Rust Escape Quotes

Violence harms the one who does it as much as the one who receives it. You could cut down a tree with an axe. The axe does violence to the tree, and escapes unharmed. Is that how you see it? Wood is soft compared to steel, but the sharp steel is dulled as it chops, and the sap of the tree will rust and pit it. The mighty axe does violence to the helpless tree, and is harmed by it. So it is with men, though the harm is in the spirit.

My art teacher had said that if you breathed deeply and imagined something, you could be there. You could see it, feel it. During our standoffs with the NKVD, I learned to do that. I clung to my rusted dreams during the times of silence. It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest part of my heart. Komorov thought he was torturing us. But we were escaping into a stillness within ourselves. We found strength there.

There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors. p.116

Once upon a time, the great big world outside Bridgeton had seemed like Xanadu - miles of golden road lined with smiling people, waiting to usher me through hundreds of open doors. There was nothing out there but bright light and possibilities. There were big dreams of other places, other people, even other boys. There had even, for two hours in April, been somebody else. He was a glimpse of the future, where I would live and breath and love far, far away from this place. A future where behind a closed door, on Saturday mornings, a boy I hadn't met yet would wrap an arm around my waist and exhale damp heat into the curve of my neck. Where we would keep our eyes closed, pull the covers closer, burrow down and deeper to escape the nine-o'clock sunshine, and the sound of heavy breath echoing along the rusted steel confines of a pickup truck would be nothing but a memory.

This place where she worked certainly didn't make it look as if she continued to believe her calling was to change the course of American history. The building's rusted fire escape would just come down, just come loose from its moorings and crash onto the street, if anyone stepped on it - a fire escape whose function was not to save lives in the event of a fire but to uselessly hang there testifying to the immense loneliness inherent to living. For him it was stripped of any other meaning - no meaning could make better use of that building. Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn't surprise us, as astonishing to experience it as it may be. You can try turning yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely. My stupid, stupid Merry dear, stupider even than your stupid father, not even blowing up buildings helps. It's lonely if there are buildings and it's lonely if there are no buildings. There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness - not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethat of manmade explosives can't touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness. On May Day go out and march with your friends to its greater glory, the superpower of superpowers, the force that overwhelms all. Put your money on it, bet on it, worship it - bow down in submission not to Karl Marx, my stuttering, angry, idiot child, not to Ho Chi-Minh and Mao Tse-tung - bow down to the great god of Loneliness!

Slowly, fresh sunbeams poured into the emerald canyon, illuminating their narrow path between the rusted rails. Because of the din of the waking jungle, they did not hear the sound of several feet sliding down the tapered trunks of the giant lauan trees towering several hundred feet above their heads and silently scampering into the undergrowth.

Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight 1 You scream, waking from a nightmare. When I sleepwalk into your room, and pick you up, and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard, as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as my broken arms heal themselves around you. 2 I have heard you tell the sun, don't go down, I have stood by as you told the flower, don't grow old, don't die. Little Maud, I would blow the flame out of your silver cup, I would suck the rot from your fingernail, I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light, I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones, I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body, I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood, I would let nothing of you go, ever, until washerwomen feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands, and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades, and rats walk away from the culture of the plague, and iron twists weapons toward truth north, and grease refuse to slide in the machinery of progress, and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men, and the widow still whispers to the presence no longer beside her in the dark. And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry, this the nightmare you wake screaming from: being forever in the pre-trembling of a house that falls. 3 In a restaurant once, everyone quietly eating, you clambered up on my lap: to all the mouthfuls rising toward all the mouths, at the top of your voice you cried your one word, caca! caca! caca! and each spoonful stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering steam. Yes, you cling because I, like you, only sooner than you, will go down the path of vanished alphabets, the roadlessness to the other side of the darkness, your arms like the shoes left behind, like the adjectives in the halting speech of old folk, which once could call up the lost nouns. 4 And you yourself, some impossible Tuesday in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out among the black stones of the field, in the rain, and the stones saying over their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît, and the raindrops hitting you on the fontanel over and over, and you standing there unable to let them in. 5 If one day it happens you find yourself with someone you love in a café at one end of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar where wine takes the shapes of upward opening glasses, and if you commit then, as we did, the error of thinking, one day all this will only be memory, learn to reach deeper into the sorrows to come—to touch the almost imaginary bones under the face, to hear under the laughter the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss the mouth that tells you, here, here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones. The still undanced cadence of vanishing. 6 In the light the moon sends back, I can see in your eyes the hand that waved once in my father's eyes, a tiny kite wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look: and the angel of all mortal things lets go the string. 7 Back you go, into your crib. The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell. Your eyes close inside your head, in sleep. Already in your dreams the hours begin to sing. Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together, we will walk out together among the ten thousand things, each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.

