Overflow Anime Quotes

I probably won't be able to look forward to summer for a long time. My chest will hurt. My tears will be overflowing. But this warmth in my hands and these summer memories will live on in my heart.

If you are not filled with overflowing love, compassion and goodwill for all creatures living wild in nature, You will never know true happiness.

Overflowing with the milk of human kindness, the family had invited everyone they could think of, including people they cordially disliked.

Life overflows with imperfections, but some matter more than others

I like eggs and bacon,” George tells me. “But”—his face clouds—“do you know that bacon is”—tears leap to his eyes—“Wilbur?” Mrs. Garrett sits down next to him immediately. “George, we’ve been through this. Remember? Wilbur did not get made into bacon.” “That’s right.” I bend down too as wetness overflows George’s lashes. “Charlotte the spider saved him. He lived a long and happy life—with Charlotte’s daughters, um, Nelly and Urania and—” “Joy,” Mrs. Garrett concludes. “You, Samantha, are a keeper. I hope you don’t shoplift.”I start to cough. “No. Never.” “Then is bacon Babe, Mom? Is it Babe?”“No, no, Babe’s still herding sheep. Bacon is not Babe. Bacon is only made from really mean pigs,George.” Mrs. Garrett strokes his hair, then brushes his tears away.“Bad pigs,” I clarify.“There are bad pigs?” George looks nervous. Oops.“Well, pigs with, um, no soul.” That doesn’t sound good either. I cast around for a good explanation. “Like the animals that don’t talk in Narnia.” Dumb. George is four. Would he know Narnia yet? He’s still at Curious George.But understanding lights his face. “Oh. That’s okay then. ’Cause I really like bacon.

In that brief glance Vronsky has time to notice the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile. She deliberately extinguished the light in her her eyes, but it shone against her will in a barely noticeable smile.

I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body.

You’re growling, poodle! Animal squealings 1230 Hardly suit the exalted feelings   Filling my soul to overflowing.   We’re used to people ridiculing   What they hardly understand,   Grumbling at the good and the beautiful—   It makes them so uncomfortable!   Do dogs now emulate mankind?

Of all the animals that fly, some are like floating flowers (butterflies), some are songbirds that are full of gulp (swallows), and some are swimming birds that also run marathons (ducks). When I compose music to be performed live in an elevator, those are my inspirations.

There was no friend of Kant's but considered the day on which he was to dine with him as a day of pleasure. Without giving himself the air of an instructor, Kant really was so in the very highest degree. The whole entertainment was seasoned with the overflow of his enlightened mind, poured out naturally and unaffectedly upon every topic, as the chances of conversation suggested it; and the time flew rapidly away, from one o'clock to four, five, or even later, profitably and delightfully. Kant tolerated no calms, which was the name he gave to the momentary pauses in conversation, or periods when its animation languished.

Think of how many people have died, and how many more animals have been killed and eaten by humans and each other, yet the Earth is not overflowing with corpses. Life continually renews itself. * * *

A zebra is the piano of the animal kingdom, and now you can learn to play like Mozart on horseback. If I can coach my ducks to become World Dodgeball Champions, I can make your musical equestrian dreams a reality.

The endless procession of people and things that forms the world is for me an interminable gallery of pictures whose content bores me. It doesn't interest me because the soul is a monotonous thing and is always the same in everyone; it differs only in its personal manifestations and the best part of it is that which overflows into dreams, into mannerisms and gestures, and thus becomes part of the image that so captures my interest [...] This is how I experience the animate exteriors of things and beings, in pure vision, indifferent as a god from another world to their content, to their spirit. I only go deep into the surface of other people, if I want profundity I look for it in myself and in my concept of things.

When you first see a Pekin duck waddling across the grass, wobbly and lopsided, you might think it's the most unathletic animal in the world. But if you then watch it swim, you'd realize if there were a Bird Olympics, it wouldn't take gold, but it isn't Eric Moussambani, either.

