Product Of Grace Quotes

A soul mate is someone to whom we feel profoundly connected, as though the communication and communing that take place between us were not the product of intentional efforts, but rather a divine grace. This kind of relationship is so important to the soul that many have said there is nothing more precious in life.

Time Progression: Wasting >>Spending >> Managing >> Investing

If you commit to giving more time than you have to spend, you will constantly be running from time debt collectors.

One of these days you who are now a 'babe' in Christ shall be a 'father' in the church. Hope for this great thing; but hope for it as a gift of grace, and not as the wages of work, or as the product of your own energy.

I have a plan, and I’m following it. I can focus on doing what is within my control, and I don’t need to be afraid of the results.

Time is the ultimate democracy. Rich and poor, young and old, male and female: all have 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week.

Reality always wins.

But the modern-day church doesn’t like to wander or wait. The modern-day church likes results. Convinced the gospel is a product we’ve got to sell to an increasingly shrinking market, we like our people to function as walking advertisements: happy, put-together, finished—proof that this Jesus stuff WORKS! At its best, such a culture generates pews of Stepford Wife–style robots with painted smiles and programmed moves. At its worst, it creates environments where abuse and corruption get covered up to protect reputations and preserve image. “The world is watching,” Christians like to say, “so let’s be on our best behavior and quickly hide the mess. Let’s throw up some before-and-after shots and roll that flashy footage of our miracle product blanching out every sign of dirt, hiding every sign of disease.” But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace. Anything else we try to peddle is snake oil. It’s not the real thing.

This transformation helped me to become productive and my mindset became focused on change for the better. My identity was the essence of me, and the path without fear was ahead of me as I walked, knowing that happiness, grace, joy, and love were my birthright!

Learning is not a product of teaching. Kids are born learning. They learn how to walk, how to talk. They’re basically little scientists. If we don’t stop that process, it will continue.

True restoration takes patience, subtlety, skill, and grace.

In the infinite permutations of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself. The arms go out, forming dendrites, sectored plates, the same angle every time, but the final product – because of wind, because of molecular vibration, because of rate of growth and temperature – is never the same.

At the core of the problem is an obsolete factory model of schooling that sorts, tracks, tests, and rejects or certifies working-class children as if they were products on an assembly line. The purpose of education, I said, cannot be only to increase the earning power of the individual or to supply workers for the ever-changing slots of the corporate machine. Children need to be given a sense of the 'unique capacity of human beings to shape and create reality in accordance with conscious purposes and plans.

Your time is your life.

The reality, when the sexy advertisements have been stripped away, is that the actual product is ethanol.122 It is a horrible-tasting, addictive poison. So we sweeten it with sugar and flavoring or process it to make it more palatable.

The young man was sincerely but placidly in love. He delighted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship, her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and ideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance. She was straightforward, loyal, and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly proved by her laughing at his jokes); and he suspected, in the depths of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joy to waken. But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

Grace is released more abundantly as you work.

People often ask me how I stay so motivated and energized. I could tell you I try to eat healthy foods and sleep well at night, but the real answer is grace.

Time investment is the NEW Time Management.

A praying mother symbolizes grace, strength and wisdom; she is an icon of productivity and ingenuity.

I think what I really want is to treat life less like a war. Wouldn't we have less Imposter Syndrome and fewer actual imposters if we just lowered our standards a bit? Modern productivity dogma encourages us to act fast, and milk our exceptionalism for all it's worth. Under that kind of pressure, perhaps the truest rebellion is to embrace our ordinariness. In everyday life, if we could not only tolerate the discomfort, but wholeheartedly embrace our own lack of expertise, then we might have a far better chance of showing others the same grace. Then perhaps life might feel, at the very least, less agitating, at most, we might even find peace. How’s this? Let’s stoop below average at 50% of all we do. We’ll relish it, the commonness. Next time we have a question, let’s hold our for as long as we humanly can before googling the answer. It’ll be erotic, like edging before a climax. It’s quite nice, I am learning, just to wonder indefinitely. To never have certain answers. To sit down, be humble, and not even dare to know

Cootamundra wattle Meaning: I wound to heal Acacia baileyana | New South Wales Graceful tree with fern-like foliage and bright golden-yellow globe-shaped flower heads. Adaptable, hardy evergreen, easy to grow. Profuse flowering in winter. Heavily fragrant and sweetly scented. Produces abundant pollen, favored for feeding bees in the production of honey.

when you have no power in this world you must create your own, you must adapt to your environment and try to foil the many dangers around you, so a woman’s pleasantness—her smile, her grace, her cheer, her sweetness, her perfumed body, her carefully made-up face—isn’t some silly by-product of fashions or tastes; it is a means of survival. The performance may cripple us, but it keeps us alive.

You may be thinking I’ve gone over the edge here, finding addictions everywhere. But follow the trajectory of these simple daily attachments and you’ll find a need for security, for safety, for intimacy, for connection, for regularity, for productivity. Go a bit deeper and you’ll find that each of these things can even replace God, providing for my needs without consideration of my deep and desperate neediness as a human being. Each can be a way of coping, a reality-denying form of self-preservation that robs me of grace.

There are no guarantees that if we keep the Sabbath we will be successful. But honouring the Sabbath (and not overworking the other six days) will give us an opportunity to grow in our trust of God and experience his faithfulness. If we take time to honour the Sabbath we may actually find that we are less productive than we were before...God's provision for us as we honour his rhythms may be the grace to accept being passed over for a promotion, while gaining a greater sense of fulfillment as we do our work more aware of God, ourselves, and the people around us.

Decay is renewal--a perhaps contradictory sentence that nevertheless characterizes the aesthetically sustainable product, which ages gracefully and which possesses the germ of aesthetic decay as process. Decay equals renewal in the sense that aesthetic decay ensures the continued interest and fascination of the recipient.

Being with other people was, to me, the feeling of being realised. This was why I wanted to be in love. In love, you don't need the minute-to-minute physical presence of the beloved to realise you. Love itself sustains and validates the rotten moments you would otherwise be wasting while you practise being a person, pacing back and forth in your shitty apartment, holding off till seven to open the wine. Being in love blesses you with a sort of grace. A friend once told me he imagined his father or God watching him while he works, to help force productivity. Being in love was like that to me, a shield, a higher purpose, a promise to something outside of yourself.

John Myers wrote, "It is Imagination, man's power to imagine, that makes living in society, any society, possible. It think what Paul Goodman says about doing away with 'intolerable biological deprivation and spiritual impoverishment' through what he calls 'creative cooperative production' is the right and humane solution to our social woes.

Grace Slaughter - the surname of her fifth husband, a manufacturer of pharmaceutical toners and "prophylactic" products, recently deceased due to a ruptured peritoneum - was sharply chauvinistic and would allow no more than two exceptions to her all-American views, exceptions with which her first spouse, Astolphe de Guéménolé-Longtgermain, no doubt had something to do: cooking had to be done by French nationals of male gender, laundry and ironing by British subjects of female gender (and absolutely not by Chinese). That allowed Henri Fresnel to be hired without having to hide his original citizenship, which is what had to be done by the director (Hungarian), the set designer (Russian), the choreographer (Lithuanian), the dancers (Italian, Greek, Egyptian), the scriptwriter (English), the librettist (Austrian), and the composer, a Finn of Bulgarian descent with a large dash of Romanian.

O, elixir of youth, thy name is hair dye.

customers often bend over backward to give market share leaders second and third chances, bringing cries of anguish from their competitors who would never be granted such grace.

The point of simplicity is not efficiency, increased productivity or even living a healthier, more relaxed life. The point is making space for treasuring God's own self.

Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it.

It was in that season that the Lord taught me to long for him more than productivity.

Subtle and coy, the cemento at Maalouf's did not speak of war, or frontiers, and the spaces they narrowed, but, rather, grandeur. The tiles returned one to a realm where imagination, artistry, and craftsmanship were not only appreciated but given free reign, where what was unique and striking, or small and perfect, or wrought with care was desired, where gazed-upon objects were the products of peaceful hearts, hands long practiced and trained. War ends the values and traditions that produce such treasures. Nothing is maintained. Cultures that may seem as durable as stone can break like glass, leaving all the things that held them together unattended. I believe that the craftsman, the artist, the cook, and the silversmith are peacemakers. They instill grace; they lull the world to calm.

As I witness and participate in our visionary efforts to revitalize Detroit and contrast them with the multibillion dollars' worth of megaprojects advanced by politicians and developed that involve casinos, giant stadiums, gentrification, and the Super Bowl, I am saddened by their shortsightedness. At the same time I rejoice in the energy being unleashed in the community by our human-scale programs that involve bringing the country back into the city and removing the walls between schools and communities, between generations, and between ethnic groups. And I am confident just as in the early twentieth century people came from around the world to marvel at the mass production lines pioneered by Henry Ford, in the twenty-first century they will be coming to marvel at the thriving neighborhoods that are the fruit of our visionary programs.

the difference between a forecast and a vision is that a forecast is limited to what you can see immediately in front of you, whereas a vision goes beyond the horizon, where nothing is certain and anything is possible.

If capitalism is not defined by the presence or absence of markets, but by the domination of society by capital, then socialism is not defined by the presence or absence of planning, but by the democratization of society. Rather than a system of top-down control, true democratic socialism would be a project of collective liberation, which would allow workers to take control over production and citizens to take control over government.

But the modern-day church doesn't like to wander or wait. The modern-day church likes results. Convinced the gospel is a product we've got to sell to an increasingly shrinking market, we like our people to function as walking advertisements: happy, put-together, finished—proof that this Jesus stuff WORKS! At its best, such a culture generates pews of Stepford Wife-style robots with painted smiles and programmed moves. At its worst, it creates environments where abuse and corruption get covered up to protect reputations and preserve image. 'The world is watching,' Christians like to say, 'so let's be on our best behavior and quickly hide the mess. Let's throw up some before-and-after shots and roll that flashy footage of our miracle product blanching out every sign of dirt, hiding every sign of disease.' But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn't offer a cure. It doesn't off a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace.

I have had an aversion to good spelling for sixty years and more, merely for the reason that when I was a boy there was not a thing I could do creditably except spell according to the book. It was a poor and mean distinction, and I early learned to disenjoy it. I suppose that this is because the ability to spell correctly is a talent, not an acquirement. There is some dignity about an acquirement, because it is a product of your own labor. It is earned, whereas to be able to do a thing merely by the grace of God, and not by your own effort, transfers the thing to our heavenly home--where possibly it is a matter of pride and satisfaction, but it leaves you naked and bankrupt.

Gospel root: You can never do enough or be enough to satisfy the masses. The most productive thing you can do is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself (see Matthew 22:37-38).

The factory of love encompasses all, but on some days, does it seem to be one of suffocation, squeezing its target too tightly? And on other days not tight enough? Or maybe that is the breath of a living love knowing when to protect, when to release, and when to protect again. For we are the products of an active love - the Father the creator, the Son the perfecter, the Spirit the supervisor - but just like in a factory, to deny the process is to ultimately create a defect of oneself.

Television is the most insidious form of escape known to man. It is the leading medication in the production of catatonia, cutting attention spans down to nothing, and as result will gut the sales of this book. And nobody gives a rat's ass because everyone's catatonic.

I believe, rather than the exception. Most individuals are dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and uncomplainingly about their business. If anyone is fortunate enough to be in a rare period of grace and health, personally, then he or she typically has at least one close family member in crisis. Yet people prevail and continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to hold themselves and their families and society together. To me this is miraculous—so much so that a dumbfounded gratitude is the only appropriate response. There are so many ways that things can fall apart, or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded people who are holding it together. They deserve some genuine and heartfelt admiration for that. It’s an ongoing miracle of fortitude and perseverance.

Volumes have been written stating the detailed mechanics of sermon making. We have become possessed with the idea that this scaffolding is the building. The young preacher has been taught to exhaust all of his strength on the form, taste, and beauty of his sermon as a mechanical and intellectual product. We have thereby cultivated a vicious taste among the people and raised the clamor for talent instead of grace. We have emphasized eloquence instead of piety, rhetoric instead of revelation, reputation and brilliance instead of holiness. By it, we have lost the true idea of preaching. We have lost preaching power and the pungent conviction for sin. We have also lost the rich experience, the elevated Christian character, and the divine authority over consciences and lives that always results from genuine preaching.

Research has found that: ‘discussing positive experiences leads to heightened well-being, increased overall life satisfaction and even more energy… sharing our joy increases joy. Telling people about our happiness has far greater benefits than just remembering it or writing it down for ourselves.

The essence of this knowledge was the ability to `see all' and to `know all'. Was this not precisely the ability Adam and Eve acquired after eating the forbidden fruit, which grew on the branches of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'? · Finally, just as Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden, so were the four First Men of the Popol Vuh deprived of their ability to `see far'. Thereafter `their eyes were covered and they could only see what was close ...' Both the Popol Vuh and Genesis therefore tell the story of mankind's fall from grace. In both cases, this state of grace was closely associated with knowledge, and the reader is left in no doubt that the knowledge in question was so remarkable that it conferred godlike powers on those who possessed it. The Bible, adopting a dark and muttering tone of voice, calls it `the knowledge of good and evil' and has nothing further to add. The Popol Vuh is much more informative. It tells us that the knowledge of the First Men consisted of the ability to see `things hidden in the distance', that they were astronomers who `examined the four corners, the four points of the arch of the sky', and that they were geographers who succeeded in measuring `the round face of the earth'. 7 Geography is about maps. In Part I we saw evidence suggesting that the cartographers of an as yet unidentified civilization might have mapped the planet with great thoroughness at an early date. Could the Popol Vuh be transmitting some garbled memory of that same civilization when it speaks nostalgically of the First Men and of the miraculous geographical knowledge they possessed? Geography is about maps, and astronomy is about stars. Very often the two disciplines go hand in hand because stars are essential for navigation on long sea-going voyages of discovery (and long sea-going voyages of discovery are essential for the production of accurate maps). Is it accidental that the First Men of the Popol Vuh were remembered not only for studying `the round face of the earth' but for their contemplation of `the arch of heaven'?

One of the paradoxes of defensive programming is that during development, you'd like an error to be noticeable—you'd rather have it be obnoxious than risk overlooking it. But during production, you'd rather have the error be as unobtrusive as possible, to have the program recover or fail gracefully.

There is even some evidence that eating a lot of tomatoes and tomato products can prevent sunburn. A recent presentation of research at the Royal Society of Medicine in London24 revealed that participants who added 5 tablespoons of tomato paste per day to their normal diet showed a 33 percent reduced risk of sunburn after twelve weeks!

Since tech became a consumer phenomenon, thousands of nontech people have come up with great ideas that use technology. But if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail. Why? It turns out that it’s easy to build an app or a website that meets the specification of some initial idea, but far more difficult to build something that will scale, evolve, handle edge cases gracefully, etc. A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all those things, to build a product that will grow with the company, if she has ownership in the company—literally as well as figuratively. Bob Noyce understood that, created the culture to support it, and changed the world.

