Rainbow Of Possibilities Quotes

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk.

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

Sometimes when I’m walking through the dining hall, just saying hello to people, she’ll drag me by my sleeve to hurry me up. “You have too many friends,” she’ll say. “I’m pretty sure that’s not possible. And, anyway, I wouldn’t call them all ‘friends.’” “There are only so many hours in the day, Simon. Two, three people—that’s all any of us have time for.” “There are more people than that in your immediate family, Penny.” “I know. It’s a struggle.

somebody/ anybody sing a black girl's song bring her out to know herself to know you but sing her rhythms carin/ struggle/ hard times sing her song of life she's been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn't know the sound of her own voice her infinite beauty she's half-notes scattered without rhythm/ no tune sing her sighs sing the song of her possibilities sing a righteous gospel let her be born let her be born & handled warmly.

without any assistance or guidance from you i have loved you assiduously for 8 months 2 wks & a day i have been stood up four times i've left 7 packages on yr doorstep forty poems 2 plants & 3 handmade notecards i left town so i cd send to you have been no help to me on my job you call at 3:00 in the mornin on weekdays so i cd drive 27 1/2 miles cross the bay before i go to work charmin charmin but you are of no assistance i want you to know this waz an experiment to see how selifsh i cd be if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover if i waz capable of debasin my self for the love of another if i cd stand not being wanted when i wanted to be wanted & i cannot so with no further assistance & no guidance from you i am endin this affair this note is attached to a plant i've been waterin since the day i met you you may water it yr damn self

The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.

Plus, I like to pray for things that seem possible. There are so many things that I pray for that seem almost too big even for God. It’s rewarding to pray for something that might actually happen.

Isn't love the emanation of desire or just a statement of emptiness in expectation? As we long for what is missing and finally hold it, could it be that we may not crave it anymore in the end? Still, if we learn to "enjoy" the precious moments of its presence, it can remain a captivating experience and a mesmerizing adventure. If it keeps on overwhelming us with "joy," love can turn into a magic prism and make it possible to discover a rainbow of twinkles and enchanting sceneries. As our imagination constantly discerns new qualities, the sparkle of love does not expire in the boredom of forgetfulness. (“Twilight of desire“)

All through first and second and third hour, Eleanor rubbed her palm. Nothing happened. How could it be possible that there were that many never ending all in one place? And were they always there, or did they just flip on wherever they felt like it? Because, if they were always there, how did she manage to turn doorknobs without fainting? Maybe this was why so many people said it felt better to drive a stick shift.

Rainbows introduce us to reflections of different beautiful possibilities so we never forget that pain and grief are not the final options in life.

f you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

I’m the most basic bitch possible.

Our life is made up of time; our days are measured in hours, our pay measured by those hours, our knowledge is measured by years. We grab a few quick minutes in our busy day to have a coffee break. We rush back to our desks, we watch the clock, we live by appointments. And yet your time eventually runs out and you wonder in your heart of hearts if those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades were being spent the best way they possibly could. In other words, if you could change anything, would you?

Lincoln closed his eyes. It seemed like the right thing to do, no matter what happened next. He closed his eyes and felt her fingertips touching his cheek, then his forehead, then his eyelids. He took a breath--ink and hand soap. "I" -- he heard her whisper, closer than he expected, and shaky and strange -- "think I might be a very stupid girl." He shook his head no. Just barely. So that only someone who was holding his cheek and his neck would notice. "Yes," she said, sounding closer. He didn't move, didn't open his eyes. What if he opened his eyes and she saw what she was doing? She kissed his cheek, and he let his head tip forward into her hands. She kissed his other cheek. And his chin. The groove below his bottom lip. "Stupid girl," she said near the corner of his mouth, sounding incredulous, "what could you possibly be thinking?" Lincoln found his mouth. "Perfect girl," he said so quietly that only someone with her hands in his hair and her lips all but touching his could possibly hear. "Pretty girl." He found her mouth. "Perfect." Kiss. "Magic." Kiss. "Only girl.

In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree.

Who Am I? I’m a creator, a visionary, a poet. I approach the world with the eyes of an artist, the ears of a musician, and the soul of a writer. I see rainbows where others see only rain, and possibilities when others see only problems. I love spring flowers, summer’s heat on my body, and the beauty of the dying leaves in the fall. Classical music, art museums, and ballet are sources of inspiration, as well as blues music and dim cafes. I love to write; words flow easily from my fingertips, and my heart beats rapidly with excitement as an idea becomes a reality on the paper in front of me. I smile often, laugh easily, and I weep at pain and cruelty. I'm a learner and a seeker of knowledge, and I try to take my readers along on my journey. I am passionate about what I do. I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me.

How could you possibly have a dark secret involving the Star Wars prequels? Are you responsible for Jar Jar Binks?

In Isleta the rainbow was a crack in the universe. We saw the barest of all life that is possible. Bright horses rolled over and over the dusking sky.

You have too many friends,” she’ll say. “I’m pretty sure that’s not possible. And, anyway, I wouldn’t call them all ‘friends.’” “There are only so many hours in the day, Simon. Two, three people—that’s all any of us have time for.” “There are more people than that in your immediate family, Penny.” “I know. It’s a struggle.

The only thing she didn't like to think, about Park, was what he could possibly see in her.

How are you?” Delusional. Possibly certifiable. Weirdly happy. “Fine,” Georgie said.

Only, in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god.

We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

Jesus. Was it possible to rape somebody’s hand?

... I must begin at whatever pace is possible, to work on the book of my own that i vaguely keep assuming lies at the end of the rainbow. It is after all my rainbow and if I don't do it no one else will...Survival is the secret so you really can't afford to doubt yourself for long because you are all you've got. The only thing to do is to go the limit with it. Exceed.

This is what people do. They get close and try to stay there. They stay. They keep trying to hold onto each other, even though it’s not really possible, I don’t think. Because people are always moving, aren’t they? But this is what they do. They keep trying.

In a fraction of a moment we fall in love, we break up, we live out a love story that lasts until the end of time. We are soulmates, we are adversaries, we are everything. We are nothing. We are at our fullest potential of every possibility. We are supposed to cross paths for one reason or another. Sometimes we don’t know the reason until it’s far behind us.

Rainbows are said to be beautiful! Rainbows are said to be colourful! Rainbows may possibly be magical! But, I have never seen a rainbow appearing in the sky!

A rainbow is not possible without a storm, similar to your success not being possible without adversity.

He opened our eyes to the possibility that we could become more than we had ever dreamed. He gave us encouragement, even though we were full of limitations.

She raised the long glass and peered back down at the harbor, at the passengers disembarking, but the image was blurry. Reluctantly, she released his hand. It felt like a promise, and she didn’t want to let go. She adjusted the lens, and her gaze caught on two figures moving down the gangplank. Their steps were graceful, their posture straight as knife blades. They moved like Suli acrobats. She drew in a sharp breath. Everything in her focused like the lens of the long glass. Her mind refused the image before her. This could not be real. It was an illusion, a false reflection, a lie made in rainbow-hued glass. She would breathe again and it would shatter. She reached for Kaz’s sleeve. She was going to fall. He had his arm around her, holding her up. Her mind split. Half of her was aware of his bare fingers on her sleeve, his dilated pupils, the brace of his body around hers. The other half was still trying to understand what she was seeing. His dark brows knitted together. “I wasn’t sure. Should I not have—” She could barely hear him over the clamor in her heart. “How?” she said, her voice raw and strange with unshed tears. “How did you find them?” “A favor, from Sturmhond. He sent out scouts. As part of our deal. If it was a mistake—” “No,” she said as the tears spilled over at last. “It was not a mistake.” “Of course, if something had gone wrong during the job, they’d be coming to retrieve your corpse.” Inej choked out a laugh. “Just let me have this.” She righted herself, her balance returning. Had she really thought the world didn’t change? She was a fool. The world was made of miracles, unexpected earthquakes, storms that came from nowhere and might reshape a continent. The boy beside her. The future before her. Anything was possible. Now Inej was shaking, her hands pressed to her mouth, watching them move up the dock toward the quay. She started forward, then turned back to Kaz. “Come with me,” she said. “Come meet them.” Kaz nodded as if steeling himself, flexed his fingers once more. “Wait,” he said. The burn of his voice was rougher than usual. “Is my tie straight?” Inej laughed, her hood falling back from her hair. “That’s the laugh,” he murmured, but she was already setting off down the quay, her feet barely touching the ground. “Mama!” she called out. “Papa!” Inej saw them turn, saw her mother grip her father’s arm. They were running toward her. Her heart was a river that carried her to the sea.

i want you to know this waz an experiment to see how selfish i cd be if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover if i waz capable of debasin my self for the love of another if i cd stand not being wanted when i wanted to be wanted & i cannot so with no further assistance & no guidance from you i am endin this affair this note is attached to a plant i've been waterin since the day i met you you may water it yr damn self

I surreptitiously attempt to practice his I’m Here And I’m Listening And I’m The Best Damn Boyfriend Ever expression on my own face. He does it so well. But it must be possible, right? It’s not like he’s that crazy-talented. He’s about to start talking, but then he stops and stares at me. “What?” I say, trying not to let my face muscles shift too much. This is damn tricky. “You look like you’re about to start playing the world’s saddest song on its tiniest little violin,” Arthur informs me. “And then hug a kitten, and paint a rainbow, and watch Titanic whilst weeping profusely.

Not to grow up properly is to retain our 'caterpillar' quality from childhood (where it is a virtue) into adulthood (where it becomes a vice). In childhood our credulity serves us well. It helps us to pack, with extraordinary rapidity, our skulls full of the wisdom of our parents and our ancestors. But if we don't grow out of it in the fullness of time, our caterpillar nature makes us a sitting target for astrologers, mediums, gurus, evangelists and quacks. The genius of the human child, mental caterpillar extraordinary, is for soaking up information and ideas, not for criticizing them. If critical faculties later grow it will be in spite of, not because of, the inclinations of childhood. The blotting paper of the child's brain is the unpromising seedbed, the base upon which later the sceptical attitude, like a struggling mustard plant, may possibly grow. We need to replace the automatic credulity of childhood with the constructive scepticism of adult science.

In earlier times, one had an easier conscience about being a person than one does today. People were like cornstalks in a field, probably more violently tossed back and forth by God, hail, fire, pestilence, and war than they are today, but as a whole, as a city, a region, a field, and as to what personal movement was left to the individual stalk – all this was clearly defined and could be answered for. But today responsibility’s center of gravity is not in people but in circumstances. Have we not noticed that experiences have made themselves independent of people? They have gone on the stage, into books, into the reports of research institutes and explorers, into ideological or religious communities, which foster certain kinds of experience at the expense of others as if they are conducting a kind of social experiment, and insofar as experiences are not actually being developed, they are simply left dangling in the air. Who can say nowadays that his anger is really his own anger when so many people talk about it and claim to know more about it than he does? A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past, and that the friendly burden of personal responsibility is to dissolve into a system of formulas of possible meanings. Probably the dissolution of the anthropocentric point of view, which for such a long time considered man to be at the center of the universe but which has been fading away for centuries, has finally arrived at the “I” itself, for the belief that the most important thing about experience is the experiencing, or of action the doing, is beginning to strike most people as naïve. There are probably people who still lead personal lives, who say “We saw the So-and-sos yesterday” or “We’ll do this or that today” and enjoy it without its needing to have any content of significance. They like everything that comes in contact with their fingers, and are purely private persons insofar as this is at all possible. In contact with such people, the world becomes a private world and shines like a rainbow. They may be very happy, but this kind of people usually seems absurd to the others, although it is still not at all clear why. And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.

It’s also joy. The joy to be here, to be free and finally able to walk around with pride and dignity as a lesbian woman in the midst of all these life-affirming rainbows, without worrying about who might see and possibly judge me.

Each day the mythical return Enzian dreamed of seems less possible. Once it was necessary to know uniforms, insignia, airplane markings, to observe boundaries. But by now too many choices have been made. The single root lost, way back there in the May desolation. Each bird has his branch now, and each one is the Zone.

