'll never go back to the fake kind. It's distinctive, complex, the freshest thing you've ever eaten. It makes you realize how rotten the other stuff is, literally rotten. But there has to be a first time. Somehow we have to get those first drops of real extra virgin oil into their mouths, to break them free from the habituation to bad oil, and from the brainwashing of advertising. There has to be some good oil left in the world for people to taste.

What happened is, we grew lonely 
living among the things,
 so we gave the clock a face,
 the chair a back,
 the table four stout legs
 which will never suffer fatigue. We fitted our shoes with tongues
 as smooth as our own
 and hung tongues inside bells
 so we could listen 
to their emotional language, and because we loved graceful profiles
 the pitcher received a lip,
 the bottle a long, slender neck. Even what was beyond us
 was recast in our image;
 we gave the country a heart,
 the storm an eye,
 the cave a mouth
 so we could pass into safety.

That’s not all they ever show,” John said. “They show your heart’s desire…what you most want to see-or who-at the time you’re looking.” “Then mine must be broken,” I said. It made sense. Why wouldn’t mine be broken? I was broken, too. Or at least I hadn’t felt normal in a long time. “Yours isn’t broken,” John said. “Considering it’s a mobile device from earth, and no mobile device from earth has ever functioned in the Underworld before, I don’t quite understand…yet.” He was looking at me speculatively. “But it did exactly what ours do. You were worried about your family, so what you were shown was your heart’s desire: the one member of your family who’s in immediate danger, and needs your-“ “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. Something dawned on me. “Was that how you always knew when I was in trouble and needed help? Like that day at school, with Mr. Mueller? And at the jeweler’s that time? Because I was the one you most wanted to see when you looked down into your-“ “Oh, look,” John said, seeming infinitely relieved by the interruption. “Here comes Frank.” Frank was sauntering over. “Found him,” he said, with casual nonchalance. My heart gave a swoop. Only something as monumental as my cousin finally being located could distract me from the discovery that all those times my boyfriend had rescued me from mortal peril, it had been because he’d been spying on me from the Underworld via a handheld device seemingly operated by the Fates.

I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women – and that was important to me back then – would say, “Oh, really?” and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, “Well, I teach high school.” He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, “I went to high school,” and walked away. Once I repeated this anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a “storyteller.” I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than “just” a teacher, and “storyteller” felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories.

It says what every olive oil says: 100 percent Italian, cold-pressed, stone ground, extra virgin..." He shook his head, as if unable to believe his eyes. "Extra virgin? What's this oil got to do with virginity? This is a whore.

The world isn’t all towers of white marble, and it isn’t all gardens of perfectly trimmed grass,” said Pain softly. “Whether we want to look or not, we cannot escape from the world. We can retreat for awhile, but always it is there.

Earthly friends may alter their minds regarding the work in which we are engaged; but if indeed we work for God, whoever may alter His mind regarding our service, He will not. Earthly friends may lose their ability to help us, however much they desire so to do; but He remains throughout eternity the infinitely Rich One.

Do what you think best with it, George, and may God help us both.

Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.

If you're not crazy, there's something wrong with you.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea of someone buying and selling children in the twenty-first century.

The mental leaps from “I’ve got a daughter” to “she’s dead” and then to “she’s been murdered” could span the Grand Canyon.

The joy which answers to prayer give, cannot be described; and the impetus which they afford to the spiritual life is exceedingly great.

I will not return to a universe of objects that do not know each other, as if islands were not the long lost children of one great continent

What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things

They’re all falling away from me. I don’t want to be the Lady. I’m just learning how to be me. I don’t want to go back to the Lady, to being an empty nothing. I’m afraid.

Sorry, Mistress, but I’m not much interested in ghosts. I have enough of my own.

I’m tired of being only a ghost,” she said with something like desperation.

I’ve noticed a curious trend in your boneghosts, Mistress Charm. Desire cannot hold on to anything, Pain is pale, and Pride is blind. It cannot be a coincidence, surely?

He did not want to hear or believe what she said, and so she said nothing.

the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,

if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.

