Scattered Clouds Quotes

Love isn't the work of the tender and the gentle; Love is the work of wrestlers. The one who becomes a servant of lovers is really a fortunate sovereign. Don't ask anyone about Love; ask Love about Love. Love is a cloud that scatters pearls.

The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth - the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars- the high mass ones among them- went unstable in their later years- they collapsed and then exploded- scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy- guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems- stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that yes we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up- many people feel small, cause their small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.

I myself have seen this woman draw the stars from the sky; she diverts the course of a fast-flowing river with her incantations; her voice makes the earth gape, it lures the spirits from the tombs, send the bones tumbling from the dying pyre. At her behest, the sad clouds scatter; at her behest, snow falls from a summer's sky.

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life. Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away. Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance. In the glare of your mind, be modest. And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

There are three lessons I would write- Three words, as with a burning pen, In tracings of eternal light, Upon the heart of men. Have hope! though clouds environ round, And gladness hides her face in scorn, Put thou the shadow from thy brow, No night but hath its morn. Have love! not love alone for one, But man as man thy brother call, And scatter like the circling sun, Thy charities on all.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an OVER-GOING and a DOWN-GOING. I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers. I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore. I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive. I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeks he his own down-going. I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going. I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing. I love him who reserves no share of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus walks he as spirit over the bridge. I love him who makes his virtue his inclination and destiny: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he is willing to live on, or live no more. I love him who desires not too many virtues. One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to. I love him whose soul is lavish, who wants no thanks and does not give back: for he always bestows, and desires not to keep for himself. I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favor, and who then asks: "Am I a dishonest player?"--for he is willing to succumb. I love him who scatters golden words in advance of his deeds, and always does more than he promises: for he seeks his own down-going. I love him who justifies the future ones, and redeems the past ones: for he is willing to succumb through the present ones. I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must succumb through the wrath of his God. I love him whose soul is deep even in the wounding, and may succumb through a small matter: thus goes he willingly over the bridge. I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things that are in him: thus all things become his down-going. I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus is his head only the bowels of his heart; his heart, however, causes his down-going. I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the dark cloud that lowers over man: they herald the coming of the lightning, and succumb as heralds. Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the SUPERMAN.--

The Layers I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.

Light, my light, the world-filling light, the eye-kissing light, heart-sweetening light! Ah, the light dances, my darling, at the centre of my life; the light strikes, my darling, the chords of my love; the sky opens, the wind runs wild, laughter passes over the earth. The butterflies spread their sails on the sea of light. Lilies and jasmines surge up on the crest of the waves of light. The light is shattered into gold on every cloud, my darling, and it scatters gems in profusion. Mirth spreads from leaf to leaf, my darling, and gladness without measure. The heaven's river has drowned its banks and the flood of joy is abroad.

Scatter as a prayer escaping my lips... as orchids blooming in clouds.

Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.

Young people, Lord. Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty. Before I was reduced to singsong, I saw all kinds of mating. Most are two-night stands trying to last a season. Some, the riptide ones, claim exclusive right to the real name, even though everybody drowns in its wake. People with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that—softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail, of course. The world outdoes them every time. While they are busy showing off, digging other people’s graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from greed to red, oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouths expecting the drops to be cold but they’re not; they are warm and smell like pineapple before they get heavier and heavier, so heavy and fast they can’t be caught one at a time. Poor swimmers head for shore while strong ones wait for lightning’s silver veins. Bottle-green clouds sweep in, pushing the rain inland where palm trees pretend to be shocked by the wind. Women scatter shielding their hair and men bend low holding the women’s shoulders against their chests. I run too, finally. I say finally because I do like a good storm. I would be one of those people in the weather channel leaning into the wind while lawmen shout in megaphones: ‘Get moving!

Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars. Then the breeze died too and there was no noise save the drip and tickle of water that ran out of clefts and spilled down, leaf by leaf, to the brown earth of the island. The air was cool, moist, and clear; and presently even the sound of the water was still. The beast lay huddled on the pale beach and the stains spread, inch by inch. The edge of the lagoon became a streak of phosphorescence which advanced minutely, as the great wave of the tide flowed. The clear water mirrored the clear sky and the angular bright constellations. The line of phosphorescence bulged about the sand grains and little pebbles; it held them each in a dimple of tension, then suddenly accepted them with an inaudible syllable and moved on. Along the shoreward edge of the shallows the advancing clearness was full of strange, moonbeam-bodied creatures with fiery eyes. Here and there a larger pebble clung to its own air and was covered with a coat of pearls. The tide swelled in over the rain-pitted sand and smoothed everything with a layer of silver. Now it touched the first of the stains that seeped from the broken body and the creatures made a moving patch of light as they gathered at the edge. The water rose further and dressed Simon's coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble. The strange, attendant creatures, with their fiery eyes and trailing vapours busied themselves round his head. The body lifted a fraction of an inch from the sand and a bubble of air escaped from the mouth with a wet plop. Then it turned gently in the water. Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling; and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved further along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon's dead body moved out towards the open sea.

Or else the cloud hovered, having barely left the lips, dense and slow, and suggested another vision: the exhalations that hang over the roofs of the metropolises, the opaque smoke that is not scattered, the hood of miasmata that weighs over the bituminous streets. Not the labile mists of memory nor the dry transparence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows, the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would find at the end of your journey.

And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb--on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost--climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!--for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,--behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries.

Huh,” she said in a neutral voice, then looked out over the pasture again, at the sheep racing through the grass like frantic clouds. A defiant expression crossed her face, and she took a breath. “Razor!” she barked, making Keirran jump. “No! Bad gremlin! You stop that, right now!” The gremlin, shockingly, looked up from where he was bouncing on a rock, sheep scattering around him. He blinked and cocked his head, looking confused. Kenzie pointed to the ground in front of her. “I want to see you. Come here, Razor,. Now!” And, he did. Blipping into sight at her feet, he gazed up expectantly, looking like a mutant Chihuahua awaiting commands. Keirran blinked in astonishment as she snapped her fingers and pointed at him, and Razor scurried up his arm to perch on his shoulder. She smiled, giving us both a smug look, and crossed her arms. “Dog training classes,” She explained.

God help me now!’ I murmured, sinking on my knees among the damp weeds and brushwood that surrounded me, and looking up at the moonlit sky, through the scant foliage above. It seemed all dim and quivering now to my darkened sight. My burning, bursting heart strove to pour forth its agony to God, but could not frame its anguish into prayer; until a gust of wind swept over me, which, while it scattered the dead leaves, like blighted hopes, around, cooled my forehead, and seemed a little to revive my sinking frame. Then, while I lifted up my soul in speechless, earnest supplication, some heavenly influence seemed to strengthen me within: I breathed more freely; my vision cleared; I saw distinctly the pure moon shining on, and the light clouds skimming the clear, dark sky; and then I saw the eternal stars twinkling down upon me; I knew their God was mine, and He was strong to save and swift to hear. ‘I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee,’ seemed whispered from above their myriad orbs. No, no; I felt He would not leave me comfortless: in spite of earth and hell I should have strength for all my trials, and win a glorious rest at last!

The wind rose high and free, to soar in an open sky with no clouds. It passed over a broken landscape scattered with corpses not yet buried. A landscape covered, at the same time, with celebrations. It tickled the branches of trees that had finally begun to put forth buds. The wind blew southward, through knotted forests, over shimmering plains and toward lands unexplored. This wind, it was not the ending. There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was an ending.

As summer neared, as the evening lengthened there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind- of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within. In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which cloud forever and shadows form, dreams persisted; and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if you questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumph, happiness prevails, order rules, or to resist the extra ordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues, something alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand which would render the possessor secure. Moreover softened and acquiescent, the spring with their bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloud about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows and fights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her knowledge of the sorrows of mankind.

That afternoon the sky was scattered with black clouds galloping in from the sea and clustering over the city. Flashes of lightening echoed on the horizon and a charged warm wind smelling of dust announced a powerful summer storm. When I reached the station I noticed the first few drops, shiny and heavy, like coins falling from heaven...Night seemed to fall suddenly, interrupted only by the lightning now bursting over the city, leaving a trail of noise and fury.

In the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of night and day; in the ships that sail the ocean bearing cargoes beneficial to man; in the water which God sends down from the sky and with which He revives the earth after its death, scattering over it all kinds of animals; in the courses of the winds, and in the clouds pressed into service between earth and sky, there are indeed signs for people who use their reason.

Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night.

And yet she didn't want to kill herself. She loved the world too much, and people. She loved taking long walks in the late afternoon, and observing her surroundings. She loved the green of the sea, the light of dusk, the rocks scattered on the sand. She loved the taste of a red pear in autumn, the full, heavy winter moon that shone amid the clouds. She loved the warmth of her bed, a good book to read without being interrupted. To enjoy that, she would have lived forever.

Liberty On my notebooks from school On my desk and the trees On the sand, on the snow I write your name On every page read On all the white sheets Stone blood paper or ash I write your name On the golden images On the soldier’s weapons On the crowns of kings I write your name On the jungle, the desert The nests and the bushes On the echo of childhood I write your name On the wonder of nights On the white bread of days On the seasons engaged I write your name On all my blue rags On the pond mildewed sun On the lake living moon I write your name On the fields, the horizon The wings of the birds On the windmill of shadows I write your name On the foam of the clouds On the sweat of the storm On dark insipid rain I write your name On the glittering forms On the bells of colour On physical truth I write your name On the wakened paths On the opened ways On the scattered places I write your name On the lamp that gives light On the lamp that is drowned On my house reunited I write your name On the bisected fruit Of my mirror and room On my bed’s empty shell I write your name On my dog greedy tender On his listening ears On his awkward paws I write your name On the sill of my door On familiar things On the fire’s sacred stream I write your name On all flesh that’s in tune On the brows of my friends On each hand that extends I write your name On the glass of surprises On lips that attend High over the silence I write your name On my ravaged refuges On my fallen lighthouses On the walls of my boredom I write your name On passionless absence On naked solitude On the marches of death I write your name On health that’s regained On danger that’s past On hope without memories I write your name By the power of the word I regain my life I was born to know you And to name you LIBERTY

The wind grabbed a handful of sand and scattered it like bright confetti along the hard-packed, sea-scoured, deserted beach. The sky had a newly rinsed look, the clouds spun and wrung out on high.

There is always safety in the truth, whether it be knowing God’s truth or knowing the truth about yourself. Many people live scattered and tumultuous lives trying to live outside of their own boundaries, not accepting and expressing the truth of who they are. Honesty about who you are gives you the biblical value of integrity, or oneness.

Sonder. You are the main character—the protagonist—the star at the center of your own unfolding story. You're surrounded by your supporting cast: friends and family hanging in your immediate orbit. Scattered a little further out, a network of acquaintances who drift in and out of contact over the years. But there in the background, faint and out of focus, are the extras. The random passersby. Each living a life as vivid and complex as your own. They carry on invisibly around you, bearing the accumulated weight of their own ambitions, friends, routines, mistakes, worries, triumphs and inherited craziness. When your life moves on to the next scene, theirs flickers in place, wrapped in a cloud of backstory and inside jokes and characters strung together with countless other stories you'll never be able to see. That you'll never know exists. In which you might appear only once. As an extra sipping coffee in the background. As a blur of traffic passing on the highway. As a lighted window at dusk.

On the mainland of America, the Wampanoags of Massasoit and King Philip had vanished, along with the Chesapeakes, the Chickahominys, and the Potomacs of the great Powhatan confederacy. (Only Pocahontas was remembered.) Scattered or reduced to remnants were the Pequots, Montauks, Nanticokes. Machapungas, Catawbas, Cheraws, Miamis, Hurons, Eries, Mohawks, Senecas, and Mohegans. (Only Uncas was remembered.) Their musical names remained forever fixed on the American land, but their bones were forgotten in a thousand burned villages or lost in forests fast disappearing before the axes of twenty million invaders. Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature—the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself.

Blow on, ye death fraught whirlwinds! blow, Around the rocks, and rifted caves; Ye demons of the gulf below! I hear you, in the troubled waves. High on this cliff, which darkness shrouds In night's impenetrable clouds, My solitary watch I keep, And listen, while the turbid deep Groans to the raging tempests, as they roll Their desolating force, to thunder at the pole. Eternal world of waters, hail! Within thy caves my Lover lies; And day and night alike shall fail Ere slumber lock my streaming eyes. Along this wild untrodden coast, Heap'd by the gelid' hand of frost; Thro' this unbounded waste of seas, Where never sigh'd the vernal breeze; Mine was the choice, in this terrific form, To brave the icy surge, to shiver in the storm. Yes! I am chang'd - My heart, my soul, Retain no more their former glow. Hence, ere the black'ning tempests roll, I watch the bark, in murmurs low, (While darker low'rs the thick'ning' gloom) To lure the sailor to his doom; Soft from some pile of frozen snow I pour the syren-song of woe; Like the sad mariner's expiring cry, As, faint and worn with toil, he lays him down to die. Then, while the dark and angry deep Hangs his huge billows high in air ; And the wild wind with awful sweep, Howls in each fitful swell - beware! Firm on the rent and crashing mast, I lend new fury to the blast; I mark each hardy cheek grow pale, And the proud sons of courage fail; Till the torn vessel drinks the surging waves, Yawns the disparted main, and opes its shelving graves. When Vengeance bears along the wave The spell, which heav'n and earth appals; Alone, by night, in darksome cave, On me the gifted wizard calls. Above the ocean's boiling flood Thro' vapour glares the moon in blood: Low sounds along the waters die, And shrieks of anguish fill the' sky; Convulsive powers the solid rocks divide, While, o'er the heaving surge, the embodied spirits glide. Thrice welcome to my weary sight, Avenging ministers of Wrath! Ye heard, amid the realms of night, The spell that wakes the sleep of death. Where Hecla's flames the snows dissolve, Or storms, the polar skies involve; Where, o'er the tempest-beaten wreck, The raging winds and billows break; On the sad earth, and in the stormy sea, All, all shall shudd'ring own your potent agency. To aid your toils, to scatter death, Swift, as the sheeted lightning's force, When the keen north-wind's freezing breath Spreads desolation in its course, My soul within this icy sea, Fulfils her fearful destiny. Thro' Time's long ages I shall wait To lead the victims to their fate; With callous heart, to hidden rocks decoy, And lure, in seraph-strains, unpitying, to destroy.

At first I couldn't see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such whiteness. Wind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects. Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting out brief sparks like a tiny comet. I walked a long time, slowly. I felt free, secure between the lips that were at that moment speaking me with such happiness. The night was a garden of eyes.

The city lies at the galaxy's dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel.

Harry flung himself out from behind the bush and pulled out his wand. "EXPECTO PATRONUM!" he yelled. And out of the end of his wand burst, not a shapeless cloud of mist, but a blinding, dazzling, silver animal. He screwed up his eyes, trying to see what it was. It looked like a horse. It was galloping silently away from him, across the black surface of the lake. He saw it lower its head and charge at the swarming dementors. . . . Now it was galloping around and around the black shapes on the ground, and the dementors were falling back, scattering, retreating into the darkness. . . . They were gone. The Patronus turned. It was cantering back toward Harry across the still surface of the water. It wasn't a horse. It wasn't a unicorn, either. It was a stag. It was shining brightly as the moon above. . . it was coming back to him. . . . It stopped on the bank. Its hooves made no mark on the soft ground as it stared at Harry with its large, silver eyes. Slowly, it bowed its antlered head. And Harry realized. . . "Prongs," he whispered. But as his trembling fingertips stretched toward the creature, it vanished.

We all walk in the sky, but only some walk with their heads in the clouds.

Wisps of clouds scattered across the heavens, as if brought to their place by a great sigh.

Clouded thoughts Scattered around My soul is restless I have nowhere to go No safe haven Nothing makes sense Not anymore I think I lost myself Somewhere on the road And I don’t even want to go back.

Cloves Where is the scent of cloves coming from? her hair? armpit? or her dress thrown on the Tunisian rug? From the third step in the house? Layla makes everything smell of cloves. Layla is the orchard when it’s wet. She is what the orchard breathes when it’s watered at night. Layla knows now that I am drunk with the scent of cloves, she stiches together my clouds and then scatters them together in a sky like a sheet as she clasps me. Layla feels that my fingers are numb, over the dunes she knows my pulse is hers, my water is hers. Layla leaves me sleeping, rocking between clouds and cloves.

The Devil's Rose You would never take a rose from a beast. If his callous hand were to hold out a scarlet flower, his grip unaffected by pricking thorns, you would shrink from the gift and refuse it. I know that is what you would do. But the cunning beast will have his beauty. He hunts not in hopeless pursuit, for fear would have you sprint all the day long. Thus, he turns toward the shadows and clutches the rosebud, crunching and twisting until every delicate petal is detached. One falls not far from your feet, and you notice the red spot in the snow. The color sparkles in the sunlight, catching your curious eye. No beast stands in sight; there is nothing to fear, so you dare retrieve the lone petal. The touch of temptation is velvet against your thumb. It carries a scent you bring to your nose, and both eyes close to float on a cloud of perfume. As your lashes lift, another scarlet drop stains the snow at a near distance. A glance around perceives no danger, and so your footprints scar the snowflakes to retrieve another rosy leaflet as soft and sweet as the first. Your eyes shine with flecks of golden greed at the discovery of more discarded petals, and you blame the wind for scattering them mere footprints apart. All you want is a few, so you step and snatch, step and snatch, step and snatch. Soon, there is enough velvet to rub against your cheek like a silken kerchief. Your collection of one-plus-one-more reeks of floral essence. Distracted, you jump at the sight of the beast in your path. He stands before his lair, grinning without love. His callous hands grip at thorns on a single naked stem, and you look down at your own hands that now cup his rose. But how can it be? You would never take a rose from a beast. You would shrink from the gift and refuse it. He knows that is what you would do.

