Nest Family Quotes

George’s utterance of the nest and the trap belonged to a bigger mystery she did not yet understand. One day I will, she promised herself. She would stake her life that those last words from her son would be solved by her. They were steppingstones into… whatever the wind and the stars and the valiant trees held for her.

Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.

All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed.

-I will bathe in vinegar, down some raw eggs, and start looking for a wasp nest ASAP to put on my head. -I do not understand this. -To reverse the leanings of the heart. Ancient family wisdom. -Ah. Very good. In my family, we just suffer.

Meantime, a midsize Labrador mutt cut me off at the cul-de-sac. He was in desperate need of a rubdown. I gave it a thought but feared his bark and constant gruff. I locked eyes then noticed his black and white patches rotated with agitations. He yapped and yapped and bluffed mightily, but he cautiously stayed a safe distance away. Eventually, he lost all courage and quietly ran for shelter. As for me, I never stopped advancing toward my brother’s place. It took some effort but I serpentine and zigzagged my way through dandelions and fast-food wrappings lying in the yard.   The closer I got, the more definite the sounds of dishes breaking, kids playing, infants testing their lungs, and TVs watching themselves became. Jerry and his wife had separated some time ago. Regardless, he was left with four adult daughters still in the nest. Obviously, the girls brought kids of their own to the mix. But everything unfolding before me appeared chaotic on the other side of that threshold. That entire scene grew larger andmore intimidating with every timid step I took.

The owls appeared now, drifting from tree to tree as silently as flakes of soot, hooting in astonishment as the moon rose higher and higher, turning to pink, then gold, and finally riding in a nest of stars, like a silver bubble.

There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter?

Right now, it felt like there was nowhere for his thoughts to alight that wasn't rife with land mines of regret or anger or guilt.

Ben: "Gorog's no assassin! She's my best friend." Mara: "She's an insect, Ben." Ben: "So? Your best friend's a lizard." Mara: "Don't be ridiculous. Aunt Leia is my best friend." Ben: "Doesn't count. She's family. Saba is a lizard." Mara: "Okay, maybe my best friend's a lizard.

When people are kids their parents teach them all sorts of stuff, some of it true and useful, some of it absurd hogwash (example of former: don't crap your pants; example of latter: Columbus discovered America). This is why puberty happens. The purpose of puberty is to shoot an innocent and gullible child full of nasty glandular secretions that manifest in the mind as confusion, in the innards as horniness, upon the skin as pimples, and on the tongue as cocksure venomous disbelief in every piece of information, true or false, gleaned from one's parents since infancy. The net result is a few years of familial hell culminating in the child's exodus from the parental nest, sooner or later followed by a peace treaty and the emergence of the postpubescent as an autonomous, free-thinking human being who knows that Columbus only trespassed on an island inhabited by our lost and distant Indian relatives, but who also knows not to crap his pants.

We. Us. Our little family. With our problems and our routines. Fucking bitch. She’s a cuckoo, laying her egg in my nest. She has taken everything from me. She has taken everything and now she calls me to tell me that my distress is inconvenient for her?

I wanted someone above me in the chain of life. I didn't want to be alone, a single blue egg in a crumbling nest.

Four men killed that day. The phrase sat up in Willie's head like a rat and made a nest for itself there

Marriage and family are only what we make of them. Without that they’re just a nest of hypocrisy. Garbage and empty words. But if there is real love, of the sort one doesn’t go around telling everyone about, the sort that is felt and lived…

Faith is a strange creature,” Schuster said. “Like a falcon that nests year after year in the same place, but then flies away, sometimes for years, only to return again, stronger than ever.” “I don’t know if it will ever return for me.” “It will. In time. Why don’t you come with me now? We’ll get you fed, and I’ll find a place for you to spend the night.” Pino thought about that, and then shook his head, saying, “I’ll come off the roof with you, My Lord Cardinal, but I think I’ll slip out after dark, go home to my family.” Schuster paused, and then said, “As you wish, my son. Bless you, and go with God.

WHEN WAS IT THAT I BECAME A VOYEUR in their midst? I was the perfect witness, an unsuspected anthropologist disguised within the body of a young girl, surrounded by other young girls who were part of the family. Yet I was a cuckoo in the nest, an imposter who listened and observed, hoarding and collecting information.

It's not the fledgling birds that are thrown out of the nest by their parents and made to fly; it's the parents who are made to get the hell out of cozy family nest by their teenage offspring. It's we who are made to be independent of them, crash-landing if we don't manage it.

I love messy homes, homes where a woman and kids have left their mark on every inch: sticky finger marks down the walls, trinkets and nests of pastel hair-gadgets on the mantelpiece, that smell of flowery things and ironing.

I love you,” she said, speaking clearly so that there might be no confusion. “I love you utterly and completely. I love your elegant hands and the way you smile with only one side of your mouth — when you smile at all — and I love how grave your eyes are. I love that you let me invade your house with nearly my entire family and yours, and never even turned a hair. I love that you made love to me when I asked you, purely for politeness’ sake, and I love that you got mad at me later and made me make love to you. I love that you let Her Grace and her puppies construct a nest out of your shirts in your dressing room. I love that you’ve spent years selflessly saving people in St. Giles — although I want you to stop right now. I love that you killed a man for me, even if I’m still mad at you about it. I love that you saved my letters before we even knew each other well, and I love the curt, overly serious letters you wrote to me in return.” She looked at him very seriously. “I love you, Godric St. John, and now I’m breaking my word. I will not leave you. You may either come with me to Laurelwood or I’ll stay here with you in your musty old house in London and drive you mad with all my talking and relatives and… and exotic sexual positions until you break down and love me back, for I’m warning you that I’m not giving up until you love me and we’re a happy family with dozens of children.” She paused at that point because she’d run out of breath and looked at him. His face had gone still and for a moment her heart sank and she had to fortify herself for a battle. But then his mouth quirked like that and he said, “Exotic sexual positions?” And she knew even before he said anything else that it was all going to be fine—more than fine. It was going to be wonderful.

The three-story derelict is home to Smitty, Gale, and Gale's baby - a nuclear family nested on the corner - and Ella is accustomed to seeing them on the front steps, waiting for redemption or a cool breeze from the harbor, neither of which seems particularly likely.

There were millions of such families anxious only for peace and quiet in their own little nests. These were the mounting blocks by which the criminals climbed to power and kept it.

Maybe she was married, too, but was a compassionate cheater who didn’t chop down her family tree just because she wanted to stick her feathers in a new nest for a while.

Il me serait difficile de rappeler au lecteur qui n'est pas familier avec la géologie les faits au moyen desquels on arrive à se faire une vague et faible idée de l'immensité de la durée des âges écoulés.

She hadn't realised how low her self esteem had been, first during her relationship, when she tried to turn herself into someone else, and then when recovering from the break up. Because however much she was a part of the decision to break up, she still felt bruised and battered, never thought she'd have the energy to go through all this again with someone new. It has been so much easier, since they separated, to be cocooned with her family, to nest in her cosy home and allow life to carry on for others, outside the safety of her house.

The gangs filled a void in society, and the void was the absence of family life. The gang became a family. For some of those guys in the gang that was the only family they knew, because when their mothers had them they were too busy having children for other men. Some of them never knew their daddies. Their daddies never look back after they got their mothers pregnant, and those guys just grew up and they couldn’t relate to nobody. When they had their problems, who could they have talked to? Nobody would listen, so they gravitated together and form a gang. George Mackey, the former representative for the historic Fox Hill community in The Bahamas.

The sea was smooth, warm and as dark as black velvet, not a ripple disturbing the surface. The distant coastline of Albania was dimly outlined by a faint reddish glow in the sky. Gradually, minute by minute, this faint glow deepened and grew brighter, spreading across the sky. Then suddenly the moon, enormous, wine-red, edged herself over the fretted battlement of mountains, and threw a straight blood-red path across the dark sea. The owls appeared now, drifting from tree to tree as silently as flakes of soot, hooting in astonishment as the moon rose higher and higher, turning to pink, then gold, and finally riding in a nest of stars, like a silver bubble.