To be or not to be! Hamlet!! I beg to differ! How much more limiting could that question be? How much more restraining could it ever get? Do we only have two possible answers to a question? Do we only have two things to choose from? Are our options so restricted? Are we so grounded? Have we gone color blind? When did our retinas stop seeing the colors of a rainbow? Why do we print our experiences in duotone? In a game of multiple choice questions, how many answers could be correct? What number of choices do we have? Who gives us the options? When do we have to submit our selections? Who decides if we passed or failed?

When a mother elevates her communication, she naturally elevates the outcomes of her child's life since a mother's words become her child's universe of possibilities.

Was it possible? Was there really somewhere else—somewhere at the far end of the rainbow that was better than this place? She certainly hoped so.

I define hope as a narcotic. It courses through our veins, igniting ideas and feelings and emotions that all work in collaboration to produce a better tomorrow, while leaving today but a distant memory. The essence of its unknown and unseen promise is beautiful and addicting to those who are in need of its satiating grace. The dependence on the idea of possibility can become a crutch however; an excuse for ignoring the here and now. It can swiftly morph from a therapeutic escape to an addictive obsession that somewhere over the rainbow lies the answer that will make everything right again. I am thankful to call myself a true addict to hope's mind altering panacea. Its blissful nirvana can seem both inconceivably irrational yet entirely fathomable to anyone lost in a sea of uncertainty. Just as age brings wisdom, experience brings the understanding that no matter what pot of gold lies at the end of your hopeful rainbow, the relief it casts over tragedy and heartache is the power behind its true magic. To the hope that resides in the depths of my being, thank you.

Surely for as long as there have been nights as bad as this one---something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels andother beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up in the capital they're wondering should they, maybe, give everybody a number; yeah, something to help SPQR record-keeping...and Herod, or Hitler, fellas...what kind of a world is it...for a baby to come in tippin' those toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's gonna redeem it, why, he ought have his head examined... "But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As it it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as. For the moment, anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.

You can't fix this,' she ground out. 'That is not true. There is nothing anyone could hold over you that could not be overcome.' 'By what?' she demanded. 'Rainbows and sprites and the everlasting good wishes of your family? It won't work, Gregory. It won't. The Bridgertons may be powerful, but you cannot change the past, and you cannot bend the future to suit your whims ... You don't understand. You can't possibly. You are all so happy, so perfect.' 'We are not.' 'You are. You don't even know that you are, and you can't conceive that the rest of us are not, that we might struggle and try and be good and still not receive what we wish for.

She and Neal had decorated that house together. They'd gone to the hardware store every weekend for a year to argue about paint. Georgie would always choose the most saturated color on the card. "You can't always pick the bottom color," Neal would say. "But the bottom color makes all the other colors look dull." "You're looking at them wrong." "How is that possible?

I think that there is a terrible possibility now, in the World. We may not brush it away, we must look at it. It is possible that They will not die. That it is now within the state of Their art to go on forever - though we, of course, will keep dying as we always have. Death has been the source of Their power. It was easy enough for us to see that. If we are here once, only once, then clearly we are here to take what we can while we may. If They have taken much more, and taken not only from Earth but also from us - well, why begrudge Them, when they’re just as doomed to die as we are? All in the same boat, all under the same shadow … yes … yes. But is that really true? Or is it the best, and the most carefully propagated, of all Their lies, known and unknown? We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival.

I get it. Having had Satoru take me in as his cat, I think I felt as lucky as he did. Strays, by definition, have been abandoned or left behind, but Satoru rescued me when I broke my leg. He made me the happiest cat on earth. I'll always remember those five years we had together. And I'll forever go by the name Nana, the name that - let's face it - is pretty unusual for a male cat. The town where Satoru grew up, too, I would remember that. And the green seedlings swaying in the fields. The sea, with its frighteningly loud roar. Mount Fuji, looming over us. How cosy it felt on top of that boxy TV. That wonderful lady cat, Momo. That nervy but earnest hound, Toramaru. That huge white ferry, which swallowed up cars into its stomach. The dogs in the pet holding area, wagging their tails at Satoru. That foul-mouthed chinchilla telling me Guddo rakku! The land in Hokkaido stretching out forever. Those vibrant purple and yellow flowers by the side of the road. The field of pampas grass like an ocean. The horses chomping on grass. The bright-red berries on the mountain-ash trees. The shades of red on the mountain ash that Satoru taught me. The stands of slender white birch. The graveyard, with its wide-open vista. The bouquet of flowers in rainbow colours. The white heart-shaped bottom of the deer. That huge, huge, huge double rainbow growing out of the ground. I would remember these for the rest of my life. And Kosuke, and Yoshimine, and Sugi and Chikako. And above all, the one who brought up Satoru and made it possible for us to meet - Noriko. Could anyone be happier than this?

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; many may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists - Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations! - in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

What is hope? Is it the ambition of discovering for the first time what the carnal definition of physical love is without understanding the concept of true passion? Or is it imagination running wild and free fueled by the dram that tonight will last forever and tomorrows will always come as you are blinded by the brilliance of another's smile? Is it a theory of inevitability that relies on fate or destiny bringing two souls together for their one shot at true and unbridled happiness? Or is it a plea to erase a past that used to hold the potential for limitless smiles and endless laughs? I define hope as a narcotic. It courses through our veins, igniting ideas and feelings and emotions that all work in collaboration to produce a better tomorrow, while leaving today, but a distant memory. The essence of its unknown and unseen promise is beautiful and addicting to those who are in need of its satiating grace. The dependence on the idea of possibility can become a crutch however; an excuse for ignoring the here and now. It can swiftly morph from a therapeutic escape to an addictive obsession that somewhere over the rainbow lies the answer that will make everything right again. I am thankful to call myself a true addict to hope's mind altering panacea. It's blissful nirvana can seem both inconceivably irrational yet entirely fathomable to anyone lost in a sea of uncertainty. Just as age brings wisdom, experience brings the understanding that no matter what pot of gold lies at the end of your hopeful rainbow, the relief it casts over tragedy and heartache is the power behind it's true magic. To the hope that resides in the depths of my being, thank you.......

God puts rainbows in the clouds so that each of us—in the dreariest and most dreaded moments—can see a possibility of hope. —Maya Angelou

How could it be possible that there were that many nerve endings all in one place?

I wonder how long I've wanted it. I'd say that I didn't—that the possibility just now occurred to me for the first time.

Across from us stood ogres in every color possible. Like a bag of skittles, see the fucking rainbow that would like to taste you after roasting you on a spit.

Did I ruin everything?" he asked. "Every-what?" she whispered, as if listening might hurt him, too. "Every-us." She shook her head, even though he probably couldn't see her. "Not Possible," she said.

Indeed, I rather hope that I shall be dead when you do. Don’t misunderstand me. I love life and hope to go on for a long time yet, but any author wants his works to reach the largest possible readership.

Vision The rainbow touched down 'somewhere in the Rio Grande,' we said. And saw the light of it from your mother's house in Isleta. How it curved down between earth and the deepest sky to give us horses of color horses that were within us all of this time but we didn't see them because we wait for the easiest vision to save us. In Isleta the rainbow was a crack in the universe. We saw the barest of all life that is possible. Bright horses rolled over and over the dusking sky. I heard the thunder of their beating hearts. Their lungs hit air and sang. All the colors of horses formed the rainbow, and formed us watching them.

I define hope as a narcotic. It courses through our vei s, igniti.g ideas and feelings and emotions that all work in collaboration to produce a better to.orrow, while leaving today but a distant memory. The essence of its unknown and unseen promise is beautiful and addicting to those who are in need of its satiati g grace. The dependence on the idea of possibility can become a crutch however; an excuse for ignoring the here and now. It can swiftly morph from a therapeutic escape to an addictive obsession that somewhere over the rainbow lies the answer that will make everything right again. I am thankful to call myself a true addict to hope's mind altering panacra. Its blissful nirvana can seem both inconceivably irrational yet entirely fathomable to anyone lost in a sea of uncertainty. Just as age brings wisdom, experience brings the understanding that no matter what pot of gold lies at the end of your hopeful rainbow, the relief it casts over tragedy and heartache is the power behind its true magic. To the hope that resides in the depths of my being, thank you.

I like to pray for things that seem possible. There are so many things that I pray for that seem almost too big even for God. It's rewarding to pray for something that might actually happen. It kind of keeps me going.

When he finished, more triumphant stories rainbowed around the room riding the shoulders of laughter. By all accounts these storytellers, born Black and male before the turn of the twentieth century, should have been ground into useless dust. Instead they used their intelligence to pry open the door of rejection and not only became wealthy but got some revenge in the bargain. It wasn't possible for me to regard them as criminals or be anything but proud of their achievements.

remember what it’s like to fall in love for the first time. To be young and fearless, when the future is spread before you in every color of the rainbow, everything bright, everything impossible suddenly made possible. You’re invincible then.

It’s so weird when people don’t go outside to enjoy the rain, or to see a rainbow when it appears, because they’re ‘in the middle of something’. It’s like, I’m sorry? Do you have better things to do? Like, what better things are there to do? What pressing or urgent matters could they possibly be to attend to? It’s fucking raining! There might be a fucking rainbow! Beings from other planets and dimensions would do anything to be a part of this into witness this shit! Get outside, dammit!

Knowing a woman's mind and spirit had been allowed me, with dance I discovered my body more intimately than I had imagined possible. With the acceptance of the ethnicity of my thighs and backside, came a clearer understanding of my voice as a woman and poet. The freedom to move in space, to demand of my own sweat perfection that could continually be approached, though never known, waz poem to me, my body and mind ellipsing, probably for the first time in my life. Dance as explicated by Raymond Sawyer and Ed Mock insisted that everything African, everything halfway colloquial, a grimace, a strut, an arched back over a yawn, waz mine. I moved what waz my unconscious knowledge of being a colored woman's body to my known everydayness.

Want the Change," Rilke said, "O be inspired by the Flame!" To laurel, to nightingale, to wind... to *wanting* it, to be taken, to embrace, to fall to-ward the flame growing to fill all the senses and... not to love because it was no longer possible to act... but to be helplessly in a condition of love...

American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy. He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fanaticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on the rightness of what they planned to do…he’d been told long ago to expect this sort of thing from Nazis, and especially from Japs—we were the ones who always played fair—but this pair outside the door now are as demoralizing as a close-up of John Wayne (the angle emphasizing how slanted his eyes are, funny you never noticed before) screaming “BANZAI!