The point which we consider it our duty to note is, that outside of and beyond his faith, as it were, the Bishop possessed an excess of love. In was in that quarter, quia multum amavit,—because he loved much—that he was regarded as vulnerable by "serious men," "grave persons" and "reasonable people"; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism takes its word of command from pedantry. What was this excess of love? It was a serene benevolence which overflowed men, as we have already pointed out, and which, on occasion, extended even to things. He lived without disdain. He was indulgent towards God's creation. Every man, even the best, has within him a thoughtless harshness which he reserves for animals. The Bishop of D—— had none of that harshness, which is peculiar to many priests, nevertheless. He did not go as far as the Brahmin, but he seemed to have weighed this saying of Ecclesiastes: "Who knoweth whither the soul of the animal goeth?" Hideousness of aspect, deformity of instinct, troubled him not, and did not arouse his indignation. He was touched, almost softened by them. It seemed as though he went thoughtfully away to seek beyond the bounds of life which is apparent, the cause, the explanation, or the excuse for them. He seemed at times to be asking God to commute these penalties. He examined without wrath, and with the eye of a linguist who is deciphering a palimpsest, that portion of chaos which still exists in nature. This revery sometimes caused him to utter odd sayings. One morning he was in his garden, and thought himself alone, but his sister was walking behind him, unseen by him: suddenly he paused and gazed at something on the ground; it was a large, black, hairy, frightful spider. His sister heard him say:—

When Jesus received the vinegar, He said, IT IS FINISHED. 'At these words,' said F.W. Krummacher, 'you hear fetters burst and prison walls falling down, barriers as high as heaven are overthrown, and gates which had been closed for thousands of years again move on their hinges.' The three English words, 'it is finished', are the equivalent of a single Greek word, tetelestai. In his charming way, F.W. Borham points out that it was a farmer's word. When there was born into his herd an animal so shapely that it seemed destitute of defects, the farmer, gazing on the creature with delighted eyes exclaimed 'Tetelestai'. It was an artist's word. When the painter had put the finishing touches to the vivid landscape, he would stand back and admire his masterpiece. Seeing that nothing called for correction or improvement he would murmur, 'tetelestai'. It was a priestly word. When some devout worshiper overflowing with gratitude for mercies received brought to the Temple a lamb without blemish, the pride of the flock, the priest, more accustomed to seeing blind and defective animals led to the altar, would look admiringly at the pretty creature and say, 'tetelestai'.

Let the dark and gloomy air be seen buffeted by the rush of contrary winds and dense from the continued rain mingled with hail and bearing hither and thither an infinite number of branches torn from the trees and mixed with numberless leaves. All round may be seen venerable trees, uprooted by the fury of the winds; and fragments of mountains, already scoured bare by the torrents, falling into those torrents and choking their valleys till the swollen rivers overflow and submerge the wide lowlands and their inhabitants. You might see on many of the hill-tops terrified animals of different kinds, collected together and subdued to tameness, in company with men and women who had fled there with their children.

Nobody is free to live everywhere; and whoever has to solve great problems that challenge all his strength actually has a very restricted choice in this matter… a mistaken choice of place and climate can not only estrange a man from his task but can actually keep it from him: he never gets to see it. His animal vigor has never become great enough for him to attain that freedom which overflows into the most spiritual regions and allows one to recognize: this only I can do.

The first source of art, then, is akin to the display of colors and plumage on the male animal in mating time; it lies in the desire to adorn and beautify the body. And just as self-love and mate-love, overflowing, pour out their surplus of affection upon nature, so the impulse to beautify passes from the personal to the external world. The soul seeks to express its feeling in objective ways, through color and form; art really begins when men undertake to beautify things.

Among the enormous multiplicity of phenomena to be observed in an organic being, that part which becomes conscious is a mere means: and the particle of "virtue," "self abnegation," and other fanciful inventions, are denied in a most thoroughgoing manner by the whole of the remaining phenomena. We would do well to study our organism in all its immorality.... The animal functions are, as a matter of fact, a million times more important than all beautiful states of the soul and heights of consciousness: the latter are an overflow, in so far as they are not needed as instruments in the service of the animal functions. The whole of conscious life: the spirit together with the soul, the heart, goodness, and virtue; in whose service does it work? In the greatest possible perfection of the means (for acquiring nourishment and advancement) serving the fundamental animal functions: above all, the ascent of the line of Life. That which is called "flesh" and "body" is of such incalculably greater importance, that the rest is nothing more than a small appurtenance. To continue the chain of life so that it becomes ever more powerful—that is the task. But now observe how the heart, the soul, virtue, and spirit together conspire formally to thwart this purpose: as if they were the object of every endeavour! ... The degeneration of life is essentially determined by the extraordinary fallibility of consciousness, which is held at bay least of all by the instincts, and thus commits the gravest and profoundest errors. Now could any more insane extravagance of vanity be imagined than to measure the value of existence according to the pleasant or unpleasant feelings of this consciousness? It is obviously only a means: and pleasant or unpleasant feelings are also no more than means. According to what standard is the objective value measured? According to the quantity of increased and more organised power alone.