Necessities 1 A map of the world. Not the one in the atlas, but the one in our heads, the one we keep coloring in. With the blue thread of the river by which we grew up. The green smear of the woods we first made love in. The yellow city we thought was our future. The red highways not traveled, the green ones with their missed exits, the black side roads which took us where we had not meant to go. The high peaks, recorded by relatives, though we prefer certain unmarked elevations, the private alps no one knows we have climbed. The careful boundaries we draw and erase. And always, around the edges, the opaque wash of blue, concealing the drop-off they have stepped into before us, singly, mapless, not looking back.

The Lady’s head ached. She didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to know anymore or fight anymore. She was so tired already. How did people live like this, with all the ugliness?

Leaders began to profess their love of peace and to claim that war had been forced upon them.118 As Mueller notes, “No longer was it possible simply and honestly to proclaim like Julius Caesar, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’ Gradually this was changed to ‘I came, I saw, he attacked me while I was just standing there looking, I won.’ This might be seen as progress.”119

If I can't read, if I can't make a simple Indian pudding, then I don't see the point in living much more, really. Because aside from a good book, and perhaps, a fresh morning in a dew-covered garden, few things in life give me as much pleasure as magic of making a truly spectacular dessert.

God is pleased continually to vary His mode of dealing with us, in order that we may not be tempted to trust in donors, or in circumstances, but in Him alone, and to keep our eye fixed upon Him.

Third, the investigation established that several individuals affiliated with the Trump Campaign lied to the Office, and to Congress, about their interactions with Russian-affiliated individuals and related matters. Those lies materially impaired the investigation of Russian election interference.

Heartland Now that we’ve given our hearts away With the bric-a-brac, we want them back. Now we look for them secondhand, Someone else’s, in the old songs, The slowly unfolding novels We never had time for. Hearts That taught themselves to fly; …overstuffed hearts, still leaking Downy secrets like feathers. We want someone to say, ‘I give you my heart’, meaning, ‘Summer and winter’, meaning ‘All my time in the this world’…

Among rocks, I am the loose one, among arrows, I am the heart, among daughters, I am the recluse, among sons, the one who dies young. Among answers, I am the question, between lovers, I am the sword, among scars, I am the fresh wound, among confetti, the black flag. Among shoes, I am the one with the pebble, among days, the one that never comes, among the bones you find on the beach the one that sings was mine

Volume II addresses the President's actions towards the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election and related matters, and his actions towards the Special Counsel's investigation.

Hamish Alexander-Harrington knew his wife as only two humans who had both been adopted by a pair of mated treecats ever could. He'd seen her deal with joy and with sorrow, with happiness and with fury, with fear, and even with despair. Yet in all the years since their very first meeting at Yeltsin's Star, he suddenly realized, he had never actually met the woman the newsies called "the Salamander." It wasn't his fault, a corner of his brain told him, because he'd never been in the right place to meet her. Never at the right time. He'd never had the chance to stand by her side as she took a wounded heavy cruiser on an unflinching deathride into the broadside of the battlecruiser waiting to kill it, sailing to her own death, and her crew's, to protect a planet full of strangers while the rich beauty of Hammerwell's "Salute to Spring" spilled from her ship's com system. He hadn't stood beside her on the dew-soaked grass of the Landing City duelling grounds, with a pistol in her hand and vengeance in her heart as she faced the man who'd bought the murder of her first great love. Just as he hadn't stood on the floor of Steadholders' Hall when she faced a man with thirty times her fencing experience across the razor-edged steel of their swords, with the ghosts of Reverend Julius Hanks, the butchered children of Mueller Steading, and her own murdered steaders at her back. But now, as he looked into the unyielding flint of his wife's beloved, almond eyes, he knew he'd met the Salamander at last. And he recognized her as only another warrior could. Yet he also knew in that moment that for all his own imposing record of victory in battle, he was not and never had been her equal. As a tactician and a strategist, yes. Even as a fleet commander. But not as the very embodiment of devastation. Not as the Salamander. Because for all the compassion and gentleness which were so much a part of her, there was something else inside Honor Alexander-Harrington, as well. Something he himself had never had. She'd told him, once, that her own temper frightened her. That she sometimes thought she could have been a monster under the wrong set of circumstances. And now, as he realized he'd finally met the monster, his heart twisted with sympathy and love, for at last he understood what she'd been trying to tell him. Understood why she'd bound it with the chains of duty, and love, of compassion and honor, of pity, because, in a way, she'd been right. Under the wrong circumstances, she could have been the most terrifying person he had ever met. In fact, at this moment, she was . It was a merciless something, her "monster"—something that went far beyond military talent, or skills, or even courage. Those things, he knew without conceit, he, too, possessed in plenty. But not that deeply personal something at the core of her, as unstoppable as Juggernaut, merciless and colder than space itself, that no sane human being would ever willingly rouse. In that instant her husband knew, with an icy shiver which somehow, perversely, only made him love her even more deeply, that as he gazed into those agate-hard eyes, he looked into the gates of Hell itself. And whatever anyone else might think, he knew now that there was no fire in Hell. There was only the handmaiden of death, and ice, and purpose, and a determination which would not— couldnot—relent or rest. "I'll miss them," she told him again, still with that dreadful softness, "but I won't forget. I'll never forget, and one day— oneday, Hamish—we're going to find the people who did this, you and I. And when we do, the only thing I'll ask of God is that He let them live long enough to know who's killing them.