She was a ray of sunshine, a warm summer rain, a bright fire on a cold winter’s day, and now she could be dead because she had tried to save the man she loved. Quote from Grace Willows To Kiss a King Copyright © 2017 by Julie Brookshier and Robin Woods All rights reserved. Except for use in a review, the reproduction or use of this work in whole or in part in any form is forbidden without written permission of one or more of the authors. This is a fictional work. Names, characters, places, and events are merely the product of the authors' imaginations or used fictitiously, purely for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead, or undead or any business establishments, events or places past, present, or future, is entirely coincidental.

Can't we all simmer down a bit? Let the teachers teach, the parents parent, and the kids do the learning. Our children will be fine, just as we were. They will figure it out, just as we did. They don't need every advantage skewed their way and every discomfort fluffed with pillows. I bet they don't even need sandwich dolphins. I am a product of bologna, red Kool-Aid, and home perms, and I turned out okay.

A good marketer can sell practically anything to anyone. Tobacco is literally dried, decaying vegetable matter that you light on fire and inhale, breathing horrid-tasting, toxic fumes into your lungs.121 At one point marketers promoted smoking as a status symbol and claimed it had health benefits. Once you give it a try, the addictive nature of the drug kicks in, and the agency’s job becomes much easier. If they can get you hooked, the product will sell itself. Since the product is actually poison, advertisers need to overcome your instinctual aversion. That’s a big hill for alcohol advertisements to climb, which is why the absolute best marketing firms on the globe, firms with psychologists and human behavior specialists on staff, are hired to create the ads. These marketers know that the most effective sale is an emotional sale, one that plays on your deepest fears, your ultimate concerns. Alcohol advertisements sell an end to loneliness, claiming that drinking provides friendship and romance. They appeal to your need for freedom by saying drinking will make you unique, brave, bold, or courageous. They promise fulfillment, satisfaction, and happiness. All these messages speak to your conscious and unconscious minds.

Peter Drucker, in my view the father of modern management thinking, was also a master of the art of the graceful no. When Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian professor most well known for his work on “flow,” reached out to interview a series of creative individuals for a book he was writing on creativity, Drucker’s response was interesting enough to Mihaly that he quoted it verbatim: “I am greatly honored and flattered by your kind letter of February 14th – for I have admired you and your work for many years, and I have learned much from it. But, my dear Professor Csikszentmihalyi, I am afraid I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your questions. I am told I am creative – I don’t know what that means…. I just keep on plodding…. I hope you will not think me presumptuous or rude if I say that one of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe whereas I do not believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take care of ALL invitations such as yours – productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one’s time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and to do well.”8 A true Essentialist, Peter Drucker believed that “people are effective because they say no.

Since the product is actually poison, advertisers need to overcome your instinctual aversion. That’s a big hill for alcohol advertisements to climb, which is why the absolute best marketing firms on the globe, firms with psychologists and human behavior specialists on staff, are hired to create the ads. These marketers know that the most effective sale is an emotional sale, one that plays on your deepest fears, your ultimate concerns.

Communication is like a pressure relief valve for your body. When a little pressure gets cooked up inside and needs to be released, you can gently turn the nozzle and release it slowly and gracefully until you feel better, by way of a productive conversation. But if you choose to ignore the warning signals and leave that pressure inside, it's going to grow and inevitably explode and make a mess, by way of an overreaction and possibly an argument.

The mercy of God is infinite too, and the man who has felt the grinding pain of inward guilt knows that this is more than academic. "Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound." Abounding sin is the terror of the world, but abounding grace is the hope of mankind. however sin may abound it still has its limits, for it is the product of finite minds and hearts; but God's much more" introduces us to infinitude. Against our deep creature-sickness stands God's infinite ability to cure. The Christian witness through the centuries has been that "God so loved the world . . ."; it remains for us to see that love in the light of God's infinitude. His love is measureless. It is more: it is boundless. It has no bounds because it is not a thing but a facet of the essential nature of God. His love is something He is, and because He is infinite that love can enfold the whole created world in itself and have room for ten thousand times ten thousand worlds beside.

The Lucas Plan was an extraordinarily ambitious document that challenged the foundations of capitalism. In place of an institution designed to generate profits via the domination of labor by capital, the workers at Lucas Aerospace had developed an entirely new model for the firm -one based on the democratic production of socially useful commodities. It was almost as if the workers had never needed managing at all, as though they were creative architects rather than obedient bees.

A soul mate is someone to whom we feel profoundly connected, as though the communicating and communing that takes place between us were not the product of intentional efforts, but rather a divine grace. This kind of relationship is so important to the soul that many have said there is nothing more precious in life. We may find a soul partner in many different forms of relationship- in friendship, marriage, work, play, and family. It is a rare form of intimacy but is not limited to one person or to one form.

We can move to a more productive outlook when we realize that our personal values are not lost if we collectively make decisions that deviate from those values. We can hold on to our values without needing public validation of them. We can recognize that different considerations are at work in the public debate than our private lives. We can seek out expressions of our values beyond the public sphere. We can recognize that sometimes more good comes out of expressing our values through private action than through public debate.

You should always use the same product line on your skin that is used in the spa where you work (If appropriate for your skin type) so your skin demonstrates how the product line can help your clients. You can’t educate and sell products that you don’t even use. You are representing how those products work. You MUST use the products, not just one piece of the product line, but you need to use many of the products so you can educate the customer on how the product line helped your skin. They need to see that you practice what you preach.

Throughout the verbal traditions handed down by our earlier forefathers, and shining through the literature of the world, far back as the first rude manuscripts of Oriental peoples and up to the newest product of the printer’s press of this year of grace, there has been a strange yet recurring allusion to another self within man. It does not matter what name was given to this mysterious self, whether it be called soul or breath, spirit or ghost. There is, indeed, no other doctrine in the world which possesses so far-flung an intellectual ancestry as this. Everybody

It may be the reason behind the apostolic prayer for the disciples to be filled with a dimension of the Holy Spirit beyond the original baptism. This conceptual crisis may account for the falling away of the Galatians; the sustained immaturity of the Hebrews; the lawlessness of the Corinthians; and the mixture among the Colossians. It becomes obvious that the apostolic exhortations to “grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord,” and to be “steadfast and immovable” are invitations to a sphere of intelligence that promote productive stewardship in the Kingdom of God.

Believe in Yourself Why must we see something to believe in its existence?The wind itself cannot be seen by man, but all have felt it's gentle touch and watched the mighty trees bow as it swept past. We cannot see love yet its nurturing warmth is the essence of our being and sorrow can touch our very soul. For remorse is like a ripple on the ocean, once given it remains only in the heart of the receiver. Yet all of these cannot be seen only felt. Why then do you doubt your self-worth? For though it cannot cast a reflection in the mirror you have only to look in the eyes of those you love to See it clearly. Prologue To Kiss a King To Kiss a King Copyright © 2017 by Julie Brookshier and Robin Woods All rights reserved. Except for use in a review, the reproduction or use of this work in whole or in part in any form is forbidden without written permission of one or more of the authors. This is a fictional work. Names, characters, places, and events are merely the product of the authors' imaginations or used fictitiously, purely for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead, or undead or any business establishments, events or places past, present, or future, is entirely coincidental.

Segways are a classic example of this phenomenon. You've seen them on occasion in malls or in airports, looking something like an old-fashioned lawn mower gone vertical, ridden around by someone in a security professional's uniform. Kind of dorky looking, but don't kid yourself. The gyroscopic balance control is fabulous, and the control movements once mastered are graceful. The hope was these devices would become a universal transport mechanism. Why didn't that happen? In a word: stairs. Stairs are pesky little devils that crop up everywhere, and Segways do not handle them well at all. That's what we call a showstopper.

believe, rather than the exception. Most individuals are dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and uncomplainingly about their business. If anyone is fortunate enough to be in a rare period of grace and health, personally, then he or she typically has at least one close family member in crisis. Yet people prevail and continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to hold themselves and their families and society together. To me this is miraculous—so much so that a dumbfounded gratitude is the only appropriate response. There are so many ways that things can fall apart, or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded people who are holding it together. They deserve some genuine and heartfelt admiration for that. It’s an ongoing miracle of fortitude and perseverance. In my clinical practice I encourage people to credit themselves and those around them for acting productively and with care, as well as for the genuine concern and thoughtfulness they manifest towards others. People are so tortured by the limitations and constraint of Being that I am amazed they ever act properly or look beyond themselves at all. But enough do so that we have central heat and running water and infinite computational power and electricity and enough for everyone to eat and even the capacity to

Where the workers behind the Lucas Plan had laid the foundations for the development of an economy that respected the dignity, creativity, and autonomy of workers, Thatcher used her control over the state to ruthlessly reassert the power of capital over labor. Cloaking her project in the language of freedom and autonomy, she crushed one of the most innovative and ingenious examples of democratic production on the world had ever seen. The success of the neoliberal movement ensured that 'individualized consumerism rather than collective services and a democratized state and economy became the main legacy of working-class struggles during the twentieth century.

Our present system based on preparing children for individual upward mobility into the system by making “us” like “them” is destroying our communities because those who succeed in the system leave the community while those who don’t take out their frustration and sense of failure in acts of vandalism. It is leaving too many children behind, labeling too many as suffering from attention deficit disorder and therefore requiring Ritalin, and widening the gap between the very rich and the very poor. The main cause of youth violence and addiction to drugs, I believe, is youth powerlessness. We have turned young people into parasites with no socially necessary or productive roles, nothing to do for eighteen years but go to school, play, and watch TV. Rich and poor, in the suburbs and the inner city, they are, as Paul Goodman pointed out years ago, “Growing Up Absurd,”4 deprived of the natural and normal ways of learning the relationship between cause and effect, actions and consequences by which the species has survived and evolved down through the millennia. Then we wonder why teenagers lack a sense of social responsibility. Schoolchildren need to be involved in community-building activities from an early age, both to empower themselves and to transform their communities from demoralizing wastelands into sources of strength and renewal. Their heads work better when their hearts and hands are engaged.

The person is otherness in communion and communion in otherness. The person is an identity that emerges through relationship; it is an 'I' that can exist only as long as it relates to a 'thou' which affirms it's existence and it's otherness. If we isolate the 'I' from the 'thou' we lose not only it's otherness but also it's very being; it simply cannot be without the other. Personhood is freedom. In its anthropological significance, personhood is inconceivable without freedom; it is the freedom of being other. I hesitate to say 'different' instead of 'other', because 'different' can be understood in the sense of qualities (clever, beautiful, etc.), which is not what the person is about. Person implies not simply the freedom to have qualities, but mainly the freedom simply to be yourself. And yet because, as we have already observed, one person is no person, this freedom is not freedom *from* the other but freedom *for* the other. Freedom thus becomes identical with *love*. We can love only if we are persons, that is, if we allow the other to be truly other, and yet to be in communion with us. If we love the other not only in spite of his of her being different from us but *because* he or she is different from us, or rather *other* than ourselves, we live in freedom as love and in love as freedom . [In this way] personhood is creativity. Freedom is not *from* but *for* someone or something other than ourselves. This makes the person *ec-static*, that is, going outside and beyond the boundaries of the 'self'. But this *ecstasis* is not to be understood as a movement towards the unknown and the infinite [an arbitrary, abstract *othering* for the sake of itself]; it is a movement of *affirmation of the other*. This drive of personhood towards the affirmation of the other is so strong that it is not limited to the 'other' that already exists, but wants to affirm an 'other' which is [the product of] the totally free grace of the person. The person [out of totally free grace] wants to create its own 'other'. This is what happens in art; and it is only the person that can be an artist in the true sense, that is, a creator that brings about a totally other identity as an act of freedom and communion. The subject of otherness, then, is raised in its absolute ontological significance. Otherness is not secondary to unity; it is primary and constitutive of the very idea of being. Respect for otherness is a matter not [only] of ethics but of ontology: if otherness disappears, beings simply cease to be. There is simply no room for ontological totalitarianism. All communion must involve otherness as a primary and constitutive ingredient. It is this that makes freedom part of the notion of being. Freedom is not simply 'freedom of will'; it is the freedom to be other in an absolute ontological sense.

thing of beauty is a joy forever: This graceful line from a poem written by John Keats is not so much inaccurate as it is archaic. Mr. Keats, it must be remembered, was not only a poet but also a product of the era in which he lived. Additionally, it must not be forgotten that one of the salient features of the early nineteenth century was an inordinate admiration for the simple ability to endure. Therefore, while a thing of beauty is a joy, to be sure, we of the modern age, confined no longer by outmoded values, are free to acknowledge that nine times out of ten a weekend is long enough. Each man kills the thing he loves: And understandably so, when he has been led to believe that it will be a joy forever.

In my own periods of darkness, in the underworld of the soul, I find myself frequently overcome and amazed by the ability of people to befriend each other, to love their intimate partners and parents and children, and to do what they must do to keep the machinery of the world running. I knew a man, injured and disabled by a car accident, who was employed by a local utility. For years after the crash he worked side by side with another man, who for his part suffered with a degenerative neurological disease. They cooperated while repairing the lines, each making up for the other’s inadequacy. This sort of everyday heroism is the rule, I believe, rather than the exception. Most individuals are dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and uncomplainingly about their business. If anyone is fortunate enough to be in a rare period of grace and health, personally, then he or she typically has at least one close family member in crisis. Yet people prevail and continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to hold themselves and their families and society together. To me this is miraculous—so much so that a dumbfounded gratitude is the only appropriate response. There are so many ways that things can fall apart, or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded people who are holding it together. They deserve some genuine and heartfelt admiration for that. It’s an ongoing miracle of fortitude and perseverance

Where on earth did it come from? You can ask that question of any poem, and one inevitable answer is a simple one: work. No made thing springs up unbidden, even those that seem to. The poem that announced itself to the intoxicated Coleridge, before a knock at the door banished most of it from his memory, or the composition that sprung full blown into the head of Mozart, as he stepped down from a carriage after a satisfying dinner, seemed to pour from the artist's hand, so long schooled those hands had become. But years of labor inform those spontaneous productions. Though a poem over which one struggles may seem labored, it often prepares the way for new writing in which what's been learned emerges with an effortless grace.

Richard Lovelace makes a compelling case that the best defense is a good offense. “The ultimate solution to cultural decay is not so much the repression of bad culture as the production of sound and healthy culture,” he writes. “We should direct most of our energy not to the censorship of decadent culture, but to the production and support of healthy expressions of Christian and non-Christian art.”10 Public protests and boycotts have their place. But even negative critiques are effective only when motivated by a genuine love for the arts. The long-term solution is to support Christian artists, musicians, authors, and screenwriters who can create humane and healthy alternatives that speak deeply to the human condition. Exploiting “Talent” The church must also stand against forces that suppress genuine creativity, both inside and outside its walls. In today’s consumer culture, one of the greatest dangers facing the arts is commodification. Art is treated as merchandise to market for the sake of making money. Paintings are bought not to exhibit, nor to grace someone’s home, but merely to resell. They are financial investments. As Seerveld points out, “Elite art of the New York school or by approved gurus such as Andy Warhol are as much a Big Business today as the music business or the sports industry.”11 Artists and writers have been reduced to “talent” to be plugged into the manufacturing process. That approach may increase sales, but it will suppress the best and highest forms of art. In the eighteenth century, the world nearly lost the best of Mozart’s music because the adults in the young man’s life treated him primarily as “talent” to exploit.

Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness. We begin by lacking charity towards Nature, so that instead of trying to co-operate with Tao or the Logos on the inanimate and sub-human levels, we try to dominate and exploit, we waste the earth's mineral resources, ruin its soil, ravage its forests, pour filth into its rivers and poisonous fumes into its air. From lovelessness in relation to Nature we advance to lovelessness in relation to art - a lovelessness so extreme that we have effectively killed all the fundamental or useful arts and set up various kinds of mass-production by machines in their place. And of course this lovelessness in regard to art is at the same time a lovelessness in regard to the human beings who have to perform the fool-proof and grace-proof tasks imposed by our mechanical art-surrogates and by the interminable paper work connected with mass-production and mass-distribution.

A visible cloud of steam rose from a long wide pipe protruding from the roof of a large concrete factory-like building nearby, and the air all around was filled with the intensely savory scent of barbecue potato chips, a flavor being manufactured in quantity for one of Southern's vendors. Grace knew that the barbecue scent came from a massive vat of liquefied compounds, which could be cooled and then poured into hundreds of fifty-five-gallon drums in the morning, carefully sealed, loaded onto tractor-trailers, and shipped out, to be warehoused for as long as two years and then, eventually, utilized in the industrial production of billions of pounds of highly processed potato-based snack foods. She knew what she smelled was a by-product from the manufacture of a highly concentrated chemical. Nevertheless, the scent evoked picnics in the park, bag lunches in elementary school lunchrooms shared over laughter with her dearest friends, long-buried feelings from childhood that rose from her heart.

DAY 10 Finding Contentment But godliness with contentment is a great gain. 1 Timothy 6:6 HCSB Everywhere we turn, or so it seems, the world promises us contentment and happiness. We are bombarded by messages offering us the “good life” if only we will purchase products and services that are designed to provide happiness, success, and contentment. But the contentment that the world offers is fleeting and incomplete. Thankfully, the contentment that God offers is all encompassing and everlasting. Happiness depends less upon our circumstances than upon our thoughts. When we turn our thoughts to God, to His gifts, and to His glorious creation, we experience the joy that God intends for His children. But, when we focus on the negative aspects of life—or when we disobey God’s commandments—we cause ourselves needless suffering. Do you sincerely want to be a contented Christian? Then set your mind and your heart upon God’s love and His grace. Seek first the salvation that is available through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and then claim the joy, the contentment, and the spiritual abundance that God offers His children. When you accept rather than fight your circumstances, even though you don’t understand them, you open your heart’s gate to God’s love, peace, joy, and contentment. Amy Carmichael Oh, what a happy soul I am, although I cannot see! I am resolved that in this world, contented I will be. Fanny Crosby If I could just hang in there, being faithful to my own tasks, God would make me joyful and content. The responsibility is mine, but the power is His. Peg Rankin The key to contentment is to consider. Consider who you are and be satisfied with that. Consider what you have and be satisfied with that. Consider what God’s doing and be satisfied with that. Luci Swindoll Jesus Christ is the One by Whom, for Whom, through Whom everything was made. Therefore, He knows what’s wrong in your life and how to fix it. Anne Graham Lotz God is everything that is good and comfortable for us. He is our clothing that for love wraps us, clasps us, and all surrounds us for tender love. Juliana of Norwich

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time. Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah. The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc. Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science. But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art. The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all,—that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms,—the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.

Most fish—like skate wing—naturally taper off and narrow at the outer edges and toward the tail. Which is fine for moving through the water. Not so good for even cooking. A chef or cook looks at that graceful decline and sees a piece of protein that will cook unevenly: will, when the center—or fattest part—is perfect, be overcooked at the edges. They see a piece of fish that does not look like you could charge $39 for it. Customers should understand that what they are paying for, in any restaurant situation, is not just what’s on the plate—but everything that’s not on the plate: all the bone, skin, fat, and waste product which the chef did pay for, by the pound. When Eric Ripert, for instance, pays $15 or $20 a pound for a piece of fish, you can be sure, the guy who sells it to him does not care that 70 percent of that fish is going in the garbage. It’s still the same price. Same principle applies to meat, poultry—or any other protein. The price of the protein on the market may be $10 per pound, but by the time you’re putting the cleaned, prepped piece of meat or fish on the plate, it can actually cost you $35 a pound. And that’s before paying the guy who cuts it for you. That disparity in purchase price and actual price becomes even more extreme at the top end of the dining spectrum. The famous French mantra of “Use Everything,” by which most chefs live, is not the operative phrase of a three-starred Michelin restaurant. Here, it’s “Use Only the Very Best.

is Jotunheim. If we go the wrong way, we’ll run across giants. Then we’ll all be butchered and put in a stew pot.” “We won’t go the wrong way,” I promised. “Will we, Jack?” “Hmm?” said the sword. “Oh, no. Probably not. Like, a sixty percent chance we’ll live.” “Jack….” “Kidding,” he said. “Jeez, so uptight.” He pointed upstream and led us through the foggy morning, with spotty snow flurries and a forty percent chance of death. Hearthstone Passes Out Even More than Jason Grace (Though I Have No Idea Who That Is) JOTUNHEIM LOOKED a lot like Vermont, just with fewer signs offering maple syrup products. Snow dusted the dark mountains. Waist-high drifts choked the valleys. Pine trees bristled with icicles. Jack hovered in front, guiding us along the river as it zigzagged through canyons blanketed in subzero shadows. We climbed trails next to half-frozen waterfalls, my sweat chilling instantly against my skin. In other words, it was a huge amount of fun. Sam and I stayed close to Hearthstone. I hoped my residual aura of Frey-glow might do him some good, but he still looked pretty weak. The best we could do was keep him from sliding off the goat. “Hang in there,” I told him. He signed something—maybe sorry–but his gesture was so listless I wasn’t sure. “Just rest,” I said. He grunted in frustration. He groped through his bag of runes, pulled one out, and placed it in my hands. He pointed to the stone, then to himself, as if to say This is me. The rune was one I didn’t know:

Traveling on, the shaft of his light reached now a great, dully shining oblong, and he stopped, surprised. Then, through the glass sides, he saw bright shapes of fish wheel in schools down the opaque water, startled by the illumination. Coming at last, and so suddenly, on life like his own, Mr. Lecky moved closer. The fixed flood of his light enveloped these small fish dimly, glowed back on him. They came sliding, drifting, mouths in motion, gills rippling, up the light, against the glass. Their senseless round eyes stared at Mr. Lecky. Idling with great grace, the extravagant products of selective breeding - fringetails, Korean, calico - passed, swayed about, came languidly back. Moving faster, stub-finned, crop-tailed danios from the Malabar coast appeared, hovered, taking the light on their fat flanks, now spotted, now iridescent pearl or opal. Seeing so many of them, so eager and attentive, Mr. Lecky felt an unexpected compunction. He was their only proprietor; and soon, trapped unnaturally here in the big tank, they would starve to death. His light went back to a counter he had just passed, showing him again the half-noticed packages - food for birds and pet animals, food, too, for fish. Returning to the tank, his light found many of the fish still waiting, the rest rushing back. He went and took a package, tore the top off, and poured the contents onto the rectangle of open water. It would perhaps postpone the time when, having eaten each other, the sick remainder must die anyway.

All these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern progress and civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for the voice of humanity, these appeals to art 'to have a mission,' are appeals which should be made to the public. The art which has fulfilled the conditions of beauty has fulfilled all conditions: it is for the critic to teach the people how to find in the calm of such art the highest expression of their own most stormy passions. 'I have no reverence,' said Keats, 'for the public, nor for anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great men and the principle of Beauty.' Such then is the principle which I believe to be guiding and underlying our English Renaissance, a Renaissance many-sided and wonderful, productive of strong ambitions and lofty personalities, yet for all its splendid achievements in poetry and in the decorative arts and in painting, for all the increased comeliness and grace of dress, and the furniture of houses and the like, not complete. For there can be no great sculpture without a beautiful national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that; no great drama without a noble national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that too. It is not that the flawless serenity of marble cannot bear the burden of the modern intellectual spirit, or become instinct with the fire of romantic passion - the tomb of Duke Lorenzo and the chapel of the Medici show us that - but it is that, as Theophile Gautier used to say, the visible world is dead, LE MONDE VISIBLE A DISPARU.

Thought is measured by a different rule, and puts us in mind, rather, of those souls whose number, according to certain ancient myths, is limited. There was in that time a limited contingent of souls or spiritual substance, redistributed from one living creature to the next as successive deaths occurred. With the result that some bodies were sometimes waiting for a soul (like present-day heart patients waiting for an organ donor). On this hypothesis, it is clear that the more human beings there are, the rarer will be those who have a soul. Not a very democratic situation and one which might be translated today into: the more intelligent beings there are (and, by the grace of information technology, they are virtually all intelligent), the rarer thought will be. Christianity was first to institute a kind of democracy and generalized right to a personal soul (it wavered for a long time where women were concerned). The production of souls increased substantially as a result, like the production of banknotes in an inflationary period, and the concept of soul was greatly devalued. It no longer really has any currency today and it has ceased to be traded on the exchanges. There are too many souls on the market today. That is to say, recycling the metaphor, there is too much information, too much meaning, too much immaterial data for the bodies that are left, too much grey matter for the living substance that remains. To the point where the situation is no longer that of bodies in search of a soul, as in the archaic liturgies, but of innumerable souls in search of a body. Or an incalculable knowledge in search of a knowing subject.

Read the following chain of events and see whether a similar pattern might apply to other toxic products that were reported in the news during your lifetime: 1. Workers were told that the paint was nontoxic, although there was no factual basis for this declaration. The employers discounted scientists. The workers believed their superiors. 2. Health complaints were made in ever-increasing frequency. It became obvious that something was seriously wrong. 3. U.S. Radium and other watch-dial companies began a campaign of disinformation and bogus medical tests - some of which involved X-rays and may even have made the condition worse. 4. Doctors, dentists, and researchers complied with U.S. Radium's and other companies' requests and refused to release their data to the public. 5. Medical professionals also aided the companies by attributing worker deaths to other causes. Syphilis was often cited as the diagnosis, which had the added benefit to management of being a smear on the victims' reputations. 6. One worker, Grace Fryer, decided to sue U.S. Radium. It took Fryer two years to find a lawyer who was willing to take on U.S. Radium. Only four other workers joined her suit; they became known as the "Radium Girls." 7. In 1928, the case was settled in the middle of the trial before it went to the jury for deliberation. The settlement for each of the five "Radium Girls" was $10,000 (the equivalent of $124,000 in 2009 dollars), plus $600 a year while the victim lived and all medical expenses. Remember the general outline of this scenario because you will see it over and over again: The company denies everything while the doctors and researchers (and even the industrial hygienists) in the company's employ support the company's distorted version of the facts. Perhaps one worker in a hundred will finally pursue justice, one lawyer out of the hundreds of thousands in the United States will finally step up to the plate, and the case will be settled for chump change.

No matter where you are on the pathway of your life, please don’t let the pain of an imperfect past hinder the glory of your fabulous future. You are so much more powerful than you may currently understand. Splendid victories—and outright blessings—are coming your way. And you’re exactly where you need to be to receive the growth necessary for you to lead the unusually productive, extremely prodigious and exceptionally influential life that you’ve earned through your harshest trials. Nothing is wrong at this moment, even if it feels like everything’s falling apart. If you sense your life’s a mess right now, this is simply because your fears are just a little stronger than your faith. With practice, you can turn down the volume of the voice of your scared self. And increase the tone of your most triumphant side. The truth is that every challenging event you’ve experienced, each toxic person that you’ve encountered and all the trials you’ve endured have been perfect preparation to make you into the person that you now are. You needed these lessons to activate the treasures, talents and powers that are now awakening within you. Nothing was an accident. Zero was a waste. You’re definitely exactly where you need to be to begin the life of your most supreme desires. One that can make you an empire-builder along with a world-changer. And perhaps even a history-maker.” “This all sounds easy but it’s a lot harder in reality,” shouted a man in a red baseball cap, seated in the fifth row. He sported a gray t-shirt and ripped jeans, the type you can buy torn at your local shopping mall. Though this outburst could have seemed disrespectful, the pitch of the participant’s voice and his body language displayed genuine admiration for The Spellbinder. “I agree with you, you wonderful human being,” responded The Spellbinder, his grace influencing all participants and his voice sounding somewhat stronger, as he stood up from his chair. “Ideas are worth nothing unless backed by application. The smallest of implementations is always worth more than the grandest of intentions. And if being an amazing person and developing a legendary life was easy, everyone would be doing it. Know what I mean?

I do not believe that we have finished evolving. And by that, I do not mean that we will continue to make ever more sophisticated machines and intelligent computers, even as we unlock our genetic code and use our biotechnologies to reshape the human form as we once bred new strains of cattle and sheep. We have placed much too great a faith in our technology. Although we will always reach out to new technologies, as our hands naturally do toward pebbles and shells by the seashore, the idea that the technologies of our civilized life have put an end to our biological evolution—that “Man” is a finished product—is almost certainly wrong. It seems to be just the opposite. In the 10,000 years since our ancestors settled down to farm the land, in the few thousand years in which they built great civilizations, the pressures of this new way of life have caused human evolution to actually accelerate. The rate at which genes are being positively selected to engender in us new features and forms has increased as much as a hundredfold. Two genes linked to brain size are rapidly evolving. Perhaps others will change the way our brain interconnects with itself, thus changing the way we think, act, and feel. What other natural forces work transformations deep inside us? Humanity keeps discovering whole new worlds. Without, in only five centuries, we have gone from thinking that the earth formed the center of the universe to gazing through our telescopes and identifying countless new galaxies in an unimaginably vast cosmos of which we are only the tiniest speck. Within, the first scientists to peer through microscopes felt shocked to behold bacteria swarming through our blood and other tissues. They later saw viruses infecting those bacteria in entire ecologies of life living inside life. We do not know all there is to know about life. We have not yet marveled deeply enough at life’s essential miracle. How, we should ask ourselves, do the seemingly soulless elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, zinc, iron, and all the others organize themselves into a fully conscious human being? How does matter manage to move itself? Could it be that an indwelling consciousness makes up the stuff of all things? Could this consciousness somehow animate the whole grand ecology of evolution, from the forming of the first stars to the creation of human beings who look out at the universe’s glittering constellations in wonder? Could consciousness somehow embrace itself, folding back on itself, in a new and natural technology of the soul? If it could, this would give new meaning to Nietzsche’s insight that: “The highest art is self–creation.” Could we, really, shape our own evolution with the full force of our consciousness, even as we might exert our will to reach out and mold a lump of clay into a graceful sculpture? What is consciousness, really? What does it mean to be human?