What he did there was, if one were to make a story of it to someone, absolutely nothing. It was fall, and in the mountains the early-autumn sun has a power of its own; mornings it lifted him up and bore him to some tree high up on the slopes, from beneath which one looked into the far distance, for in spite of his heavy hiking boots he was really not conscious of walking. In the same self-forgetful way he changed his location several times during the day and read a little in a few books he had with him. Nor was he really thinking, although he felt his mind more deeply agitated than usual, for his thoughts did not shake themselves up as they usually do, so that a new idea is always landing on top of the pyramid of the earlier ones while the ones at the bottom are becoming more and more compacted until finally they fuse with flesh, blood, skull case, and the tendons supporting the muscles, but his insights came like a jet into a full vessel, in endless overflowing and renewal, or they passed in an everlasting progression like clouds through the sky in which nothing changes, not the blue depths and not the soundless swimming of those mother-of-pearl fish. It could happen that an animal came out of the woods, observed Ulrich, and slowly bounded away without anything changing; that a cow grazed nearby, or a person went past, without any more happening than a beat of the pulse, twin to all the others of the stream of life that softly pounds without end against the walls of the understanding.

THE CLOWN AND THE COUNTRYMAN A Nobleman announced his intention of giving a public entertainment in the theatre, and offered splendid prizes to all who had any novelty to exhibit at the performance. The announcement attracted a crowd of conjurers, jugglers, and acrobats, and among the rest a Clown, very popular with the crowd, who let it be known that he was going to give an entirely new turn. When the day of the performance came, the theatre was filled from top to bottom some time before the entertainment began. Several performers exhibited their tricks, and then the popular favourite came on empty-handed and alone. At once there was a hush of expectation: and he, letting his head fall upon his breast, imitated the squeak of a pig to such perfection that the audience insisted on his producing the animal, which, they said, he must have somewhere concealed about his person. He, however, convinced them that there was no pig there, and then the applause was deafening. Among the spectators was a Countryman, who disparaged the Clown's performance and announced that he would give a much superior exhibition of the same trick on the following day. Again the theatre was filled to overflowing, and again the Clown gave his imitation amidst the cheers of the crowd. The Countryman, meanwhile, before going on the stage, had secreted a young porker under his smock; and when the spectators derisively bade him do better if he could, he gave it a pinch in the ear and made it squeal loudly. But they all with one voice shouted out that the Clown's imitation was much more true to life. Thereupon he produced the pig from under his smock and said sarcastically, "There, that shows what sort of judges you are!

The animal soul, the intelligent soul, and two kinds of knowing There's a part of us that's like an itch. Call it the animal soul, a foolishness that, when we're in it, makes hundreds of others around us itchy. And there is an intelligent soul with another desire, more like sweet basil or the feel of a breeze. Listen and be thankful even for scolding that comes from the intelligent soul. It flows out close to where you flowed out. But that itchiness wants to put food in our mouths that will make us sick, feverish with the aftertaste of kissing a donkey's rump. It's like blackening your robe against a kettle without being anywhere near a table of companionship. The truth of being human is an empty table made of soul intelligence. Gradually reduce what you give your animal soul, the bread that after all overflows from sunlight. The animal soul itself spilled out and sprouted from the other. Taste more often what nourishes your clear light, and you'll have less use for the smoky oven. You'll bury that baking equipment in the ground! There are two kinds of knowing: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as the new sciences. With such intelligence you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind others with regard to your competence in retaining information. YOu stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your tablets. There is another kind of tablet, one already completed inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of your chest. This intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid, and it doesn't move from outside to inside through the conduits of plumbing-learning. This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you moving out. Drink from there!

What commandment did we disobey? The commandment to live the Animal life in all simplicity — without clothing, so to speak. But we craved the knowledge of good and evil, and we obtained that knowledge, and now we are reaping the whirlwind. In our efforts to rise above ourselves we have indeed fallen far, and are falling farther still; for, like the Creation, the Fall, too, is ongoing. Ours is a fall into greed: why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us, while in reality we belong to Everything? We have betrayed the trust of the Animals, and defiled our sacred task of stewardship. God’s commandment to “replenish the Earth” did not mean we should fill it to overflowing with ourselves, thus wiping out everything else. How many other Species have we already annihilated? Insofar as you do it unto the least of God’s Creatures, you do it unto Him. Please consider that, my Friends, the next time you crush a Worm underfoot or disparage a Beetle!