So let me get this straight,” Ysabel asked. “You lost five prisoners, have no idea how or when, have no video footage due to some malfunction, and you can’t even make one chained up soul talk?” “When you put it that way, it sounds bad.” Ysabel stepped up to the warden and although she remained shorter than him by almost a foot, she seemed to grow somehow in presence. “What’s bad is if you let any more prisoners escape, the Devil won’t have to fire you because I’ll come down here myself, carve your body parts off one at a time and feed them to the hounds. Incompetence is unacceptable and I will not tolerate it.” “Yes, ma’am.” Remy laughed as Crax reeled back from her, a dazed look on his face. He was still chuckling as they exited the rusted gates. “What is so damned funny?” she asked through gritted teeth. “You. I mean, you couldn’t even hold your own against Pedro last night and yet you’re threatening the warden of Hell’s Prison. That takes balls.” He received no warning, just a flick of her hand and he went flying, his impromptu airborne status halted by a crag of rock. And not a smooth one. -Ysabel, Crax, & Remy

Says Juliet love wields the scissors love is the escape love blows through pinholes love refuses to die love holds its breathe though the absence of oxygen love defines the weight of the pillow slips free of the knot love builds a fire out of hope love climbs a rope of maybe love trusts the grappling hook to hold let the world tell us no love is the rusted fire escape that shouldn't support our weight but does

People assume a captive to be in their power. Often the best way to escape is by fighting back.” “What?” Marasi said, finally taking the handkerchief. “You discharged a pistol right beside your head,” Wax said. “You are going to have trouble hearing. Rusts … you’ve probably done some permanent damage to your ear. Hopefully it won’t be too bad.” “What?

Suddenly—so suddenly it scared him—there was light ahead, around a corner. Not the light of a rainy evening in the city, but paler, less certain. They rounded the corner. He noticed the flashlight bulb starting to flicker; lost the alligator momentarily. Then turned the corner and found a wide space like the nave of a church, an arched roof overhead, a phosphorescent light coming off walls whose exact arrangement was indistinct. “Wha,” he said out loud. Backwash from the river? Sea water shines in the dark sometimes; in the wake of a ship you see the same uncomfortable radiance. But not here. The alligator had turned to face him. It was a clear, easy shot. He waited. He was waiting for something to happen. Something otherworldly, of course. He was sentimental and superstitious. Surely the alligator would receive the gift of tongues, the body of Father Fairing be resurrected, the sexy V. tempt him away from murder. He felt about to levitate and at a loss to say where, really, he was. In a bonecellar, a sepulchre. “Ah, schlemihl,” he whispered into the phosphorescence. Accident prone, schlimazzel. The gun would blow up in his hands. The alligator’s heart would tick on, his own would burst, mainspring and escapement rust in this shindeep sewage, in this unholy light. “Can I let you just go?” Bung the foreman knew he was after a sure thing. It was down on the clipboard. And then he saw the alligator couldn’t go any further. Had settled down on its haunches to wait, knowing damn well it was going to be blasted. In Independence Hall in Philly, when the floor was rebuilt, they left part of the original, a foot square, to show the tourists. “Maybe,” the guide would tell you, “Benjamin Franklin stood right there, or even George Washington.” Profane on an eighth-grade class trip had been suitably impressed. He got that feeling now. Here in this room an old man had killed and boiled a catechumen, had committed sodomy with a rat, had discussed a rodent nunhood with V., a future saint—depending which story you listened to. “I’m sorry,” he told the alligator. He was always saying he was sorry. It was a schlemihl’s stock line. He raised the repeater to his shoulder, flicked off the safety. “Sorry,” he said again. Father Fairing talked to rats. Profane talked to alligators. He fired. The alligator jerked, did a backflip, thrashed briefly, was still. Blood began to seep out amoebalike to form shifting patterns with the weak glow of the water. Abruptly, the flashlight went out.

Rusty Shears In my prime I was ruthless. I cut down anything that stood in front of me. Now I lay rusting on the wall, no longer the sharpest tool in the shed. Pardon the pun, but it was by sheer luck I escaped being sold for scrap. I am grateful for that. I’m also grateful that I can decay with my better half. We are jointed at the hip. We once moved in opposite directions. Time and oxidation has welded us together. Now we watch the world around us split, like the atoms that fell on Hiroshima. We’re not ruthless anymore. In stillness, our eyes are wide open.