Heart of my heart, we are one with the wind, One with the clouds that are whirled o'er the lea, One in many, O broken and blind, One as the waves are at one with the sea! Ay! when life seems scattered apart, Darkens, ends as a tale that is told, One, we are one, O heart of my heart, One, still one, while the world grows old.

One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling. Werner’s head swivels lightly on his neck. The wind is strong and gusting stronger, and the corners of the tent strain against their guy ropes, and where the flaps at the two ends come up, he can see trees buck and sway. Everything rustles. Werner zips his old notebook and the little house into his duffel and the man beside him murmurs questions to himself and the rest of the ruined company sleeps. Even Werner’s thirst has faded. He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters. Out there, through the open flaps of the tent, clouds hurtle above treetops. Toward Germany, toward home. Silver and blue, blue and silver. Sheets of paper tumble down the rows of cots, and in Werner’s chest comes a quickening. He sees Frau Elena kneel beside the coal stove and bank up the fire. Children in their beds. Baby Jutta sleeps in her cradle. His father lights a lamp, steps into an elevator, and disappears. The voice of Volkheimer: What you could be. Werner’s body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed. “Ernst,” says the man beside him. “Ernst.” But there is no Ernst; the men in the cots do not reply; the American soldier at the door of the tent sleeps. Werner walks past him into the grass. The wind moves through his undershirt. He is a kite, a balloon. Once, he and Jutta built a little sailboat from scraps of wood and carried it to the river. Jutta painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality. But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and the flat black water swallowed it. Jutta blinked at Werner with wet eyes, pulling at the battered loops of yarn in her sweater. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.” Did they? He hopes they did. He seems to remember a little boat—a more seaworthy one—gliding down a river. It sailed around a bend and left them behind. Didn’t it? The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn’t the wind move the light? Across the field, an American watches a boy leave the sick tent and move against the background of the trees. He sits up. He raises his hand. “Stop,” he calls. “Halt,” he calls. But Werner has crossed the edge of the field, where he steps on a trigger land mine set there by his own army three months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth.

It started slow and hit her with the force of a sledgehammer, a cataclysm of such power she could only hold on to him and let it happen. He went rigid against her, rock hard in her arms, and he probably muttered “oh, shit” again, but she was beyond hearing, lost in some mind-scattered cloud of inexpressible pleasure. She fell back, limp, awash in shimmering sensation, and she knew an odd, faint trace of regret that he’d used a condom. She’d wanted all of him inside her, a total giving, and he’d withheld something.

THE BARROW In this high field strewn with stones I walk by a green mound, Its edges sheared by the plough. Crumbs of animal bone Lie smashed and scattered round Under the clover leaves And slivers of flint seem to grow Like white leaves among green. In the wind, the chestnut heaves Where a man's grave has been. Whatever the barrow held Once, has been taken away: A hollow of nettles and dock Lies at the centre, filled With rain from a sky so grey It reflects nothing at all. I poke in the crumbled rock For something they left behind But after that funeral There is nothing at all to find. On the map in front of me The gothic letters pick out Dozens of tombs like this, Breached, plundered, left empty, No fragments littered about Of a dead and buried race In the margins of histories. No fragments: these splintered bones Construct no human face, These stones are simply stones. In museums their urns lie Behind glass, and their shaped flints Are labelled like butterflies. All that they did was die, And all that has happened since Means nothing to this place. Above long clouds, the skies Turn to a brilliant red And show in the water's face One living, and not these dead." — Anthony Thwaite, from The Owl In The Tree

I remember reading once how some Stone Age Indians from the Brazilian rain forest with no knowledge or expectation of a world beyond the jungle were taken to Sao Paulo or Rio, and when they saw what it contained-the buildings, the cars, the passing airplanes-and how thoroughly at variance it was with their own simple lives, they wet themselves, lavishly and in unison. I believe I had some idea how they felt. It is such a strange contrast. When you’re on the AT, the forest is your universe, infinite and entire. It is all you experience day after day. Eventually it is about all you can imagine. You are aware, of course, that somewhere over the horizon there are mighty cities, busy factories, crowded freeways, but here in this part of the country, where woods drape the landscape for as far as the eye can see, the forest rules. Even the little towns like Franklin and Hiawassee and even Gatlinburg are just way stations scattered helpfully through the great cosmos of woods. But come off the trail, properly off, and drive somewhere, as we did now, and you realize how magnificently deluded you have been. Here, the mountains and woods were just backdrop-familiar, known, nearby, but no more consequential or noticed than the clouds that scudded across their ridgelines. Here the real business was up close and on top of you: gas stations, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, Dunkin Donuts, Blockbuster Videos, a ceaseless unfolding pageant of commercial hideousness.

Only five minutes later he noticed a dozen crocuses growing round the foot of an old tree- gold and purple and white. Then came a sound even more delicious than the sound of water. Close beside the path they were following, a bird suddenly chirped from the branch of a tree. It was answered by the chuckle of another bird a little further off. And then, as if that had been a signal, there was chattering and chirruping in every direction, and then a moment of full song, and within five minutes the whole wood was ringing with birds' music, and wherever Edmund's eyes turned he saw birds alighting on branches, or sailing overhead or chasing one another or having their little quarrels or tidying up their feathers with their beaks. "Faster! Faster!" said the Witch. There was no trace of the fog now. The sky became bluer and bluer, and now there were white clouds hurrying across it from time to time. In the wide glades there were primroses. A light breeze sprang up which scattered drops of moisture from the swaying branches and carried cool, delicious scents against the faces of the travelers. The trees began to come fully alive. The larches and birches were covered with green, the laburnums with gold. Soon the beech trees had put forth their delicate, transparent leaves. As the travelers walked under them the light also became green. A bee buzzed crossed their path.

Now he was…dust. To an outside observer, these ten seconds had been ground up into ten thousand uncorrelated moments and scattered throughout real time - and in model time, the outside world had suffered an equivalent fate. Yet the pattern of his awareness remained perfectly intact: somehow he found himself, “assembled himself” from these scrambled fragments. He’d been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle - but his dissection and shuffling were transparent to him. Somehow - on their own terms - the pieces remained connected. Imagine a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what’s left? A cloud of random numbers. But if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet, why shouldn’t the pattern we think of as ‘the universe’ assemble itself, find itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers, then what makes you think that you’re not doing the very same thing?

His deep voice drifted to her through the crowd of women. “…my lady when she returns. Och, there ye are, Blossom,” Faolán grinned, standing up and taking her hand so she could ease back into the restaurant booth. “These lasses were just asking if I was a stripper. I told them I doona think so,” he said, his face clouded with uncertainty. “I’m not, am I?” The inquisitive lasses in question flushed scarlet and scattered to the four corners of the room at the murderous look on Colleen’s face. “No, you’re not, but I guess I can see how they’d think that,” she muttered darkly. “What you are is a freaking estrogen magnet.

I turn and walk back to the home shore whose tall yellow bluffs still bare of snow I can see nearly half a mile to the north. I find my way as I came, over dusty sandbars and by old channels, through shrubby stands of willows. The cold, late afternoon sun breaks through its cloud cover and streaks the grey sand mixed with snow. As it has fallen steadily in the past weeks, the river has left behind many shallow pools, and these are now roofed with ice. When I am close to the main shore I come upon one of them, not far from the wooded bank. The light snow that fell a few days ago has blown away; the ice is polished and is thick enough to stand on. I can see to the bottom without difficulty, as through heavy dark glass. I bend over, looking at the debris caught there in the clear, black depth of the ice: I see a few small sticks, and many leaves. There are alder leaves, roughly toothed and still half green; the more delicate birch leaves and aspen leaves, the big, smooth poplar leaves, and narrow leaves from the willows. They are massed or scattered, as they fell quietly or as the wind blew them into the freezing water. Some of them are still fresh in color, glowing yellow and orange; others are mottled with grey and brown. A few older leaves lie sunken and black on the silty bottom. Here and there a pebble of quartz is gleaming. But nothing moves there. It is a still, cold world, something like night, with its own fixed planets and stars.

It is done," Jasper said, rising. "You are husband and wife." They day turned to night.... "This is an omen. A powerful one." Jasper shook his head in wonder. "A good one from the King of Gods." The unnatural clouds started to scatter, and sunlight broke through as Jasper smiled. "Nyktos, even asleep, approves of this union.

The principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. […] After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn’t slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the universe.

I do have a strong faith in humanity that the day will come when good Muslims will stand up collectively against bad Muslims and say, "That is not Islam", and good Christians will stand up against bad Christians and say, "That is not how Christ would behave", and good Jews will take a stand against bad Jews and say, "That is not true Judaism", and good Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs will stand up against bad Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs and do the same — and so on. The day will come when the genuinely 'Truthful and Beautiful' will stand up against the 'Untruthful and Ugly', and the conscience will overpower the ego, and substance will reign over the superficial. This day will come before my generation is buried 6 feet deep, but not before the storm passes, and not before all races and religions of the world recognize that we all share a common enemy, and that the sum of us all is ONE. This day will come. I promise it will come. But it starts now with me, you and everyone. And do remember, dark clouds always eventually scatter after every storm to make way for the majestic rays of the beautiful sun. There is hope over the horizon. Truth always rises with Time.

O Moon that rid'st the night to wake Before the dawn is pale, The hamadryad in the brake, The Satyr in the vale, Caught in thy net of shadows What dreams hast thou to show? Who treads the silent meadows To worship thee below? The patter of the rain is hushed, The wind's wild dance is done, Cloud-mountains ruby-red were flushed About the setting sun: And now beneath thy argent beam The wildwood standeth still, Some spirit of an ancient dream Breathes from the silent hill. Witch-Goddess Moon, thy spell invokes The Ancient Ones of night, Once more the old stone altar smokes, The fire is glimmering bright. Scattered and few thy children be, Yet gather we unknown To dance the old round merrily About the time-worn stone. We ask no Heaven, we fear no Hell, Nor mourn our outcast lot, Treading the mazes of a spell By priests and men forgot.

Then, as if they were wind-blown clouds, all of the ideas in which we’ve felt life and all the ambitions and plans on which we’ve based our hopes for the future tear apart and scatter like ashes of fog, tatters of what wasn’t nor could ever be. And behind this disastrous rout, the black and implacable solitude of the desolate starry sky appears.

What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe? "The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth. The atoms that make up the human body are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high mass ones among them went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems. Stars with orbiting planets, and those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky and I know that yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small because they’re small and the Universe is big – but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity. That’s really what you want in life, you want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant you want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings on of activities and events around you. That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive…

Listen little birds on unfound branches, Dance in the blue sky of scattered white clouds, I have with me a song that I almost forgot, She sings it too!

The dark clouds scatter, and Bekker thinks he might find a way to make the time pass after all.

In Babel, the people ’s greatest fear is the very thing God desires: To be scattered over the face of the earth.

There was a sound like a rush of wings in the blackish clouds, and I knew his spirit had left him. I imagined it like a great flock of birds, soaring, scattering, coming to rest everywhere.

mainland of America, the Wampanoags of Massasoit and King Philip had vanished, along with the Chesapeakes, the Chickahominys, and the Potomacs of the great Powhatan confederacy. (Only Pocahontas was remembered.) Scattered or reduced to remnants were the Pequots, Montauks, Nanticokes. Machapungas, Catawbas, Cheraws, Miamis, Hurons, Eries, Mohawks, Senecas, and Mohegans. (Only Uncas was remembered.) Their musical names remained forever fixed on the American land, but their bones were forgotten in a thousand burned villages or lost in forests fast disappearing before the axes of twenty million invaders. Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature—the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself.

The clear cold sunshine glances into the brittle woods, and approvingly beholds the sharp wind scattering the leaves and drying the moss. It glides over the park after the moving shadows of the clouds, and chases them, and never catches them, all day. It looks in the windows, and touches the ancestral portraits with bars and patches of brightness, never contemplated by the painters.

Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth; and the variation of the night and the day; and the ships that run upon the sea with what benefits mankind; and the water God sends down from the sky whereby He revives the earth after its death, scattering all manner of beast therein; and the shifting of the winds; and the clouds subdued between the sky and the earth are surely signs for a people who understand.

How gaily and lightly these people I met carried their radiant heads, and swung themselves through life as through a ball-room! There was no sorrow in a single look I met, no burden on any shoulder, perhaps not even a clouded thought, not a little hidden pain in any of the happy souls. And I, walking in the very midst of these people, young and newly-fledged as I was, had already forgotten the very look of happiness. I hugged these thoughts to myself as I went on, and found that a great injustice had been done me. Why had the last months pressed so strangely hard on me? I failed to recognize my own happy temperament, and I met with the most singular annoyances from all quarters. I could not sit down on a bench by myself or set my foot any place without being assailed by insignificant accidents, miserable details, that forced their way into my imagination and scattered my powers to all the four winds. A dog that dashed by me, a yellow rose in a man's buttonhole, had the power to set my thoughts vibrating and occupy me for a length of time.

When The Lamp Is Shattered When the lamp is shattered, The light in the dust lies dead; When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow's glory is shed; When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot. As music and splendor Survive not the lamp and the lute, The heart's echoes render No song when the spirit is mute:-- No song but sad dirges, Like the wind through a ruined cell, Or the mournful surges That ring the dead seaman's knell. When hearts have once mingled, Love first leaves the well-built nest; The weak one is singled To endure what it once possessed. O Love! who bewailest The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home, and your bier? Its passions will rock thee, As the storms rock the ravens on high; Bright reason will mock thee, Like the sun from a wintry sky. From thy nest every rafter Will rot, and thine eagle home Leave thee naked to laughter, When leaves fall and cold winds come. When The Lamp Is Shattered

I want him to touch me again. I want to feel his hands, as soft as clouds. But I’m afraid if he touches me, all seven billion billion billion atoms that make up my body will blow apart and scatter across the universe.

It is finished,” Jesus said. There was a sound like a rush of wings in the blackish clouds, and I knew his spirit had left him. I imagined it like a great flock of birds, soaring, scattering, coming to rest everywhere.

Lamium Migraine dreams, jagged seams, A badge of love and pain. Or dreamy eyes, sleepy eyes, Drooping, closing, losing light. Packages scattered under the tree, Some torn open, some tied tight. Is there a heartbeat in those purple veins? Are those embryos or mouths or rosary beads? The color of my first dress, gathered with love, Fairy cups stirred with blades of grass, notes clustered on a windy score, Three blooms, three friends, alas! Grape flowers, cloud flowers, love flowers, Paper parasols upside down, a butterfly herd Stopped to rest by a deep green pool. Petals small as a child's tears good-bye, Dropped stitches everywhere From a blanket the color of sky.

This is an omen. A powerful one.” Jasper shook his head in wonder. “A good one from the King of Gods.” The unnatural clouds started to scatter, and sunlight broke through as Jasper smiled. “Nyktos, even asleep, approves of this union.

The evolutionists, piercing beneath the show of momentary stability, discovered, hidden in rudimentary organs, the discarded rubbish of the past. They detected the reptile under the lifted feathers of the bird, the lost terrestrial limbs dwindling beneath the blubber of the giant cetaceans. They saw life rushing outward from an unknown center, just as today the astronomer senses the galaxies fleeing into the infinity of darkness. As the spinning galactic clouds hurl stars and worlds across the night, so life, equally impelled by the centrifugal powers lurking in the germ cell, scatters the splintered radiance of consciousness and sends it prowling and contending through the thickets of the world.

Her silences spoke louder than her words, and the one that followed merely reprised what I already knew without providing any connecting bits to help me make a song of the scattered verses. [RICHARD ETHERIDGE, referring to his mother]

The Radaune pounded along against the muddy tide that knew but one direction, deftly avoiding sandbanks with the aid of constantly changing pilots. To right and left, beyond the dikes, the same flat landscape with occasional hills, already harvested. Hedges, sunken lanes, a hollow basin with broom, a level plain between the scattered farms, just made for cavalry attacks, for a division of uhlans to wheel in from the left onto the sand table, for hedge-vaulting hussars, for the dreams of young cavalry officers, for battles long past and battles yet to come, for an oil painting: tartars leaning forward, dragoons rearing up, Brethren of the Sword falling, grandmasters staining their noble robes, not a button missing from their cuirasses, save for one, struck down by the Duke of Mazowsze, and horses, no circus has horses so white, nervous, covered with tassels, sinews rendered with precision, nostrils flaring, crimson, snorting small clouds impaled by lowered lances decked with pennants, and parting the heavens, the sunset’s red glow, the sabers, and there, in the background—for every painting has a background—clinging tightly to the horizon, with smoke rising peacefully, a small village between the hind legs of the black stallion, crouching cottages, moss-covered, thatched, and inside the cottages, held in readiness, the pretty tanks, dreaming of days to come when they too would be allowed to enter the picture, to come out onto the plain beyond the Vistula’s dikes, like slender colts among the heavy cavalry.

