She Who Creates Herself Quotes

When God Created Mothers" When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of "overtime" when the angel appeared and said. "You're doing a lot of fiddling around on this one." And God said, "Have you read the specs on this order?" She has to be completely washable, but not plastic. Have 180 moveable parts...all replaceable. Run on black coffee and leftovers. Have a lap that disappears when she stands up. A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair. And six pairs of hands." The angel shook her head slowly and said. "Six pairs of hands.... no way." It's not the hands that are causing me problems," God remarked, "it's the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have." That's on the standard model?" asked the angel. God nodded. One pair that sees through closed doors when she asks, 'What are you kids doing in there?' when she already knows. Another here in the back of her head that sees what she shouldn't but what she has to know, and of course the ones here in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and say. 'I understand and I love you' without so much as uttering a word." God," said the angel touching his sleeve gently, "Get some rest tomorrow...." I can't," said God, "I'm so close to creating something so close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick...can feed a family of six on one pound of hamburger...and can get a nine year old to stand under a shower." The angel circled the model of a mother very slowly. "It's too soft," she sighed. But tough!" said God excitedly. "You can imagine what this mother can do or endure." Can it think?" Not only can it think, but it can reason and compromise," said the Creator. Finally, the angel bent over and ran her finger across the cheek. There's a leak," she pronounced. "I told You that You were trying to put too much into this model." It's not a leak," said the Lord, "It's a tear." What's it for?" It's for joy, sadness, disappointment, pain, loneliness, and pride." You are a genius, " said the angel. Somberly, God said, "I didn't put it there.

By all appearances, Hillary made a deal with herself over Bill’s philandering. She’s a private person who hates campaigning, so her marriage to a charismatic “people person” in Bill created a dynamic partnership.

It’s in English,” I call out as it comes into focus. “It says ‘Made in China.’” At first Sister Loretta thinks I must be wrong, but when she sees the words for herself, she explains to us that God anticipated that the Communists in China would create technology that makes medals, rosaries, and plastic figurines really cheaply, and He was ready to temporarily forgive them for not being a democracy and for being pagans if they were willing to sell these holy goods to us at a fantastic discount, which shows us that God, like everyone else, goes out of His way to get a good deal on something He really needs. Who doesn’t like a bargain?

God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody’s appendage? she prayed desperately.

Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true. She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with white hair, with a daughter and a grand-daughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy. Or that's a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull. Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months' pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us. There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow. There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter's wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.

First of all, I must make it clear that this girl does not know herself apart from the fact that she goes on living aimlessly. Were she foolish enough to ask herself 'Who am I?', she would fall flat on her face. For the question 'Who am I?' creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need? To probe oneself is to recognize that one is incomplete.

And now she began muttering to herself. "God , who created you, must have known what He did. Enough is enough.

If Mike convinces a woman to date him because he is dominant, the resulting relationship will be entirely different than if he had inspired this same woman to date him by convincing her that, through dating him, she could improve herself (though such dynamics might be ameliorated through therapy). One of the core reasons why people either end up in one bad relationship after another—or come to believe that all members of a certain gender have very constrained behavior patterns—is that they do not understand how different lures function (in male communities, this often manifests in the saying “AWALT,” which stands for “all women are like that”). These people do not realize that the lure they are using is creating those relationship dynamics and/or constrained behavior patterns. Talking with individuals who say guys or girls always act like X or Y feels like talking to a fisherman who insists that all fish have whiskers. When you point out that all the lures in his tackle box are designed specifically to only catch catfish, he just turns and gives you a quizzical look saying, “what's your point?

What is this all about,' asked Sai, but her mouth couldn't address her ear in the tumult; her mind couldn't talk to her heart. 'Shame on myself,' she said...Who was she...she with her self-importance, her demand for happiness, yelling it at fate, at the deaf heavens, screaming for her joy to be brought forth..? How dare...How dare you not... Why shouldn't I have...How dare...I deserve...Her small greedy soul...Her tantrums and fits...Her mean tears...Her crying, enough for all the sadness in the world, was only for herself. Life wasn't single in its purpose...or even its direction...The simplicity of what she'd been taught wouldn't hold. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own tiny happiness and live safely within it.

Most abusive men put on a charming face for their communities, creating a sharp split between their public image and their private treatment of women and children. He may be: Enraged at home but calm and smiling outside Selfish and self-centered with you but generous and supportive with others Domineering at home but willing to negotiate and compromise outside Highly negative about females while on his own turf but a vocal supporter of equality when anyone else is listening Assaultive toward his partner or children but nonviolent and nonthreatening with everyone else Entitled at home but critical of other men who disrespect or assault women The pain of this contrast can eat away at a woman. In the morning her partner cuts her to the quick by calling her a “brainless fat cow,” but a few hours later she sees him laughing with the people next door and helping them fix their car. Later the neighbor says to her, “Your partner is so nice. You’re lucky to be with him—a lot of men wouldn’t do what he does.” She responds with a mumbled “Yeah,” feeling confused and tongue-tied. Back at home, she asks herself over and over again, “Why me?

Andre had been telling her an ancient legend of the fall of man into evil. It came about, he said, by the hand of a woman, Eve, who gave man forbidden fruit. "And how was this woman to know that the fruit was forbidden?" Madame Wu had inquired. "An evil spirit, in the shape of a serpent, whispered it to her," Andre had said. "Why to her instead of to the man?" she had inquired. "Because he knew that her mind and her heart were fixed not upon the man, but upon the pursuance of life," he had replied. "The man's mind and heart were fixed upon himself. He was happy enough, dreaming that he possessed the woman and the garden. Why should he be tempted further? He had all. But the woman could always be tempted by the thought of a better garden, a larger space, more to possess, because she knew that out of her body would come many more beings, and for them she plotted and planned. The woman thought not of herself, but of the many whom she would create. For their sake she was tempted. For their sake she will always be tempted.

When she decided to get a job, she rejected a tempting offer from a company that had just been set up in her recently created country in favor of a job at the public library, where you didn’t earn much money but where you were secure. She went to work every day, always keeping to the same timetable, always making sure she wasn’t perceived as a threat by her superiors; she was content; she didn’t struggle, and so she didn’t grow: All she wanted was her salary at the end of the month. She rented the room in the convent because the nuns required all tenants to be back at a certain hour, and then they locked the door: Anyone still outside after that had to sleep on the street. She always had a genuine excuse to give boyfriends, so as not to have to spend the night in hotel rooms or strange beds. When she used to dream of getting married, she imagined herself in a little house outside Ljubljana, with a man quite different from her father—a man who earned enough to support his family, one who would be content just to be with her in a house with an open fire and to look out at the snow-covered mountains. She had taught herself to give men a precise amount of pleasure; never more, never less, only what was necessary. She didn’t get angry with anyone, because that would mean having to react, having to do battle with the enemy and then having to face unforeseen consequences, such as vengeance. When she had achieved almost everything she wanted in life, she had reached the conclusion that her existence had no meaning, because every day was the same. And she had decided to die.

It was difficult to write about someone I felt I knew so well. The words were unwieldy, engorged with pretension. I wanted to uncover something special about her that only I could reveal. That she was so much more than a housewife, than a mother. That she was her own spectacular individual. Perhaps I was still sanctimoniously belittling the two roles she was ultimately most proud of, unable to accept that the same degree of fulfillment may await those who wish to nurture and love as those who seek to earn and create. Her art was the love that beat on in her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book. There could not be one without the other. Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.

Does God exist? Unlike many people, this had not been the great inner debate of her life. Under the old Communist regime, the official line in schools had been that life ended with death, and she had gotten used to the idea. On the other hand, her parents’ generation and her grandparents’ generation still went to church, said prayers, and went on pilgrimages, and were utterly convinced that God listened to what they said. At twenty-four, having experienced everything she could experience—and that was no small achievement—Veronika was almost certain that everything ended with death. That is why she had chosen suicide: freedom at last. Eternal oblivion. In her heart of hearts, though, there was still a doubt: What if God did exist? Thousands of years of civilization had made of suicide a taboo, an affront to all religious codes: Man struggles to survive, not to succumb. The human race must procreate. Society needs workers. A couple has to have a reason to stay together, even when love has ceased to exist, and a country needs soldiers, politicians and artists. If God exists, and I truly don’t believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created this confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed, and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but the results have proved disastrous; if God exists, he will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this Earth early, and he might even apologize for having made us spend time here. To hell with taboos and superstitions. Her devout mother would say: “God knows the past, the present, and the future.” In that case, he had placed her in this world in the full knowledge that she would end up killing herself, and he would not be shocked by her actions. Veronika began to feel a slight nausea, which became rapidly more intense.

My grandmother Rose was a tough woman, so tough she'd built the family home with her own hands while my grandpa worked as a tailor in the market. She'd even built the furnace and molded the bricks herself, which is not an easy job, and even today, not the job of a woman.

She was good with a needle–I hardly felt it go in. Euphoria is, I believe, the term they use to describe the sensation, and upon experience I found it to be an entirely useless definition, as it relies on comparatives that are not apt to the situation. A happiness beyond compare, a contentment beyond understanding, a bliss, a travelling, a freeing of the mind from the flesh–these are all, in their ways, an appropriate description of the process, but they mean nothing, for no recollection can re-create them and no substitute mimic them. So, having known what euphoria is, it remains precisely that–a word with longing attached, but no meaning when actually experiencing the thing. My arms and legs were heavy, my mouth was dry, and I did not care, for my mouth was not mine. I knew that I was still and time was moving, and wondered how it had taken me so long to comprehend that this was the nature of time itself, and wished I had a notebook to hand so I could jot down these thoughts–these profound, beautiful thoughts I had never thought before, which would, I felt certain, revolutionise the way mankind worked. I watched Akinleye inject herself, and inject the maid, who lay with her head in Akinleye’s lap, a dutiful kitten as the drug did its work, and I wanted to explain to them that I’d had the most extraordinary idea about the nature of reality, seen the most incredible truth, if only I could make others understand it!

Unveiling this woman is revealing her beauty; it is baring her secret, breaking her resistance, making her avail­able for adventure. Hiding the face is also disguising a secret; it is also creating a world of mystery, of the hidden. In a confused way, the European experiences his relation with the Algerian woman at a highly complex level. There is in it the will to bring this woman within his reach, to make her a possible ob­ject of possession. This woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colo­nizer. There is no reciprocity. She does not yield herself, does not give herself, does not offer herself.

We may have been taught to set aside acute insight in order to get along. However, the reward for simply being nice in oppressive circumstances is to be mistreated all the more. Although a woman feels that if she is herself she will alienate others, it is just this psychic tension that is needed in order to make soul and to create change.

In bed that night, in the darkness, with the illuminated dial of her alarm clock glowing from the bedside table, she asked herself whether one could force oneself to like somebody, or whether one could merely create conditions for affection to come into existence and hope that it did, spontaneously. Open then our hearts - these words came into her mind, dredged from somewhere in her memory, from some unknown context. If one opened one's heart, then friendship, and love, too, might alight and make their presence known. It was the act of opening that came first; that was the important thing, the first thing. But who was it who said, Open then our hearts? Where did that come from?

A number of terrible things about falling in love make it not worth the time and the effort. But the worst of these is that we can never truly fall in love with a person, but only what we think that person is - more precisely, we fall in love with an image of a person that we create in our minds based on a few inconsequential traits: hair color; bloodline; timbre of voice; preference in music or literature. We are so quick to make a judgment on first sight, and it is so easy for us to decide that the object of our love is unquestionably perfect. And while people can only be human at best, these same fallible humans are more than capable of imagining each other to be infallible gods. Any relationship we have with another human being is an ongoing process of error correction, altering this image that we see in our mind's eye whenever we lay love-blinded eyes on our beloved. It changes bit by bit until it matches the beloved herself, who is invariably less than perfect, often unworthy of love, and often incapable of giving love. This is why any extended interpersonal relationship other than the most superficial, be it a friendship, a romance, or a tie between father and daughter, must by necessity involve disappointment and pain. When the woman you worship behaves as a human being eventually will, she does not merely disappoint; she commits sacrilege, as if the God we worship were to somehow damn Himself.

During the many evenings she’d spent babysitting her nieces and nephew, she’d ached to have the same for herself, someone to love unconditionally. Of course she loved her sisters’ kids, but it wasn’t the same at all. She dreamed of having someone she had helped to create and mold, someone who depended on her, who needed her, who would always seek her out for guidance and who, until her dying day, would call her “Mum.

