Rhythm Short Quotes

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches. May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty. When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer. Guide her, protect her When crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age. Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels. What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit. May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers. Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short – a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day – And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait. O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed. And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it. And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back. “My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.

Ribbons! Long ones, short ones, ones for every mood." He does a little dance to the singsong rhythm. "Thin ones, thick ones, and ones to tie your shoes!

INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'. Won't you come to Sandymount, Madeline the mare? Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare. Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see. See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.

Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with the energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals - sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

Shortly afterwards it started raining, very innocently at first, but the sky was packed tight with cloud and gradually the drops grew bigger and heavier, until it was autumn’s dismal rain that was falling—rain that seemed to fill the entire world with its leaden beat, rain suggestive in its dreariness of everlasting waterfalls between the planets, rain that thatched the heavens with drabness and brooded oppressively over the whole countryside, like a disease, strong in the power of its flat, unvarying monotony, its smothering heaviness, its cold, unrelenting cruelty. Smoothly, smoothly it fell, over the whole shire, over the fallen marsh grass, over the troubled lake, the iron-grey gravel flats, the sombre mountain above the croft, smudging out every prospect. And the heavy, hopeless, interminable beat wormed its way into every crevice in the house, lay like a pad of cotton wool over the ears, and embraced everything, both near and far, in its compass, like an unromantic story from life itself that has no rhythm and no crescendo, no climax, but which is nevertheless overwhelming in its scope, terrifying in its significance. And at the bottom of this unfathomed ocean of teeming rain sat the little house and its one neurotic woman.

The crisis creates situations which are dangerous in the short run, since the various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly, or of reorganizing with the same rhythm. The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. Perhaps it may make sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and disperse his leading cadres, who cannot be be very numerous or highly trained.

Jacob caught my arm with a shivering hand. "Please, Bella. I'm begging." His dark eyes were glistening with tears. A lump filled my throat. "Jake, I have to―" "You don't, though. You really don't. You could stay here with me. You could stay alive. For Charlie. For me." The engine of Carlisle's Mercedes purred; the rhythm of the thrumming spiked when Alice revved it impatiently. I shook my head, tears spattering from my eyes with the sharp motion. I pulled my arm free, and he didn't fight me. "Don't die Bella," he choked out. "Don't go. Don't." What if I never saw him again? The thought pushed me past the silent tears; a sob broke out from my chest. I threw my arms around his waist and hugged for one too-short moment, burying my tear-wet face against his chest. He put his big hand on the back of my hair, as if to hold me here. "Bye, Jake." I pulled his hand from my hair, and kissed his palm. I couldn't bear to look at his face. "Sorry," I whispered.

I wrote an essay about the rhythm of Tolkien’s writing in The Lord of the Rings. Short rhythms repeated form long rhythms; there’s a cyclical repetition in his work which I think is part of why it totally enchants so many of us. We are caught in this rhythm and are happy there.

You cannot hear a poem without it changing you," she told me. "They heard it, and it colonized them. It inherited them and it inhabited them, its rhythms becoming part of the way that they thought; its images permanently transmuting their metaphors; its verses, its outlook, its aspirations becoming their lives. Within a generation their children would be born already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather than later, as these things go, there were no more children born. There was no need for them, not any longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known.

I noticed several things about the drummer all at once. He was focused on the task at hand, keeping perfect rhythm. Instead of a swirl of transparent colors around his torso, there was a small, concentrated starburst of bright red at his sternum. But otherwise his aura was blank. Huh. That was strange. But before I could contemplate it too much, my eyes landed on his face. Wowza. He was smokin' hot. As in H-O-T-T hot. I'd never understood until that moment why girls insisted on adding an extra T. This guy was extra-T worthy. I examined the drummer, determined to find a flaw. Brown hair. An interesting haircut: short around the sides and back, but longer on top, hanging loose and angling across his forehead. His eyes were narrow and his eyebrows were a bit thick and...Oh, who was I kidding? I could pick him apart, but even the shifty slant of his eyes made him more alluring to me.

The efficiency of Wu Wei is like that of water flowing over and around the rocks in its path—not the mechanical, straight-line approach that usually ends up short-circuiting natural laws, but one that evolves from an inner sensitivity to the natural rhythm of things.

The strikes continue ruthlessly. I brace for each blow, numbering it as the heat subsides, and enjoying her tender exploration of my swollen lips in between. The rhythm pulls me through the assault and, all too soon, I acknowledge the tenth strike.

You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, "Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here." You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, "More input! More input for Johnny 5! as you rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching - Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Dorothy Parker gunning people down; Grace Jones singing "Slave to the Rhythm" - you will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be, eventually, you? And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone. And some versions of you will end in dismal failure - many prototypes won't even get out the front door, as you suddenly realize that no, you can't style-out an all-in-one gold bodysuit and a massive attitude problem in Wolverhampton. Others will achieve temporary success - hitting new land-speed records, and amazing all around you, and then suddenly, unexpectedly exploding, like the Bluebird on Coniston Water. But one day you'll find a version of you that will get you kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked. Until - slowly, slowly - you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day. You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things. What your nature began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely - as you're too busy doing, now. And ten years will pass without you even noticing. And later, over a glass of wine - because you drink wine now, because you are grown - you will marvel over what you did. Marvel that, at the time, you kept so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself. Tried to metamorphose in the dark. The loud, drunken, fucking, eyeliner-smeared, laughing, cutting, panicking, unbearably present secret of yourself. When really you were about as secret as the moon. And as luminous, under all those clothes.

Although he had changed his name, his history came with him, even to his writing. The rhythm of his rain-soaked childhood became a sequence of words. His memories of the understory of the great forest burst into lyrical phrases, as resinous as the sap of a pinecone, as crisp as the shell of a beetle. Sentences grew long, then pulled up short, taking on the tempo of the waves upon the shore, or swayed gently, like the plaintive song of a lone harmonica. His fury became essays that pointed, stabbed, and burned. His convictions played out with the monotonous determination of a printing press. And his affections became poems, as warm and supple as the wool of a well-loved sheep.

Women did such things and went on doing them while the sun died because in all of women's lives there were so many moments that would kill the mind if one thought about them, which would suck the heart and the life out of one, and engrave lines in the face and put gray in the hair if ever one let one's mind work; but there was in the rhythm and the fascination of the stitches a loss of thought, a void, a blank, that was only numbers and not even that, because the mind did not need to count, the fingers did, the length of a thread against the finger measured evenly as a ruler could divide it, the slight difference in tension sensed finely as a machine could sense, the exact number of stitches keeping pattern without really the need to count, but something inward and regular as the beat of a heart, as the slow passing of time which could be frozen in such acts, or speeded past.

The antidote to busyness of soul is not sloth and indifference. The antidote is rest, rhythm, death to pride, acceptance of our own finitude, and trust in the providence of God.

The mind’s ‘seasons’ are conditioned by an organic rhythm; it is not up to ‘me’ to be naïve or cynical: my truths are the sophisms of my enthusiasm or of my dejection.

cardiovascular functions are influenced by circadian rhythms, and as a result, heart attacks are much more common in the morning hours.

I continued working without a break, but in the middle of the third story...I felt myself tiring more than if I had been working on a novel. The same thing happened with the fourth. In fact, I did not have the energy to finish them. Now I know why: The effort involved in writing a short story is as intense as beginning a novel, where everything must be defined in the first paragraph: structure, tone, style, rhythm, length, and sometimes even the personality of a character. All the rest is the pleasure of writing, the most intimate, solitary pleasure one can imagine, and if the rest of one's life is not spent correcting the novel, it is because the same iron rigor needed to begin the book is required to end it. But a story has no beginning, no end: Either it works or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, my own experience, and the experience of others, shows that most of the time it is better for one's health to start again in another direction, or toss the story in the wastebasket. Someone, I don't remember who, made the point with this comforting phrase: "Good writers are appreciated more for what they tear up than for what they publish.

What's the password?" "Gaby's birthday should be a national holiday." I grinned like an idiot, and fortunately, I was in my room alone so he couldn't see my facial expression. It had to be bordering on ugly from how hard my cheeks strained in such a short amount of time. "Andddd?" I asked, in what had become our game. He laughed from the other side of the door. "I bought you a book.

A cathedral, like a symphony, has a coherent plan, its windows and arches form rhythms, its decorations have themes and tell stories, but the whole thing is so rich that at first it overwhelms us.

We're pupils of the religions—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish . . . Well, the Christian religions. Those who directed French education down through the centuries were the Jesuits. They taught us how to make sentences translated from the Latin, well balanced, with a verb, a subject, a complement, a rhythm. In short—here a speech, there a preach, everywhere a sermon! They say of an author, “He knits a nice sentence!” Me, I say, “It's unreadable.” They say, “What magnificent theatrical language!” I look, I listen. It's flat, it's nothing, it's nil. Me, I've slipped the spoken word into print. In one sole shot.

Some may call it foolish, but at my age, when you love someone, you move to the rhythm of your own heart—life is too short to worry about how the shape & size of one’s love appears to the rest of the world.

This?" He thrust short and hard into her, the impact sending jolts of pleasure through her body. "Yes, that," he murmured to himself as if pleased, and did it again. And again. Until the heat between them combusted. Until she felt hot liquid wash over her limbs. Until she looked up and wondered why she'd ever thought his gray eyes emotionless. He was watching her with passion. With lust. With so much love. She felt tears in her eyes. He groaned above her, his hips jerking without rhythm, but all the while he watched her with those eyes. And when he at last stilled and rested his sweaty forehead against hers, he whispered, "I love you.

We cannot elude existence by explanations, we can only endure it, love it or hate it, adore it or dread it, in that alternation of happiness and horror which expresses the very rhythm of being, its oscillations, its dissonances, its bright or bitter vehemences.

Poor lighting, absence of handrails, confusing patterns on the treads, risers that are unusually high or low, treads that are unusually wide or narrow, and landings that interrupt the rhythm of ascent or descent are the principal design faults that lead to accidents.

Though our initial engagement with the poor might begin with a short-term mission trip, it must not end there, because Jesus himself was known as a friend of the broken—not just a visitor. Our lives must develop an ongoing rhythm of interacting with and embracing those who are struggling.