The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds while we busily went on our way and paid no heed. We sang no glad songs nor played; we went not to the village for barter; we spoke not a word nor smiled; we lingered not on the way. We quickened our pace more and more as the time sped by. The sun rose to the mid sky and doves cooed in the shade. Withered leaves danced and whirled in the hot air of noon. The shepherd boy drowsed and dreamed in the shadow of the banyan tree, and I laid myself down by the water and stretched my tired limbs on the grass. My companions laughed at me in scorn; they held their heads high and hurried on; they never looked back nor rested; they vanished in the distant blue haze. They crossed many meadows and hills, and passed through strange, far-away countries. All honour to you, heroic host of the interminable path! Mockery and reproach pricked me to rise, but found no response in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad humiliation---in the shadow of a dim delight. The repose of the sun-embroidered green gloom slowly spread over my heart. I forgot for what I had travelled, and I surrendered my mind without struggle to the maze of shadows and songs. At last, when I woke from my slumber and opened my eyes, I saw thee standing by me, flooding my sleep with thy smile. How I had feared that the path was long and wearisome, and the struggle to reach thee was hard!

Mortality Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud, A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave, He passes from life to his rest in the grave. The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade, Be scattered around, and together be laid; And the young and the old, the low and the high, Shall molder to dust, and together shall lie. Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain, Are mingled together in sunshine and rain; And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge, Still follow each other, like surge upon surge. 'Tis the wink of an eye - 'tis the draught of a breath - From the blossom of health to the paleness of death, From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?

The travelers emerged into a spacious square. In the middle of this square were several dozen people on a wooden bandstand like in a public park. They were the members of a band, each of them as different from one another as their instruments. Some of them looked round at the approaching column. Then a grey-haired man in a colorful cloak called out and they reached for their instruments. There was a burst of something like cheeky, timid bird-song and the air – air that had been torn apart by the barbed wire and the howl of sirens, that stank of oily fumes and garbage – was filled with music. It was like a warm summer cloud-burst ignited by the sun, flashing as it crashed down to earth. People in camps, people in prisons, people who have escaped from prison, people going to their death, know the extraordinary power of music. No one else can experience music in quite the same way. What music resurrects in the soul of a man about to die is neither hope nor thought, but simply the blind, heart-breaking miracle of life itself. A sob passed down the column. Everything seemed transformed, everything had come together; everything scattered and fragmented -home, peace, the journey, the rumble of wheels, thirst, terror, the city rising out of the mist, the wan red dawn – fused together, not into a memory or a picture but into the blind, fierce ache of life itself. Here, in the glow of the gas ovens, people knew that life was more than happiness – it was also grief. And freedom was both painful and difficult; it was life itself. Music had the power to express the last turmoil of a soul in whose blind depths every experience, every moment of joy and grief, had fused with this misty morning, this glow hanging over their heads. Or perhaps it wasn't like that at all. Perhaps music was just the key to a man's feelings, not what filled him at this terrible moment, but the key that unlocked his innermost core. In the same way, a child's song can appear to make an old man cry. But it isn't the song itself he cries over; the song is simply a key to something in his soul.

As the storm moved closer it broke into hundreds of pieces so that the rain fell here and there from the high clouds in long, curving gray plumes. It looked like maybe fifty or sixty fires scattered over the city, except that the tall, smoky columns were flowing in reverse.

I Am Not in Here I have a disciple in Vietnam who wants to build a stupa for my ashes when I die. He and others want to include a plaque with the words “Here lies my beloved teacher.” I told them not to waste the temple land. “Do not put me in a small pot and put me in there!” I said. “I don’t want to continue like that. It would be better to scatter the ashes outside to help the trees to grow.” I suggested that, if they still insist on building a stupa, they have the plaque say, “I am not in here.” But in case people don’t get it, they could add a second plaque, “I am not out there either.” If people still don’t understand, then you can write on the third and last plaque, “I may be found in your way of breathing and walking.” This body of mine will disintegrate, but my actions will continue me. In my daily life, I always practice to see my continuation all around me. We don’t need to wait until the total dissolution of this body to continue—we continue in every moment. If you think that I am only this body, then you have not truly seen me. When you look at my friends, you see my continuation. When you see someone walking with mindfulness and compassion, you know he is my continuation. I don’t see why we have to say “I will die,” because I can already see myself in you, in other people, and in future generations. Even when the cloud is not there, it continues as snow or rain. It is impossible for a cloud to die. It can become rain or ice, but it cannot become nothing. The cloud does not need to have a soul in order to continue. There’s no beginning and no end. I will never die. There will be a dissolution of this body, but that does not mean my death. I will continue, always.

Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of the inky overcast like glinting eyes: singly, in pairs or in larger groups, each positioned far, far away from any other set.

Now that the clouds are finally drifting away, the scattered light is awaking my soul to a brighter day. I use to be so lost, but Nurse Hope's kindness is helping me find my way. Her actions have made me realize that love doesn’t cost a thing and that I want more out of life. I know that it is possible.

Brentwood stands on that fine and wealthy slope of country, one of the richest in Scotland, which lies between the Pentland Hills and the Firth. In clear weather you could see the blue gleam-like a bent bow, embracing the wealthy fields and scattered houses of the great estuary on one side of you; and on the other the blue heights, not gigantic like those we had been used to, but just high enough for all the glories of the atmosphere, the play of clouds, and sweet reflections, which give to a hilly country an interest and a charm which nothing else can emulate. Edinburgh, with its two lesser heights - the Castle and the Calton Hill - its spires and towers piercing through the smoke, and Arthur's Seat lying crouched behind, like a guardian no longer very needful, taking his repose beside the well-beloved charge, which is now, so to speak, able to take care of itself without him - lay at our right hand. From the lawn and drawing-room windows we could see all these varieties of landscape. The colour was sometimes a little chilly, but sometimes, also, as animated and full of vicissitude as a drama. I was never tired of it. Its colour and freshness revived the eyes which had grown weary of arid plains and blazing skies. It was always cheery, and fresh, and full of repose. ("The Open Door")

A flush came into the sky, the wan moon, half-way down the west, sank into insignificance. On the shadowy land things began to take life, plants with great leaves became distinct. They came through a pass in the big, cold sandhills on to the beach. The long waste of foreshore lay moaning under the dawn and the sea; the ocean was a flat dark strip with a white edge. Over the gloomy sea the sky grew red. Quickly the fire spread among the clouds and scattered them. Crimson burned to orange, orange to dull gold, and in a golden glitter the sun came up, dribbling fierily over the waves in little splashes, as if someone had gone along and the light had spilled from her pail as she walked.

When The Lamp Is Shattered When the lamp is shattered, The light in the dust lies dead; When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow's glory is shed; When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot. As music and splendor Survive not the lamp and the lute, The heart's echoes render No song when the spirit is mute:-- No song but sad dirges, Like the wind through a ruined cell, Or the mournful surges That ring the dead seaman's knell. When hearts have once mingled, Love first leaves the well-built nest; The weak one is singled To endure what it once possessed. O Love! who bewailest The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home, and your bier? Its passions will rock thee, As the storms rock the ravens on high; Bright reason will mock thee, Like the sun from a wintry sky. From thy nest every rafter Will rot, and thine eagle home Leave thee naked to laughter, When leaves fall and cold winds come.

Few things are harder to visualise than that a cold snowbound landscape, so marrow-chillingly quiet and lifeless, will, within mere months, be green and lush and warm, quivering with all manner of life, from birds warbling and flying through the trees to swarms of insects hanging in scattered clusters in the air. Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed heather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue water of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids and bathing bodies. It is not there, it does not exist, everything is white and still, and if the silence is broken it is by a cold wind or a lone crow caw-cawing. But it is coming ... it is coming... One evening in March the snow turns to rain, and the piles of snow collapse. One morning in April there are buds on the trees, and there is a trace of green in the yellow grass. Daffodils appear, white and blue anemones too. Then the warm air stands like a pillar among the trees on the slopes. On sunny inclines buds have burst, here and there cherry trees are in blossom. If you are sixteen years old all of this makes an impression, all of this leaves its mark, for this is the first spring you know is spring, with all your sense you know this is spring, and it is the last, for all coming springs pale in comparison with your first. If, moreover, you are in love, well, then ... then it is merely a question of holding on. Holding on to all the happiness, all the beauty, all the future that resides in everything.

The weather was still cold, but I was not. The blood thrummed near the surface of my skin, and I felt heat rise in my palms. I reached a hand out to the pine that stood by me, drops of water trembling on each needle, its bark black with wet. I breathed its scent and let the water touch my skin, cool as vapor. The rain fell in shushing stillness all around me, dampening my clothes ’til they clung to me softly, like clouds upon the mountain. Jamie had told me once that he must live on a mountain, and I knew now why this was so—though I could in no wise have put the notion into words. All my scattered thoughts receded, as I listened for the voice of rocks and trees—and heard the bell of the mountain strike once, somewhere deep beneath my feet.

Some gifted people have all five and some less. Every gifted person tends to lead with one. As I read this list for the first time I was struck by the similarities between Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities and the traits of Sensitive Intuitives. Read the list for yourself and see what you identify with: Psychomotor This manifests as a strong pull toward movement. People with this overexcitability tend to talk rapidly and/or move nervously when they become interested or passionate about something. They have a lot of physical energy and may run their hands through their hair, snap their fingers, pace back and forth, or display other signs of physical agitation when concentrating or thinking something out. They come across as physically intense and can move in an impatient, jerky manner when excited. Other people might find them overwhelming and they’re routinely diagnosed as ADHD. Sensual This overexcitability comes in the form of an extreme sensitivity to sounds, smells, bright lights, textures and temperature. Perfume and scented soaps and lotions are bothersome to people with this overexcitability, and they might also have aversive reactions to strong food smells and cleaning products. For me personally, if I’m watching a movie in which a strobe light effect is used, I’m done. I have to shut my eyes or I’ll come down with a headache after only a few seconds. Loud, jarring or intrusive sounds also short circuit my wiring. Intellectual This is an incessant thirst for knowledge. People with this overexcitability can’t ever learn enough. They zoom in on a few topics of interest and drink up every bit of information on those topics they can find. Their only real goal is learning for learning’s sake. They’re not trying to learn something to make money or get any other external reward. They just happened to have discovered the history of the Ming Dynasty or Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and now it’s all they can think about. People with this overexcitability have intellectual interests that are passionate and wide-ranging and they study many areas simultaneously. Imaginative INFJ and INFP writers, this is you. This is ALL you. Making up stories, creating imaginary friends, believing in Santa Claus way past the ordinary age, becoming attached to fairies, elves, monsters and unicorns, these are the trademarks of the gifted child with imaginative overexcitability. These individuals appear dreamy, scattered, lost in their own worlds, and constantly have their heads in the clouds. They also routinely blend fiction with reality. They are practically the definition of the Sensitive Intuitive writer at work. Emotional Gifted individuals with emotional overexcitability are highly empathetic (and empathic, I might add), compassionate, and can become deeply attached to people, animals, and even inanimate objects, in a short period of time. They also have intense emotional reactions to things and might not be able to stomach horror movies or violence on the evening news. They have most likely been told throughout their life that they’re “too sensitive” or that they’re “overreacting” when in truth, they are expressing exactly how they feel to the most accurate degree.

Sometime after midnight, another band of soldiers broke into the tiny chapel in the Imperial Park which had become Rasputin’s tomb and exhumed the coffin. They took it to a clearing in the forest, pried off the lid and, using sticks to avoid touching the putrefying corpse, lifted what remained of Rasputin onto a pile of pine logs. The body and logs were drenched with gasoline and set on fire. For more than six hours, the body burned while an icy wind howled through the clearing and clouds of pungent smoke rose from the pyre. Along with the soldiers, a group of peasants gathered, silent and afraid, to watch through the night as the final scene of this baleful drama was played. It had happened as Rasputin once predicted: he would be killed and his body not left in peace, but burned, with his ashes scattered to the winds.

We left the diner for another long walk along the lake. The sky had lightened the last couple of days, making me think that Ontonagon was a Michigan paradise tucked up in its northern corner. But today, racks of clouds as big as steamships parked themselves above us, giving the whole town the grey murkiness I'd grown used to. Wind came off Lake Superior, bypassed my skin and veins, and dug right into my bones. We stopped at one of the benches along the lakeshore. Pieces of driftwood were scattered across the sand like they'd been tossed there long ago by some burly creature or god. My mind drifted to the sort of gods that would inhabit Upper Michigan, tough ones to be sure. No grape-eating lounging Greeks; these gods would be plaid-wearing giants as big as pine trees who waded into Superior's violent water for a morning dip.

If, in the further reaches of some or another remote corridor in an immense house of two or, perhaps, three storeys, and behind some or another door that remains mostly closed but in sight of a window overlooking some or another tract of far-reaching landscape of mostly level grassy countryside with low hills or a line of trees in the distance, a certain man at his desk, on some or another day of sunshine with scattered clouds, were to spurn the predictable words and phrases of the many writers of fiction who have reported of this or that male character that he once fell in love with this or that female character, and if that same man, after striving as neither I, the author of this sentence, nor even the most discerning reader of the sentence, have or has striven nor will ever strive, in late afternoon, and at about the time when the rays of the declining sun might have caused the pane in the window of his room to seem to a traveller on a distant road like a spot of golden oil, had found in his heart, or wherever such things are to be found, the words best fitted to suggest what he seemed to have felt long before, on a certain hot afternoon, in a distant inland city, and whether he had simply kept those words in mind or whether he had actually written them, either as notes for a work of fiction that he might one day write or as part of an actual work of fiction, then I do not doubt that the words would have been to the effect that a certain boy, a mere child, while he watched unobserved a certain girl, a mere child, whose name he did not know and who had almost certainly never had sight of him, wished for the means to inform her that he was worthy of trust.

But such was his state of mind that two bottles were not enough to extinguish his thoughts; so he remained, too drunk to fetch any more wine, not drunk enough to forget, seated in front of his two empty bottles, with his elbows on a rickety table, watching all the specters that Hoffman scattered across manuscripts moist with punch, dancing like a cloud of fantastic black dust in the shadows thrown by his long-wicked candle.

So now Zenia is History. No: now Zenia is gone. She is lost and gone forever. She's a scattering of dust, blown on the wind like spores; she's an invisible cloud of viruses, a few molecules, dispersing. She will only be history if Tony chooses to shape her into history. At the moment she is formless, a broken mosaic; the fragments of her are in Tony's hands, because she is dead, and all of the dead are in the hands of the living.

But he was afraid to speak. He could see that speaking would be like dashing some very fragile bond to pieces, like kicking a dandelion gone to seed; the wispy, tenuous sphere of its body would scatter in the wind. So instead they stood together, the snow fluttering down from the clouds to melt into the water where their own reflected images trembled like two people trapped against the glass of a parallel world, and he reached, finally, to take her hand.

nature aria . . "Autumn wind chases in From all directions And a thousand chaste leaves Give way. Scatter in me the seeds Of a thousand saplings. Let grow a grassy heaven. On my brow: a sun. This bliss is yours, Living World, and alone it endures. Music at midnight. Fistfuls of rain fall hard, fill My heart with mud. An old wind May still come chasing in. Resurrection fire. And me here Laughing like a cloud in trousers, Entreating the earth to bury me.

People with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that—softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail, of course. The world outdoes them every time. While they are busy showing off, digging other people’s graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from green to red, oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouths expecting the drops to be cold but they’re not; they are warm and smell like pineapple before they get heavier and heavier, so heavy and fast they can’t be caught one at a time. Poor swimmers head for shore while strong ones wait for lightning’s silver veins. Bottle-green clouds sweep in, pushing the rain inland where palm trees pretend to be shocked by the wind. Women scatter shielding their hair and men bend low holding the women’s shoulders against their chests. I run too, finally. I say finally because I do like a good storm. I would be one of those people on the weather channel leaning into the wind while lawmen shout in megaphones: “Get moving!

Ten strong things have been created in the world. The rock is hard, but the iron cleaves it. The iron is hard, but the fire softens it. The fire is hard, but the water quenches it. The water is strong, but the clouds bear it. The clouds are strong, but the wind20 scatters them. The wind is strong, but the body bears it. The body is strong, but fright crushes it. Fright is strong, but wine banishes it. Wine is strong, but sleep works it off. Death is stronger than all, and charity saves from death.

Please,” they say, and their eyes glitter in the light. “Tell us what he found inside the goddess’s magical book.” “When Aethon peered into it,” she says, “he saw the heavens and the earth and all its lands scattered around the ocean, and all the animals and birds upon it. The cities were full of lanterns and gardens, and he could faintly hear music and singing, and he saw a wedding in one city with girls in bright linen robes, and boys with gold swords on silver belts, jumping through rings, doing handsprings and leaping and dancing in time. But on the next page he saw dark, flaming cities in which men were slaughtered in their fields, their wives enslaved in chains, and their children pitched over the walls onto pikes. He saw hounds eating corpses, and when he bent his ear low to the pages, he could hear the wailing. And as he looked, turning the leaf over and back, Aethon saw that the cities on both sides of the page, the dark ones and the bright ones, were one and the same, that there is no peace without war, no life without death, and he was afraid.