Sometimes, When the Light" Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles and pulls you back into childhood and you are passing a crumbling mansion completely hidden behind old willows or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks and giant firs standing hip to hip, you know again that behind that wall, under the uncut hair of the willows something secret is going on, so marvelous and dangerous that if you crawled through and saw, you would die, or be happy forever. Lisel Mueller, Alive Together: New and Selected Poems. (LSU Press October 1, 1996)

many of the President’s acts directed at witnesses, including discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons, took place in public view. That circumstance is unusual, but no principle of law excludes public acts from the reach of the obstruction laws. If the likely effect of public acts is to influence witnesses or alter their testimony, the harm to the justice system’s integrity is the same.

There was no moon. The sky was like black cotton batting that enveloped us in a way that felt like walking through clear water in a pool painted black. Very clear and cloudless was the night sky, so it was thick with stars. We even saw clusters of the dust from exploded supernovas deep in space, thousands of light years away.

Why We Tell Stories I Because we used to have leaves and on damp days our muscles feel a tug, painful now, from when roots pulled us into the ground and because our children believe they can fly, an instinct retained from when the bones in our arms were shaped like zithers and broke neatly under their feathers and because before we had lungs we knew how far it was to the bottom as we floated open-eyed like painted scarves through the scenery of dreams, and because we awakened and learned to speak

They made you! They made you to control me! A childish woman who lives to be good. To be proper. To be appropriate! To do what she’s told! And every time I came to the surface you split that ‘me’ off! It isn’t the mindlock that kept you from throwing me out, it’s that I’m Charmaine and you were never part of me. And I won’t feel guilty anymore for what was done to us! I won’t feel guilty about surviving! I won’t be ashamed of what was done to me! I won’t be ashamed of remaking myself. And I won’t turn my back on myself.

How did you escape?” It took Pain a moment to decide. She wasn’t sure she liked the answer she found. “Well, first of all you threw me away. And now I am becoming too much my own self.” She paused. “I am afraid, too. We are the same in that, at least. I don’t want to go back to sleep. I don’t want to be only an empty place. I do not think I can do it.

Still, when your truthful eyes, your keen, attentive stare, endow the vacuous slut with royalty, when you match her soul to her shimmering hair, what can she do but rise to your imagined throne? And what can I, but see beyond the world that is, when, faithful, you insist I have the golden key-- and learn from you once more the terror and the bliss, the world as it might be?

Each friend I've lost was an extraordinary person, not just to me, but to hundreds of people who knew their work and their fight. These were the kind of people who lifted the quality of all our lives, their war was against ignorance, the bankruptcy of beauty, and the truancy of culture. They were people who hated and scorned pettiness, intolerance, bigotry, mediocrity, ugliness, and spiritual myopia; the blindness that makes life hollow and insipid was unacceptable. They tried to make us see. All of these friends were connected to the arts. Time and history have proven that the sensitive souls among us have always been more vulnerable.

