Refuge Related Quotes

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative.

The perfection of his relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defects, all our evils; for our childhood is born of his fatherhood. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to him, “Thou art my refuge, because thou art my home.

Relatively new to the faith, she stumbled around at first. But after a bit, she settled down to read her favorite psalms. The verses she often referred to were Psalm 27:14, 52:8-9, and 91:2. She read all three passages, then focused on the verse from Psalm 91: I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress; My God, in Him I will trust.

The coming decades are likely to challenge much of what we think we know about what progress is, and about who we are in relation to the rest of nature. Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?

help to create an environment of relative safety, an atmosphere that conveys refuge, hope and possibility.

Most people relate to themselves as storytellers. They usually have no use for poems, and although the occasional “because” or “in order that” gets knotted into the thread of life, they generally detest any brooding that goes beyond that; they love the orderly sequence of facts because it has the look of necessity, and the impression that their life has a “course” is somehow their refuge from chaos. It now came to Ulrich that he had lost his elementary, narrative mode of thought to which private life still clings, even though everything in public life has already ceased to be narrative and no longer follows a thread, but instead spreads out as an infinitely interwoven surface.

The most dangerous place for your life is in your home, as you probably know. Most people are killed by family or those they are relatively close to. Refuges for women are important to deal with this. But in the end there are certain risks you take – when you walk in the streets you might be hit by a car.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Virginia elites had taken the best land for themselves, leaving the former indentured servants land poor and resentful. Inequalities of class proved the source of great tension in the colony, fostering instances of rebellion great and small. These tensions were buried when race entered the picture as the prime dividing line for status within the colony. There would be no alliance between blacks and lower-class whites, who each in their own way had legitimate grievances against their overlords. Instead, poor whites, encouraged by the policies of the elites, took refuge in their whiteness and the dream that one day they, too, could become slave owners, though only a relative handful could ever hope to amass the land, wealth, and social position of the most prominent members of the Virginia gentry, who gained their place early on and would keep it for decades to come.

...in providing refuge and in challenging us - [stories] are instruments of healing. For all these reasons, the power of story is one we must not abdicate. The church needs to be a place where stories are told, where we are invited back into the stories we live by, and where we come to find ourselves at home again in a dwelling made of words that is reconstructed in every telling. We need good storytellers to keep us alive and imagining. The exercise of the imagination is the training ground of compassion. Stories educate the heart. Stories, like poetry, are related to prayer. They have an incantatory, invocational function. They call forth and focus our dread and desire. They are vehicles of confession, thanksgiving, petition.

Our lives were not without anxiety, since our relatives in Germany were suffering under Hitler’s anti-Jewish laws. After the pogroms in 1938 my two uncles (my mother’s brothers) fled Germany, finding safe refuge in North America. My elderly grandmother came to live with us. She was seventy-three years old at the time. After May 1940 the good times were few and far between

So, for example, if I had been raised in a critical or demanding environment, it might have been easier for me, relatively speaking, to find refuge in worse-than or need-to-be-seen-as justifications. Those who were raised in affluent or sanctimonious environments, on the other hand, may naturally gravitate to better-than and I-deserve justifications, and so on. Need-to-be-seen-as boxes might easily arise in such circumstances as well. “But the key point, and the point that is the same for all of us, is that we all grab for justification, however we can get it. Because grabbing for justification is something we do, we can undo it. Whether we find justification in how we are worse or in how we are better, we can each find our way to a place where we have no need for justification at all. We can find our way to peace—deep, lasting, authentic peace—even when war is breaking out around us.

Last night, I spoke at one of the Circle Meetings of the Baptist Church. Afterward, a Kenyan friend, Wangari Waigwa-Stone, and I spoke about darkness and stars. “I was raised under an African sky,” she said. “Darkness was never something I was afraid of. The clarity, definition, and profusion of stars became maps as to how one navigates at night. I always knew where I was simply by looking up.” She paused. “My sons do not have these guides. They have no relationship to darkness, nothing in their imagination tells them there are pathways in the night they can move through.” “I have a Norwegian friend who says, ‘City lights are a conspiracy against higher thought,’ ” I added. “Indeed,” Wangari said, smiling, her rich, deep voice resonating. “I am Kikuyu. My people believe if you are close to the Earth, you are close to people.” “How so?” I asked. “What an African woman nurtures in the soil will eventually feed her family. Likewise, what she nurtures in her relations will ultimately nurture her community. It is a matter of living the circle. “Because we have forgotten our kinship with the land,” she continued, “our kinship with each other has become pale. We shy away from accountability and involvement. We choose to be occupied, which is quite different from being engaged. In America, time is money. In Kenya, time is relationship. We look at investments differently.

According to the Islamic law of international treaties, Muslims could make treaties of peace and live at peace with countries outside of dār al-islām if they themselves were not threatened by them. The best example of such a situation is the friendly relations the Prophet himself had with then Christian Abyssinians, who had in fact given refuge to some of the Muslims from Mecca shortly after the advent of the Quranic revelation. Many instances of such peaceful coexistence are also to be seen between Muslim and Christian kingdoms in Spain and Hindu and Muslim states in India. In

If there was any part of the global crisis that the United States owned, it was the chaos that was unfolding in the Middle East. The United States had not played a direct role in the ethnic cleansing that had taken place in Southeast Asia, or the wars that had broken out across Africa. But the United States was directly responsible for the chain of events that led up to the destruction of Iraq and the related dissolution of Syria. If there were any refugees this country might have felt a moral obligation to accept, it would be people from some of the very countries listed in the ban.

The individuals under a totalitarian regime are not free, even though man in the collective sense is free. Finally, when the Empire delivers the entire human species, freedom will reign over herds of slaves, who at least will be free in relation to God and, in general, in relation to every kind of transcendence. The dialectic miracle, the transformation of quantity into quality, is explained here: it is the decision to call total servitude freedom. Moreover, as in all the examples cited by Hegel and Marx, there is no objective transformation, but only a subjective change of denomination. In other words, there is no miracle. If the only hope of nihilism lies in thinking that millions of slaves can one day constitute a humanity which will be freed forever, then history is nothing but a desperate dream. Historical thought was to deliver man from subjection to a divinity; but this liberation demanded of him the most absolute subjection to historical evolution. Then man takes refuge in the permanence of the party in the same way that he formerly prostrated himself before the altar. That is why the era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity. The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