What I saw was a face which couldn’t be called pretty, but one also not easily forgotten: pointed features, oblique eyebrows, pale skin with slightly enlarged pores, and expensive lipstick that threatened to drip off her lips. Once beautiful, but now a dream in which willow branches have withered, clouds have scattered and drifting petals have fallen to the ground. A face that has been corroded by pleasure, impetuosity and dreams, each of which has left scars on it, leaving it sharp yet worn, capable of hurting, yet vulnerable as well.

Even without world wars, revolutions and emigration, siblings growing up in the same home almost never share the same environment. More accurately, brothers and sisters share some environments — usually the less important ones — but they rarely share the one single environment that has the most powerful impact on personality formation. They may live in the same house, eat the same kinds of food, partake in many of the same activities. These are environments of secondary importance. Of all environments, the one that most profoundly shapes the human personality is the invisible one: the emotional atmosphere in which the child lives during the critical early years of brain development. The invisible environment has little to do with parenting philosophies or parenting style. It is a matter of intangibles, foremost among them being the parents’ relationship with each other and their emotional balance as individuals. These, too, can vary significantly from the birth of one child to the arrival of another. Psychological tension in the parents’ lives during the child’s infancy is, I am convinced, a major and universal influence on the subsequent emergence of ADD. A hidden factor of great importance is a parent’s unconscious attitude toward a child: what, or whom, on the deepest level, the child represents for the parents; the degree to which the parents see themselves in the child; the needs parents may have that they subliminally hope the child will meet. For the infant there exists no abstract, “out-there” reality. The emotional milieu with which we surround the child is the world as he experiences it. In the words of the child psychiatrist and researcher Margaret Mahler, for the newborn, the parent is “the principal representative of the world.” To the infant and toddler, the world reveals itself in the image of the parent: in eye contact, intensity of glance, body language, tone of voice and, above all, in the day-today joy or emotional fatigue exhibited in the presence of the child. Whatever a parent’s intention, these are the means by which the child receives his or her most formative communications. Although they will be of paramount importance for development of the child’s personality, these subtle and often unconscious influences will be missed on psychological questionnaires or observations of parents in clinical settings. There is no way to measure a softening or an edge of anxiety in the voice, the warmth of a smile or the depth of furrows on a brow. We have no instruments to gauge the tension in a father’s body as he holds his infant or to record whether a mother’s gaze is clouded by worry or clear with calm anticipation. It may be said that no two children have exactly the same parents, in that the parenting they each receive may vary in highly significant ways. Whatever the hopes, wishes or intentions of the parent, the child does not experience the parent directly: the child experiences the parenting. I have known two siblings to disagree vehemently about their father’s personality during their childhood. Neither has to be wrong if we understand that they did not receive the same fathering, which is what formed their experience of the father. I have even seen subtly but significantly different mothering given to a pair of identical twins.

Around him, the universe disintegrated with every clap, every drumbeat, every word spoken by Nate. Pixelated patches emerged around them, distorting plants, clouds, and faces. The random scattered black and gray pixels scarred space and time. In some places, people moved in slow motion, while in others, time rushed to disclose the future. All together, there and everywhere, the Plurizien pulled apart reality’s fabric, running interference on bits and bytes of information. “Qubits, my heart,” Sibyl said, correcting his thoughts. “Millions of qubits.

The Dawning Ah! what time wilt Thou come? when shall that cry, The Bridegroom’s coming! fill the sky; Shall it in the evening run When our words and works are done? Or will Thy all-surprising light Break at midnight, When either sleep or some dark pleasure Possesseth mad man without measure? Or shall these early, fragrant hours Unlock Thy bow’rs, And with their blush of light descry Thy locks crown’d with eternity? Indeed, it is the only time That with Thy glory doth best chime; All now are stirring, ev’ry field Full hymns doth yield; The whole Creation shakes off night, And for Thy shadow looks the light; Stars now vanish without number, Sleepy Planets set and slumber, The pursy Clouds disband and scatter, All expect some sudden matter; Not one beam triumphs but from far That morning-star; O at what time soever thou (Unknown to us,) the heavens wilt bow, And, with Thy angels in the van, Descend to judge poor careless man, Grant, I may not like puddle lie In a corrupt security, Where if a traveller water crave, He finds it dead, and in a grave. But as this restless, vocal spring All day and night doth run, and sing, And though here born, yet is acquainted Elsewhere, and flowing keeps untainted; So let me all my busy age In Thy free services engage; And though (while here) of force I must Have commerce sometimes with poor dust, And in my flesh, though vile and low, As this doth in her channel flow, Yet let my course, my aim, my love, And chief acquaintance be above; So when that day and hour shall come, In which Thyself will be the sun, Thou’lt find me drest and on my way, Watching the break of Thy great day.

BLUE HEAVENS It could make a person dizzy, those spinning, circling heavens filled with knots of stars, swirling blue stars approaching, blue-shadow stars fading away. It’s a mayhem of reeling, a scattering blue dust of star clouds circling the circling centers of spiraling galaxies wheeling forever toward no known horizon. Someone, immersed in the deep beauty of these blue celestials, could get lost while waiting for hands to deliver perhaps an orange, perhaps an apple, scarlet or gold, a sprig of green, a blossom, pink dogwood, spring plum. Inspired by “Golden Horn” Tondino The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

Ode to the West Wind I O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear! II Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion, Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aëry surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith’s height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear! III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull’d by the coil of his crystàlline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear! IV If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. V Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

If we are convinced that communion with Christ is our chief good, why is living in the light of his presence so difficult? Why are we so Christ-negligent? Why is it that our minds are so scattered when it comes to Christ? Newton once admitted, “I approach the throne of grace encumbered with a thousand distractions of thought, each of which seems to engage more of my attention than the business I have in hand.”53 This is the battle of the Christian life and where Newton turns particularly practical. The Christian life is bound up with clear thinking, and the enemies are the clouds, the shrouds, and the trifles of life that take our eyes off Christ.

remember how we used to play" in the upper atmosphere in the vertical climb in the sky above the clouds remember how we used to play in the nautical dusk along the radians of midheaven… out there amid the scattered wavelengths within the aerosols of a meteorological meadow we tread upon the aether side by side the ampere and the joule the whisper and the gleam borne along effervescent freeways remember how we came to rest inside the amethyst auditorium of a storm there - suspended in an echo-plex of thunder you drew me close and I tasted the voltage of your skin the radiometry of your eyes the amphetamine of your lips the flushed cushion of your tongue

Absence " Then the birds stitching the dawn with their song have patterned your name. Then the green bowl of the garden filling with light is your gaze. Then the lawn lengthening and warming itself is your skin. Then a cloud disclosing itself overhead is your opening hand. Then the first seven bells from the church pine on the air. Then the sun's soft bite on my face is your mouth. Then a bee in a rose is your fingertip touching me here. Then the trees bending and meshing their leaves are what we would do. Then my steps to the river are text to a prayer printing the ground. Then the river searching its bank for your shape is desire. Then a fish nuzzling for the water's throat has a lover's ease. Then a shawl of sunlight dropped in the grass is a garment discarded. Then a sudden scatter of summer rain is your tongue. Then a butterfly paused on a trembling leaf is your breath. Then the gauzy mist relaxed on the ground is your pose. Then the fruit from the cherry tree falling on grass is your kiss, your kiss. Then the day's hours are theatres of air where I watch you entranced. Then the sun's light going down from the sky is the length of your back. Then the evening bells over the rooftops are lovers' vows. Then the river staring up, lovesick for the moon, is my long night. Then the stars between us are love urging its light.

But despite heavy clouds, a feeling of contentment hangs in the air, coming from the kitchen's ability to be two things at once: to be an enclosed space that effectively opens up the world through taste and flavor and imagination. Nature comes in here. Pomegranate seeds on rice dishes, a strip of orange peel for a negroni, or a ribbon of lemon skin for a martini. A lime wedge for gin. A bowl of ripening pears. A jar of dates. Peaches roasted in rose water and stuffed with marzipan. Blackberries scattered on pancakes. Apricots cinched in chutney. Memories of melons, and the vine pergolas and fruit trees of summer, of prized Uzbek cherries carried in boxes across borders. The kitchen is an orchard.

Fifty tons of vaporised nuclear fuel were thrown into the atmosphere, destined to be carried away in a poisonous cloud that would spread across most of Europe. The mighty explosion ejected a further 700 tons of radioactive material - mostly graphite - from the periphery of the core, scattering it across an area of a few square kilometers. This included the roofs of the turbine hall, Unit 3, and the ventilation stack it shared with Unit 4, all of which erupted into flames. The reactor fuel’s extreme temperature, combined with air rushing into the gaping hole, ignited the core’s remaining graphite and generated an inferno that burned for weeks. Most lights, windows and electrical systems throughout the severely damaged Unit 4 were blown out, leaving only a smattering of emergency lighting to provide illumination.124

Spring was a long time unfolding. During the last weeks of Lent the weather was clear and frosty. In the daytime it thawed in the sun, but at night it went down to seven below; there was such a crust that carts could go over it where there was no road. There was still snow at Easter. Then suddenly, on Easter Monday, a warm wind began to blow, dark clouds gathered, and for three days and nights warm, heavy rain poured down. On Thursday the wind dropped, and a thick grey mist gathered, as if concealing the mysteries of the changes taking place in nature. Under the mist waters flowed, ice blocks cracked and moved off, the muddy, foaming streams ran quicker, and on the eve of Krasnaya Gorka the mist scattered, the dark clouds broke up into fleecy white ones, the sky cleared, and real spring unfolded. In the morning the bright sun rose and quickly ate up the thin ice covering the water, and the warm air was all atremble, filled with the vapours of the reviving earth. The old grass and the sprouting needles of new grass greened, the buds on the guelder-rose, the currants and the sticky, spiritous birches swelled, and on the willow, all sprinkled with golden catkins, the flitting, newly hatched bee buzzed. Invisible larks poured trills over the velvety green fields and the ice-covered stubble, the peewit wept over the hollows and marshes still filled with brown water; high up the cranes and geese flew with their spring honking. Cattle, patchy, moulted in all but a few places, lowed in the meadows, bow-legged lambs played around their bleating, shedding mothers, fleet-footed children ran over the drying paths covered with the prints of bare feet, the merry voices of women with their linen chattered by the pond, and from the yards came the knock of the peasants’ axes, repairing ploughs and harrows. The real spring had come.

Swift as thought, he slipped away from me, running down the hillside like a cloud’s shadow when the wind blows. My connection to him frayed away as he went, scattering and floating like dandelion fluff in the wind. Instead of small and secret, I felt our bond go wide and open, as if he had invited all the Witted creatures in the world in to share our joining. All the web of life on the whole hillside suddenly swelled within my heart, linked and meshed and woven through with one another. It was too glorious to contain. I had to go with him; a morning this wondrous must be shared. “Wait!” I cried, and in shouting the word, I woke myself. Nearby, the Fool sat up, his hair tousled. I blinked. My mouth was full of salve and wolf-hair, my fingers buried deep in his coat. I clutched him to me, and my grip sighed his last stilled breath out of his lungs. But Nighteyes was gone. Cold rain was cascading down past the mouth of the cave.

Mike continued to walk unhurriedly toward the crowd until he loomed up in the stereo tank in life size, as if he were in the room with his water brothers. He stopped on the grass verge in front of the hotel, a few feet from the crowd. "You called me?" He was answered with a growl. The sky held scattered clouds; at that instant the sun came out from behind one and a shaft of golden light hit him. His clothes vanished. He stood before them, a golden youth, clothed only in his own beauty, beauty that made Jubal's heart ache, thinking that Michelangelo in his ancient years would have climbed down from his high scaffolding to record it for generations unborn. Mike said gently, "Look at me. I am a son of man." . . . . "God damn you!" A half brick caught Mike in the ribs. He turned his face slightly toward his assailant. "But you yourself are God. You can damn only yourself and you can never escape yourself." "Blasphemer!" A rock caught him just over his left eye and blood welled forth. Mike said calmly, "In fighting me, you fight yourself... for Thou art God and I am God * . . and all that groks is God-there is no other." More rocks hit him, from various directions; he began to bleed in several places. "Hear the Truth. You need not hate, you need not fight, you need not fear. I offer you the water of life-" Suddenly his hand held a tumbler of water, sparkling in the sunlight. "-and you may share it whenever you so will . . . and walk in peace and love and happiness together." A rock caught the glass and shattered it. Another struck him in the mouth. Through bruised and bleeding lips he smiled at them, looking straight into the camera with an expression of yearning tenderness on his face. Some trick of sunlight and stereo formed a golden halo back of his head. "Oh my brothers, I love you so! Drink deep. Share and grow closer without end. Thou art God." Jubal whispered it back to him. . . . "Lynch him! Give the bastard a nigger necktie!" A heavy-gauge shotgun blasted at close range and Mike's right arm was struck off at the elbow and fell. It floated gently down, then came to rest on the cool grasses, its hand curved open in invitation. "Give him the other barrel, Shortie-and aim closer!" The crowd laughed and applauded. A brick smashed Mike's nose and more rocks gave him a crown of blood. "The Truth is simple but the Way of Man is hard. First you must learn to control yourself. The rest follows. Blessed is he who knows himself and commands himself, for the world is his and love and happiness and peace walk with him wherever he goes." Another shotgun blast was followed by two more shots. One shot, a forty-five slug, hit Mike over the heart, shattering the sixth rib near the sternum and making a large wound; the buckshot and the other slug sheered through his left tibia five inches below the patella and left the fibula sticking out at an angle, broken and white against the yellow and red of the wound. Mike staggered slightly and laughed, went on talking, his words clear and unhurried. "Thou art God. Know that and the Way is opened." "God damn it-let's stop this taking the Name of the Lord in vain!"- "Come on, men! Let's finish him!" The mob surged forward, led by one bold with a club; they were on him with rocks and fists, and then with feet as he went down. He went on talking while they kicked his ribs in and smashed his golden body, broke his bones and tore an ear loose. At last someone called out, "Back away a little so we can get the gasoline on him!" The mob opened up a little at that waning and the camera zoomed to pick up his face and shoulders. The Man from Mars smiled at his brothers, said once more, softly and clearly, "I love you." An incautious grasshopper came whirring to a landing on the grass a few inches from his face; Mike turned his head, looked at it as it stared back at him. "Thou art God," he said happily and discorporated.

For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. 12As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness. 13I will bring them out from the nations and gather them from the countries, and I will bring them into their own land. I will pasture them on the mountains of Israel, in the ravines and in all the settlements in the land. 14I will tend them in a good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel will be their grazing land. There they will lie down in good grazing land, and there they will feed in a rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. 15I myself will tend my sheep and have them lie down, declares the Sovereign LORD. 16I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy. I will shepherd the flock with justice.

Camera You want this instant: nearly spring, both of us walking, wind blowing walking sunlight knitting the leaves before our eyes the wind empty as Sunday rain drying in the wormy sidewalk puddles the vestiges of night on our lightscratched eyelids, our breezy fingers you want to have it and so you arrange us: in front of a church, for perspective, you make me stop walking and compose me on the lawn; you insist that the clouds stop moving the wind stop swaying the church on its boggy foundations the sun hold still in the sky for your organized instant. Camera man how can I love your glass eye? Wherever you partly are now, look again at your souvenir, your glossy square of paper before it dissolves completely: it is the last of autumn the leaves have unravelled the pile of muddy rubble in the foreground, is the church the clothes I wore are scattered over the lawn my coat flaps in a bare tree there has been a hurricane that small black speck travelling towards the horizon at almost the speed of light is me

Grace paused. And while she did, the clouds scattered and let the moonlight through, and Dogville underwent another of those little changes of light. lt was as if the light, previously so merciful and faint, finally refused to cover up for the town any longer. Suddenly you could no longer imagine a berry that would appear one day on a gooseberry bush, but only see the thorn that was there right now. The light now penetrated every unevenness and flaw in the buildings... and in... the people! And all of a sudden she knew the answer to her question all too well. lf she had acted like them she could not have defended a single one of her actions and could not have condemned them harshly enough. lt was as if her sorrow and pain had finally assumed their rightful place. No. What they had done was not good enough. And if one had the power to put it to rights, it was one's duty to do so. For the sake of the other towns. For the sake of humanity. And not least for the sake of the human being that was Grace herself.

Suddenly, a loud popping and banging shattered the quiet. Almost hidden in a cloud of dust, a car roared along the road below us. Cattle lumbered to their feet, horses raised their heads and galloped away, a flock of chickens scattered in all directions. Hannah gasped. “Oh, my Lord, it’s John Larkin in his father’s motorcar. If he catches me looking like this, he’ll think I’m a common hoyden.” Her bare foot plunged toward me. The tree swayed violently, my head swam. Afraid to move, I clung to a branch. “For heaven’s sake, Andrew, hurry. He’ll be here any moment!” With Hannah pushing me, I slid from limb to limb, down, down, faster and faster. By the time I hit the ground, my legs were shaking so hard I could barley stand. Without so much as a thought for me, Hannah grabbed her shoes and ran across the lawn. Her feet were bare, her shirtwaist untucked, her skirt dusty. Twigs and leaves clung to her hair. As quick as she was, the Model T was quicker. Pursued by Buster, it rolled to a noisy stop under a tree. Without pausing to say hello, Hannah darted past John, scurried up the steps, and vanished into the house.