Monet Refuses the Operation" Doctor, you say that there are no halos around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and now you want to restore my youthful errors: fixed notions of top and bottom, the illusion of three-dimensional space, wisteria separate from the bridge it covers. What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames? I will not return to a universe of objects that don’t know each other, as if islands were not the lost children of one great continent. The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, becomes water, lilies on water, above and below water, becomes lilac and mauve and yellow and white and cerulean lamps, small fists passing sunlight so quickly to one another that it would take long, streaming hair inside my brush to catch it. To paint the speed of light! Our weighted shapes, these verticals, burn to mix with air and changes our bones, skin, clothes to gases. Doctor, if only you could see how heaven pulls earth into its arms and how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

In our natural state we dislike dealing with God alone. Through our natural alienation from God we shrink from Him, and from eternal realities. This cleaves to us more or less, even after our regeneration. Hence it is, that more or less, even as believers, we have the same shrinking from standing with God alone,--from depending upon Him alone,--from looking to Him alone:--and yet this is the very position in which we ought to be, if we wish our faith to be strengthened. The more I am in a position to be tried in faith with reference to my body, my family, my service for the Lord, my business, etc., the more shall I have opportunity of seeing God's help and deliverance.

People who've never traveled on the ocean have no idea how scary it is to be on a little boat out there with no land in sight, waves towering over you while you do into the valley of a swell with nothing to see except water... water and sky, no other boas anywhere, no semblance of any kinds of firm reality at all. The main thing one shouldn't do is imagine things. One shouldn't think about the boat tipping over, just falling over and rolling under. Things like that happen all of a sudden. A gigantic three story high wave could whollop the boat broadside. Splash! Whoops! You're gone! No hint of a boat in about three minutes! If you don't get sucked under with it, then where are you?

You began as an emptiness, and all your experiences are only yours. I don’t need an empty place now. It scares me to be without it,” she admitted, “but I’m not going to let another person carry my hurt. You’re a separate person now; so much so that you have your own name, and a rather lean, slightly sticky gentleman who loves you.” She paused and tipped her head at the rosy blush that crept up Mercy’s face. Mercy clamped a hand over her mouth for a moment, giggling. Her scarlet eyes shone with tears. Charm went on. “I wouldn’t feel right taking your life away from you. So…welcome to the world.” Charm smiled in spite of the pinch in her throat. Something that was hers, and not Pain’s. The fragility in the air seemed to fall away with Mercy’s shaky smile. “Thank you.

Necessities 1 A map of the world. Not the one in the atlas, but the one in our heads, the one we keep coloring in. With the blue thread of the river by which we grew up. The green smear of the woods we first made love in. The yellow city we thought was our future. The red highways not traveled, the green ones with their missed exits, the black side roads which took us where we had not meant to go. The high peaks, recorded by relatives, though we prefer certain unmarked elevations, the private alps no one knows we have climbed. The careful boundaries we draw and erase. And always, around the edges, the opaque wash of blue, concealing the drop-off they have stepped into before us, singly, mapless, not looking back. 2 The illusion of progress. Imagine our lives without it: tape measures rolled back, yardsticks chopped off. Wheels turning but going nowhere. Paintings flat, with no vanishing point. The plots of all novels circular; page numbers reversing themselves past the middle. The mountaintop no longer a goal, merely the point between ascent and descent. All streets looping back on themselves; life as a beckoning road an absurd idea. Our children refusing to grow out of their childhoods; the years refusing to drag themselves toward the new century. And hope, the puppy that bounds ahead, no longer a household animal. 3 Answers to questions, an endless supply. New ones that startle, old ones that reassure us. All of them wrong perhaps, but for the moment solutions, like kisses or surgery. Rising inflections countered by level voices, words beginning with w hushed by declarative sentences. The small, bold sphere of the period chasing after the hook, the doubter that walks on water and treads air and refuses to go away. 4 Evidence that we matter. The crash of the plane which, at the last moment, we did not take. The involuntary turn of the head, which caused the bullet to miss us. The obscene caller who wakes us at midnight to the smell of gas. The moon's full blessing when we fell in love, its black mood when it was all over. Confirm us, we say to the world, with your weather, your gifts, your warnings, your ringing telephones, your long, bleak silences. 5 Even now, the old things first things, which taught us language. Things of day and of night. Irrational lightning, fickle clouds, the incorruptible moon. Fire as revolution, grass as the heir to all revolutions. Snow as the alphabet of the dead, subtle, undeciphered. The river as what we wish it to be. Trees in their humanness, animals in their otherness. Summits. Chasms. Clearings. And stars, which gave us the word distance, so we could name our deepest sadness.