The emergence of society—the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen. Not only would we not agree with the Greeks that a life spent in the privacy of “one’s own” (idion), outside the world of the common, is “idiotic” by definition, or with the Romans to whom privacy offered but a temporary refuge from the business of the res publica; we call private today a sphere of intimacy whose beginnings we may be able to trace back to late Roman, though hardly to any period of Greek antiquity, but whose peculiar manifoldness and variety were certainly unknown to any period prior to the modern age. This is not merely a matter of shifted emphasis. In ancient feeling the privative trait of privacy, indicated in the word itself, was all-important; it meant literally a state of being deprived of something, and even of the highest and most human of man’s capacities. A man who lived only a private life, who like the slave was not permitted to enter the public realm, or like the barbarian had chosen not to establish such a realm, was not fully human. We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word “privacy,” and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism. However, it seems even more important that modern privacy is at least as sharply opposed to the social realm—unknown to the ancients who considered its content a private matter—as it is to the political, properly speaking. The decisive historical fact is that modern privacy in its most relevant function, to shelter the intimate, was discovered as the opposite not of the political sphere but of the social, to which it is therefore more closely and authentically related. The

I tell my seven-year-old son about his remarkable forefathers. I leave out the bloody details. (For him these people are like knights, which sounds better than hangmen or executioners.) In his bedroom hangs a collage made up of photos of long-dead family members--great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, their aunts, their uncles, their nephews and nieces..Sometimes at night he wants to hear stories about these people, and I tell him what I know about them. Happy stories, sad stories, frightening stories. For him the family is a safe refuge, a link binding him to many people whom he loves and who love him. I once heard that everyone on this earth is at least distantly related to everyone else. Somehow this is a comforting idea.

Battling racism and battling heterosexist and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. None of these struggles are ever easy, and even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable. And all power is relative. Recognizing the existence as well as the limitations of my own power, and accepting the responsibility for using it in my own behalf, involve me in direct and daily actions that preclude denial as possible refuge. Simone de Beauvoir’s words echo in my head: “It is in the recognition of the genuine conditions of our lives that we gain the strength to act and our motivation for change.

More than fifteen years later, Uganda's Self-Reliance Strategy has endured as a relatively unique experiment. It was further formalized within Uganda's 2006 Refugee Act, now regarded as one of the most progressive pieces of refugee legislation in Africa. At times, self-reliance has been criticized for legitimizing the premature withdrawal of food rations. The quality of plots of land distributed to refugees has also become uneven as numbers have increased. And refugees still clearly face challenges, including discrimination and informal barriers to market participation. But compared to the alternatives in neighbouring countries, the model is both a shining beacon of policy innovation and a rare opportunity to understand what happens when refugees are given autonomy.

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

SHOHAKU OKUMURA: In chapter 30, Sawaki Roshi and Uchiyama Roshi talked about people who chase external things and lose sight of themselves. In this chapter they discuss how one’s own opinion is not valid. On the surface, these two are contradictory. How can we seek ourselves without having our own opinion? When the Buddha, Sawaki Roshi, and Uchiyama Roshi talk about “self” they don’t mean the image of ourselves created within the framework of separation between I as subject and others as objects. In Harischandra Kaviratna’s translation of the Dhammapada, the Buddha says, “The self is the master of the self. Who else can that master be? With the self fully subdued, one obtains the sublime refuge, which is very difficult to achieve.” Self is master of the self, but the self still needs to be subdued. In the Japanese translation of this verse, “subdued” is more like “harmonized” or “well tuned.” In Genjokoan, Dogen said, “To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.” To study the self, we need to forget the self. In these sayings, self is not a fixed, permanent entity separate from other beings. Self is our body and mind, that is, a collection of the five aggregates: form, sensation, perception, formation, and consciousness. These aggregates are always changing, but somehow we create a fixed self-image based on our past experiences and relations with others. We grasp this image as I. This I is an illusion, yet we measure everything based on the tunnel vision of this fictitious self. When we see fiction as fiction, illusion as illusion, they can be useful. Although no map is reality itself, when we know how a map was made, what its distortions are, and how to use it, the map can be a useful tool for understanding reality. However, if we don’t see a model’s limitations, we build our entire lives on a delusion.

On undetached people who are full of self-will.4 People say: ‘O Lord, I wish that I stood as well with God and that I had as much devotion and peace with God as other people, and that I could be like them or could be as poor as they are.’ Or they say: ‘It never works for me unless I am in this or that particular place and do this or that particular thing. I must go to somewhere remote or live in a hermitage or a monastery.’ Truly, it is you who are the cause of this yourself, and nothing else. It is your own self-will, even if you don’t know it or this doesn’t seem to you to be the case. The lack of peace that you feel can only come from your own self-will, whether you are aware of this or not. Whatever we think – that we should avoid certain things and seek out others, whether these be places or people, particular forms of devotion, this group of people or this kind of activity – these are not to blame for the fact that you are held back by devotional practices and by things; rather it is you as you exist in these things who hold yourself back, for you do not stand in the proper relation to them. Start with yourself therefore and take leave of yourself. Truly, if you do not depart from yourself, then wherever you take refuge, you will find obstacles and unrest, wherever it may be. Those who seek peace in external things, whether in places or devotional practices, people or works, in withdrawal from the world or poverty or self-abasement: however great these things may be or whatever their character, they are still nothing at all and cannot be the source of peace. Those who seek in this way, seek wrongly, and the farther they range, the less they find what they are looking for. They proceed like someone who has lost their way: the farther they go, the more lost they become. But what then should they do? First of all, they should renounce themselves, and then they will have renounced all things. Truly, if someone were to renounce a kingdom or the whole world while still holding on to themselves, then they would have renounced nothing at all. And indeed, if someone renounces themselves, then whatever they might keep, whether it be a kingdom or honour or whatever it may be, they will still have renounced all things. St Peter said, ‘See, Lord, we have left everything’ (Matt. 19:27), when he had left nothing more than a mere net and his little boat, and a saint5 comments that whoever willingly renounces what is small, renounces not only this but also everything which worldly people can possess or indeed even desire. Whoever renounces their own will and their own self, renounces all things as surely as if all things were in that person’s possession to do with as they pleased, for what you do not wish to desire, you have given over and given up to God. Therefore our Lord said, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ (Matt. 5:3), which is to say those who are poor in will. Let no one be in any doubt about this: if there were a better way, then our Lord would have told us, who said, ‘If anyone would follow me, he must first deny himself’ (Matt 16:24). This is the point which counts. Examine yourself, and wherever you find yourself, then take leave of yourself. This is the best way of all.