They stepped out of the trees, which opened onto a large meadow that appeared to be in the middle of a mountain range, large boulders scattered around like a giant had dropped them like seeds. Bernie dashed between them, kicking up snow and leaving a twisty trail of tracks. The nearest boulder stood right next to them, taller than Jack. Most of the sides were straight, but the one facing the mountains had a seat carved out of it. Astra imagined some ancestor had created it as a convenient place to rest. On the horizon, the sun glowed orange in the space between the low-hanging clouds and the mountaintops, covered in snow-topped pines. Astra was stunned into silence. There was no explanation for this. The faintest breeze kissed her cheek, the air scented with pine and newly fallen snow. Jack set his hands on her shoulders behind her, and she melted into him, sharing this moment. A sight he had surely seen a thousand times, but could it ever get old? "This is the most beautiful..." She couldn't find the words. "I know." They stood in silence until the sun completely disappeared and the night sky turned from orange and red to purple to a deep black only broken by more stars than Astra had ever seen.

I never saw a sky like the sky over Dorrego - so vast, so black, with stars in an infinite array of size and brilliance. Maybe it seemed vast because the Earth didn’t get in the way: the countryside around Dorrego is flat, there are no big cities to blot out the stars with their own clouds of gas, their artificial starlight. (Cities have a terrible tendency to try and imitate starlight, you only have to see them from a plane.) … Before Dorrego, I had always thought of the sky as a black screen on which a handful of scattered stars twinkled vaguely, but were no more enthralling than the ceiling of the Cine Opera. Dorrego revealed the other sky, the boundless dome that sends you rushing to a dictionary for synonyms for ‘infinite’; stars that clustered, not into constellations, but into galaxies; stars like swarms of bees which suggested not stillness or permanence but movement, the trail of something, of someone that passed just now, a moment ago, when you weren’t looking. A sky that seemed to suddenly reveal the meaning of all things: Man’s need to create language to describe it, geography to explain his place within it, biology to remind him that he is a newcomer in this universe, and history, because everything is written in the sky above Dorrego.

the Man of Fancy preceded the company to another noble saloon, the pillars of which were solid golden sunbeams taken out of the sky in the first hour in the morning. Thus, as they retained all their living lustre, the room was filled with the most cheerful radiance imaginable, yet not too dazzling to be borne with comfort and delight. The windows were beautifully adorned with curtains made of the many-colored clouds of sunrise, all imbued with virgin light, and hanging in magnificent festoons from the ceiling to the floor. Moreover, there were fragments of rainbows scattered through the room; so that the guests, astonished at one another, reciprocally saw their heads made glorious by the seven primary hues; or, if they chose,—as who would not?—they could grasp a rainbow in the air and convert it to their own apparel and adornment. But the morning light and scattered rainbows were only a type and symbol of the real wonders of the apartment. By an influence akin to magic, yet perfectly natural, whatever means and opportunities of joy are neglected in the lower world had been carefully gathered up and deposited in the saloon of morning sunshine. As may well be conceived, therefore, there was material enough to supply, not merely a joyous evening, but also a happy lifetime, to more than as many people as that spacious apartment could contain.

Indeed, Newton confessed, “an evil heart of unbelief fills my sky with many clouds.”73 This lack of trust in God “is the primary cause of all our inquietude.”74 Newton prayed hard against the unbelief in his heart: “For this I sigh and long, and cry to the Lord to rend the veil of unbelief, scatter the clouds of ignorance, and break down the walls which sin is daily building up to hide him from my eyes.”75 Yet in our pride we hold tightly to our cares and open ourselves to spiritual attack (1 Pet. 5:6–8). We pull anxiety close like a blanket, so close that we cover our faces and cloud our souls from the victory and sovereign reign of Christ in the heavens. Even worse, unbelief makes us despondent. By faith we see our sin more clearly, and we see the sufficiency of Christ, which brings daily opportunities for joy in Christ. In turn, joy in Christ brings spiritual fortitude. “The joy of the Lord is the strength of his people: whereas unbelief makes our hands hang down, and our knees feeble, dispirits ourselves, and discourages others; and though it steals upon us under a semblance of humility, it is indeed the very essence of pride.”76 Pride exchanges joy in Christ for a cloud of spiritual despondency. Unbelief also brings insecurity about our salvation, and insecurity in Christ carries compounded anxieties and doubts to snuff out joy in Christ.

Dear Shift in the storm, This is abnormal, but I love how the clouds are shifting in my life. I noticed the lens flare as the clouds drift away. I used to think I was better off because the storm was the storyteller of my life, and I thought it was here to stay. Now that the clouds are finally drifting away, the scattered light is awaking my soul to a brighter day. I use to be so lost, but Nurse Hope's kindness is helping me find my way. Her actions have made me realize that love doesn’t cost a thing and that I want more out of life. I know that it is possible. Dear shift in the storm, would you take my complex memories with you? Therefore, curiosity will not enable me to continue to think of the ‘what-ifs.' If you can, would you do me the honor of shrinking my and Kace's memories? Could you void them as they shrink in the fading light? There’s no need to expand what we are trying to do away with. May you melt our frozen tears? If not, could you please make them invincible in the light? Could Kace and I become intangible as our old life disappears in the shift of the storm? We’ve had more than our share of fragments—and we are ready to be set free. For far too long, we’ve reached our breaking point. Dear shift in the storm, could you wash away our fears and wash us whole—as we step into our new life? Let there be no more secrets and lies, for Kace and I have endured enough. We are ready to shed our skin, and we are most certainly ready for our new beginning. I feel the change because the tear stains on my face have left their footprints for me to walk into a new world. During this shift, I am going to be still because I know when the storm is over that I am going to be alright. I no longer have to be selfish for all the wrong reasons.

At that moment, remarkably, there was a man in the expansive reactor hall of Unit 4 who witnessed all this.121 Night Shift Chief of the Reactor Shop Valeriy Perevozchenko saw the top of the reactor - a 15-meter-wide disk comprised of 2000 individual metal covers which cap safety valves - begin to jump up and down. He ran. The reactor’s uranium fuel was increasing power exponentially, reaching some 3,000°C, while pressure rose at a rate of 15 atmospheres per second. At precisely 01:23:58, a mere 18 seconds after Akimov pressed the SCRAM button, steam pressure overwhelmed Chernobyl’s incapacitated fourth reactor. A steam explosion blew the 450-ton, 3-meter-thick upper biological shield clear off the reactor before it crashed back down, coming to rest at a steep angle in the raging maw it left behind. The core was exposed.122 A split second later, steam and inrushing air reacted with the fuel’s ruined zirconium cladding to create a volatile mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, which triggered a second, far more powerful explosion.123 Fifty tons of vaporised nuclear fuel were thrown into the atmosphere, destined to be carried away in a poisonous cloud that would spread across most of Europe. The mighty explosion ejected a further 700 tons of radioactive material - mostly graphite - from the periphery of the core, scattering it across an area of a few square kilometers. This included the roofs of the turbine hall, Unit 3, and the ventilation stack it shared with Unit 4, all of which erupted into flames. The reactor fuel’s extreme temperature, combined with air rushing into the gaping hole, ignited the core’s remaining graphite and generated an inferno that burned for weeks. Most lights, windows and electrical systems throughout the severely damaged Unit 4 were blown out, leaving only a smattering of emergency lighting to provide illumination.124

I landed a bit too fast and stumbled in my unlaced sneakers before slamming face first into Darius’s chest as he lurched forward to catch me. “Sorry,” I laughed as I looked up at him with a grin and he fell still as he helped me steady myself. “What?” I asked, trying to blink the sleep out of my eyes. “You’ve never smiled at me like that before,” he said in a rough voice, reaching out to brush some tangled strands of black hair out of my face. “Shut up, I smile at you all the time,” I replied as heat touched my cheeks and I tried to run my fingers through my knotty hair. Really should have taken a minute to brush it dumbass. Let’s hope he assumes it’s from flying. “Not like that you don’t,” Darius countered, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth too as his gaze ran over me. “You look…cute.” “I don’t know what you mean. And I don’t do cute.” Darius snorted at me. “You look like you got dressed in the dark…” “Gee thanks, any more observations, Sherlock?” I asked, rolling my eyes at him but I was still grinning so there wasn’t much bite with my snark. “Well… You’re not wearing any makeup.” “I…woke up late, so-” “I like it,” he said, his smile growing as he looked me over. “You look all sleepy and innocent. I could almost imagine you just woke up in my bed.” I was definitely goddamn blushing now and thanks to my lack of bronzer he was clearly well aware of it. The sky was darkening overhead already as we lingered, but I fought the stars for just another moment. “If I’d spent the night in your bed, there wouldn’t have been anything innocent about it,” I taunted to get him back onto safer, less mortifying topics of conversation. Like sex. “As much as I ache for the feeling of your body against mine – and I really fucking do – I think if I was allowed a single cheat against this curse that keeps us apart, I’d just want to be able hold you in my arms,” he replied. “Just to wake up with you there, knowing you were safe.” My heart pounded at his words, but a crash of thunder from the heavens stopped me from replying. I offered him a frustrated smile and turned away from him as I began my run. Darius followed behind me, far enough back to allow the clouds to scatter again and I tried not to dwell on the disappointment that lingered in me as I upped my pace. Did I just shoot over here at the speed of light without brushing my hair or putting any makeup on rather than risk missing out on our run? I shook my head at myself as I tried to figure out what was going on here. I’d been purposefully ignoring this question up until now, but I seriously needed to consider what I was doing. Running with him every morning, messaging him every night. Exchanging little looks whenever we ended up in the same place and thinking about him way too often. This felt a hell of a lot like the start of something instead of the end of it, but that wasn’t possible. Even if he wanted it. Even if I wanted it. We couldn’t have it. The damn stars wouldn’t allow it. My mind twisted around and around as we ran on and I cursed the stars out with everything I had. But why was I doing that? Hadn’t I made my mind up about this? Hadn’t I already made the only decision I could? Darius might have been showing me more of himself now, he might have stopped hurting me and be trying to change but had he done enough to make up for all the pain he’d caused me? When I really thought about it, I still wasn’t sure. But I was sure that he made me smile when he messaged me, that I looked for him whenever I arrived in a room, that he seemed to be trying to do everything he could to set things right. And that I fantasised about him more than I had about any man in all my life. Even Tom Hardy. Even. Tom. Hardy. Fuck it. We ran around Aqua Lake, circling the shore and heading on into The Wailing Wood. Darius kept pace behind me in silence like always, but I decided to drop back. (Tory)

Lucifer Sansfoi Varlet Sansfoi Omer Perdiu I.B.Perdie Billy Perdy I'll unwind your guts from Durham to Dover and bury em in Clover-- Your psalms I'll 'ave engraved in your toothbone-- Your victories nilled-- You jailed under under a woman's skirt of stone-- Stone blind woman with no guts and only a scale-- Your thoughts & letters Shandy'd about in Beth (Gaelic for grave) Your philosophies run up your nose again-- Your confidences and essays bandied in ballrooms from switchblade to switchblade --Your final duel with sledge hammers-- Your essential secret twinned to buttercups & dying-- Your guide to 32 European cities scabbed in Isaiah --Your red beard snobbed in Dolmen ruins in the editions of the Bleak-- Your saints and Consolations bereft --Your handy volume rolled into an urn-- And your father And mother besmeared at thought of you th'unspent begotless crop of worms --You lay there, you queen for a day, wait for the "fun- sucked frogs" to carp at you Your sweety beauty discovered by No Name in its hidingplace till burrs Part from you from lack of issue, sinew, all the rest-- Gibbering quiver graveryard Hoo! The hospital that buries you be Baal, the digger Yorick, & the shoveler groom-- My rosy tomatoes pop squirting from your awful rotten grave-- Your profile, erstwhile Garboesque, mistook by earth- eels for some fjord to Sheol-- And your timid voice box strangled by lie-hating earth forever. May the plighted Noah-clouds dissolve in grief of you-- May Red clay be your center, & woven into necks, of hogs, boars, booters & pilferers & burned down with Stalin, Hitler & the rest-- May you bite your lip that you cannot meet with God-- or Beat me to a pub --Amen The Almoner, his cup hat no bottom, nor I a brim. Devil, get thee back to the russet caves.

Yatima found verself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, reorganised. It looked like a flesher embryo – though not quite a realist portrait. The imaging technique kept changing, revealing different structures: Yatima saw hints of delicate limbs and organs caught in slices of transmitted dark; a stark silhouette of bones in an X-ray flash; the finely branched network of the nervous system bursting into view as a filigreed shadow, shrinking from myelin to lipids to a scatter of vesicled neurotransmitters against a radio-frequency MRI chirp. There were two bodies now. Twins? One was larger, though – sometimes much larger. The two kept changing places, twisting around each other, shrinking or growing in stroboscopic leaps while the wavelengths of the image stuttered across the spectrum. One flesher child was turning into a creature of glass, nerves and blood vessels vitrifying into optical fibres. A sudden, startling white-light image showed living, breathing Siamese twins, impossibly transected to expose raw pink and grey muscles working side by side with shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuators, flesher and gleisner anatomies interpenetrating. The scene spun and morphed into a lone robot child in a flesher's womb; spun again to show a luminous map of a citizen's mind embedded in the same woman's brain; zoomed out to place her, curled, in a cocoon of optical and electronic cables. Then a swarm of nanomachines burst through her skin, and everything scattered into a cloud of grey dust. Two flesher children walked side by side, hand in hand. Or father and son, gleisner and flesher, citizen and gleisner... Yatima gave up trying to pin them down, and let the impressions flow through ver. The figures strode calmly along a city's main street, while towers rose and crumbled around them, jungle and desert advanced and retreated. The artwork, unbidden, sent Yatima's viewpoint wheeling around the figures. Ve saw them exchanging glances, touches, kisses – and blows, awkwardly, their right arms fused at the wrists. Making peace and melting together. The smaller lifting the larger on to vis shoulders – then the passenger's height flowing down to the bearer like an hourglass's sand.

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

Suddenly he felt his foot catch on something and he stumbled over one of the trailing cables that lay across the laboratory floor. The cable went tight and pulled one of the instruments monitoring the beam over, sending it falling sideways and knocking the edge of the frame that held the refractive shielding plate in position. For what seemed like a very long time the stand wobbled back and forth before it tipped slowly backwards with a crash. ‘Take cover!’ Professor Pike screamed, diving behind one of the nearby workbenches as the other Alpha students scattered, trying to shield themselves behind the most solid objects they could find. The beam punched straight through the laboratory wall in a cloud of vapour and alarm klaxons started wailing all over the school. Professor Pike scrambled across the floor towards the bundle of thick power cables that led to the super-laser, pulling them from the back of the machine and extinguishing the bright green beam. ‘Oops,’ Franz said as the emergency lighting kicked in and the rest of the Alphas slowly emerged from their hiding places. At the back of the room there was a perfectly circular, twenty-centimetre hole in the wall surrounded by scorch marks. ‘I am thinking that this is not being good.’ Otto walked cautiously up to the smouldering hole, glancing nervously over his shoulder at the beam emitter that was making a gentle clicking sound as it cooled down. ‘Woah,’ he said as he peered into the hole. Clearly visible were a series of further holes beyond that got smaller and smaller with perspective. Dimly visible at the far end was what could only be a small circle of bright daylight. ‘Erm, I don’t know how to tell you this, Franz,’ Otto said, turning towards his friend with a broad grin on his face, ‘but it looks like you just made a hole in the school.’ ‘Oh dear,’ Professor Pike said, coming up beside Otto and also peering into the hole. ‘I do hope that we haven’t damaged anything important.’ ‘Or anyone important,’ Shelby added as she and the rest of the Alphas gathered round. ‘It is not being my fault,’ Franz moaned. ‘I am tripping over the cable.’ A couple of minutes later, the door at the far end of the lab hissed open and Chief Dekker came running into the room, flanked by two guards in their familiar orange jumpsuits. Otto and the others winced as they saw her. It was well known already that she had no particular love for H.I.V.E.’s Alpha stream and she seemed to have a special dislike for their year in particular. ‘What happened?’ she demanded as she strode across the room towards the Professor. Her thin, tight lips and sharp cheekbones gave the impression that she was someone who’d heard of this thing called smiling but had decided that it was not for her. ‘There was a slight . . . erm . . . malfunction,’ the Professor replied with a fleeting glance in Franz’s direction. ‘Has anyone been injured?’ ‘It doesn’t look like it,’ Dekker replied tersely, ‘but I think it’s safe to say that Colonel Francisco won’t be using that particular toilet cubicle again.’ Franz visibly paled at the thought of the Colonel finding out that he had been in any way responsible for whatever indignity he had just suffered. He had a sudden horribly clear vision of many laps of the school gym somewhere in his not too distant future.