Apollodorus, the leading classical authority on Greek myths, records a tradition that the real scene of the poem was the Sicilian seaboard, and in 1896 Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon, came independently to the same conclusion. He suggested that the poem, as we now have it, was composed at Drepanum, the modern Trapani, in Western Sicily, and that the authoress was the girl self-portrayed as Nausicaa. None of his classical contemporaries, for whom Homer was necessarily both blind and bearded, deigned to pay Butler’s theory the least attention; and since he had, as we now know, dated the poem some three hundred years too early and not explained how a Sicilian princess could have passed off her saga as Homer’s, his two books on the subject are generally dismissed as a good-humoured joke. Nevertheless, while working on an explanatory dictionary of Greek myths, I found Butler’s arguments for a Western Sicilian setting and for a female authorship irrefutable. I could not rest until I had written this novel. It re-creates, from internal and external evidence, the circumstances which induced Nausicaa to write the Odyssey, and suggest how, as an honorary Daughter of Homer, she managed to get it included in the official canon. Here is the story of a high-spirited and religious-minded Sicilian girl who saves her father’s throne from usurpation, herself from a distasteful marriage, and her two younger brothers from butchery by boldly making things happen, instead of sitting still and hoping for the best.

His mother is dead. She was a suicide. Her marriage was terrifying to her. In the center of it she found herself completely alone. During the last year she sent long telegrams to her sister, sometimes quoting poetry, Swinburne, Blake. One day she burned her diaries, a spring day, and walked into the Connecticut River to drown, just like Virginia Woolf or Madame Magritte. She was buried in Boston, her home. I could see the ceremony. Dean is six years old and his sister three. They stand stunned and obedient as the great, glistening coffin is lowered into the ground. Within lies the drowned woman who had given them life and who now gives an example of melancholy and commitment which will stay with them forever. Clods of earth thunder onto the hollow lid and, half-orphan, bearer of his mother’s death which is not yet even real, he begins his life. Much of it you know, at any rate college, the wanderings. Now, at twenty-four, he has come to the time of choice. I know quite well how all that is. And then, I read his letters. His father writes to him in the most beautiful, educated hand, the born hand of a copyist. Admonitions to confront life, to think a little more seriously about this or that. I could have laughed. Words that meant nothing to him. He has already set out on a dazzling voyage which is more like an illness, becoming ever more distant, more legendary. His life will be filled with those daring impulses which cause him to disappear and next be heard of in Dublin, in Veracruz… I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that.

She thinks, ‘I’m telling him who I am. He’s interested in who I am.’ That is true, but I am curious about who she is because I want to fuck her. I don’t need all of this great interest in Kafka and Velazquez. Having this conversation with her, I am thinking, how much more am I going to have to go through? Three hours? Four? Will I go as far as eight hours? Twenty minutes into the veiling and already I’m wondering, what does any of this have to do with her skin and how she carries herself? The French art of being flirtatious is of no interest to me. The savage urge is. No, this is not seduction. This is comedy. It is the comedy of creating a connection that is not the connection – created unartificially by lust. This is the instant conventionalizing, the giving us something in common on the spot, the trying to transform lust into something socially appropriate.

Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass. She says she doesn’t deprive herself, but I’ve learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork. In every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate. I’ve realized she only eats dinner when I suggest it. I wonder what she does when I’m not there to do so. Maybe this is why my house feels bigger each time I return; it’s proportional. As she shrinks the space around her seems increasingly vast. She wanes while my father waxes. His stomach has grown round with wine, late nights, oysters, poetry. A new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports that now she’s “crazy about fruit." It was the same with his parents; as my grandmother became frail and angular her husband swelled to red round cheeks, rotund stomach and I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking making space for the entrance of men into their lives not knowing how to fill it back up once they leave. I have been taught accommodation. My brother never thinks before he speaks. I have been taught to filter. “How can anyone have a relationship to food?" He asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs. I want to tell say: we come from difference, Jonas, you have been taught to grow out I have been taught to grow in you learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence, you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much I learned to absorb I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself I learned to read the knots in her forehead while the guys went out for oysters and I never meant to replicate her, but spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits that’s why women in my family have been shrinking for decades. We all learned it from each other, the way each generation taught the next how to knit weaving silence in between the threads which I can still feel as I walk through this ever-growing house, skin itching, picking up all the habits my mother has unwittingly dropped like bits of crumpled paper from her pocket on her countless trips from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom again, Nights I hear her creep down to eat plain yogurt in the dark, a fugitive stealing calories to which she does not feel entitled. Deciding how many bites is too many How much space she deserves to occupy. Watching the struggle I either mimic or hate her, And I don’t want to do either anymore but the burden of this house has followed me across the country I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word “sorry". I don’t know the requirements for the sociology major because I spent the entire meeting deciding whether or not I could have another piece of pizza a circular obsession I never wanted but inheritance is accidental still staring at me with wine-stained lips from across the kitchen table.

Today, she is standing at the top of a mountain and appreciating the majestic panoramic view of mesmerizing Himalaya. As a kid, she used to look up in the sky and wish for wings to fly up to the mountains. And now after a long wait of many years, she is standing here and living her dream. It’s the moment when she can’t believe her eyes because what she always dreamed of has come alive. She looks with amazement as if she’s witnessing a miracle. It is the moment of her life. She just wants to feel it. There are beautiful clouds below her and there are snow clad mountain peaks emerging from those clouds. The white peaks shining in blue sky among white clouds look like glittering diamonds to her. The view of the large lush green meadow surrounded by mountains under blue sky with a rainbow circling the horizon has put her in a state of tranquility. As the sun starts drowning in the horizon, the sky begins to boast his mystical colours. The beautiful mix of pink, orange and red looks like creating a twilight saga. She opens her both arm and takes a deep breath to entwine with the nature. The glimmering rays of the moon are paying tribute to her by kissing her warm cheeks and her eyes twinkle in bright moon light. She raises her face towards the moon and senses the flood of memories which she wants to unleash. The cool breeze lifts her ruffled hair and blows her skirt up. She closes her eyes and breathes deep as if she wants to let her know that she is finally here and then she opens her eyes and finds herself on the same wheelchair inside a room with an empty wall in front of her eye. Tears rolls down from her eye but these are the tears of Joy because she is living her dreams today. The feelings comes to her mind while waiting for her daughter who is coming back home today after her first expedition of a high range mountain ~ AB

Woman thus emerged as the inessential who never returned to the essential, as the absolute Other, without reciprocity. All the creation myths express this conviction that is precious to the male, for example, the Genesis legend, which, through Christianity, has spanned Western civilization. Eve was not formed at the same time as man; she was not made either from a different substance or from the same clay that Adam was modeled from: she was drawn from the first male’s flank. Even her birth was not autonomous; God did not spontaneously choose to create her for herself and to be directly worshiped in turn: he destined her for man; he gave her to Adam to save him from loneliness, her spouse is her origin and her finality; she is his complement in the inessential mode. Thus, she appears a privileged prey. She is nature raised to the transparency of consciousness; she is a naturally submissive consciousness. And therein lies the marvelous hope that man has often placed in woman: he hopes to accomplish himself as being through carnally possessing a being while making confirmed in his freedom by a docile freedom. No man would consent to being a woman, but all want there to be women. “Thank God for creating woman.” “Nature is good because it gave men woman.” In these and other similar phrases, man once more asserts arrogantly and naively that his presence in this world is an inevitable fact and a right, that of woman is a simple accident—but a fortunate one. Appearing as the Other, woman appears at the same time as a plenitude of being by opposition to the nothingness of existence that man experiences in itself; the Other, posited as object in the subject’s eyes, is posited as in-itself, thus as being. Woman embodies positively the lack the existent carries in his heart, and man hopes to realize himself by finding himself through her.

of the problem was that Chaos got a little creation-happy. It thought to its misty, gloomy self: Hey, Earth and Sky. That was fun! I wonder what else I can make. Soon it created all sorts of other problems—and by that I mean gods. Water collected out of the mist of Chaos, pooled in the deepest parts of the earth, and formed the first seas, which naturally developed a consciousness—the god Pontus. Then Chaos really went nuts and thought: I know! How about a dome like the sky, but at the bottom of the earth! That would be awesome! So another dome came into being beneath the earth, but it was dark and murky and generally not very nice, since it was always hidden from the light of the sky. This was Tartarus, the Pit of Evil; and as you can guess from the name, when he developed a godly personality, he didn't win any popularity contests. The problem was, both Pontus and Tartarus liked Gaea, which put some pressure on her relationship with Ouranos. A bunch of other primordial gods popped up, but if I tried to name them all we’d be here for weeks. Chaos and Tartarus had a kid together (don’t ask how; I don’t know) called Nyx, who was the embodiment of night. Then Nyx, somehow all by herself, had a daughter named Hemera, who was Day. Those two never got along because they were as different as…well, you know. According to some stories, Chaos also created Eros, the god of procreation... in other words, mommy gods and daddy gods having lots of little baby gods. Other stories claim Eros was the son of Aphrodite. We’ll get to her later. I don’t know which version is true, but I do know Gaea and Ouranos started having kids—with very mixed results. First, they had a batch of twelve—six girls and six boys called the Titans. These kids looked human, but they were much taller and more powerful. You’d figure twelve kids would be enough for anybody, right? I mean, with a family that big, you’ve basically got your own reality TV show. Plus, once the Titans were born, things started to go sour with Ouranos and Gaea’s marriage. Ouranos spent a lot more time hanging out in the sky. He didn't visit. He didn't help with the kids. Gaea got resentful. The two of them started fighting. As the kids grew older, Ouranos would yell at them and basically act like a horrible dad. A few times, Gaea and Ouranos tried to patch things up. Gaea decided maybe if they had another set of kids, it would bring them closer…. I know, right? Bad idea. She gave birth to triplets. The problem: these new kids defined the word UGLY. They were as big and strong as Titans, except hulking and brutish and in desperate need of a body wax. Worst of all, each kid had a single eye in the middle of his forehead. Talk about a face only a mother could love. Well, Gaea loved these guys. She named them the Elder Cyclopes, and eventually they would spawn a whole race of other, lesser Cyclopes. But that was much later. When Ouranos saw the Cyclops triplets, he freaked. “These cannot be my kids! They don’t even look like me!” “They are your children, you deadbeat!” Gaea screamed back. “Don’t you dare leave me to raise them on my own!

But why bother? Why exert all this effort to focus totally on the boring prattlings of a six-year-old? First, your willingness to do so is the best possible concrete evidence of your esteem you can give your child. If you give your child the same esteem you would give a great lecturer, then the child will know him- or herself to be valued and therefore will feel valuable. There is no better and ultimately no other way to teach your children that they are valuable people than by valuing them. Second, the more children feel valuable, the more they will begin to say things of value. They will rise to your expectation of them. Third, the more you listen to your child, the more you will realize that in amongst the pauses, the stutterings, the seemingly innocent chatter, your child does indeed have valuable things to say. The dictum that great wisdom comes from "the mouths of babes" is recognized as an absolute fact by anyone who truly listens to children. Listen to your child enough and you will come to realize that he or she is quite an extraordinary individual. And the more extraordinary you realize your child to be, the more you will be willing to listen. And the more you will learn. Fourth, the more you know about your child, the more you will be able to teach. Know little about your children, and usually you will be teaching things that either they are not ready to learn or they already know and perhaps understand better than you. Finally, the more children know that you value them, that you consider them extraordinary people, the more willing they will be to listen to you and afford you the same esteem. And the more appropriate your teaching, based on your knowledge of them, the more eager your children will be to learn from you. And the more they learn, the more extraordinary they will become. If the reader senses the cyclical character of this process, he or she is quite correct and is appreciating the truth of the reciprocity of love. Instead of a vicious downward cycle, it is a creative upward cycle of evolution and growth. Value creates value. Love begets love. Parents and child together spin forward faster and faster in the pas de deux of love.

How does Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw choose one idea over another? She asks herself seven questions. Do I have a basic understanding of the area? Do I know something about what is happening in the larger space of that idea? How will I build differentiation, particularly if the idea is a common product? How do I make it affordable and at the same time, deliver high value? Wherever there is a collaborator involved in the ideation process, how do I create larger leverage through the relationship beyond just that one idea? Do I know upfront who will be a paying customer and how I will go about marketing my idea? Finally, do I have conviction about the idea?