Water: They were restless, creative, flighty, and persuasive. Like water, they eroded people’s wills away. If you knew a water witch, chances were they’d be the ones that everyone tended to agree with. They were deeply charming and could change people’s minds. Their symbol was Bilios, the world tree, which sat in a circle representing the universe. Fire: They protected people. They were strength. Confidence. Power. They could usually fight. They were natural leaders. Their symbol was a thick cross with tapered ends inside a circle. Air: The seers. They told the future and could see the truth of the present. They were the ones most used as consultants by powerful people, and that was how they made their living and their money. The site speculated that Gwydion was an air witch. They were very susceptible to mental attack and tended to be extremely sensitive individuals. Their symbol was a three-pronged rod inside a circle. Earth: They were the practical witches, well-versed in herb lore. They took care of the everyday necessities of the witch, such as health products and medicines, home protection, magicked food. They got none of the glory, but they were the most essential of all witches; often the head of the family. They were grounded, patient, loving, and forthright. Their symbol was a five-pointed star, representing the five senses, usually with a gem studded in the middle to symbolize themselves, at the calm center of all things.

When I listen to Inside Story, I can hear the energy of what was going on the moment it was made. It is different from Nightclubbing, different from Slave to the Rhythm, but I listen to that record, and I love it. It’s where I was at the time. Nile’s ear was different from mine, and he was responding to his idea of me, and it was an American Nile production, with all that entails, but I think it is beautiful. There were other ways of doing that material, but I like how it ended up.

allegedly abandoned identities as unbelievers. Today too many churches believe that we can reach the world with the message of Christ by appealing to people with the things of the world, with spectacle, showmanship, and production. Paul never thinks to do this. He never suggests that more of what you left behind is the best route to what lies ahead. You don’t win godly saints in worldly ways. You don’t turn sinners into saints with a worldly message.

Simply because holiness is the product of grace, and God gives grace only to the humble.

Yet to accept tributes to yourself, whether for your innate qualities or your work, allows other people to receive the benefits of the admiration they give. If you’re not accustomed to gracefully accepting praise, that’s a good skill to work on. When you receive appreciation, refrain from quickly deflecting attention back to the other person or deprecating your talents. A gracious, genuine “Thank you” often suffices. Doing so could increase your own happiness and fulfillment.

Buying more and more of the best land, sometimes owning multiple estates spread across several states, extended plantation families - fathers who provided sons and sons-in-law with a start - created slaveholding conglomerates that controlled hundreds and sometimes thousands of slaves. The grandees' vast wealth allowed them to introduce new hybrid cotton seeds and strains of cane, new technologies, and new forms of organization that elevated productivity and increased profitability. In some places, the higher levels of capitalization and technical mastery of the grandees reduced white yeomen to landlessness and forced smallholders to move on or else enter the wage-earning class as managers or overseers. As a result, the richest plantation areas became increasingly black, with ever-larger estates managed from afar as the planters retreated to some local country seat, one of the region's ports, or occasionally some northern metropolis. Claiming the benefits of their new standing, the grandees - characterized in various places as 'nabobs,' 'a feudal aristocracy,' or simply 'The Royal Family' - established their bona fides as a ruling class. They built great houses strategically located along broad rivers or high bluffs. They named their estates in the aristocratic manner - the Briars, Fairmont, Richmond - and made them markers on the landscape. Planters married among themselves, educated their sons in northern universities, and sent their wives and daughters on European tours, collecting the bric-a-brac of the continent to grace their mansions. Reaching out to their neighbors, they burnished their reputations for hospitality. The annual Christmas ball or the great July Fourth barbecue were private events with a public purpose. They confirmed the distance between the planters and their neighbors and allowed leadership to fall lightly and naturally on their shoulders, as governors, legislators, judges, and occasionally congressmen, senators, and presidents.

My own belief is the result of a combination of many acts of grace and many acts of will. It is the product of study, experience, and encounters with God - both directly and through his children. At the most basic level, however, the reason I believe is because God gave me the spiritual gift of faith. I humbly count this as a precious gift from God. I do not take my gift of faith for granted. I don't deserve it. I didn't earn it. I can't explain why, but I was born, like Nephi, naturally inclined to religion, more so even than two of my siblings who were raised in the same home by the same parents and who attend church but struggle with it more than I do. Religion has come fairly naturally for me, church has generally been a comfortable place for me, and God has always been real for me. I have spent a lot of time with troubling historical and even anti-Mormon material, but I have never experienced a faith crisis. I have not always been immersed in God's spirit, but I have never felt totally forsaken. That doesn't make my story of faith any better or worse than anyone else's - it just happens to be mine.

A large part of a PM’s job is to figure out the small number of key features to prioritize for the customer, and to lay the groundwork for long-term business viability by gracefully saying “no” to the numerous requests that don’t fit the customer’s needs.

And yet there were men—and she knew it—who were able to obtain transportation whenever they wished, as by a mystic secret, as by the grace of some power which one was not to question or explain. They were the men whose dealings with Cuffy Meigs were regarded by people as that unknowable of mystic creeds which smites the observer for the sin of looking, so people kept their eyes closed, dreading, not ignorance, but knowledge. She knew that deals were made whereby those men sold a commodity known as “transportation pull”—a term which all understood, but none would dare define. She knew that these were the men of the emergency specials, the men who could cancel her scheduled trains and send them to any random spot of the continent which they chose to strike with their voodoo stamp, the stamp superseding contract, property, justice, reason and lives, the stamp stating that “the public welfare” required the immediate salvation of that spot. These were the men who sent trains to the relief of the Smather Brothers and their grapefruit in Arizona—to the relief of a factory in Florida engaged in the production of pin-ball machines—to the relief of a horse farm in Kentucky—to the relief of Orren Boyle’s Associated Steel.

The challenge of productivity (and life) is in bridging the gap between what we know and what we do.

What you’ll soon discover is that throwing more time at a project doesn’t make you more productive. Leading a more balanced life, keeping to a more manageable schedule, taking care of yourself, and doing the things you love don’t compromise your productivity, but enhance it.

1. Life is imperfection. 2.      The origin of imperfection is separation from the Fullness of the Pleroma (the realms of Perfection). 3. It’s possible to reconnect to the Pleroma. 4.      Reconnection to the Pleroma is possible via this Way, the cultivation of gnosis. There’s a story that goes along with this, similar to other religious stories. It has to do with the fall from grace of Sophia, or Wisdom, an aspect of Divinity, and her production of a being called the Demiurge, a misguided oaf of a deity who ended up creating our universe, but who didn’t do a very good job. It’s kind of a theory of “Unintelligent Design.

Healthy ministry communities, which leave a legacy of long-term gospel productivity, have longevity and fruit because they are, at their core, communities of grace. Rather than achievement forming how the leadership community forms itself and operates, the gospel does.

Do you have gorgeous, lustrous curly hair? Well, you may wonder about different hairstyles or even complain about the magnificent curls. However, opting for a French braid on the curly mane can change your whole outlook. French braid, also known as French plait, is undoubtedly a timeless classic. It has the ability to give an air of sophistication and grace. The conventional French braid doesn’t strain the hair and causes few breakages, leading to healthy hair. How to French Braid Curly Hair Steps to French braid the curly hair? Follow these steps to French braid the curly hair. • Part the hair from the middle. • Now start a regular braid on the side. • Before crossing, get a little bit of the main hair and add it to the small section that is now taken to the middle area. • Repeat this addition till all the main hair gets used. • After that, proceed with the traditional braiding style and finish it off with a hairband. How to French Braid Curly Hair Can the right hairbrush aid in making the perfect French braid? Do you desire the perfect French braid on your curly tresses? Well, with the best styling brush, attaining that illustrious French braid is easy and manageable. If you are looking for the best brush for your hair, stop! Check out NuWay DoubleC Brush! It is a patented brush that comes with a multitude of features. Here, you will find a speedy dry, ergonomic shape to circular venting scheme. Why choosing NuWay DoubleC Brush is the best choice for a French braid? NuWay DoubleC Brush offers different features that inevitably make it the best scalp brush. • DoubleC Curve The Double C shape brush aids in offering depth and helps in lifting added volumes. • Carries hair care products With a broad curve, the NuWay DoubleC Brush can carry hair products with ease. It is indeed the best brush for applying hair care products. • Circular venting scheme The circular venting scheme decreases the drying time, thus offering speed dry. Moreover, it also protects against heat. • Ergonomic shape With an ergonomic shape, the brush assists in scalp care. Now, you can get the perfect braid with ease! • Non-slip grip The NuWay DoubleC Brush comes with a TPR handle. It indicates a non-slip grip and aids in detangling hairs. No wonder it is credited as the best brush for detangling tresses. • Easy to clean The brush is exceptionally easy to clean. You only need some detergent and water to wash off the dirt. Then, air dries it in a cool place for further use. • Tips diffused with argan oil The tips of the bristles are smeared with argan oil, maintaining the softness and shine of the hair. These also promote blood circulation and stimulate the hair follicles. These spectacular features definitely make the NuWay DoubleC Brush even more appealing. Magnificent, right? Get this impressive hairbrush on Amazon here!

What does this mean for you? Focus only on what you can control. Your attitude—will you be positive or negative? Your actions—will you be productive or ineffectual? Your time—will you use it wisely or waste it? Your emotions—will you manage them or let them manage you?

Being in love blesses you with a sort of grace. A friend once told me he imagined his father or God watching him while he works, to help force productivity. Being in love was like that to me, a shield, a higher purpose, a promise to something outside of yourself

And yet surely it is but the transition from false to true. Considered as the whole truth, it is false altogether;—the product of entire sceptical blindness, as yet only struggling to see. Hero-worship exists forever, and everywhere: not Loyalty alone; it extends from divine adoration down to the lowest practical regions of life. "Bending before men," if it is not to be a mere empty grimace, better dispensed with than practiced, is Hero-worship,—a recognition that there does dwell in that presence of our brother something divine; that every created man, as Novalis said, is a "revelation in the Flesh." They were Poets too, that devised all those graceful courtesies which make life noble! Courtesy is not a falsehood or grimace; it need not be such. And Loyalty, religious Worship itself, are still possible; nay still inevitable.

She had seen her mother looking ethereal, in her tutu and swan feathers and dinky little crown, in the poster from a Denver Opera Ballet production—looking like something you could break in two. But looking over her shoulder one day and seeing Nita eyeing dubiously that old framed poster, her mother had said, “Honey, take my advice. Don’t mess around with swans. One of those pretty white wings could break your leg in three places.” And off she had gone with the laundry basket, sailing past, graceful and strong, with the danger showing only around the edges of the chuckle.

fully three-quarters of life’s great & bounteous cornucopia consists of parasites, battening furtively on the flesh of the few productive species that grace creation.

New England Puritans equated productivity and hard work with divine election; therefore, unwillingness to work signified being devoid of God’s irresistible grace.

God has always used imperfect people for His awesome purposes. He specializes in taking broken lives and turning them into joyful, productive, and inspiring trophies of His grace.

I think what I really want is to treat life less like a war. Wouldn't we have less Imposter Syndrome and fewer actual imposters if we just lowered our standards a bit? Modern productivity dogma encourages us to act fast, and milk our exceptionalism for all it's worth. Under that kind of pressure, perhaps the truest rebellion is to embrace our ordinariness. In everyday life, if we could not only tolerate the discomfort, but wholeheartedly embrace our own lack of expertise, then we might have a far better chance of showing others the same grace. Then perhaps life might feel, at the very least, less agitating, at most, we might even find peace. How’s this? Let’s stoop below average at 50% of all we do. We’ll relish it, the commonness. Next time we have a question, let’s hold our for as long as we humanly can before googling the answer. It’ll be erotic, like edging before a climax. It’s quite nice, I am learning, just to wonder indefinitely. To never have certain answers. To sit down, be humble, and not even dare to knowThe hormonal rewards of constantly checking our phones fatigue the mind just as much as the stressors do. Studies of phone addiction have found the little hits of dopamine that keep users jonesing for notifications come with a tragic side effect. They actually inhibit the amount of dopamine we feel when exposed to real-life novelty. Said another way, phone addiction decreases our ability to enjoy new experiences in the physical world. When you’re hooked on novelty in electronic form, new foods and flowers lose their magic.

But surely this kind of alchemy no longer works today? Well, have you ever eaten Chilean sea bass?* It is the product of a particular sort of alchemy, ‘The Alchemy of Semantics’. The $20 slice of fish that graces plates in high-end restaurants under the name ‘Chilean sea bass’ actually comes from a fish that for many years was known as the Patagonian toothfish. No one is going to pay $20 for a plate of Patagonian toothfish – call it Chilean sea bass, however, and the rules change. An American fish wholesaler called Lee Lentz had the idea, even though, strictly speaking, most of the catch doesn’t come from Chile and the toothfish isn’t even related to the bass.

The problem with our inability to understand the ways in which capitalist planning functions is that it closes off potential alternatives to the current system. When politicians mess up, we're told that the state has grown too big, so we should cut public spending and hand more power to unaccountable corporations. And when corporations abuse their power, we're told that the solution is to give more power to the politicians who are funded by those corporations. Power remains concentrated at the top of the same institutions, even as politicians lose elections and corporate executives are replaced. The elite carousel gives many people a deep sense of hopelessness. No matter who you vote for, no matter what products you buy, no matter where you work, it doesn't seem to make a difference. Yet we're supposed to live in a free-market democracy. We're supposed to be free.

Pregnancy Skincare: Nurturing Your Glow with Expert Care – Motherhood Chaitanya Hospital Pregnancy – a wondrous journey that transforms your world in every conceivable way. As you prepare to welcome a new life into the world, your body takes center stage, and so does your skincare routine. Amidst the excitement and anticipation, the canvas of your skin undergoes its own set of changes. But fret not, for the guidance of best gynecologist obstetricians in Chandigarh and the expert care at Motherhood Chaitanya Hospital can help you navigate the realm of pregnancy skincare with grace and confidence. The Glow and the Challenges Ah, the famed pregnancy glow! While it’s true that many expectant mothers experience a certain radiance, it’s also a time when your skin decides to throw a few curveballs. Hormones like estrogen and progesterone, the maestros behind many pregnancy changes, might lead to increased oil production. This could result in unexpected acne or that elusive “glow” turning into a somewhat excessive shine. And let’s not forget about the infamous melasma, often referred to as the “mask of pregnancy.” This uneven pigmentation might make an appearance on your face, especially if you’re basking in the sun’s rays without proper protection. But worry not, for the guidance of the best gynaecologist in Chandigarh, you can take steps to manage these challenges and let your true radiance shine through. Dos and Don’ts In this symphony of pregnancy skincare, it’s crucial to compose a harmonious routine that nurtures both your skin and the life growing within you. First and foremost, let’s talk hydration. Drinking water is like giving your skin a refreshing dose of vitality, ensuring that it remains supple and resilient. As you venture into the world of skincare products, remember that less is more. Opt for gentle, pregnancy-safe cleansers that cleanse without stripping away your skin’s natural moisture. Ingredients like hyaluronic acid and glycerin can be your skin’s best friends, offering hydration without clogging pores. Ah, the allure of sunscreen! Now more than ever, shielding your skin from the sun’s rays is of paramount importance. Look for a broad-spectrum SPF and ensure that it’s pregnancy-safe. A hat and sunglasses can also join the ensemble of sun protection. Now, as you scan the beauty aisles, you might come across a wide array of products promising miracles. But be cautious – not all ingredients are pregnancy-friendly. Best gynecologist in Sector44C would advise steering clear of retinoids, salicylic acid, and benzoyl peroxide. Instead, embrace the calming embrace of ingredients like chamomile and aloe vera. Treating Yourself with Care Amidst the whirlwind of preparations, don’t forget to treat yourself to moments of self-care. A gentle exfoliation once or twice a week can help slough away dead skin cells and keep your complexion radiant. Opt for exfoliants with natural granules to ensure that your skin is treated with the gentleness it deserves. Expert Support for Your Glow The journey of pregnancy is as unique as a fingerprint, and so is your skin’s response to it. That’s why seeking guidance from the best obstetricians in Chandigarh can make all the difference. As you navigate the realms of pregnancy skincare, remember that the changes your skin undergoes are a testament to the incredible journey you’re on. It’s a journey of growth, transformation, and the anticipation of new beginnings. With the guidance of experts, a touch of self-care, and the support of Motherhood Chaitanya Hospital, you can stride through this journey with confidence, letting your inner glow shine as brightly as your dreams.