Yet let us reflect, where does the animal cease, where does man begin? — man, who is nature’s sole concern! As long as anyone desires life as he desires happiness, he has not yet raised his eyes above the horizon of the animal, for he only desires more consciously what the animal seeks through blind impulse. But that is what we all do for the greater part of our lives; usually we fail to emerge out of animality, we ourselves are the animals whose suffering seems to be senseless. But there are moments when we realize this: then the clouds are rent asunder, and we see that, in common with all nature, we are pressing towards something that stands high above us. In this sudden illumination we gaze around us and behind us with a shudder; we behold the more subtle beasts of prey and there we are in the midst of them. The tremendous coming and going of men on the great wilderness of the earth, their founding of cities and states their wars their restless assembling and scattering again, their confused mingling, mutual imitation, mutual outwitting and downtreading, their wailing in distress, their howls of joy in victory — all this is a continuation of animality; as though man was to be deliberately retrogressed and defrauded of his metaphysical disposition, indeed as though nature, after having desired and worked at man for so long, now drew back from him in fear and preferred to return to the unconsciousness of instinct. Nature needs knowledge and it is terrified of the knowledge it has need of; and so the flame flickers restlessly back and forth as though afraid of itself and seizes upon a thousand things before it seizes upon that on account of which nature needs knowledge at all. In individual moments we all know how the most elaborate arrangements of our life are made only so as to flee from the tasks we actually ought to be performing, how we would like to hide our head somewhere as though our hundred-eyed conscience could not find us out there, how we hasten to give our heart to the state, to money-making, to sociability or science merely so as no longer to possess it ourselves, how we labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because to us it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself; universal too is the shy concealment of this haste because everyone wants to seem content and would like to deceive more sharp-eyed observers as to the wretchedness he feels; and also universal is the need for new tinkling word-bells to hang upon life and so bestow upon it an air of noisy festivity. Everyone is familiar with the strange condition in which unpleasant memories suddenly assert themselves and we then make great efforts, through vehement noise and gestures, to banish them from our minds: but the noise and gestures which are going on everywhere reveal that we are all in such a condition all the time, that we live in fear of memory and of turning inward. But what is it that assails us so frequently, what is the gnat that will not let us sleep? There are spirits all around us, every moment of our life wants to say something to us, but we refuse to listen to these spirit-voices. We are afraid that when we are alone and quiet something will be whispered into our ear, and so we hate quietness and deafen ourselves with sociability.

ONE of the evil results of the political subjection of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nation unnecessarily and excessively conscious of its past. Its achievements in the old great days of freedom are remembered, counted over and exaggerated by a generation of slaves, anxious to convince the world and themselves that they are as good as their masters. Slaves cannot talk of their present greatness, because it does not exist; and prophetic visions of the future are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. There remains the past. Out of the scattered and isolated facts of history it is possible to build up Utopias and Cloud Cuckoo Lands as variously fantastic as the New Jerusalems of prophecy. It is to the past — the gorgeous imaginary past of those whose present is inglorious, sordid, and humiliating — it is to the delightful founded-on-fact romances of history that subject peoples invariably turn. Thus, the savage and hairy chieftains of Ireland became in due course “the Great Kings of Leinster,” “the mighty Emperors of Meath.” Through centuries of slavery the Serbs remembered and idealised the heroes of Kossovo. And for the oppressed Poles, the mediaeval Polish empire was much more powerful, splendid, and polite than the Roman. The English have never been an oppressed nationality; they are in consequence most healthily unaware of their history. They live wholly in the much more interesting worlds of the present — in the worlds of politics and science, of business and industry. So fully, indeed, do they live in the present, that they have compelled the Indians, like the Irish at the other end of the world, to turn to the past. In the course of the last thirty or forty years a huge pseudo-historical literature has sprung up in India, the melancholy product of a subject people’s inferiority complex. Industrious and intelligent men have wasted their time and their abilities in trying to prove that the ancient Hindus were superior to every other people in every activity of life. Thus, each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it. A sentence of a dozen words, obscure even to the most accomplished Sanskrit scholars, is triumphantly quoted to prove that the ancient Hindus were familiar with the chemical constitution of water. Another, no less brief, is held up as the proof that they anticipated Pasteur in the discovery of the microbic origin of disease. A passage from the mythological poem of the Mahabharata proves that they had invented the Zeppelin. Remarkable people, these old Hindus. They knew everything that we know or, indeed, are likely to discover, at any rate until India is a free country; but they were unfortunately too modest to state the fact baldly and in so many words. A little more clarity on their part, a little less reticence, and India would now be centuries ahead of her Western rivals. But they preferred to be oracular and telegraphically brief. It is only after the upstart West has repeated their discoveries that the modern Indian commentator upon their works can interpret their dark sayings as anticipations. On contemporary Indian scholars the pastime of discovering and creating these anticipations never seems to pall. Such are the melancholy and futile occupations of intelligent men who have the misfortune to belong to a subject race. Free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit upon such vanities. From those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have.

And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost—climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!—for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs. Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;—than this furnace of music,—than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.

The clouds hang heavy, like wet wool, and stars start to appear through the trees like large, shining stones at the bottom of a river. The temperature has fallen with the sun and Lauren hugs her padded arms to her padded body. ‘It’s already dark. Come on,’ he says. ‘I’ve got homework to do.’ The thought of school tomorrow sits in her stomach. They gather various belongings and treasures scattered around the camp – some plastic binoculars, a handmade catapult, a rusty teapot, a length of rope – and put them inside the hut. They argue about whether to take home the packet of bourbons that have been stolen from Billy’s larder, before deciding to leave it in the supply tin, half buried in the frozen ground. They walk back down the looping path, banked by snow-laden ferns, towards Clavanmore. She likes Billy walking beside her like this, in his Aberdeen beanie. He’s like a big brother, but with a better face and hair. Lauren rolls the silver ring between her index finger and thumb, in her pocket. Darkness seeps into the forest and the white snow fades to a dark grey, then darker still, until the world is black.

The sun is ever glorious in the most cloudy day, but it appears not so till it hath scattered the clouds that muffle it up from the sight of the lower world.  God is glorious when the world sees him not, but his declarative glory then appears when the glory of his mercy, truth, and faithfulness break forth in his people's salvation.  Now

From John Haines: I recall an afternoon in October many years ago, when I stood on the edge of that high overlook near Maclaren Summit in the Alaska Range and gazed down onto the wide sweep of the Maclaren River Basin. The cold, late afternoon sun came through broken clouds, and the tundra below me was patched with sunlight. The river, a thin, silvery-blue thread, twisted through the subdued autumn coloration of the land. I was entirely alone at that moment…the land seemed incredibly vast and empty. far below me, a few scattered caribou were feeding in the meadows of the river basin…I felt as if I were looking down on a landscape elementary to our being, and that nothing had occurred to change it since the last of the continental ice melted from the earth, and the first grasses and shrubs began to grow.

As an element in the world revealed by computer exploration, the strange attractor began as a mere possibility, marking a place where many great imaginations in the twentieth century had failed to go. Soon, when scientists saw what computers had to show, it seemed like a face they had been seeing everywhere, in the music of turbulent flows or in clouds scattered like veils across the sky. Nature was constrained. Disorder was channeled, it seemed, into patterns with some common underlying theme.

Some days the doves seemed to know what we needed to know. Some days you would run until you fell into the air. and the birds would scatter like clouds. What is it you were wanting to hold there in your empty hand? I think you were starting to play, even then, your flute, hearing the strange music of the doves, the notes floating feather-like into the future. And what does a single feather mean except the love we treasure, or a butterfly mean except the dreams we chase, the way those doves chased whatever called them from beyond the park, something beyond words, beyond the sky that gives away nothing except the longing to discover how love creates its own endless skies. — Richard Jackson, “Poem for Any,” Broken Horizons (Press 53, 2018)

I feel as though I might fly apart or dissolve like a cloud or be caught by a gust of wind and scattered. Like a dandelion.

In the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alternation of night and day; in the ships that sail the oceans for the benefit of mankind; in the water that God sends down from the sky, and revives the earth with it after it had died, and scatters in it all kinds of creatures; in the changing of the winds, and the clouds disposed between the sky and the earth; are signs for people who understand.

With a snarl of pain, she forced herself to sit up, her head spinning with the sudden movement. One hand touched her temple, sticky with dried blood. She winced, feeling a gash along her eyebrow. It was long but shallow, and already scabbing over. She clenched her jaw, teeth grinding, as she surveyed the beach with squinting eyes. The ocean stared back at her, empty and endless, a wall of iron blue. Then she noticed shapes along the beach, some half-buried in the sand, others caught in the rhythmic pull of the tide. She narrowed her eyes and the shapes solidified. A torn length of sail floated, tangled up with rope. A shattered piece of the mast angled out of the sand like a pike. Smashed crates littered the beach, along with other debris from the ship. Bits of hull. Rigging. Oars snapped in half. The bodies moved with the waves. Her steady breathing lost its rhythm, coming in shorter and shorter gasps until she feared her throat might close. Her thoughts scattered, impossible to grasp. All thoughts but one. “DOMACRIDHAN!” Her shout echoed, desperate and ragged. “DOMACRIDHAN!” Only the waves answered, crashing endless against the shore. She forgot her training and forced herself to stand, nearly falling over with dizziness. Her limbs aches but she ignored it, lunging toward the waterline. Her lips moved, her voice shouting his name again, though she couldn’t hear it above the pummel of her own heart. Sorasa Sarn was no stranger to corpses. She splashed into the waves with abandon, even as her head spun. Sailor, sailor, sailor, she noted, her desperation rising with every Tyri uniform and head of black hair. One of them looked ripped in half, missing everything from the waist down. His entrails floated with the rear of him, like a length of bleached rope. She suspected a shark got the best of him. Then her memories returned with a crash like the waves. The Tyri ship. Nightfall. The sea serpent slithering up out of the deep. The breaking of a lantern. Fire across the deck, slick scales running over my hands. The swing of a greatsword, Elder-made. Dom silhouetted against a sky awash with lightning. And then the cold, drowning darkness of the ocean. A wave splashed up against her and Sorasa stumbled back to the shore, shivering. She had not waded more than waist deep, but her face felt wet, water she could not understand streaking her cheeks. Her knees buckled and she fell, exhausted. She heaved a breath, then two. And screamed. Somehow the pain in her head paled in comparison to the pain in her heart. It dismayed and destroyed her in equal measure. The wind blew, stirring salt-crusted hair across her face, sending a chill down to her soul. It was like the wilderness all over again, the bodies of her Amhara kin splayed around her. No, she realized, her throat raw. This is worse. There is not even a body to mourn. She contemplated the emptiness for awhile, the beach and the waves, and the bodies gently pressing into the shore. If she squinted, they could only be debris from the ship, bits of wood instead of bloated flesh and bone. The sun glimmered on the water. Sorasa hated it. Nothing but clouds since Orisi, and now you choose to shine.

Against the gray fog, the explosive cloud of her ashes appears silvery and white. She booms up into the air like a little atomic cloud, blows back over us, scatters down into the sea, up into the branches and sky. She goes everywhere. And I laugh and laugh and laugh, feeling her delight. Her wild freedom. Recycled. Back into the universe.

164. Indeed, in the creation of the heavens and the earth; the alternation of the day and the night; the ships that sail the sea for the benefit of humanity; the rain sent down by God from the skies, reviving the earth after its death; the scattering of all kinds of creatures throughout; the shifting of the winds; and the clouds drifting between the heavens and the earth—˹in all of this˺ are surely signs for people of understanding.

The young Prince arrived in this world, lost and very frightened. The thread he had followed was broken, and he had no means of spinning another. His friend, the Spider Mage, was too far away to hear his cries, and this world of cruelty and noise was too much for him. Even the air was unbreathable. And so he crept into World Below, and wept to himself in the darkness. As he wept, his grief was so great that he broke into a cloud of butterflies and moths, each one a fragment of himself, that scattered into the darkness of the tunnels beneath the city. Some of them found their way to the light. Others stayed in the darkness. Some slept. And they became two separate groups-- one living underground, one in the light, both yearning for the world they had left, and for the chance to be whole again.

When man was in the world a wide-eyed boy, And clouds of sorrow crossed his sky of joy To scatter dewdrops on the buds of May. Then could he work and love and fight and pray, Nor heartsick grow in fortune's long employ. Mighty to build and ruthless to destroy He lived, while masked death unquestioned lay. Now ponder we the ruins of the years, And groan beneath the weight of boasted gain; No unsung bacchanal can charm our ears And lead our dances to the woodland fane, No hope of heaven sweeten our few tears And hush the importunity of pain.

KALI THE MOTHER The stars are blotted out, The clouds are covering clouds, It is darkness vibrant, sonant. In the roaring, whirling wind Are the souls of a million lunatics Just loose from the prison-house, Wrenching trees by the roots, Sweeping all from the path. The sea has joined the fray, And swirls up mountain-waves, To reach the pitchy sky. The flash of lurid light Reveals on every side A thousand, thousand shades Of Death begrimed and black — Scattering plagues and sorrows, Dancing mad with joy, Come, Mother, come! For Terror is Thy name, Death is in Thy breath, And every shaking step Destroys a world for e'er. Thou "Time", the All-Destroyer! Come, O Mother, come! Who dares misery love, And hug the form of Death, Dance in Destruction's dance, To him the Mother comes.

The lights of the little highway town ahead spread with their approach and then scattered like flushed prey as they entered its limits. Under the filling-station sheds, swirling insects clouded the naked bulbs. The stores were closed; the depot dark.

Ten strong things have been created in the world. The rock is hard, but the iron cleaves it. The iron is hard, but the fire softens it. The fire is hard, but the water quenches it. The water is strong, but the clouds bear it. The clouds are strong, but the wind scatters them. The wind is strong, but the body bears it. The body is strong, but fright crushes it. Fright is strong, but wine banishes it. Wine is strong, but sleep works it off. Death is stronger than all, and charity saves from death.

Everything seems neon lit when I look back at that time, like the track suits that made color exhausting and the parachute pants that gave all the boys who wore them airplane eyes. Sometimes I'll even remember an old man in greasy overalls and instead of mechanic's blue, I see them bright yellow and glowing. That's the art of the '80s. It's also the damage of it. Perhaps because they belonged to me, I will say that the '80s were as best as any time to grow up in. I think too they were a good time to meet the devil. Particularly that June day in 1984, when the sky seemed to be made on the kitchen counter, the clouds scattering like spilled flour.

The twelve burros crane their scrawny necks in his direction when Brady emerges from the merc. He reaches into his greatcoat, pulls out a tin of Star Navy tobacco, and shoves a chaw between lips and gums gone blackish purple in the last year. “What the hell?” he whispers. When he delivered supplies two weeks ago, this little mining town was bustling. Now Abandon looms listless before him in the gloom of late afternoon, streets empty, snow banked high against the unshoveled plank sidewalks, no tracks as far as he can see. The cabins scattered across the lower slopes lie buried to their chimneys, and with not a one of them smoking, the air smells too clean. Brady is a man at home in solitude, often spending days on the trail, alone in wild, quiet places, but this silence is all wrong—a lie. He feels menaced by it, and with each passing moment, more certain that something has happened here. A wall of dark clouds scrapes over the peaks, and snowflakes begin to speck the sleeves of his slicker. Here comes the wind. Chimes clang together over the doorway of the merc. It will be night soon.

He was polite; he was cool; he was enigmatic. He was every bit what they expected and wanted the storied Duke of Falconbridge to be, because it amused him to be so. In truth, his eyes were on the stairs. He waited with the patience of a cat near a mouse hole for Genevieve Eversea to arrive. He almost didn't recognize her when she did appear. Her dress was a glossy silk of midnight blue, cut very low, and the "sleeves"- really scraps of net- clung to her pale, flawless shoulders, as though she'd tumbled down through clouds to get here and brought a few sheds of sky with her. Her neck was long. Her collarbone had that smooth pristine temptation of a bank of new-fallen snow. It was interrupted only by a drop of a blue stone on a chain that pointed directly at quite confident cleavage, as if the owner knew full well it was splendid and was accustomed to exposing it. Her sleek dark hair was dressed up high and away from her face, and tiny diamanté sparks were scattered through it. Her face beneath it was revealed in delicate simplicity. A smooth, pale, high forehead, etched cheekbones. Elegant as Wedgwood, set off by that dark, dark hair and those vivid eyes. He stared. He wasn't precisely... nonplussed. Still, this particular vision of Genevieve Eversea required reconciling with the quiet girl in the morning dress, the moor pony with the determined gait. As though they were not quite the same thing, or were perhaps 'variations' of the same thing, like verb tenses. He felt a bit like a boy who needed to erase his morning lessons and begin again.

Just as photons are scattered off the charged particle-antiparticle pairs fluctuating in the vacuum, electrical charges will interact with the virtual photons of zero-point radiation. Again, the resistance the physical vacuum might be opposing in this way to the propagation of the electron cannot be measured by comparison with any resistance an emptier space might offer; the charge emits, then absorbs a photon in the emptiest imaginable space. This is what makes vacuum effects observable im the first place-elementary particles don't just interact with each other. Their accompanying clouds scatter off the particles and off one another.