Many readers are familiar with the spirit and the letter of the definition of “prayer”, as given by Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary. It runs like this, and is extremely easy to comprehend: Prayer: A petition that the laws of nature be suspended in favor of the petitioner; himself confessedly unworthy. Everybody can see the joke that is lodged within this entry: The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right. Half–buried in the contradiction is the distressing idea that nobody is in charge, or nobody with any moral authority. The call to prayer is self–cancelling. Those of us who don’t take part in it will justify our abstention on the grounds that we do not need, or care, to undergo the futile process of continuous reinforcement. Either our convictions are enough in themselves or they are not: At any rate they do require standing in a crowd and uttering constant and uniform incantations. This is ordered by one religion to take place five times a day, and by other monotheists for almost that number, while all of them set aside at least one whole day for the exclusive praise of the Lord, and Judaism seems to consist in its original constitution of a huge list of prohibitions that must be followed before all else. The tone of the prayers replicates the silliness of the mandate, in that god is enjoined or thanked to do what he was going to do anyway. Thus the Jewish male begins each day by thanking god for not making him into a woman (or a Gentile), while the Jewish woman contents herself with thanking the almighty for creating her “as she is.” Presumably the almighty is pleased to receive this tribute to his power and the approval of those he created. It’s just that, if he is truly almighty, the achievement would seem rather a slight one. Much the same applies to the idea that prayer, instead of making Christianity look foolish, makes it appear convincing. Now, it can be asserted with some confidence, first, that its deity is all–wise and all–powerful and, second, that its congregants stand in desperate need of that deity’s infinite wisdom and power. Just to give some elementary quotations, it is stated in the book of Philippians, 4:6, “Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication and thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God.” Deuteronomy 32:4 proclaims that “he is the rock, his work is perfect,” and Isaiah 64:8 tells us, “Now O Lord, thou art our father; we art clay and thou our potter; and we are all the work of thy hand.” Note, then, that Christianity insists on the absolute dependence of its flock, and then only on the offering of undiluted praise and thanks. A person using prayer time to ask for the world to be set to rights, or to beseech god to bestow a favor upon himself, would in effect be guilty of a profound blasphemy or, at the very least, a pathetic misunderstanding. It is not for the mere human to be presuming that he or she can advise the divine. And this, sad to say, opens religion to the additional charge of corruption. The leaders of the church know perfectly well that prayer is not intended to gratify the devout. So that, every time they accept a donation in return for some petition, they are accepting a gross negation of their faith: a faith that depends on the passive acceptance of the devout and not on their making demands for betterment. Eventually, and after a bitter and schismatic quarrel, practices like the notorious “sale of indulgences” were abandoned. But many a fine basilica or chantry would not be standing today if this awful violation had not turned such a spectacularly good profit. And today it is easy enough to see, at the revival meetings of Protestant fundamentalists, the counting of the checks and bills before the laying on of hands by the preacher has even been completed. Again, the spectacle is a shameless one.

In traditional Aeluon culture, a mother was not a parent. Parents were men and shon. Parents went to school for it. Parents were the people who actually raised children, not those who had done the easy business of creating them. The gendered expectations of parenting were dissolving, but even though women could be found working in creches now, there was still an enormous difference between the person who produced an egg and the person who took care of the little being that crawled out of it. Parenting was a profession, and it was not Pei’s. She could not imagine living like Ouloo, performing two distinct jobs at once, splitting herself for decades until Tupo reached adulthood. The whole idea was overwhelming.

Skye's footsteps are growing louder now. And the closer I get to her, the faster I walk, and the lighter I feel. My throat begins to relax. Two steps behind her, I say her name. "Skye". -Such a suspenseful end to the book. I was correct, the reason why Hannah created the tapes were because she although no one tried hard enough for her.. hopefully with the tapes someone ill learn to care and try hard for someone who seems to carry herself the way Hannah once did. I like how it says that Skye's foot steps are getting louder because its really symoblizing how her steps are louder because someone acknowledges her steps, someone acknowledges her attitude and the way she carries herself.. just like Hannah did when she was alive.

Woman is lost. Where are the women? Today's women are not women"; we have seen what these mysterious slogans mean. In the eyes of men — and of the legions of women who see through these eyes — it is not enough to have a woman's body or to take on the female function as lover and mother to be a "real woman"; it is possible for the subject to claim autonomy through sexuality and maternity; the "real woman" is one who accepts herself as Other. The duplicitous attitude of men today creates a painful split for women; they accept, for the most part, that woman be a peer, an equal; and yet they continue to oblige her to remain the inessential; for her, these two destinies are not reconcilable; she hesitates between them without being exactly suited to either, and that is the source of her lack of balance.

Giving herself a mental shake, she jumped back into the conversation. “It would help if we knew the exact origins of the vampire species. We think the first case of vampirism started around four hundred years ago, here in America, but we don’t know where the virus came from, if it was originally airborne—” Grant took a sip of his purple concoction and grimaced. “You know the vampire legend of their origins, yes?” “Yes, but the legend is ridiculous.” “Is it?” He had to be kidding. “Two Native American tribal chiefs kill each other, and then a crow and a raven fight over their bodies, spilling their blood into the men, who afterward rise that night as undead? Um, yes. Ridiculous.” “Some vampires agree with you. Mostly the turned ones. There are also rumors of demons creating the first vampires, but if they are so much as whispered inside these walls, Hunter will shut them down with rare temper.

Psychologist Jean Baker Miller, who has done extensive research on women’s development, has written about “a growth-fostering relationship” as having five characteristics. She says that in the relationship: 1.​Each person feels a greater sense of zest (vitality, energy). 2.​Each person feels more able to act and does act. 3.​Each person has a more accurate picture of herself or himself and the other person. 4.​Each person feels a greater sense of worth. 5.​Each person feels more connected to the other person and a greater motivation for connections with other people beyond those in the specific relationship.12 Though it was slow, hazardous, and often exasperating work, Sandy and I worked to undo the old marriage and create a new one stripped of the old dependencies and patriarchal set-up, a growth-inducing relationship that offered each of us freedom to choose and be, that not only allowed for but enhanced the soul in each of us.

An it isn’t just children…A woman who experienced early sexual abuse would sabotage her adult relationships-whether they were happy or not, by removing herself emotionally. She dissociated even though she cared deeply about her partner. She’d go through the motions of being in the relationship-compliance-but, as you say, it was a hollow compliance. She wasn’t really there. But after working with a therapist to create and maintain healthy relationships, she now actively practiced staying present.

On the other hand, maybe what attracts us aren't the stories of falling apart so much as the stories of self-creation. The falling apart stuff is just a byproduct, a hazard of the trade. Maybe what I loved about Camille Claudel was what she created out of what she smashed to bits. How did a bourgeois girl become an artist and a woman? What was the female equivalent of the Great Man? If it didn't exist, why not? Who said it didn't? Who said it couldn't? What were the conditions that made it so hard? Rodin was the image Claudel identified with and against which she defined herself. Scott was this image for Zelda. A woman could not be a great artist and have a traditional marriage - not unless her husband was a Leonard Woolf. One boyfriend I had in college used to joke, 'Only one artist in the family,' meaning not me. I didn't get it then, but I get it now. There was always something self-annihilating in the act of loving, for a girl with creative aspirations - always - but far more then than now. The message, invariably, was that youthful passions lead to middle-age breakdowns, so choose your institution wisely. Marriage or the nuthouse. One or the other. It started to dawn on me that it wasn't that I was attracted to stories about girls who went mad, I was attracted to stories about girls with ambitions who wound up institutionalized. Getting locked up was not the result of adventure, it was the price you paid for adventure, it was your punishment. I had mistaken correlation for causation. Rookie mistake.

Perhaps I was still sanctimoniously belittling the two roles she was ultimately most proud of, unable to accept that the same degree of fulfillment may await those who wish to nurture and love as those who seek to earn and create. Her art was the love that beat on in her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book. There could not be one without the other. Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.

In a town in Liberia, a young woman named Fatu Kekula, who was a nursing student, ended up caring for four of her family members at home when there was no room for them in a hospital—her parents, her sister, and a cousin. She didn’t have any protective gear, so she created a bio-hazmat suit out of plastic garbage bags. She tied garbage bags over her feet and legs, put on rubber boots over the bags, and then put more bags over her boots. She put on a raincoat, a surgical mask, and multiple rubber gloves, and she covered her head with pantyhose and a garbage bag. Dressed this way, Fatu Kekula set up IV lines for her family members, giving them saline solution to keep them from becoming dehydrated. Her parents and sister survived; her cousin died. And she herself remained uninfected. Local medical workers called Fatu Kekula’s measures the Trash Bag Method. All you needed were garbage bags, a raincoat, and no small amount of love and courage. Medical workers taught the Trash Bag Method, or variants of it, to people who couldn’t get to hospitals

We all have things we love to do. And it’s the people around us who love us that help us unlock these dreams. It’s ONLY when you find the people you love that you can create and flourish. Henry Ford was 45 when he started his third car company and created the assembly line. He did this once he eliminated all the people who tried to control him at prior companies. Colonel Sanders was 65 when he started KFC. Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 when she wrote her first book. The book launched the Little House on the Prairie series. This was after she had been totally wiped out in the Great Depression and left with nothing but she started to surround herself with people who encouraged her and pushed her to pursue writing to make ends meet. 4.“What humanity has collectively learned so far would make up a tiny mark within the circle. Everything we all have to learn in the future would take up the rest of the space. It is a big universe, and we are all learning more about it every day. If you aren’t listening, you are missing out.” The other day someone asked me if I believe in God. There’s no answer. Always have reverence for the infinite things we will never know.

Had he imagined things in Charlotte that had never been there? Had he invented virtues for he, to add luster to her staggering looks?...Perhaps he had created a Charlotte in her own image who had never existed outside his own besotted mind, but what of it? He had loved the real Charlotte too, the woman who had stripped herself bare in front of him, demanding whether he could still love her if she did this, if she confessed to this, if she treated him like this..until finally she had found his limit and beauty, rage and tears had been insufficient to hold him, and she had fled into the arms of another man.

Prostitution clearly promotes the depersonalisation of sex, which can never be good news for women—any women. Prostitution has a ripple effect. It creates the illusory view in the minds of men that women are not human beings as men are, but simply the walking carrier of a product, and that they serve one principal function, whether or not they are paid for it, which is to be used as vessels for the sexual release of men. They are effortlessly and imperceptibly relegated from the realms of the human. They are not people on a par with their male counterparts. How could they be, when their principal function is as something to be fucked? Prostitution obscures women’s humanity from society generally, but it also causes women specifically to lose sensitivity to their own humanity by way of tolerating the prostitution of others of their gender. When women tolerate prostitution they are actually tolerating the dehumanisation of their own gender in a broader and more encompassing sense. Countries with male-majority governments are implementing the legalisation of prostitution with frightening rapidity throughout the western world. Where is the female revolt towards all this? There is no widespread female revolt because female sexuality has so long been viewed as a commodity that woman have begun to believe in the necessity of a separate class of women to provide it. If a woman tolerates this treatment of her fellow women, if she accepts it under the banner of ‘liberalism’ or anything else, then she must also accept that she herself is only removed from prostitution by lack of the circumstances necessary to place her there. Should these circumstances ever occur, her body, too, would be just as welcome for mauling, sucking and fucking by the clients of the brothels and would be just as reviled by the men who are on the look-out for a wife. The acceptance of prostitution makes all women potential prostitutes in the public view since there are only two requirements for a woman to work in a brothel: one is that circumstance has placed her so (and who knows when that can happen, to any of us?) and the other is that she has a vagina, and all women are born meeting at least one of these requirements. It bears repeating: if the commodification of women is to be accepted then all women fall under that potential remit. If a woman accepts prostitution in society, then she accepts this personal indenture, whether she knows it or not; and yes, that is a loss. As

An Act for establishing religious Freedom. Section 1 Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free; That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do, That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time; That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical; That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their personal conduct are an additional incitement to earnest and unremitting labours for the instruction of mankind; That our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry, That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right, That it tends only to corrupt the principles of that very Religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments those who will externally profess and conform to it; That though indeed, these are criminal who do not withstand such temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; That to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own; That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; And finally, that Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

These educated parents subjected the poor five-year old girl to every possible torture. They beat her, flogged her, kicked her, not knowing why themselves, until her whole body was nothing but bruises; finally they attained the height of finesse: in the freezing cold, they locked her all night in the outhouse, because she wouldn't ask to get up and go in the middle of the night (as if a five-year-old child sleeping its sound angelic sleep could have learned to ask by that age)--for that they smeared her face with her excrement and made her eat the excrement, and it was her mother, her mother who made her! And this mother could sleep while her poor little child was moaning all night in that vile place! Can you understand that a small creature, who cannot even comprehend what is being done to her, in a vile place, in the dark and the cold, beats herself on her strained little chest with her tiny fist and weeps with her anguished, gentle, meek tears for 'dear God' to protect her--can you understand such nonsense, my friend and my brother, my godly and humble novice, can you understand why this nonsense is needed and created? Without it, they say, man could not even have lived on earth, for he would not have known good and evil. Who wants to know this damned good and evil at such a price? The whole world of knowledge is not worth the tears of that little child to 'dear God.' I'm not talking about the suffering of grown-ups, they ate the apple and to hell with them, let the devil take them all, but these little ones!