You inhaled to the rhythm of her thick sighs as she scrutinized her form in the full-length bedroom mirror, her newly sewn skirt showing, she said, too much hip, too much leg. She yanked it off, snipping open the seams, laying it out across the dining table like a freshly gutted fish, where it eventually disappeared from view beneath sheaths of brown paper patterns, paisley skirts whose hems needed letting out, floral dresses whose cleavages needed closing in, and an assortment of garments whose long and short zippers would go neither up nor down, jammed from the humidity and the salt of August days.

They lost their sense of reality, the notion of time, the rhythm of daily habits. They closed the doors and windows again so as not to waste time getting undressed and they walked about the house as Remedios the Beauty had wanted to do and they would roll around naked in the mud of the courtyard, and one afternoon they almost drowned as they made love in the cistern. In a short time they did more damage than the red ants: they destroyed the furniture in the parlor, in their madness they tore to shreds the hammock that had resisted the sad bivouac loves of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and they disemboweled the mattresses and emptied them on the floor as they suffocated in storms of cotton. Although Aureliano was just as ferocious a lover as his rival, it was Amaranta ?rsula who ruled in that paradise of disaster with her mad genius and her lyrical voracity, as if she had concentrated in her love the unconquerable energy that her great-great-grandmother had given to the making of little candy animals. And yet, while she was singing with pleasure and dying with laughter over her own inventions, Aureliano was becoming more and more absorbed and silent, for his passion was self-centered and burning. Nevertheless, they both reached such extremes of virtuosity that when they became exhausted from excitement, they would take advantage of their fatigue. They would give themselves over to the worship of their bodies, discovering that the rest periods of love had unexplored possibilities, much richer than those of desire. While he would rub Amaranta ?rsula’s erect breasts with egg whites or smooth her elastic thighs and peach-like stomach with cocoa butter, she would play with Aureliano’s portentous creature as if it were a doll and would paint clown’s eyes on it with her lipstick and give it a Turk’s mustache with her eyebrow pencil, and would put on organza bow ties and little tinfoil hats. One night they daubed themselves from head to toe with peach jam and licked each other like dogs and made mad love on the floor of the porch, and they were awakened by a torrent of carnivorous ants who were ready to eat them alive.

Trying to compose even a single sentence can have the same effect, as we try to juggle grammatical and syntactical alternatives plus all the possibilities of tone, nuance, and rhythm even a simple sentence offers. Composing, then, is a cognitive activity that constantly threatens to overload short-term memory.

I felt a warm hand touch mine. “Are you okay?” “If you mean am I injured, then the answer is no. If you mean am I ‘okay’ as in am-I-confident-I’m-still-sane, the answer is still no.” Ren frowned. “We have to find a way to get across the chasm.” “You’re certainly welcome to give it a try.” I waved him off and went back to drinking my water. He moved to the edge and peered across, looking speculatively at the distance. Changing back to a tiger, he trotted a few paces back in the direction we had come from, turned, and ran at full speed toward the hole. “Ren, no!” I screamed. He leapt, clearing the hole easily, and landed lightly on his front paws. Then he trotted a short distance away and did the same thing to come back. He landed at my feet and changed back to human form. “Kells, I have an idea.” “Oh, this I’ve got to hear. I just hope you don’t plan on including me in this scheme of yours. Ah. Let me guess. I know. You want to tie a rope to your tail, leap across, tie it off, and then have me pull my body across the rope, right?” He cocked his head as if considering it, and then shook his head. “No, you don’t have the strength to do something like that. Plus, we have no rope and nothing to tie a rope to.” “Right. So what’s the plan?” He held my hands and explained. “What I’m proposing will be much easier. Do you trust me?” I was going to be sick. “I trust you. It’s just-“ I looked into his concerned blue eyes and sighed. “Okay, what do I have to do?” “You saw that I was able to clear the gap pretty well as a tiger, right? So what I need you to do is to stand right at the edge and wait for me. I’ll run to the end of the tunnel, build up speed, and leap as a tiger. At the same time, I want you to jump up and grab me around my neck. I’ll change to a man in midair so that I can hold onto you, and we’ll fall together to the other side.” I snorted noisily and laughed. “You’re kidding, right?” He ignored my skepticism. “We’ll have to time it precisely, and you’ll have to jump too, in the same direction, because if you don’t, I’ll just hit you full power and drive us both over the edge.” “You’re serious? You seriously want me to do this?” “Yes, I’m serious. Now stand here while I make a few practice runs.” “Can’t we just find another corridor or something?” “There aren’t any. This is the right way.” Reluctantly, I stood near the edge and watched him leap back and forth a few times. Observing the rhythm of his running and jumping, I began to grasp the idea of what he wanted me to do. All too quickly Ren was back in front of me again. “I can’t believe you’ve talked me into doing this. Are you sure?” I asked. “Yes, I’m sure. Are you ready?” “No! Give me a minute to mentally write a last will and testament.” “Kells, it’ll be fine.” “Sure it will. Alright, let me take in my surroundings. I want to make sure I can record every minute of this experience in my journal. Of course, that’s probably a moot point because I’m assuming that I’m going to die in the jump anyway.” Ren put his hand on my cheek, looked in my eyes, and said fiercely, “Kelsey, trust me. I will not let you fall.

Can two walk together, unless they are agreed?’ Amos 3:3 ‘Does This Person Belong in your Life?’ A toxic relationship is like a limb with gangrene: unless you amputate it the infection can spread and kill you. Without the courage to cut off what refuses to heal, you’ll end up losing a lot more. Your personal growth - and in some cases your healing - will only be expedited by establishing relationships with the right people. Maybe you’ve heard the story about the scorpion who asked the frog to carry him across the river because he couldn’t swim. ‘I’m afraid you’ll sting me,’ replied the frog. The scorpion smiled reassuringly and said, ‘Of course I won’t. If I did that we’d both drown!’ So the frog agreed, and the scorpion hopped on his back. Wouldn’t you know it: halfway across the river the scorpion stung him! As they began to sink the frog lamented, ‘You promised you wouldn’t sting me. Why’d you do it?’ The scorpion replied, ‘I can’t help it. It’s my nature!’ Until God changes the other person’s nature, they have the power to affect and infect you. For example, when you feel passionately about something but others don’t, it’s like trying to dance a foxtrot with someone who only knows how to waltz. You picked the wrong dance partner! Don’t get tied up with someone who doesn’t share your values and God-given goals. Some issues can be corrected through counselling, prayer, teaching, and leadership. But you can’t teach someone to care; if they don’t care they’ll pollute your environment, kill your productivity, and break your rhythm with constant complaints. That’s why it’s important to pray and ask God, ‘Does this person belong in my life?

I heard Taylor Swift playing through the speakers, and laughed when Chase reached his hand out to me. “I didn’t think you’d be a fan of Taylor Swift,” I said, following him a short distance away from his truck. He turned and wrapped one arm around my waist, and took my hand in his. He started swaying, and I fell into his easy rhythm.

Profoundly moralistic in regard to the present, the revolutionary is cynical in action. He protests against police brutality, the inhuman rhythm of industrial production, the severity of bourgeois courts, the execution of prisoners whose guilt has not been proved beyond doubt. Nothing, short of a total ‘humanisation’, can appease his hunger for justice. But as soon as he decides to give his allegiance to a party which is as implacably hostile as he is himself to the established disorder, we find him forgiving, in the name of the Revolution, everything he has hitherto relentlessly denounced. The revolutionary myth bridges the gap between moral intransigence and terrorism.

We know, however, that the mind is capable of understanding these matters in all their complexity and in all their simplicity. A ball flying through the air is responding to the force and direction with which it was thrown, the action of gravity, the friction of the air which it must expend its energy on overcoming, the turbulence of the air around its surface, and the rate and direction of the ball's spin. And yet, someone who might have difficulty consciously trying to work out what 3 x 4 x 5 comes to would have no trouble in doing differential calculus and a whole host of related calculations so astoundingly fast that they can actually catch a flying ball. People who call this "instinct" are merely giving the phenomenon a name, not explaining anything. I think that the closest that human beings come to expressing our understanding of these natural complexities is in music. It is the most abstract of the arts - it has no meaning or purpose other than to be itself. Every single aspect of a piece of music can be represented by numbers. From the organization of movements in a whole symphony, down through the patterns of pitch and rhythm that make up the melodies and harmonies, the dynamics that shape the performance, all the way down to the timbres of the notes themselves, their harmonics, the way they change over time, in short, all the elements of a noise that distinguish between the sound of one person piping on a piccolo and another one thumping a drum - all of these things can be expressed by patterns and hierarchies of numbers. And in my experience the more internal relationships there are between the patterns of numbers at different levels of the hierarchy, however complex and subtle those relationships may be, the more satisfying and, well, whole, the music will seem to be. In fact the more subtle and complex those relationships, and the further they are beyond the grasp of the conscious mind, the more the instinctive part of your mind - by which I mean that part of your mind that can do differential calculus so astoundingly fast that it will put your hand in the right place to catch a flying ball- the more that part of your brain revels in it. Music of any complexity (and even "Three Blind Mice" is complex in its way by the time someone has actually performed it on an instrument with its own individual timbre and articulation) passes beyond your conscious mind into the arms of your own private mathematical genius who dwells in your unconscious responding to all the inner complexities and relationships and proportions that we think we know nothing about. Some people object to such a view of music, saying that if you reduce music to mathematics, where does the emotion come into it? I would say that it's never been out of it.

Poems are surmountable. They have rhymes and rhythms to help you make meaning. They're short enough. . . to read and reread until you've made some sense of them. Short stories are a different ballgame. You read them and understand the words completely. You know what happens in each sentence. You follow the dialogue and action. at the end, you know exactly what's happened. And also you have no idea.

Strand sees his main skill as just paying attention to the textures and rhythms of life, being receptive to the multifaceted, constantly changing yet ever recurring stream of experiences. The secret of saying something new is to be patient. If one reacts too quickly, it is likely that the reaction will be superficial, a cliché. “Keep your eyes and ears open,” he says, “and your mouth shut. For as long as possible.” Yet life is short, so patience is painful to the poet. Poetry is about slowing down, I think. It’s about reading the same thing again and again, really savoring it, living inside the poem. There’s no rush to find out what happens in a poem. It’s really about feeling one syllable rubbing against another, one word giving way to another, and sensing the justice of that relationship between one word, the next, the next, the next.