Then the man who had received the one talent came. “Master,” he said, “I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.” His master replied, “You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.

Pak Suleh recalled the atmosphere on his island of Pulau Sebidang, which had been ruled by his ancestors for more than a hundred years. Now it had been passed to foreign hands—whichever nation from whatever foreign world which had been claiming the island was theirs—such that he and his ancestors who had lived on that island for generation after generation had been chased away to live in these birdhouses. They had now inherited these congested breathing diseases. Why was it that he could no longer enjoy the wind which blows from the sea, which is very much one of God’s incomparable benevolences? He could no longer savour the swaying coconut trees, ketapang trees, beringin trees and other trees which whistled and murmured when caressed by the winds as their dried leaves fell onto the sand, mixed with red and white flowers scattered all over the pristine white beach, resembling the moving clouds on a wide piece of white paper. I have lost everything, thought Pak Suleh deep in his heart.

You're floating on a cloud, about to explode like a star, scattering your light over the universe. I'll feel the beauty of it, but you are far above and beyond me. You're what I worship.

The breeze was calm and the sun beamed between the scattering clouds. Glancing across the rolling heather-covered landscape and toward the burn, he didn't see Remy or anyone else. "Twas too bad that the heather was not in bloom for the sight would have been lovely. Glancing up, he noticed something else. A giant double rainbow spanned across the horizon, one slightly dimmer than the other. "Ah," he halted and turned in the saddle. "Have you ever seen such a bonny rainbow?" Shona gasped. "Nay. 'Tis very bright." Even lovelier, at least to Keegan, was Shona's smile as she took in the scenery. She was so beautiful, his chest ached. Yet, he knew not how he was going to keep her in his life so that he might see her smile every day.

Reinvention is my philosophy, if you want to call it that,” he says, looking out the window. “Imagination is the key to creating a life that is ever new.” Stanley turns his eyes to me. “We are each of us a changeling person,” he says. “We are not going to be the same decade after decade. Wisdom results from confronting not only one’s desires and capacities but also one’s limitations.” “The Layers,” one of Stanley’s best-loved poems, is his crystallization of this wisdom. I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road is precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: “Live in the layers, not on the litter.” Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.

Field Collapse. The answer to Schrodinger's dilemma is what we now call field collapse. In QFT, when a field quantum interacts, it must interact as a unit. Half of the quantum cannot do one thing while the other half does another. If a quantum is absorbed by a molecule, the entire quantum must be absorbed, no matter how spread out it may be. If a quantum is scattered by a molecule in a cloud chamber, it can interact only with that molecule, and not with several molecules at the same time. As Art Hobson wrote, The tracks are made by successive individual interactions between a matter field and gas or water molecules. The matter field collapses...each time it interacts with a molecule, while spreading out as a matter field between impacts. However, I must remind you that field collapse, while a necessary consequence of the quantum nature of fields, is not described by the equations of QFT. This problem will be discussed further in Chapter 8 (The Gaps). Nonetheless, and even though many physicists find it a bitter pill to swallow, there is nothing inconsistent or paradoxical about field collapse. It just isn't what we expected.

They drove together under the stars to the lake, where they sat with fishing poles in a metal rowboat and waited for something to bite. Zack ate the toast, Uncle Orson gave some pointers, and then they cast their lines, again and again, into the pale fog. Dawn broke. The sunrise cracked. Clouds settled across the sky. The fog scattered as the air heated. And they still weren’t catching anything. And that whole time, the exact same gull was circling overhead. “Nothing’s happening,” Zack complained. But Uncle Orson smiled at the clouds and smiled at the rowboat and smiled at the gull and smiled at the poles. “Nothing has to happen,” Uncle Orson had said.

The force of the blast did not scatter the crystals, as Bridget’s common sense told her it absolutely should have. Instead it just seemed to disperse, spreading out like a wave. Where the wave spread, the little crystals burst into hot, angry light. And abruptly and all at once, they rose into the air in a cloud of glowing motes. Folly appeared among them, striding forward, flickers of light dancing along her candy-stripe hair, her mismatched eyes blazing. Sark loosed several more blasts, all of which dispersed into the crystals, making them glow with even brighter light. Folly’s voice rang out, cold and hard. “We don’t like it when people try to hurt our friends.” And the entire cloud of crystals flew at Sark like bullets loosed from a gun. Sark

Henry glances at his office door, and a moment later, a dark-skinned man in a rough coat enters, his cloud of curly hair pulled back into a knot at the nape of his neck. “Monty, why is there a skull with the . . .” He catches sight of me and breaks off, looking between us. “Sorry. I didn’t realize you had a meeting.” Henry—Monty—what?—sighs. I swear, even that small twitch is enough to make the dimples in both his cheeks pop out. I only inherited one from our father, but he appears to have the matching set. “Johanna sent it. I believe it’s meant to be some kind of present. Or possibly we are meant to keep it for her until she’s next in London. It’s always so hard to tell, and it has arrived so near to your birthday.” “I would imagine the latter.” The dark-skinned man takes a wide stride over the pile of papers I inadvertently scattered and extends a hand to me. He has a broad smile, which is deployed in full as he says, “Good day. I’m Percy Newton.

He doesn't fall like the others. Instead of blood pouring from his wound, red moths stream out, in to the air. They rush out of him so quickly that in a moment, the High King's body is gone and there are just those red moths, swirling up in to the air in a vast cloud, a tornado of soft wings. But whatever magic made them does not last. They begin to fall until they are scattered across the dais like blown leaves. The High King Eldred is, impossibly, dead.

The four guys were just staring at me—or Rome—their mouths a little unhinged. “Did she say that she set a building on fire?” Yael rasped. “And knocked someone out and stuffed them into a cupboard?” Aros, this time. “And set a bunch of panteras free.” Coen was scratching his head. “That’s my girl.” Siret was the only one who seemed pleased by my overload of information. “Rome is messing with us.” Yael was shaking his head. “This is too fucked-up.” “I’m not.” I tried to sound as convincing as possible, but Yael only shook his head and stepped closer to Rome, his fists clenched. “Cut this shit out right now,” he seethed, “or I’ll hit you so hard she’ll have to start calling you Crushed.” “That’s not very nice—” I started to say, but apparently Yael wasn’t in the mood for pacifications. He pulled his arm back and slammed it into the side of Rome’s face. I couldn’t feel the actual blow, but my vision swam to the side, and then suddenly I was staring at the sky—I hadn’t paid much attention to where we were, but the sky was bluer than blue, the clouds all happy and perfect. They were still in Topia. “You hit me!” I yelled at the sky, and it was almost humorous to hear Rome’s deep voice so full of feminine outrage. “Oh.” Yael sounded genuinely shocked. “It really is her. Rome just dropped like a bag of rocks.” “He’s still not moving,” Coen noted, his head appearing in my field of vision. “You okay in there, dweller-baby?” “He hit me!” I repeated. “I think she’s fine.” Yael’s head appeared beside Coen’s. “Rome’s head is too damn thick for any of the pain to reach her—right, Willa-toy?” “You still hit me!” This time, it was a growl, and Siret’s head popped up beside Yael’s. “You should get revenge,” he suggested helpfully. “You have so many muscles right now. You’re the God of Strength right now. The possibilities are endless.” “No they aren’t,” I said, “Rome is going to wake up soon. I don’t always black out for long. But you have a point.” I struggled to get back to my feet, but controlling Rome wasn’t so easy. His limbs were bigger than expected, and I accidently knocked over a low wooden table, up-ending a bowl of fruit and sending apples and oranges scattering over the marble floor. When I was finally standing, I focussed on Yael, and tried to swing a punch at him. Unfortunately, I miscalculated the distance to his face, and Rome’s fist connected with the pillar just to the right of Yael’s head. I watched in fascination as the stone cracked beneath Rome’s fist, caving in around his hand. I was so fascinated that I didn’t even realise I was stuck until I tried to pull his fist back again and it wouldn’t budge. “Well … this is awkward.” Yael was smirking, turned to the side so that he could see the fist I had embedded into the pillar.

She wanted them to see the better world she could picture. She wanted to stuff it into their eyeballs until every HiveWing went, “YES! That world is WAY BETTER than this one! Let’s be like that instead!” Luna wished she had magic. Magic would be so useful for problems like this! Even if it was a magic like Clearsight’s, seeing the future — well, she’d find a way to make it useful! But proper magic, like spells and enchantments and brain changers, like in the old dragon fairy tales, that’s what she really wanted. Something to go, “POOF! Now you are all fair and kind and incapable of cruelty or injustice!” That’s what she needed, but apparently it didn’t exist — or if it had existed, once, in the Distant Kingdoms, now it didn’t work anymore. She traced her claw through the sand with a sigh. The sun was rising behind her, casting golden ripples across the ocean like trails of flamesilk. On the other side of that ocean was Pantala: her home, her mothers, her tribe, Blue, and Swordtail, and they were all in trouble, and it was all a mess, and she didn’t know how to begin untangling it. Before her Metamorphosis, Luna had dreamed of flying. She dreamed of scattering the clouds with her new pale green wings, and she imagined sunshine pouring through her scales the higher she flew. She

I crawled back to bed, knowing I was done for. Hours later, the phone in our room started ringing. It was George. He was not happy. "Room 312. Now!" he shouted. Bouldy got up. I tried to pull myself together, splashing my face with water and hauling on my shorts and flip flops. It was a lovely day outside, the sun was scorching hot and there wasn't a cloud in the sky, but it might as well have been a pissing wet morning in St Albans for all I cared. I felt sick to the pit of my stomach as we made the Walk of Death to Room 312, which I knew was Paul and Gus's room. When we walked in, I thought I'd arrived in downtown Baghdad. Water dripped from the ceiling. The board games were in pieces and all the plastic parts were scattered over the floor. The balcony window was wide open and I could see a bed upended by the pool outside.

Many people live scattered and tumultuous lives trying to live outside of their own boundaries, not accepting and expressing the truth of who they are.

And then they broke out of the tree line and she could see the Blue Lakes, the water curving in and out of the great masses of land before disappearing around a bend where she knew it continued for miles more. The mountains seemed to wrap themselves around the water, to form a protective sort of wall so high and strong that Ari had the feeling she could be crushed by their enormity. Instead of wanting to flee, her insignificance shocked her with a strange sense of elation and she thought, for just a moment, that she had never seen anything so tragically beautiful. From where they stood, nearly at the foot of the lake, they were infinitely tiny yet the clouds and the water and the land all mixed together until she was entirely unaware of proportion. Perhaps the lake was an ocean. Perhaps the mountains were only hills. In a moment, she understood the neat green of the forest and the scattered rocks and the dark of the land. She felt the Zrignigh Mountains breathing, and they were not a collection of dirt and stones but a single entity, a power more terrifying than anything she had ever witnessed. All connected by one beating heart, they swallowed the Blue Lakes whole, envel- oped them, fed off of their fruits, their life. She tried to breathe with them and found herself overwhelmed by their heartbeat.

And then they broke out of the tree line and she could see the Blue Lakes, the water curving in and out of the great masses of land before disappearing around a bend where she knew it continued for miles more. The mountains seemed to wrap themselves around the water, to form a protective sort of wall so high and strong that Ari had the feeling she could be crushed by their enormity. Instead of wanting to flee, her insignificance shocked her with a strange sense of elation and she thought, for just a moment, that she had never seen anything so tragically beautiful. From where they stood, nearly at the foot of the lake, they were infinitely tiny yet the clouds and the water and the land all mixed together until she was entirely unaware of proportion. Perhaps the lake was an ocean. Perhaps the mountains were only hills. In a moment, she understood the neat green of the forest and the scattered rocks and the dark of the land. She felt the Zrignigh Mountains breathing, and they were not a collection of dirt and stones but a single entity, a power more terrifying than anything she had ever witnessed. All connected by one beating heart, they swallowed the Blue Lakes whole, envel- oped them, fed off of their fruits, their life. She tried to breathe with them and found herself overwhelmed by their heartbeat.

King of My Palace You are this heart's charm, and awake it is, in a thousand songs. Like the sun with faraway light, sometimes in sight, Sometimes, circled by the clouds, you, too, reside behind the veils. In this palace of mine, you are the lover, whose name I sing, For this mouth of mine shall never speak another name. You are the reason for every ache, you are the blush on sunset sky. You are the laughter that breaks the sky at dawn, You are the charm, eternal in lovers' hearts. You set this heart on fire, and the longing surges. For every moment brings wonders of light. In this palace of mine, you are the king of kings, Who conquered my heart. An eternal connection, unbroken, will remain, On my eyelashes, you bring the dew of morn, And when night falls, you turn my sighs into songs. So, I am a songmaker on earth, For in your light, woken am I to the eternal charm. In my palace, you are the king Who brought wealth to my heart. This heart of mine, I shall never sell to the allure of earth. O Heart, gather his love-letters in the winds, for he writes them, one by one, and scatters them in the breeze. O Heart, remain faithful to this king, For this love burns every other desire, every ache into quivering ecstasy." 'I Sense My Thirst'...Excerpt

King of My Palace You are this heart's charm, and awake it is, in a thousand songs. Like the sun with faraway light, sometimes in sight, Sometimes, circled by the clouds, you, too, reside behind the veils. In this palace of mine, you are the lover, whose name I sing, For this mouth of mine shall never speak another name. You are the reason for every ache, you are the blush on sunset sky. You are the laughter that breaks the sky at dawn, You are the charm, eternal in lovers' hearts. You set this heart on fire, and the longing surges. For every moment brings wonders of light. In this palace of mine, you are the king of kings, Who conquered my heart. An eternal connection, unbroken, will remain, On my eyelashes, you bring the dew of morn, And when night falls, you turn my sighs into songs. So, I am a songmaker on earth, for in your light, Woken am I to the eternal charm. In my palace, you are the king Who brought wealth to my heart. This heart of mine, I shall never sell to the allure of earth. O Heart, gather his love-letters in the winds, for he writes them, one by one, and scatters them in the breeze. O Heart, remain faithful to this king, for this love burns every other desire, every ache into quivering ecstasy. 'I Sense My Thirst....Excerpt

He sucked in the moist air, choking on it, and his legs galloped for purchase; but he succeeded only in scattering the clouds. The stallions snorted with amusement and dropped toward the forest, their hooves skimming the top branches. Star’s gut lurched from the rapid descent, and his damp hide and feathers caused him to shiver. Below he saw three deer hopping through the aspens, avoiding the wide, black shadows of his captors’ wings.

As the priests morning and evening entered the holy place at the time of incense, the daily sacrifice was ready to be offered upon the altar in the court without. This was a time of intense interest to the worshipers who assembled at the tabernacle. Before entering into the presence of God through the ministration of the priest, they were to engage in earnest searching of heart and confession of sin. They united in silent prayer, with their faces toward the holy place. Thus their petitions ascended with the cloud of incense, while faith laid hold upon the merits of the promised Saviour prefigured by the atoning sacrifice. The hours appointed for the morning and the evening sacrifice [354] were regarded as sacred, and they came to be observed as the set time for worship throughout the Jewish nation. And when in later times the Jews were scattered as captives in distant lands, they still at the appointed hour turned their faces toward Jerusalem and offered up their petitions to the God of Israel. In this custom Christians have an example for morning and evening prayer. While God condemns a mere round of ceremonies, without the spirit of worship, he looks with great pleasure upon those who love him, bowing morning and evening to seek pardon for sins committed and to present their requests for needed blessings.

Once in a while, he worries, but about what? Like the scattered clouds that drift over farmland in the afternoon, that sort of anxiety is what, ultimately?

Their obese emperors from New York are suave smiling assassins who buy silk, nylon, cigars petty tyrants and dictators. They buy countries, people, seas, police, county councils, distant regions where the poor hoard their corn like misers their gold: Standard Oil awakens them, clothes them in uniforms, designates which brother is the enemy. The Paraguayan fights its war, and the Bolivian wastes away in the jungle with its machine gun. A President assassinated for a drop of petroleum, a million-acre mortgage, a swift execution on a morning mortal with light, petrified, a new prison camp for subversives, in Patagonia, a betrayal, scattered shots beneath a petroliferous moon, a subtle change of ministers in the capital, a whisper like an oil tide, and zap, you’ll see how Standard Oil’s letters shine above the clouds, above the seas, in your home, illuminating their dominions.

We live on the scattered rocks of a large planet that burst out of emotions. Therefore, it is normal to experience pain and stress, it's how life is completed.

Some novels even overdramatize events, which, in real life, happen in a far more unassuming and inconsequential way; they happen, then they're over, they run into one another, floating like clouds scattered by the wind between the odd deceptive pause that turns out to be impossible, because time—which no one understands—stops for nothing.

Darlene pictured the funnel cloud roaring through Tucker's mind, scattering the elements of his personality across the landscape, leaving only chaos in his wake.