It is frequently urged that it is necessary to create a public feeling in favour of the full and unchecked mental development of women. Such an argument overlooks the fact that 'emancipation,' the 'woman question,' 'women's rights movements,' are no new things in history, but have always been with us, although with varying prominence at different times in history. It also largely exaggerates the difficulties men place in the way of the mental development of women, especially at the present time. Furthermore it neglects the fact that at the present time it is not the true woman who clamours for emancipation, but only the masculine type of woman, who misconstrues her own character and the motives that actuate her when she formulates her demands in the name of woman. As has been the case with every other movement in history, so also it has been with the contemporary woman's movement. Its originators were convinced that it was being put forward for the first time, and that such a thing had never been thought of before. They maintained that women had hitherto been held in bondage and enveloped in darkness by man, and that it was high time for her to assert herself and claim her natural rights. But the prototype of this movement, as of other movements, occurred in the earliest times. Ancient history and medieval times alike give us instances of women who, in social relations and intellectual matters, fought for such emancipation, and of male and female apologists of the female sex. It is totally erroneous to suggest that hitherto women have had no opportunity for the undisturbed development of their mental powers.

And Ghostly, everyone thinks they know Paleandghostly, everyone thinks Paleandghostly doesn’t need anything, doesn’t feel anything, can take care of herself and doesn’t need a thing. She is the single most terrifying woman Draxie has ever met, yes, she’s read every book Draxie knows of and a hell of a lot more of them that she couldn’t even understand, she’s got a mind like diamond-edged steel, she is awesome in a sense of the word older than the internet - and she lives with her mom, in her trailer, in the middle of nowhere, because there’s no-one else to look after her. She sits watching her mom’s mind slowly crumble from its edges inwards while she forgets to drink unless she’s told to and wants to go for a walk down streets she hasn’t lived anywhere near in decades, and Ghostly who should be - Draxie doesn’t even know, running the CIA, creating entire new disciplines of thought, running the country, Ghostly helps her mom wash and cleans the trailer and spends her mind, her ravenous, razor-bright, vicious mind, defending him from everyone on the internet. Even from other fanghosts half the time when she points out that they’re being creepy as all fuck and look maybe you can justify using a character with that name but don’t pretend for one second that you know who he is, because he’s a person you’ll never know the inside of and you don’t get to act like you’re entitled to that. Draxie doesn’t know what Ghostly would do without him. Hate the world, while her mind flayed itself to pieces from the inside. Hate the world and all the injustice in it, and no-one to give a fuck about it. But there’s him. And she says, Oh, good, at least someone’s being sensible …

A group of women can constellate a Mother morphic field when we gather together in a sacred circle. We create a 'temenos,' which means 'sanctuary' in Greek. In a women's circle, every woman in the circle is herself and an aspect of every other woman there as well. There is no vertical hierarchy in a circle, and when a circle is a temenos, it is a safe place to tell the truth of our own feelings, perceptions, and experiences. For a women's circle to work as a spiritual and psychological cauldron for change and growth, we need to see every woman in the circle as a sister who mirrors back to us reflections of ourselves. This means that whatever happened to her could have happened to us, that whatever she has felt or done is a possibility for us, that she is someone toward whom we feel neither superior nor inferior nor indifferent. These are not just concepts but the emotional reality that comes from listening to women tell the truth about their lives. Additional depth comes from the psychological awareness that strong reactions to another woman may occur because she represents something in ourselves that is psychologically charged; our reactions are not just about her but about us. Perhaps we can't stand her because she expresses experiences we have repressed; maybe we find her difficult because we react to her like we did to our personal mother or some other significant figure; maybe we are drawn to her because she embodies a potential in ourselves and the positive qualities we so admire in her are growing in us; maybe we avoid her because we fear our own addictions, dependency, or neediness. In this way, we are symbolic figures for each other that we need to understand as we would symbols in a personal dream.

By reversing roles with her son, a mother communicates to him that he is supposed to comfort, protect, and take care of her. She may express this to the child in a variety of ways; she may suffer in martyred silence but make it very clear to her child that she feels trapped and miserable; she may tell her child that she can't take care of herself and that without his love she has nothing left to live for; she may get ill often or be chronically depressed, drink heavily, or become involved in some other form of self-destructive behavior. No matter how she shows her suffering, the result is the same: the young boy feels it is his responsibility to make her happy. He believes that he is expected to rescue his mother. By shoving her son into a role he is not equipped to handle, this mother helps to create in him deep resentments that will later turn into anger at women.

God--I wrote, more or less--creates man, Ish, in his image. He creates a masculine and a feminine version. How? First, with the dust of the earth, he forms Ish, and blows into his nostrils the breath of life. Then he makes Isha'h, the woman, from the already formed male material, material no longer raw but living, which he takes from Ish's side, and immediately closes up the flesh. The result is that Ish can say: This thing is not, like the army of all that has been created, other than me, but is flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones. God produced it from me. He made me fertile with the breath of life and extracted it from my body. I am Ish and she is Isha'h. In the word above all, in the word that names her, she derives from me. I am in the image of the divine spirit. I carry within me his Word. She is therefore a pure suffix applied to by verbal root, she can express herself only within my word.

The Well-Watered Woman isn’t the perfect woman. She’s fueled by the undeserved grace of God, not by her ambitions to be a “good girl.” She recognizes that the good within her comes from God alone (see Psalm 16:2; Galatians 5:22-23). Jesus has set her free from her past mistakes, and she lives as a new creation (see 2 Corinthians 5:17). He has given her a fresh start, and his mercy propels her forward in love and obedience each day. She has come to the end of herself and found a new beginning in Jesus. Her future is secure, and her new life is most hopeful of all—eternity with Christ. The goal of the Well-Watered Woman isn’t to be someone but to know someone—the one who changes everything. Her ambitions and dreams are being transformed by Jesus as he shows her, day by day, the better way to live. As she makes it her daily pursuit to know Jesus, she becomes the someone God created her to be: the Well-Watered Woman.

Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it nobody would do it, and so, giving herself a little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking—one, two, three, one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a news-paper. And so then, she concluded, addressing herself by bending silently in his direction to William Bankes—poor man! who had no wife, and no children and dined alone in lodgings except for tonight; and in pity for him, life being now strong enough to bear her on again, she began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the ship sunk, he would have whirled round and round and found rest on the floor of the sea. “Did

was no one else there to comfort her. There was only him. The real him. She stepped forward and laid her head against his chest. Samantha: I’ll never forget the moment when Perry and Celeste walked into the trivia night. There was like this ripple across the room. Everyone just stopped and stared. 23. Isn’t this FANTASTIC!” cried Madeline to Chloe as they took their really very excellent seats in front of the giant ice rink. “You can feel the cold from the ice! Brrr! Oh! Can you hear the music? I wonder where the princesses—” Chloe had reached over and placed one hand gently over her mother’s mouth. “Shhh.” Madeline knew she was talking too much because she was feeling anxious and ever so slightly guilty. Today needed to be stupendous to make it worth the rift she’d created between herself and Renata. Eight kindergarten children, who would otherwise be attending Amabella’s party, were here watching Disney On Ice because of Madeline. Madeline looked past Chloe at Ziggy, who was nursing a giant stuffed toy on his lap. Ziggy was the reason they were here today, she reminded herself. Poor Ziggy wouldn’t have been at the party. Dear little fatherless Ziggy. Who was possibly a secret psychopathic bully . . . but still! “Are you taking care of Harry the Hippo this weekend, Ziggy?” she said brightly. Harry the Hippo was the class toy. Every weekend it went home with a different child, along with a scrapbook that had to be returned with a little story about the weekend, accompanied by photos. Ziggy nodded mutely. A child of few words. Jane leaned forward, discreetly chewing gum as always. “It’s quite stressful having Harry to stay. We have to give Harry a good time. Last weekend he went on a roller coaster— Ow!” Jane recoiled as one of the twins, who was sitting next to her and fighting his brother, elbowed her in the back of the head. “Josh!” said Celeste sharply. “Max! Just stop it!” Madeline wondered if Celeste was OK today. She looked pale and tired, with purplish shadows under her eyes, although on Celeste they looked like an artful makeup effect that everyone should try. The lights in the auditorium began to dim, and then went to black. Chloe clutched Madeline’s arm. The music began to pound, so loud that Madeline could feel the vibrations. The ice rink filled with an

There once was a female snake that roamed around a small village in the countryside of Egypt. She was commonly seen by villagers with her small baby as they grazed around the trees. One day, several men noticed the mother snake was searching back and forth throughout the village in a frenzy — without her young. Apparently, her baby had slithered off on its own to play while she was out looking for food. Yet the mother snake went on looking for her baby for days because it still hadn't returned back to her. So one day, one of the elder women in the village caught sight of the big snake climbing on top of their water supply — an open clay jug harvesting all the village's water. The snake latched its teeth on the big jug's opening and sprayed its venom into it. The woman who witnessed the event was mentally handicapped, so when she went to warn the other villagers, nobody really understood what she was saying. And when she approached the jug to try to knock it over, she was reprimanded by her two brothers and they locked her away in her room. Then early the next day, the mother snake returned to the village after a long evening searching for her baby. The children villagers quickly surrounded her while clapping and singing because she had finally found her baby. And as the mother snake watched the children rejoice in the reunion with her child, she suddenly took off straight for the water supply — leaving behind her baby with the villagers' children. Before an old man could gather some water to make some tea, she hissed in his direction, forcing him to step back as she immediately wrapped herself around the jug and squeezed it super hard. When the jug broke burst into a hundred fragments, she slithered away to gather her child and return to the safety of her hole. Many people reading this true story may not understand that the same feelings we are capable of having, snakes have too. Thinking the villagers killed her baby, the mother snake sought out revenge by poisoning the water to destroy those she thought had hurt her child. But when she found her baby and saw the villagers' children, her guilt and protective instincts urged her to save them before other mothers would be forced to experience the pain and grief of losing a child. Animals have hearts and minds too. They are capable of love, hatred, jealousy, revenge, hunger, fear, joy, and caring for their own and others. We look at animals as if they are inferior because they are savage and not civilized, but in truth, we are the ones who are not being civil by drawing a thick line between us and them — us and nature. A wild animal's life is very straightforward. They spend their time searching and gathering food, mating, building homes, and meditating and playing with their loved ones. They enjoy the simplicity of life without any of our technological gadgetry, materialism, mass consumption, wastefulness, superficiality, mindless wars, excessive greed and hatred. While we get excited by the vibrations coming from our TV sets, headphones and car stereos, they get stimulated by the vibrations of nature. So, just because animals may lack the sophisticated minds to create the technology we do or make brick homes and highways like us, does not mean their connections to the etheric world isn't more sophisticated than anything we could ever imagine. That means they are more spiritual, reflective, cosmic, and tuned into alternate universes beyond what our eyes can see. So in other words, animals are more advanced than us. They have the simple beauty we lack and the spiritual contentment we may never achieve.

Gideon lowered her onto the bed, thankful that he’d felt no evidence of stays through her gown as he carried her. As soon as he slid his arms out from under her, she rolled over onto her side and grabbed the second pillow. She snuggled the downy square to her bosom and mumbled a few unintelligible words before settling herself. An unexpected tenderness rose within him as he watched her sleep. Could there be more to his feelings than simple attraction? Something deeper and more lasting? He’d escorted countless debutantes about London in the past, beautiful women who inspired ample appreciation within him for their feminine charms. But none of those women had created the tug of possessiveness he felt when he gazed at Adelaide. None of them stirred this desire to cherish and protect. And no matter how suitable their background and manner, none of them made him smile like his Addie. Addie. The name fit. Fanciful, whimsical—just like the woman herself. Yet there was strength in it, too. Simple, straightforward strength. He’d known she cared for Bella, yet until her relentless plea this morning, he hadn’t realized how deep her affections ran. Gideon couldn’t help hoping that some of those affections extended to him, as well.