I will rouse you from your sleep, you who have given yourself up to recitation, who have taken the study of the Qur’an as a practice, who have seized upon some of its outward meanings and sentences. How long will you wander about the shore of the sea with your eyes closed to its wonders? Was it not for you to sail through its depths in order to see its amazing things, to travel to its islands to pick its delicacies, to dive to its bottom and become rich from obtaining its jewels? Don’t you despise yourself for losing out on its pearls and jewels as you continue to look only to its shores and esoteric aspects? Haven’t you heard that the Qur’an is an ocean from which the knowledge of all ages branches out just as rivers and streams branch out from the shores of the ocean? Don’t you envy the happiness of people who have plunged into its overflowing waves and seized red sulfur, who have dived into its depths and taken out red rubies, shining pearls and green chrysolite, who have roamed its shores and gathered gray ambergris and fresh blooming aloes wood, who have clung to its islands and found an abundance in their animals of the greatest antidote and pungent musk?

Once people believed her careful documentation, there was an easy answer—since babies are cute and inhibit aggression, something pathological must be happening. Maybe the Abu langur population density was too high and everyone was starving, or male aggression was overflowing, or infanticidal males were zombies. Something certifiably abnormal. Hrdy eliminated these explanations and showed a telling pattern to the infanticide. Female langurs live in groups with a single resident breeding male. Elsewhere are all-male groups that intermittently drive out the resident male; after infighting, one male then drives out the rest. Here’s his new domain, consisting of females with the babies of the previous male. And crucially, the average tenure of a breeding male (about twenty-seven months) is shorter than the average interbirth interval. No females are ovulating, because they’re nursing infants; thus this new stud will be booted out himself before any females wean their kids and resume ovulating. All for nothing, none of his genes passed on. What, logically, should he do? Kill the infants. This decreases the reproductive success of the previous male and, thanks to the females ceasing to nurse, they start ovulating. That’s the male perspective. What about the females? They’re also into maximizing copies of genes passed on. They fight the new male, protecting their infants. Females have also evolved the strategy of going into “pseudoestrus”—falsely appearing to be in heat. They mate with the male. And since males know squat about female langur biology, they fall for it—“Hey, I mated with her this morning and now she’s got an infant; I am one major stud.” They’ll often cease their infanticidal attacks. Despite initial skepticism, competitive infanticide has been documented in similar circumstances in 119 species, including lions, hippos, and chimps. A variant occurs in hamsters; because males are nomadic, any infant a male encounters is unlikely to be his, and thus he attempts to kill it (remember that rule about never putting a pet male hamster in a cage with babies?). Another version occurs among wild horses and gelada baboons; a new male harasses pregnant females into miscarrying. Or suppose you’re a pregnant mouse and a new, infanticidal male has arrived. Once you give birth, your infants will be killed, wasting all the energy of pregnancy. Logical response? Cut your losses with the “Bruce effect,” where pregnant females miscarry if they smell a new male. Thus competitive infanticide occurs in numerous species (including among female chimps, who sometimes kill infants of unrelated females). None of this makes sense outside of gene-based individual selection. Individual selection is shown with heartbreaking clarity by mountain gorillas, my favorite primate. They’re highly endangered, hanging on in pockets of high-altitude rain forest on the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are only about a thousand gorillas left, because of habitat degradation, disease caught from nearby humans, poaching, and spasms of warfare rolling across those borders. And also because mountain gorillas practice competitive infanticide. Logical for an individual intent on maximizing the copies of his genes in the next generation, but simultaneously pushing these wondrous animals toward extinction. This isn’t behaving for the good of the species.

The fourth thing about authenticity and to create loving relationships to yourself, to others and to life is to learn to love yourself. If you love and accept yourself that is the beginning of accepting all. Then all is good as it is, in that experience life takes on a new joy, a new gratefulness.If you reject yourself, you are rejecting existence. If you accept yourself, you have accepted existence. Then life is good, you feel grateful. Then whatsoever happens is good, because it happens out of the whole. But you have been conditioned for centuries not to love and accept yourself. Nobody has ever told you that you are good as you are. Once you are incapable of loving yourself, you will never be able to love anybody. You can love others only if you are able to love yourself. A person who loves himself sooner or later starts overflowing with love.Love yourself because if you don't love yourself; nobody else will ever be able to love you. You cannot love a person, who hates himself. How can you love a person, who is condemning himself? He cannot love himself, how can you love him. He will not believe you. He cannot allow anybody to love him, because he knows that heis unworthy of love. And you know what you are: worthless. That is what you have been told by the parents, the priests and the politicians. Nobody has ever accepted you as you are. Nobody has given you the feeling that you are loved and respected, that you are needed and that this existence will miss you, that without you this existence will not be the same. Without you this existence will lose some joy, love, beauty, truth and poetry. Nobody has told you that you are love and respected by existence. Love and accept yourself,relax into your being, you are cherished by the whole. Once you start feeling this love and respect of the whole in you, you will start growing roots in your being. Only then you can love people, you can love the trees and the animals. Love is only possible when there is a deep love and acceptance of oneself, of the other and of the world. And then you will be surprised: life is always ready to shower you with gifts. Life is always ready to give abundantly, but we cannot receive it, because we don't feel that we are worthy of receiving it. Accept yourself, love yourself, you are God's creation. 