You could cut down a tree with your axe,” Raen said. “The axe does violence to the tree, and escapes unharmed. Is that how you see it? Wood is soft compared to steel, but the sharp steel is dulled as it chops, and the sap of the tree will rust and pit it. The mighty axe does violence to the helpless tree, and is harmed by it. So it is with men, though the harm is in the spirit.

The rust on the fire escape was so thick that tetanus seemed a far greater threat than smoke inhalation.

At the Judgment Seat of Christ, believers were thoroughly examined to see how faithful they were to the Bridegroom [Jesus] during this time. But this was also a time of celebration, as the Redeemed were rewarded for the good they did and for the evil they refrained from, after believing in Christ. Five eternal crowns were awarded to those deserving of them—the Crown of Righteousness, the Incorruptible Crown, the Crown of Life, the Crown of Rejoicing, and the Crown of Glory. These eternal rewards would never rust, tarnish or ever be stolen. The Crown of Righteousness was awarded to those who lived righteous lives in the eyes of the Lord, shunning evil whenever it visited their doorsteps. The Incorruptible Crown, also called the “Victor’s Crown”, was awarded to those who denied self, and rejected earthly opportunities in order to fully pursue God’s Kingdom. The Crown of Rejoicing was awarded to those who led others to faith in Christ. The Crown of Glory, also known as the “Elder’s Crown,” was awarded to those who preached the Word of God—pastors, ministers, priests, bishops, evangelists, and the like. The Crown of Life, sometimes called the “Martyr’s Crown,” was awarded to those who were killed because of their faith in God, and for their testimony. Those who lived righteous lives in the eyes of the Lord, who shunned evil in the flesh, denied self in order to further God’s Kingdom—leading many to Christ in the process—and preached the Gospel everywhere they went, then died martyr’s deaths received all five crowns. Many received four crowns at the Judgment Seat of Christ. Multitudes more received three. Others two. Some received only one. Sadly, some received none. As recorded in 1 Corinthians 3:15, “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.

That is the biggest problem with the truth: When you don't lock it in, it escapes you and, like a stray, it may be taken in by someone else.

I thought I saw a flicker of movement inside through the cabin’s grime-covered window next to its crooked door. A shadow. I had to know who was in there. I walked closer, reached out a trembling hand, and firmly gripped the rusted doorknob. It turned roughly, then the door creaked and opened inward, barely an inch. Musty air and dust escaped in a puff of smoke, as if inside lay a tomb that had been sealed for a thousand years. Now my heart began to race. I pushed the door harder, its hinges moaning as it fully extended inside. I stared momentarily at a wall of solid blackness, then released a shuddering breath and stepped inside.

and from her heart there runs a cold sad feeling that says she is going to die, she opens her eyes and knows she has crossed a border of some kind, wet light on the asphalt and rusting green on the railing that runs in unity along the path to the shops and she knows she is lying not against the road but against something endmost and is astonished by her calm, death is waiting and she was not prepared, death stood before her in brazen signal and she did not look but ran into its arms without thinking of her children, and it is grief that seizes hold of her when she sees her children abandoned, seeing how she was told and did not listen, it was your duty to deliver them from danger but instead you stood your ground, such foolishness and blindness before the facts, you should have got them out, hearing the words her father gave in warning again and again, to leave the country and make a better life, seeing the missed opportunities grow before her and how they could have escaped, all of it dust, all of it a nothingness in a false past and she sees herself in a hole in the earth and she sees the best parts of her love, sees how one thing gives to another thing and how her life has been consumed by some law of force that governs all and she is nothing within it but a speck of dust,

I love that our sudden access to the entire history of human knowledge has afforded us the information we need to self-diagnose our heretofore ignored mental health; among so many other things hidden from us. We also see history laid bare before us, sans embellishing by the brutal and subhuman “victors” of bloody invasions that wrongly usurped land and resources that would have been voluntarily shared, had they any sort of backbone or ounce of morality at ALL. Now we suffer and toil on said stolen land at useless busy work, slave labor jobs that only exist to build wealth for shareholders and further poison the land they claim as their own while draining the remaining “good years” from us like opening a vein. Reject the system, and escape the grid, the more of us that exit the machine the faster it rusts and grinds to its inevitable halt… and the earth and all its inhabitants can finally heal.