But there’s this way he drums his fingers on the table. Not even like really drumming. More like in-way between drumming and like this scratching, picking, the way you see somebody picking at dead skin. And without any kind of rhythm, see, constant and never-stopping but with no kind of rhythm you could grab onto and follow and stand. Totally like whacked, insane. Like the kind of sounds you can imagine a girl hears in her head right before she kills her whole family because somebody took the last bit of peanut butter or something. You know what I’m saying? The sound of a fucking mind coming apart. You know what I’m saying? So yeah, yes, OK, the short answer is when he wouldn’t quit with the drumming at supper I sort of poked him with my fork. Sort of. I could see how maybe somebody could have thought I sort of stabbed him. I offered to get the fork out, though. Let me just say I’m ready to make amends at like anytime. For my part in it. I’m owning my part in it is what I’m saying. Can I ask am I going to get Restricted for this? Cause I have this Overnight tomorrow that Gene he approved already in the Overnight Log. If you want to look. But I’m not trying to get out of owning my part of the, like, occurrence. If my Higher Power who I choose to call God works through you saying I’ve got some kind of a punishment due, I won’t try to get out of a punishment. If I’ve got one due. I just wanted to ask. Did I mention I’m grateful to be here?

A moment later, as he pulls away from the curb, I’m assuming the ride to school will be awkward with my sister in the back. It’s confirmed when she asks, “So what’s the deal with you and my sister?” He laughs shortly and rubs the back of his neck like something is there, tickling, tapping. “Tamra.” Clutching the dashboard, I turn and glare at her. “There is no deal.” She snorts. “Well, we wouldn’t be sitting here if that was the case now, would we?” I open my mouth to demand she end the interrogation when Will’s voice stops me. “I like your sister. A lot.” I look at him dumbly. He looks at me, lowers his voice to say, “I like you.” I know that, I guess, but heat still crawls over my face. I swing forward in my seat, cross my arms over my chest and stare straight ahead. Can’t stop shivering. Can’t speak. My throat hurts too much. “Jacinda,” he says. “I think you’ve shocked her,” Tamra offers, then sighs. “Look, if you like her, you have to make it legit. I don’t want everyone at school whispering about her like she’s some toy you get your kicks with in a stairwell.” Now I really can’t speak. My blood burns. I already have one mother doing her best to control my life. I don’t need my sister stepping in as mother number two. I know,” he says. “That’s what I’m trying to do now—if she’ll let me.” I feel his gaze on the side of my face. Anxious. Waiting. I look at him. A breath shudders from me at the intensity in his eyes. He’s serious. But then he would have to be. If he’s willing to break free of his self-imposed solitude for me, especially when he suspects there’s more to me than I’m telling him . . . he means what he’s saying. His thumb beats a staccato rhythm on the steering wheel as he drives. “I want to be with you, Jacinda.” He shakes his head. “I’m dong fighting it.” “Jeez,” Tamra mutters. And I know what she means. It seems too much. The declaration extreme. Fast. After all, we’re only sixteen . . . I start, jerk a little. I think he’s sixteen.

She felt the sun on her face, warming her after the months of snow and freezing temperatures. She took off her sweatshirt, tied it around her waist and ran in shorts and T-shirt... she needed some sunshine on her skin, and it felt exhilarating to stretch herself out. She flew alongside the raging river, the rhythm of her strides and the beating of her trainers on the path chasing out the gloomy thoughts that had become a part of her whole being, ingrained like dirt in the creases of her skin.

Zenosyne. It's actually just after you're born that life flashes before your eyes. Entire aeons are lived in those first few months when you feel inseparable from the world itself, with nothing to do but watch it passing by. At first, time is only felt vicariously, as something that happens to other people. You get used to living in the moment, because there's nowhere else to go. But soon enough, life begins to move, and you learn to move with it. And you take it for granted that you're a different person every year, Upgraded with a different body...a different future. You run around so fast, the world around you seems to stand still. Until a summer vacation can stretch on for an eternity. You feel time moving forward, learning its rhythm, but now and then it skips a beat, as if your birthday arrives one day earlier every year. We should consider the idea that youth is not actually wasted on the young. That their dramas are no more grand than they should be. That their emotions make perfect sense, once you adjust for inflation. For someone going through adolescence, life feels epic and tragic simply because it is: every kink in your day could easily warp the arc of your story. Because each year is worth a little less than the last. And with each birthday we circle back, and cross the same point around the sun. We wish each other many happy returns. But soon you feel the circle begin to tighten, and you realize it's a spiral, and you're already halfway through. As more of your day repeats itself, you begin to cast off deadweight, and feel the steady pull toward your center of gravity, the ballast of memories you hold onto, until it all seems to move under its own inertia. So even when you sit still, it feels like you're running somewhere. And even if tomorrow you will run a little faster, and stretch your arms a little farther, you'll still feel the seconds slipping away as you drift around the bend. Life is short. And life is long. But not in that order.

A drumbeat joins Sami's rhythm, the crowd ripples and separates, and soon we are dancing. Here in this place the city carved out and abandoned, there is only movement and heat and darkness. I can't see my body, or Reem's, or Sami's, or anyone's. I can only feel my hips moving the stale air and listen to the rise and fall of the feet of those around me. I have been taught all my life that masculinity means short hair and square-toed shoes, taking up space, raising one's voice. To be soft is to be less of a man. To be gentle, to laugh, to create art, to bleed between the legs -- I have been taught that these things make me a woman. I have been taught all my life that to dance is to be vulnerable, and that the world will crush the vulnerable. I was taught to equate invincibility with being worthy of love. But here in the darkness of his abandoned subway platform, I can almost imagine a world big enough for boys like Sami and me to love each other, to dance and let the pain out of our bodies, to breathe and make love and be enough and be enough and be enough.

My approach to training echoed how I climbed. The romance of climbing didn’t interest me. I didn’t seek harps and wings. I heard no opera up there. Instead, my mountains had teeth. The jagged edge we walked up there dragged itself across my throat, and the throats of my friends and peers. I took the mountains’ indifference to life as aggression, and fought back. I armored myself against that indifference; with training, with thinking, with attitude. I trained with friends who shared a similar approach. Our mantra was dark, but it motivated us. When we ran we breathed in rhythm—no matter the speed—and that beat had words: “They all died.” We inhaled and exhaled the great alpine epics—like the tragedy that befell Walter Bonatti’s party on the Freney Pillar—to push ourselves to a place where we would never come up short, physically. The consequences of falling short made training important. I realized early that controlling the things that I could control gave me greater freedom to address the things that I could not control. And the mountains offered those in spades.

neuroscientists monitored guitarists playing a short melody together, they found that patterns in the guitarists’ brain activity became synchronized. Similarly, studies of choir singers have shown that singing aligns performers’ heart rates. Music seems to create a sense of unity on a physiological level. Scientists call this phenomenon synchrony and have found that it can elicit some surprising behaviors. In studies where people sang or moved in a coordinated way with others, researchers found that subjects were significantly more likely to help out a partner with their workload or sacrifice their own gain for the benefit of the group. And when participants rocked in chairs at the same tempo, they performed better on a cooperative task than those who rocked at different rhythms. Synchrony shifts our focus away from our own needs toward the needs of the group. In large social gatherings, this can give rise to a euphoric feeling of oneness—dubbed “collective effervescence” by French sociologist Émile Durkheim—which elicits a blissful, selfless absorption within a community.

I held Carlito's hands in mine, my fingers wedged between the cuffs and his wrists because I hoped that at least for a moment he would feel me and not the cold metal against his skin. Those are things to which he'd become too accustomed. I saw it in his posture. The way the years of walking with his hands chained to his waist, his ankles shackled together by leg irons, had sloped his spine, causing him to walk with his head tilted down, in short steps, so different from the way he moved when he was free, with rhythm in his gait, a walk more like a glide

Temporarily then, for a short time only, they were to live in Palermo: the south of south. Every culture has its southerners—people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing, brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives—envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibited, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do. Every country, including southern countries, has its south: below the equator, it lies north. Hanoi has Saigon, Sao Paulo has Rio, Delhi has Calcutta, Rome has Naples, and Naples, which to those at the top of this peninsula

Even time is not immune to time. Once the only times that mattered were the rhythms of the planet and the body. The first people on this island needed time four times a year: the solstices and the equinoxes, to avoid planting seed too early or too late. When the Church got here, it staked out Sundays, Christmases, Easter, and began colonizing the year with saints' days. The English brought short leases and tax deadlines. With the railway, the hours had to march in time. Now TV satellites beam the same six o'clock news everywhere at the same six o'clock. Science has been as busy splicing time into ever thinner slivers as it has matter... But nobody knows if time is slowing down or speeding up

ESTABLISHING A DAILY MEDITATION First select a suitable space for your regular meditation. It can be wherever you can sit easily with minimal disturbance: a corner of your bedroom or any other quiet spot in your home. Place a meditation cushion or chair there for your use. Arrange what is around so that you are reminded of your meditative purpose, so that it feels like a sacred and peaceful space. You may wish to make a simple altar with a flower or sacred image, or place your favorite spiritual books there for a few moments of inspiring reading. Let yourself enjoy creating this space for yourself. Then select a regular time for practice that suits your schedule and temperament. If you are a morning person, experiment with a sitting before breakfast. If evening fits your temperament or schedule better, try that first. Begin with sitting ten or twenty minutes at a time. Later you can sit longer or more frequently. Daily meditation can become like bathing or toothbrushing. It can bring a regular cleansing and calming to your heart and mind. Find a posture on the chair or cushion in which you can easily sit erect without being rigid. Let your body be firmly planted on the earth, your hands resting easily, your heart soft, your eyes closed gently. At first feel your body and consciously soften any obvious tension. Let go of any habitual thoughts or plans. Bring your attention to feel the sensations of your breathing. Take a few deep breaths to sense where you can feel the breath most easily, as coolness or tingling in the nostrils or throat, as movement of the chest, or rise and fall of the belly. Then let your breath be natural. Feel the sensations of your natural breathing very carefully, relaxing into each breath as you feel it, noticing how the soft sensations of breathing come and go with the changing breath. After a few breaths your mind will probably wander. When you notice this, no matter how long or short a time you have been away, simply come back to the next breath. Before you return, you can mindfully acknowledge where you have gone with a soft word in the back of your mind, such as “thinking,” “wandering,” “hearing,” “itching.” After softly and silently naming to yourself where your attention has been, gently and directly return to feel the next breath. Later on in your meditation you will be able to work with the places your mind wanders to, but for initial training, one word of acknowledgment and a simple return to the breath is best. As you sit, let the breath change rhythms naturally, allowing it to be short, long, fast, slow, rough, or easy. Calm yourself by relaxing into the breath. When your breath becomes soft, let your attention become gentle and careful, as soft as the breath itself. Like training a puppy, gently bring yourself back a thousand times. Over weeks and months of this practice you will gradually learn to calm and center yourself using the breath. There will be many cycles in this process, stormy days alternating with clear days. Just stay with it. As you do, listening deeply, you will find the breath helping to connect and quiet your whole body and mind. Working with the breath is an excellent foundation for the other meditations presented in this book. After developing some calm and skills, and connecting with your breath, you can then extend your range of meditation to include healing and awareness of all the levels of your body and mind. You will discover how awareness of your breath can serve as a steady basis for all you do.