Dear Pinterest, When we first started dating, you lured me in with Skittles-flavored vodka and Oreo-filled chocolate chip cookies. You wooed me with cheesy casseroles adjacent to motivational fitness sayings. I loved your inventiveness: Who knew cookies needed a sugary butter dip? You did. You knew, Pinterest. You inspired me, not to make stuff, but to think about one day possibly making stuff if I have time. You took the cake batter, rainbow and bacon trends to levels nobody thought were possible. You made me hungry. The nights I spent pinning and eating nachos were some of the best nights of my life. Pinterest, we can’t see each other anymore. You see, it’s recently come to my attention that some people aren’t just pinning, they are making. This makes me want to make, too. Unfortunately, I’m not good at making, and deep down I like buying way more. Do you see where I’m going with this? I’m starting to feel bad, Pinterest. I don’t enjoy you the way I once did. We need to take a break. I’m going to miss your crazy ideas (rolls made with 7Up? Shut your mouth). This isn’t going to be easy. You’ve been responsible for nearly every 2 a.m. grilled cheese binge I’ve had for the past couple of years, and for that I’ll be eternally grateful. Stay cool, Pinterest. PS. You hurt me. PPS. I’m also poor now. Xo Me 10

WhatsApp forwards about love and kindness. I wonder if on a Sunday morning all these enthusiastic do-gooders could send out truly helpful things like ‘11 cures for a hangover’ or ‘How to clean puke stains from your dress’. I have no such luck; all I get are strange messages like ‘Little memories can last for years’. Very useful when you are trying hard to forget all the embarrassing things you did the night before. Do I really need messages saying, ‘A little hug can wipe out a big tear’ or ‘Friendship is a rainbow’? There is also a message saying, ‘God blues you’, which I am trying to guess could mean that either God wants to bless me, rule me or make a blue movie with me. Has it ever happened that a murderer just before committing his crime gets a message stating, ‘Life is about loving’, and stops in his tracks, or a banker reads ‘No greater sin than cheating’, and quits his job? So, what do these messages really do? I think they allow lazy people to think that they are doing a good deed in the easiest possible manner by sending these daft bits of information out into the universe. Go out there! Sweep a pavement, plant a tree, feed a stray dog. Do something, anything; rather than just using your fingers to tap three keys and destroy 600 people’s brain cells in one shot. 11 a.m.: This is turning out to be a hectic day. The

There had been an uprising by the Bondelswaartz in 1922, and general turmoil in the country. His radio experiments interrupted, he sought refuge, along with a few score other whites, in the villa of a local landowner named Foppl. The place was a stronghold, cut off on all sides by deep ravines. After a few months of siege and debauchery, “haunted by a profound disgust for everything European,” Mondaugen went out alone into the bush, ended up living with the Ovatjimba, the aardvark people, who are the poorest of the Hereros. They accepted him with no questions. He thought of himself, there and here, as a radio transmitter of some kind, and believed that whatever he was broadcasting at the time was at least no threat to them. In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals - sense data, feeling, memories relocating - are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero. “In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid.

Ancestrales est bien plus fort que le leur. Il va falloir jouer serré si elles veulent sauver leur peau. — Comment est-ce que c’est possible ? demande Icy d’une voix blanche. — L’Arbre de Vie devrait être mort ! Lysliss essaie d’attraper le bourgeon magique avec ses doigts crochus, elle a l’intention de le détruire. Mais la douleur qu’elle ressent alors est tellement forte qu’elle doit le lâcher. — Maintenant, je la sens. L’énergie positive est sur Éraklyon. J’en suis

I might only be a speck of dust in the universe, but there's always the possibility that I might land somewhere and catch the light just right so that I become a beautiful rainbow. If that happens, I'll be the only one of my kind in the universe, without ever having screamed at the top of my lungs, claiming that I'm someone special. It took a lot of time and effort before I realized that, but there's this small twist: even had I not tried that hard, it would have always been true.

It all suddenly made me nervous, and a little, tiny, baby bit worried. Pulling one of the stools at the island back, I plopped into it and simply stared at that discolored, harsh face in unease. “I just want to know whether I need to steal a bat or make a phone call.” His mouth had been open and poised to argue with me… until he heard the last thing I said. “What?” “I need to know—” “What do you need to steal a bat for?” “Well, no one I know owns one, and I can’t go buy one at the store and have it caught on videotape.” “Videotape?” Did he know nothing? “Aiden, come on, if you beat the shit out of someone with a bat, they’re going to look for suspects. Once they have suspects, they’ll look through their things or their purchases. They’ll see I bought one recently and know it was premeditated. Why are you looking at me like that?” His mauve-colored eyelids went heavy over the bright whites of his eyes, and the expression on his face was filled such a vast range of emotions, one after another after another, that I wasn’t sure which one I was supposed to hold on to. He switched the icepack to the other side of his bruised jaw and shook his head. “The amount you know about committing crimes is terrifying, Van.” His mouth twitched under the rainbow of whatever he was thinking. “It scares the hell out of me, and I don’t get scared easily.” I snorted, pretty pleased with myself. “Calm down. I went through this phase when I was into watching a lot of crime TV shows. I’ve never even stolen a pen in my life.” Aiden’s careful expression didn’t go anywhere. “I’m not trying to kill anyone… unless we had to,” I joked weakly. His nostrils flared so slightly I almost missed it. But what I didn’t miss was the way the corners of his mouth tipped up into a tiny smile. I smiled at him as innocently as possible. “So do you want to tell me who’s going to get the fists of fury?” I hoped I sounded as harmless as I intended, even though I felt the exact opposite as every second passed. “Fists of fury?” “Yep.” I held up my hands just a little so he could see them. He had no idea the number of fights I’d gotten into with my sisters over the years. I didn’t always win—I rarely won if I was going to be honest—but I never gave up. The sigh that came out of him was so long and drawn out, I kind of prepped myself for the half-assed answer that was going to come out of his mouth. “It’s nothing.” There it was

An inquiry which I once made into the psychology of the Indian sign language with a view to discovering a possible relation between it and Greek manual gesture as displayed in ancient graphic art, led to the conclusion that Indian rhythms arise rather in the centre of self-preservation than of self-consciousness. Which is only another way of saying that poetry is valued primarily by the aboriginal for the reaction it produces within himself rather than for any effect he is able to produce on others by means of it.

Colors matter to us. Color TVs, printers, and books are more prized than their black-and-white cousins. It’s natural to expect that an extra dimension of color would be a spectacular thing to see. To learn that it could be taken for granted threatens to drain color of its magic. But of course, all of us—monochromat, dichromat, trichromat, or tetrachromat—take the colors that we see for granted. Each of us is stuck in our own Umwelt. As I wrote in the introduction, this is a book not about superiority but about diversity. The real glory of colors isn’t that some individuals see more of them, but that there’s such a range of possible rainbows.

Of all her putative fathers -- Max Schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, Franz Pökler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that Alpdrücken Night, on the other -- Bianca is closest, this last possible moment below decks here behind the ravening jackal, closest to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your seat, never threatened along any rookwise row or diagonal all night, you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying sure I know them, omitting, chuckling count me in, unable, thinking probably some hooker... She favors you, most of all. You'll never get to see her. So somebody has to tell you.

Dying, finds Lala, is something like surfing a rainbow with very bright colors in all shapes and forms, dancing out of a point that is perpetually spilling them so that you are forever traveling forward on swaths of billowing reds and blues but never really getting anywhere, just forever traveling toward a tiny hole where all the color originates and where it ends. She wonders whether this is how her daughter must have felt when she was dying—the glorious, giddy kaleidoscope hurtling toward a hole that inexplicably remains the same distance away. Lala thinks that if, perhaps, to die means the eternal roller coaster of color, the giddy dance on blues and greens and reds and purples, then—possibly—to kill could be a kindness.

One might argue here that endorsing Joe’s life-style over that of his fellow workers is reprehensibly “elitist.” After all, the guys in the saloon are having a good time, and who is to say that grubbing away in the backyard making rainbows is a better way to spend one’s time? By the tenets of cultural relativism the criticism would be justifiable, of course. But when one understands that enjoyment depends on increasing complexity, it is no longer possible to take such radical relativism seriously. The quality of experience of people who play with and transform the opportunities in their surroundings, as Joe did, is clearly more developed as well as more enjoyable than that of people who resign themselves to live within the constraints of the barren reality they feel they cannot alter.

Wait: His boyfriend? He was gay? The focus on the lens sharpened, and I could see it clearly now. Of course he was gay. Everyone could see that, except the chubby little lonely heart sitting at seven o'clock, drawing sparkly rainbows on the page with her glitter crayons. I was still beating myself up when the round robin arrived to me, and I sputtered along trying to assemble some phony epiphany with strong verbs, but tears dripped down my face. The room fell into silence as people waited for me to explain. But what could I possibly say? That I had just discovered my future husband was gay? That I was going to live the rest of my life surrounded by nothing but empty lasagna pans and an overloved cat destined to die before me? "I'm sorry," I finally said. "I was just reminded of something very painful." And I guess that wasn't a lie.

The spiritual experience of Binah is the Vision of Sorrow. Within this Sephirah, one is to have a vision of the holistic picture of all that is, all that was, why it was, what it is now, why it is, and what it is to become. In essence, true and total understanding of all existence. The Great Mother sees all. She sees our joys but also our pains and our sins. And, in all that she sees, she is indeed in sorrow. We are a very stubborn species. Binah watches as all too often we neglect our children’s future, poison our air and seas, enslave each other, and go to war. We are at home in our own addictions, and unfortunately it frequently takes a major trauma to wake us up from our unhealthy habits or anosognosia. Regrettably, this is another aspect of the mystical experience not taken into consideration by some. It is not all bliss and rainbows. It is not just a possibility, but a necessity, to assimilate the Vision of the Sorrow that compels the Goddess into her eternal cry for her children. The Tree of Life will simply not allow you to proceed unless this is done. Therefore, managing the Vision of Sorrow is best achieved through Binah’s primary virtue: silence. It is necessary to still the noise and the raging waters to Understand all things in their truest vision. By stilling the clamor can the sparkling stars of the Heavens accurately reflect on the mirroring surface of the body of water below. As the archetypal Temple, she is the root of all temples in manifestation, the Inner Church, the sacred space of all sacred spaces. Because of this, Binah truly is the womb of life, the container from which all has been embodied. Approach the Dark Mother’s temple in silence, approach the temple in sorrow, and the vision shall be received.

Say more about the Crips and the Bloods,” Richard said, stalling for time while he tried to get his mental house in order. “To us they look the same. Urban black kids with similar demographics and tastes. Seems like they all ought to pull together. But that’s not where they’re at. They are shooting each other to death because they see the Other as less than human. And I’m saying it has been the case for a long time in T’Rain that those people we have lately started calling the Earthtone Coalition have always looked at the ones we now call the Forces of Brightness and seen them as tacky, uncultured, not really playing the game in character. And what happened in the last few months was that the F.O.B. types just got tired of it and rose up and, you know, asserted their pride in their identity, kind of like the gay rights movement with those goddamned rainbow flags. And as long as it’s possible for those two groups to identify each other on sight, each one of them is going to see the other as, well, the Other, and killing people based on that is way more ingrained than killing them on this completely bogus and flimsy fake-Good and fake-Evil dichotomy that we were working with before.” “I get it,” Richard said. “But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods?” “What if it’s true?” Devin shrugged. “Then you’re not doing your fucking job,” Richard said. “Because the world is supposed to have a real story to it. Not just people killing each other over color schemes.” “Maybe you’re not doing yours,” Devin said. “How can I write a story about Good and Evil in a world where those concepts have no real meaning—no consequences?” “What sort of consequences do you have in mind? We can’t send people’s characters to virtual Hell.” “I know. Only Limbo.” They both laughed.

To escape the throngs, we decided to see the new Neil Degrasse Tyson planetarium show, Dark Universe. It costs more than two movie tickets and is less than thirty minutes long, but still I want to go back and see it again, preferably as soon as possible. It was more visually stunning than any Hollywood special effect I’d ever seen, making our smallness as individuals both staggering and - strangely - rather comforting. Only five percent of the universe consists of ordinary matter, Neil tells us. That includes all matter - you, and me, and the body of Michael Brown, and Mork’s rainbow suspenders, and the letters I wrote all summer, and the air conditioner I put out on the curb on Christmas Day because I was tired of looking at it and being reminded of the person who had installed it, and my sad dying computer that sounds like a swarm of bees when it gets too hot, and the fields of Point Reyes, and this year’s blossoms which are dust now, and the drafts of my book, and Israeli tanks, and the untaxed cigarettes that Eric Garner sold, and my father’s ill-fitting leg brace that did not accomplish what he’d hoped for in terms of restoring mobility, and the Denver airport, and haunting sperm whales that sleep vertically, and the water they sleep in, and Mars and Jupiter and all of the stars we see and all of the ones we don’t. That’s all regular matter, just five percent. A quarter is “dark matter,” which is invisible and detectable only by gravitational pull, and a whopping 70 percent of the universe is made up of “dark energy,” described as a cosmic antigravity, as yet totally unknowable. It’s basically all mystery out there - all of it, with just this one sliver of knowable, livable, finite light and life. And did I mention the effects were really cool? After seeing something like that it’s hard to stay mad at anyone, even yourself.