Benjamin Munro was his name. She mouthed the syllables silently, Benjamin James Munro, twenty-six years old, late of London. He had no dependents, was a hard worker, a man not given to baseless talk. He'd been born in Sussex and grown up in the Far East, the son of archaeologists. He liked green tea, the scent of jasmine, and hot days that built towards rain. He hadn't told her all of that. He wasn't one of those pompous men who bassooned on about himself and his achievements as if a girl were just a pretty-enough face between a pair of willing ears. Instead, she'd listened and observed and gleaned, and, when the opportunity presented, crept inside the storehouse to check the head gardener's employment book. Alice had always fancied herself a sleuth, and sure enough, pinned behind a page of Mr. Harris's careful planting notes, she'd found Benjamin Munro's application. The letter itself had been brief, written in a hand Mother would have deplored, and Alice had scanned the whole, memorizing the bits, thrilling at the way the words gave depth and color to the image she'd created and been keeping for herself, like a flower pressed between pages. Like the flower he'd given her just last month. "Look, Alice"- the stem had been green and fragile in his broad, strong hand- "the first gardenia of the season.

She turned her head and stared at this sudden stranger in her bed. She wanted to deny that he had ever spoken such words, wanted to pretend that they did not reflect his feelings but had been said out of some kind of spite. Coldness welled up within her now. Spite words or true, did it not come to the same thing? All these years, she had been married to a fantasy, not a real person. She imagined a husband to herself, a tender, loving, laughing man who only stayed away so many months because he must, and she put Kyle’s face on her creation. Easy enough to ignore or excuse a few flaws or even a dozen when he made on of his brief stops at home. She had always been able to pretend he was tired, that the voyage had been both long and hard, that they were simply getting re-adjusted to one another. Despite all the things he had said and done in the weeks since her father’s death, she had continued to treat and react to him as if he were the man she had created in her mind. The truth was that he had never been the romantic figure her fancies had made him. He was just a man, like any other man. No. He was stupider than most. He was stupid enough to think she had to obey him. Even when she knew better, even when he was not around to oppose her. Realizing this was like opening her eyes to the sun’s rising. How had it never occurred to her before?

Conversely, if she has learned one thing about herself that is the most discouraging, it is that she is immune to the illusions in which so many people take comfort. Even though comfort based on an illusion is itself illusory, it is for a while a deliverance from the anxiety and existential dread that the world today can generate in abundance. She does not believe that any political ideology can shape society into a utopia. She knows that, instead, even the most earnest utopians always and everywhere create horrific dystopias. She does not believe that scientists are always honest, that rapidly advancing technology will inevitably save us, that everything that is called “progress” is in fact progress. She knows that “experts” are often frauds, that “intellectuals” can be as ignorant as anyone, and that those who most strenuously signal their virtue and are celebrated for it will always prove to be among the most corrupt. Such innate clearheadedness ensures that comforting illusions will elude her, though there are times, as now, when she might welcome the comfort of them. When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad. History is filled with chilling examples. Joe Smith knew it when he built this house.

My Future Self My future self and I become closer and closer as time goes by. I must admit that I neglected and ignored her until she punched me in the gut, grabbed me by the hair and turned my butt around to introduce herself. Well, at least that’s what it felt like every time I left the convalescent hospital after doing skills training for a certification I needed to help me start my residential care business. I was going to be providing specialized, 24/7 residential care and supervising direct care staff for non-verbal, non-ambulatory adult men in diapers! I ran to the Red Cross and took the certified nurse assistant class so I would at least know something about the job I would soon be hiring people to do and to make sure my clients received the best care. The training facility was a Medicaid hospital. I would drive home in tears after seeing what happens when people are not able to afford long-term medical care and the government has to provide that care. But it was seeing all the “young” patients that brought me to tears. And I had thought that only the elderly lived like this in convalescent hospitals…. I am fortunate to have good health but this experience showed me that there is the unexpected. So I drove home each day in tears, promising God out loud, over and over again, that I would take care of my health and take care of my finances. That is how I met my future self. She was like, don’t let this be us girlfriend and stop crying! But, according to studies, we humans have a hard time empathizing with our future selves. Could you even imagine your 30 or 40 year old self when you were in elementary or even high school? It’s like picturing a stranger. This difficulty explains why some people tend to favor short-term or immediate gratification over long-term planning and savings. Take time to picture the life you want to live in 5 years, 10 years, and 40 years, and create an emotional connection to your future self. Visualize the things you enjoy doing now, and think of retirement saving and planning as a way to continue doing those things and even more. However, research shows that people who interacted with their future selves were more willing to improve savings. Just hit me over the head, why don’t you! I do understand that some people can’t even pay attention or aren’t even interested in putting money away for their financial future because they have so much going on and so little to work with that they feel like they can’t even listen to or have a conversation about money. But there are things you’re doing that are not helping your financial position and could be trouble. You could be moving in the wrong direction. The goal is to get out of debt, increase your collateral capacity, use your own money in the most efficient manner and make financial decisions that will move you forward instead of backwards. Also make sure you are getting answers specific to your financial situation instead of blindly guessing! Contact us. We will be happy to help!

The lab tech closed his eyes. “Listen,” he said, slowly reopening them as if to dramatize her stupidity. “I’ve been here a lot longer than you and I know things. You know what Calvin Evans is famous for, don’t you? Besides chemistry?” “Yes. Having an excess of equipment.” “No,” he said. “He’s famous for holding a grudge. A grudge!” “Really?” she said taking interest. — Elizabeth Zott held grudges too. Except her grudges were mainly reserved for a patriarchal society founded on the idea that women were less. Less capable. Less intelligent. Less inventive. A society that believed men went to work and did important things—discovered planets, developed products, created laws—and women stayed at home and raised children. She didn’t want children—she knew this about herself—but she also knew that plenty of other women did want children and a career. And what was wrong with that? Nothing. It was exactly what men got. She’d recently read about some country where both parents worked and took part in raising the children. Where was that, again? Sweden? She couldn’t remember. But the upshot was, it functioned very well. Productivity was higher; families were stronger. She saw herself living in such a society. A place that didn’t always automatically mistake her for a secretary, a place where, when she presented her findings in a meeting, she didn’t have to brace herself for the men who would invariably talk over her, or worse, take credit for her work. Elizabeth shook her head. When it came to equality, 1952 was a real disappointment.

There are so many things to remember, and I guess what ultimately stresses me out is the idea that other moms—at school or out there in the wild world—are somehow way better at keeping track of this than I am. I am one of the most organized people I have ever met, and even with all of my planning, I still am constantly forgetting things—or remembering them at midnight the night before they’re due. And no matter what I do or create or volunteer for, some mythical “other mom” at school has done it better. “Yes, Mommy, you can buy the T-shirt we need for make-your-own-T-shirt day, but Liam’s mom grew organic cotton plants. Then she hand-separated the seed from the fiber before spinning it into thread and fabric for the shirt she sewed him herself.” I can’t even begin to keep up, and the stress of trying to do so can make me crazy. So this year I made a big decision. I’m over it. I am utterly over the idea of crushing back-to-school time—or any other part of school for that matter! I do some parts of it well. Our morning routine might be choreographed chaos, but we are never late to school. My kids (with the exception of the four-year-old) are well groomed and well mannered, and they get good grades. Beyond that, they are good people—the kind of kids who befriend the outcasts and the loners. Sure, they attack each other at home and are dramatic enough about their lack of access to technology to earn themselves Oscars, but whatever. We are doing pretty good—and pretty good is way better than trying to fake perfection any day of the week.

If I give you two possible worlds to choose from, in which you would like your children and grandchildren to live, which one would you choose - a world filled with hatred and discrimination, or a world where the humans care about their fellow humans beyond the petty little man-made labels of religion, race, nationality, intellect, gender etc.! We do not need to make efforts and be kind in order to keep Nature running, she can do that quite well and far better than us herself, in fact, it'd benefit Nature, if suddenly the humans were to disappear. It is us who need Nature in order to exist, not the other way around. We must stand on the side of kindness, goodness, compassion and conscience, not to keep the processes in Nature functioning, but because if we don't, the environment that we would be giving our future generations, would be no different than the violent and lethal environment of the wild. Hence, our kindness would make no difference to Nature whatsoever, rather it would simply be a selfish yet humanely necessary act on our part, that we must carry out to create a humane environment for the human species. Upon the kindness of us humans, the fate of humanity is predicated, not the fate of Nature. We are born in a world filled with hatred and discrimination, hence it is our existential responsibility as sentient and conscientious beings to contribute in the elimination of such discrimination and hatred. Kindness of ours in our daily walks of life, shall pave the path for a truly humane society for our children and grandchildren to live in.

I haven’t been disingenuous in what I’ve said describing my perception of “truth” and “reality.” Certainly, I understand what is generally meant to be the “truth,” I understand this notion, but it’s not something I trust in, OK? The only answer that feels true (I said feels, not is) is that yes, the character Minnie is me, but she is not me. She is a projection of some tumult which originates within me, but she is not me. I use elements of myself, including my likeness, for the character, perhaps as Cindy Sherman uses herself in her work, but like Sherman’s photographs, the work itself is not any more about the creator than it is about everyone. I won’t deny that Minnie does things I have done, and that things happen to her that have happened to me, but she, unlike me, having been created, is who she is and will remain so, unchanged now. I make no attempt to create “documentary.” There is a process of dissociation that takes place when I make a story, I make creative decisions in a fugue state that I could hardly describe to you, but the end result is, I hope, a story with some meaning or resonance, something created, with a beginning, a middle and an end, an encapsulation of feeling and impression, but in no way a documentary of anything other than an “emotional truth.” If I told most interviewers that my work is “true” and that it is based on real events that occurred in my life, they would more readily accept this than they do the explanation I try to give. Sadly, what they would believe feels to me like a lie and a simplification of a process that is for me as complex and vague as life itself…

Are we going to share the sleeping bag?” “I thought I’d go stay with Cookie.” “Oh.” Disappointment flooded her way more than the river had. It was just as cold, but not as wet. “Phoebe, we talked about this,” he reminded her. “You deserve better than a quickie out in the open.” “We’re in a tent,” she said before she could stop herself. “And it doesn’t have to be quick.” As soon as the words were out, she wanted to pull the sleeping bag over her head and disappear. Instead, she closed her eyes and waited for Zane to stalk off in disgust. When he didn’t move, she opened first one eye, then the other. He was staring at her with the hungry expression of a man who has been starving all his life. The need burning in his dark irises warmed her way more than the sleeping bag. He wanted her. She could feel his desire all the way to her toes. She wasn’t sure why he wanted her or for how long, but she couldn’t worry about any of that now. She watched the battle rage inside of him. Base need fought his desire to be a gentleman. She wasn’t exactly sure how to influence the outcome, but she was determined to get her way in this. After considering several options, she settled on a simple, yet direct approach. She unzipped the sleeping bag and sat up. While she was sure her hair was wet and spiky and that the flashlight didn’t exactly flatter her skin tone, Zane didn’t seem to notice any of that. His gaze dropped to her bare breasts and didn’t budge. There was an audible exhalation of air, a swearword, then a low groan that sounded very much like surrender. A heartbeat later, the flashlight clicked off. Phoebe blinked in the darkness. “Zane?” “We’re gonna have to do this by feel. Otherwise we’ll be putting on a show.” She thought about how flashlights in the tents created detailed shadows and blushed at the thought of entertaining the others.

The contrast between the two, the sweetness and the badness, wrenches the heart of the lover as such sweetness on its own would not, and the lover shudders all the more at dread of the beloved’s recklessness, for the sake of the sweetness that is there, and the shudder only makes more violent the shuddering that announces love (Phaedrus 251). I do not think, but for that sweetness, the friend of whom I spoke would have become impassioned as he did and he would have recognized that such a one, entirely wanting in the desire to become better than what he knows himself to be, was not worthy of his love. She who signs herself “I Don’t Know How (Or If) to Love Him” repeated the word “exciting” three times. A VBB (and let us remember that there are also, though perhaps they are rarer, VBGs) creates around himself or herself a separate world in which all that happens is exciting, for exciting it must be. Excitement is the air they breathe, and they cannot exist without it. And when they pull others into their world, then these others leave the world of common air and now they breathe the rare air of excitement, which they are not accustomed to, and in their confused state they are more apt to think that the excitement they breathe is the excitement of love. She asks whether she should continue to love her VBB, but I do not think she really loves him, just as he, and this for a certainty, does not love her. For I think even the best man of his day of whom I just wrote did not love that boy as he thought he did. Perhaps if your questioner thinks more on the true nature of the excitement she feels, she will be able to see the wisdom of the course of action that you and I both urge on her, and then she will find the strength to break the spell that her VBB casts upon her. Last, let her think on this, that though love is a profound disturbance, not all profound disturbances are love.