Damn, he was gorgeous. Ethan felt his orgasm building inside him. His hips lost their rhythm, and his thrusts became short and hard, his muscles straining and the sweat dripping down the side of his face as he chased after his release. It slammed into him, and Ethan folded himself over Calvin, slipping his arms under Calvin’s shoulders and taking hold of him. He brought Calvin down hard against him as he thrust in, Calvin’s sharp cry sending Ethan over the edge. He gasped as he came inside Calvin, thrusting deep a couple of more times before slowing down. His muscles relaxed, and a heavenly haze washed over him as he gently pulled out. He collapsed onto his side as he tried to catch his breath. Calvin

Just a short time ago, reading a book was a part of our natural rhythm, an inclination to find the quiet within the chaos. When we had a few minutes to spare, we often turned to a book. In fact, we yearn for this core sense of peace because we viscerally recognize it. And we have the freedom to claim it, to lean into the quiet and pick up a book. To claim this—to slow down and settle in with a story—this becomes a radical act of self-care. Reading is self-care. As human beings living in a digital age, time-starved and rushing around, printed books are reminders of the time we once had, the time we want to have, and the time we hope to have. Printed books quell the chaos. Printed books make us feel comfortable and make us feel like everything is going to be OK.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the ice cream man. The ice cream man, he tunnels into our town, solves our streets, turns on his music, and waits like a spider. Nothing’s more inscrutable than a darkened house. Nothing except a whole street of darkened houses. Some of us sleep, some lie in bed counting their resting heart rate. Every website agrees: its rhythm is unusual. This isn’t good. We like our refrigerator magnets and our dental hygienists’ hairstyles to be unusual, not our resting heart rates. I remember when sleep was so easy, a nice calm pool warmed by humming turbines . . . now sleep is a panicked rabbit clutched tight to my chest. Just keep still and I won’t hurt you, I tell my rabbit, but you can’t calm the thing you’re clutching. That’s been true for years.

So what's the deal with you and my sister?" He laughs shortly and rubs the back of his neck like something is there, tickling, tapping. "Tamra." Clutching the dashboard, I turn and glare at her. "There is no deal." She snorts. "Well, we wouldn't be sitting here if that was the case now, would we?" I open my mouth to demand she end the interrogation when Will's voice stops me. "I like your sister. A lot." I look at him dumbly. He looks at me, lowers his voice to say, "I like you." I know that, I guess, but heat crawls over my face. I swing forward in my seat, cross my arms over my chest and stare straight ahead. Can't stop shivering. Can't speak. My throat hurts too much. "Jacinda," he says. "I think you've shocked her," Tamra offers, then sighs. "Look, if you like her, you have to make it legit. I don't want everyone at school whispering about her like she's some toy you get your kicks with in a stairwell." Now I really can't speak. My blood burns. I already have one mother doing her best to control my life. I don't need my sister stepping in as mother number two. "I know," he says. "That's what I'm trying to do now-if she'll let me." I feel his gaze on the side of my face. Anxious. Waiting. I look at him. A breath shudders from me at the intensity in his eyes. He's serious. But then he would have to be. If he's willing to break free of his self-imposed solitude for me, especially when he suspects there's more to me than I'm telling him...he means what he's saying. His thumbs beat a staccato rhythm on the steering wheel as he drives. "I want to be with you, Jacinda." He shakes his head. "I'm done fighting it." "Jeez," Tamra mutters. And I know what she means. It seems too much. The declaration extreme. Fast. After all, we're only sixteen... I start, jerk a little. I think he's sixteen. I don't even know. I don't know anything about him other than his secret. That sort of eclipses everything else. But he has to be more. More than the secret. More than a hunter. More than a boy who doesn't want to be a force of destruction. More than the boy who saved my life. The boy I've built a fantasy around. I don't know the real him. Xander mentioned Will being sick, and I don't even know what happened to him. But then I don't feel bad about that for long. Because he doesn't know the real me either. And yet he still wants to be with me. Maybe it's perfect because I want to be with him, too. And not just because I need to get close to him and use him for information. Although there is that. Something I would like to forget but can't let myself. Forgetting is resigning myself to a life here. Forever. As a ghost. A small voice whispers through me, a tempting thought... Not if you have Will.

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike; "art of the Muses"). The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to personal interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within the arts, music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art. It may also be divided among art music and folk music. There is also a strong connection between music and mathematics. Music may be played and heard live, may be part of a dramatic work or film, or may be recorded. To many people in many cultures, music is an important part of their way of life. Ancient Greek and Indian philosophers defined music as tones ordered horizontally as melodies and vertically as harmonies. Common sayings such as "the harmony of the spheres" and "it is music to my ears" point to the notion that music is often ordered and pleasant to listen to. However, 20th-century composer John Cage thought that any sound can be music, saying, for example, "There is no noise, only sound. Musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez summarizes the relativist, post-modern viewpoint: "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus ... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be.

The Mother’s Prayer for Its Daughter First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither the Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches. May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty. When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer. Guide her, protect her When crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age. Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels. What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit. May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers. Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For Childhood is short—a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day— And Adulthood is long and Dry-Humping in Cars will wait. O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed. And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it. And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, That I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back. “My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes. Amen

To make a fresh start, the first thing I had to do was get rid of my stack of manuscript paper and my fountain pen. As long as they were sitting in front of me, what I was doing felt like “literature.” In their place, I pulled out my old Olivetti typewriter from the closet. Then, as an experiment, I decided to write the opening of my novel in English. Since I was willing to try anything, I figured, why not give that a shot? Needless to say, my ability in English composition didn’t amount to much. My vocabulary was severely limited, as was my command of English syntax. I could only write in simple, short sentences. Which meant that, however complex and numerous the thoughts running around my head, I couldn’t even attempt to set them down as they came to me. The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact, everything arranged to fit a container of limited size. The result was a rough, uncultivated kind of prose. As I struggled to express myself in that fashion, however, step by step, a distinctive rhythm began to take shape. Since I was born and raised in Japan, the vocabulary and patterns of the Japanese language had filled the system that was me to bursting, like a barn crammed with livestock. When I sought to put my thoughts and feelings into words, those animals began to mill about, and the system crashed.

Rose, let me show you upstairs to your new room. Do you know that my brother has bought the contents of an entire toy shop for you? Dolls and books, and the biggest doll house you've ever seen.” As the little girl squealed with delight and followed her at once, Holly stared at Zachary Bronson with rapidly dawning disapproval. “An entire toy shop?” “It was nothing like that,” Bronson said immediately. “Elizabeth is prone to exaggeration.” He threw a warning glance at Paula, silently demanding that she agree with him. “Isn't that right, Mother?” “Well,” Paula said uncertainly, “actually, you did rather—” “I'm certain Lady Holland will want a tour of the house while her belongings are unpacked,” Bronson interrupted hastily. “Why don't you take her around?” Clearly overwhelmed by shyness, Mrs. Bronson gave a noncommittal murmur and sped away, leaving the two of them alone in the parlor. Faced with Holly's disapproving stare, Zachary shoved his hands in his pockets, while the toe of his expensive shoe beat a quick, impatient rhythm on the floor. “What harm is there in an extra toy or two?” he finally said in an excessively reasonable tone. “Her room was about as cheerful as a prison cell. I thought a doll and a handful of books would make the place more appealing for her—” “First of all,” Holly interrupted, “I doubt that any room in this house could be described as a prison cell. Second… I will not have my daughter spoiled and overwhelmed, and influenced by your taste for excess.” “Fine,” he said with a gathering scowl. “We'll get rid of the damned toys, then.” “Please do not swear in my presence,” Holly said, and sighed. “How am I to remove the toys after Rose has seen them? You don't know very much about children, do you?” “No,” he said shortly. “Only how to bribe them.

What else do you want to know?’ he asked. Possessed by morbid curiosity, her eyes darted to the scar that cut just over his ear. She’d found it shortly after they met, while he lay unconscious in the grass. He didn’t need to ask what had caught her attention. ‘I got that in a fight against imperial soldiers. Ask me why.’ She shook her head, unable to bring herself to do it. The cocoon of warmth that had enveloped the entire afternoon unwound itself in an instant. ‘Are you having second thoughts about being here with me?’ He planted a hand into the grass, edging closer. ‘No. I trust you.’ He was giving her all the time in the world to shove him away, to rise, to flee. Her heartbeat quickened as she watched him. Moving ever so slowly, he braced an arm on either side of her, his fingers sinking into the moss. ‘I asked you to come with me.’ Despite her words, she dug her heels into the ground and inched backwards. ‘I feel safe with you.’ ‘I can see that.’ He affected a lazy smile as she retreated until her back pressed against the knotted roots that crawled along the ground. His boldness was so unexpected, so exciting. She held her breath and waited. Her pulse jumped when he reached for her. She’d been imagining this moment ever since their first duel and wondering whether it would take another swordfight for him to come near her again. His fingers curled gently against the back of her neck, giving her one last chance to escape. Then he lowered his mouth and kissed her. It was as natural as breathing to wrap his arms around her and lower her to the ground. He settled his weight against her hips. The perfume of her skin mixed with the damp scent of the moss beneath them. At some point, her sense of propriety would win over. Until then he let his body flood with raw desire. It felt good to kiss her the way he wanted to. It felt damn good. He slipped his tongue past her lips to where she was warm and smooth and inviting. Her hands clutched at his shirt as she returned his kiss. A muted sound escaped from her throat. He swallowed her cry, using his hands to circle her wrists: rough enough to make her breath catch, gentle enough to have her opening her knees, cradling his hips with her long legs. He stroked himself against her, already hard beyond belief. He groaned when she responded, instinctively pressing closer. ‘I need to see you,’ he said. The sash around her waist fell aside in two urgent tugs while his other hand stole beneath her tunic. She gasped when his fingers brushed the swath of cloth at her breasts. The faint, helpless sound nearly lifted him out of the haze of desire. He didn’t want to think too hard about this. Not yet. He felt for the edge of the binding. ‘In back.’ She spoke in barely a whisper, a sigh on his soul. She peered up at him, her face in shadow as he parted her tunic. She watched him in much the same way she had when they had first met: curious, fearless, her eyes a swirl of green and gold. He pulled at the tight cloth until Ailey’s warm, feminine flesh swelled into his hands. He soothed his palms over the cruel welts left by the bindings. She bit down against her lip as blood rushed back into the tortured flesh. With great care, he stroked her nipples, teasing them until they grew tight beneath his roughened fingertips. God’s breath. Perfect. He wanted his mouth on her and still it wouldn’t be enough. Her heart beat out a chaotic rhythm. His own echoed the same restless pulse. ‘I knew it would be like this.’ His words came out hoarse with passion. At that moment he’d have given his soul to have her. But somewhere in his thick skull, he knew he had a beautiful, vulnerable girl who trusted him pressed against the bare earth. He sensed the hitch in her breathing and how her fingers dug nervously into his shoulders, even as her hips arched into him. He ran his thumb gently over the reddened mark that ran just below her collarbone and felt her shiver beneath him.