MONKEY BREAD   Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. 1 and ¼ cups white (granulated) sugar 1 and ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon 4 cans (7.5 ounce tube) unbaked refrigerated biscuits (I used Pillsbury) 1 cup chopped nuts of your choice (optional) 1 cup chocolate chips (optional) (that’s a 6-ounce size bag) ½ cup salted butter (1 stick, 4 ounces, ¼ pound) Hannah’s 1st Note: If you prefer, you can use 16.3 ounce tubes of Pillsbury Grands. If you do this, buy only 2 tubes. They are larger—you will use half a tube for each layer. Tony’s Note: If you use chocolate chips and/or nuts, place them between each biscuit layer. Spray the inside of a Bundt pan with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray. Set your prepared pan on a drip pan just in case the butter overflows. Then you won’t have to clean your oven. Mix the white sugar and cinnamon together in a mixing bowl. (I used a fork to mix it up so that the cinnamon was evenly distributed.) Open 1 can of biscuits at a time and break or cut them into quarters. You want bite-size pieces. Roll the pieces in the cinnamon and sugar mixture, and place them in the bottom of the Bundt pan. Sprinkle one-third of the chopped nuts and one-third of the chocolate chips on top of the layer, if you decided to use them. Open the second can of biscuits, quarter them, roll them in the cinnamon and sugar, and place them on top of the first layer. (If you used Pillsbury Grands, you’ll do this with the remainder of the first tube.) Sprinkle on half of the remaining nuts and chocolate chips, if you decided to use them. Repeat with the third can of biscuits (or the first half of the second tube of Grands). Sprinkle on the remainder of the nuts and chocolate chips, if you decided to use them. Repeat with the fourth can of biscuits (or the rest of the Grands) to make a top layer in your Bundt pan. Melt the butter and the remaining cinnamon and sugar mixture in a microwave safe bowl on HIGH for 45 seconds. Give it a final stir and pour it over the top of your Bundt pan. Bake your Monkey Bread at 350 degrees F. for 40 to 45 minutes, or until nice and golden on top. Take the Bundt pan out of the oven and let it cool on a cold burner or a wire rack for 10 minutes while you find a plate that will fit over the top of the Bundt pan. Using potholders or oven mitts invert the plate over the top of the Bundt pan and turn it upside down to unmold your delicious Monkey Bread. To serve, you can cut this into slices like Bundt cake, but it’s more fun to just let people pull off pieces with their fingers. Hannah’s 2nd Note: If you’d like to make Caramel Monkey Bread, use only ¾ cup of white sugar. Mix it with the cinnamon the way you’d do if it was the full amount of white sugar. At the very end when you melt the butter with the leftover cinnamon and sugar mixture, add ¾ cup of brown sugar to the bowl before you put it in the microwave. Pour that hot mixture over the top of your Bundt pan before baking and it will form a luscious caramel topping when you unmold your Monkey Bread. Hannah’s 3rd Note: I don’t know why this is called “Monkey Bread”. Norman thinks it has something to do with the old story about the monkey that couldn’t get his hand out of the hole in the tree because he wouldn’t let go of the nut he was holding in his fist. Mike thinks it’s because monkeys eat with their hands and you can pull this bread apart and eat it with your hands. Mother says it’s because monkeys are social animals and you can put this bread in the center of the table and everyone can sit around it and eat. Tracey says it’s because it’s a cute name. Bethie doesn’t care. She just wants to eat it.