Oh, my son loves Japan!" she says, her voice soaring. "He's been studying Japanese, all by himself, and he went there recently actually for the first time, and he said he just felt immediately at home there, you know really comfortable. I mean with him it's mostly the, the, the-" My brain silently fills in the next word: anime. "The animation and so on, you know he's really into technology. I mean he's only seventeen, you know so who knows what is going to happen. But it does seem like, you know, a real thing for him." "Right," I say, and I nod. "That's great." Sometimes at times like these, what fills my head is the things I do not and could not ever say. For example: "You have no idea how many stories I've heard exactly like that one!" Or: "You know, even though I'm generally reluctant to admit the existence of 'types' among people, I'm often shocked by the parallels that exist between the kind of young men who like anime and all things Japanese, to the extent that I sometimes struggle to believe that a group of people with such intensely similar interests are in fact individuals." Certainly I do not say: "And what would you like to bet that he ends up marrying a Japanese woman and becomes an academic teaching the world about Japanese culture while she gives up her job to bring up his children?" But even if these things flicker through my mind, I'm not anywhere near as rageful as any of that makes me sound. In fact, if anything, what I feel in this particular moment is something like envy, for this son of hers that I've never met, I understand that taking refuge in Japan and being shielded from the demands of full adulthood is a privilege offered to predominantly white, educated, Anglophone men, because they are deemed the most desirable that the world has to offer; that it feeds off power relations that date back to the American occupation and beyond, and which hew closely to the colonial paradigm even if there are important differences (and even if Japan also has a history of colonialism of its own to reckon with); and that even leaving all of this aside, this Peter Pan status is not something I am interested in. And yet I can't help but look at the sort of person who feels "immediately" comfortable in Japan and wish that I had felt like that, only because it might validate the way I've dedicated a lot of my life to the country, but because the security of that sensation in itself feels like something I would love to experience.

It contrives the acceptance of injustice, crime, and falsehood by the promise of a miracle. Still greater production, still more power, uninterrupted labor, incessant suffering, permanent war, and then a moment will come when universal bondage in the totalitarian empire will be miraculously changed into its opposite: free leisure in a universal republic. Pseudo-revolutionary mystification has now acquired a formula: all freedom must be crushed in order to conquer the empire, and one day the empire will be the equivalent of freedom. And so the way to unity passes through totality.[...]Totality is, in effect, nothing other than the ancient dream of unity common to both believers and rebels, but projected horizontally onto an earth deprived of God. To renounce every value, therefore, amounts to renouncing rebellion in order to accept the Empire and slavery. Criticism of formal values cannot pass over the concept of freedom. Once the impossibility has been recognized of creating, by means of the forces of rebellion alone, the free individual of whom the romantics dreamed, freedom itself has also been incorporated in the movement of history. It has become freedom fighting for existence, which, in order to exist, must create itself. Identified with the dynamism of history, it cannot play its proper role until history comes to a stop, in the realization of the Universal City. Until then, every one of its victories will lead to an antithesis that will render it pointless. The German nation frees itself from its oppressors, but at the price of the freedom of every German. The individuals under a totalitarian regime are not free, even though man in the collective sense is free. Finally, when the Empire delivers the entire human species, freedom will reign over herds of slaves, who at least will be free in relation to God and, in general, in relation to every kind of transcendence. The dialectic miracle, the transformation of quantity into quality, is explained here: it is the decision to call total servitude freedom. Moreover, as in all the examples cited by Hegel and Marx, there is no objective transformation, but only a subjective change of denomination. In other words, there is no miracle. If the only hope of nihilism lies in thinking that millions of slaves can one day constitute a humanity which will be freed forever, then history is nothing but a desperate dream. Historical thought was to deliver man from subjection to a divinity; but this liberation demanded of him the most absolute subjection to historical evolution. Then man takes refuge in the permanence of the party in the same way that he formerly prostrated himself before the altar. That is why the era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity. The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

It is related that Satan came before Yahyâ . The latter saw that Satan had plucks of everything on his body. He asked him: “O Satan! What are these plucks?” He replied: “These are the desires with which I hunt mankind.” Yahyâ asked: “Do you have any of my plucks there?” He replied: “Perhaps you ate a stomach full which caused you to feel heavy and uncomfortable in offeringsalâh and remembering Allâh .” Yahyâ asked: “Is there anything else?” He replied: “No.” Yahyâ said: “I take an oath that I will never fill my stomach with food.” Satan said to him: “I take an oath that I will never advise a Muslim.” Among them is the love to have beautiful utensils, clothing and to adorn and decorate the house. When Satan sees that this quality has overpowered the heart of a particular person, he settles down and establishes himself in that person’s heart. He then continually invites him towards building the house, beautifying its roofs and walls, expanding it, etc. He also invites him towards beautifying himself with clothing and animals. He causes the person to undergo losses throughout his life in fulfilling all these demands. Once he gets him involved in all this, he does not have to go that person a second time because these very demands [and desires] lead him to fulfil other demands. This continues till his death. He thus dies in the path of Satan and in following his desires. An evil destiny is thus feared from all this. We seek refuge in Allâh

In 1969 the Khmer Rouge numbered only about 4,000. By 1975 their numbers were enough to defeat the government forces. Their victory was greatly helped by the American attack on Cambodia, which was carried out as an extension of the Vietnam War. In 1970 a military coup led by Lon Nol, possibly with American support, overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, and American and South Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia. One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War. The decision to bomb was taken by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and was originally justified on the grounds that North Vietnamese bases had been set up in Cambodia. The intention (according to a later defence by Kissinger’s aide, Peter W. Rodman) was to target only places with few Cambodians: ‘From the Joint Chiefs’ memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians. The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT; the overall programme was given the name MENU.’ Rodman makes the point that SUPPER, for instance, had troop concentrations, anti-aircraft, artillery, rocket and mortar positions, together with other military targets. Even if relatively few Cambodians were killed by the unpleasantly names items on the MENU, each of them was a person leading a life in a country not at war with the United States. And, as the bombing continued, these relative restraints were loosened. To these political decisions, physical and psychological distance made their familiar contribution. Roger Morris, a member of Kissinger’s staff, later described the deadened human responses: Though they spoke of terrible human suffering reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: 'capabilities', 'objectives', 'our chips', 'giveaway'. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men… They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereo-types. On the ground the stereotypes were replaced by people. In the villages hit by bombs and napalm, peasants were wounded or killed, often being burnt to death. Those who left alive took refuge in the forests. One Western ob-server commented, ‘it is difficult to imagine the intensity of their hatred to-wards those who are destroying their villages and property’. A raid killed twenty people in the village of Chalong. Afterwards seventy people from Chalong joined the Khmer Rouge. Prince Sihanouk said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger created the Khmer Rouge by expanding the war into Cambodia.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only by those who live in that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp Williams, who retired a year later, saying, “I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years.” On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.” Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy. The New York Times ran a page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.

Aristotle, who lived after the downfall of Sparta, gives a very hostile account of its constitution.5 What he says is so different from what other people say that it is difficult to believe he is speaking of the same place, e.g. 'The legislator wanted to make the whole State hardy and temperate, and he has carried out his intention in the case of men, but he has neglected the women, who live in every sort of intemperance and luxury. The consequence is that in such a State wealth is too highly valued, especially if the citizens fall under the dominion of their wives, after the manner of most warlike races…. Even in regard to courage, which is of no use in daily life, and is needed only in war, the influence of the Lacedaemonian women has been most mischievous…. This license of the Lacedaemonian women existed from the earliest times, and was only what might be expected. For ... when Lycurgus, as tradition says, wanted to bring the women under his laws, they resisted, and he gave up the attempt.' He goes on to accuse Spartans of avarice, which he attributes to the unequal distribution of property. Although lots cannot be sold, he says, they can be given or bequeathed. Two-fifths of all the land, he adds, belongs to women. The consequence is a great diminution in the number of citizens: it is said that once there were ten thousand, but at the time of the defeat by Thebes there were less than one thousand. Aristotle criticizes every point of the Spartan constitution. He says that the ephors are often very poor, and therefore easy to bribe; and their power is so great that even kings are compelled to court them, so that the constitution has been turned into a democracy. The ephors, we are told, have too much licence, and live in a manner contrary to the spirit of the constitution, while the strictness in relation to ordinary citizens is so intolerable that they take refuge in the secret illegal indulgence of sensual pleasures.