With the relief of knowing I had passed through a crisis, I sighed because there was nothing to hold me back. It was no time for fear or pretense, because it could never be this way with anyone else. All the barriers were gone. I had unwound the string she had given me, and found my way out of the labyrinth to where she was waiting. I loved her with more than my body. I don’t pretend to understand the mystery of love, but this time it was more than sex, more than using a woman’s body. It was being lifted off the earth, outside fear and torment, being part of something greater than myself. I was lifted out of the dark cell of my own mind, to become part of someone else—just as I had experienced it that day on the couch in therapy. It was the first step outward to the universe—beyond the universe—because in it and with it we merged to recreate and perpetuate the human spirit. Expanding and bursting outward, and contracting and forming inward, it was the rhythm of being—of breathing, of heartbeat, of day and night—and the rhythm of our bodies set off an echo in my mind. It was the way it had been back there in that strange vision. The gray murk lifted from my mind, and through it the light pierced into my brain (how strange that light should blind!), and my body was absorbed back into a great sea of space, washed under in a strange baptism. My body shuddered with giving, and her body shuddered its acceptance. This was the way we loved, until the night became a silent day. And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other’s arms, giving and taking. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other—child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death. But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding. As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other’s hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing. And in the moment before I fell off into sleep, I remembered the way it had been between Fay and myself, and I smiled. No wonder that had been easy. It had been only physical. This with Alice was a mystery. I leaned over and kissed her eyes. Alice knows everything about me now, and accepts the fact that we can be together for only a short while. She has agreed to go away when I tell her to go. It’s painful to think about that, but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime.

Let us now assume that under truly extraordinary circumstances, the daimon nevertheless breaks through in the individual, so to speak, and is this able to let its destructive transcendence be felt: then one would have a kind of active experience of death. Thereupon the second connection becomes clear: why the figure of the daimon or doppelgänger in the ancient myths could be melded with the deity of death. In the Nordic tradition the warrior sees his Valkyrie precisely at the moment of death or mortal danger. In religious asceticism, mortification, self-renunciation, and the impulse of devotion to God are the preferred methods of provoking and successfully overcoming the crisis I have just mentioned. Everyone knows the expressions which refer to these states, such as the 'mystical death' or 'dark night of the soul', etc. In contrast to this, within the framework of a heroic tradition, the path to the same goal is the active rapture, the Dionysian unleashing of the active element. At its lower levels, we find phenomenons such as the use of dance as a sacred technique for achieving an ecstasy of the soul that summons and uses profound energies. While the individual’s life is surrendered to Dionysian rhythm, another life sinks into it, as if it where his abyssal roots surfacing. The 'wild host' Furies, Erinyes, and suchlike spiritual natures are symbolic picturings of this energy, thus corresponding to a manifestation of the daimon in its terrifying and active transcendence. At a higher level we find sacred war-games; higher still, war itself. And this brings us back to the ancient Aryan concept of battle and the warrior ascetic. At the climax of danger and heroic battle, the possibility for such an extraordinary experience was recognized. The Lating ludere, meaning both 'to play' and 'to fight', seems to contain the idea of release. This is one of the many allusions to the inherent ability of battle to release deeply-buried powers from individual limitations and let them freely emerge. Hence the third comparison: the daimon, the Lar, the individualizing I, etc., are not only identical with the Furies, Erinyes, and other unleashed Dionysian natures, which themselves have many traits similar to the goddess of death — they are also synonymous with the storm maidens of battle, the Valkyries and Fravartis. In the texts, for example, the Fravartis are called 'the terrible, the all-powerful', 'those who attack in storm and bestow victory upon those who conjure them', or, more precisely, those who conjure them up in themselves. From there to the final comparison is only a short step. In the Aryan tradition the same martial beings eventually take on the form of victory-goddesses, a transformation which denotes the happy completion of the inner experience in question. Just as the daimon or doppelgänger signifies a deep, supra-individual power in its latent condition as compared to ordinary consciousness; just as the Furies and Erinyes reflect a particular manifestation of daimonic rages and eruptions (and the goddesses of death, Valkyries, Fravartis, etc., refer to the same conditions, as long as these are facilitated by battle and heroism) — in the same way the goddess of victory is the expression of the triumph of the I over this power. She signifies the victorious ascent to a state unendangered by ecstasies and sub-personal forms of disintegration, a danger that always lurks behind the frenetic moment of Dionysian and even heroic action. The ascent to a spiritual, truly supra-personal condition that makes one free, immortal, and internally indestructible, when the 'Two becomes One', expresses itself in this image of mythical consciousness.

I don’t…believe you,” she lied, her blood running wild through her veins. His gleaming gaze impaled her. “Then believe this.” And suddenly his mouth was on hers. This was not what she’d set out to get from him. But oh, the joy of it. The heat of it. His mouth covered hers, seeking, coaxing. Without breaking the kiss, he pushed her back against the wall, and she grabbed for his shoulders, his surprisingly broad and muscular shoulders. As he sent her plummeting into unfamiliar territory, she held on for dear life. Time rewound to when they were in her uncle’s garden, sneaking a moment alone. But this time there was no hesitation, no fear of being caught. Glorying in that, she slid her hands about his neck to bring him closer. He groaned, and his kiss turned intimate. He used lips and tongue, delving inside her mouth in a tender exploration that stunned her. Enchanted her. Confused her. Something both sweet and alien pooled in her belly, a kind of yearning she’d never felt with Edwin. With any man but Dom. As if he sensed it, he pulled back to look at her, his eyes searching hers, full of surprise. “My God, Jane,” he said hoarsely, turning her name into a prayer. Or a curse? She had no time to figure out which before he clasped her head to hold her for another darkly ravishing kiss. Only this one was greedier, needier. His mouth consumed hers with all the boldness of Viking raiders of yore. His tongue drove repeatedly inside in a rhythm that made her feel all trembly and hot, and his thumbs caressed her throat, rousing the pulse there. Thank heaven there was a wall to hold her up, or she was quite sure she would dissolve into a puddle at his feet. Because after all these years apart, he was riding roughshod over her life again. And she was letting him. How could she not? His scent of leather and bergamot engulfed her, made her dizzy with the pleasure of it. He roused urges she’d never known she had, sparked fires in places she’d thought were frozen. Then his hands swept down her possessively as if to memorize her body…or mark it as belonging to him. Belonging to him. Oh, Lord! She shoved him away. How could she have fallen for his kisses after what he’d done? How could she have let him slip that far under her guard? Never again, curse him! Never! For a moment, he looked as stunned by what had flared between them as she. Then he reached for her, and she slipped from between him and the wall, panic rising in her chest. “You do not have the right to kiss me anymore,” she hissed. “I’m engaged, for pity’s sake!” As soon as her words registered, his eyes went cold. “It certainly took you long enough to remember it.” She gaped at him. “You have the audacity to…to…” She stabbed his shoulder with one finger. “You have no business criticizing me! You threw me away years ago, and now you want to just…just take me up again, as if nothing ever happened between us?” A shadow crossed his face. “I did not throw you away. You jilted me, remember?” That was the last straw. “Right. I jilted you.” Turning on her heel, she stalked back toward the road. “Just keep telling yourself that, since you’re obviously determined to believe your own fiction.” “Fiction?” He hurried after her. “What are you talking about?” “Oh, why can’t you just admit what you really did and be done with it?” Grabbing her by the arm, he forced her to stop just short of the street. He stared into her face, and she could see when awareness dawned in his eyes. “Good God. You know the truth. You know what really happened in the library that night.” “That you manufactured that dalliance between you and Nancy to force me into jilting you?” She snatched her arm free. “Yes, I know.” Then she strode out of the alley, leaving him to stew in his own juices.