For unknown ages after the explosive outpouring of matter and energy of the Big Bang, the Cosmos was without form. There were no galaxies, no planets, no life. Deep, impenetrable darkness was everywhere, hydrogen atoms in the void. Here and there, denser accumulations of gas were imperceptibly growing, globes of matter were condensing-hydrogen raindrops more massive than suns. Within these globes of gas was kindled the nuclear fire latent in matter. A first generation of stars was born, flooding the Cosmos with light. There were in those times, not yet any planets to receive the light, no living creatures to admire the radiance of the heavens. Deep in the stellar furnaces, the alchemy of nuclear fusion created heavy elements from the ashes of hydrogen burning, the atomic building blocks of future planets and lifeforms. Massive stars soon exhausted their stores of nuclear fuel. Rocked by colossal explosions, they returned most of their substance back into the thin gas from which they had once condensed. Here in the dark lush clouds between the stars, new raindrops made of many elements were forming, later generation of stars being born. Nearby, smaller raindrops grew, bodies far too little to ignite the nuclear fire, droplets in the interstellar mist on their way to form planets. Among them was a small world of stone and iron, the early Earth. Congealing and warming, the Earth released methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen gases that had been trapped within, forming the primitive atmosphere and the first oceans. Starlight from the Sun bathed and warmed the primeval Earth, drove storms, generated lightning and thunder. Volcanoes overflowed with lava. These processes disrupted molecules of the primitive atmosphere; the fragments fell back together into more and more complex forms, which dissolved into the early oceans. After a while the seas achieved the consistency of a warm, dilute soup. Molecules were organized, and complex chemical reactions driven, on the surface of clay. And one day a molecule arose that quite by accident was able to make crude copies of itself out of the other molecules in the broth. As time passed, more elaborate and more accurate self replicating molecules arose. Those combinations best suited to further replication were favored by the sieve of natural selection. Those that copied better produced more copies. And the primitive oceanic broth gradually grew thin as it was consumed by and transformed into complex condensations of self replicating organic molecules. Gradually, imperceptibly, life had begun. Single-celled plants evolved, and life began generating its own food. Photosynthesis transformed the atmosphere. Sex was invented. Once free living forms bonded together to make a complex cell with specialized functions. Chemical receptors evolved, and the Cosmos could taste and smell. One celled organisms evolved into multicellular colonies, elaborating their various parts into specialized organ systems. Eyes and ears evolved, and now the Cosmos could see and hear. Plants and animals discovered that land could support life. Organisms buzzed, crawled, scuttled, lumbered, glided, flapped, shimmied, climbed and soared. Colossal beasts thundered through steaming jungles. Small creatures emerged, born live instead of in hard-shelled containers, with a fluid like the early ocean coursing through their veins. They survived by swiftness and cunning. And then, only a moment ago, some small arboreal animals scampered down from the trees. They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work….” —Deuteronomy 5:13 (NIV) Henry spread a soft blanket across the living room floor. I thought he was going to lie down and read a book, but then when I looked up from my newspaper, he was on all fours spreading out another blanket beside the first one. “What are you doing, Hen?” I asked. “I’m making a soft world,” he said. I went back to reading my article and pushed away thoughts that I should go upstairs to my home office and get a jump start on the week ahead by checking e-mail and diving into my projects. I heard Henry go upstairs and then I heard thump, thump, thump as he came down, his arms overflowing with blankets from his bed. His brother Solomon rested in his favorite reading spot with his nose in a book. His father worked on the Sunday crossword, and I went back to the paper. I kept one eye watching Henry cover the living room floor with blankets, pillows, and a bunch of his stuffed animals. When everything was just so, every pillow exactly where he wanted, he rolled around on his favorite blue blanket, grinning from ear to ear. “Like it? This is my soft world.” He hugged his favorite stuffed dinosaur. I’m so glad I stayed downstairs with my family. Had I gone off to do work, I would have missed the soft world. Dear God, thank You for the day of rest— just what I need to relax and feel blessed. —Sabra Ciancanelli Digging Deeper: Gn 2:3; Lk 6:1–11

The Hours Of Darkness" When there are words waiting in line once more I find myself looking into the eyes of an old man I have seen before who is holding a long white cane as he stares past my head talking of poems and youth after him a shadow where I thought to see a face asks have you considered how often you return to the subject of not seeing to the state of blindness whether you name it or not do you intend to speak of that as often as you do do you mean anything by it I look up into the year that the black queen could still see the year of the alien lights appearing to her and then going away with the others the year of the well of darkness overflowing with no moon and no stars it was there all the time behind the eye of day Rumphius saw it before he had words for anything long before he wrote of the hermit crabs These wanderers live in the houses of strangers wondering where they had come from Vermeij in our time never saw any creature living or as a fossil but can summon by touch the story of a cowrie four hundred million years old scars ancestry and what it knew in the dark sea there Borges is talking about Milton's sonnet and Milton hears the words of Samson to someone else and Homer is telling of a landscape without horizons and the blind knight whom no one ever could touch with a sword says in my head there is only darkness so they never find me but I know where they are it is the light that appears to change and be many to be today to flutter as leaves to recognize the rings of the trees to come again one of the stars is from the day of the cowrie one is from a time in the garden we see the youth of the light in all its ages we see it as bright points of animals made long ago out of night how small the day is the time of colors the rush of brightness Poetry Vol. 174, No. 3, JUNE 1999