Indeed, a bird is made in such a way that it can fly, gather food and build a nest, and when I see a bird doing these things I rejoice. Goats, hares and wolves are made in order to eat, multiply and feed their families, and when they do this I feel quite sure that they are happy and that their lives are meaningful. What should a man do? He too must work for his existence, just as the animals do, but with the difference that he will perish if he does it alone, for he must work for an existence, not just for himself, but for everyone. And when he does this I feel quite sure that he is happy and that his life has meaning. And what had I been doing for all those thirty years of conscious life? Far from working for an existence for everyone, I had not even done so for myself. I had lived as a parasite and when I asked myself why I lived, I received the answer: for nothing. If the meaning of human existence lies in working to procure it I had spent thirty years attempting, not to procure it, but to destroy it for myself and for others. How then could I get any answer other than that my life is evil and meaningless? Indeed it was evil and meaningless.

The survivor movements were also challenging the notion of a dysfunctional family as the cause and culture of abuse, rather than being one of the many places where abuse nested. This notion, which in the 1990s and early 1980s was the dominant understanding of professionals characterised the sex abuser as a pathetic person who had been denied sex and warmth by his wife, who in turn denied warmth to her daughters. Out of this dysfunctional triad grew the far-too-cosy incest dyad. Simply diagnosed, relying on the signs: alcoholic father, cold distant mother, provocative daughter. Simply resolved, because everyone would want to stop, to return to the functioning family where mum and dad had sex and daughter concentrated on her exams. Professionals really believed for a while that sex offenders would want to stop what they were doing. They thought if abuse were decriminalised, abusers would seek help. The survivors knew different. P5

Musicians are some of the most driven, courageous people on the face of the earth. They deal with more day-to-day rejection in one year than most people do in a lifetime. Every day, they face the financial challenge of living a freelance lifestyle, the disrespect of people who think they should get real jobs, and their own fear that they’ll never work again. Every day, they have to ignore the possibility that the vision they have dedicated their lives to is a pipe dream. With every note, they stretch themselves, emotionally and physically, risking criticism and judgement. With every passing year, many of them watch as the other people their age achieve the predictable milestones of normal life – the car, the family, the house, the nest egg. Why? Because musicians are willing to give their entire lives to a moment – to that melody, that lyric, that chord, or that interpretation that will stir the audience’s soul. Musicians are beings who have tasted life’s nectar in that crystal moment when they poured out their creative spirit and touched another’s heart. In that instant, they were as close to magic, God, and perfection as anyone could ever be. And in their own hearts, they know that to dedicate oneself to that moment is worth a thousand lifetimes.

Mon rêve familier Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant D'une femme inconnue, et que j'aime, et qui m'aime Et qui n'est, chaque fois, ni tout à fait la même Ni tout à fait une autre, et m'aime et me comprend. Car elle me comprend, et mon coeur, transparent Pour elle seule, hélas ! cesse d'être un problème Pour elle seule, et les moiteurs de mon front blême, Elle seule les sait rafraîchir, en pleurant. Est-elle brune, blonde ou rousse ? - Je l'ignore. Son nom ? Je me souviens qu'il est doux et sonore Comme ceux des aimés que la Vie exila. Son regard est pareil au regard des statues, Et, pour sa voix, lointaine, et calme, et grave, elle a L'inflexion des voix chères qui se sont tues.

I live, eat, spend, travel, support a family, entertain.....but I do not go to work. There is something wrong. My nest egg just keeps growing.

All the millions of things we possessed as a family were inside the house, but, inexorably, there came one shocking moment when we discovered that the house was full.

If a baby stork is not happy with the way it is being reared, it sometimes abandons its parents and wanders into another nearby nest to be fed by a new family!

Your family shouldn't have built a household out of your pain.

Geese were safe as long as one of them did not stray from the rest and become a goose, and if one of a family of mice wandered from the nest, he became a mouse and lost his impunity.

She’s just a friend you said so I invited her in and offered her my coffee, my friendship, and my couch but then she took you right out from under me and now she lives in the house I used to call home and sleeps with the man I used to call my own like a cuckoo who lays its eggs in another bird’s nest and watches as it single-handedly destroys a family and justifies it with instinct. Cuckoo Bird

you, my friend, could be the smoke’s daughter, you who may not have known you were born of fire and rage, lightning over flaming lava etched your violet mouth, your sex in the scorched oak’s moss like a ring in a nest, your fingers there in the flames, your compact body rose from leaves of fire that make me recall there were bakers in your family tree, you’re still the rainforest’s bread, ash from violent wheat,

Not a single family finds itself exempt from that one haunted casualty who suffered irreparable damage in the crucible they entered at birth. Where some children can emerge from conditions of soul-killing abuse and manage to make their lives into something of worth and value, others can’t limp away from the hurts and gleanings time decanted for them in flawed beakers of memory. They carry the family cross up the hill toward Calvary and don’t mind letting every other member of their aggrieved tribe in on the source of their suffering. There is one crazy that belongs to each of us: the brother who kills the spirit of any room he enters; the sister who’s a drug addict in her teens and marries a series of psychopaths, always making sure she bears their children, who carry their genes of madness to the grave. There’s the neurotic mother who’s so demanding that the sound of her voice over the phone can cause instant nausea in her daughters. The variations are endless and fascinating. I’ve never attended a family reunion where I was not warned of a Venus flytrap holding court among the older women, or a pitcher plant glistening with drops of sweet poison trying to sell his version of the family maelstrom to his young male cousins. When the stories begin rolling out, as they always do, one learns of feuds that seem unbrokerable, or sexual abuse that darkens each tale with its intimation of ruin. That uncle hates that aunt and that cousin hates your mother and your sister won’t talk to your brother because of something he said to a date she later married and then divorced. In every room I enter I can sniff out unhappiness and rancor like a snake smelling the nest of a wren with its tongue. Without even realizing it, I pick up associations of distemper and aggravation. As far as I can tell, every family produces its solitary misfit, its psychotic mirror image of all the ghosts summoned out of the small or large hells of childhood, the spiller of the apple cart, the jack of spades, the black-hearted knight, the shit stirrer, the sibling with the uncontrollable tongue, the father brutal by habit, the uncle who tried to feel up his nieces, the aunt too neurotic ever to leave home. Talk to me all you want about happy families, but let me loose at a wedding or a funeral and I’ll bring you back the family crazy. They’re that easy to find.

Not to fear for love is a growth for the soul, to know that there are no limitations or taboos to develop feelings for someone, regardless of genitalia, only to feel and not condemn oneself. Enjoy life as a nest of opportunities.

You can learn tips and tricks to help keep your home more put-together and beautiful. Or you can accept the fact that your home will be imperfect and that each season of your family’s life will bring different kinds of beautiful messes.

I can remember Grandma telling stories about little nest makers leaving wards in the wid. The details would shift and change as she got older, but it always involved Saint Vinson's crystal spider and a wandering soul haunted by nightmares.

I can remember Grandma telling stories about little nest makers leaving wards in the wild. The details would shift and change as she got older, but it always involved Saint Vinson's crystal spider and a wandering soul haunted by nightmares.

Outre qu'il est fatigant d'écouter debout dans la foule un long morceau d'éloquence, entendre tonner contre les ennemis du régime n'est pas un pur plaisir quand on tient soi-même de plus près qu'on ne voudrait aux suspects et aux condamnés.

...On their first day in the new house, Addams had gotten up in the dark. From the surrounding swamp came bloodcurdling screams - the sound of possums mating, Tee later speculated, though it was perhaps a fisher, the dark-colored marten who stalked the wetlands, rooting rabbits from their nests. Addams returned to bed. "Someone is murdering babies in the swamp," he said. "Oh darling," came the sleepy reply from the pillows, "I forgot to tell you about the neighbors." "All my life I wanted to live in one of those Addams Family houses, but I've never achieved that," Addams had recently told a reporter. "I do my best to add little touches," he said. ...Still, he conceded, "it's hard to convert a ranch-type house into a Victorian monster."