Truth or dare,” I ask, my voice edgy with anticipation and yearning. I know he’ll answer dare – and it will be the last one I give him. “Dare.” “Fuck me,” I beg. He immediately rolls over, gently resting his body on top of mine. I spread my legs, positioning his trim waist and hips in between my thighs. The hard outline of his cock grazes the front of my panties, sending my eyes rolling into the back of my head. He slides his hands under the covers. His fingers sneak under the waistband of my panties. He sits up to slowly glide them down my legs, revealing body in the moonlight. He tosses them, dripping wet, by the side of the bed and the then slides off his tight briefs. His erect cock stands at attention once removed from its fabric confines, pulsing up and down in rhythm with Cole’s racing heartbeat. With the covers now cast to the side, Cole leans over me, devouring my lips. My lips open and I yield him my tongue, which he handles adroitly, flicking it with his own and sucking it with his lips. He leans over to the side of the bed and bends down, picking up his shorts. The movement of his body over mine sends the peaks of his deeply sculpted abs gliding across my soft skin, generating a shiver that trembles through my body. He pulls out his wallet from his shorts pocket and extracts a condom. He kneels on the bed and works the condom down the expansive length of his solid shaft. He imposes his body back over mine, covering me with his huge torso. The length of his cock rests against my warm pussy, throbbing against it. I wrap my legs around his waist and lock my ankles together, pulling him closer toward me. His rough, masculine scent fills my nostrils. He kisses my neck, the light stubble on the side of his check rubbing against my skin. I buck my hips toward him, pressing his cock against me. The bottom of his shaft rests on my warm opening, the tip extends up to my belly button. A delicious anxiousness overtakes me. Will I really be able to fit all of him inside me? “Fuck, Emma, you’re so sexy,” he moans while raking his lips and tongue up and down my neck. He nibbles lightly on my earlobe, his hot, staggered breath brushing against the side of my face. “I want you inside me,” I pant to him. He lifts his hips up and steadies his cock at the precipice of my slick center. He looks me in the eye, and I nod, imploring him to plunge inside me. He does. I shut my eyes as a brief wave of pain washes over me, the shock of accommodating his massive size inside. It soon subsides and my body comfortably accustomed itself to his presence. He slowly pumps in and out of me. I bite down on my bottom lip, waves of pleasure erupting from my center and traversing every inch of my body. My stomach is in knots and my breath is quick and sharp. Every time he lifts his hips to thrust out, my wet cavern craves for him to come back – and he immediately does, pushing himself back in, the length of his shaft rubbing against my insides, the friction driving me wild with ecstasy. I lose track of time as he continues to thrust in and out. I buck my hips against him, hungry for his full length. I tighten my grip with my legs around his waist, greedy for his body to press against mine. “Fuck, Emma, shit,” he moans. I can only respond with unarticulated moans of pleasure and gasps for breath. “Oh, fuck, Cole, I’m gonna come,” I announce. I shut my eyes tight and wrap my arms around his neck, pulling him into me. He thrusts one more time, strongly, and my orgasm erupts. Pulses of pleasure shoot up and down my spine and turn my insides, my chest beats and my heartrate booms against my eardrums. The outside world disappears as I feel my body melting into Cole’s. Cole collapses next to me, a sheen of sweat glistening over his body in the moonlight, highlighting the twists and turns of his musculature. Slowly the world comes back into focus and a blissful

  MANTRAS: These are often referred to as sacred sounds because they are part of the practice of different religious traditions. Mantra is a Sanskrit word whose literal meaning is “that which protects and purifies the mind.” Here mind represents not only thought but also feelings. These sounds, each of which is a kind of germinating seed (in Sanskrit bija) that is implanted in the mind, are catalysts for ridding ourselves of traits that impede our spiritual unfoldment. Like toning and chanting they are sounded repetitively in a steady rhythm. They can be sounded either inwardly or aloud. Done inwardly within the mind, no tone is needed. Only the rhythm is necessary. This inner repetition is useful because it can be set in motion at any time and in any situation.   CHANTING: This is actually a form of singing characterized by the repetition of short phrases of tones, fairly narrow in range, often wedded to some kind of sacred text and done as part of a

Our political solar system, in short, has been characterized not by two equally competing suns, but by a sun and a moon. It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period arc fought out; while the minority party shines in reflected radiance of the beat thus generated .... Each time one majority sun sets and a new sun arises, the drama of American politics is transformed. Figuratively and literally a new political era begins. For each new majority party brings its own orbit of conflict, its own peculiar rhythm of ethnic antagonisms, its own economic equilibrium, its own sectional balance.

The first music to be called blues seems to have been slow, but not necessarily sad—it was a sexy rhythm, popular with African American working-class dancers in New Orleans and other parts of the Deep South.

Priorities—there are a handful of rules, some of which don’t change much like the core values of the firm and the long-term Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) and others that change every quarter and every week, what I call the Top 5 and Top 1 of 5. It’s the balance of short term and long term. 2. Data—in order to know if you’re acting consistent to your priorities you need feedback in terms of real time data. There are key metrics within the business that you want to measure over an extended period of time, called Smart Numbers; and there are metrics that provide a short-term laser focus on an aspect of the business or someone’s job called a Critical Number. It’s the balance of short term and long term. 3. Rhythm—until your people are “mocking” you, you’ve not repeated your message enough. A well-organized set of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual meetings keep everyone aligned and accountable. And the agendas for each provide the necessary balance between the short term and long term.

Contemporary Americans, immersed in the busy rhythms of twenty-first-century life, rarely pause to reflect that they dwell in a land that has been inhabited for millennia. Human settlement on the continent we call North America (after the Florentine cartographer Amerigo Vespucci) began at least 15,000 years ago,

When I was a little girl, I had short black hair with small tight curls. Just as soon as you stretched them out with a comb, they snapped back into place like tiny springs. I wished for wavy tresses, blonde, that swayed to the rhythm of my movements. I yearned for hair like that of the girls who lived in the big houses that my mother cleaned. My

Unclothed we’re on my bed, her knees at my armpits, her palms flat and open next to me. Her breasts are like lemons. Her skin bruises against mine. She curls her fingers closer to the need of me, her soft thigh presses against mine. I gasp as she moves, she circles me and her mouth moves to my breast. She sucks it with the same rhythm and at the feel of her teeth I feel myself close and groan out. She moves downward with her mouth, and with her tongue she makes me come, wonderfully, feverishly, and I’m feeble after that, but not enough to stop me wanting her, wanting to make her sigh, and I gravitate to her, moving on top and pressing into her. She is deliciously wet, and I put my hand in between us. It is only a short moment until she joins me, shouting, sighing. I kiss her deeply and see how relaxed she looks, eyes curled up. I

The two-point rhythm of walking's stride clears the mind for thinking. (N.B.: Perhaps, after telling the spinal circuits to "take a walk," the forebrain shifts to automatic pilot, so to speak, freeing the neocortex to ponder important issues of the day.) Many philosophers were lifetime walkers, who found that bipedal rhythms facilitated creative contemplation and thought. In his short life, e.g., Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles--ten times the circumference of earth.

What is important to notice here is not the exact times or durations, as those will vary with each family, but rather the rhythm that is in place. There is a clear start to the day; a routine that is always followed, then educational time is started with circle time. The child understands that this first circle time marks the beginning of the instructional period. Clear breaks allow the child to transition from one activity to the next. By having a set number of activities before breaks such as snack time, your child begins to understand the concept of time. Eventually, this will become so second nature even to the youngest child that they will begin to transition by themselves. Allow for a range in flexibility in your routine. The exact minutes on the clock do not matter as much as the rhythm. If your child is losing interest in his or her self-directed activity ten minutes early, you may try to keep them interested a bit longer. However, it is acceptable to acknowledge that your child has gained all that they require from that lesson today and it is time to move on to the next phase. The same is true for extending activities. There is no need to interrupt a child that is engrossed in discovery. Simply let the interest and curiosity be satisfied in its own time and then carry on with the day. This is the beauty of Montessori home school, being able to tailor the experience to each child.

It is most comfortable to be invisible, to observe life from a distance, at one with our own intoxicating superior thoughts. But comfort and isolation are not where the surprises are. They are not where hope is. Hope tends to appear when we see that all sorts of disparate personalities can come together, no matter how different and jarring they may seem at first. Little kids think all colors or patterns of shirt go with all patterns and colors of pants, and it takes us elders a minute to see that they in fact do. Blue madras shorts can look great with a Peter Max print top, in the right hands—say, of someone who has found a visual rhythm, in patterns that play off each other without being chaotic. I’ve seen this many times. In life the fussy beautician can be beautiful beside the motorcyclist with neck tats, filling boxes with donated food for Thanksgiving dinners, or reading together on the same ratty couch at the library. Only together do we somehow keep coming through unsurvivable loss, the stress of never knowing how things will shake down, to the biggest miracle of all, that against all odds, we come through the end of the world, again and again—changed but intact (more or less).

Compare this to the Azish system, where a bad Prime is unable to single-handedly ruin their government.” “And a good one is unable to accomplish much,” Dalinar said, then held his hand up to forestall further argument. “I see what you’re saying. But I find nobility in the traditional way of rule.” “Having read the histories, I believe the nobility you imagine is created from stories about the inhabitants of ancient days, but rarely possessed by said inhabitants. Those kings tended to live short, brutal lives. No matter. Once we win this war, I expect to have decades to persuade you.” Kelek help him. Dalinar poured himself more orange wine. (less)

The Ekarv method, named after Margareta Ekarv of the Swedish Postal Museum, is a proven set of guidelines, the effectiveness of which has been substantiated by research and has been widely adopted. 1. Use simple language to express complex ideas. 2. Use normal spoken word order. 3. One main idea per line, the end of the line coinciding with the natural end of the phrase. "The robbers were sentenced to death by hanging" is short and to the point. 4. Lines of about 45 letters; text broken into short paragraphs of four or five lines. 5. Use the active form of verbs and state the subject early in the sentence. 6. Avoid: subordinate clauses, complicated constructions, unnecessary adverbs, hyphenating words and the end of lines. 7. Read texts aloud and note natural pauses. 8. Adjust wording and punctuation to reflect the rhythm of speech. 9. Discuss texts with colleagues and consider their comments. 10. Pin draft texts in their final positions to assess affect. 11. Continually reverse and refine the wording. 12. Concentrate the meaning to an "almost poetic level".

As the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, the monarch is the defender of the faith—the official religion of the country, established by law and respected by sentiment. Yet when the Queen travels to Scotland, she becomes a member of the Church of Scotland, which governs itself and tolerates no supervision by the state. She doesn’t abandon the Anglican faith when she crosses the border, but rather doubles up, although no Anglican bishop ever comes to preach at Balmoral. Elizabeth II has always embraced what former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey called the “sacramental manner in which she views her own office.” She regards her faith as a duty, “not in the sense of a burden, but of glad service” to her subjects. Her faith is also part of the rhythm of her daily life. “She has a comfortable relationship with God,” said Carey. “She’s got a capacity because of her faith to take anything the world throws at her. Her faith comes from a theology of life that everything is ordered.” She worships unfailingly each Sunday, whether in a tiny chapel in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec or a wooden hut on Essequibo in Guyana after a two-hour boat ride. But “she doesn’t parade her faith,” said Canon John Andrew, who saw her frequently during the 1960s when he worked for Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey. On holidays she attends services at the parish church in Sandringham, and at Crathie outside the Balmoral gates. Her habit is to take Communion three or four times a year—at Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday, and the occasional special service—“an old-fashioned way of being an Anglican, something she was brought up to do,” said John Andrew. She enjoys plain, traditional hymns and short, straightforward sermons. George Carey regards her as “middle of the road. She treasures Anglicanism. She loves the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which is always used at Sandringham. She would disapprove of modern services, but wouldn’t make that view known. The Bible she prefers is the old King James version. She has a great love of the English language and enjoys the beauty of words. The scriptures are soaked into her.” The Queen has called the King James Bible “a masterpiece of English prose.