From Alice Walker: I think I am telling you that the animals of the planet are in desperate peril and that they are fully aware of this. No less than human beings are doing in all parts of the world, they are seeking sanctuary. But I am also telling you that we are connected to them as least as intimately as we are connected to trees. Without plant life human beings could not breathe. Plants produce oxygen. Without free animal life, I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen. “Magic,” intuition, sheer astonishment at the forms the Universe devises in which to express life-itself- will no longer be able to breathe in us. One day it occurred to me that if all the birds died, as they might well do, eventually, from the poisonings of their air, water, and food, it would be next to impossible to describe to our children the wonder of their flight. But what I am also sharing with you is this thought- the Universe responds. What you ask of it, it gives. I realize now that I did not understand prayer; which I know now to be the active affirmation in the physical world do our inseparableness from the divine; and everything, especially the physical world, is divine. War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all. Peace will come where it is sincerely invited. Love will overflow every sanctuary given it. Truth will grow where the fertilizer that nourishes it is also truth…Knock and the door shall be opened. Ask and you shall receive. Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do also unto me- and to yourself. For we are one. “God” answers prayers. Which is another way of saying, “the Universe responds.” We are indeed the world. Only if we have reason to fear what is in our own hearts need we fear for the planet. Teach yourself peace. Pass it on.

Your mother will die some day, and you and I will have to die some day, too. Yet My God has never died. Perhaps you haven’t heard clearly the story that tells how He goes on living for ever and ever. In appearance only did He die. But three days after He had died He came to life again and with great pomp He rose up to heaven.” “How often?” the chief asked in a dry tone. Astonished at this unexpected question, the monk answered, “Why . . . why . . . eh . . . once only, quite naturally once only.” “Once only? And has he, your great god, ever returned to earth?” “No, of course not,” Padre Balmojado answered, his voice burdened with irritation. “He has not returned yet, but He has promised mankind that He will return to earth in His own good time, so as to judge and to . . .” “. . . and to condemn poor mankind,” the chief finished the sentence. “Yes, and to condemn!” the monk said in a loud and threatening tone. Confronted with such inhuman stubbornness he lost control of himself. Louder still he continued: “Yes, to judge and to condemn all those who deny Him and refuse to believe in Him, and who criticize His sacred words, and who ignore Him, and who maliciously refuse to accept the true and only God even if He is brought to them with brotherly love and a heart overflowing with compassion for the poor ignorant brethren living in sin and utter darkness, and who can obtain salvation for nothing more than having belief in Him and having the true faith.” Not in the least was the chieftain affected by this sudden outburst of the monk, who had been thrown off routine by these true sons of America who had learned to think long and carefully before speaking. The chieftain remained very calm and serene. With a quiet, soft voice he said: “Here, my holy white father, is what our god had put into our hearts and souls, and it will be the last word I have to say to you before we return to our beautiful and tranquil tierra: Our god dies every evening for us who are his children. He dies every evening to bring us cool winds and freshness of nature, to bring us peace and quiet for the night so that we may rest well, man and animal. Our god dies every evening in a deep golden glory, not insulted, not spat upon, not spattered with stinking mud. He dies beautifully and glori¬ously, as every real god will die. Yet he does not die forever. In the morning he returns to life, refreshed and more beautiful than ever, his body still trailing the veils and wrappings of the dead. But soon his golden spears dart across the blue firmament as a sign that he is ready to fight the gods of darkness who threaten the peoples on earth. And before you have time to realize what happens, there he stands before wondering human eyes, and there he stays, great, mighty, powerful, golden, and in ever-growing beauty, dominating the universe. “He, our god, is a spendthrift in light, warmth, beauty, and fertility, enriching the flowers with perfumes and colors, teaching the birds to sing, filling the corn with strength and health, playing with the clouds in an ocean of gold and blue. As my beloved mother does, so does he give and give and never cease giving; never does he ask for prayers, not expect¬ing adoration or worship, not commanding obedience or faith, and never, never condemning anybody or thing on earth. And when evening comes, again he passes away in beauty and glory, a smile all over his face, and with his last glimmer blesses his Indian children. Again the next morning he is the eternal giver; he is the eternally young, the eternally beautiful, the eternally new-born, the ever and ever returning great and golden god of the Indians. “And this is what our god has put into our hearts and souls and what I am bound to tell you, holy white father: ‘Do not, not ever, beloved Indian sons of these your beautiful lands, give away your own great god for any other god.’ ” ("Conversion Of Some Indians")

The moral system must become a natural system. All sickness is the equivalent of sin; it is through an excess that it is transcended. Our sicknesses are all phenomena of a heightened sensation that in great force will overflow. As man would become God, he sins-- The sickness of plants is animalization; the sickness of animals is rationalization; the sickness of stones is vegetation. Shouldn't each plant correspond to a stone and to an animal? Reality of sympathy. Parallelisms of the natural realm. --Plants are dead stones; animals are dead plants, and so forth. Theory of metempsychosis.