The main takeaway here is that corporations are political-as well as economic-entities. Within the corporation, relationships are shaped by the social division of labor: the fact that some own the things we need to produce commodities, while other are forced to sell their labor power as an input to production merely in order to survive. The corporation came into existence to formalize this unequal and exploitative relationship between worker and boss, while insulating owners from risk. The corporation is capital personified. As corporations have become bigger, they have gained more power over both the markets in which they operate and the workforces they control. Complex corporate hierarchies have institutionalized the power imbalance between workers and bosses, mediated by a large class of professional managers. Ultimately, these corporations have become sovereign actors within our society-capable of delivering punishment, governing life, and making and breaking law in much the same way as states.

While claiming a grand civilizing mission to end poverty and promote development, rich countries have in fact underdeveloped the rest of the world in order to enrich themselves. In his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney argues forcefully that the wealth of the rich economies comes through the exploitation of poor ones, through 'trade, colonial domination, and capitalist investment.;' The exploitation of the Global South is a cornerstone of production in the Global North, a relationship that yields great profit for corporations headquartered in countries that used to colonize much of the planet.

Let’s not forget that our call as Christians is to make much of Jesus. The Great Commission calls us to make disciples of Jesus, not to recruit other people to a works-based lifestyle that makes us feel better (for a while) and makes them feel like constant failures. We are sharing the gospel, not hawking a product for commission. We must emphasize grace before we talk about commitment, because once grace becomes a believer’s identity, commitment will follow.

Finally, I must acknowledge the role my lovely wife Annie, to whom I have dedicated the book, played in its production. I had the good luck to have married a woman who is incredibly smart and whose sound intuitions are untainted by philosophy. The price she pays for this is that she is subjected to calls interrupting her own work in which I ask her things like: ‘‘What’s an example of a gesture that gives an instruction?’’ or ‘‘Is the following sentence intuitively true: ‘Jeff owns more surfboards than Napoleon’?’’ She handles this with remarkable grace and humor, while providing excellent answers. In addition, while I was working on the book, she bent over backwards to do things for me that would allow me more time to write at crucial junctures. This even before we were married! And finally, the love and support she gave me while I worked on this book were of incalculable value to me. My friends say she is too good for me. They’re right

The document, which would later be published by Monthly Review Press, first as a special summer issue of the magazine and then as a book,19 began by describing the death of the union because of its failure to grapple with the question of automation. It went on to say that the rapid development of the productive forces by capitalism and the diminishing number of workers resulting from high technology were forcing us to go beyond Marx because Marx’s analyses and projections had been made in the springtime of capitalism, a period of scarcity rather than of abundance. The document projected blacks replacing workers as the revolutionary social force in the 1960s. It concluded by insisting that no group is automatically revolutionary: People in every stratum [must] clash not only with the agents of the silent police state but with their own prejudices, their own outmoded ideas, their own fears which keep them from grappling with the new realities of our age. The American people must find a way to insist upon their own right and responsibility to make political decisions and to determine policy in all spheres of social existence—whether it is foreign policy, the work process, education, race relations, community life. The coming struggle is a political struggle to take political power out of the hands of the few and put it into the hands of the many. But in order to get this power into the hands of the many, it will be necessary for the many not only to fight the powerful few but to fight and clash among themselves as well.20

Prostitution’ similarly denotes a fall from grace, a failure to live up to expectations of productivity and chastity by women. All these, then, are images used mainly for young people, and their power lies in their association with failure.

Our concern,” Jimmy wrote in the DU brochure, is with how our city has been disintegrating socially, economically, politically, morally and ethically. We are convinced that we cannot depend upon one industry or any large corporation to provide us with jobs. It is now up to us—the citizens of Detroit—to put our hearts, our imaginations, our minds, and our hands together to create a vision and project concrete programs for developing the kinds of local enterprises that will provide meaningful jobs and income for all citizens. To engage Detroiters in the creation of this vision, DU embarked on a campaign for open government in the city, issuing a series of leaflets calling on citizens to examine the whole chain of developer-driven megaprojects with which Young had tried and failed to revive the city (including Poletown and the People Mover) and to assume responsibility for envisioning and implementing alternative roads of development based on restoring neighborhoods and communities. During the debate over casino gambling Young had challenged his opponents to come up with an alternative, accusing us of being naysayers without any solutions of our own. Jimmy welcomed the challenge. There was nothing he liked better than using crisis and breakdown as an opportunity for renewal and transformation. His forte was devising solutions that were visionary and at the same time so down-to-earth that people could almost taste them. For more than fifteen years he had been writing and talking about the crisis developing in our cities and the need to redefine work, especially for the sake of our young people. In October 1986, at a meeting in Oakland, California, which the Bay Area NOAR sponsored to present “a vision of 21st century neighborhoods and communities,” Jimmy had declared that it was now “idealistic” to expect the government or corporations to do the work that is needed to keep up our communities and to provide for our elementary safety and security. Multinational corporations and rapid technological development have turned our cities into graveyards. “Efficiency in production,” he argued, “can no longer be our guiding principle because it comes at the price of eliminating human creativity and skills and making millions of people expendable.” He continued: “The residue of the last 100 years of rapid technological development is alienation, hopelessness, self-hate and hate for one another, and the violence which has created a reign of terror in our inner cities.

What did you say was in that salve?” “Comfrey,” Ellen said, sounding relieved at the shift in topic. “Likely mint, as well, rosemary, and maybe some lavender, arnica if memory serves, a few other herbs, some for scent, some for comfort.” “I like the scent,” Val said, wondering how long she’d hold his hand. It was childish of him, but he suspected the contact was soothing him as much as the specific ingredients. “Is it helping?” Ellen asked, her fingers slowing again. “It helps. I think the heat of your touch is as therapeutic as your salve.” “It might well be.” Ellen sandwiched his larger hand between her smaller ones. “I do not hold myself out as any kind of herbalist. There’s too much guesswork and room for error involved.” “But you made this salve.” “For my own use.” Ellen kept his hand between hers. “I will sell scents, soaps, and sachets but not any product that could be mistaken for a medicine, tincture, or tisane.” “Suppose it’s wise to know one’s limits.” Ellen was just holding Val’s hand in hers, and he was glad for the darkness, as his gratitude for the simple contact was probably plain on his face.

Exodus and resurrection, the most dramatic divine interventions in history, both declare that there is a grace-filled power loose in the world that far outstrips our greatest human ambitions and can quiet our deepest human fears. We enter into the work of cultural creativity not as people who desperately need to strategize our way into cultural relevance, but as participants in a story of new creation that comes just when our power seems to have been extinguished. Culture making becomes not just the product of clever cultural strategy or the natural byproduct of inherited privilege, but the astonished and grateful response of people who have been rescued from the worst that culture and nature can do.

If you have legs that work, walk in the right direction. If you have an audible voice, say constructive words. If you have functional eyes, see great things. If you are in a position of power, use it productively and if you have a sound mind, think exceptionally; for such is not a given, but grace.

Unrushing our lives is a risk, though, isn’t it? It means we may have to give up something—or a lot of things—in order to slow down. And often we don’t like the idea of slowing down, because it sounds unproductive. But we risk missing something far more valuable than our productivity in keeping at a hurried pace: life. Real life.

Hearthstone Passes Out Even More than Jason Grace (Though I Have No Idea Who That Is) JOTUNHEIM LOOKED a lot like Vermont, just with fewer signs offering maple syrup products. Snow dusted the dark mountains. Waist-high drifts choked the valleys. Pine trees bristled with icicles. Jack hovered in front, guiding us along the river as it zigzagged through canyons blanketed in subzero shadows. We climbed trails next to half-frozen waterfalls, my sweat chilling instantly against my skin. In

Grace Lee Boggs was both product and producer of an improbable history. “I grew up in New York as a first generation Chinese American in an all-Caucasian community with no role models,” she once told an audience. “So I realized early on that I had to blaze my own trail.” It was this background, she continued, that likely “predisposed me to make so many unconventional decisions when I became an adult, for example, to become an activist in the African American community and to marry an African American worker.” 1 On other occasions, she attributed the origins of her “revolutionary activism to a combination of my mother’s rebelliousness and my father’s commitment to country and community.” 2 By mapping what can be known of her childhood, early intellectual development, and formal education, we can identify central experiences and influences during the first quarter century of her life that called forth and shaped her subsequent political commitments and intellectual work.

But the factor is real: a sovereign is a sovereign, and no government can be entirely without paternal graces. No one in a sane society will be rendered into diesel, or even be allowed to starve to death for lack of productive earning power. Perhaps there are enough Randians on the planet for one city-state, but probably not two. Otherwise, it just won’t happen, and keeping it from happening is just one of the realm’s many business expenses.

all that is necessary for the valid administration of the Sacraments is the direct intention, i. e. the purpose of performing the rite as is usual among Catholics. To demand in addition a reflex in tention, either for the administration of the Sac rament as such, or for the production of the sac ramental character and the infusion of grace, would be to make the validity of the Sacrament depend upon the orthodoxy of the minister,—an assumption which we have shown to be false.

The so-called Sacraments of the dead require for their worthy reception attrition along with its various dispositive acts (faith, fear, hope, etc.), whereas the Sacraments of the living demand nothing less than the state of grace. a) Sacraments of the dead are those instituted for the remission of sin or the production of the state of grace (iustificatio prima). There are two—Baptism and Penance. Their worthy re ception depends upon the same requisites as justi fication itself, viz.: faith, fear, hope of forgive ness, contrition and a firm purpose of amend-

All the Sacraments, as acts of their invis ible author and chief minister, Jesus Christ, by vir tue of their immanent dignity, move God to the (physical) production of grace, and hence exert at least a moral causality.

The fascination with automation in part reflected the country’s mood in the immediate postwar period, including a solid ideological commitment to technological progress. Representatives of industry (along with their counterparts in science and engineering) captured this mood by championing automation as the next step in the development of new production machinery and American industrial prowess. These boosters quickly built up automation into “a new gospel of postwar economics,” lauding it as “a universal ideal” that would “revolutionize every area of industry.” 98 For example, the November 1946 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the prospects for “The Automatic Factory.” The issue included an article titled “Machines without Men” that envisioned a completely automated factory where virtually no human labor would be needed. 99 With visions of “transforming the entire manufacturing sector into a virtually labor-free enterprise,” factory owners in a range of industries began to introduce automation in the postwar period. 100 The auto industry moved with particular haste. After the massive wave of strikes in 1945–46, automakers seized on automation as a way to replace workers with machines. 101 As they converted back to civilian auto production after World War II, they took the opportunity to install new labor-saving automatic production equipment. The two largest automakers, Ford and General Motors, set the pace. General Motors introduced the first successful automated transfer line at its Buick engine plant in Flint in 1946 (shortly after a 113-day strike, the longest in the industry’s history). The next year Ford established an automation department (a Ford executive, Del S. Harder, is credited with coining the word “automation”). By October 1948 the department had approved $ 3 million in spending on 500 automated devices, with early company estimates predicting that these devices would result in a 20 percent productivity increase and the elimination of 1,000 jobs. Through the late 1940s and 1950s Ford led the way in what became known as “Detroit automation,” undertaking an expensive automation program, which it carried out in concert with the company’s plans to decentralize operations away from the city. A major component of this effort was the Ford plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, a $ 2 billion engine-making complex that attracted visitors from government, industry, and labor and became a national symbol of automation in the 1950s. 102

Corporate interests raised a nearly unified voice heralding automation as a certain and universal beneficial advancement. However, some observers saw the new technology as a cause for concern and cautioned that the final word on automation would depend on the choices that industry and the nation made in the face of difficult questions regarding the pace of automation’s implementation, the uses of the new productivity, and the fate of displaced workers as well as depleted or eliminated job classifications, communities, and even industries. Norbert Wiener, for example, a prominent MIT mathematician and pioneer in the science of cybernetics, emphasized the potentially calamitous economic and social consequences of the new production technology. Wiener had begun to express concerns about the impacts of automation on labor and the entire society during World War II, and he authored two books in the immediate Cold War years warning that potentially disastrous unemployment and related social problems may come from industry’s drive toward automation. He characterized automation and computer controls in the production process as the “modern” or “second” industrial revolution, which even more than the first held “unbounded possibilities for good and evil.” 104 In particular, Wiener feared that the larger impact of the changes caused by automation would be a massive displacement of workers, compounded by the profit-driven indifference of industry. “The automatic machine … will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.” 105

Grace leaned forward, studying him up close, able to make out some of his facial features in the clay mask: strong brow, broad cheekbones, prominent jawline and chin. As a flavorist, she was familiar with kaolin clay, a virtually tasteless edible mineral often used as an anti-caking agent in processed foods, various toothpastes, and originally kaopectate. But she'd never encountered the raw product out of the lab, and certainly not like this. She leaned closer to him. He smelled of sediment and mostly sweat, a decidedly masculine note, the precise replication of which one could base an entire career, and then some. Even the most skilled perfumers in the world, experts in the animal secrets of civet and ambergris, couldn't get it just right. It was a human thing. And she'd studied it, androstadienone and most of the known male pheromones, and she knew the effects certain concentrates could have on certain women. She'd written the reports and seen the CT scans of activity in women's brains. Still, knowing about it intellectually and rationally did not in any way lessen what it was doing to her right now, the effect it was having on her senses and her body. 'Can he tell?' she wondered. Lean and broad-shouldered, he had the build of a man who spent his days using his body in labor. She could see it in the way the mud set into the ridged musculature of his forearms, like the russeting across a firm apple. Still, the inner details of him escaped her. His hair was caked with dry clay, and she thought of the figures she'd seen artists craft in their hillside studios in Montmartre, with the Sacre-Coeur church on the summit above and the bawdy Moulin Rouge crowds teeming below. He looked like that, an unglazed unfinished sculpture of a man, but for his eyes, vast and deep, and very much alive, as if he were trapped inside his statued body.

We started talking and came to the conclusion that building a good, solid relationship is like forging metals. Life and emotions are the fire, but it's our vision of what we want to create and our willingness to pound with determination that give us a sturdy, useful end product.