It’s easy to find people who think work is good and leisure is bad (i.e., you rest to work). You can also find people who think leisure is good and work is bad (i.e., you work to rest). But according to the Bible, both work and rest can be good if they are done to the glory of God.4 The Bible commends hard work (Prov. 6:6–11; Matt. 25:14–30; 1 Thess. 2:9; 4:11–12; 2 Thess. 3:10) and it also extols the virtue of rest (Ex. 20:8–11; Deut. 5:12–15; Ps. 127:2). Both have their place. The hard part is putting them in the right places. Many of us are less busy than we think, but life feels constantly overwhelming because our days and weeks and years have no rhythm.

Sometimes the best preparation is a wandering, soul-enriching procrastination. Take a nap, throw the Frisbee, sing a song, and then write the paper. The land won’t produce a harvest if it never lies fallow. We can’t be “all in” all the time. Just think of the Israelite calendar. It had times for feasting and times for fasting. It was for their piety and their productivity that God put them on a predictable pattern filled with daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, annual, and multiyear rhythms.

In 1997 Gary McPherson studied 157 randomly selected children as they picked out and learned a musical instrument. Some went on to become fine musicians and some faltered. McPherson searched for the traits that separated those who progressed from those who did no. IQ was not a good predictor. Neither were aural sensitivity, math skills, income or a sense or rhythm. The best single predictor was a question McPherson had asked the students before they had even selected their instruments: How long do you think you will play? The students who planned to play for a short time did not become very proficient. The children who planned to play for a few years had modest success. But there were some children who said, in effect: "I want to be a musician, I'm going to play my whole life." Those children soared. The sense of identity that children brought to the first lesson was the spark that would set off all the improvement that would subsequently happen. It was a vision of their future self.

my arms on the cinder track. Kids came running our way, thirty girls in bright shorts, an improbable bobbing mass. The eager breathing, the overlapping rhythms of their footfalls. Sometimes I think our love is inexperienced. The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future. Simple things are doomed, or is that a superstition? We watched

HeartMath Inner Balance biofeedback monitor. It detects your heart’s minutest rhythms and sends a graph to your smartphone, facilitating HRV training.

Once they were safely ensconced, Dani released his arm and turned to face him, but drew up short when she saw how close he actually was, with only inches between them. He was staring down at her with a new intensity that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She swallowed and broke away from his gaze, but found she didn't know where else to look. His lips, soft and parted ever so slightly, were a definite no-go. Her eyes traced down the column of this throat, the sharp edge of his collarbone just below his open collar, the spot over his heart where hours ago, in another life, she'd rested her hand and felt the rhythm of his pulse. "How are we going to get Zephyr out of the dungeon?" she asked his chest.

If I hear notes in music I see each note visually. This is called synesthesia. Each one is as visually distinct as it is auditorally. Bach is geometric. Beethoven is like very long leaps of fire and light. Prokofiev is intricate scenes of lights and movement. Mozart is curly bands of lights and rosy colors. Jazz is sharp angles of light. Opera is lots of really huge deep lightning bolts. Pop is short simple bands of light. Rap is not a pretty sight. It is like an angry visual mess. I don’t enjoy it, but I do like samba and Latin rhythms. Those have cool bouncy lights and colors.

Why should it be Africa, where children starve amidst food,

If you live in Europe, mature deciduous trees offer a special service to help you: a short-term weather forecast brought to you by chaffinches. These rust-red birds with gray heads normally sing a song whose rhythm ornithologists like to transcribe as "chip chip chip chooee chooee cheeoo." But you'll hear that song only on a fine day. If it looks like rain, the song changes to a loud "run run run run run".

Each organism lived its cycle, whether long or short, then died. Only the animal and vegetable species didn’t know they were dying and his – the inhuman – did. He was tormented by the idea of leaving the world, not the natural business of leaving it, but because he would depart before extracting a possible meaning: so-called experience had alienated him from life and its rhythms, his thirst for knowledge had led to an unlearning of all wisdom and certainties. All that remained of him was the shadow projected from the window of a train hurtling towards an unknown destination.

I felt myself falling into a different rhythm. I realized then that to recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow. After three months in Provincetown, I had written 92,000 words of my novel. They might be terrible, but in one sense, I didn’t care. The reason why became clear to me when one day, shortly before I left Provincetown, I placed my deck chair in the ocean so the sea was lapping at my feet and I finished the third volume of War and Peace. As I closed its last page, I realized I had been sitting there for most of the day. I had been reading like this, day after day, for weeks. And I thought suddenly: It came back! My brain came back! I feared my brain had been broken, and this experiment might just reveal I was a permanently degenerated blob. But I could see now that healing was possible. I cried with relief.

Our hearts beat in unison, in time with the rhythm of life.

Most of the times we are mere spectators in the stadium, watching us run the race of our life. This race is not a defined format either; it could be a combination of short exhilarating sprints, strategic middle distance running, high hurdles, low hurdles or grueling marathons. The biggest challenge is the element of mystery in the format; each lap may require us to get into a rhythm to run a different kind of race and the number of laps assigned to us in the format is never known to us. We have to put our best performance irrespective of the outcome; we might blaze away to glory or we might pale into the oblivion, the race has to be run. We also share the track with fellow runners and each of them is engrossed in running their own race as per the format prescribed to them. Do not ever get intimidated by runners who zoom past us; we must plan to run our race at our own pace. Remember, the beauty of this format is that there is no competition among runners; the key is to concentrate on our own race and wish others well.

You begin to compose a sentence in your head. You don’t write it down. You let the sentence play through your mind again. (It’s only six words long.) You replace one or two of the words. You adjust the rhythm by changing the verb. You discard the metaphor. You decide you like the sentence. You write it down. Is this composition? Or revision? It’s both.

Reread your notes, and take notes on them. And again. Take notes on your thoughts. Most of all, take notes on what interests you. Be certain you’ve marked out what interests you. Don’t make an outline from your notes. Don’t turn your notes into a road map for the sentences to come. Reread your notes. No matter how long or short they are. Then think. And think again. Learn to be patient in the presence of your thoughts. Learn to be equally patient in the presence of a new sentence or a phrase you like. Let yourself pause and work on that sentence. In your head. Don’t write it down. Be patient. Pay attention to everything you’re thinking. Notice your thoughts, See if you can feel your awareness illuminating them. If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that some of your thoughts interest you and some don’t. How can you tell? You’ll stop and rethink the thought, Pause in its presence. Let the thoughts that interest you distract you. Ask yourself about them. Why do they interest you? What were you thinking about before they appeared? Then come back to the main sequence, Unless you’ve discovered a better main sequence By following a thought you’re interested in. Don’t try to distinguish between thinking and making sentences. Pretend they’re the same thing. Don’t rush your thinking. Don’t rush to make sentences. See what happens when you try to put words to a thought that interests you. See what words the thought itself is presenting and try making a sentence out of them, A sentence like the ones we’ve been talking about, with rhythm and clarity and balance. Not a volunteer sentence. See if the thought you’re interested in becomes sharper and clearer by making a sentence from it. It may become more obscure. What does that tell you? Don’t panic, keep working at it. If you make a sentence while thinking, It doesn’t mean you have to make more sentences immediately. You can go back to thinking and see what the business of making a sentence stirred up in you. It may have dislodged other thoughts, other connections. No one will teach you how to wait while you think or what to wait for while you’re thinking. You’ll have to teach yourself. Above all, you’ll have to teach yourself to be patient. Trying this once or twice won’t do.

Do you rememberin’ Assumption, Calixta?” he asked in a low voice broken by passion. Oh! she remembered; for in Assumption he had kissed her and kissed and kissed her; until his senses would well nigh fail, and to save her he would resort to a desperate flight. If she was not an immaculate dove in those days, she was still inviolate; a passionate creature whose very defenselessness had made her defense, against which his honor forbade him to prevail. Now well, now her lips seemed in a manner free to be tasted, as well as her round, white throat and her whiter breasts. They did not heed the crashing torrents, and the roar of the elements made her laugh as she lay in his arms. She was a revelation in that dim, mysterious chamber; as white as the couch she lay upon. Her firm, elastic flesh that was knowing for the first time its birthright, was like a creamy lily that the sun invites to contribute its breath and perfume to the undying life of the world. The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and found response in depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached. When he touched her breasts they gave themselves up in quivering ecstasy, inviting his lips. Her mouth was a fountain of delight. And when he possessed her, they seemed to swoon together at the very borderland of life’s mystery. He stayed cushioned upon her, breathless, dazed, enervated, with his heart beating like a hammer upon her. With one hand she clasped his head, her lips lightly touching his forehead. The other hand stroked with a soothing rhythm his muscular shoulders. The growl of the thunder was distant and passing away. The rain beat softly upon the shingles, inviting them to drowsiness and sleep. But they dared not yield.

Light can pass through the translucent eggs, and chemicals can diffuse into them. But vibrations are what really matter. They pass into the eggs and into the embryos, which can distinguish between bad vibes and benign ones without any previous experience of either. A bite from a snake will trigger hatching. Rain, wind, and footsteps will not. Even when a mild earthquake rattled Warkentin’s pond, the embryos didn’t react. By recording different vibrations and playing them back at the eggs, Warkentin showed that they’re attuned to pitch and rhythm. Falling raindrops produce a steady pitter-patter of short, high-frequency vibrations. Attacking snakes produce lower frequencies and more complicated patterns, with prolonged bouts of chewing punctuated by periods of stillness. If Warkentin edited gaps of stillness into rainfall recordings to make them feel more snake-like, the tadpoles found them scarier and were more likely to hatch. They can clearly sense the world before entering it, and they can use that information to defend themselves. They have agency. They have an Umwelt.

thoughts, and Pepper regained his natural walking rhythm.