The society’s ‘look’ is a self-publicizing one. The American flag itself bears witness to this by its omnipresence, in fields and built-up areas, at service stations, and on graves in the cemeteries, not as a heroic sign, but as the trademark of a good brand. It is simply the label of the finest successful international enterprise, the US. This explains why the hyperrealists were able to paint it naively, without either irony or protest (Jim Dine in the sixties), in much the same way as Pop Art gleefully transposed the amazing banality of consumer goods on to its canvases. There is nothing here of the fierce parodying of the American anthem by Jimi Hendrix, merely the light irony and neutral humour of things that have become banal, the humour of the mobile home and the giant hamburger on the sixteen-foot long billboard, the pop and hyper humour so characteristic of the atmosphere of America, where things almost seem endowed with a certain indulgence towards their own banality. But they are indulgent towards their own craziness too. Looked at more generally, they do not lay claim to being extraordinary; they simply are extraordinary. They have that extravagance which makes up odd, everyday America. This oddness is not surrealistic (surrealism is an extravagance that is still aesthetic in nature and as such very European in inspiration); here, the extravagance has passed into things. Madness, which with us is subjective, has here become objective, and irony which is subjective with us has also turned into something objective. The fantasmagoria and excess which we locate in the mind and the mental faculties have passed into things themselves. Whatever the boredom, the hellish tedium of the everyday in the US or anywhere else, American banality will always be a thousand times more interesting than the European - and especially the French - variety. Perhaps because banality here is born of extreme distances, of the monotony of wide-open spaces and the radical absence of culture. It is a native flower here, asis the opposite extreme, that of speed and verticality, of an excess that verges on abandon, and indifference to values bordering on immorality, whereas French banality is a hangover from bourgeois everyday life, born out of a dying aristocratic culture and transmuted into petty-bourgeois mannerism as the bourgeoisie shrank away throughout the nineteenth century. This is the crux: it is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality, whereas the Americans have succeeded in preserving some humour in the material signs of manifest reality and wealth. This also explains why Europeans experience anything relating to statistics as tragic. They immediately read in them their individual failure and take refuge in a pained denunciation of the merely quantitative. The Americans, by contrast, see statistics as an optimistic stimulus, as representing the dimensions of their good fortune, their joyous membership of the majority. Theirs is the only country where quantity can be extolled without compunction.

ESTABLISH STABLE ANCHORS OF ATTENTION Mindfulness meditation typically involves something known as an anchor of attention—a neutral reference point that helps support mental stability. An anchor might be the sensation of our breath coming in and out of the nostrils, or the rising and falling of our abdomen. When we become lost in thought during practice, we can return to our anchor, fixing our attention on the stimuli we’ve chosen. But anchors can also intensify trauma. The breath, for instance, is far from neutral for many survivors. It’s an area of the body that can hold tension related to a trauma and connect to overwhelming, life-threatening events. When Dylan paid attention to the rising and falling of his abdomen, he would be swamped with memories of mocking faces while walking down the hallway. Other times, feeling a constriction of his breath in the chest echoed a feeling of immobility, which was a traumatic reminder. For Dylan, the breath simply wasn’t a neutral anchor. As a remedy, we can encourage survivors to establish stabilizing anchors of attention. This means finding a focus of attention that supports one’s window of tolerance—creating stability in the nervous system as opposed to dysregulation. Each person’s anchor will vary: for some, it could be the sensations of their hands resting on their thighs, or their buttocks on the cushion. Other stabilizing anchors might include another sense altogether, such as hearing or sight. When Dylan and I worked together, it took a while until he could find a part of his body that didn’t make him more agitated. He eventually found that the sense of hearing was a neutral anchor of attention. At my office, he’d listen for the sound of the birds or the traffic outside, which he found to be stabilizing. “It’s subtle,” he said to me, opening his eyes and rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “But it is a lot less charged. I’m not getting riled up the same way, which is a huge relief.” In sessions together, Dylan’s anchor was a spot he’d rest his attention on at the beginning of a session or a place to return to if he felt overwhelmed. If he practiced meditation at home—I’d recommended short periods if he could stay in his window of tolerance—he used hearing as an anchor, or “home base” as he called it. “I finally feel like I can access a kind of refuge,” he said quietly, placing his hand on his belly. “My body hasn’t felt safe in so long. It’s a relief to finally feel like I’m learning how to be in here.” Anchors of attention you can offer students and clients practicing mindfulness—besides the sensation of the breath in the abdomen or nostrils—include different physical sensations (feet, buttocks, back, hands) and other senses (seeing, smelling, hearing). One client of mine had a soft blanket that she would touch slowly as an anchor. Another used a candle. For some, walking meditation is a great way to develop more stable anchors of attention, such as the feeling of one’s feet on the ground—whatever supports stability and one’s window of tolerance. Experimentation is key. Using subtler anchors does come with benefits and drawbacks. One advantage to working with the breath is that it is dynamic and tends to hold our attention more easily. When we work with a sense that’s less tactile—hearing, for instance—we may be more prone to drifting off into distraction. The more tangible the anchor, the easier it is to return to it when attention wanders.

Generally speaking, you can have two different types of individuals. On the one hand, you can have a wealthy, successful person, surrounded by relatives and so on. If that person’s source of dignity and sense of worth is only material, then so long as his fortune remains, maybe that person can sustain a sense of security. But the moment the fortune wanes, the person will suffer because there is no other refuge. On the other hand, you can have another person enjoying similar economic status and financial success, but at the same time, that person is warm and affectionate and has a feeling of compassion. Because that person has another source of worth, another source that gives him or her a sense of dignity, another anchor, there is less chance of that person’s becoming depressed if his or her fortune happens to disappear. Through this type of reasoning you can see the very practical value of human warmth and affection in developing an inner sense of worth.