We knew nothing about these ships, which would become infamous in the annals of Second World War history as ‘hellships’ - a fleet of dozens of rusting hulks used to shuttle supplies and prisoners around Japan’s Far Eastern empire. Some of the most appalling episodes of the war occurred on these ships in which men driven crazy by thirst killed fellow prisoners to drink their blood. In some cases prisoners trying to escape from the seething mass of hysterical captives were shot by Japanese soldiers guarding the stairways from the holds. Some voyages took weeks with only a handful of prisoners surviving. Men drank their own urine. Sick prisoners were trampled to death or suffocated. The sane murdered the insane and wondered when it would be their turn to go mad. Cannibalism as well as vampirism was not unknown and even Japanese medics were shocked by what they found when the holds were finally opened. In the case of the Oryoku Maru, where insane prisoners killed fellow men for their blood, only 271 men survived out of 1619. The experience of one Dutch group was fairly typical: of 1500 men shipped from Java to Rangoon to work on the Death Railway, 200 died and 450 were unable to walk on arrival in Burma. Nineteen of the fifty-six hellships were sunk by submarines and aircraft and a total of 22,000 allied prisoners died during agonising voyages to the slave camps in Japan and Taiwan.

That's the biggest problem regarding the truth: Once it has escaped you, it is a stray and may be taken in by someone else.

Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities, wreck any sanctuary you can ever build. It’s not if, it’s when. Chaos is the only sure thing in this world. The master that rules us all. My scientist father taught me early that there is no escaping the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy is only growing; it can never be diminished, no matter what we do.

33. Don’t believe in good or bad, or winning and losing, or victory and defeat, or ups and down. At your lowest and your highest, whether you are happy or despairing or calm or angry, there is a kernel of you that stays the same. That is the you that matters. 34. Don’t worry about the time you lose to despair. The time you will have afterwards has just doubled its value. 35. Be transparent to yourself. Make a greenhouse for your mind. Observe. 36. Read Emily Dickinson. Read Graham Green. Read Italo Calvino. Read Maya Angelou. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are escape routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind. 37. If the sun is shining, and you can be outside, be outside. 38. Remember that the key thing about life on earth is change. Cars rust. Paper yellows. Technology dates. Caterpillars become butterflies. Nights morph into days. Depression lifts. 39. Just when you feel you have no time to relax, know that this is the moment you most need to make time to relax. 40. Be brave. Be strong. Breathe, and keep going. You will thank yourself later.

By the means of Telescopes, there is nothing so far distant but may be represented to our view; and by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding. By this means the Heavens are open’d, and a vast number of new Stars, and new Motions, and new Productions appear in them, to which all the ancient Astronomers were utterly Strangers. By this the Earth it self, which lyes so neer us, under our feet, shews quite a new thing to us … We may perhaps be inabled to discern all the secret workings of Nature. What may not be therefore expected from it if thoroughly prosecuted? Talking and contention of Arguments would soon be turn’d into labours; all the fine dreams of Opinions, and universal metaphysical natures, which the luxury of subtil Brains has devis’d, would quickly vanish, and give place to solid Histories, Experiments and Works. And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way, not only by beholding and contemplating, but by tasting too those fruits of Natural knowledge, that were never yet forbidden. From hence the World may be assisted with variety of Inventions, new matter for Sciences may be collected, the old improv’d, and their rust rubb’d away …

How to scale and enter the risen path was largely unknown. It all might begin in darkness, but it cast a shadow that, when viewed from the ground, was too bleak. Demolition was once a question not of “whether, but when,” until one photographer spent a year on the trail documenting what was there. 4 The scenes were “hallucinatory”—wildflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, irises, and grasses wafted next to hardwood ailanthus trees that bolted up from the soil on railroad tracks, on which rust had accumulated over the decades. 5 Steel played willing host to an exuberant, spontaneous garden that showed fealty to its unusual roots. Tulips shared the soilbed with a single pine tree outfitted with lights for the winter holidays, planted outside of a building window that opened onto the iron-bottomed greenway with views of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty to the left and traffic, buildings, and Tenth Avenue to the right. 6 Wading through waist-high Queen Anne’s lace was like seeing “another world right in the middle of Manhattan.” 7 The scene was a kind of wildering, the German idea of ortsbewüstung, an ongoing sense of nature reclaiming its ground. 8 “You think of hidden things as small. That is how they stay hidden. But this hidden thing was huge. A huge space in New York City that had somehow escaped everybody’s notice,” said Joshua David, who cofounded a nonprofit organization with Robert Hammonds to save the railroad. 9 They called it the High Line. “It was beautiful refuse, which is kind of a scary thing because you find yourself looking forward and looking backwards at the same time,” architect Liz Diller told me in our conversation about the conversion of the tracks into a public space, done in a partnership with her architectural firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and James Corner, Principal of Field Operations, and Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. Other architectural plans proposed turning the High Line into a “Street in the Air” with biking, art galleries, and restaurants, but their team “saw that the ruinous state was really alive.” Joel Sternfeld, the “poet-keeper” of the walkway, put the High Line’s resonance best: “It’s more of a path than a park. And more of a Path than a path.” 10

The facility occupied the ground floor of a gray commercial building hemmed in by rusting fire escapes and choked with high-tension wires that clung to the structure’s façade like rotting vegetation.