The pastry kitchen is colder than I had imagined but smells delicious, as sweet and crisp as the bite of an apple. The walls are covered in white tiles, and almost everything is made of stainless steel. There are quite a few Chinese chefs in the kitchen, busy at work. They don't look rushed at all, carefully executing their tasks. One chef is releasing praline balls from their molds and then dipping them in a bowl of melted chocolate. It looks like a silken soup, and my mouth waters. He drops each ball in with a large fork and slowly stirs it around. When it comes up again, it has the satin sheen of the warm chocolate. He rolls it, the fork providing a cradle against a marble bench top until it is cool. The fork leaves no crease or mark on the finished product, a perfect sphere. There is such slow art to it; I feel hypnotized.

How to Write a Suggestion Letter No need to ramble on about your environmental concerns or the ideology behind your lifestyle. Keep your letter short and concise, your words tactful and courteous, and your content diplomatic and hopeful. In short, write a letter that you would like to receive. 1. Start with gratitude: state your appreciation for the company, such as the efficiency, affordability, or availability of their product or service. 2. Show understanding of the current practice employed. 3. Address the problem. 4. Propose up to three constructive solutions. 5. Support your solutions with working examples: how other companies have addressed the problem effectively. 6. Mention how the change would benefit your addressee, focusing on financial profit. 7. Gracefully conclude with a positive note.

Messages that tell us we aren’t pretty enough, young enough, thin enough, or desirable enough are garbage. Anyone who implies we are unable to care for our own families is lying. If you believe the persona that marketing culture has crafted --helpless, too stressed, overwhelmed, incompetent (without their products)-- I am here to say otherwise. You are not a moron or a damsel in distress. You are smart and able, and getting older is not a tragedy. Don’t believe them. Even if some observations are descriptive, they need not be prescriptive. You are not a total hot disaster! Well, no more than any of us. You can do hard things. (Some “hard things” are actually “easy things” rebranded as impossible.) You are more than some company’s profitability, and you don’t need their tricks to live a beautiful, meaningful life. We can reclaim our merit without dancing like monkeys.

Each business process is represented by a dimensional model that consists of a fact table containing the event's numeric measurements surrounded by a halo of dimension tables that contain the textual context that was true at the moment the event occurred. This characteristic star-like structure is often called a star join, a term dating back to the earliest days of relational databases. Figure 1.5 Fact and dimension tables in a dimensional model. The first thing to notice about the dimensional schema is its simplicity and symmetry. Obviously, business users benefit from the simplicity because the data is easier to understand and navigate. The charm of the design in Figure 1.5 is that it is highly recognizable to business users. We have observed literally hundreds of instances in which users immediately agree that the dimensional model is their business. Furthermore, the reduced number of tables and use of meaningful business descriptors make it easy to navigate and less likely that mistakes will occur. The simplicity of a dimensional model also has performance benefits. Database optimizers process these simple schemas with fewer joins more efficiently. A database engine can make strong assumptions about first constraining the heavily indexed dimension tables, and then attacking the fact table all at once with the Cartesian product of the dimension table keys satisfying the user's constraints. Amazingly, using this approach, the optimizer can evaluate arbitrary n-way joins to a fact table in a single pass through the fact table's index. Finally, dimensional models are gracefully extensible to accommodate change. The predictable framework of a dimensional model withstands unexpected changes in user behavior. Every dimension is equivalent; all dimensions are symmetrically-equal entry points into the fact table. The dimensional model has no built-in bias regarding expected query patterns. There are no preferences for the business questions asked this month versus the questions asked next month. You certainly don't want to adjust schemas if business users suggest new ways to analyze their business.

As soon as the numbers get up in a chart - or better yet, a graph - as soon as they thus become blessed with some specious authenticity, they become the drivers in high-risk, low-data situations because these people are so anxious to have data. That's when you hear them saying things like "It will be a billion-dollar market in 2016. If we only get five percent of that market..." When you hear that sort of stuff, exit gracefully, holding on to your wallet.

When the world one loves is seen to be dying, the viewer dies a little with it. A great American painter, Reginald Marsh, exemplifies this truism. Every day until his death at the age of 56, he sketched and painted the most earthy, sweaty and lusty examples of humanity he could lay his eyes upon. His productive voyeurism led him through the entire spectrum of cheap cafes, carnivals, amusement parks, skid rows, exclusive clubs, opera openings, coming-out parties and everything in-between. His super-realistic canvases were jammed with the kind of people he loved to watch in the environments he loved to haunt. As his closing years approached, Reginald Marsh grew depressed at the changing scene. New styles were emerging and it now became more difficult to immerse himself in the vistas from which he had so long drawn, both in his paintings and life itself. His canvases of lumpy women and pot-bellied men were too unappealing for the “think thin” era of the 1950s, and his floozies violated the then-current Grace Kelly/Ivory Soap look. His disdain for modern masters (“Matisse draws like a three-year-old, “Picasso ... a false front”) became exemplified as he summed up modern art as “high and pure and sterile — no sex, no drink, no muscles.” Marsh’s “out of date” feeling reached its zenith when he was asked to take part in an art symposium. The first speaker, who was a then-popular New York painter, enthusiastically championed current trends. Then followed a professor who advocated new and dynamic experimentation in visual appeal. At last it was Reginald Marsh’s turn to speak. He stood on the platform for a moment, as if trying to collect his thoughts. A sad look of resignation appeared in his eyes as he gazed down at the audience. The talented watcher of his innermost secret lusts and life-giving scintillations declared softly, “I am not a man of this century,” and sat down. He died shortly thereafter.

Jews are obligated to fulfill the particularities of Mosaic law. They don't light Sabbath candles simply because candles make them feel close to God, but because God commanded the lighting of candles: Closeness might be a nice by-product, but it is not the point. Christians will understand candle-lighting a little differently. Spiritual practices don't justify us. They don't save us. Rather, they refine our Christianity; they make the inheritance Christ gives us on the Cross more fully our own... Practicing the spiritual disciplines does not make us Christians. Instead, the practicing teaches us what it means to live as Christians.

They thought they’d completed their assignment when the studio asked for one more, something punchy for a big production number. So they returned to the piano in their office on the Paramount lot. Several unproductive hours later, they gave up and took a drive in the Los Angeles hills, each of them in an irritable mood. Mercer, trying to think of something cheerful, remembered an “offbeat little rhythm tune”8 he’d heard Arlen humming a few days earlier, one that brought to mind a three-word phrase that had long intrigued him, “Accentuate the Positive.” Later, he gave differing accounts of where he’d first heard that phrase. One was that he’d been in an African American church in Savannah when the preacher, Bishop Grace—called Daddy Grace by his congregation—used it in a sermon. The other was that he’d been told that Father Divine—a Harlem preacher who claimed to be God—had used it. Either way, it was perfect for a song, which he and Arlen created by singing to each other as they continued their drive. Given the source of its lyric and the music’s gospel feel, it’s ironic that it was used in a racially offensive way. In the movie, Bing Crosby and Sonny Tufts performed it in blackface. But “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” became a jukebox hit and an enduring pop classic.

Dreaming Big Dreams When dreams come true, there is life and joy. Proverbs 13:12 NLT Are you willing to entertain the possibility that God has big plans in store for you? Hopefully so. Yet sometimes, especially if you’ve recently experienced a life-altering disappointment, you may find it difficult to envision a brighter future for yourself and your family. If so, it’s time to reconsider your own capabilities … and God’s. Your Heavenly Father created you with unique gifts and untapped talents; your job is to tap them. When you do, you’ll begin to feel an increasing sense of confidence in yourself and in your future. It takes courage to dream big dreams. You will discover that courage when you do three things: accept the past, trust God to handle the future, and make the most of the time He has given you today. Nothing is too difficult for God, and no dreams are too big for Him—not even yours. So start living—and dreaming—accordingly. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. Eleanor Roosevelt The future lies all before us. Shall it only be a slight advance upon what we usually do? Ought it not to be a bound, a leap forward to altitudes of endeavor and success undreamed of before? Annie Armstrong Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God. Corrie ten Boom You pay God a compliment by asking great things of Him. St. Teresa of Avila Our dreams are who we are. Barbara Sher Always stay connected to people and seek out things that bring you joy. Dream with abandon. Pray confidently. Barbara Johnson God created us with an overwhelming desire to soar. He designed us to be tremendously productive and “to mount up with wings like eagles,” realistically dreaming of what He can do with our potential. Carol Kent Allow your dreams a place in your prayers and plans. God-given dreams can help you move into the future He

The only way to be productive is to realize we don't HAVE TO be productive. Our goal is to PLEASE God, not APPEASE God.

In forming a judgment of ourselves now," Edwards writes, we should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last day…. There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive evidence…. The degree in which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and divine.

I believe that the story of how Jimmy and I, coming from such different backgrounds, were able to enjoy such a productive life together can be instructive to other Americans, especially in light of the rapidly changing ethnic composition of this country. In the past few decades the majority of immigrants entering this country are no longer Europeans but people of color from the Third World, especially Asia and Latin America. In some cities Hispanics and Asians are already the majority, and it is widely predicted that by the middle of the twenty-first century both Europeans and African Americans will be among the many minorities that make up the majority of the American population. With this new situation will inevitably come new stresses and strains. If the new immigrants are viewed as a threat, these tensions can explode as they did in South Central Los Angeles in 1992. On the other hand, if older migrants—and except for Native Americans, we have all migrated to this country, by choice or in chains—can see the new arrivals as people on whose backs we have prospered and whom we now need to make ourselves whole, we can embark together on the struggles necessary to make the United States of America what it was meant to be—a country that all of us, regardless of national or ethnic origin, will be proud to call our own.

To rebuild Detroit, we have to think of a new mode of production based upon serving human needs and the needs of the.… community and not on any get-rich-quick schemes.… If we are going to create hope especially for our young people, we have to stop seeing the city as just a place to which you come for a job or to make a living and start seeing it as the place where the humanity of people is enriched because they have the opportunity to live with people of many different ethnic and social backgrounds. The foundation of our city has to be people living in communities who realize that their human identity or their Love and Respect for Self is based on Love and Respect for others and who have also learned from experience that they can no longer leave the decision as to their present and their future to the market place, to corporations or to capitalist politicians, regardless of ethnic background. We, the People, have to see ourselves as responsible for our city and for each other, and especially for making sure that our children are raised to place more value on social ties than on material wealth.… We have to get rid of the myth that there is something sacred about large-scale production for the national and international market.… We have to begin thinking of creating small enterprises which produce food, goods and services for the local market, that is, for our communities and our city. Instead of destroying the skills of workers, which is what large-scale industry does, these small enterprises will combine craftsmanship, or the preservation and enhancement of human skills, with the new technologies which make possible flexible production and constant readjustment to serve the needs of local customers.… In order to create these new enterprises we need a view of our city which takes into consideration both the natural resources of our area and the existing and potential skills and talents of Detroiters.… We also need a fundamental change in our concept of Schools. Since World War II our schools have been transformed into custodial institutions where our children are housed for 12 years with no function except to study and get good grades so that they can win the certificates that will enable them to get a job.… We have to create schools which are an integral part of the community, in which young people naturally and normally do socially necessary and meaningful work for the community, for example, keeping the school grounds and the neighborhood clean and attractive, taking care of younger children, growing gardens which provide food for the community, etc., etc.5

Most of this material is accessible in the Dunayevskaya and Glaberman collections in the Wayne State University Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs in Detroit. When occasionally I look up something in the collections, I find it hard to believe that we wrote so much and took on so many literary critics and historians. The Johnson-Forest Tendency consisted of a small number of members—never more than sixty to seventy in an organization of several hundred. But the fervor with which we supported the independent black struggle and attacked the alienation of human beings in the process of capitalist production made us stand out in any gathering. Most members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency were part of the new generation who had joined the radical movement in the 1940s because we wanted to make a second American Revolution—which to us meant mainly encouraging the struggles of rank-and-file workers to take over control of production inside the plant and supporting the black struggle for full social, economic, and political equality. Black, white, Asian, and Chicano, workers and intellectuals, living on the East Coast, West Coast, and in the Midwest, we were a representative sample of the new human forces that were emerging in the United States during World War II. Because CLR could not be publicly active, we acted as his transmission belt to the larger American community. Our little organization was a collective way to know reality.

We must continually abide in the vine, so that we can keep bearing lasting fruits

As Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” We see this in the very etymology of the word attention, which comes from the Latin verb attendere, meaning “to stretch toward” something. So to give someone or something our full attention is to extend ourselves, our resources, our energy, our generosity. The gift of attention can be extended to other parts of our lives. It can be given societally, to pressing problems such as income inequality, the climate crisis, and systemic racial injustice. Directing our attention to such issues is signaling what

We all too readily regard the life of meditation and prayer as something that we have to do apart from Christ and His presence with us. We think of our devotions as our duty or work, our achievement and the product of our determination and self-discipline. And that assumption sets us up for failure and spiritual disillusionment.

Reading about productivity doesn’t make you productive.

Being productive is about increasing OUTPUT. Being “busy” is about increasing INPUT. The two are, in fact, diametrically opposed:

Yoga, whether dualist or nondualist, is concerned with the elimination of suffering (duhkha). Here suffering does not mean the pain resulting from a cut or the emotional torment experienced through political oppression. These are simply manifestations of a deeper existential suffering. That suffering is the direct outcome of our habitual sense of being locked into a body-mind that is separate from all others. Yoga seeks to prevent future suffering of this kind by pointing the way to the unitary consciousness that is disclosed in ego-transcending ecstatic states. From the viewpoint of traditional Yoga, even the pleasure or well-being (sukha) experienced as a result of the regular performance of yogic postures, breath control, or meditation is suffused with suffering. First of all, the pleasure is bound to be only temporary, whereas the innate bliss (ānanda) of the Self is permanent. Second, pleasure is relative: We can compare our present sense of enjoyment with similar experiences at different times or by different people. Thus, our experience contains an element of envy. Third, there is always the hidden fear that a pleasurable state will come to an end, which is a reasonable assumption. Yoga is a systematic attempt to step out of this whole cycle of gain and loss. When the yogin or yoginī is in touch with the Reality beyond the bodymind, and when he or she has a taste of the unalloyed delight of the Self, all possible pleasures that derive from objects (rather than the Self) come to lose their fascination. The mind begins to be more equanimous. As the Bhagavad-Gītā (2.48), the most popular Hindu Yoga scripture, puts it: “Yoga is balance (samatva).” This notion of balance is intrinsic to Yoga and occurs on many levels of the yogic work. Its culmination is in the “vision of sameness” (sama-darshana), which is the graceful state in which we see everything in the same light. Everything stands revealed as the great Reality, and nothing excites us as being more valuable than anything else. We regard a piece of gold and a clump of clay or a beautiful person and an unattractive individual with the same even-temperedness. Nor are we puffed up by praise or deflated by blame. This condition, which is one of utter lucidity and serenity, must not be confused with one of the many types of ecstasy (samādhi) known to yogins. Ecstasies, visions, and psychic (paranormal) phenomena are not at all the point of spiritual life. They can and do occur when we earnestly devote ourselves to higher values, but they are by-products rather than the goal of authentic spirituality. They should certainly not be made the focus of our aspiration. Thus, Yoga is a comprehensive way of life in which the ultimate Reality, or Spirit, is given precedence over other concerns. It is a sacred path that conducts us, in the words of an ancient Upanishad, from the unreal to the Real, from falsehood to Truth, from the temporal to the Eternal.