I will bathe in vinegar, down some raw eggs, and start looking for a wasp nest ASAP to put on my head." "I do not understand this," he says. "To reverse the leanings of the heart. Ancient family wisdom." He laughs. "Ah. Very good. In my family, we just suffer.

I believe it is customary,” the duke said, his tone low and a bit ominous, “for a guardian to spout vague threats to his ward’s new husband should that husband bring any harm to his new wife.” James nodded, glancing quickly at the duke’s right boot, where he’d learned a dagger was always sheathed. “I, however, do not make vague threats.” The duke’s eyes narrowed. “Should you show yourself in any way less than worthy of the trust Daphne has placed in you, you will find yourself swinging from the gibbet at Falstone Castle, taken down regularly to be beaten, then locked in irons in the dungeon and placed in the room I refer to as the Rat’s Nest, where the vermin will be delighted to make your better acquaintance. You will next be invited to join me in my vast, dense forest, where I will leave you for the wolves to chew on.

After the Family was caught, Time magazine picked up on the bizarre parallels between Stranger in a Strange Land and Manson’s own “nest.” In January 1970, it ran a piece called “A Martian Model?” arguing that Manson had “no powers of invention at all… He may have murdered by the book.

What she does not see behind her is the disturbance her nuns have left in the forest, the families of squirrels, of dormice, of voles, of badgers, of stoats who have been chased in confusion from their homes, the trees felled that held green woodpeckers, the pine martens, the mistle thrushes and the long-tailed tits, the woodcocks and capercaillies chased from their nests, the willow warbler vanished in panic from these lands for the time being; it will take a half century to lure these tiny birds back. She sees only the human stamp upon the place. She considers it good.

Do you know what happened to my birth mother?” Roz told Brightbill about that fateful day in spring. About how the rocks had fallen and only one egg had survived. About how she’d put the egg in a nest and carried it away. About how she’d watched over the egg until a tiny gosling hatched. Brightbill listened carefully until she finished. “Should I stop calling you Mama?” said the gosling. “I will still act like your mother, no matter what you call me,” said the robot. “I think I’ll keep calling you Mama.” “I think I will keep calling you son.” “We’re a strange family,” said Brightbill, with a little smile. “But I kind of like it that way.

A griffon vulture’s egg was found at the Amsterdam Zoo but none of the vultures would accept it until the employees placed the egg in the nest of two gay vultures who immediately accepted it. Now they live as a happy family of three. Whenever Steve Jobs got stressed, he would go to the restroom and soak his feet in the company's toilet to relax.

In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.

A wealth of nuances, family expectations, words, and laughter. So many stories that are by themselves unremarkable, but together are meaningful and the story of our lives so far. And yes, there are more to come, but not the same kind of stories-in the same house with the same dynamic- with each of us in our set role before we make the big shift to the future us.

[John Clare's] father was a casual farm labourer, his family never more than a few days' wages from the poorhouse. Clare himself, from early childhood, scraped a living in the fields. He was schooled capriciously, and only until the age of 12, but from his first bare contact fell wildly in love with the written word. His early poems are remarkable not only for the way in which everything he sees flares into life, but also for his ability to pour his mingled thoughts and observations on to the page as they occur, allowing you, as perhaps no other poet has done, to watch the world from inside his head. Read The Nightingale's Nest, one of the finest poems in the English language, and you will see what I mean. ("John Clare, poet of the environmental crisis 200 years ago" in The Guardian.)

If it’s of any comfort, B. J. Casey and her colleagues speculate that there’s an evolutionary reason why Kirk rather than Spock so often emerges the victor in the quest for control over an adolescent’s mind. Human beings need incentives to leave the family nest. Leaving home is dangerous; leaving home is hard. It requires courage and learning lessons of independence. It may even require a purposeful recklessness.

So far in his life, his happiness had mostly consisted of seeing his wife and his children happy. He had snatched and grabbed pleasure for them, passing it on to them and snatching incessantly at more, making himself very unpleasant in the process. The bird that plucks its breast to line the nest for its young may be very disagreeable with other birds. And the fact that its young don't need more than a minimum of down, or that something else less hardly come by would do just as well, probably doesn't stop the bird from plucking. Mr. Lockwood went on snatching and grabbing wealth, often other people's, long after his wife and daughters had more than enough. Where he differed from the bird was that he had enjoyed snatching and grabbing for his family; whereas the bird can hardly, one imagines, enjoy plucking till the blood flows.

Wild geese pair off for life. I never knew them to even make an application for divorce. The male guards his mate on the nest. As soon as the young hatch, he protects them from the side opposite the mother, keeping the babies between the parents. He will leave his family for her and for her only, but he will die in the front ranks for any of them....I have placed their bushels of corn around one of my mating pairs, and of the thousands of hungry geese that come here, none will interfere with these little plots to take even one kernel...When traveling in the air, the male Canada Goose leads the way, breaking the air for his sweetheart, who is quartering behind him, and his family travels next to her. In brief, he is one of the most self-sacrificing, godly-principled leaders the human eye ever beheld, and to know him is to love and admire him.

Her mouth dry, her gaze ventured inevitably down, past the curls on his chest and belly, clear to where his rod thrust high and hard against the white of one bare thigh. Her recall was instantaneous- as if she'd ever forgotten. As if she ever could! With stark, unremitting clarity, she remembered precisely how it had felt to touch him there, her knuckles buried in the coarse nest of curls that thickened and surrounded the base of his erection.

Voilà bien la famille : même celui qui n'a pas sa place dans le monde, qui n'est ni célèbre ni riche, à qui il n'est venu ni enfants ni idées, et dont le public ne lira le nom que dans sa notice nécrologique, celui-là, en famille, a pourtant sa place attitrée. En famille, on est quelqu'un. Vous n'imaginez pas comme Caroline imite bien Chaplin, ni comme Rudi est irritable. Et quel sens de l'humour, dans toute la famille ! Ce qui, partout ailleurs, n'aurait rien d'humoristique déclenche ici des rires retentissants, on ne saurait dire pourquoi ; c'est drôle, voilà tout, n'est-ce pas l'essentiel en matière d'humour ? Et puis, tous ceux qui ne sont pas de la famille sont bien plus ridicules qu'ils ne s'en doutent. Dieu les a voués à la caricature ; si vous êtes seul au monde, sans attaches, vous pouvez être sûr d'être le summum du ridicule pour les diverses familles qui vous observent. Il est vrai que ces qualités, comme tout, peuvent être vues sous leur angle négatif : la famille a l'esprit plus petit qu'une petite ville. Plus elle est chaleureuse, plus elle se montre dure pour tout ce qui n'est est pas elle, et elle est toujours plus cruelle qu'un être confronté seul à la souffrance du monde. En cantonnant la gloire dans son cercle restreint, où elle est faceil à atteindre (« gloire de la famille »), elle endort l'ambition. Et parce que tous les événements familiaux suscitent une tristesse plus profonde ou une joie plus éclatante qu'ils ne le méritent réellement, parce qu'en famille ce qui n'a rien d'humoristique devient de l'humour, et des peines insignifiantes à l'échelle collective, un malheur personnel, elle est le berceau de toute l'ineptie qui imprègne notre vie publique. Il y aurait encore long à en dire et on l'a dit parfois, mais jamais en des jours comme celui-ci.

The biggest is family- unless they are certifiable or criminals, try to keep your kids connected to their cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, whatever you've got, even if it means sacrificing vacations and that new fridge. And visit each other in good times and bad. It teaches your kids more than you can imagine about love and loyalty, and means they will not always have a place to celebrate and someone to celebrate with, but a net to catch them if they fall.

Communist Romania almost everything was owned by the state. Democratic Romania quickly privatised its assets, selling them at bargain prices to the ex-communists, who alone grasped what was happening and collaborated to feather each other’s nests. Government companies that controlled national infrastructure and natural resources were sold to former communist officials at end-of-season prices while the party’s foot soldiers bought houses and apartments for pennies. Ion Iliescu was elected president of Romania, while his colleagues became ministers, parliament members, bank directors and multimillionaires. The new Romanian elite that controls the country to this day is composed mostly of former communists and their families. The masses who risked their necks in Timişoara and Bucharest settled for scraps, because they did not know how to cooperate and how to create an efficient organisation to look after their own interests.21

Of Julia’s wiggly, vertical balloon Sally made a tree with birds in their nests. “El’s right,” Julia said. “You are a good artist. Is that what you want to be when you grow up?” Something inside Sally clanged. Nobody had ever called her an artist, yet by that clang she knew that’s exactly what she was. She nodded and ducked close to her paper, abashed and wildly pleased. Julia said, “Good. You and me. We’ll be the artists in the family—agreed?” Sally has thought of this moment a thousand times since.

Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.

Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange had argued for adults’ right to have sex with children – or rather by a slippery sleight of word, PIE inverted the imperative by arguing that children should have the right to have sex with adults. This group had been disbanded after the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, its leader, with some of its activists bunkered in Holland’s paedophile enclaves, only to re-appear over the parapets in the sex crime controversies of the 1990s. How recent it was, then, that paedophilia was fielded as one of the liberation movements, how many of those on the left and right of the political firmament, were – and still are – persuaded that sex with children is merely another case for individual freedom? Few people in Britain at the turn of the century publicly defend adults’ rights to sex with children. But some do, and they are to be found nesting in the coalition crusading against evidence of sexual suffering. They have learned from the 1970s, masked their intentions and diverted attention on to ‘the system’. Others may not have come out for paedophilia but they are apparently content to enter into political alliances with those who have. We believe that this makes their critique of survivors and their allies unreliable. Others genuinely believe in false memories, but may not be aware of the credentials of some of their advisors.

I had braced myself for shock and sadness and guilt and hopelessness over Topiwo’s house. I knew his family had struggled to survive through drought until Compassion stepped in to help. But after visiting that beautiful dirt home, I didn’t feel sad about where Topiwo lives. Unlike most of the homes we had visited, Topiwo’s home was rich with love and community and joy and gracefulness. Richer than a lot of homes I see in our country. Rich with the contentment I want to have. It was, in a word, breathtaking. I had been welcomed into a true home. Topiwo knew. He knew what I so easily forget.

Now, my dear, make yourself at home," said Mrs. K. in her motherly way, "I'm on the drive from morning to night, as you may suppose with such a family, but a great anxiety will be off my mind if I know the children are safe with you. My rooms are always open to you, and your own shall be as comfortable as I can make it. There are some pleasant people in the house if you feel sociable, and your evenings are always free. Come to me if anything goes wrong, and be as happy as you can. There's the tea bell, I must run and change my cap." And off she bustled, leaving me to settle myself in my new nest.

Returning home can be awkward for any college-age kid. We spend our teenage years learning to be obnoxious and short with our parents. We prefer to confide in friends. We connive, we become reclusive, we strive to become remote. We may still have a little voice somewhere deep inside pleading, 'Just keep loving me, I'll come back,' but for the most part, coming home from college is like reaching for the end of an umbilical cord we worked so hard to cut. We enjoy the security, the lazy familiarity, but we have left the nest, proven our capacity for independence, and now demand the respect afforded adults.

Daily gaslighting. Until the bitter end, I left you with those lingering doubts, which would wake you, breathless in the night. Had you imagined everything? Was it really as terrible as you remembered? Why didn’t the others seem disturbed? Why didn’t they say anything? Was something wrong with you? Why not just move on? Why call attention to yourself? Why make a big deal? It’s just the way things were. Why rattle the cage, upset the nest? He was your father. He did the best he could. This was your family. You were always so difficult. Why can’t you just fit in? Always have to be so grandiose. So special.

Beatrix didn't walk, she explored. She liked to go deep into the forest, investigating flora, fungi, nests, webs, and holes in the ground. Nothing delighted the youngest Hathaway so much as the discovery of a black newt, a lizard's nest, or a rabbit warren, or the tracking of badgers' marks. Injured creatures were caught, rehabilitated, and set free, or if they could not fend for themselves, they became part of the Hathaway household. And the family had become so accustomed to Beatrix's animals that no one so much as batted an eye when a hedgehog waddled through the parlor or a pair of rabbits hopped past the dinner table.

Barnaby Fanning was the lone offspring of a marriage between two of New Orleans’ finest families. Growing up in a Garden District mansion so iconic it was a stop on all the tours, the future heir to sugar and cotton fortunes both, his adolescence spent at debutante balls during the season and trips abroad during the summer: it was the stuff of true Southern gentlemen. But Bucky always refused the first table at a restaurant. He carried a pocket calculator so he could tip a strict twelve percent. When his father nudged him out of the nest after graduating Vanderbilt (straight Cs), Bucky fluttered only as far as the carriage house because no other address would suit. He sported head-to-toe Prada bought on quarterly pilgrimages to Neiman Marcus in Dallas, paid for by Granny Charbonneau. At the slightest perceived insult, Bucky would fly into rages, becoming so red-faced and spitty in the process that even those on the receiving end of his invective grew concerned for his health. During the holidays, Bucky would stand over the trash and drop in Christmas cards unopened while keeping mental score of who’d sent them. He never accepted a dinner invitation without first asking who else would be there. Bucky Fanning had never been known to write a thank-you note.

What’s going on in your backyard?” He heard her chair creak. “Mr. Bluebird’s nowhere in sight. He must be out hunting for food. Mrs. Bluebird is incubating her eggs.” “They’re married?” “Of course.” “How do you know?” “Because . . . they’re, you know, they’re having a family.” “Did Audubon’s publication tell you birds who nest are married?” “I’ll have you know, sir, bluebirds mate for life.” “They do?” “They do.” “Well, then. I stand corrected.” Across the room a pair of carved cuckoo birds in an ornate clock poked out to announce the quarter hour. “Are cuckoo birds monogamous?” “Mostly.” “In that case, Mr. and Mrs. Cuckoo say hello.

For many years, a family of ospreys lived in a large nest near my summer home in Maine. Each season, I carefully observed their rituals and habits. In mid-April, the parents would arrive, having spent the winter in South America, and lay eggs. In early June, the eggs hatched. The babies slowly grew, as the father brought fish back to the nest, and in early to mid August were large enough to make their first flight. My wife and I recorded all of these comings and goings with cameras and in a notebook. We wrote down the number of chicks each year, usually one or two but sometimes three. We noted when the chicks first began flapping their wings, usually a couple of weeks before flying from the nest. We memorized the different chirps the parents made for danger, for hunger, for the arrival of food. After several years of cataloguing such data, we felt that we knew these ospreys. We could predict the sounds the birds would make in different situations, their flight patterns, their behavior when a storm was brewing. Reading our “osprey journals” on a winter’s night, we felt a sense of pride and satisfaction. We had carefully studied and documented a small part of the universe. Then, one August afternoon, the two baby ospreys of that season took flight for the first time as I stood on the circular deck of my house watching the nest. All summer long, they had watched me on that deck as I watched them. To them, it must have looked like I was in my nest just as they were in theirs. On this particular afternoon, their maiden flight, they did a loop of my house and then headed straight at me with tremendous speed. My immediate impulse was to run for cover, since they could have ripped me apart with their powerful talons. But something held me to my ground. When they were within twenty feet of me, they suddenly veered upward and away. But before that dazzling and frightening vertical climb, for about half a second we made eye contact. Words cannot convey what was exchanged between us in that instant. It was a look of connectedness, of mutual respect, of recognition that we shared the same land. After they were gone, I found that I was shaking, and in tears. To this day, I do not understand what happened in that half second. But it was one of the most profound moments of my life.