I” - he heard her whisper, closer than he expected, and shaky and strange – “think I might be a very stupid girl.” He shook his head no. Just barely. So that only someone who was holding his check and his neck would notice. “Yes,” she said, sounding closer. He didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes. What if he opened his eyes and she saw what she was doing? She kissed his check, and he let his head tip forward into her hands. She kissed his other check. And his chin. The groove below his bottom lip. “Stupid girl,” she said near the corner of his mouth, sounding incredulous, “what could you possibly be thinking?” Lincoln found his mouth. “Perfect girl,” he said so quietly that only someone with her hands in his hair and her lips all but touching his could possibly hear. “Pretty girl.” He found her mouth. “Perfect.” Kiss. “Magic.” Kiss. “Only girl.” There are moments when you can’t believe something wonderful is happening . And there are moments when your entire consciousness is filled with knowing absolutely that something wonderful is happening. Lincoln felt life he’d dunked his head into a sink full of Pop Rocks and turned on the water. He shook his jacket onto the floor and put his arms around her. All he could think was Beth. All he could do was let this dream come true.

He opened his eyes then, white fire flaring hotly within them. “Send me home, Legna,” he commanded her, his voice hoarse with suppressed emotion. She moved her head in affirmation even as she leaned toward him to catch his mouth once more in a brief, territorial kiss, her teeth scoring his bottom lip as she broke away. It was an incidental wound, one he could heal in the blink of an eye. But he wouldn’t erase her mark on him, and they both knew it. Finally, she stepped back, closed her eyes, and concentrated on picturing his home in her thoughts. She had been in his parlor dozens of times as a guest, always accompanied by Noah. His library, his kitchen, even the grounds of the isolated estate were well known to her. She could have sent him to any of those locations. But as she began to focus, her mind’s eye was filled with the image of a dark, elegant room she had never seen before. Hand-carved ebony-paneled walls soared up into a vast ceiling, enormous windows of intricate stained glass spilled colored light over the entire room as if a multitude of rainbows had taken up residence. It all centered around an enormous bed, the coverlet’s color indistinguishable under the blanket of colorful dawn sunlight that streamed into the room. She could feel the sun’s warmth, ready and waiting to cocoon any weary occupant who thrived on sleeping in the heat of the muted daylight sun. It was a beautiful room, and she knew without a doubt that it was Gideon’s bedroom and that he had shared the image of it with her. If she sent him there, it would be the first time she had ever teleported someone to a place she had not first seen for herself. The ability to take images of places from others’ minds for teleporting purposes was an advanced Elder ability. “You can do it,” he encouraged her softly, all of his thoughts and his will completely full of his belief in that statement. Legna kept his gaze for one last long moment, and with a flick of a wrist sent him from the room with a soft pop of moving air. She exhaled in wonder, everything inside of her knowing without a doubt that he had appeared in his bedroom, safe and sound, that very next second. Legna turned to look at her own bed and wondered how she would ever be able to sleep. Nelissuna . . . go to bed. I will help you sleep. Gideon’s voice washed through her, warming her, comforting her in a way she hadn’t thought possible. This was the connection that Jacob and Isabella shared. For the rest of the time both of them lived, each would be privy to the other’s innermost thoughts. She realized that because he was the more powerful, it was quite possible he would be able to master parts of himself, probably even hide things from her awareness and keep them private—at least, until she learned how to work her new ability with better skill. After all, she was a Demon of the Mind. It was part of her innate state of being to figure the workings of their complex minds. She removed her slippers and pushed the sleeves of her dress from her shoulders so that it sheeted off her in one smooth whisper of fabric. She closed her eyes, avoiding looking in the mirror or at herself, very aware of Gideon’s eyes behind her own. His masculine laughter vibrated through her, setting her skin to tingle. So, you are both shy and bold . . . he said with amusement as she quickly slid beneath her covers. You are a source of contradictions and surprises, Legna. My world has begun anew. As if living for over a millennium is not long enough? she asked him. On the contrary. Without you, it was far, far too long. Go to sleep, Nelissuna. And a moment after she received the thought, her eyes slid closed with a weight she could not have contradicted even if she had wanted to. Her last thought, as she drifted off, was that she had to make a point of telling Isabella that she might have been wrong about what it meant to have another to share one’s mind with.

I stepped somewhat apprehensively into 2020, unaware of what was to happen, of course, thinking little about the newly-emerged coronavirus, but knowing myself to be at a tipping point in my life. I had come so very far over the years, the decades, from my birthplace in the United Kingdom, to Thailand, Japan and then back to Thailand to arrive at an age—how had I clocked up so many turns under the sun?—at which most people ask for nothing more than comfort, security and love, or at least loving kindness. Instead, I was slowly extricating myself, physically and emotionally, from a marriage that had, over the course of more than a decade, slowly, almost imperceptibly, deteriorated from complacency to conflict, from apathy to antagonism, from diversity to divergence as our respective outlooks on life first shifted and then conflicted. Instrumental in exacerbating this had been my decision to travel as and where I could after witnessing my mother’s devastating and terminal descent into dementia. For reasons which even now I cannot recall with any accuracy, the first destination for this reborn, more daring me was Tibet, thus initiating a new love affair, this time with the culture and majesty of the Himalayan swathe, and the awakening within me of a quest for the spiritual. I had, over the years, been a teacher, a lecturer, a consultant and an advisor, but I now wanted to inspire and release my verbal and photographic creativity, to capture the places I visited and the experiences I had in words and images—and if possible to have the wherewithal of sharing them with like-minded people.

I sucked on a blade of grass and watched the millwheel turn. I was lying on my stomach on the stream's opposite bank, my head propped in my hands. There was a tiny rainbow in the mist above the froth and boil at the foot of the waterfall, and an occasional droplet found its way to me. The steady splashing and the sound of the wheel drowned out all other noises in the wood. The mill was deserted today, and I contemplated it because I had not seen its like in ages. Watching the wheel and listening to the water were more than just relaxing. It was somewhat hypnotic. … My head nodding with each creak of the wheel, I forced everything else from my mind and set about remembering the necessary texture of the sand, its coloration, the temperature, the winds, the touch of salt in the air, the clouds... I slept then and I dreamed, but not of the place that I sought. I regarded a big roulette wheel, and we were all of us on it-my brothers, my sisters, myself, and others whom I knew or had known-rising and falling, each with his allotted section. We were all shouting for it to stop for us and wailing as we passed the top and headed down once more. The wheel had begun to slow and I was on the rise. A fair-haired youth hung upside down before me, shouting pleas and warnings that were drowned in the cacophony of voices. His face darkened, writhed, became a horrible thing to behold, and I slashed at the cord that bound his ankle and he fell from sight. The wheel slowed even more as I neared the top, and I saw Lorraine then. She was gesturing, beckoning frantically, and calling my name. I leaned toward her, seeing her clearly, wanting her, wanting to help her. But as the wheel continued its turning she passed from my sight. “Corwin!” I tried to ignore her cry, for I was almost to the top. It came again, but I tensed myself and prepared to spring upward. If it did not stop for me, I was going to try gimmicking the damned thing, even though falling off would mean my total ruin. I readied myself for the leap. Another click... “Corwin!” It receded, returned, faded, and I was looking toward the water wheel again with my name echoing in my ears and mingling, merging, fading into the sound of the stream. … It plunged for over a thousand feet: a mighty cataract that smote the gray river like an anvil. The currents were rapid and strong, bearing bubbles and flecks of foam a great distance before they finally dissolved. Across from us, perhaps half a mile distant, partly screened by rainbow and mist, like an island slapped by a Titan, a gigantic wheel slowly rotated, ponderous and gleaming. High overhead, enormous birds rode like drifting crucifixes the currents of the air. We stood there for a fairly long while. Conversation was impossible, which was just as well. After a time, when she turned from it to look at me, narrow-eyed, speculative, I nodded and gestured with my eyes toward the wood. Turning then, we made our way back in the direction from which we had come. Our return was the same process in reverse, and I managed it with greater ease. When conversation became possible once more, Dara still kept her silence, apparently realizing by then that I was a part of the process of change going on around us. It was not until we stood beside our own stream once more, watching the small mill wheel in its turning, that she spoke.

But whether I’m on deck or below it, I’ll never be far.” “Shall I take that as a promise? Or a threat?” She sauntered toward him, hands cocked on her hips in an attitude of provocation. His eyes swept her body, washing her with angry heat. She noted the subtle tensing of his shoulders, the frayed edge of his breath. Even exhausted and hurt, he still wanted her. For a moment, Sophia felt hope flicker to life inside her. Enough for them both. And then, with the work of an instant, he quashed it all. Gray stepped back. He gave a loose shrug and a lazy half-smile. If I don’t care about you, his look said, you can’t possibly hurt me. “Take it however you wish.” “Oh no, you don’t. Don’t you try that move with me.” With trembling fingers, she began unbuttoning her gown. “What the devil are you doing? You think you can just hike up your shift and make-“ “Don’t get excited.” She stripped the bodice down her arms, then set to work unlacing her stays. “I’m merely settling a score. I can’t stand to be in your debt a moment longer.” Soon she was down to her chemise and plucking coins from the purse tucked between her breasts. One, two, three, four, five… “There,” she said, casing the sovereigns on the table. “Six pounds, and”-she fished out a crown-“ten shillings. You owe me the two.” He held up open palms. “Well, I’m afraid I have no coin on me. You’ll have to trust me for it.” “I wouldn’t trust you for anything. Not even two shillings.” He glared at her a moment, then turned on his heel and exited the cabin, banging the door shut behind him. Sophia stared at it, wondering whether she dared stomp after him with her bodice hanging loose around her hips. Before she could act on the obvious affirmative, he stormed back in. “Here.” A pair of coins clattered to the table. “Two shillings. And”-he drew his other hand from behind his back-“your two leaves of paper. I don’t want to be in your debt, either.” The ivory sheets fluttered as he released them. One drifted to the floor. Sophia tugged a banknote from her bosom and threw it on the growing pile. To her annoyance, it made no noise and had correspondingly little dramatic value. In compensation, she raised her voice. “Buy yourself some new boots. Damn you.” “While we’re settling scores, you owe me twenty-odd nights of undisturbed sleep.” “Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “We’re even on that regard.” She paused, glaring a hole in his forehead, debating just how hateful she would make this. Very. “You took my innocence,” she said coldly-and completely unfairly, because they both knew she’d given it freely enough. “Yes, and I’d like my jaded sensibilities restored, but there’s no use wishing after rainbows, now is there?” He had a point there. “I suppose we’re squared away then.” “I suppose we are.” “There’s nothing else I owe you?” His eyes were ice. “Not a thing.” But there is, she wanted to shout. I still owe you the truth, if only you’d care enough to ask for it. If only you cared enough for me, to want to know. But he didn’t. He reached for the door. “Wait,” he said. “There is one last thing.” Sophia’s heart pounded as he reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a scrap of white fabric. “There,” he said, unceremoniously casting it atop the pile of coins and notes and paper. “I’m bloody tired of carrying that around.” And then he was gone, leaving Sophia to wrap her arms over her half-naked chest and stare numbly at what he’d discarded. A lace-trimmed handkerchief, embroidered with a neat S.H.

Night after night I would speak to Violet in the womb (no matter how strange that may seem to some people) because I was looking forward to the day when I would hold her in my arms, no longer just talking to my wife’s pajamas like a fucking lunatic. When the day finally came, I was nervously packing up the car to go to the hospital when I noticed a huge rainbow overhead, something that happens maybe once every thousand years in Los Angeles. I was immediately calmed. Yes, it sounds nauseatingly romantic, but yes, it’s true, and I took it as a sign. After a long and difficult labor, Violet was born to the sound of the Beatles in the background, and she arrived screaming with a predetermined vocal capacity that made the Foo Fighters sound like the Carpenters. Once she was cleaned up and put under the little Arby’s heat-lamp bed, I put my face close to hers, stared into her gigantic blue eyes, and said, “Hey, Violet, it’s Dad.” She immediately stopped screaming and her eyes locked with mine. She recognized my voice. We stared at each other in silence, our first introduction, and I smiled and talked to her as if I had known her my whole life. I am happy to say that, still to this day, when we lock eyes it’s the same feeling. This was a love I had never experienced before. There is an inevitable insecurity that comes along with being a famous musician that makes you question love. Do they love me? Or do they love “it”? You are showered with superficial love and adoration on a regular basis, giving you something similar to a sugar high, but your heart crashes once the rush dies off. Is it possible for someone to see a musician without the instrument being a part of their identity? Or is that a part of the identity that the other loves? Regardless, it’s a dangerous and slippery slope to question love, but one thing is for certain: there is nothing purer than the unconditional love between a parent and their child.