Dans l’intemporel, la liberté prêtée aux êtres individuels retourne à sa source divine ; en « ce jour-là », Dieu seul est le « Roi absolu » : l’essence même du libre arbitre », son fond inconditionné, s’identifie dès lors à l’Acte divin. C’est en Dieu seul que la liberté, l’acte et la vérité coïncident, et c’est pour cela que certains Soufis disent que les êtres, au jugement dernier, se jugeront eux-mêmes en Dieu, conformément d’ailleurs à un texte coranique selon lequel ce sont les membres de l’homme qui accusent ce dernier. L’homme est jugé d’après sa tendance essentielle ; celle-ci peut être conforme à l’attraction divine, elle peut être opposée à elle ou encore indécise entre les deux directions ; ce sont là respectivement les voies de « ceux sur lesquels est Ta grâce », de « ceux qui subissent Ta colère », et de « ceux qui errent », c’est-à-dire qui se dispersent dans l’indéfinité de l’existence, où ils tournent pour ainsi dire en rond. En parlant de ces trois tendances, le Prophète dessina une croix : la « voie droite » est la verticale ascendante ; la « colère divine » agit en sens inverse ; la dispersion de ceux qui « errent » est dans l’horizontale. Les mêmes tendances fondamentales se retrouvent dans tout l’univers ; elles constituent les dimensions ontologiques de la « hauteur » (at-tûl), de la « profondeur » (al-’umq) et de l’« ampleur » (al-’urd). L’Hindouisme désigne ces trois tendances cosmiques (gûnas) par les noms de sattva, rajas et tamas, sattva exprimant la conformité au Principe, rajas la dispersion centrifuge et tamas la chute, non seulement dans un sens dynamique et cyclique, bien entendu, mais aussi dans un sens statique et existentiel. On peut dire également qu’il n’y a, pour l’homme, qu’une seule tendance essentielle, celle qui le ramène vers sa propre Essence éternelle ; toutes les autres tendances ne sont que l’expression de l’ignorance créaturielle, aussi seront-elles retranchées, jugées. La demande que Dieu nous conduise sur la voie droite n’est donc rien d’autre que l’aspiration vers notre propre Essence prétemporelle. Selon l’exégèse ésotérique, la « voie droite » (aç-çirât al-mustaqîm) est l’Essence unique des êtres, comme l’indique ce verset de la sourate Hûd : « Il n’y a pas d’être vivant que Lui (Dieu) ne tienne par la mèche de son front ; en vérité, mon Seigneur est sur une voie droite ». Ainsi cette prière correspond à la demande essentielle et foncière de toute créature ; elle est exaucée par là même qu’elle est proférée. L’aspiration de l’homme vers Dieu comporte les deux aspects qu’exprime le verset: « C’est Toi que nous adorons [ou servons], et c’est auprès de Toi que nous cherchons refuge [ou aide] » ; l’adoration, c’est l’effacement de la volonté individuelle devant la Volonté divine, qui se révèle extérieurement par la Loi sacrée et intérieurement par les mouvements de la Grâce ; le recours à l’aide divine, c’est la participation à la Réalité divine par la Grâce et, plus directement, par la Connaissance. En dernière analyse, les mots : « C’est Toi que nous adorons » correspondent à l’« extinction » (al-fanâ), et les mots « c’est auprès de Toi que nous cherchons refuge » à la « subsistance » (al-baqâ) dans l’Être pur. Le verset que nous venons de mentionner est ainsi l’« isthme » (al-barzakh) entre les deux « océans » de l’Être (absolu) et de l’existence (relative).

if I had been raised in a critical or demanding environment, it might have been easier for me, relatively speaking, to find refuge in worse-than or need-to-be-seen-as justifications. Those who were raised in affluent or sanctimonious environments, on the other hand, may naturally gravitate to better-than and I-deserve justifications, and so on. Need-to-be-seen-as boxes might easily arise in such circumstances as well.

On all these grounds it is excellent that after the Heart of Jesus there is nothing among corporeal things either in Heaven or on earth that can be compared in excellence with the Heart of Mary - nothing holier, nothing more precious, nothing nobler, nothing greater, nothing sweeter, nothing more pleasing to God. And if we now go on to consider this admirable Heart in relation to men, to whom it is presented as an object of devotion, where shall we find anything sweeter or more tenderly than this virginal Heart? For it is the Heart of our heavenly mistress, our good Mother, our advocate, our consolation, our refuge; the source and seat of the charity, compassion, mercy and tender love of the Blessed Virgin for us; the centre of those unmeasured sorrows that our Blessed Mother suffered on the occasion of our redemption; finally, the model according to which we should form our hearts, the model of humility, purity, meekness, charity, love, and all other virtues.

The inability of refugees to earn a living within the standard UNHCR approach was not only psychologically diminishing for the refugees, but also highlighted the lack of viability of the financing model. Paying for 4 million refugees to live without work for ten years was manifestly unsustainable. Even at a cost of only $1,000 per refugee per year, which would have implied a drastic reduction in lifestyle relative to Syrian pre-refugee conditions, the bill would have amounted to $40bn.

There is no human creature in this country, or in any other, so defenceless as an illegitimate child, for the simple reason that, while it is to nobody’s material advantage to keep it alive, there are obvious reasons why its death would be welcome. Deprived, in almost every case, of a father’s protection, and a cause of disgrace to relatives who might otherwise have taken an affectionate interest in it, the poor thing has but one refuge – its mother’s love.

One family described their core value of hospitality, lived out as they cleaned the house together each Friday for the express purpose of welcoming people over the weekend. They wanted to be able to spontaneously invite others over, knowing their space was ready to receive them. All this was explained to their kids by connecting the dots between the practice of keeping house and the immense welcome of God. They talked about their apartment as a gift and a refuge, and how important it was for it to feel inviting. Hosting people was not about living some Magnolia life; it was how they loved their neighbors. Thus, Friday night cleanup was a faith practice. One family used the tradition of a summer road trip to visit relatives as a means to support being who God uniquely made each of them to be. Each family member got to design the itinerary for one day of the trip. On that day, everyone else went along with that person’s choices for restaurants and an activity. They talked about the wonder of God’s image in each person and how this was a fun way to see each member of the family just as God made them to be. Thus, a family trip was a faith ritual. What about your family? What unique characteristics need to be accounted for as you craft a vision for faith? • Who makes up your family? List the members. You may share a living space with them or not, live in the same town or not, be relationally close or not. • Next to each person on the list, jot down a few distinguishing key traits of that person. What are they like? What are they interested in? • What are some of your family’s strengths and loves as a group? Do you love a good party? Cheer for a certain team? Love a particular place or meal? • What are some of your family’s unique challenges right now? Do you have a child who doesn’t “fit the mold,” for whatever reason? Are finances tight? Have any of the relationships been strained or broken? • List anything else that feels important to you about who your family is and what they are like. What other traits make you, you?

[T]here is every probability that, although the historic scenes of many of the Arthurian exploits can be traced to the kingdom of Strathclyde or Cumbria, and the north of England generally, the poems celebrating them were chiefly framed in Armorica - the place of quiet retreat and refuge for the exiled Britons of our island - and that they thence came back to Britain itself, and also spread over the Courts of France and Germany in Norman-French.