The family were wild," she said suddenly. "They tried to marry me off. And then when I'd begun to feel that after all life was scarcely worth living I found something"—her eyes went skyward exultantly—"I found something!" Carlyle waited and her words came with a rush. “Courage—just that; courage as a rule of life, and something to cling to always. I began to build up this enormous faith in myself. I began to see that in all my idols in the past some manifestation of courage had unconsciously been the thing that attracted me. I began separating courage from the other things of life. All sorts of courage—the beaten, bloody prize-fighter coming up for more—I used to make men take me to prize-fights; the déclassé woman sailing through a nest of cats and looking at them as if they were mud under her feet; the liking what you like always; the utter disregard for other people's opinions—just to live as I liked always and to die in my own way—Did you bring up the cigarettes?" He handed one over and held a match for her silently. "Still," Ardita continued, "the men kept gathering—old men and young men, my mental and physical inferiors, most of them, but all intensely desiring to have me—to own this rather magnificent proud tradition I'd built up round me. Do you see?" "Sort of. You never were beaten and you never apologized." "Never!" She sprang to the edge, poised or a moment like a crucified figure against the sky; then describing a dark parabola plunked without a slash between two silver ripples twenty feet below. Her voice floated up to him again. "And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life—not only over-riding people and circumstances but over-riding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things." She was climbing up now, and at her last words her head, with the damp yellow hair slicked symmetrically back, appeared on his level. "All very well," objected Carlyle. "You can call it courage, but your courage is really built, after all, on a pride of birth. You were bred to that defiant attitude. On my gray days even courage is one of the things that's gray and lifeless." She was sitting near the edge, hugging her knees and gazing abstractedly at the white moon; he was farther back, crammed like a grotesque god into a niche in the rock. "I don't want to sound like Pollyanna," she began, "but you haven't grasped me yet. My courage is faith—faith in the eternal resilience of me—that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide—not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often—and the female hell is deadlier than the male." "But supposing," suggested Carlyle, "that before joy and hope and all that came back the curtain was drawn on you for good?" Ardita rose, and going to the wall climbed with some difficulty to the next ledge, another ten or fifteen feet above. "Why," she called back, "then I'd have won!

As I started to set out the traps, one would pop before the next one was set. I caught over two hundred mice the first night! As I went to bed that night, I could hardly sleep from the anticipation of the next day’s hunt. I’d persuaded my dad to put me in a tree blind by myself while he entertained the out-of-town hunters in another tree blind about five hundred yards away. I also couldn’t sleep because I heard mice scurrying all over the trailer. As I finally started to close my eyes, I heard quite a commotion from my dad, who was sleeping in a bunk below me. Then I heard a loud thud against the wall. “Danged rat was trying to build a nest in my beard,” he said. “He needs to find somewhere else to build a nest.” My dad and I started laughing. “We’re going to need some more mousetraps, Jase,” he said.

Sitting on his lap, their limbs all a-tangle, she splayed her hands wide across the dark fur on his chest, coasting them down his belly to tangle in the thick nest between his thighs. Her mouth followed, her lips hot on his naked skin. She sank to her knees on the floor. Aidan went very still. No. He could not believe that she would... His hands twisted in her hair. It was the most incredibly erotic sensation in his life. Her tongue danced and circled, down to the very root of him and back up, tasting and exploring that most sensitive part of him. He gritted his teeth until he could stand no more. He caught his hand in her hair and pulled her up and onto his rod. They were both frantic, twisting wildly in perfect union, until at last he exploded inside her, spurting wildly again and again and again.

You are made of life and beauty, and the dreams of my family for a hundred years. You are made of wind, water and wide blue days. My beauty, my pride, you must not die. If all else fails, if darkness devours all I was, you, at least, must go on. She opened both heart and mind to her ship, and flooded her with memories: her father’s deep booming laugh, and the proud moment when she had first taken the wheel into her own hands. A sun-swept vista from the crow’s nest, the horrific poetry of looking up at waves in a storm. You cannot end with me, Althea insisted fiercely. For if you do, all this does with you. All this beauty, all this life. How can you be made of death? It was not his death my father poured into you, but the summation of his life. How can you be made of death, when it was inheriting his life that quickened you?

Carol's liveliest interest was in her walks with the baby. Hugh wanted to know what the box-elder tree said, and what the Ford garage said, and what the big cloud said, and she told him, with a feeling that she was not in the least making up stories, but discovering the souls of things. They had an especial fondness for the hitching-post in front of the mill. It was a brown post, stout and agreeable; the smooth leg of it held the sunlight, while its neck, grooved by hitching-straps, tickled one's fingers. Carol had never been awake to the earth except as a show of changing color and great satisfying masses; she had lived in people and in ideas about having ideas; but Hugh's questions made her attentive to the comedies of sparrows, robins, blue jays, yellowhammers; she regained her pleasure in the arching flight of swallows, and added to it a solicitude about their nests and family squabbles.

The harsh truth is that the most important driver in the growth of your assets is how much you save, and saving requires discipline. Without a regular savings program, it doesn’t matter if you make 5 percent, 10 percent, or even 15 percent on your investment funds. The single most important thing you can do to achieve financial security is to begin a regular savings program and to start it as early as possible. The only reliable route to a comfortable retirement is to build up a nest egg slowly and steadily. Yet few people follow this basic rule, and the savings of the typical American family are woefully inadequate. It is critically important to start saving now. Every year you put off investing makes your ultimate retirement goals more difficult to achieve. Trust in time rather than in timing. As a sign in the window of a bank put it, little by little you can safely stock up a strong reserve here, but not until you start.

Flouting federal laws governing record-keeping requirements. Failing to preserve emails sent or received from her personal accounts, as required by law. Circumventing the Freedom of Information Act. Instructing her aides to send classified materials on her unsecure network. Running afoul of the “gross negligence” clause of the Espionage Act (which meant prosecutors would not have to prove “intent” to find her guilty). Pretending she didn’t know that Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) was classified. Transferring classified material that originated at the CIA, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence sources, to her unsecured network. Authoring hundreds of emails with classified information to people who did not have security clearance. Inducing aides to commit perjury. Lying to the FBI. Engaging in public corruption by using the office of secretary of state to feather the nest of the Clinton family foundation.

I was a bird. I lived a bird's life from birth to death. I was born the thirty-second chick in the Jipu family. I remember everything in detail. I remember breaking out of the shell at birth. But I learned later that my mother had gently cracked the shell first to ease my way. I dozed under my mother's chest for the first few days. Her feathers were so warm and soft! I was strong, so I kicked away my siblings to keep the cozy spot. Just 10 days after I was born, I was given flying lessons. We all had to learn quickly because there were snakes and owls and hawks. My little brothers and sisters, who didn't practice enough, all died. My little sister looked so unhappy when she got caught. I can still see her face. Before I could fly, I hadn't known that our nest was on the second-lowest branch of a big tree. My parents chose the location wisely. Snakes could reach the lowest branch and eagles and hawks could attack us if we lived at the top. We soared through the sky, above mountains and forests. But it wasn't just for fun! We always had to watch out for enemies, and to hunt for food. Death was always nearby. You could easily starve or freeze to death. Life wasn't easy. Once, I got caught in a monsoon. I smacked into a tree and lay bleeding for days. Many of my family and friends died, one after another. To help rebuild our clan, I found myself a female and married her. She was so sweet. She laid many eggs, but one day, a human cut down the tree we lived in, crushing all the eggs and my beloved. A bird's life is an endless battle against death. I survived for many years before I finally met my end. I found a worm at some harvest festival. I came fluttering down. It was a bad mistake. Some big guy was waiting to ambush hungry little birdies like me. I heard my own guts pop. It was clear to me that I was going to die at last. And I wanted to know where I'd go when I died.