It is strange how this fails to annoy me, although as a rule I am sensitive to bad manners. It is just that occasionally, very occasionally, one meets someone who is so markedly a contrast with the general run of people that one’s instinctive reaction is one of admiration, indulgence, and, no doubt, if one is not very careful indeed, of supplication. I am not arguing the rights and wrongs of this: I am simply stating the facts as they appear to me. And not only to me, for I have noticed that extremely handsome men and extremely beautiful women exercise a power over others which they themselves have no need, or indeed no time, to analyse. People like Nick attract admirers, adherents, followers. They also attract people like me: observers. One is never totally at ease with such people, for they are like sovereigns and one’s duty is to divert them. Matters like worth or merit rarely receive much of their attention, for, with the power of choice which their looks bestow on them, they can change their minds when they care to do so. Because of their great range of possibilities, their attention span is very limited. And their beauty has accustomed them to continuous gratification. I find such people – and I have met one or two – quite fascinating. I find myself respecting them, as I would respect some natural phenomenon: a rainbow, a mountain, a sunset. I recognize that they might have no intrinsic merit, and yet I will find myself trying to please them, to attract their attention. ‘Look at me,’ I want to say. ‘Look at me.’ And I am also intrigued by their destinies, which could, or should, be marvelous. I will exert myself for such people, and I will miss them when they leave. I will always want to know about them, for I tend to be in love with their entire lives. That is a measure of the power they exert. That is why I join Nick in a smile of complicity when he spares himself the boredom of a conversation with Dr. Simek. It is a kind of law, I suppose.

Kennewick Man is a skeleton discovered in Washington State in 1996, carbon-dated to older than 9,000 years. Anthropologists were intrigued by anatomical suggestions that he might be unrelated to typical Native Americans, and therefore might represent a separate early migration across what is now the Bering Strait, or even from Iceland. They were preparing to do all-important DNA tests when the legal authorities seized the skeleton, intending to hand it over to representatives of local Indian tribes, who proposed to bury it and forbid all further study. Naturally there was widespread opposition from the scientific and archaeological community. Even if Kennewick Man is an American Indian of some kind, it is highly unlikely that his affinities lie with whichever particular tribe happens to live in the same area 9,000 years later. Native Americans have impressive legal muscle, and ‘The Ancient One’ might have been handed over to the tribes, but for a bizarre twist. The Asatru Folk Assembly, a group of worshippers of the Norse gods Thor and Odin, filed an independent legal claim that Kennewick Man was actually a Viking. This Nordic sect, whose views you may follow in the Summer 1997 issue of The Runestone, were actually allowed to hold a religious service over the bones. This upset the Yakama Indian community, whose spokesman feared that the Viking ceremony could be ‘keeping Kennewick Man’s spirit from finding his body’. The dispute between Indians and Norsemen could well be settled by DNA comparison, and the Norsemen are quite keen to be put to this test. Scientific study of the remains would certainly cast fascinating light on the question of when humans first arrived in America. But Indian leaders resent the very idea of studying this question, because they believe their ancestors have been in America since the creation. As Armand Minthorn, religious leader of the Umatilla tribe, put it: ‘From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time. We do not believe our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do.’ Perhaps the best policy for the archaeologists would be to declare themselves a religion, with DNA fingerprints their sacramental totem. Facetious but, such is the climate in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, it is possibly the only recourse that would work.

The Scientific Revolution was revolutionary in a way that is hard to appreciate today, now that its discoveries have become second nature to most of us. The historian David Wootton reminds us of the understanding of an educated Englishman on the eve of the Revolution in 1600: He believes witches can summon up storms that sink ships at sea. . . . He believes in werewolves, although there happen not to be any in England—he knows they are to be found in Belgium. . . . He believes Circe really did turn Odysseus’s crew into pigs. He believes mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw. He believes in contemporary magicians. . . . He has seen a unicorn’s horn, but not a unicorn. He believes that a murdered body will bleed in the presence of the murderer. He believes that there is an ointment which, if rubbed on a dagger which has caused a wound, will cure the wound. He believes that the shape, colour and texture of a plant can be a clue to how it will work as a medicine because God designed nature to be interpreted by mankind. He believes that it is possible to turn base metal into gold, although he doubts that anyone knows how to do it. He believes that nature abhors a vacuum. He believes the rainbow is a sign from God and that comets portend evil. He believes that dreams predict the future, if we know how to interpret them. He believes, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours.7 A century and a third later, an educated descendant of this Englishman would believe none of these things. It was an escape not just from ignorance but from terror. The sociologist Robert Scott notes that in the Middle Ages “the belief that an external force controlled daily life contributed to a kind of collective paranoia”: Rainstorms, thunder, lightning, wind gusts, solar or lunar eclipses, cold snaps, heat waves, dry spells, and earthquakes alike were considered signs and signals of God’s displeasure. As a result, the “hobgoblins of fear” inhabited every realm of life. The sea became a satanic realm, and forests were populated with beasts of prey, ogres, witches, demons, and very real thieves and cutthroats. . . . After dark, too, the world was filled with omens portending dangers of every sort: comets, meteors, shooting stars, lunar eclipses, the howls of wild animals.8 To the Enlightenment thinkers the escape from ignorance and superstition showed how mistaken our conventional wisdom could be, and how the methods of science—skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing—are a paradigm of how to achieve reliable knowledge. That knowledge includes an understanding of ourselves.

The masses of dense foliage all round became prison walls, impassable circular green ice-walls, surging towards her; just before they closed in, I caught the terrified glint of her eyes. On a winter day she was in the studio, posing for him in the nude, her arms raised in a graceful position. To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; until I saw the cords attached to her wrists and ankles. Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world. Fear was the climate she lived in; if she had ever known kindness it would have been different. The trees seemed to obstruct her with deliberate malice. All her life she had thought of herself as a foredoomed victim, and now the forest had become the malign force that would destroy her. In desperation she tried to run, but a hidden root tripped her, she almost fell. Branches caught in her hair, tugged her back, lashed out viciously when they were disentangled. The silver hairs torn from her head glittered among black needles; they were the clues her pursuers would follow, leading them to their victim. She escaped from the forest at length only to see the fjord waiting for her. An evil effluence rose from the water, something primitive, savage, demanding victims, hungry for a human victim. It had been night overhead all along, but below it was still daylight. There were no clouds. I saw islands scattered over the sea, a normal aerial view. Then something extraordinary, out of this world: a wall of rainbow ice jutting up from the sea, cutting right across, pushing a ridge of water ahead of it as it moved, as if the flat pale surface of sea was a carpet being rolled up. It was a sinister, fascinating sight, which did not seem intended for human eyes. I stared down at it, seeing other things at the same time. The ice world spreading over our world. Mountainous walls of ice surrounding the girl. Her moonwhite skin, her hair sparkling with diamond prisms under the moon. The moon’s dead eye watching the death of our world.

They'd talked every day since that first day they met. But they were supposed to end up together-together. Everyone thought it would happen--Georgie had thought it would happen. Just as soon as Seth exhausted his other possibilities, as soon as he worked through his queue of admirers. He hand't been in any hurry, and Georgie didn't have a say in the matter. She'd taken a number. She was waiting patiently. And then, one day, she wasn't.

Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.

The goal is not to turn Zimbabwe into the United States or to turn decaying neighborhoods into wealthy suburbs. Nor is the goal to reshape the world into the image of Western Christianity. We are not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Rather, the goal is to seek to be as much like the New Jerusalem as possible. And to achieve that goal, we need a different story of change, one that is centered on the gospel, the good news that most of us don’t really understand.

They watched as Micah left the building, striding out to stand below the spinning disk. As if anticipating, he raised his hammer above his head as another bolt of energy lashed downward, blinding those who watched from the door. When the initial blaze of white died down, they could see Micah standing upright, hammer held overhead as the crackling energies cascaded around him, scattering in broken spectrum, so that all the colors of the rainbow danced within the inferno. The very ground at his feet smoked and burned, but he was unharmed. Then the flow of energy halted, and in an instant Micah had pulled back his hammer and made his throw. Almost too quick for the eye to follow, the hammer left his hand and became a blur of blue-white energy as bright and blinding as its target. Higher than was possible for a man to throw, the bolt of flame sped, striking the blazing disk dead center. It seemed to bounce off the disk, and the blue bolt returned to Micah’s hand.

Quotes about God and Religion God puts rainbows in the clouds so that each of us – in the dreariest and most dreaded moments – can see a possibility of hope.

Most of the Times, Life shows us how difficult this journey is, only at Times when the sun clears we see the Sunshine, but the rain often washes away the clouds and both the clouds and the rain dampen our weary hearts, only to let us see a glimpse of a distant rainbow, once in a while. I guess it's always about the Time, the guardian of this Journey that we have to wait and persevere, that we have to remain resilient in the resolve to walk ahead, to find some way to hold on to the voyage, to not let the ship sink in the hollows of a mirage, to just live. And that is what Life is about, perhaps to know that Gloom and Melancholy is a distinct part of our journey, and actually something that occupies the most part of our journey, and it doesn't have to be a deep Grief it can simply be the mundane sorrow of carrying on this existence knowing that Life is just a short frame holding dark colours as much as the bright ones, sometimes even more of those blackness only to bring out the whites a little bit more. And while all of this goes on, somewhere our heart would know that there is One who is beyond this frame of Life and the space of Time and Cosmos; who is always holding your hand giving you the breath to walk ahead. May be He doesn't take away the blackness but throughout stays firm in your path, holding your shadow and your soul ever so gently to make you become the Light that you could only possibly be by embracing all of your Soul's journey. He doesn't perhaps change the potholes in your way, but He does ensure that even when you tumble you don't end up falling and if you do fall, He makes sure that you rise all over again from the flames of Life's fire with the fury of a phoenix. He doesn't end your suffering but lets you see that throughout your pain He is partaking in an even greater portion of it, alongside you. Simple, He doesn't let you see that He is God, because He shares your Life as a companion, walking beside you hand in hand, to make you live all that your soul had contracted before this journey began and even when He is beyond Time, He lets Time be your friend in a journey that is bound in human flesh and guarded by the tick-tock of that guardian. So when I asked my Soul, what is that troubles me the most, I heard my Soul, Smile in a safe knowledge, when I have Him, need I let my troubles concern me? My heart knew, He has already tucked my mind in the tranquil world of Life's paint-brush and a rainbow is just around the corner. A distant yet distinct rainbow. A rainbow that is churned in Love, the love that only He can provide, the Love that is always lurking on the edges of those clouds and rain, in the silhouette of a rainbow forever promised on the other side of a thunderstorm. Love & Light, always - Debatrayee

Love is like that rainbow we all wait hopefully for after a long storm. It is the one feeling that can fill even the darkest times with color so never stop giving love, especially to yourself. Because in the end love - the real, free and unconditional kind- makes the impossible possible.