What I try to convey to my patients is that they can meet the challenges life throws at them by changing the way they relate to them. The goal is to meet the challenges with equanimity, not to make them go away. When Suzuki Roshi said not to be bothered by the waves' fluctuations, he meant it. And one thing we can say for sure. Life gives us endless opportunity to practice. Mostly we fail. Who can say they are not bothered by anything, really? But when we make the effort, the results can be astonishing. In an insecure world, we can become our own refuge. Our eon do not have to have the last word.

Going to Moscow was a dream for us,' Ilich said years later. He and his younger brother started the course within weeks of Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia to crush the heady 'Prague Spring'. But they soon found that discipline at the cosmopolitan university, whose 6000 students were all selected through the Communist Party of their country of origin, was as stifling as its modernist architecture. Drab grey concrete blocks squatted around a charmless artificial pond. The only dash of colour was a map of the world painted on to the façade of one block in a valiant attempt to symbolise the ideals of the university: from an open book, symbol of learning, a torch emerges, issuing multicoloured flames that spread like waves across the planisphere. Perhaps Ilich drew some comfort from glancing up at the mural as, huddled against the rigours of the Russian winter and wearing a black beret in tribute to Che Guevara who had died riddled by bullets in October of the previous year, he trudged across the bleak square on his way to lectures. Coincidentally, the base of the flame is very close to Venezuela. Rules and regulations governed virtually every aspect of Ilich's life from the moment he started the first year's induction course, which was designed to flesh out his knowledge of the Russian language and introduce him to the delights of Marxist society before he launched into his chosen subjects, languages and chemistry. Like father, like son. Ilich rebelled against the rules, preferring to spend his time chasing girls. He would often crawl back to his room drunk. His professors at the university, some of them children of Spanish Civil War veterans who had sought refuge in Moscow, were unimpressed by his academic performance. 'His name alone, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, was so strange that people were curious about him,' relates Kirill Privalov, a journalist on the newspaper Druzhba (Friendship) which was printed at the small university press, and an acquaintance of Ilich. The Venezuelan's escapades, wildly excessive by the standards of the university, only fanned people's interest. 'llich was not at all the typical student sent by his country's Communist Party, nothing to do with the good little soldier of Mao who laboured in the fields every summer. He was a handsome young man although his cheeks looked swollen, and he was a great bon viveur. Flush with cash sent by his parents, Ilich could afford to spend lavishly on whisky and champagne in the special stores that only accepted payment in hard currencies and which were off-limits to most people. More Russian than the Russians, the privileged student and his friends would throw over their shoulders not only empty glasses but bottles as well. The university authorities, frustrated in their attempts to impose discipline on Ilich, reasoned that his freedom of action would be drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him were reduced. But when they asked Ramírez Navas to be less generous, the father, piqued, retorted that his son had never wanted for anything. 'The university had a sort of vice squad, and at night students were supposed either to study or sleep,' recounts Privalov. "One night the patrol entered Ilich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and glasses on the table, but he was apparently alone. The squad opened the cupboard door and a girl who was completely drunk fell out. She was naked and was clutching her clothes in her hands. They asked her what she was doing there and she answered: 'I feel pity for the oppressed.' She was obviously a prostitute. Another time, and with another girl, Ilich didn't bother to hide her in the cupboard. He threw her out of the window. This one was fully dressed and landed in two metres of snow a foor or two below. She got up unhurt and shouted abuse at him.

The shepherd’s life of diligence and care-taking, and his tender compassion for the helpless creatures entrusted to his charge, have been employed by the inspired writers to illustrate some of the most precious truths of the gospel. Christ, in his relation to his people, is compared to a shepherd. After the Fall he saw his sheep doomed to perish in the dark ways of sin. To save these wandering ones he left the honors and glories of his Father’s [191] house. He says, “I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick.” I will “save My flock, and they shall no more be a prey.” “Neither shall the beast of the land devour them.” Ezekiel 34:16, 22, 28. His voice is heard calling them to his fold, “a shadow in the daytime from the heat, and for a place of refuge, and for a covert from storm and from rain.” Isaiah 4:6. His care for the flock is unwearied. He strengthens the weak, relieves the suffering, gathers the lambs in his arms, and carries them in his bosom. His sheep love him. “And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him; for they know not the voice of strangers.” John 10:5. Christ says, “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth; and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the Good Shepherd, and know My sheep, and am known of Mine.” Verses 11-14.

Irena wrote to us that many Jews wouldn’t give up their children because they didn’t believe the Germans would kill them. When did the Jews know that they would die?” “This is a profound question. The first message about the mass killings in Eastern Poland, like Ponary, around Vilna, comes to Warsaw almost a year before the liquidation of the ghetto. But this news only reaches a very small circle of people in the ghetto. The Ringelblum archives tell us that in the autumn of 1941 some people believed this, especially those active in the Underground. In March 1942, when Aktion Reinhard, the murder of the Jews in the General Gouvernement, began, a lot of common people from the east sent letters through the post to their relatives and friends in the Warsaw ghetto with the message: ‘They are killing us. Be careful. Take refuge, because they are killing us.

Many writers have investigated the question of extraterrestrial involvement in the world of men. Many believe the visitors were generally moral and that their arrival was good for humanity. We find it difficult to accept theories of this sort. It is just as reasonable to assume the visitors were, as many scriptures suggest, immoral beings who corrupted their own planet until they were forcibly expelled. Information from ancient legends convinces this writer that the visitors, for all their intellectual acumen and technological expertise, were warlike and corrupt. In our opinion the alien renegades took refuge on Earth, were considered gods, and took full advantage of the relative credulity of their hosts. Having no love for the people of Earth, they sought to enslave them. It is our opinion that they were successful, and that we cannot have a thorough understanding of human history until we take the question of alien colonization seriously.