The way you see the change in a person you've been away from for a long time, where somebody who sees him every day, day in, day out, wouldn't notice because the change is gradual. All up the coast I could see the signs of what the Combine had accomplished since I was last through this country, things like, for example a train stopping at a station and laying a string of full-grown men in mirrored suits and machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects, half-life things coming pht-pht-pht out of the last car, then hooting its electric whistle and moving on down the spoiled land to deposit another hatch. Or things like five thousand houses punched out identical by a machine and strung across the hills outside of town, so fresh from the factory theyre still linked together like sausages, a sign saying NEST IN THE WEST HOMES NO DWN. PAYMENT FOR VETS, a playground down the hill from the houses, behind a checker-wire fence and another sign that read ST. LUKE'S SCHOOL FOR BOYS there were five thousand kids in green corduroy pants and white shirts under green pullover sweaters playing crack-the-whip across an acre of crushed gravel. The line popped and twisted and jerked like a snake, and every crack popped a little kid off the end, sent him rolling up against the fence like a tumbleweed. Every crack. And it was always the same little kid, over and over. All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by those guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed. They ate and went to bed. The only one they noticed was the little kid at the end of the whip. He'd always be so scuffed and bruised that he'd show up out of place wherever he went. He wasn't able to open up and laugh either. It's a hard thing to laugh if you can feel the pressure of those beams coming from every new car that passes, or every new house you pass.

of the story showed the four brain-destroyed women Linda Gail had shown me. The grainy transfer of the images to newsprint had made them even more macabre. The story had come off the wire in Los Angeles and was written by a gossip columnist who quoted other gossip columnists as the story’s source. The details were bizarre and prurient and unbelievable, in the way of stories from True Detective, Argosy, Saga, and Male, and because they were so unbelievable, the reader concluded they could not have been manufactured. I saw Roy’s name and Linda Gail’s and the director Jerry Fallon’s and Clara Wiseheart’s. The story was basically accurate; the prose was another matter. It was purple, full of erotic suggestion, cutesy about “love nests” and “romance in Mayheco.” But as tabloid reporting often does for no purpose other than to satisfy a lascivious readership, the article brought to light an injustice and criminal conspiracy that mainstream newspaper and radio would not have touched. In other words, the account was less one of fact than a hazy description of infidelity, a movie set that had turned into the Baths of Caracalla, a young starlet seduced by

My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it; but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato says, the master of a family (patremfamilias) must have in his rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is, "an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to expect hard times; it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and glory." I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck each. I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one's head—useful to keep off rain and snow, where the king and queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof; where some may live in the fireplace, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose; a house which you have got into when you have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over; where the weary traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without further journey; such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping; where you can see all the treasures of the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man should use; at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse, and garret; where you can see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil, and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there—in solitary confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a man's premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but I am not aware that I have been in many men's houses. I might visit in my old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I have described, if I were going their way; but backing out of a modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am caught in one.

- Je ne comprends pas... comment la monarchie n'existerait-elle plus? - Si on prends les choses à la lettre, elle dure toujours, naturellement. Nous avons encore une armée - le compte désigna le sous-lieutenant - et des fonctionnaires - le compte désigna le préfet. Mais son corps vivant se désagrège. Elle se désagrège, elle est dèjà désagrégée. C'est un vieillard voué à la mort, dont le moindre rhume de cerveau met la vie en danger, qui mantient l'ancien trône pour la simple et miraculeuse raison qu'il peut encore s'y tenir assis. Pour combien de temps encore, pour combien de temps? Cette époque veut d'abord se créer des états nationaux indépendants. On ne croit plus en Dieu. La nouvelle réligion, c'est le nationalisme. Les peuples ne vont plus à l'église. Ils fréquentent des groupement nationaux. La monarchie, notre monarchie, est fondée sur la pitié; sur la croyance que Dieu a choisi les Habsbourg pour régner sur tant et tant de nations chrétiennes. Notre Empereur est un frère séculier du pape, il est Sa Majesté apostolique, impériale et royale, aucune autre Majesté n'est "apostolique", aucune autre Majesté d'Europe ne dépend, comme lui, de la grâce divine et de la foi des peuples en la grâce divine. L'empereur de l'Allemagne continuera toujours de régner, même si Dieu l'abandonne, il régnera, le cas écheant, par la grâce de la nation. L'empereur d'Autriche, lui, ne peut régner sans Dieu. Mais maintenant, Dieu l'a abandonné!

When the Kingdom Comes Your mother is not your mother, she is something else, a bird nesting in the heart of a hollowed out tree, a saint whose skin is cool and soft as apple-flesh, the will of God. And your brothers are not your brothers, they are the ash that is all of us, scattered in its periphery, unfortunate multitude. Your sister, your lover, your friend none of these are yours. The stone belongs only to the river which bled it smooth. What you call your face, that canvas of mercy which smiles with grief at even November's drizzle and chill, is the face of someone else, someone to come, good tidings, the Christ child in a stable, cooing as Mary tends such tiny hands. It is her face that seems so familiar, the answer to everything whetting the tip of your tongue. The hairs on your head, they belong only to themselves, and when they are done with such a manner of belonging, they offer themselves to stars which outnumber them galacticly. Everything you think is yours is not. A father had two sons, and one of them was heavy with desire. Friend—what's lost is found, forever. You will wear the very best robe. You will wear rings on every finger of each hand. And they are not your hands. They are God's hands and She formed you with them Herself turning tricks with clay until finally the sand sang alleluia, and it was good. These hands, She will hold like treasure all the way to Paradise, where under the glimmer of the moon and the spark of light that fuels every prayer, She keeps her family. And we will all be there. And we will all be.

Are we to treat persons known for liars and strife-makers as the children of the devil or not? Are we to turn away from them, and refuse to acknowledge them, rousing an ignorant strife of tongues concerning our conduct? Are we guilty of connivance, when silent as to the ambush whence we know the wicked arrow privily shot? Are we to call the traitor to account? or are we to give warning of any sort? I have no answer. Each must carry the question that perplexes to the Light of the World. To what purpose is the spirit of God promised to them that ask it, if not to help them order their way aright? One thing is plain—that we must love the strife-maker; another is nearly as plain—that, if we do not love him, we must leave him alone; for without love there can be no peace-making, and words will but occasion more strife. To be kind neither hurts nor compromises. Kindness has many phases, and the fitting form of it may avoid offence, and must avoid untruth. We must not fear what man can do to us, but commit our way to the Father of the Family. We must be nowise anxious to defend ourselves; and if not ourselves because God is our defence, then why our friends? is he not their defence as much as ours? Commit thy friend's cause also to him who judgeth righteously. Be ready to bear testimony for thy friend, as thou wouldst to receive the blow struck at him; but do not plunge into a nest of scorpions to rescue his handkerchief. Be true to him thyself, nor spare to show thou lovest and honourest him; but defence may dishonour: men may say, What! is thy friend's esteem then so small? He is unwise who drags a rich veil from a cactus-bush.

Meanwhile, he continued to speak out on behalf of black citizens. In March 1846, a terrifying massacre took place in Seward’s hometown. A twenty-three-year-old black man named William Freeman, recently released from prison after serving five years for a crime it was later determined he did not commit, entered the home of John Van Nest, a wealthy farmer and friend of Seward’s. Armed with two knives, he killed Van Nest, his pregnant wife, their small child, and Mrs. Van Nest’s mother. When he was caught within hours, Freeman immediately confessed. He exhibited no remorse and laughed uncontrollably as he spoke. The sheriff hauled him away, barely reaching the jail ahead of an enraged mob intent upon lynching him. “I trust in the mercy of God that I shall never again be a witness to such an outburst of the spirit of vengeance as I saw while they were carrying the murderer past our door,” Frances Seward told her husband, who was in Albany at the time. “Fortunately, the law triumphed.” Frances recognized at once an “incomprehensible” aspect to the entire affair, and she was correct. Investigation revealed a history of insanity in Freeman’s family. Moreover, Freeman had suffered a series of floggings in jail that had left him deaf and deranged. When the trial opened, no lawyer was willing to take Freeman’s case. The citizens of Auburn had threatened violence against any member of the bar who dared to defend the cold-blooded murderer. When the court asked, “Will anyone defend this man?” a “death-like stillness pervaded the crowded room,” until Seward rose, his voice strong with emotion, and said, “May it please the court, I shall remain counsel for the prisoner until his death!