Routine was a system, a machine that would make me, well. Where before I had noted the ease with which routine arose, here, I felt its implacability, it's remorselessness and determination. It was a schedule designed to stifle possibility, because an excess of possibility had made me ill. At night, the lights in my room snapped off and told me that it was time to sleep. In the morning they flared and told me it was time to wake. After I woke I showered. After I showered I ate. Then I washed down a rainbow of pills and went to my first class or session. My body was irrelevant, my desires redundant and discouraged. To each external stimulus, only a single, pre-approved response was acceptable. (p.319)

The Joy of Self-Care It can be a joy to take care of yourself and you deserve it. You already know that you deserve to take a shower and brush your teeth. In fact, more self-care is deserved than that. You need to pay attention to your body, mind, and spirit. If you take time out every day to take care of yourself, you will be more productive, a brighter light and a support in the world. Gradual Morning Movement Get up early enough to have time to do a routine in the morning. At least, take a moment to rest before getting out of bed. Grab a couple of takes. Allow yourself in bed to wake up. Perform a few simple laps. Make sure you have time to eat a good breakfast when you get out of bed, clean and floss your teeth, and go out for a breath of fresh air before getting on with your busy day. Enjoying yourself before you prepare your day is good for you. It is said you are blocked from enlightened bliss by discontent and too much seriousness and are signals that you are attached to your physical body and the world's cares. Lightening is healthy for body, mind, and spirit all around. You can still participate in the world with more lightness and non-attachment to the results, and care about the state of affairs. In other words, do your world's best job without incentive aspirations. Let the job be where you find happiness. Let self-care be the same. Please take care of yourself. Eating the Rainbow When shopping for food, pick up food in all the rainbow colors. Look for recipes online if there's a food of a certain color and it's new to you. Ask friends and colleagues if they have any season and swap favorite recipes. Please try new things and see how many different colors in one day you can eat. For the Good of All You help yourself and those around you when you take care of yourself. You are a light for others by being healthy, and a model of how good health might look and feel. As you get healthy, others will wonder how you've done that. Taking pleasure in taking care of yourself makes it possible for others to see that it is possible and feel good doing the same thing. And, you have the energy and ability to give back when you're healthy.

There is no possibility for color in a world where everything is black or white. Only in shades of gray does an opportunity exist to find the rainbow.

I thought there was only ever a thing and its opposite, and nothing in between. In writing this book I have come to believe in this far less than I did when I started. Unraveling and unlearning this split logic is crucial to justice, I think, and it is crucial to love - loving a person, community, or most of all perhaps, a place, which may turn out to be the same thing. It is possible to be a victim and a perpetrator at the same time. Most of us are. We are more than the worst story that has ever been told about us. But if we refuse to listen to it, that story can become a prophecy.

Elspeth Murray awoke in the greatest possible way — to the sound of Kermit the Frog gently crooning Rainbow Connection in her ear.

Angela had been grieving Marcos almost as long as she'd known him, and finally, like a rainbow against a bruise-hued cloud, she saw the real Marcos—not as an idea, dream, hope, or possibility—but as he really was. Marcos drew an outline of a person who was generous, wise, and kind, and Angela's longing animated his image with life and color. This two-dimensional Marcos, the one she imagined, was never real.

Prayer and art are passionate acts of will. One wants to transcend and enhance the will's normal possibilities. Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts. prayer means casting oneself into the miraculous rainbow that stretches between becoming and dying, to be utterly consumed in it, in order to bring its infinite radiance to bed in the frail little cradle of one's own existence

By the time I show up at Jazz’s place, I’ve changed out of my work clothes and into my favorite jean shorts and a rainbow-colored t-shirt reminding people—myself included—to “live aloha”. This might be because it’s one of my favorite outfits, or it might be because it’s one of the few things not spilling out of my dirty clothes hamper. Possibly both.

He once told him everything was a story, and that Simon was the hero. They'd been dancing at the time. Touching. Baz was looking at Simon like anything was possible for them now, like love was inevitable.

We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival. We are their harvests...

I take his phone and thumb my number in. As I hand it back to him, I notice the case. A light purple, with a giant rainbow across the back, and there’s a unicorn flying over the rainbow with sparkly glitter adorning the horn. It’s quite possibly the gayest thing I’ve ever seen.

My lover and I had unconsciously entered the kingdom. Neither of us realized we had attained ‘moksha’ (emancipation, liberation or release) from Saṃsāra - the repeating cycle of birth, life and death. We dwelt in this sensually spirited realm, unaware of time, allowing our unhindered consciousness to guide us towards euphoric provenance, where all things are possible. A distant voice called us to reality. Neither my lover nor I desired to return. With our sacred gyrations suspended, we had not the need for release, but we wanted to sustain the momentum our divinity beckoned us uninterrupted. This was my first and certainly not the last of such subliminal providence.               When we finally egressed from our cogitation, we found the Zentologist dumbfounded and in awe, overwhelmed by what he later described as witnessing the Sahasrāra (“thousand-petaled” – White Lotus) above our heads. The glowing rainbow halo of Kundalini Shanti illuminated my lover and me, encircling our sacred union with asama-prajnata-samadhi – a state in which there is no activity of the mind, no knower, no knowledge, nothing to be known: knowledge, knower and known become unified and liberated.               His virility was deeply buried within my core. My lover and I remained in our Garden of Love. Our guiltlessness deterred us from separation. We abided in this state until our rapturous Samadhi subsided. Only then did we dress and follow my teacher back towards the madding crowd.               That day at the poppy field, Andy and I regained our spiritual eroticism, which the Zentologist canalized as “Divine Providence.

It's so beautiful,” she whispers, face tilted up toward the domed ceiling and walls covered in the fractured rainbows. “Do you think they knew?” She finally tears her gaze away, just enough to look up at me. “Knew what beauty was?” My heart's slamming against my chest, and it's not just that I'm holding her in my arms again, that I'm gazing down at her, her mouth only a breath from mine. It's that in this instant, she's me, back in Valencia. Opening herself to exploration. To curiosity. It's not just that for a moment she's sharing in my thrill of discovery. She's experiencing it. She understands. As she reaches out across the millennia to the Undying, to wonder if they knew what beauty was, to wonder why they created something so delicate and perfect, she's opening her mind to all the possibilities they represent. She's communicating with them, by picking up the stories they left behind and adding her own words, asking her own questions. This is what I do – what exploration and archeology is – and in this moment, Mia's in it with me.

You look a little lost, my dear,' a nun says behind me, and I jump. 'Were you interested in seeing the Bevington Triptych?' 'Oh,' I say. 'Erm... yes. Absolutely.' 'Up there,' she points, and I walk tentatively towards the front of the chapel, hoping it will become obvious what the Bevington Triptych is. A statue, maybe? Or a.. a piece of tapestry? But as I reach the elderly lady, I see that she's staring up at a whole wall of stained glass windows. I have to admit, they're pretty amazing. I mean look at that huge blue one in the middle. It's fantastic! 'The Bevington Triptych,' says the elderly woman. 'It simply has no parallel, does it?' 'Wow,' I breathe reverentially, staring up with her. 'It's beautiful.' It really is stunning. God, it just shows, there's no mistaking a real work of art, is there? When you come across real genius, it just leaps out at you. And I'm not even an expert. 'Wonderful colours,' I murmur. 'The detail,' says the woman, clasping her hands, 'is absolutely incomparable.' 'Incomparable,' I echo. I'm just about to point out the rainbow, which I think is a really nice touch - when I suddenly notice that the elderly woman and I aren't looking at the same thing. She's looking at some painted wooden thing which I hadn't even noticed. As inconspicuously as possible, I shift my gaze - and feel a pang of disappointment. Is this the Bevington triptych? But it isn't even pretty! 'Whereas this Victorian rubbish,' the woman suddenly adds savagely, 'is absolutely criminal! That rainbow! Doesn't it make you feel sick?' She gestures to my big blue window, and I gulp. 'I know,' I say. 'It's shocking, isn't it? Absolutely... You know - I think I'll just go for a little wander...

You look a little lost, my dear,' a nun says behind me, and I jump. 'Were you interested in seeing the Bevington Triptych?' 'Oh,' I say. 'Erm... yes. Absolutely.' 'Up there,' she points, and I walk tentatively towards the front of the chapel, hoping it will become obvious what the Bevington Triptych is. A statue, maybe? Or a.. a piece of tapestry? But as I reach the elderly lady, I see that she's staring up at a whole wall of stained glass windows. I have to admit, they're pretty amazing. I mean look at that huge blue one in the middle. It's fantastic! 'The Bevington Triptych,' says the elderly woman. 'It simply has no parallel, does it?' 'Wow,' I breathe reverentially, staring up with her. 'It's beautiful.' It really is stunning. God, it just shows, there's no mistaking a real work of art, is there? When you come across real genius, it just leaps out at you. And I'm not even an expert. 'Wonderful colours,' I murmur. 'The detail,' says the woman, clasping her hands, 'is absolutely incomparable.' 'Incomparable,' I echo. I'm just about to point out the rainbow, which I think is a really nice touch - when I suddenly notice that the elderly woman and I aren't looking at the same thing. She's looking at some painted wooden thing which I hadn't even noticed. As inconspicuously as possible, I shift my gaze - and feel a pang of disappointment. Is this the Bevington triptych? But it isn't even pretty! 'Whereas this Victorian rubbish,' the woman suddenly adds savagely, 'is absolutely criminal! That rainbow! Doesn't it make you feel sick?' She gestures to my big blue window, and I gulp. 'I know,' I say. 'It's shocking, isn't it? Absolutely... You know - I think I'll just go for a little wander...

Nothing was going right. They’d been attacked by a venomous crested woodfoul. And then they’d hidden in the cave with the spiders and the whatever-that-thing-was that had bitten Simon’s tennis shoe, possibly a rat. And then Baz had taken Simon’s hand. Or maybe Simon had taken Baz’s hand.… Anyway, it was totally forgivable because woodfoul and spiders and rats. And sometimes you held somebody’s hand just to prove that you were still alive, and that another human being was there to testify to that fact.

you feeling full longer and your metabolism revved up. The protein can make the smoothie taste slightly pasty, so try the smoothie first without it and then add the protein to see if it is palatable to you. Since you will be avoiding dairy (cow’s milk) during the cleanse, be sure you use a non-dairy, plant-based protein powder, such as rice, soy, or hemp protein, and not whey protein powder, which is made from cow’s milk. My favorite brands are RAW Protein by Garden of Life, Sunwarrior’s Protein Blend, or Rainbow Light’s Acai Berry Blast Protein Energizer. However, there are other quality options also. Other great sources of protein include hard-boiled eggs, raw or unsalted nuts and seeds, especially chia seeds or flaxseeds, and unsweetened peanut butter. Chew your smoothies. Try to go through the chewing motion as much as possible, as the saliva in your mouth starts the digestive process. So, in as much as you can remember, try “chewing” your smoothie. This will also help minimize gas and bloating. Expect your weight to fluctuate.

double rainbows, waterfalls and fire-breathing dragons—well, my mother might have taken some liberties with the landscape. My sister and father would often join in with the fantastic storytelling, but I never minded the fiction too much. I did become a writer, after all. Liam’s driving is so calm and solid compared to Owen’s. I can’t help thinking that I wish I could be driving with him forever. Even if we never get to my sister’s wedding, it will have been worth it to me for the trip. I haven’t had this much fun in years, and it’s so nice to be around other human beings. These two doctors are so silly and nice, and I simply love road trips. Liam’s words from earlier come back to me, unbidden, and I try to shut them out. For some reason, the doctor’s words really did make me feel special and important. I had not realized that my work had caused such a great impact on anyone. I am suddenly stricken with the realization of what’s happening. Am I really doing this? Am I really in a car with two men I just met, heading back to New York? Am I really going to have a chance at getting my vision back? Could it be possible? Am I really going to see my family? For a few minutes, I get lost in thoughts of my mother and father. I remember how much they loved each other. I remember Carmen’s boundless energy and enthusiasm, and how she could never miss an opportunity to insult or tease me. I remember when things were good. “Tell us a story, Helen.” My mother’s

But when I look past the rainbow landscape, the shops with overflowing shelves, the rattle and hiss of daily life that spills from every mouth and machine, I can see the difference. It's an absence — an absence of guards, of bindings, of rabid fear to comply. And in that absence, human will and creativity and resourcefulness have grown, unchecked, filling every possible crevice like some tenacious, lovely weed. These people refuse to be stopped. There is nothing to stop me here.