Across the Reich, the Gestapo recorded increased the activity of anti-state elements. It’s kind of a helpless protest by those wretches against our celebration of victory. They organize bomb attacks against representatives of the Reich or against the civilian German population. We’ve also noticed murder-suicides. Eighty-seven civilians killed have been reported during the last week. From the Protectorate of Bohmen und Mahren, the destruction of Peter Brezovsky’s long-sought military cell was announced. From Ostmark…” “Enough,” Beck interrupted him, “I’m interested only in Brezovsky.” That name caused him discomfort. In his mind, he returned to the Bohemian Forest in 1996. It was in a different dimension, before he had used time travel. At the time, Peter Brezovsky was the only man who had passed through the Time Gate. He’d offered him a position by his side during the building of the Great German Reich. He’d refused. Too bad, he could have used a man like him. These dummies weren’t eager enough to fulfill his instructions. He also remembered Werner Dietrich, who had died in the slaughter during an inspection in the Protectorate. “… in the sector 144-5. It was a temporary base of the group. There were apparently targeted explosions of the surrounding buildings,” the man continued. “This area interests me. I want to know everything that’s happening there. Go on,” he ordered the man. He was flattered at the leader’s sudden interest. Raising his head proudly, he stretched his neck even more and continued, “For your entertainment, Herr Führer, our two settlers, living in this area from 1960, on June the twenty first, met two suspect men dressed in leather like savages. The event, of course, was reported to the local department of the Gestapo. It’s funny because during the questioning of one of Brezovsky’s men we learnt an interesting story related to these men.” He relaxed a little. The atmosphere in the room was less strained, too. He smiled slightly, feeling self-importance. “In 1942, a certain woman from the Bohemian Forest made a whacky prophecy. Wait a minute.” He reached into the jacket and pulled out a little notebook. “I wrote it down, it’ll certainly amuse you. Those Slavic dogs don’t know what to do, and so they take refuge in similar nonsense.” He opened the notebook and began to read, “Government of darkness will come. After half a century of the Devil’s reign, on midsummer’s day, on the spot where he came from, two men will appear in flashes. These two warriors will end the dominance of the despot and will return natural order to the world.” During the reading, men began to smile and now some of them were even laughing aloud. “Stop it, idiots!” screamed Beck furiously. In anger, he sprang from behind his desk and severely hit the closest man’s laughing face. A deathly hush filled the room. Nobody understood what had happened. What could make the Führer so angry? This was the first time he had hit somebody in public. Beck wasn’t as angry as it might look. He was scared to death. This he had been afraid of since he had passed through the Time Gate. Since that moment, he knew this time would come one day. That someone would use the Time Gate and destroy everything he’d built. That couldn’t happen! Never! “Do you have these men?” he asked threateningly. Reich Gestapo Commander regretted he’d spoken about it. He wished he’d bitten his tongue. This innocent episode had caused the Führer’s unexpected reaction. His mouth went dry. Beck looked terrifying. “Herr Führer,” he spoke quietly, “unfortunately…” “Aloud!” yelled Beck. “Unfortunately we don’t, Herr Führer. But they probably died during the action of the Gestapo against Brezovsky. His body, as well as the newcomers, wasn’t found. The explosion probably blew them up,” he said quickly. “The explosion probably blew them up,” Beck parodied him viciously, “and that was enough for you, right?

ANTLIONS, LACEWINGS, AND RELATIVES: ORDER NEUROPTERA The net-winged insects are an order of beneficial predators with interesting appearances, habits, and names. Though the adult antlion feeds on nectar from flowers, it gets its name from the predatory habits of its ravenous larva, which can consume large quantities of ants. Antlion larvae live in sandy areas where they dig pits. The antlion, or doodlebug as the larva is sometimes called, buries itself in the sand at the bottom of the cone-shaped pit with only its jaws exposed. When an ant or other hapless insect approaches the edge of the pit, the sand begins to crumble and the insect tumbles into the waiting jaws of the doodlebug. The name doodlebug is thought to be a reference to the tracks the larva makes in the sand while searching for a perfect location for its pit. The tracks look as though something had been doodling in the sand. Young children often chant “Doodlebug, doodlebug, come out of your hole,” and it is believed that the expiration of breath in proximity to the pit will lure the larva from its subterranean refuge.Children also fish for doodlebugs with blades of grass, pulling the insects from the sand when they grasp at the blade.

Harshaw recalled the tragedy that relativity had been for many scientists. Unable to digest it, they had taken refuge in anger at Einstein. Their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was die and let younger minds take over.

But the more the human race emerges from these primary bonds, the more it separates itself from the natural world, the more intense becomes the need to find new ways of escaping separateness. One way of achieving this aim lies in all kinds of orgiastic states. These may have the form of an auto-induced trance, sometimes with the help of drugs. Many rituals of primitive tribes offer a vivid picture of this type of solution. In a transitory state of exaltation the world outside disappears, and with it the feeling of separateness from it. Inasmuch as these rituals are practiced in common, an experience of fusion with the group is added which makes this solution all the more effective. Closely related to, and often blended with this orgiastic solution, is the sexual experience. The sexual orgasm can produce a state similar to the one produced by a trance, or to the effects of certain drugs. Rites of communal sexual orgies were a part of many primitive rituals. It seems that after the orgiastic experience, man can go on for a time without suffering too much from his separateness. Slowly the tension of anxiety mounts, and then is reduced again by the repeated performance of the ritual. As long as these orgiastic states are a matter of common practice in a tribe, they do not produce anxiety or guilt. To act in this way is right, and even virtuous, because it is a way shared by all, approved and demanded by the medicine men or priests; hence there is no reason to feel guilty or ashamed. It is quite different when the same solution is chosen by an individual in a culture which has left behind these common practices. Alcoholism and drug addiction are the forms which the individual chooses in a non-orgiastic culture. In contrast to those participating in the socially patterned solution, such individuals suffer from guilt feelings and remorse. While they try to escape from separateness by taking refuge in alcohol or drugs, they feel all the more separate after the orgiastic experience is over, and thus are driven to take recourse to it with increasing frequency and intensity. Slightly different from this is the recourse to a sexual orgiastic solution. To some extent it is a natural and normal form of overcoming separateness, and a partial answer to the problem of isolation. But in many individuals in whom separateness is not relieved in other ways, the search for the sexual orgasm assumes a function which makes it not very different from alcoholism and drug addiction. It becomes a desperate attempt to escape the anxiety engendered by separateness, and it results in an ever-increasing sense of separateness, since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily. All forms of orgiastic union have three characteristics: they are intense, even violent; they occur in the total personality, mind and body; they are transitory and periodical.

Reality and honesty are closely related like identical twins. Sometimes, it’s not easy to bear them together, at the same time, like a blazing fire in a scorching desert. It’s easier to take refuge in the dark shade of a lie: we know it’s a lie, but we don’t have the strength for honesty.

This idea of the interface as a material region in which two substances can mix together to produce a completely new hybrid body, can serve as the starting point for rethinking more generally our relationship to the matter around us. If all the bodies we enter into relations with are modified and modify us in turn, then we can no longer delude ourselves that matter is simply a passive object onto which we project our knowledge. But neither can we take refuge in the convenient idea that we can never have any knowledge of that which is not human—that the matter around us is, ultimately, completely alien and unknowable, and that it really has nothing to do with us. Inhabiting the interface affords us the opportunity to redefine our knowledge of matter as a creative and collaborative process in which every material actively participates. Every time we enter into a relationship with a new material, we construct a physical space of mutual interaction which modifies the world around us and opens us to the possibility of modifying ourselves in turn.

Explore relating to a refuge not as something “over there” that’s separate from you, but rather as something already present in you.

as the Markrams explain in their scientific publication from 2010: The intense world that the autistic person faces could easily become aversive if the amygdala and related emotional areas are significally affected with local hyper-functionality. The lack of social interaction in autism may therefore not be because of deficits in the ability to process social and emotional cues, but because a sub-set of cues are overly intense, compulsively attended to, excessively processed and remembered with frightening clarity and intensity. Typical autistic symptoms, such as averted eye gaze, social withdrawal, and lack of communication, may be explained by an initial over-awareness of sensory and social fragments of the environment, which may be so intense, that avoidance is the only refuge.

team working on two children who had been thrown from the back of their father’s pickup truck onto the roadway. By the time I reached the floor, Immy had been taken upstairs to surgery. The surgery had lasted almost twelve hours, and things had not gone well. The bypass pump, a relatively new technology, had malfunctioned for several minutes and Immy had lost a great deal of blood. She was on a respirator, unconscious and unresponsive, in the Intensive Care Unit. On the day after surgery, Immy’s mother told me in a shaking voice that Immy’s gown had been removed in the operating room and thrown into the hospital laundry. The medal was gone. Concerned, I called the surgery resident and told him what had happened. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked me.