How to prepare your spirit and body for a nap. STARTING POINTS TO JUMP-START YOUR CURIOSITY AND EXPERIMENTATION: We cannot wait for the perfect space or opportunity to rest. Rest now. In Part One: Rest!, I share the need for seeing rest as not an extra treat that we must run to but more of a lifelong, consistent, and meticulous love practice. We must snatch rest. We must believe we are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn it. It is our birthright. It is one of our most ancient and primal needs. Our bodies are a site of liberation; therefore, wherever our bodies are, we can embody rest. This second tenet of The Nap Ministry is a mantra and a meditation. Productivity should not look like exhaustion. The concept of laziness is a tool of the oppressor. A large part of your unraveling from capitalism will include becoming less attached to the idea of productivity and more committed to the idea of rest as a portal to just be. Your early understanding of “productivity” is most likely tainted by the toxic socialization we all received growing up. It must be examined. Deprogramming our minds and hearts from our toxic brainwashing around naps and rest will increase our ability to craft a rest practice. Our slumber and opportunities for community care will be deeper because of our work in this area. Go slow and realize you have been brainwashed by a system that attaches your inherent worth to how much you can labor and produce. Grind culture is violence. Resist participating in it. This must be flexible so please also resist the desire to become rigid. I have gone months consistently experimenting with a rest practice daily or weekly. The next week I am caught up in an all-nighter to finish a deadline. We are moving in and out of worlds all the time so give beautiful grace to yourself. Start again

Seeker” appears to function as a pious code word for “religious consumer,” a potential client eyeing each particular church to see which one might offer the best product. Unfortunately, many “seeker friendly” churches really do not do much by way of biblical evangelism at all.

Le Bucarest bohème et dépravé des « Les Seigneurs du Vieux-Castel » de Matei Caragiale devient triste et miséreux dans le ghetto de Văcăreşti du roman homonyme de Isaac Peltz (1899-1980). Globalement, le réalisme caractérise la production romanesque de l'entre-deux-guerres. La matière narrative s'affine grace à l'analyse psychologique mais continue de fonctionner – excepté chez Anton Holban et Max Blecher, entièrement axés sur l'introspection – en lien étroit avec la problématique sociale.

One way I have learned to work against handling conflict sinfully is to advocate in my mind for my critics. What if their problem isn’t with you but with change? Maybe they’re taking out frustrations on you, but it’s not really about you. What if they’re just uncomfortable? Or confused? Or unaccustomed to managing their feelings in productive ways? Or going through a difficult personal problem that is bubbling over?

Her Majesty the Queen is here And loyal subjects raise a cheer His Royal Highness by her side A Royal welcome to Chirnside God bless them both in all they do And praise and glory be to you God bless the men from Windsor Locks And pretty girls in summer frocks Bless all whose intellect and skill Have just extended Dexter's Mill Bless all the people they employ May skill and safety be their joy May their customers come drovin' For their Hydraspun Nonwoven Bless the good folk of Berwickshire Who make the products we require Lord, look down in love and pity On all your folk in tea bag city Bless our food and bless our table Help us do what we are able To make the world a better place And so bless all the human race ["Grace At The Queen's Royal Visit," Tea, A Magazine, December 1994, p 6]

Whether the individuals are members of the Eisenhower Generation or the Baby Boomers, The Villages produces a culture of individual and collective youthfulness, but one paradoxically without youth. Youthfulness in these terms is not only produced through communal activities but also through the repair, development, and enhancement of the individual body itself. The programming of the strip hospital complex supports what might be termed as 'cyborgian' ambitions of the residents with respect to a broad range of treatments and products, from the biochemical and the biomechanical, to the bio-cosmetic and the psychochemical. Blechman's documentation of the 'Don Juan' of the villages, Mr. Midnight, resonates with this notion of posthuman subjecthood: 'I have to pick up my Viagra,' he says, and soon returns with a brown package. 'It's not that I need it, mind you. It's an enhancement, like whipped cream and nuts on a sundae. If it's a special night, I might take 100 milligrams.' Other 'enhancements' include the over-the-counter canned oxygen product Big Ox Power Oxygen reportedly used by residents to speed hangover recovery. These forms of experimental subjectivity and collectivity produce unforeseen effects: Doctors said sexually transmitted diseases among senior citizens are running rampant at a popular Central Florida retirement community, according to a Local 6 News report. A gynaecologist at The Villages community near Orlando, Fla., said she treats more cases of herpes and the human papilloma virus in the retirement community than she did in the city of Miami. According to the news report, local doctors attributed this predicament to the ready availability of Viagra within the community, a lack of sexual education, and the non-risk of pregnancy within the age group. It will be suggested here, however, that the broader spatiotemporal construction of The Villages, including golf carts and golf cart infrastructure, downtown public settings, and happy hours, further contribute to the social milieu that promotes enhanced intimacy as well as sexual activity.

The sacrifice taken as a whole is conceived as Haug notes "to be a kind of machinery in which every piece must tally with the other," the slightest discrepancy in the performance of even a minute ritualistic detail, say in the pouring of the melted butter on the fire, or the proper placing of utensils employed in the sacrifice, or even the misplacing of a mere straw contrary to the injunctions was sufficient to spoil the whole sacrifice with whatsoever earnestness it might be performed. Even if a word was mispronounced the most dreadful results might follow. Thus when Tva@s@t@r performed a sacrifice for the production of a demon who would be able to kill his enemy Indra, owing to the mistaken accent of a single word the object was reversed and the demon produced was killed by Indra. But if the sacrifice could be duly performed down to the minutest detail, there was no power which could arrest or delay the fruition of the object. Thus the objects of a sacrifice were fulfilled not by the grace of the gods, but as a natural result of the sacrifice. The performance of the rituals invariably

You will then find yourself turning across time, incrementally and gracefully, to aim ever more accurately at that tiny pinpoint, the X that marks the spot, the bull’s-eye, and the center of the cross; to aim at the highest value of which you can conceive. You will pursue a target that is both moving and receding: moving, because you do not have the wisdom to aim in the proper direction when you first take aim; receding, because no matter how close you come to perfecting what you are currently practicing, new vistas of possible perfection will open up in front of you. Discipline and transformation will nonetheless lead you inexorably forward. With will and luck, you will find a story that is meaningful and productive, improves itself with time, and perhaps even provides you with more than a few moments of satisfaction and joy. With will and luck, you will be the hero of that story, the disciplined sojourner, the creative transformer, and the benefactor of your family and broader society.

How much more meaningful is a life designed for spiritual formation, rather than spiritual evaluation. All tests evaluate, and life is no exception. But the most meaningful and productive tests are those that assess with an eye to improvement, that measure in order to remedy, and that improve and prepare us for the next stage in an upward process of advancement. For these reasons, all talk of heaven that operates in terms of earning rather than becoming is misguided. Such ideas misconstrue the nature of God, His grace, and the salvation He offers.

Here stands the bride, Cassandra. She is unique in this world. Her beauty, grace, and charms are the legacy of those who have come before her and will be gifted to those who are born through her. “This man, Wulf, on the other hand stands before us a product of…” Urian frowned as he paused. “Well, he’s the product of a bitch who can’t stand the thought of Apollo’s children ruling the earth.” “Urian, behave!

Here stands the bride, Cassandra. She is unique in this world. Her beauty, grace, and charms are the legacy of those who have come before her and will be gifted to those who are born through her. “This man, Wulf, on the other hand stands before us a product of…” Urian frowned as he paused. “Well, he’s the product of a bitch who can’t stand the thought of Apollo’s children ruling the earth.” “Urian, behave!” Phoebe snapped from where she stood with their father. He bristled at her command. “Considering the fact that I just bound a member of your family to one of the people I have sworn to annihilate, I think I’m being remarkably good.

Pace Yourself You have four hours a day for work, sometimes six. Choose carefully. Keep your correspondence current. Enjoy! Enjoy! 6. Pray Every Hour Let your movements be a prayer, your work, your daily food. 7. Pursue Peaceful Activity Cut television down. It depresses you. Read what comes to you. Listen to music, clear and clean in small ways, watch the fire, write letters to your friends. 8. Play! Spend time in ways that give you joy and make you laugh. 9. Prioritize Put your first passion first. It is your most productive activity. 10. Plan a Sustainable Life.

The young men were strangers to Tilly and therefore strangers to Chevis Green. They looked rather nice, rather interesting, but, as one was tall and fair and the other short and dark, neither of them was the future husband who would love her passionately and help in the production of her family.

The most successful advertising speaks very little about the product being sold and volumes about what void that product will fill in your life.

Take perfume advertisements. What’s the product? A yellowish liquid that looks a bit like urine. Now that doesn’t equate to compelling ad copy. What is the product’s product? The yellowish liquid smells nice. Yet smelling nice is still not why people buy perfume. Advertisements selling the smell are not very successful. No, it’s the product’s product’s product that you must sell. For perfume? Yes, it’s sex.

The reality, when the sexy advertisements have been stripped away, is that the actual product is ethanol.122 It is a horrible-tasting, addictive poison. So we sweeten it with sugar and flavoring or process it to make it more palatable. The product’s product is inebriation, a gradual deadening of your senses until you become completely intoxicated. And the side effects that are never disclosed are many. Think about ads for new medications, like Viagra or blood pressure medication. They are legally required to disclose all the statistically relevant side effects. Alcohol has the same cancer-causing effects as asbestos,123 and just three drinks per week can increase a woman’s chance of developing breast cancer by 15%,124 yet there are no labeling requirements whatsoever. Yet compared to other drugs (illegal, legal, and prescription), alcohol bears the highest harm rating.125

If someone offers you a prescription for what ails you, but the prescription leaves your condition unchanged, it usually means that something is not quite right about either the prescription or the diagnosis. If what we really need in order to stop feeling so worn out and pressed to perform at a certain standard is a better strategy, then why are the prescriptions not working?

Agape is not a mere emotional by-product of action but a supernatural outpouring of the grace of God infusing all our behavior with the life of Christ.

One world is marked by a bland forgetfulness, where we do not permit ourselves an openness to the simple, graced beauty that is always with us. The other is marked by attentiveness, aliveness, love. This is the state of wonder, which is commonly treated as a passive phenomenon—a kind of visitation or feeling that overcomes us in the face of something wondrous. But the ground of the word, the Old English wundrian, is very active, meaning “to be affected by one’s own astonishment.” We decide, moment to moment, if we will allow ourselves to be affected by the presence of this brighter world in our everyday lives. Certainly we get no encouragement from what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls the “overculture.” It cannot be assessed by the standardized cultural criteria of worth—measures that can be labeled with a sum or a statistic or even, perhaps, a word. Receptivity to wonder is not economically productive, marketable, quantifiable. The rewards, also, stand beyond such calculation. But it is in such receptivity that we discover what draws us, and along with it our originality, our creativity, our soulfulness, our gladness, our art. Mozart found inspiration in the presence of a common bird. For us, too, the song of the world so often rises in places we had not thought to look.

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The greatest wealth and satisfaction of our desires lies not in clear-cutting forests, stripping the oceans, or spewing billions of tons of toxins into the atmosphere but within the forces of nature's wild movement and growth. Nature is the mother of all invention and many of humankind's greatest achievements have been made by copying nature. However, our copies have been rough. We haven't succeeded in mimicking nature's grace, efficiency-and most importantly-sustainability. We're coloring outside the lines and making a mess. Let's look again, using nature as our model as the earliest humans did, but aided by the tools of science. With nature, it's never too late. Nature is a survivor. Nature never gives up. She heals all wounds. Nature pushes up tiny little blades of grass through city concrete and asphalt and overgrows Mayan cities. She keeps putting out billions of seeds, spores, and baby spiders, growing mountains, evolving new species. She is always creating. It's not just okay to feel optimistic, it's natural, and essential. Combining our human intelligence with optimism is the best way we can give back to our earth. Right now, across the globe, we humans, the products of nature, have the skills and the technology to solve just about any problem we're facing, without sacrifice-if the will is there. There is a way, if we allow ourselves to be guided by nature's optimism and nature's wisdom. We can do it.

Frequently do we meet with the idea that the world is to be converted to Christ by the spread of civilization. Now civilization always follows the Gospel and is, in a great measure, the product of it, but many people put the cart before the horse and make civilization the first cause. According to their opinion, trade is to regenerate the nations! The arts are to ennoble them and education is to purify them. Peace Societies are formed, against which I have not a word to say, but much in their favor. Still, I believe the only efficient Peace Society is the Church of God and the best peace teaching is the love of God in Christ Jesus! The Grace of God is the great instrument for lifting up the world from the depths of its ruin and covering it with happiness and holiness. Christ’s Cross is the Pharos of this tempestuous sea, like the Eddystone lighthouse flinging its beams through the midnight of ignorance over the raging waters of human sin, preserving men from rock and shipwreck, piloting them into the port of peace! Tell it among the heathen—the Lord reigns from the Cross—and as you tell it believe that the power to make the peoples believe it is with God the Father and the power to bow them before Christ is in God the Holy Spirit. Saving energy lies not in learning, nor in wit, nor in eloquence, nor in anything except in the right arm of God who will be exalted among the heathen, for He has sworn that surely all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

Volumes have been written laying down the mechanics and taste of sermon-making, until we have become possessed with the idea that this scaffolding is the building. The young preacher has been taught to lay out all his strength on the form, taste, and beauty of his sermon as a mechanical and intellectual product. We have thereby cultivated a vicious taste among the people and raised the clamor for talent instead of grace, eloquence instead of piety, rhetoric instead of revelation, reputation and brilliancy instead of holiness. By it we have lost the true idea of preaching, lost preaching power, lost pungent conviction for sin, lost the rich experience and elevated Christian character, lost the authority over consciences and lives which always results from genuine preaching.

At some point you just have to let go… knowing full well you might look back in a couple years and be embarrassed by the finished product. But that’s life. And like I said before, if I were to strive for perfection I would never get anything done.

We also can’t have productive dialogue with others without getting curious about what stakes color the other person’s perspective. Our stakes aren’t always logical, coherent, or rational, and that’s okay. The same holds true for other people. We don’t need to discount a person’s position because of what’s influencing it; we just need to acknowledge what’s influencing it.

So we can see all cultural production (and remember, everything we do at work is some form of cultural production) as a dialogue between our innate, affirming response to God’s common grace and the idolatrous, rebellious nature of our hearts. Therefore, human culture is an extremely complex mixture of brilliant truth, marred half-truths, and overt resistance to the truth. “Loss of faith in a given religion does not by any means imply the eradication of the religious instinct. It merely means that the instinct, temporarily repressed, will seek an object elsewhere.