One of my best friends is LinDee Loveland, who is a Bible teacher at OCS and the children’s minister at our church. She and another friend and teacher, Mrs. Rita, were there at the hospital with us. As soon as they heard that everything had gone well, the two of them gathered all of Mia’s cousins together. “Missy, what’s Mia’s room number?” LinDee asked. I rattled it off, then quickly caught up with Jase, who was heading to the recovery room. We spent an hour in the recovery room with Mia, and when she was ready to be moved to her regular hospital room, Jase and I walked beside her gurney. When we walked into her room, I burst into tears. Mia’s room was beautiful! Several weeks before Mia’s scheduled surgery, Mrs. LinDee had asked the children at church to make snowflakes that would be given to a child who needed some encouragement. Mia even made one herself and signed it. “Each individual snowflake is special, and no two are alike,” Mrs. LinDee told them. “It’s the same way with us,” she shared. “No two people are alike. God makes everyone unique and special, with a purpose designed to glorify Him.” Later, when Mia wasn’t there, she asked all the children to make cards for Mia. When LinDee and the cousins scooted out of the waiting room, they went straight to Mia’s room and hung up the cards and the snowflakes all over her room. Mia was awake by the time she got back to her room, and when she saw the decorations, she literally oohed and ahhed. Dr. Sperry and Dr. Genecov both made the same comment when they visited Mia later. “I’ve never seen a room like this! This is the most decorated room that’s ever been in this hospital!” And Dr. Sperry summed it up beautifully: “Wow, somebody must really love you.” Having a room decorated means so much to a child--and maybe even more to a child’s parents. The fact that so many of Mia’s friends had created such exquisite, handmade snowflakes and worked so hard to make cards for her, and that Mrs. LinDee, Mrs. Rita, and all the cousins surprised us with the final display, spoke volumes to me about the way people loved Mia and our family. That expression of creativity was not only beautiful, it also touched my heart deeply.

Long story short, I got lured into a trap. A Mage using that concealment spell tried to knife me. Then someone else tried to blow my brains out with a bullet." "A Mage attacked you?" Alain asked, feeling a sick sensation inside. "She tried. I knew they'd been watching me. I didn't give them any reason to try to kill me." Mari looked at him. "Did I?" "It is my fault," Alain admitted. "Even though I have tried to keep them from finding out who you are, they still believe that you are dangerous." She gave him another look, then shook her head. "From the looks of things, I'm mainly dangerous to my friends and myself. Just how much trouble did you actually get in because of spending time with me in Dorcastle?" Alain looked into the fire. "My Guild did not believe that I had been with you in Dorcastle. The elders thought that the woman I had been seen with in that city was a common I had sought out because she researched the Mechanic I had met in Ringhmon." "Why would you want to find a common who looked like me?" Mari asked. "For physical satisfaction." The simple statement would have created no reaction in a Mage, but he saw the outraged look in Mari's face and hurriedly added more. "I would not have done that. But the elders assumed that I did. I told you that they believed I was attracted to you." "Alain, 'attracted to' doesn't bring to mind the idea of finding another woman who resembles me so that you can pretend that you're—" she choked off the words, glaring into the night. "The elders assumed that. I never wanted it. I would never do it. There is no other woman like you." Somehow he must have said the right thing, because she relaxed. "But because of that belief of theirs," Mari said, "your elders thought you might look for me again." "They actually thought that you would seek me," Alain explained. "They were very concerned that you would..." His "social skills" might need work, but Alain realized that he probably should not say the rest. Too late. Mari bent a sour look his way. "What did they think I would do?" "It is not important." "Alain..." He exhaled slowly, realizing that Mari would not give up on this question. "The elders thought that you would seek to ensnare me, using your physical charms, and through me work to strike at the Mage Guild." She stared back in disbelief. "Ensnare? They actually used the word ensnare?" "Yes. Many times." "Using my physical charms?" Mari seemed unable to decide whether to laugh or get angry. She looked down at herself. "I'm a little low on ammunition when it comes to physical charms, or hadn't these elders of yours noticed?" "You are beautiful beyond all other women," Alain objected. Mari rolled her eyes. "And you ate seriously deluded. I hadn't realized how badly until this moment.

[the virgin birth account] occurs everywhere. When the Herod figure ( the extreme figure of misgovernment) has brought man to the nadir of spirit, the occult forces of the cycle begin to move. In an inconspicuous village, Mary is born who will maintain herself undefiled by fashionable errors of her generation. Her womb, remaining fallw as the primordial abyss, summons itself by its very readiness the original power that fertilzed the void. Mary's virgin birth story is recounted everywhere. and with such striking unity of the main contours, that early christian missionaries had to think the devil must be creating mockeries of Mary's birth wherever they testified. One missionary reports that after work was begun among Tunja and Sogamozzo South American Indians, "the demon began giving contrary doctrines. The demon sought to discredit Mary's account, declaring it had not yet come to pass; but presently, the sun would bring it to pass by taking flesh in the womb of a virgin in a small village, causing her to conceive by rays of the sun while she yet remained virgin." Hindu mythology tells of the maiden parvati who retreated to the high hills to practice austerities. Taraka had usurped mastery of the world, a tyrant. Prophecy said only a son of the high god Shiva could overthrow him. Shive however was the pattern god of yoga-alone, aloof, meditating. It was impossible Shiva could be moved to beget. Parvati tried changing the world situation by metching Shiva in meditation. Aloof, indrawn in her soul meditating, she fasted naked beneath the blazing sun, even adding to the heat by building four great fires. One day a Brahmin youth arrived and asked why anyone so beautiful should be destroying herself with such torture. "My desire," she said "is Shiva, the Highest. He is the god of solitude and concentration. I therefore imitate his meditation to move him from his balance and bring him to me in love." Shiva, the youth announced, is a god of destruction, shiva is World Annhilator. Snakes are his garlands. The virgin said: He is beyond the mind of such as you. He is terrifying but the source of grace. snake garlands or jewel garlands he can assume or put off at will. Shiva is my love. The youth thereupon put away his disguise-he was Shiva. The Buddha descended from heaven to his mother's womb in the shape of a milk white elephant. The Aztec Coatlicue was approached by a god in the form of a ball of feathers. The chapters of Ovid's Metamorphoses swarm with nymphs beset by gods in sundry masquerades: jove as a bull, a swan, a shower of gold. Any leaf, any nut, or even the breath of a breeze, may be enough to fertilize the ready virgin womb. The procreating power is everywhere. And according to whim or destiny of the hour, either a hero savior or a world--annihilating demon may be conceived-one can never know.

Any parent would be dismayed to think that this was their child’s experience of learning, of socializing, and of herself. Maya is an introvert; she is out of her element in a noisy and overstimulating classroom where lessons are taught in large groups. Her teacher told me that she’d do much better in a school with a calm atmosphere where she could work with other kids who are “equally hardworking and attentive to detail,” and where a larger portion of the day would involve independent work. Maya needs to learn to assert herself in groups, of course, but will experiences like the one I witnessed teach her this skill? The truth is that many schools are designed for extroverts. Introverts need different kinds of instruction from extroverts, write College of William and Mary education scholars Jill Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. And too often, “very little is made available to that learner except constant advice on becoming more social and gregarious.” We tend to forget that there’s nothing sacrosanct about learning in large group classrooms, and that we organize students this way not because it’s the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with our children while the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the prevailing model. The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself. The school environment can be highly unnatural, especially from the perspective of an introverted child who loves to work intensely on projects he cares about, and hang out with one or two friends at a time. In the morning, the door to the bus opens and discharges its occupants in a noisy, jostling mass. Academic classes are dominated by group discussions in which a teacher prods him to speak up. He eats lunch in the cacophonous din of the cafeteria, where he has to jockey for a place at a crowded table. Worst of all, there’s little time to think or create. The structure of the day is almost guaranteed to sap his energy rather than stimulate it. Why do we accept this one-size-fits-all situation as a given when we know perfectly well that adults don’t organize themselves this way? We often marvel at how introverted, geeky kids “blossom” into secure and happy adults. We liken it to a metamorphosis. However, maybe it’s not the children who change but their environments. As adults, they get to select the careers, spouses, and social circles that suit them. They don’t have to live in whatever culture they’re plunked into. Research from a field known as “person-environment fit” shows that people flourish when, in the words of psychologist Brian Little, they’re “engaged in occupations, roles or settings that are concordant with their personalities.” The inverse is also true: kids stop learning when they feel emotionally threatened.

As if reading his mind, she smiled happily up at him. “Gary really came through for us, didn’t he?” “Absolutely, ma petite. And Beau LaRue was not so bad either. Come, we cannot leave the poor man pacing the swamp. He will think we are engaging in something other than conversation.” Wickedly Savannah moved her body against his, her hands sliding provocatively, enticingly, over the rigid thickness straining his trousers. “Aren’t we?” she asked with that infuriating sexy smile he could never resist. “We have a lot of clean-up to do here, Savannah,” he said severely. “And we need to get word to our people, spread the society’s list through our ranks, warn those in danger.” Her fingers were working at the buttons of his shirt so that she could push the material aside to examine his chest and shoulder, where two of the worst wounds had been. She had to see his body for herself, touch him to assure herself he was completely healed. “I suggest, for now, that your biggest job is to create something for Gary to do so we can have a little privacy.” With a smooth movement, she pulled the shirt from over her head so that her full breasts gleamed temptingly at him. Gregori made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a moan. His hands came up to cup the weight of her in his palms, the feel of her soft, satin skin soothing after the burning torture of the tainted blood. His thumbs caressed the rosy tips into hard peaks. He bent his head slowly to the erotic temptation because he was helpless to do anything else. He needed the merging of their bodies after such a close call as much as she did. He could feel the surge of excitement, the rush of liquid heat through her body at the feel of his mouth pulling strongly at her breast. Gregori dragged her even closer, his hands wandering over her with a sense of urgency. Her need was feeding his. “Gary,” she whispered. “Don’t forget about Gary.” Gregori cursed softly, his hand pinning her hips so that he could strip away the offending clothes on her body. He spared the human a few seconds of his attention, directing him away from the cave. Savannah’s soft laughter was taunting, teasing. “I told you, lifemate, you’re always taking off my clothes.” “Then stop wearing the damn things,” he responded gruffly, his hands at her tiny waist, his mouth finding her flat stomach. “Someday my child will be growing right here,” he said softly, kissing her belly. His hands pinned her thighs so that he could explore easily without interruption. “A beautiful little girl with your looks and my disposition.” Savannah laughed softly, her arms cradling his head lovingly. “That should be quite a combination. What’s wrong with my disposition?” She was writhing under the onslaught of his hands and mouth, arcing her body more fully into his ministrations. “You are a wicked woman,” he whispered. “I would have to kill any man who treated my daughter the way I am treating you.” She cried out, her body rippling with pleasure. “I happen to love the way you treat me, lifemate,” she answered softly and cried out again when he merged their bodies, their minds, their hearts and souls.