If your long path is short-circuited by stress, and your brain is using the short path instead, you might be so alarmed at the mere thought of a shark that you have a panic attack just thinking about taking a swim in the ocean. All the body’s machinery of FFF then gets engaged by this imaginary threat, just as if you were nose to nose with Jaws. Your gut clenches, your heart races, your breathing becomes fast and shallow, and your focus narrows to the point where you can’t think about anything other than the threat. This takes a huge biological toll on the body. High adrenaline produces dramatic reductions in life span. Stressed people have much more disease and live much shorter lives than unstressed people. Whatever form stress takes—depression, anxiety, or PTSD—correlates with higher rates of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. The deficits in the life spans of stressed people are measured in decades rather than years. In meditators, the amygdala is quiet. It becomes even quieter with practice. The difference in amygdala activation between the longest-term meditators and their less-experienced peers has been measured. The adepts show 400% less reactivity to stressful events. But even in novices who practice mindfulness for 30 hours over 8 weeks, decreased amygdala activity is found. Other structures within the midbrain or limbic system work together with the hippocampus and amygdala. One of them, the thalamus, is like a relay station. Close to the corpus callosum, it identifies information coming in from the senses like touch, hearing, and taste, and directs it to the consciousness centers of the prefrontal cortex. The thalamus typically becomes more active during meditation, as it works harder to suppress sensory input (like “that buzzing mosquito” or “this chair is too hard”) that pulls us out of Bliss Brain. With the hippocampus regulating emotion, the thalamus regulating sensory input, and the long path in good working order, stress-inducing signals aren’t sent to the amygdala. In turn, all the body’s FFF machinery remains offline. This produces corresponding biological benefits. Heart rhythm is even. Respiration is deep and slow. Digestion is effective. Immunity is high. That’s why so many studies show pervasive health and longevity benefits among meditators.

I took a step inside and fumbled for the light switch. It was so black-like the black water… Where was that switch? Just like the black water, with the orange flame flickering impossibly on top of it. The flame that couldn't be a fire, but what then…? My fingers traced the wall, still searching, still shaking- suddenly, something Marcel had told me this afternoon echoed in my head, finally sinking in… She took off into the water, he'd said. The bloodsuckers have the advantage there. That's why I raced home -I was afraid she was going to double back swimming. My hand froze in its searching, my whole body froze into place, as I realized why I recognized the strange orange color of the water. Maggie's hair, blowing wild in the wind, the color of fire… She'd been right there. Right there in the harbor with me and Marcel. If Sam hadn't been there if it had been just the two of us…? I couldn't breathe or move. The light flicked on, though my frozen hand had still not found the switch. I blinked at the sudden light and saw that someone was there, waiting for me. VISITOR UNNATURALLY STILL AND WHITE, WITH LARGE BLACK EYES intent on my face, my visitor waited perfectly motionless in the center of the halt, beautiful beyond imagining. My knees trembled for a second, and I nearly fell. Then I hurled myself at her. ‘Olivia, oh, Olivia!’ I cried as I slammed into her. I'd forgotten how hard she was; it was like running headlong into a wall of cement. ‘Bell?’ There was a strange mingling of relief and confusion in her voice. I locked my arms around her, gasping to inhale as much of the scent of her skin as possible. It wasn't like anything else-not floral or spice, citrus, and musk. No perfume in the world could compare. My memory hadn't done it justice. I didn't notice when the gasping turned into something else-I only realized I was sobbing when Olivia dragged me to the living room couch and pulled me into her lap. It was like curling up into a cool stone, but a stone that was contoured comfortingly to the shape of my body. She rubbed my back in a gentle rhythm, waiting for me to get control of myself. ‘I'm… sorry,’ I blubbered. ‘I'm just… so happy… to see you!’ ‘It's okay, Bell. Everything's okay.’ ‘Yes,’ I bawled. And, for once, it seemed that way. Olivia sighed. ‘I'd forgotten how exuberant you are,’ she said, and her tone was disapproving. I looked up at her through my streaming eyes. Olivia's neck was tight, straining away from me, her lips pressed together firmly. Her eyes were black as pitch. ‘Oh,’ I puffed, as I realized the problem. She was thirsty. And I smelled appetizing. It had been a while since I'd had to think about that. ‘Sorry.’ ‘It's my fault. It's been too long since I hunted. I shouldn't let myself get so thirsty. But I was in a hurry today.’ The look she directed at me then was a glare. ‘Speaking of which, would you like to explain to me how you're alive?’ That brought me up short and stopped the sobs. I realized what must have happened immediately, and why Olivia was here. I swallowed loudly, ‘you saw me fall.’ ‘No,’ she disagreed, her eyes narrowing. ‘I saw you jump.’ I pursed my lips as I tried to think of an explanation that wouldn't sound nuts.

There's a story written in us, added to with each conception' it remembers and it changes us' we move to something from something.' Abbess Glass held her two hands before her side by side, palms out, thumbs folded in, very close together so that the narrowest of gaps stood between the index finger of both.'Life.' She raised one hand a fraction.'Death.' She raised the other to match it.'We spend all our years on the short journey across this gap. But look' the gap is narrow if you cross it, but follow it and it's long. As long as you like. You and I journey across the gap, but as a people we follow it. The Ancestor stands at both ends. The Ancestor watches us from before the flight' before the shiphearts first beat their rhythm. That is the Ancestor of singular form, the origin, the alpha. Along our journey we have become many and varied. The Ancestor watches us from the start and from the end, from beyond the death of stars, in the cold dark of beyond. That is the Ancestor of singular mind, the destination, the omega.'The Ancestor is meaning in chaos, memory in time, and that is holy. The ritual that Sister Wheel teaches is part of that memory' our connection to it, and it is important, whatever you think about the person who delivers the message. But what I really care about is the knowing behind it. We are many parts of the one. We are the steps, the Ancestor is the journey.

What to remove? Dairy. From cows, goats, and sheep (including butter). Grains. For the more intensive version of this 30-day diet, eliminate all grains. This is important for those with digestive or autoimmune conditions. If this feels undoable for a full month, add in a small serving a day of gluten-free grains like white rice or quinoa. If that still feels undoable, consider a whole-foods diet rich in vegetables that is strictly gluten- and dairy-free. Legumes. Beans of all kinds (soy, black, kidney, pinto, etc.), lentils, and peanuts. Green peas and snap peas are okay. Sweeteners, real or artificial. Sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, maple syrup, honey, agave, Splenda, Equal, NutraSweet, xylitol, stevia, etc. Processed or refined snack foods. Sodas and diet sodas. Alcohol in any form. White potatoes. Premade sauces and seasonings. How to avoid common pitfalls: Prepare well beforehand. Choose a time frame during which you will have limited or reduced travel, and that doesn’t include holidays or special occasions. Study the list of foods allowed on the diet and make a shopping list. Remove the foods from your pantry or refrigerator that aren’t allowed on the diet, if that makes it easier. Engage the whole family to try this together, or find a friend to join you. Success happens in community. Set up a calendar to mark your progress. Print out a free 30-day online calendar, tape it to the refrigerator door, and mark off each day. Pack snacks with you, pack your lunch, call ahead to restaurants to check their menu (or check online). Get enough vegetables and fats. If you feel jittery or lose too much weight, increase your carbohydrates (starchy vegetables like yams, taro, sweet potatoes). Don’t misread withdrawal-type symptoms as the diet “not working.” These symptoms usually resolve within a week’s time. Personalize it. Start with the basics above and: * If you’re having trouble with autoimmune conditions, eliminate eggs, too. * If you’re prone to weight gain, eat less meat and heavier foods (ex: stews, chili), more vegetables and raw foods. * If you’re prone to weight loss or having trouble gaining weight, eat more meats and heavier foods (ex: stews, chili), less raw foods like salads. * If you’re generally healthy and wanting a boost in energy, try short-term fasts of 12–16 hours. Due to the circadian rhythm of the digestive tract, skipping dinner is best (as opposed to skipping breakfast). Try this 1–2 times a week. (This fast also means no supplements or beverages other than tea or water during the fasting time.)

Stockings, but no drawers?" he teased, breathlessly. He nudged the neckline of her gown lower with his teeth, exposing her breast, distracting her as his hand glided farther up her thigh, to come gently to rest against the damp, silken curls at the crook of them. "Too warm for... drawers... but I liked the... garters..." She gasped out the words, and he gave a short laugh before he took her nipple into his mouth. Puckered velvet, it was, the palest, most delicate pink, like her lips; her breast could fill the palm of his hand. He knew because he skimmed his palm over the other one. "Kit," she rasped. "God." "One and the same," he murmured. He heard her gasp something, either a tortured laugh or a word, which may have been "beast," but she stopped abruptly when he took her nipple into his mouth again and drew slow circles around it with his tongue. Her softly sighed, "oh," her back arching up to meet him, her fingers combing over his head, made him wilder than he thought he could bear. But he would bear it. Today was for her, and today was all there would be. He settled for tucking his hips closer to her, his aching erection brushing against her. His fingers stroked lightly over the curls between her legs, twining in them. And then he returned his lips to hers, gently, because he wanted to watch her eyes when he slid a finger lightly along her cleft. He felt her body go taut when he did; she drew in a sharp breath. His hand stilled. "No?" he said softly. "Yes," she disagreed on a whisper, touching his face. He kissed her softly, as his finger slid lightly again, and then again, and at last her legs slipped open wider still, inviting him in. Desire clawed him, a great bird of prey clinging to his back, he could scarcely breathe. With his fingers, he circled her gently, slowly at first, and then insistently, listening to the pulse of her breath, to her soft murmurs, to learn the rhythm she wanted, until her desire drenched his fingers. He touched nearly chaste kisses to her mouth as his fingers played over her, and watched, triumphant, as her pupils grew large, her beautiful, complicated eyes opaque, her breathing become a quiet storm. "Kit?" she whispered urgently. "I---it's---" "I know," he sympathized hoarsely. "Move with me now." And she began to move her hips in time with his knowing fingers, colluding with him in her own pleasure, and he moved his own hips against her, craving his own release even as he knew he must deny it. He covered her moth with a kiss, a deep kiss, tangling his tongue with hers, and oh the taste of her: honey and velvet, rich as plums. He moved his fingers in time with his tongue, knew by her escalating breathing, the rhythm of her hips, that it would be soon. She took her lips from his, her head thrashed to one side. "Please..." "Hold on to me, Susannah." She was utterly focused on her journey now, and God, how he wanted to go there with her. At last, her fingers dug into his arms and she bowed up with a soft cry, pulsing against his hand. And somehow, this seemed nearly as precious as the beat of her heart, and the pleasure he took in her release was so acute it might well have been his own.

The girl's body dropped into the rhythm of a canter —and what girl doesn't love a horse, doesn't already know how to ride? The knowledge lurks in them, breath and bone, part of an ancient copact between big grazing beasts and the women who patiently tamed them, knowing brutality might work for a short while but true partnership can never be forced.