Android Girl Just Wants to Have a Baby! The first thing I do when I wake up is run my hands over my body. I like to make sure all my wires are in place. I lotion my silicone shell and snap my hair helmet over my head. I once had a dream I was a real girl, but when I woke up I was still myself in my paleness under the halogen light. The saliva of androids emits a spectral resonance, barely sticky between freshly-gapped teeth. After they made me, the first thing they did was peel the cellophane from my eyes. I blinked once, twice, and cried because that's how you say you are alive before you are given language. They named each of my heartbeats on the oceanic monitor: Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I listened to them blur into one. The fetus carves for itself a hollowed vector, a fragile wetness. In utero, extension cords are umbilical. Before puberty, I did not know there was such a thing as dishonor. Diss-on- her. This is what they said when I began to drip petrol between my legs. A tension exists between ritual and proof, a fantasy and its execution. Since then, I have been to the emergency room twice. The first time for a suicide attempt, and the second time because my earring was swallowed up by my newly pierced earlobe overnight, and when I woke up, it was tangled in a helix of wires. The idea of dying doesn't scare me but the ocean does. I was once told that fish will swim up my orifices if I am no longer a virgin. Is anyone thinking about erotic magazines when they are not aroused, pubes parted harshly down the center like red seas? My body carries the weight of four hundred eggs. I rise from a weird slumber, let them drip into the bath. This is what I'll leave behind - tiny shards purer than me. I have always been afraid of pregnant women because of their power, and because I don't yet understand what it means to carry something stubborn and blossoming inside of me, screeching towards an exit. The ectoplasm is the telos for the wound. A trance state is induced when salt is poured on it, pixel by pixel. I wish they had made me into an octopus instead, because octopuses die after their eggs hatch and crawl out into the sea, and I want to know what it's like to set something free into the dark unknown and trust it to choose mercy. If you can generate aura in a non-place, then there is no such thing as an authentic origin. In Chinese, the word for mercy translates to my heart hurts for you. They say my heart continues beating even after it is dislocated from my body. The sound of its beating comes from the valves opening and closing like a portal - Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I first learned about love by watching a sex tape where a girl looks up from performing fellatio and says, show them the sunset. Her boyfriend pans the camera to the sky, which is tinged violet like a bruise. In this moment, the sky displaces her, all digital and hyped, and saturates the scene until it collapses on me too, its transient witness. I move in the space between belly ring and catharsis. That night I have a dream where I am a camgirl, but all I do on screen is wash my laundry. Everybody loves me because I am a real girl doing real girl things. What lives on the border between meditation and oblivion, static and flux, a pomegranate seed and an embryo? I set up my webcam in the corner of the room and play ambient music while I scrub my underwear, letting soap bubbles rise up from the sink, laughing when they overflow on the linoleum floor - my frizzy hair, my pockmarked skin, my face slick with sweat. A body with exit wounds. I ride the bright rails of an animal forgetting. And when I wake up, the sky is a mess of blue.

The Creator carefully designed humans and animals with two primary needs: to draw nutrition and energy from food in order to sustain life and to find companionship in sharing life with others. The only thing God called “not good” in the initial act of creation was a human being alone. And because God created the world out of an overflow of delight, these most basic needs are fulfilled in the joyous act of commensality—eating together.

A legend of the desert tells the story of a man who wanted to move to another oasis, and began to load up his camel. He piled on his rugs, his cooking utensils, his trunks of clothes -and the animal accepted it all. As they were leaving, the man remembered a beautiful blue feather his father had given him. He retrieved it and placed it on the camel's back. With that, the animal collapsed of the weight and died. “My camel couldn't even bear the weight of a feather,” the man must have thought. Sometimes we think the same of others -without understanding that our little joke may have been the drop that caused the goblet of suffering to overflow.

What was this excess of love? It was a serene benevolence which overflowed men, as we have already pointed out, and which, on occasion, extended even to things. He lived without disdain. He was indulgent towards God’s creation. Every man, even the best, has within him a thoughtless harshness which he reserves for animals. The Bishop of D—— had none of that harshness, which is peculiar to many priests, nevertheless. He did not go as far as the Brahmin, but he seemed to have weighed this saying of Ecclesiastes: ‘Who knoweth whither the soul of the animal goeth?