The "kindness of giving you a body" means that, at first, our bodies are not fully matured nor are our pleasant complexions. We started in the mother's womb as just an oval spot and oblong lump, and from there we developed through the vital essence of the mother's blood and flesh. We grew through the vital essence of her food while she endured embarrassment, pain, and suffering. After we were born, from a small worm until we were fully grown, she developed our body. The "kindness of undergoing hardships for you" means that, at first, we were not wearing any clothes with all their ornamentation, did not possess any wealth, and did not bring any provisions. We just came with a mouth and stomach-empty-handed, without any material things. When we came to this place where we knew no one, she gave food when we were hungry, she gave drink when we were thirsty, she gave clothes when we were cold, she gave wealth when we had nothing. Also, she did not just give us things she did not need. Rather, she has given us what she did not dare use for herself, things she did not dare eat, drink, or wear for herself, things she did not dare employ for the happiness of this life, things she did not dare use for her next life's wealth. In brief, without looking for happiness in this life or next, she nurtured her child. She did not obtain these things easily or with pleasure. She collected them by creating various negative karmas, by sufferings and hardships, and gave them all to the child. For example, creating negative karma: she fed the child through various nonvirtuous actions like fishing, butchering, and so forth. For example, suffering: to give to the child, she accumulated wealth by working at a business or farm and so forth, wearing frost for shoes, wearing stars as a hat, riding on the horse of her legs, her hem like a whip, giving her legs to the dogs and her face to the people. Furthermore, she loved the unknown one much more than her father, mother, and teachers who were very kind to her. She watched the child with eyes of love, and kept it warm in soft cloth. She dandled the child in her ten fingers, and lifted it up in the sky. She called to it in a loving, pleasant voice, saying, "Joyful one, you who delight Mommy. Lu, lu, you happy one," and so forth. The "kindness of giving you life" means that, at first, we were not capable of eating with our mouth and hands nor were we capable of enduring all the different hardships. We were like feeble insects without strength; we were just silly and could not think anything. Again, without rejection, the mother served us, put us on her lap, protected us from fire and water, held us away from precipices, dispelled all harmful things, and performed rituals. Out of fear for our death or fear for our health, she did divinations and consulted astrologers. Through many ritual ceremonies and many other different things, in inconceivable ways, she protected the life of her child. The "kindness of showing you the world" means that, at first, we did not come here knowing various things, seeing broadly, and being talented. We could only cry and move our legs and hands. Other than that, we knew nothing. The mother taught us how to eat when we did not know how. She taught us how to wear clothes when we did not know how. She taught us how to walk when we did not know how. She taught us how to talk when we did not know how to say "Mama," or "Hi," and so forth. She taught us various skills, creative arts, and so forth. She tried to make us equal when we were unequal, and tried to make the uneven even for us. Not only have we had a mother in this lifetime, but from beginningless samsara she served as a mother countless times.

the leader of the troupe, looked carefully at the girl in front of him. She was a real windfall, and since she herself was prepared to starve with them, he had no objection. She might even, if she had talent as she said, be good for the troupe. For years now he’d been traveling all over Greece. He had given performances in cafés, in the open air, even in barns. Once, when he was young, he had begun his career with lots of dreams, and he’d played beside some serious actors of the day. He’d managed to make a name for himself, but he very soon started to get into the drink. The beginning of the end had arrived, but he hadn’t understood it at the time. He began to forget his words onstage and to delay his entrances, creating gaps in the performance. Soon he stopped being in demand. When he met Zoe, he stopped drinking, but it was too late. Nobody trusted him, nobody would offer him even a small role. But the bug for acting didn’t leave him. He formed his own troupe and from then on he traveled around the countryside. A lot of people had been with him and moved on. Some were real actors and some didn’t want to believe that they would never become actors. Very occasionally, real talent had appeared beside him, but precisely because of that talent they always left for some theater in Athens. He had suffered hundreds of humiliations. Frustrated by the troupe’s poor performances, audiences often threw whatever they found at them, forcing the show to end. And it wasn’t so unusual for them to have to flee from a village in the night so that the disgruntled locals, who felt they’d been cheated after such a bad show, didn’t beat them up. Tickets were often used to barter for eggs, honey, corn, even vegetables—the important thing was for the troupe to eat. When they were lucky, though, they ate in a restaurant. They’d been able to do so today because the tour in Pieria had gone very well thanks to Martha, the woman who was observing Polyxeni so carefully. Lambros had to admit that her acting had saved the whole troupe. She’d been with them for two months, and things

Madre Carmela brought the covered bowl over to Rosalia. A subtle, sweet aroma reached Rosalia's nose. Her mouth watered in anticipation of whatever culinary surprise Madre Carmela had for her today. Instead of waiting for the sister to unfold the napkin, Rosalia pulled it back herself and almost gasped when she saw what delights were in store for her. Puffy clusters of dough in vanilla and chocolate were piled one on top of the other to form a misshapen pyramid. Chocolate and vanilla cream oozed from a few of the pastries. "Ha-ha! I see you couldn't wait," Madre Carmela gently teased Rosalia, who quickly looked up, her cheeks turning the same hot pink hue as the sugar roses the nuns had painstakingly created this morning for a wedding cake. "That's all right, my child. I'm happy to see you are feeling more comfortable here. Go ahead. Have as many as you like." Rosalia wondered which one she should try first- the chocolate or the vanilla. She'd always loved anything vanilla, so she opted for one of those first. Instead of taking a small, tentative bite out of the pastry, as she would have done her first few weeks at the convent, she popped the whole sweet at once into her mouth, eliciting another hearty laugh from Madre Carmela. But this time, Rosalia wasn't embarrassed. She closed her eyes, savoring the pastry's airy, flaky crust and the rich sweetness of the vanilla cream.

Michelle Phan grew up in California with her Vietnamese parents. The classic American immigrant story of the impoverished but hardworking parents who toil to create a better life for the next generation was marred, in Phan’s case, by her father’s gambling addiction. The Phan clan moved from city to city, state to state, downsizing and recapitalizing and dodging creditors and downsizing some more. Eventually, Phan found herself sleeping on a hard floor, age 16, living with her mother, who earned rent money as a nail salon worker and bought groceries with food stamps. Throughout primary and secondary school, Phan escaped from her problems through art. She loved to watch PBS, where painter Bob Ross calmly drew happy little trees. “He made everything so positive,” Phan recalls. “If you wanted to learn how to paint, and you wanted to also calm down and have a therapeutic session at home, you watched Bob Ross.” She started drawing and painting herself, often using the notes pages in the back of the telephone book as her canvas. And, imitating Ross, she started making tutorials for her friends and posting them on her blog. Drawing, making Halloween costumes, applying cosmetics—the topic didn’t matter. For three years, she blogged her problems away, fancying herself an amateur teacher of her peers and gaining a modest teenage following. This and odd jobs were her life, until a kind uncle gave her mother a few thousand dollars to buy furniture, which was used instead to send Phan to Ringling College of Art and Design. Prepared to study hard and survive on a shoestring, Phan, on her first day at Ringling, encountered a street team which was handing out free MacBook laptops, complete with front-facing webcams, from an anonymous donor. Phan later told me, with moist eyes, “If I had not gotten that laptop, I wouldn’t be here today.

This lady believed she could force her husband to submit because she was “spiritually anointed.” She did not reckon on God. A woman who thinks she can walk her own way because she believes herself spiritually gifted has no fear of Almighty God.

She grows within me She wakes up like a beautiful dream in my mind, Seeking something and desperately trying to find, My memories where she lives everywhere, And as she discovers her thoughts dashing here and there, In every corner of my mind, She loves me in ways refined and undefined, As she discovers my true feelings of love, That fly always unto her, bearing the wings of dove, Then as she dislodges herself intentionally, From this state of loving me endlessly, She wanders tirelessly in the garden of life, To pick a rose that represents love and life, And gifts it to me, Then as its scent floods through me, She gushes like a feeling within me, And how I love in this state to be, Forever within her, and she within me, Where she is not she, I am not who I am, Because we have fused together and that is now who she is and who I am, Two lovers existing as one, One heartbeat, one passion, one strife, one feeling, no other thoughts, none, And as this feelings grows over me, I feel a sense of infinite glee, And ah the wonder that now I can see, Her holding me in her arms in that embrace of eternity, In the light of the day, in the dark of the night, It is she, who now is my only delight, And she lives in my mind, in its thoughts, in my memories all, It is a feeling that nothing can uninstall, I no more feel anything, I only see her wherever I see, And this is how, now I wish it to be, She and I , where her mind grows inside me, And creates a sea, the endless sea, Where we lie hidden from the sun, the moon and the Heaven too, And I confess ceaselessly to her, I love you, I do, yes, I do! In the form of waves in the sea and in the form of tender breeze, So begins our romance that is not meant to cease.

Here in the sixteenth century one of the most unusual and talented women in England’s history – Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke – maintained an alchemical laboratory, assisted by Sir Walter Raleigh’s half-brother Adrian Gilbert, who also created an elaborate magical garden in the grounds, based on sacred geometry. And although the garden and house have undergone many changes since their time, through fire and restoration, it still seems as if its former inhabitants were here only yesterday. Mary Sidney is remarkable for being one of the few women whose names appear in the history of alchemy in England and, indeed, the world. She was also the first English woman to achieve a significant literary reputation. Some even believe that it was her genius that lay behind the plays of William Shakespeare, which they claim she either wrote herself or collaborated upon with the group of literary luminaries that she patronised.

Dowager wanted power, so she created a coup, and placed herself in charge. She was cold, calculating, and brutal; she stated, “Whoever makes me unhappy for a day, I will make suffer a lifetime.

Remember! she told herself. Remember the solution to this test! Remembrance was a Buddhist philosopher’s trick. Rather than asking her mind to search for a solution to a potentially impossible challenge, Vittoria asked her mind simply to remember it. The presupposition that one once knew the answer created the mindset that the answer must exist . . . thus eliminating the crippling conception of hopelessness. Vittoria often used the process to solve scientific quandaries . . . those that most people thought had no solution. At the moment, however, her remembrance trick was drawing a major blank. So she measured her options . . . her needs. She needed to warn someone. Someone at the Vatican needed to take her seriously. But who? The camerlengo? How? She was in a glass box with one exit. Tools, she told herself. There are always tools. Reevaluate your environment. Instinctively she lowered her shoulders, relaxed her eyes, and took three deep breaths into her lungs. She sensed her heart rate slow and her muscles soften. The chaotic panic in her mind dissolved. Okay, she thought, let your mind be free. What makes this situation positive? What are my assets? The analytical mind of Vittoria Vetra, once calmed, was a powerful force.

We also see that the serpent has no trouble talking about God rather than inviting the woman to have a conversation with God. This is one of shame’s most important means of creating the isolation that supports its affective gravitas. At this point the woman can begin to consider God in her own mind, by herself. She is given the opportunity to decide independently who God is and what he thinks and feels in response to her. She begins the process of analyzing God—of judging him from a distance, rather than interacting with him.

And then there were their dresses. Fancy cotton confections of candy-colored frills and bows, with puffed sleeves and ribbon sashes. Sally had never seen such dresses before, and for a moment, she felt a little inadequate when she gazed down at her own homemade ensemble, rather plain in comparison. But then, she'd made this dress herself, she thought. And who was to say she couldn't make one of theirs, too, if she just gave it a try? In fact, if she could find the right material, she was almost positive she could re-create one of these ensembles back in Halloween Town, adding her own special Sally touches, of course. For example, their sashes were practically screaming to be replaced by proper spiderwebs. And a few slashes with a serrated knife would give the puffed sleeves a lovely shredded flair. Her mouth curled as she imagined herself walking past the fountain in her hometown square, sashaying in a swish of silk and spiders. Halloween Town wouldn't know what hit them! And what if, her mind whirred, others wanted a dress like this, too? She could take orders. Charge money. Maybe even eventually open her own shop. Support herself so she would no longer be reliant on Dr. Finkelstein. She gasped at the idea. This could change everything! Feeling almost giddy, she studied the dolls' dresses, taking the time to memorize every detail while happily munching on her sugarplums. Christmas Town was truly amazing, she decided. Even if it was very different from home. And while she'd always be a fan of the grim and gruesome, she saw now that fun and festive was actually pretty great, too.

Mary was created only for God, and it is unthinkable that she should reserve even one soul for herself. On the contrary she leads every soul to God and to union with him. Mary is the wonderful echo of God. The more a person joins himself to her, the more effectively she unites him to God. When we say "Mary", she re-echoes "God". When, like St Elizabeth, we call her blessed, she gives the honour to God. If those misguided ones who were so sadly led astray by the devil, even in their prayer-life, had known how to discover Mary, and Jesus through her, and God through Jesus, they would not have had such terrible falls. The saints tell us that when we have once found Mary, and through Mary Jesus, and through Jesus God the Father, then we have discovered every good. When we say "every good", we except nothing. "Every good" includes every grace, continuous friendship with God, every protection against the enemies of God, possession of truth to counter every falsehood, endless benefits and unfailing headway against the hazards we meet on the way to salvation, and finally every consolation and joy amid the bitter afflictions of life.