That’s when I hear Maysilee begin to scream. In a flash, I’m on my feet and thrashing through the smoky tunnel in the hedge. I spy bright patches of pink up ahead, hear honking, not unlike Lenore Dove’s geese. My ax is out of my belt, drawn and ready as I leave the holly bushes for a whirlwind of feathers. The two dozen waterbirds remind me of ones I’ve seen at the lake. Long-legged. Beaks like sword blades — thin, narrow, and deadly. Not cool blue gray, not paper white, but the color of the bubblegum sold at the Donners’ sweetshop. They dive again and again at Maysilee, who’s kneeling on the ground, trying to use a tarp as protection while she vehemently slices at them with her dagger. A couple of dead birds lie on the ground, but they have taken their toll. Blood blossoms from her cheek, her chest, the palm of her hand. Like Ampert’s squirrels, they have no interest in me. Programmed to target Maysilee in a very personal punishment. I hack away at the mutts with my ax, piling up a collection of rosy wings and legs like cattail stems, but they badly outnumber us. A bird swoops down at a sharp angle, driving its beak through her throat. As it withdraws, I decapitate it, slicing through the skinny neck. I realize Maysilee’s beyond recovery when the flock clears out. Falling to my knees beside her, I reach for her sound hand, which grasps mine like a vise. Her wounded one curls up and rests in her nest of necklaces, which lays in a pool of blood. Through the rasping of her breath, she attempts to speak, but the last mutt silenced her voice with its wicked beak. Mine seems silenced as well, as no words of comfort or hope or apology make it out. I just stare into those burning blue eyes, letting her know she’s not dying alone. She’s with family. She’s with me.

Missy and I became best friends, and soon after our first year together I decided to propose to her. It was a bit of a silly proposal. It was shortly before Christmas Day 1988, and I bought her a potted plant for her present. I know, I know, but let me finish. The plan was to put her engagement ring in the dirt (which I did) and make her dig to find it (which I forced her to do). I was then going to give a speech saying, “Sometimes in life you have to get your hands dirty and work hard to achieve something that grows to be wonderful.” I got the idea from Matthew 13, where Jesus gave the Parable of the Sower. I don’t know if it was the digging through the dirt to find the ring or my speech, but she looked dazed and confused. So I sort of popped the question: “You’re going to marry me, aren’t you?” She eventually said yes (whew!), and I thought everything was great. A few days later, she asked me if I’d asked her dad for his blessing. I was not familiar with this custom or tradition, which led to a pretty heated argument about people who are raised in a barn or down on a riverbank. She finally convinced me that it was a formality that was a prerequisite for our marriage, so I decided to go along with it. I arrived one night at her dad’s house and asked if I could talk with him. I told him about the potted plant and the proposal to his daughter, and he pretty much had the same bewildered look on his face that she’d had. He answered quite politely by saying no. “I think you should wait a bit, like maybe a couple of years,” he said. I wasn’t prepared for that response. I didn’t handle it well. I don’t remember all the details of what was said next because I was uncomfortable and angry. I do remember saying, “Well, you are a preacher so I am going to give you some scripture.” I quoted 1 Corinthians 7:9, which says: “It is better to marry than to burn with passion.” That didn’t go over very well. I informed him that I’d treated his daughter with respect and he still wouldn’t budge. I then told him we were going to get married with him or without him, and I left in a huff. Over the next few days, I did a lot of soul-searching and Missy did a lot of crying. I finally decided that it was time for me to become a man. Genesis 2:24 says: “For this reason [creation of a woman] a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” God is the architect of marriage, and I’d decided that my family would have God as its foundation. It was time for me to leave and cleave, as they say. My dad told me once that my mom would cuddle us when we were in his nest, but there would be a day when it would be his job to kick me out. He didn’t have to kick me out, nor did he have to ask me, “Who’s a man?” Through prayer and patience, Missy’s parents eventually came around, and we were more than ready to make our own nest.

Sharon passed around a handout: "Triangle of Self-Actualization" by Abraham Maslow. The levels of human motivation. It resembled the nutrition triangle put out by the FDA, with five horizontal levels of multiple colors. I vaguely remembered it from my one college psychology course in the 1970's. "Very applicable with refugees," Sharon said. "Maslow theorized that one could not move to a higher level until the prior level was satisfied. The first level, the triangle base, is physiological needs. Like food and water. Until a person has enough to eat and drink, that's all one would be concerned with." I'd never experienced not being able to satisfy my thirst or hunger, but it sounded logical that that would be my only concern in such a situation. For the Lost Boys, just getting enough food and water had been a daily struggle. I wondered what kind of impact being stuck at the bottom level for the last fourteen years would have on a person, especially a child and teen. "The second level is safety and security. Home. A sanctuary. A safe place." Like not being shot at or having lions attack you. They hadn't had much of level two, either. Even Kakuma hadn't been safe. A refugee camp couldn't feel like home. "The third level is social. A sense of belonging." Since they'd been together, they must have felt like they belonged, but perhaps not on a larger scale, having been displaced from home and living in someone else's country. "Once a person has food, shelter, family and friends, they can advance to the fourth level, which is ego. Self-esteem." I'd never thought of those things occurring sequentially, but rather simultaneously, as they did in my life. If I understood correctly, working on their self-esteem had not been a large concern to them, if one at all. That was bound to affect them eventually. In what way remained to be seen. They'd been so preoccupied with survival that issues of self-worth might overwhelm them at first. A sure risk for insecurity and depression. The information was fascinating and insightful, although worrisome in terms of Benson, Lino, and Alepho. It also made me wonder about us middle-and upper-class Americans. We seldom worried about food, except for eating too much, and that was not what Maslow had been referring to. Most of us had homes and safety and friends and family. That could mean we were entirely focused on that fourth level: ego. Our efforts to make ourselves seem strong, smart, rich, and beautiful, or young were our own kind of survival skill. Perhaps advancing directly to the fourth level, when the mind was originally engineered for the challenges of basic survival, was why Prozac and Zoloft, both antidepressants, were two of the biggest-selling drugs in America. "The pinnacle of the triangle," Sharon said, "is the fifth level. Self-actualization. A strong and deeply felt belief that as a person one has value in the world. Contentment with who one is rather than what one has. Secure in ones beliefs. Not needing ego boosts from external factors. Having that sense of well-being that does not depend on the approval of others is commonly called happiness." Happiness, hard to define, yet obvious when present. Most of us struggled our entire lives to achieve it, perhaps what had brought some of us to a mentoring class that night.

In the early 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffee house and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton’s Principia, Hemy Cavendish’s weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar. There, some forgotten sailor or sailor’s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings. We don’t know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo, so we don’t know which arrived first a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time. You would be hard pressed, I would submit to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being-a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up. The indignities to the poor dodo didn’t end quite there. In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo’s death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution’s stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb. As a result of this and other departures from common sense, we are not now entirely sure what a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose-a handful of crude descriptions by "unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments," in the somewhat aggrieved words of the nineteenth century naturalist H. E. Strickland. As Strickland wistfully observed, we have more physical evidence of some ancient sea monsters and lumbering saurapods than we do of a bird that lived into modern times and required nothing of us to survive except our absence. So what is known of the dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, and was the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family, though by quite what margin is unknown as its weight was never accurately recorded. Extrapolations from Strickland’s "osseous fragments" and the Ashmolean’s modest remains show that it was a little over two and a half feet tall and about the same distance from beak tip to backside. Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainly gone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again. We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what sounds it made in tranquility or alarm. We don’t possess a single dodo egg. From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years.