Oh, my son loves Japan!" she says, her voice soaring. "He's been studying Japanese, all by himself, and he went there recently actually for the first time, and he said he just felt immediately at home there, you know really comfortable. I mean with him it's mostly the, the, the-" My brain silently fills in the next word: anime. "The animation and so on, you know he's really into technology. I mean he's only seventeen, you so who knows what is going to happen. But it does seem like, you know, a real thing for him." "Right," I say, and I nod. "That's great." Sometimes at times like these, what fills my head is the things I do not and could not ever say. For example: "You have no idea how many stories I've heard exactly like that one!" Or: "You know, even though I'm generally reluctant to admit the existence of 'types" among people, I'm often shocked by the parallels that exist between the kind of young men who like anime and all things Japanese, to the extent that I sometimes struggle to believe that a group of people with such intensely similar interests are in fact individuals." Certainly I do not say: "And what would you like to bet that he ends up marrying a Japanese woman and becomes an academic teaching the world about Japanese culture while she gives up her job to bring up his children?" But even if these things flicker through my mind, I'm not anywhere near as rageful as any of that makes me sound. In fact, if anything, what I feel in this particular moment is something like envy, for this son of hers that I've never met, I understand that taking refuge in Japan and being shielded from the demands of full adulthood is a privilege offered to predominantly white, educated, Anglophone men, because they are deemed the most desirable that the world has to offer; that it feeds off power relations that date back to the American occupation and beyond, and which hew closely to the colonial paradigm even if there are important differences (and even if Japan also has a history of colonialism of its own to reckon with); and that even leaving all of this aside, this Peter Pan status is not something I am interested in. And yet I can't help but look at the sort of person who feels "immediately" comfortable in Japan and wish that I had felt like that, only because it might validate the way I've dedicated a lot of my life to the country, but because the security of that sensation in itself feels like something I would love to experience.

Oh, my son loves Japan!" she says, her voice soaring. "He's been studying Japanese, all by himself, and he went there recently actually for the first time, and he said he just felt immediately at home there, you know really comfortable. I mean with him it's mostly the, the, the-" My brain silently fills in the next word: anime. "The animation and so on, you know he's really into technology. I mean he's only seventeen, you know so who knows what is going to happen. But it does seem like, you know, a real thing for him." "Right," I say, and I nod. "That's great." Sometimes at times like these, what fills my head is the things I do not and could not ever say. For example: "You have no idea how many stories I've heard exactly like that one!" Or: "You know, even though I'm generally reluctant to admit the existence of 'types" among people, I'm often shocked by the parallels that exist between the kind of young men who like anime and all things Japanese, to the extent that I sometimes struggle to believe that a group of people with such intensely similar interests are in fact individuals." Certainly I do not say: "And what would you like to bet that he ends up marrying a Japanese woman and becomes an academic teaching the world about Japanese culture while she gives up her job to bring up his children?" But even if these things flicker through my mind, I'm not anywhere near as rageful as any of that makes me sound. In fact, if anything, what I feel in this particular moment is something like envy, for this son of hers that I've never met, I understand that taking refuge in Japan and being shielded from the demands of full adulthood is a privilege offered to predominantly white, educated, Anglophone men, because they are deemed the most desirable that the world has to offer; that it feeds off power relations that date back to the American occupation and beyond, and which hew closely to the colonial paradigm even if there are important differences (and even if Japan also has a history of colonialism of its own to reckon with); and that even leaving all of this aside, this Peter Pan status is not something I am interested in. And yet I can't help but look at the sort of person who feels "immediately" comfortable in Japan and wish that I had felt like that, only because it might validate the way I've dedicated a lot of my life to the country, but because the security of that sensation in itself feels like something I would love to experience.

America was well set up to teach new arrivals the overriding value of white skin. Throughout the eighteenth century, the range of dependent labor relations had blurred the distinction between freedom and slavery. The Revolution led to the decline of apprenticeship, indenture, and imprisonment for debt. These changes, together with the growth of slavery as the basis of Southern society, reinforced the tendency to equate freedom with whiteness and slavery with blackness. At the same time, the spread of wage labor made white laborers anxious about losing the precarious independence they had gained from the Revolution. In response, they sought refuge in whiteness. Republican ideology became more explicitly racial than it had been during the Revolutionary era.

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism. My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary.

Hailed in his lifetime as ‘the Peacemaker’, Edward VII was spared the destruction of the European order of courts and crowned cousins in which he had been the dominant figure. Both of his imperial nephews, Tsar Nicholas of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, were brought low. Along with his wife and all of their children, Nicholas was butchered by the Bolsheviks in the summer of 1918. The year before, George V, worried about his own position, had resisted the suggestion that they should be given refuge in Britain. Once the news of their murders had been confirmed, he despatched a battleship to the Crimea to rescue his aunt, the Dowager Empress Marie, as well as a large party of her relations and retainers. Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, who had represented Nicholas at Edward’s funeral, was not among them. The first of the Romanovs to die, he had been taken into a forest in the Urals and shot a month before his elder brother. In the chaos that enveloped Russia during that terrible period, another, more improbable, victim met his end. Minoru, the royal racehorse which had swept to victory in the Epsom Derby of 1909, had subsequently been sold to a stud near Kharkiv for £20,000. He was last seen struggling to draw a cart on the 900-mile evacuation from Moscow to the Black Sea.

Yet the cryptozoologists’ longing to believe that we share our world with mysterious, almost-human beings is also a kind of denial. Rather than grappling with the difficult question of how we relate to real-world sentient animals of near-human intelligence, human beings take refuge in cultural constructions of imagined, hidden beings who always lie beyond the fringe of scientific knowledge, or beyond our ability to detect them, like the monsters who people the edges of old maps. Our reluctance to rethink our relationship to the animal world seems, in turn, to be just one expression of a broader dysfunctionality in humans’ interaction with our natural environment. As Chris Gosden has argued, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, we dwell within ‘sensate ecologies’ that include other non-human sentient beings, and ‘it is often difficult to say where the body stops and its surroundings start’.26 It is increasingly clear that the unease many people feel at the exploitation of sentient animals, the felling of ancient trees or the poisoning and destruction of habitats is moral and spiritual as well as emerging from a sense of global civic responsibility or a self-interested, pragmatic fear for the survival of the human species as we lay waste to non-renewable resources.