Hey, Call! You over here? Call! Is everything all right?” She whimpered as he whipped his mouth away and softly cursed. With an unsteady hand, he jerked down her sweatshirt and stepped protectively in front of her, leaving her shielded behind his body and the trunk of the tree. “Everything’s fine, Toby.” His voice sounded raspy. She wondered if his friend would notice. “I thought I heard shots,” Toby said, “but I was cooking so I didn’t pay all that much attention. Then I went into the living room and found the front door open. When I saw your rifle gone from the rack, I was afraid something bad might have happened.” “Our neighbor, Ms. Sinclair, came nose to nose with her first black bear.” Call looked her way, gave her a quick once-over, saw that she didn’t look too disheveled, and tugged her out from behind the tree. “Charity Sinclair, meet Toby Jenkins. Toby’s chief-cook-and-bottle-washer over at my place, and all-around handyman. At least he is till he leaves for college in the fall. Toby, this is Ms. Sinclair, our new neighbor.” “Nice to meet you, ma’am. I heard Mose sold the place. I’ve been meaning to come over and say hello.” “Forget the ma’am,” Charity told him. “It makes me feel too old. Charity is enough.” He nodded, smiled. He was young, maybe nineteen or twenty, with thick, dark red hair and a few scattered freckles, sort of a young John Kennedy, an attractive boy with what appeared to be a pleasant disposition. She wondered if he could tell by looking at her what had been going on when he arrived. Then she noticed Call’s shirt was open and missing a button and felt her face heating up again. Call cleared his throat. “I’ll be home in a couple of minutes, Toby.” “Yes, sir. I’ll have your breakfast waiting.” With a wave good-bye, he set off down the path the way he had come. When Charity turned, she saw Call watching her, his face dark, his expression closed up as it usually was. “I didn’t mean for that to happen.” Oh, God. He was obviously sorry it had and it made her even more embarrassed. “Neither did I. I don’t make a habit of…of…I don’t exactly know what happened.” She studied her feet, then stared off toward the creek. “It must have been the fear, you know? They say when your life is threatened you revert to your most basic instincts.” She risked a glance at him, saw that his jaw looked iron-hard. “Yeah, that must be it.” She glanced away, trying not to think of what they’d just done. Trying not to wonder what would have happened if Toby hadn’t arrived when he did. “You’d better go,” she said, making an effort to smile. “Your breakfast is waiting and I’ve got work to do.” As she started to turn, the sun peeked out from behind a cloud, casting shadows beneath his cheekbones and the little indentation on his chin. He didn’t move when she grabbed the plastic bag of garbage and headed for one of the heavy iron trash cans that were supposed to be bear-proof. She saw him walk over and pick up his rifle, his fingers wrapping around the stock with a casual ease that said he was comfortable with the weapon. He didn’t walk away as she expected. Instead, he stood there watching, waiting until she disappeared inside the house.

bustling. Now Abandon looms listless before him in the gloom of late afternoon, streets empty, snow banked high against the unshoveled plank sidewalks, no tracks as far as he can see. The cabins scattered across the lower slopes lie buried to their chimneys, and with not a one of them smoking, the air smells too clean. Brady is a man at home in solitude, often spending days on the trail, alone in wild, quiet places, but this silence is all wrong—a lie. He feels menaced by it, and with each passing moment, more certain that something has happened here. A wall of dark clouds scrapes over the peaks, and snowflakes begin to speck the sleeves of his slicker. Here comes the wind. Chimes clang together over the doorway of

38 Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said: 2 “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? 3 Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. 4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. 5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? 6 On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone— 7 while the morning stars sang together and all the angels[a] shouted for joy? 8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, 9 when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, 10 when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, 11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’? 12 “Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place, 13 that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it? 14 The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment. 15 The wicked are denied their light, and their upraised arm is broken. 16 “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? 17 Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness? 18 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth? Tell me, if you know all this. 19 “What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside? 20 Can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings? 21 Surely you know, for you were already born! You have lived so many years! 22 “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, 23 which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle? 24 What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? 25 Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, 26 to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, 27 to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? 28 Does the rain have a father? Who fathers the drops of dew? 29 From whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens 30 when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen? 31 “Can you bind the chains[b] of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt? 32 Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons[c] or lead out the Bear[d] with its cubs? 33 Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s[e] dominion over the earth? 34 “Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water? 35 Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’? 36 Who gives the ibis wisdom[f] or gives the rooster understanding?[g] 37 Who has the wisdom to count the clouds? Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens 38 when the dust becomes hard and the clods of earth stick together? 39 “Do you hunt the prey for the lioness and satisfy the hunger of the lions 40 when they crouch in their dens or lie in wait in a thicket? 41 Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?

All was iris-blue, earth and sky together, with a cluster of clouds in the west. The young sun made his way, knee-deep in the grass. The wind scattered the dew like a lively colt. It sent up flights of birds which swam for a while among the waves of the sky, as if drunk and dizzy from screaming, and then suddenly dropped, like handfuls of stones.

Aida sighed at her melancholy thoughts and tipped her head back to look at the sky stained with brilliant purples and blues tinged with vicious red. Cheery gold limned the low-hanging clouds with stars beginning to peek out from their hiding. Night would fall fast here in the mountain’s shadow, though less so than when they traveled at its feet. Squinting up at the vast expanse, she tried to pick out the stars she might recognize. Uncertain if they had names as so many things seemed to in this frightening world, she looked only for the brightest among them.The wind picked up, riffling through her hair and sending it into a tangled banner behind her as she continued to look up at the sky. Smiling as a break in the trees gave her an unimpeded view of the deep indigo scattered with diamonds. A few hours yet, and it would look just like her eyes. Midnight black with twinkling blue. The only of their kind that she knew of.

The wind whipped Lucky’s fur and he shivered, crouching low to the ground. The Moon-Dog had vanished, leaving only a scattering of stars to cast their shallow light. He squinted into the darkness. As his eyes adjusted, he realized he was perching on a blade of black rock, a tiny stone island surrounded by water. He took a tentative step over the rock and faltered. The water wasn’t moving—it was frozen to ice. As Lucky lowered his head, he could see white patterns across its surface like spiders’ webs. Ahead, the sky of no-sun was as thick and dark as a storm cloud, yet craning his head Lucky could just make out a circle of amber light. Was it the Sun-Dog rising, or something else? He took a step forward, placing his forepaw on the ice. The freezing cold was sharper than a blast of fire and Lucky whipped away his paw with a howl of pain. He licked it, gazing into the distance. He could still see a light, though now it looked farther away. . . . Somehow he knew he had to reach it, but he didn’t think he’d make it over the long stretches of ice. He backed over the black rock, wondering what to do. He was alone, trapped on the island—and the Ice Wind was coming. He heard hissing and spun around. The ice was clawing its way over the edge of the island. Its touch turned the rock a shiny white, like clear-stone. Lucky’s breath caught in his throat. He threw a frantic look over his shoulder. The ice was creeping onto the land from all sides, fizzing and murmuring with its cool, white tongue, freezing the land beneath its ghostly pelt. Lucky cried out. “Bella! Sweet!” No dog answered his calls. The ice was close now, whispering and crackling at his paws. Lucky watched in horror as it climbed up his legs, searing him with its deathly touch, turning his fur brittle and white as frost. He tried to pull away, but his legs were frozen. He tried to cry out again, but his jaw was locked with cold. Far in the distance, the amber light flickered and died. Now there was only chill and darkness. And then, in the darkness, the furious howls of fighting dogs.

My heart pounded at his words, but a crash of thunder from the heavens stopped me from replying. I offered him a frustrated smile and turned away from him as I began my run. Darius followed behind me, far enough back to allow the clouds to scatter again and I tried not to dwell on the disappointment that lingered in me as I upped my pace. Did I just shoot over here at the speed of light without brushing my hair or putting any makeup on rather than risk missing out on our run? I shook my head at myself as I tried to figure out what was going on here.

The sun slants to the horizon early. There is a sense of the world turning a shoulder away from the sun. Twilight comes quickly. Another year is passing away. At first the ground of the stubble is hard underfoot. The corn’s roots sucked its moisture. Showers fall. Day by day the stubble-walker feels a softening of the surface he treads. Latterly it is like walking on a pile carpet. As it softens, the day when the plough will enter it draws nearer. These pleasant strolls are doomed. A man may have made a little daily route for himself, such is habit. At first he goes this way one day, another way the next – across the middle of a stubble today, yesterday along by that hedge, tomorrow beside the ash trees. Yet in a week or so he comes to take a favourite route at a favourite hour. Evening is best. There is half an hour of twilight. The sun, fallen into a welter of clouds, scatters fire into the tree-tops. The glow, at setting out too bright to look on, swiftly fades to cool colours. Watching the sky, dwelling on fat woods, a man can let his feet stray; no path to miss, no clod to stumble over. Called back to earth by a whirr of wings or the swish of a surprised rabbit, he can note speedwell and charlock, pluck a leaf of wild mint and smell it, mixed with an inhalation of wood smoke from afar.

I have not been to Bayembe in nearly twenty years, but my memory of it remains as fresh as yesterday. Not the factual details, but the experience of the place: the enormous quality the sky seemed to take on, and the vast stretches of dry grass rustling in the breeze. Scattered umbrella thorns spread their branches like flat clouds above the ground;

It was in the Month of Mary that I remember beginning to be fond of hawthorns. Not only were they in the church, which was so holy but which we had the right to enter, they were put up on the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration they took part, their branches running out among the candles and holy vessels, attached horizontally to one another in a festive preparation and made even lovelier by the festoons of their foliage, on which were scattered in profusion, as on a bridal train, little bunches of buds of a dazzling whiteness. But, though I dared not do more than steal a glance at them, I felt that the ceremonious preparations were alive and that it was nature herself who, by carving those indentations in the leaves, by adding the supreme ornament of those white buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a popular festivity and a mystical celebration. Higher up, their corollas opened here and there with a careless grace, still holding so casually, like a last and vaporous adornment, the bouquets of stamens, delicate as gossamer, which clouded them entirely, that in following, in trying to mime deep inside myself the motion of their flowering, I imagined it as the quick and thoughtless movement of the head, with coquettish glance and contracted eyes, of a young girl in white, dreamy and alive.

163Your God is the one God: there is no god except Him, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy. 164In the creation of the heavens and earth; in the alternation of night and day; in the ships that sail the seas with goods for people; in the water which God sends down from the sky to give life to the earth when it has been barren, scattering all kinds of creatures over it; in the changing of the winds and clouds that run their appointed courses between the sky and earth: there are signs in all these for those who use their minds. 165Even so, there are some who choose to worship others besides God as rivals to Him, loving them with the love due to God, but the believers have greater love for God. If only the idolaters could see—as they will see when they face the torment—that all power belongs to God, and that God punishes severely.

There's sunshine after every cloud, William. Perfect, since it's taking a long time to get this going," Elie said. "That's a nice way of saying we're currently crashing and burning.

Ispent the following day roaming through the valley. I stood beside the sources of the Arveiron, which take their rise in a glacier, that with slow pace is advancing down from the summit of the hills to barricade the valley. The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial nature was broken only by the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands. These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillized it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had contemplated during the day. They congregated round me; the unstained snowy mountain-top, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine, the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds—they all gathered round me and bade me be at peace.

I suppose those mist-shrouded mountains could easily stir the imagination,” she murmured, but felt the rousing of a keen curiosity she had never been able to conquer. “Tis certain that many people fear such places, fear what might lurk in such a dark forest or in those clouded hills. But, this time, ’twas some foolish tale they heard in that village we stopped at for the night.” “Ye heard it, too?” “Nay. The men told it to me. Some tale about a creature from those hills, one who disguised himself as a mon. A mon who ne’er showed himself when the sun rose, only ventured out at night. A mon with eyes like a wolf and teeth like one, as weel. A mon so strong it took near a dozen villagers to subdue him, many of them suffering grievous injuries. A mon who could bewitch any lass into offering him her chastity.” The scorn in Nan’s voice made it very clear that she did not believe the tale at all. Bridget was pleased that that scorn did not stop the woman from repeating the tale, however. “Why did they feel the need to attack him, to subdue him? And, what did they do with him after they captured him?” “They caught him sinfully fornicating with another mon’s wife. They dragged him before the priest. Tis then that they realized what they had—a devil, a demon, one of Hell’s foul creatures. The priest had the mon tortured, but that mon didnae confess his sins or repent them. They said his wounds healed as if by magic. The priest then declared him a demon, or a witch. I am nay quite sure. They garroted him, burned him, and scattered his bones far and wide o’er the moors so that he couldnae come back to life.” “How cruel. He may have been innocent.” “I certainly doubt he was all they claim he was, but he wasnae innocent. If there was a mon executed, it was probably for the sins of fornication and adultery. He showed the villagers that their women lacked morals.” Bridget

The sushi rice was topped with thin strips of omelet, grilled conger eel, steamed prawns, boiled shiitake mushrooms, ginkgo nuts, and large green soybeans. There was also a scattering of something reddish pink--- probably dried and shredded fish. Taking care not to touch the bowl again, Shuji used his chopsticks to scoop up some of the mushi-zushi and slip it into his mouth. It was so hot that he found himself wondering how it was even possible for food to retain such a high temperature. He opened his mouth wide as he chewed, releasing clouds of steam. The rice itself was packed with minced conger eel; he could feel its rich umami flavor racing across his tongue. Now he saw what a bit of warmth could bring to a bowl of sushi.

Wait for you? Not likely! I’ve always had to run ahead of you and show you the way. Swift as thought, he slipped away from me, running down the hillside like a cloud’s shadow when the wind blows. My connection to him frayed away as he went, scattering and floating like dandelion fluff in the wind. Instead of small and secret, I felt our bond go wide and open, as if he had invited all the Witted creatures in the world in to share our joining. All the web of life on the whole hillside suddenly swelled within my heart, linked and meshed and woven through with one another. It was too glorious to contain. I had to go with him; a morning this wondrous must be shared.

After the stormy disruption of the elements, there comes a great peace. The elements then shine with a wonderful clarity, fire has no searing heat, air is free of dense clouds, water does not rage and flood, and the earth is not fragile and crumbling. Sun, moon, and stars sparkle in brilliant illumination and beauty; they stand still, so that there is no night, but only day. Since the body, as well as the psyche, is composed of the elements, there is great healing as the scattered and bruised fragments of our being are brought together again, in wholeness. The fiery aspect of our nature glows golden like the dawn; the air of our mind is clear and shining; the water currents of our body and the emotional currents of our psyche become transparent and still; the earthy part of our nature, our flesh and bones, becomes strong and well-proportioned. Here is revealed a vision of the total transformation possible for the human being—a psycho-alchemical transmutation of the elements from a state of disorder and conflict to a state of harmony and balance.

Operational inquiry has established that Danylo Shablia assisted in the espionage activities of his son, Peter Shablia, helping him organize an anti-Soviet network in the settlement of Tomakivka at his place of residence.” Peter read the paragraph in the middle of the page. “As you can see, the document is signed, stamped, and fully prepared for dispatch. Your choice, therefore, is limited. You understand perfectly well what consequences such a response will have for your father,” the NKVD operative Kidman added smoothly. Inwardly, he was triumphant. The fabricated report had worked exactly as intended. The staged performance had exceeded expectations—he could read it on Peter’s face. Now I must not lose the initiative, the operative thought, careful not to betray his satisfaction. “Well? Surely you understand that you have no alternative,” he pressed. Peter understood. From fellow prisoners who had endured the brutal interrogations of Soviet counterintelligence, he knew what such accusations meant for a former prisoner of war: almost certainly execution. But he also knew something else. He would never be able to live with himself as a secret informant for the NKVD. That, to him, was worse than death. He felt it physically—the sense of being driven into a corner. As had happened before in moments of moral extremity, a red haze clouded his mind. Some uncontrollable mechanism inside him broke loose, awakening a furious force that swept aside calculation and fear. “To hell with you and your threats!” he shouted, hurling the papers into the operative’s face. “I want no part of your methods—or your masters!” He leapt to his feet, seized a chair, and flung it toward Kidman. “Cut me to pieces if you must—but I will not become an informer! You’ll drag me back here only as a corpse!” He stormed out, slamming the door so hard it echoed down the corridor. A group of startled onlookers scattered as he made his way back to the barracks — Volodymyr Shablia, Stone. Book Four Context note: Set in 1942 during World War II, this scene portrays one of the coercive methods used by the NKVD—the Soviet secret police—to recruit forced informants inside labor camps. Prisoners were often threatened with fabricated charges against their relatives, including accusations of espionage or anti-Soviet activity, which could result in execution. By exploiting family loyalty and fear, the system sought to turn inmates into secret collaborators tasked with informing on fellow prisoners. The episode reflects the psychological warfare and moral pressure that defined Stalinist repression in Soviet labor camps.

In a sermon on prayer and fasting, for instance, Augustine—who was not an extreme ascetic—said, “Fasting cleanses the soul, raises the mind, subjects one’s flesh to the spirit, renders the heart contrite and humble, scatters the clouds of concupiscence, quenches the fire of lust, and kindles the true light of chastity. Enter again into yourself.

As summer neared, as the evenings lengthened, there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind—of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of cliff, sea, cloud, and sky brought purposely together to assemble outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within.

Q: How can anyone seriously position the ‘Apollo 11’ reflector at a minimum distance of only 40ft/12m away from a rocket engine that they knew was going to scatter vast clouds of lunar dust over a wide area at take off? A location that, by their own admission, would become so badly covered in dust and debris that the reflector would be rendered virtually useless?