I could never imagine what would drive someone to want to own one. I’ve only fired a gun two or three times in my life, while I was in high school in Iowa. Even then, shooting at rusted oil drums on my best friend’s farm, I didn’t experience the same thrill as the other kids. It scared me too much. As I would stand facing the target, aiming the heavy pistol, I couldn’t escape the thought that I was holding death.

That’s the biggest problem with the truth: once it has escaped you, it runs away and starts having a life of its own. ~ As the moon began to rust

Eton, for all its virtues, seriously lacked girls. (Well, apart from the kitchen girls who we camped out on the roof waiting for night after night.) But beyond that, and the occasional foxy daughter of a teacher, it was a desert. (Talking of foxy daughters, I did desperately fancy the beautiful Lela, who was the daughter of the clarinet teacher. But she ended up marrying one of my best friends from Eton, Tom Amies--and everyone was very envious. Great couple. Anyway, we digress.) As I said, apart from that…it was a desert. All of us wrote to random girls whom we vaguely knew or had maybe met once, but if we were honest, it was all in never-never land. I did meet one quite nice girl who I discovered went to school relatively nearby to Eton. (Well, about thirty miles nearby, that is.) I borrowed a friend’s very old, single-geared, rusty bicycle and headed off one Sunday afternoon to meet this girl. It took me hours and hours to find the school, and the bike became steadily more and more of an epic to ride, not only in terms of steering but also just to pedal, as the rust cogs creaked and ground. But finally I reached the school gates, pouring with sweat. It was a convent school, I found out, run entirely by nuns. Well, at least they should be quite mild-natured and easy to give the slip to, I thought. That was my first mistake. I met the girl as prearranged, and we wandered off down a pretty, country path through the local woods. I was just summoning up the courage to make a move when I heard this whistle, followed by this shriek, from somewhere behind us. I turned to see a nun with an Alsatian, running toward us, shouting. The young girl gave me a look of terror and pleaded with me to run for my life--which I duly did. I managed to escape and had another monster cycle ride back to school, thinking: Flipping Nora, this girl business is proving harder work than I first imagined. But I persevered.

The storefront was a nail salon called Nail-R-Us in a not-yet-redeveloped section of Queens. The building had that decrepit thing going on, as if leaning against it would cause a wall to collapse. The rust on the fire escape was so thick that tetanus seemed a far greater threat than smoke inhalation. Every window was blocked by either a heavy shade or a plank of wood. The structure was four levels and ran almost the entire length of the block. Myron

The storefront was a nail salon called Nail-R-Us in a not-yet-redeveloped section of Queens. The building had that decrepit thing going on, as if leaning against it would cause a wall to collapse. The rust on the fire escape was so thick that tetanus seemed a far greater threat than smoke inhalation. Every window was blocked by either a heavy shade or a plank of wood. The structure was four levels and ran almost the entire length of the block. Myron said to Win, “The R on the sign is crossed out.” “That’s intentional.” “Why?” Win looked at him, waited. Myron did it in his head. Nail-R-Us had become Nail Us. “Oh,” Myron said. “Cute.

We each share in innumerable physical and emotional experiences. Our like-kind responses to the external world connect every person together whoever walked this earth. Who has not seen death tap dancing amongst the shagged icicles of a winter wonderland? Who has not heard their hearts petals welcome the bloom of springtime’s opalescence? Who has not experienced the calm of leaves rusting beneath their feet or felt befallen with an overwhelming sense of regeneration after slathered in baptismal wetness by an unexpected rainstorm? Who has not drunk in the smoky smells of leaves burning in October, hunted solace in the singeing embrace of a campfire on a cold winter night, or sought to escape from summers burning blanket of oppression by dunking their overheated stovetop into a mountain stream of clear water? Who has not felt the cold kiss of winter or experienced the melted butter feeling of crawling into bed after a day of hard work? Who is exempt from the punch of hunger in their gut or immune from the enraged screams of an unquenchable thirst? Who has not broken out in a frisson of Goosebumps when passing the graveyard on an ill-omened evening and experienced the electric sensation of ghostly fingernails running down the tapered stem of their spine? Who has not fallen in love at first sight? Who has not danced on the edge of a cliff, stared into the gloom, and asked themselves what if they slipped over the lip? Who has not experienced the existential vertigo, the anxiety of dizziness that freedom brings whenever a human being standing in solitude navigates amongst the tension between the finite and infinite and contemplates the possibility or of the divine shaping reality?