Jesus. Was it possible to rape somebody’s hand? Eleanor wouldn’t look at Park during English and history. He went to her locker after school, but she wasn’t there. When he got on the bus, she was already sitting in their seat – but sitting in his spot, against the wall. He was too embarrassed to say anything. He sat down next to her and let his hands hang between his knees … Which meant she really had to reach for his wrist, to pull his hand into hers. She wrapped her fingers around his and touched his palm with her thumb. Her fingers were trembling. Park shifted in his seat and turned his back to the aisle. ‘Okay?’ she whispered. He nodded, taking a deep breath. They both stared down at their hands. Jesus. ========== Eleanor & Park (Rainbow Rowell)

It took ten seconds of standing by myself for awkwardness to kick in. A minute passed before I regretted coming. Three minutes…I had played out several scenarios on how to get home and I wasn’t above imagining a Pegasus or a magical rainbow. It was possible I’d seen the twins’ My Little Pony cartoon one too many times.

But fight him we must. You were recruited to Watford because we believe the Humdrum has taken a special interest in you. We want to protect you; I vow to do so with my life. But you must learn, Simon, as soon as possible, how best to protect yourself.

Globalization 3.0 makes it possible for so many more people to plug in and play, and you are going to see every color of the human Rainbow take part.

The worst possible manager for a manse," said Miss Cornelia bitterly. "Mr. Meredith won't get any other housekeeper because he says it would hurt Aunt Martha's feelings. Anne dearie, believe me, the state of that manse is something terrible. Everything is thick with dust and nothing is ever in its place. And we had painted and papered it all so nice before they came." "There

We had learned the spirit of giving as much as possible, not taking as much as possible. That mentality made us always grateful, even in poverty.

Life isn’t always sunshine and rainbows and cuddly puppies. Those things do exist, but in a dark tunnel when all you can see are dark clouds, pain, and despair, it makes life seem hopeless. We need to hold on to hope, hold on to the possibility that things can get better. We need to take hold of the power we possess and take control of the demons wreaking havoc in our brains. Talk to someone. Get help.

Un ponte di pietra tra le anime? Meglio allora un arcobaleno." "Sì, è possible che il ponte che unisce due anime sia simile a un arcobaleno.

HOPE, the rainbow facet, is a buoyant feeling of possibility amid uncertainty that often illuminates the most profound changes in our lives. While we endure adversity or crisis, this facet of wonder momentarily points the way proactively toward a better future. Much richer than mere wishful thinking, hope can buoy you in turbulent times and help you find a way through suffering.

Elphaba had an okay voice. He saw the imaginary place she conjured up, a land where injustice and common cruelty and despotic rule and the beggaring fist of drought didn't work together to hold everyone by the neck. No he wasn't giving her credit: Elphaba had a good voice. It was controlled and feeling and not histrionic. He listened through to the end, and the song faded into the hush of a respectful pub. Later, he thought: The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief. "You next, you promised," cried Elphaba, pointing at Fiyero, but nobody would sing again, because she had done so well. Nessarose nodded to Nanny to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye. "Elphaba says she's not religious but see how feelingly she sings of the afterlife," said Nessarose, and for once no one was inclined to argue.

Give because giving is like coloring the cloud Cloud is better looking at all times but even better with a rainbow Rainbow the cloud with your deeds and actions for others to see See the beauty in each one. Yes, each one has a beauty somehow Somehow you will be given a possibility to color Color even if you do not have color tools or you don't know-how How to color, will be acquired in the process Process even if you fall all the time. Just do it with God God Exist

The only thing that carried a pulse in that apartment was an uncomfortably large print in the living room – a painting of a smiling girl-gymnast with silk angel wings, arms outstretched on a balance beam, rainbow colors bleeding off her and then melting into a dark expanse. I guess it was supposed to be inspirational – Through Me All Things Are Possible, it said in flamingo pink script – but the glow in the girl, the pitch-blackness of her eyes, gave me vertigo. Like looking down through a bridge of glass onto the Milky Way.

so it was hard to believe that establishing once and for all that there was no God could ever be done definitively. But if it were possible…would Leonard even mind at this point? Would he truly care if he and Pearl—if Man—meant nothing in the scheme of the universe?

To transcend this place, whatever, wherever and whenever it is, we must first travel inward through the wrinkles and folds of our own conscious, subconscious and unconscious minds. In doing so while utilizing specific techniques, it’s possible to amass enough energy, or personal power, to fly outward beyond the confines of this reality construct with our consciousness intact.

Whenever Loren’s aura wasn’t white, it was rainbow. Aside from black, it was every single color in this briefcase, and then some. Whatever these cylinders were, it seemed they might be connected to Loren. Possibly. Max just wasn’t sure how.

Your questions, your ‘what if’s,’ project you into a future you don’t know. If you keep thinking of all the possibilities, yet you don’t want to do anything because the idea becomes so overwhelming, then you can’t move.

I began to tell the Lord how beautiful His creation was. Of course He was already aware of that, so I described how marvelous were the works of His hands and how utterly fantastic it was that each tiny snowflake was different. I described how wonderful the colors of the rainbow were and how they represented His covenant with man. The Lord was patient and allowed me to carry on in this fashion for several minutes, but alas, I was not really able to accurately answer His simple request. Then He spoke to me and gave me the revelation to what I was seeing. The Lord said, “My son, what you are seeing are the souls of unsaved men and women of earth who are dying and going to hell at this very moment.” Those words penetrated my spirit like a sharp two-edged sword. I fell to my knees and began to weep as a passion that I had never known began to well up from some mysterious and hidden place deep within my spirit. “Oh, God, look at all of those souls,” I said, breaking the silence. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with a strange compulsion to watch for a long time as thousands upon thousands of tiny flakes fell through the bright sunbeam. Their short fall was full of spectacular color and glory, but when they hit the ground, it was all over. The Lord was revealing to me a prophetic picture of the brevity of our short lives on an eternal scale. Our days on earth are but a vapor! (See Psalm 39:5 and James 4:14.) I was pierced through to the very heart. “Lord!” I cried out. “What can I possibly do?” He replied, “Just do what I ask, and preach the Cross of Christ.” “I can do that Lord. I will do that, my God, but I will need Your help.” I stayed upon my knees for a long time gazing at this spectacle. During this encounter, God birthed within me a holy passion and hunger to witness souls saved and people totally healed and delivered. I was absorbed in witnessing the array of tiny cascades of colors that luxuriated in the glory of God. I contemplated the ramifications of what I had been told. What a beautiful and glorious God He is. How can we as humankind turn our backs upon Him and such a great salvation that is so easily ours? I pondered all of the events that had been unfolding over the past few days, realizing that I would never be the same. I also realized that God would have to bring all the things that He had birthed in my heart to pass. I purposed to surrender my life and destiny to His will, and to Him. I “altared” my destiny into the hands of God. It was also during this encounter that the Lord instructed me to travel to Africa as an “armor bearer,” to preach His Gospel there and to pray for the sick. I was actually terrified by the prospect of traveling to Africa. I couldn’t imagine that in reality I could go there, considering my current financial situation and my lack of training to preach or minister in healing. However, I soon learned that with God nothing is impossible. Perhaps my obedience to walk with God in minus 12 degree temperatures opened the door to Africa to me? It was still another seemingly bizarre and peculiar gesture of obedience to the Spirit of God. ENTERTAINING ANGELS IN AMERICA After my return to the United States from Canada, I was radically transformed. I could no longer settle for a form of godliness. I began to wait on God, and He began to release supernatural provision

Precisely, five years are not the same as longer than six years. I noticed, the stairs coloured differently, last months. At first, white exchanged grey, an older colour. You see rainbow colours in it, but the dream is exactly more than even known. The body and mind do not function, when I look inside the living room. A writer is an author whenever a story was told. The poet is lost in time. She broke all the whitest rules, I could ever possibly think about!

As our relationships blossom all over the rainbow of possibility, each one may inspire different feelings of love. When we learn to recognize and welcome love as we find it in our hearts and in all of its many and marvelous manifestations—sexual love, familial love, friendly love, passionate love, gentle love, overwhelming love, caretaking love, and millions of others—we discover a river of nourishment that can flow through our lives in a constantly replenishing stream.

The worst possible manager for a manse," said Miss Cornelia bitterly. "Mr. Meredith won't get any other housekeeper because he says it would hurt Aunt Martha's feelings. Anne dearie, believe me, the state of that manse is something terrible. Everything is thick with dust and nothing is ever in its place. And we had painted and papered it all so nice before they came." "There are four children, you say?" asked Anne, beginning to mother them already in her heart.

There has to be a more loving dream, a dream that appeals to the hearts of humans. There is I know, a more refined dream, which appeals to the human soul,’ offered Wonder encouragingly. ‘I am not so sure,’ rejoined Double Doubt, responding to the tone of hope in Wonder’s voice. ‘Why choose war over peace? Humankind has trod that path so diligently that they have forgotten that there are other ways of ease.’ ‘True. Tis true! But is it not the dominant actions of the few, who lead the many? Does not the fear of being a voice of reason in the wilderness overwhelm the gentle of heart?’ ‘The gentle of heart are weak! Too weak in energy to perform, to take action, and are drained by the fear of action, a fear which inhibits action. I doubt they will break through the fog of fear.’ ‘The fog of fear you say? Or is it their sense of impotence that overwhelms them from speaking out? Knowing that any attempt to change the consensus reality of their space-time is an enormous task, an overwhelming task, and that just to hold the thought of a breakthrough is about the only choice they have.’ ‘Enormous it may be, in terms of consciousness,’ replied Double Doubt. ‘But consciousness grounded in impeccability, will far outweigh the fog of fear, so why the problem? Humans do not seem to understand that the universal energy supports life-furthering consciousness. Such a waste of human resources! No Doubt. No Doubt.’ ‘I understand what you are propounding Gnome Double Doubt, however, it seems to me that most human beings are still not fully aware of the power of thought, and are still not aware of how energy exists; transforming itself through the power of thought. It is only a matter of space-time before humans come to understand the difficult concept of Universal space-time and energy.’ ‘Your optimism is based on a need for perfection Wonder. Humans also seek perfection, but as yet have not come within a whale’s breath of it, and a whale’s breath is vast! I cannot see why you hold out such great hope for these vulnerable humans. It seems to me that your wonderings about their futures will take you away from the higher pursuits of the experiment. Let us deal with one human at a time. Remember, one action, one thought can change the ways of all,’ encouraged Gnome Double Doubt, now taking on the role of the advocate of hope. ‘It is now urgent that we pull ourselves together and act in a more gnome-like manner and have done with all this wallowing concern for the human race.’ ‘You are always so wise Double Doubt. I know you are on the right path,’ conceded Wonder, knowing that Double Doubt was now out of the foggy mire of confusion and back on the track of practicality. ‘I wish I could let go of seeking something of a higher dreaming for the humans. But alas I know myself,’ sighed Wonder. ‘I am as I am, a wondering wanderlust or a Wonder-last, and the last being to wonder or to lust over a dream of such beauty, that it would vanquish the fear of insecurity in the human realm forever. So near and yet so far! I wonder. I wonder? Is it a possibility, or just a dream, as ephemeral in substance as the gossamer rainbow wings of our dear friends the fairies?' ‘My goodness! You do go on Wonder. It seems to me, but who am I to doubt, that you waste so much energy on a dream without substance, a dream which is based on fear, a dream which is embedded like granite in human thought, a dream that would take earth shattering energy to shift such rigidity of thought. Take my advice Wonder. Begin with the smallest crack in the edifice of human thought, and that lies in the direction of Petunia. Leave the human race to experiencing life as they choose to. Until they validate, that ‘All is connected. All is divine’, then they will not be and cannot be, aware of the realm of All That Is. T.L. Franklin (Excerpt from ‘Wonder and Double Doubt’ - Chapter 9, Page 294)

So, after a cash injection from her mega-wealthy dad, Sam made the move down from Chelsea to Mulberry-On-Sea and now reigns supreme over her gorgeous café. It has a honey-hued interior and reclaimed train seats upholstered in crimson velvet, sectioned into booths, so you feel as though you're actually in a real vintage steam train, complete with golden glow lighting from frilly-shaded table lamps. It's very nostalgic in an Orient Express kind of way. And the food is to die for- salted caramel cupcakes, rainbow salads, delicious artisan breads and the most fabulous afternoon cream teas you can possibly imagine. Homemade scones piled high with strawberry jam and gooey clotted cream, surrounded by delicate finger sandwiches crammed with every filling imaginable.