Where are all my clothes?” I jerked awake, knocking my elbow against the headboard. Any hopes of it all being a dream were dashed by the sight of Tristan, his arms full of colorful silk dresses, storming about the room. Both my maids and a grey-clad manservant stood in a row, their heads lowered. Covers tucked up around my shoulders, I watched Tristan dash into the closet and emerge with another armload of dresses. He threw them in a pile on the floor. “Why is my closet full of dresses?” “Are they mine?” I asked with interest. Silver eyes fixed on me. “Well, they certainly are not mine. Unless you imagine that I dress up in ladies’ clothing and prance about the palace when the mood strikes me?” A giggle slipped out of Élise, which she promptly smothered with a hand over her mouth. “You consider this a laughing matter?” Tristan glowered at the girl. “Sorry, my lord,” she said. “Your clothes are in the other closet.” “Why?” “Her Grace thought the larger closet more appropriate for her ladyship’s gowns, my lord.” “She did, did she?” He stormed back into the closet, returning with another armload. “That’s the last of them.” “You are wrinkling my dresses,” I said. “Zoé and Élise will waste their entire day pressing them.” “And then they can hang them somewhere else,” he snapped. “You’re creating an enormous amount of unnecessary work.” “It is the role of the aristocracy to create work,” he said, kicking the pile of gowns. “Necessary or otherwise. Without us, who knows what would happen to productivity.” I rolled my eyes and climbed out of bed. Catching the corner of a sheet, I set to making the bed. “What are you doing?” Tristan shouted. “What does it look like I’m doing?” “Ladies do not make their own beds! It shows initiative, which is broadly considered most unladylike!” My temper rising, I whirled about. “Dear me,” I shouted. “I must have forgotten that my new purpose in life is to create work.” Jerking all the blankets off the bed, I threw them on the floor. The pillows followed next, and I proceeded to run around the room taking all the cushions off the chairs and tossing them about the room. The last I deliberately aimed at Tristan’s head. It froze midair. “You are making quite the mess of my room.” “Our room!” I shouted back.

The human products of bread and wine become a means of grace, earthen vessels whereby the sacred becomes present to us. So also the Bible is sacrament, a human product whereby God becomes present to us. Its words become a means whereby the Spirit speaks to us in the present.

Jesus declared that our productivity, our fruitfulness, is directly linked to our abiding in Him. As Christians, we will bear fruit, but it will vary in degree. The closer we stay to Christ, the more fruit we will bear. The more we wander out from the center and neglect the means of grace that He has given to us, the less fruit we will produce.

Inquisitive and productive discussions can be the building blocks for a new kind of politics. One of the reasons that we’re able to talk to each other, fully aware of our many differences in thought, is that we trust each other’s why. We trust that we are both doing our best to love our neighbors. We trust that we both love our country and want to do what is best for the country and all its citizens. We trust each other to care about “the least of these” and to think carefully about what data and research tell us about the effectiveness of different systems. That means we come to a health-care discussion or any other policy discussion trusting that we both want good outcomes for everyone. When we strip away the demonizing intentions, we can move our conversations out of the mud and into terrain that might help us start solving problems.

Because the examen helps me understand my spiritual and emotional rhythms, it helps me live with greater focus and effectiveness. I can see the clutter to remove it. I distinguish the habitual from the purposeful, mere busyness from real productiveness. I separate actions that are fruitful from those that are fruitless, ways of thinking that are self-generating from those that are self-defeating, relationships that are life-giving from those that are life-sucking. And then I rearrange or rebuild the 'workshop' so that I operate out of strength and joy. It doesn't mean I avoid hard things or difficult people. It means I'm more likely to deal with such things and such people from a place of wisdom, grace, clarity, and peace.

In my practice, when I see clients for the first time, I see them as the end product—the way they will be in the future. They are all beautiful. What stands between who they are and who they want to be is their willingness to change strong habits, belief systems, and the gracefulness to embrace a new way of living. I aid them in their pursuit of change and liberation from unwanted habits.

In the fringes of our yard, daffodils await their triumphant chorus. The golden bells have just opened on our forsythia, and clusters of hyacinth flowers await flourish in purple blooms. By aesthetic standards, any of these blossoms would have outshone the fistful of yellow spikes my little boy offered. In the coming months, dozens of its cousins, cast away as weeds, will meet an untimely end beneath the blades of a lawnmower. Their brazen head will be lopped off, their awkward petals demolished and scattered. They will be declared a nuisance, expendable. Yet when gripped within Pip's fingers, how perfect, how precious became this paltry bloom. He had put aside the torrent of irritability and overwhelm that trouble him hourly, and found grace in a spiral of petals. Through a humble weed, love had broken through. God works this way. He does great things with the meager, and beautiful things with the misshapen. He chooses the smallest, the humblest, the most broken as his servants. (1 Sam 16:10-12, Numbers 12:3, 1 Tim 1:15) He works for good through the greatest calamity. (Gen 50:20) With his most beloved broken and crushed, he reaches through the firmament, and in love makes things new. (Rev 21:5) Where we see weakness, he offers grace. (2 Cor 12:9) He shatters pride, so new blossoms can burst forth. I've spent the past few months wrestling with God. After Pip's evaluation, as we clumsily felt out life with special needs, the questions of why wrapped around my heart, infusing me with daily bitterness. Resentment broiled to the surface. I'd left medicine to follow God's call, but a large part of me, in shocking arrogance, wanted to comply on my terms. Over the past two years, God has compelled me to confront my idols. I thrived on productivity. But now I inevitably find grime in corners I have just cleaned. I prized efficiency. But it now takes 30 minutes of wrangling over potty... I'm an introvert, who needs alone time to rejuvenate. But is anyone less alone than a mom with young kids? A "save the world" mentality drives me. But my daily life fodder is now the mundane. I relish instant gratification. But this business of shepherding hearts is long, with few immediate rewards. I relished accolades... I consider God's graciousness to us, and in the stillness of a springtime morning, I struggle for breath. His mercy toward us in this season -- in the face of my arrogance, despite the brokenness to which I've so stalwartly clung -- is stunning. During all the years of my training and career, homeschooling was never the plan. God inexplicably placed the idea in my heart, like a shadow that deepened daily. But now, I see how perfect were his methods. I shudder to think of how our family would struggle if I was still barreling ahead at the hospital, subsumed with my own self importance, while Pip fought daily to deal with every crowd... Homeschooling was never the plan. . . but oh, what a plan! That he called us this way, was mercy manifest. That he has equipped us to continue, is the greatest gift. Even on the hard days, I count it all joy. On the days when Pip, after a week of handling things so well, has a meltdown in the grocery store, complete with screaming and a blow to my chin -- there is joy there. God can work even with our ugliness. Through Christ, God redeems even the most corrupt. He assembles the stray petals, the unseemly stems, and makes things new. He strips away the idolatry of a surgeon desperate to prove her own worth, and points her toward the fount of all worth -- Christ Jesus. There is a deep well of peace in serving God where he has placed you. There is a refining grace, in realizing his work even in the hard moments. There is a profound beauty in redemption -- in the love that breaks forth through brokenness -- if we can only put away our preoccupations, and embrace his will. "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." -- 2 Cor 12:9

The law in the hands of Jesus becomes alive with God's own personality. Majestic and authoritative, he is present in every commandment, so absolute in his demands, so observant of our conduct, so intent upon the outcome, that the thought of giving him less than heart and soul and mind and strength in the product of our moral life ceases to be tolerable to ourselves.

Most individuals are dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and uncomplainingly about their business. If anyone is fortunate enough to be in a rare period of grace and health personally, then he or she typically has at least one close family member in crisis. Yet people prevail. And continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to hold themselves and their families and society together. To me, this is miraculous, so much so that a damnfounded gratitude is the only appropriate response. There are so many ways that things can fall apart or fail to work altogether. And it is always wounded people who are holding it together. They deserve some genuine and heartfelt admiration for that. It's an ongoing miracle of fortitude and perseverance.

I soon learned, however, that my services would be required on stage that evening. Mrs. Grace Merriweather had composed an original pageant entitled Maycomb County: Ad Astra Per Aspera, and I was to be a ham. She thought it would be adorable if some of the children were costumed to represent the county's agricultural products: Cecil Jacobs would be dressed up to look like a cow; Agnes Boone would make a lovely butterbean, another child would be a peanut, and on down the line until Mrs. Merriweather's imagination and the supply of children were exhausted.

The last thing I could afford right now was another mouth to feed. I rubbed the cat's downy cheeks and she rammed her head into my hand with pleasure. She gave my palm a delicate, rough lick. Her mouth was, I reasoned, a small one. I would just feed her until I could find her a home. Maybe this good deed would make up for my bad behavior. Hail, cat, full of grace, please accept this can of by-products, blessed is your ignorance, forgive us humans for the things you do not know we have done.

6. Practice saying “no,” even if you have the time to help the other person. This may seem unkind and selfish. But as with every bad habit profiled in this book, making a positive change requires developing a new habit to replace the harmful one. Forming a new habit takes time and practice. It takes repeated application, a theme that runs through this entire action guide. Be graceful, but steadfast. Saying “no” will become easier with time. 7. Work in time blocks. Set aside chunks of time during which you are not to be disturbed. For example, if you’re using the Pomodoro Technique, you could set aside a 2-hour block. That would cover four 25-minute Pomodoros and their attendant 5-minute breaks. The key to making this work is to clearly communicate to others that you’ll be unavailable during these 2-hour periods. If someone “forgets” and approaches to ask for your help, gently remind him or her that you’re unavailable. Let that person know when your time block ends, and ask him or her to return at that time.

What’s your next production?’ ‘Murder at Dress Rehearsal. It’s a one-act play by somebody called Paul Mathews.’ ‘Never heard of him.’ ‘Neither had I. But he wrote to me practically begging the Goosing Players to perform his play. I checked out his publicity photo. He’s shaven-headed but seems to have good teeth so I gracefully agreed. He was so grateful, he promised to come along to one of our rehearsals.

In fact, Zinn’s radicalism was not a good fit for Spelman College, where he must have stood out like a sore thumb. Spelman was a conservative Christian school that had been founded in 1881 by eleven ex-slaves who met in Friendship Baptist Church, wanting to read the Bible.34 It became Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary and then, in 1924, Spelman College. Karen Vanlandingham in her 1985 master’s thesis, “In Pursuit of a Changing Dream: Spelman College Students and the Civil Rights Movement, 1955–1962,” explains that the “religious tradition inherent in Spelman’s founding endured as a part of the school’s educational philosophy.” The 1958–1959 college catalogue asserted, “Spelman College is emphatically Christian. The attitude toward life exemplified by the life and teachings of Jesus is the ideal which governs the institution.”35 College life there included mandatory daily chapel attendance and adherence to a strict curfew and dress code. Howard Zinn, however, felt it was his mission and his right to change the college. In the August 6, 1960, Nation, he observed: “ ‘You can always tell a Spelman girl,’ ” alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The ‘Spelman girl’ walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly and, in general, had all the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school. If intellect and talent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, by-products.”36 Zinn set out to transform the “finishing school” into a “school for protest.

Where there is radical difference of opinion in an organization, one side must yield. The great lesson for democracies to learn is for the majority to give to the minority a full, free opportunity to present their side of the case, and then for the minority, having failed to win a majority to their views, gracefully to submit and to recognize the action as that of the entire organization, and cheerfully to assist in carrying it out, until they can secure its repeal.

Above all, the story of the Stato da Mar is a saga about trade. Alone in all the world, Venice was organized to buy and sell. The Venetians were merchants to their fingertips; they calculated risk, return, and profit with scientific precision. The red and gold lion banner of Saint Mark fluttered from mastheads like a corporate logo. Trade was their creation myth and their justification, for which they were frequently reviled by more terrestrial neighbors. There exists no more explicit description of the city's raison d'être and its anxieties than the appeal it made to the pope in 1343 for permission to trade with the Muslim world: "Since, by the Grace of God, our city has grown and increased by the labors of merchants creating traffic and profits for us in diverse parts of the world by land and sea and this is our life and that of our sons, because we cannot live otherwise and know not how except by trade, therefore we must be vigilant in all our thoughts and endeavors, as our predecessors were, to make provision in every way lest so much wealth and treasure should disappear." The appeal's gloomy conclusion echoes a manic-depressive streak in the Venetian soul. The city's prosperity rested on nothing tangible — no landholdings, no natural resources, no agricultural production or large population. There was literally no solid ground underfoot. Physical survival depended on a fragile ecological balance. Venice was perhaps the first virtual economy, whose vitality baffled outsiders. It harvested nothing but barren gold and lived in perpetual fear that, if its trade routes were severed, the whole magnificent edifice might simply collapse.

You understand mathematics, Grace. Negativity has more power than positivity. When you multiply a positive by a negative the product is always negative. You must see things differently. You must make a plus out of the minus.

You understand mathematics, Grace. Negativity has more power than positivity. When you multiply a positive by a negative the product is always negative.

Society creates all kinds of conditioning and hindrances for us to reach our true nature. Society does not allow us to be ourselves. Society is dampening all our attempts to be happy. The whole effort and conditioning of culture, politics, religion, education, media and civilization is not to allow you to be your own natural self, not to allow you to be happy. This is done for the simple reason that the person who can be himself and who can be happy cannot be manipulated. if people are to be manipulated - politically, socially and religiously - then their trust to be themselves has to be destroyed. We have not yet been able to create a natural and life-affirmative culture. So the individual has to make every effort to be himself and to be happy for himself, so that others also can be allowed to be who they are and to be happy. The first concern is our own being, our own consciousness, our true self, and everything else is secondary. The first concern is not society, the church, the world and to fight for your country. The first responsibility is to discover our innermost being, our true self. Once it is discovered everything else becomes easy, and it happens on its own accord. Then love, silence, joy, truth, compasion, freedom, creativity and grace flows. They are by-products of consciousness.

Here are a few helpful tips for replacing your “yes” habit with a “no” habit: Always know what is important to you (this is where you should spend your time). Recognize that saying “no” rejects the request, not the person making it. Create a few graceful responses (e.g., “I’d like to help you, but I’m swamped right now.”). Offer an alternative (e.g., “My schedule is packed today and tomorrow. Can I help you on Thursday?”). Be candid and clear (say, “No, I won’t be able to attend tonight” rather than “Umm, I’m not sure…”). Grow comfortable with missing out.

In his book Parliamentary Law, Henry Robert gives a word to the wise when he states, Where there is radical difference of opinion in an organization, one side must yield. The great lesson for democracies to learn is for the majority to give the minority a full, free opportunity to present their side of the case, and then for the minority, having failed to win a majority to their views, gracefully to submit and to recognize the action as that of the entire organization, and cheerfully to assist in carrying it out, until they can secure its repeal.

You look beautiful right now. Is that okay for me to say?” The hand of the arm around me cradles the side of my neck. She shifts slightly in my lap. “Do you really mean that?” I nod. “Then it’s okay for you to say.” I wonder how many other complimentary things it would be okay for me to say. We’re so close our noses could touch if we leaned forward slightly. She smells like cotton candy and the vanilla of her hair products. I inch closer slightly. “Halle…” “Henry,” she says quietly in the only way I want to hear her say my name from now on. I cup her cheek and her free hand covers mine. Her eyes look past me. “We have an audience.