No chance of a ceremony inside the church,” he reported to Kev and Cam as they gathered in the main parlor. “It’s a sodding mess.” “We’ll get married on the church steps, then,” Kev said. “Impossible, I’m afraid.” Leo looked rueful. “According to the rubric of the church, it has to be inside a church or chapel that has been officially licensed. And neither the vicar nor the rector dare go against the laws. The consequences are so severe that they might receive three years’ suspension. When I asked where the nearest licensed chapel was, they looked in the records. As it happens, about fifty years ago our estate chapel was licensed for a family wedding, but it ran out since then.” “Can we renew it?” Cam asked. “Today?” “I asked that. The rector seemed to think it was an acceptable solution, and he agreed as long as Merripen and Win promised to privately solemnize the marriage at the church as soon as the roof is repaired.” “But the marriage would be legal starting today?” Kev demanded. “Yes, legal and registered, as long as it’s held before noon. The church won’t recognize a wedding if it’s held even one minute after twelve.” “Good,” Kev said curtly. “We’ll marry this morning at the estate chapel. Pay the rector whatever he demands.” “There’s only one problem with this plan,” Cam said. “We don’t have an estate chapel. At least, I’ve never seen one.” Leo looked blank. “What the bloody hell happened to it?” They both glanced at Kev, who had been in charge of the estate restoration for the past two years. He had taken down walls, razed small buildings, and made new additions to the original manor house. “What did you do with the chapel, phral?” Cam asked apprehensively. A scowl settled on Kev’s face. “No one was using it except some nesting birds. So we turned it into a granary and attached it to the barn.” In the face of their silence, he said defensively, “It still counts.” “You want to be married in a granary?” Leo asked incredulously. “Among bins of animal feed?” “I want to be married anywhere,” Kev said. “The granary’s as good a place as any.” Leo looked sardonic. “Someone may want to ask Win if she is willing to be married in a former chapel that now amounts to a shed attached to the barn. Forbearing as my sister is, even she has standards.” “I’m willing!” came Win’s voice from the stairs. Cam smothered a grin. Leo shook his head and spoke in his sister’s direction. “It’s a barn, Win.” “If our Lord didn’t mind being born in a stable,” she replied cheerfully, “I certainly have no objection to being married in a barn.” Briefly lifting his gaze heavenward, Leo muttered, “I’ll go take care of the renewal fee. I can hardly wait to see the vicar’s expression when I tell him we’ve turned the chapel into a granary. It doesn’t reflect well on this family’s piety, let me tell you.” “You’re concerned about appearing pious?” Kev asked. “Not yet. I’m still in the process of being led astray. But when I finally get around to repenting, I’ll have no damned chapel for it.” “You can repent in our officially licensed granary,” Cam said, shrugging into his coat. 

The place didn’t look much like a family dwelling, really. It looked like a rich man’s love nest, a secluded little getaway nestled back in the trees of the peninsula and safe from spying eyes. Or an ideal location for a novice sorcerer to come to try out his fledgling abilities, safe from interruptions. A good place for Victor Sells to set up shop and practice

USING YOUR NEST EGG TO DELAY CLAIMING If you’re fortunate enough to have a nest egg and you want to retire, you can consider withdrawing more savings up front as a way to hold off starting your Social Security benefit. But does the strategy make sense? It well may, and there are some important things to keep in mind. Social Security benefits go up about 7 percent for each year they are not claimed between age 62 and your full retirement age. Wait longer and the reward grows even more: Benefits increase 8 percent annually for each year they are not claimed between full retirement age and 70. Are your financial resources adequate to support your lifestyle without Social Security, so you can delay claiming and lock in the income gains I just described? The issue can get complicated, and those interested may want to talk it over with a financial advisor. Among the considerations are the following: The tax bite: A portion of your Social Security benefit may be subject to income tax (though at least 15 percent is tax free for everyone). Withdrawals from (non-Roth) Individual Retirement Accounts will surely have tax implications. But some research has shown that withdrawing more up front may reduce the tax bite later. Check your situation with an expert. Family income: Is your spouse eligible for Social Security based on his or her work record? This increases your options. Just know that your total income may affect whether your Social Security benefits are subject to income tax, how much, and whether it makes sense to delay claiming. (See Chapter 13 for a discussion of income tax rules and Social Security, including provisional income.) Your investments: Consider reasonable rates of return, including your appetite for risk, in weighing the pros and cons of delaying a claim for Social Security. It’s extremely difficult to beat Social Security’s guaranteed returns. Finally, a note of caution (and common sense): If your nest egg is modest, the strategy of withdrawing savings to delay Social Security may be unwise, because it’s important to have a cushion. Be realistic when calculating how much of a cushion you need.

To live and strive in modern America is to participate in a series of morally fraught systems. If a family’s entire financial livelihood depends on the value of its home, it’s not hard to understand why that family would oppose anything that could potentially lower its property values, like a proposal to develop an affordable housing complex in the neighborhood. If an aging couple’s nest egg depends on how the stock market performs, it’s not hard to see why that couple would support legislation designed to yield higher returns, even if that means shortchanging workers. Social ills—segregation, exploitation—can be motivated by bigotry and selfishness as well as by the best of intentions, such as protecting our children. Especially protecting our children. These arrangements create what the postwar sociologist C. Wright Mills called “structural immorality” and what the political scientist Jamila Michener more recently labeled exploitation “on a societal level.”[27] We are connected, members of a shared nation and a shared economy, where the advantages of the rich often come at the expense of the poor. But that arrangement is not inevitable or permanent. It was made by human hands and can be unmade by them.

Was nützt einem ein Vater? Er drängt dich dazu auszufliegen, schubst dich aus dem Nest und rät dir, die Flügel zu benutzen, weil du sonst zu Boden stürzt.

As for me, I got what someone once described as the only reliable friend a politician can have in Washington. Bo also gave me an added excuse to put off my evening paperwork and join my family on meandering after-dinner walks around the South Lawn. It was during those moments—with the light fading into streaks of purple and gold, Michelle smiling and squeezing my hand as the dog bounded in and out of the bushes with the girls giving chase, Malia eventually catching up to us to interrogate me about things like birds’ nests or cloud formations while Sasha wrapped herself around one of my legs to see how far I could carry her along—that I felt normal and whole and as lucky as any man has a right to expect.

Carmen [pet starling] brings joy and depth and insight to our family. I believe she has a good life, and I am glad she did not die with her nest mates. But not one single day passes that I do not wish I could see her fly free.

Regina kicked a hornet's nest, throwing around accusations within the Myers family, and Betsy publicly threatened her." Oh, Betsy. "Regardless of what Betsy says in anger, Regina knows Betsy would never hurt her family and accusations aren't proof. What about the biker guy? All signs point to him, in my opinion." Eddie sighed. "Regina has other ideas." "Ah, ideas that just so happen to not paint her daughter-in-law as a cheater and her son as a moron for being blind to her stepping out on him.

The bee flew past, buzzing loudly. They could feel the wind from its wings as it zoomed into the bee nest. Kate furrowed her brow. “I don’t know, they seem to ignore us like regular bees would.”  “Yeah,” Jack said, “they are bee-having normally.”  Kate giggled. “Bee-hiving normally.”  “But they DO have red eyes,” Mom said, “maybe they’ve been bee-witched!”  Dad groaned at Mom. “You too?” “What's wrong hub-bee?” Mom asked with a smirk.  Dad rolled his eyes. “No more please!”  “What?” Mom said, “can’t you tell that I’ve POLLEN in love with you?”  Dad covered his ears, and the kids laughed.  Mom continued. “Because you’re my honey.”  Dad cringed again. “Dad,” Jack said, “if you don’t like her jokes tell her to buzz off.”  Kate laughed. “Yeah, maybe you guys aren't in the... HONEY-moon phase anymore.”  “Don’t be a bay-bee,” Mom said to Dad, “bee positive!”  “AAAH!” Dad yelled. “Stop, stop!”  “What’s wrong?” Mom asked, “Do these jokes sting?”  Jack and Kate cracked up and even Mom started laughing her head off while Dad stood there with his hands over his ears saying, “Lalala! I can’t hear you!” When he noticed they had all stopped talking, he took his hands down. “Finally. You guys were bee-ing annoying.” They had a final laugh, then walked closer to the bee nest, to get a better look. Mom tapped Dad on the shoulder. “Do you like my hair today?”  Dad looked confused for a moment. “Uh... yes? It's very nice. You always look nice.”  Mom smiled at him. “Thank you dear, I just wanted to know if I needed to honeycomb it.

To offer a simple example, if I am looking to buy a new car, there are several different facets or levels of my life that can influence my decision. At the self level, I might think about which car most appeals to me based on my individual preferences, likes, dislikes, needs and what I can afford. If I expand beyond my personal perspective to the relational level, I will consider which car would be best for my family, including my son’s needs. Additionally, the cultural level informs what kind of car I would consider purchasing based on how I do or do not want to be perceived by others. The range of cars I have access to in the US falls under the societal level, and considerations such as electric versus gas come under the global or collective level. In discussion of the nested model of attachment and trauma, I will refer to the different facets, dimensions or perspectives of our lives that coalesce into the whole of our experience, even if we’re unaware of them. The current literature on attachment predominantly focuses on the self and relationship levels.