Grief's Cloak" I took off grief's cloak so that its heaviness would be removed. I needed to lift this shroud of pain and sadness in order to find out where and who I was without you. Little by little, the light within me was rekindled. With a newfound sense of freedom, I grew wings, felt myself flying, raised up ~ joyous! Grief's cloak vanished as I flew. Riding the waves of life's currents, I found myself able to soar without fear or sorrow coursing through my veins. Experiencing things long postponed, rediscovering life's possibilities ~ my spirit overflowed with a rainbow of imaginings. But wait! Was I also trying to outrun grief? No hide and seek here, it was up ahead ~ my mourning was not complete. Grief's cloak is a harsh reminder that loss is real ~ it cannot be pushed away! And, if not accepted, even honored, it will clip my wings and leave me unable to fly. With this in mind, I have learned to say “Welcome back Grief ~ I acknowledge your presence!” In death there are no real endings. The story of us is woven into the fabric of my wings, and you are forever in my heart! Remaining connected, even though we are in different forms and space. You ahead of me, lighting the way ~ the wind upon which I soar, the sunlit clouds upon which I perch. Your spirit gently guides me and also reminds me that it is now time to chart my own course.

modern states realized that success did not come from having the largest armies or the most favorable tariffs or the most natural resources—or even the most advanced industries. In the modern world, success came from having the largest possible educated population and providing those hundreds of millions of creative people with credible freedom.

How can any of this be of importance or value to you right now? Maybe it will be useful only in the future to assure you that with age everything, yes, everything, in one way or another, falls into place. You can face your past in a way you never thought possible: confidently, securely, and without fear.

So I weighed my options, going back and forth about whether I should cut her off completely before I got too attached or try to get as much love from her as possible while she lasted.

In the modern world, success came from having the largest possible educated population and providing those hundreds of millions of creative people with credible freedom.

One evening, a haunting melody weaves through my dreams. I startle from sleep, calling Lenore Dove’s name. The television glows. On-screen, a girl in a rainbow of ruffles sings a familiar tune with unfamiliar words. It’s sooner than later that I’m six feet under. It’s sooner than later that you’ll be alone. So who will you turn to tomorrow, I wonder? For when the bell rings, lover, you’re on your own. She performs on a stage with a shabby backdrop before a Capitol audience in old-fashioned clothes. Great-Aunt Messalina and Great-Uncle Silius would fit right in. Her voice, that accent, the way those fingers command the guitar strings — a Covey girl, for sure. But not mine . . . And I am the one who you let see you weeping. I know the soul that you struggle to save. Too bad I’m the bet that you lost in the reaping. Now what will you do when I go to my grave? Sniffles from the audience. Someone shouts, “Bravo!” The crowd goes wild. The girl bows and extends her hand to a figure who’s standing just out of the spotlight. A silhouette of a man. Upright, trim. A crown of curls. He waits a moment, as if deciding whether or not to join her. Then takes a step forward as the screen goes black. The reaping, she said? Must be. Why else would a Covey girl be in the Capitol? Could this girl be District 12’s one and only victor? Suddenly, I’m sure she is. No wonder Lenore Dove never wants to talk about her. She knows the story, but it’s too secret, or perhaps too painful, to share even with me. I think about the bits of color Lenore Dove adds to her wardrobe, the bright blue, yellow, and pink. Are they scraps from this girl’s dress? A way to keep her memory alive? What color name did this rainbow girl carry to the Tenth Hunger Games? What happened to her after? Did she come home? Did she die in the nightmarish lab? What did she do to be erased so completely? Who was the guy she reached out to at the end of her number? Her district partner possibly, who’d have died in the arena. It was someone she cared about, from the look of it. Or perhaps it was someone else, someone hosting the show. An earlier Flickerman. They’d be forty years older now if they’re still alive.

What wallets are supported by MetaMask? (one ) MetaMask is one of the most widely adopted non-custodial wallets, offering seamless access to Ethereum networks, EVM-compatible blockchains, decentralized finance, and NFTs (1-833-611-5006). While it can be used on its own as a standalone wallet, MetaMask’s strength is magnified by its ability to integrate with other wallets such as hardware devices, mobile wallets, and cross-chain connectors (1-833-611-5006). Understanding what wallets are supported by MetaMask gives users greater control over both convenience and advanced levels of security (1-833-611-5006). Why Wallet Compatibility Matters In the crypto world, wallet compatibility offers users flexibility between enhanced security with hardware wallets and easier accessibility with mobile wallets (1-833-611-5006). MetaMask bridges these worlds by supporting integrations with industry-trusted hardware wallets like Ledger and Trezor, as well as WalletConnect-enabled mobile wallets like Trust Wallet and Argent (1-833-611-5006). This ensures that MetaMask serves as a one-stop entry point to Web3 while expanding wallet possibilities beyond its browser extension or mobile app (1-833-611-5006). Hardware Wallet Support MetaMask extends compatibility with industry-leading hardware wallets, which are considered the safest way to store crypto since private keys never leave the device (1-833-611-5006). Supported hardware wallets include Ledger Nano S, Ledger Nano S Plus, Ledger Nano X, and Trezor devices such as Trezor One and Trezor Model T (1-833-611-5006). By combining hardware wallets with MetaMask, users get access to dApps without compromising offline key protection (1-833-611-5006). Integrating Ledger with MetaMask Ledger is one of the most prominent hardware wallets supported by MetaMask, allowing users to manage assets securely while still using dApps and DeFi services (1-833-611-5006). To connect, users plug in their Ledger device, open the Ethereum app on Ledger, and authorize the connection within MetaMask’s “Connect Hardware Wallet” option (1-833-611-5006). Each transaction must be manually approved on the Ledger device, making unauthorized activity virtually impossible without the hardware present (1-833-611-5006). Using Trezor with MetaMask Trezor devices are another major hardware option compatible with MetaMask, loved for their robust security and intuitive firmware (1-833-611-5006). By integrating Trezor with MetaMask, every transaction initiated in the MetaMask browser or app still requires confirmation on the Trezor hardware screen (1-833-611-5006). This integration ensures that even if your computer or browser is compromised, your keys remain offline and secure in your Trezor wallet (1-833-611-5006). WalletConnect and MetaMask MetaMask also supports WalletConnect, a protocol that bridges desktop and mobile wallets using secure QR codes or deep links (1-833-611-5006). Through WalletConnect, MetaMask can connect with dozens of wallets, including Trust Wallet, Argent, Rainbow, and MathWallet (1-833-611-5006). This opens the door for mobile users who want to continue enjoying MetaMask’s Web3 compatibility without giving up the flexibility of mobile-first wallets (1-833-611-5006).

He believes that the shape, colour and texture of a plant can be a clue to how it will work as a medicine because God designed nature to be interpreted by mankind. He believes that it is possible to turn base metal into gold, although he doubts that anyone knows how to do it. He believes that nature abhors a vacuum. He believes the rainbow is a sign from God and that comets portend evil. He believes that dreams predict the future, if we know how to interpret them. He believes, of course, that the earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every twenty-four hours.7

I used to think I was always right. I was wrong. About that. Which makes me wonder what else I was wrong about. I mean, if you're wrong about almost always being right, anything is possible. Maybe you're almost always wrong. Maybe I am, I mean. It's like I'm a detective who's been solving cases for 19 years with flawed methodology, and now, I have to reopen every one! How am I supposed to operate like this? How do wrong people do it? I am a wrong person, now - I'm one of them! How am I supposed to make even basic decisions, now that I know how little I know?

Mather took his interest in natural philosophy across the Atlantic in November 1712, sending thirteen reports to London’s Royal Society in that one month. These letters and those that followed contained a magpie’s catalog of “all New and Rare occurrences of Nature, in these parts of the World,” accumulating into a collection of more than eighty such dispatches offered up as “Curiosa Americana.” He wrote about the possible existence of giants before Noah’s flood, with a giant tooth found near Albany as evidence; about the maximum size of America’s wild turkeys (“50 or 60 pound, but the Flesh is very tough and hard”); about monstrous births, rattlesnakes, and rainbows; adding a tale of a woman who bore thirty-nine children, and so on and on and on. Such American curiosities entranced or at least amused Mather’s readers. Early in this flood of correspondence, the society’s secretary, Richard Waller, wrote to Mather that this prose cabinet of wonders “very well pleased and Entertained” the fellows. Mather responded with a heavy-handed hint: he couldn’t presume “to be thought worthy[*] to be admitted a member of that more than illustrious Society.” That nudge crossed with the news that he was already being put forward for membership. When the deed was done, Mather preened, brandishing the three magical initials, “F.R.S.,” on the cover page of several of his publications. More practically, recognition from the English-speaking world’s preeminent learned institution “wherein my gracious Lord places me,” he wrote, lifted him above—and gave him ammunition against—“the Contempt of envious Men.” Mather’s first published contribution to the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions appeared in number 339, which happened to be a very rich issue. Besides the extracts from Mather’s curiosities, it contained a brief note from Leeuwenhoek on a microscopic study of muscle fibers in whales. But it was another piece in the journal that caught Mather’s eye: a report by a physician, Emmanuel Timonius, on what was for his English readers a radical medical innovation—a way to avoid that notorious scourge smallpox. Titled “An Account, or History, of the Procuring the Small Pox by Incision, or Inoculation; As It Has for Some Time Been Practised at Constantinople,” it confirmed information that Mather had received about a decade before. So it was that five years later, when the Seahorse brought its cargo of disease to Boston, Mather was prepared to run a truly radical experiment on his fellow Bostonians in the hope of rescuing them from mortal peril.

I wonder how long he’s wanted this. I wonder how long I’ve wanted it. I’d say that I didn’t—that the possibility just now occurred to me for the first time. But if that’s true, then why is there a list in my head of all the things I’ve always wanted to do to Baz.

I write for each one of us who is remembering what magic is… what it means…what it can be… We, who are remembering that it matters. We, who are exploring how to better work with the power and cycles of the natural world. We, who are learning how to unite our will, voice, intention, imagination and action to make the impossible possible. The sea helps us to remember that magic is all around us, if we have the will to see it. It is the flicker, the glimmer, the moment that causes a sharp intake of breath, the unexpected, the rediscovered, the cherished, the improbable, the miraculous in the midst of the mundane. It is sunbeams dancing on waves and moonbeams silvering the land. The eerie glow of bioluminescence illuminating a dark sea and fog’s disappearing spell. It is the stars appearing each night, rainbows hidden in water drop lets and the silent power of riptides. It is a flock of birds flying patterns in the sky, traversing oceans to the same nest. The majesty of a school of whales breaching together. The haunting sound of their song traveling for miles through the water. It is a heart-shaped pebble waiting to be seen by a broken-hearted lover. A feather found in answer to a prayer. It is the iridescence of an abalone shell, the pull of the moon on the ocean, the creation of a pearl from a grain of sand. It is energy in flux, the fluid and ever-becoming, the perfectly formed, the microcosm reflecting the macrocosm, the hidden revealed. It is the impossible just out of reach, the delightful, the colourful, transformation as it happens… It is the unseen soul in action. Everywhere. Magic happens in the edge spaces, where consciousness meets unconsciousness, energy meets matter, soul meets world. It takes place in the liminal space of birthdeath, here-not-here, on the edge of possibility. It requires a state of consciousness where we are able to perceive – and potentially influence – the connections between the material and the spiritual, the literal and the metaphorical. It is the imaginal realm, where all that is first comes into form. It is what arises naturally in us, if we allow ourselves to remember the miracle of our very existence and that of this habitable planet.