Surely a young beauty like yourself is lonely, too. It can be a part of the game, if you like.” “Get off,” she said, thoroughly done with this. His answer was to lean in closer. So she kneed him in the groin. As hard as she could. “Aw, ow, dammit!” He doubled over and thudded onto his knees. Jane brushed off her knee, feeling like it had touched something dirty. “Aw, ow, dammit indeed! What’re you thinking?” Jane heard hurried footsteps coming down the stairs. It was Mr. Nobley. “Miss Erstwhile!” He was barefoot in his breeches, his shirt untucked. He glanced down at the groaning man. “Sir Templeton!” “Ow, she kicked me,” said Sir Templeton. “Kneed him, I kneed him,” Jane said. “I don’t kick. Not even when I’m a ninja.” Mr. Nobley stood a moment in silence, looking over the scene. “I hope you remembered to shout ‘Ya’ when taking him down. I hear that is very effective.” “I’m afraid I neglected that bit, but I’ll certainly ‘ya’ from here to London if he ever touches me again.” “Miss Erstwhile, were you perhaps employed by your president’s armed forces in America?” “What? Don’t British women know how to use their knees?” “Happily, I have never put myself in a position to find out.” He stared at the prostrate Sir Templeton. “Did he hurt you?” “Frankly, your arm-yanking earlier was worse.” “I see. Perhaps you should retire to your chambers, Miss Erstwhile. Would you like me to escort you?” “I’m fine,” she said, “as long as there aren’t any other Sir Templetons lurking upstairs.” “Well, I cannot give Colonel Andrews a glowing reference, but I believe the way is safe.” She stepped closer to Mr. Nobley and whispered, “Are you going to out me to Mrs. Wattlesbrook for the servants’ quarters lurking?” “I think,” he said, nudging the prostrate Sir Templeton with his foot, “that you have suffered enough tonight.” Mr. Nobley smiled at her, the first time she had seen his real smile. She wouldn’t go so far as to call it a grin. His lips were closed, but his eyes brightened and the corners of his mouth definitely turned up, creating pleasing little cheek wrinkles on either side as though the smile were in parentheses. It bothered her in a way she couldn’t explain, like feeling itchy but not knowing exactly where to scratch. He was not particularly amused, she saw, but smiled to reassure her. Wait, who wanted to reassure her? Mr. Nobley or the actual man, Actor X? “Thanks. Good night, Mr. Nobley.” “Good night, Miss Erstwhile.” She hesitated, then left, Sir Templeton’s groans following her up the stairs. On the second floor, Aunt Saffronia was emerging from her room, clutching a white shawl over her nightgown. “What was that noise? Is everything all right?” “Yes. It was…your husband. He was being inappropriate.” Aunt Saffronia blinked. “Inebriated?” “Yes.” She nodded slowly. “I’m sorry, Jane.” Jane wasn’t sure if Aunt Saffronia was speaking to Jane the niece or Jane the client. For the first time it didn’t matter; both Janes felt exactly the same. She acknowledged the apology with a nod, went to her room, and locked the door behind her. She thought she was angry but instead she plopped herself down on her bed, put her face in her pillow, and laughed. “What a joke,” she said, sounding to herself like the movie incarnation of Lydia Bennet. “I come for Mr. Darcy, fall for the gardener, and get propositioned by the drunk husband.” Tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow she would play for real. She was going to drive full force into the game, have a staggering good time, and kick the nasty Darcy habit for good. She fell asleep with the ticklish thought of Mr. Nobley’s smile.

Take a moment and read that again…do you believe it? If work is a team sport, then you are dependent upon others for your success. You cannot perform at a high level alone. However, in many organizations a “hero mentality” abounds in which individuals wait to step in and save the day. In those organizations, I tend to see a short-term focus in which firefighting becomes the norm and long-range fire prevention is overlooked. In extreme situations, it's not just firefighting that occurs, but arson, where individuals actually create a crisis in order to be the hero. Those who save the day are then rewarded with other “problem areas to fix” or other recognition that serves to perpetuate the individual mindset. A culture of silos and barriers to collective success abounds! …short-term focus where firefighting becomes the norm and fire prevention tactics are overlooked. In extreme situations it's not just firefighting…it's arson. While this solo mindset may deliver results in the short term, burnout occurs when the self-imposed demands become too great. Team members may become complacent, sitting back and saying to themselves, “Why bother? She will just do it herself anyway.

So she retreated into herself, rebuilt the damaged pathways of her mind, explored long-unvisited memories, wandered among the trillions of human lives that were open to her observation, read over the libraries of every book known to exist in every language human beings had ever spoken. She created out of all this a self that was not utterly linked to Ender Wiggin, though she was still devoted to him, still loved him above any other living soul. Jane made herself into someone who could bear to be cut off from her lover, husband, father, child, brother, friend.

When Vanity caught Stack staring toward them, she smiled. “I really think you guys should let us use the locker room. I’m perspiring. Cherry’s perspiring.” Cherry went still, then looked down at herself and blushed. Sweat dampened the front of her tank top, especially between and beneath her big boobs. Denver scowled, giving Stack a shove. Which in turn knocked him into Armie. None of them spoke. Cannon took up the torch. “It’s only set up for men.” “We don’t need the urinals,” Vanity said. “Just the showers.” Yvette plucked at her top. “I really could—” Cannon put his hand over her mouth. “We don’t have a door on the locker room, and sure, we’d all know not to step in, but there are other people here, other guys, and—” Vanity said, “So put someone there to keep watch for us.” Stack opened his mouth, but at first nothing came out. He cleared his throat. “Sounds carry down there.” He gestured. “There not being a door and all.” Grinning, Armie said, “Meaning whoever keeps guard—” “Watch,” Vanity corrected. “—will hear every little detail. Like clothes dropping. And water running. Even slick, soapy hands—” This time, Stack shoved him without Denver’s help. “I’ll do it,” Cannon offered, and he sounded like he’d just thrown himself on the sacrificial altar. “Fuck that.” Denver took a step forward. “I don’t want you listening to Cherry shower.” Cherry’s face got hotter. “Denver!” Folding his arms, Cannon stared at him. “You think I’d let you listen to Yvette?” “Cannon!” Yvette joined the brigade of embarrassed women. Only Vanity remained unflustered. “Let Armie do it.” Mutually appalled, Stack, Denver and Cannon all stared at her. Going along, Armie nodded and rubbed his hands together. “Yeah, let me do it.” “Hell, no.” “In his dreams.” “Not in this lifetime.” Armie laughed. “You guys know I won’t be thinking anything you wouldn’t be thinking.” “Maybe,” Denver said. “But we wouldn’t go blabbing it everywhere.” Crossing his heart dramatically, Armie swore, “It’ll be between me and my pillow.” Denver took a step toward him, but Vanity put herself in his way. “We’re showering. For the future, you might want to think about creating a space for women.” “Tried,” Cannon argued. “We’re out of room here. I wanted to expand, but the guy who owns the lot next to us doesn’t want to sell.” “Hmm...” Vanity got a thoughtful look on her face. “Well then, I suggest you find a desk to put down there and then, perhaps, we could plan this around when Harper is here doing the scheduling. She could be our lookout.” “I could call her—” Cannon tried to offer. But Stack noticed that Vanity already had both her arms wrapped around one of Armie’s. And damn him, Armie just let her, smiling in a way that just might lose him a few teeth. Leese looked at each of the men and started snickering. “They’re pathetic, right?” Armie said. “They’re something,” Leese agreed. “Not sure what.” “You two losers are just jealous,” Cannon accused. “Yeah,” Armie said, patting at Vanity’s arm. “So jealous.” Denver growled when Cherry cozied up to the other side of Armie, and even Yvette smiled as she followed along, all of them heading to the locker room. The men stared until the group was out of sight. “I’m going to have to punch him,” Denver said. “At least once.” “Get in line,” Cannon told him. Then he pointed at Leese. “Not a word out of you!” Trying to bite back his grin, Leese got started mopping. Damn, Stack wondered, did Vanity enjoy making him nuts? And unlike Cannon and Denver, he couldn’t protest as much as he wanted because, though he’d thrown out some signals, he and Vanity weren’t official. Fuck.

Let’s talk about pussy. Let’s also talk about balls. No, things are not about to get pornographic, I’m sorry to say, but hopefully they will remain juicy. There is a deeply encoded tendency in our society to describe negative concepts with female terminology, and vice versa. For example, in the sports locker room we might say to a weak team member, “Don’t be a pussy.” Conversely, should a woman distinguish herself, utilizing her talents and gumption, we might say of her, “she’s got balls.” I’m sure you can think of more examples—“Don’t be a little bitch,” for instance. (The same goes for “faggot” and “gay,” obviously, but that’s another chapter.) Every time this sort of imagery is utilized, it subtly but firmly reinforces negative gender stereotypes. This usage must be extirpated from daily use if we are to progress in a substantial way. We have enough trouble with the patriarchal foundations of the language to begin with, without worrying about our naughty bits being misrepresented. For example, a few paragraphs back, I accused Ms. Anderson of exhibiting showmanship, which is anatomically incorrect. However, that’s how the dudes who created our words set it up. We don’t have the word showwomanship. This is clearly bullshit. One

He loves you. It’s plain for anyone to see. He came after you, didn’t he? Admitted he was wrong to abandon you?” I shrugged. “We’ve been friends since I was born, or almost.” “He doesn’t look at you like he thinks you’re just his friend.” “It doesn’t matter,” I insisted. The doubts that Melaina had stirred up, that I had had so long to contemplate in her cell, flared inside me again. “What can come of him loving me? He’s still an earl’s son and I’m…a scribe girl. His family would never let him marry me. They were lining up girls at court for him to pick through before we left. Girls with titles and land…noble girls. It doesn’t make any difference if he loves me. We can’t be together.” Mika pushed herself back as she blew a breath upward to stir the hair on her forehead. “What makes you think he’ll ask their permission?” I gaped at her. Kiernan, not marry who his family wanted? It wasn’t done, not in the noble families of Thorvaldor. You married to create ties to other nobles, to strengthen your family’s position. Sometimes you got love as well, but that was just luck thrown into the bargain. “And you. You’re willing to fight an impossible battle to get me on the throne, but you won’t fight for him?” “I never said that,” I said, stung. “I just--” But I could go no further, because just then I heard the jingle of horse tack, and then Kiernan rode into view.

We trapped several smaller females, all around the nine-foot mark. That’s when Steve stepped back and let the all-girl team take over: all the women in camp, zoo workers mainly, myself, and others. We would jump on the croc, help secure the tracking device, and let her go. At one point Steve trapped a female that he could see was small and quiet. He turned to Bindi. “How would you like to jump the head?” Bindi’s eyes lit up. This was what she had been waiting for. Once Steve removed the croc from the trap and secured its jaws, the next step was for the point person to jump the croc’s head. Everybody else on the team followed immediately afterward, pinning the crocodile’s body. “Don’t worry,” I said to Bindi. “I’ll back you up.” Or maybe I was really talking to Steve. He was nervous as he slipped the croc out of its mesh trap. He hovered over the whole operation, knowing that if anything went amiss, he was right there to help. “Ready, and now!” he said. Bindi flung herself on the head of the crocodile. I came in right over her back. The rest of the girls jumped on immediately, and we had our croc secured. “Let’s take a photo with the whole family,” Professor Franklin said. Bindi sat proudly at the crocodile’s head, her hand casually draped over its eyes. Steve was in the middle, holding up the croc’s front legs. Next in line was me. Finally, Robert had the tail. This shot ended up being our 2006 family Christmas card. I look at it now and it makes me laugh out loud. The family that catches crocs together, rocks together. The Irwin family motto. Steve, Bindi, and I are all smiling. But then there is Robert’s oh-so-serious face. He has a top-jaw rope wrapped around his body, with knots throughout. He took his job seriously. He had the rope and was ready as the backup. He was on that croc’s tail. It was all about catching crocs safely, mate. No mucking around here. As we idled back in to camp, Robert said, “Can I please drive the boat?” “Crikey, mate, you are two years old,” Steve said. “I’ll let you drive the boat next year.” But then, quite suddenly and without a word, Steve scooped Robert up and sat him up next to the outboard. He put the tiller in his hand. “Here’s what you do, mate,” Steve said, and he began to explain how to drive the boat. He seemed in a hurry to impart as much wisdom to his son as possible. Robert spent the trip jumping croc tails, driving the boat, and tying knots. Steve created a croc made of sticks and set it on a sandbar. He pulled the boat up next to it, and he, Robert, and Bindi went through all the motions of jumping the stick-croc. “I’m going to say two words,” Robert shouted, imitating his father. “’Go,’ and ‘Now.’ First team off on ‘Go,’ second team off on ‘Now.’” Then he’d yell “Go, now” at the top of his lungs. He and Steve jumped up as if the stick-croc was about to swing around and tear their arms off. “Another croc successfully caught, mate,” Steve said proudly. Robert beamed with pride too. When he got back to Croc One, Robert wrangled his big plush crocodile toy. I listened, incredulous, as my not-yet-three-year-old son muttered the commands of a seasoned croc catcher. He had all the lingo down, verbatim. “Get me a twelve-millimeter rope,” Robert commanded. “I need a second one. Get that top-jaw rope under that tooth, yep, the eye tooth, get it secured. We’ll need a third top-jaw rope for this one. Who’s got a six-millimeter rope? Hand me my Leatherman. Cut that rope here. Get that satellite tracker on.” The stuffed animal thoroughly secured, Robert made as if to brush off his little hands. “Professor Franklin,” he announced in his best grown-up voice, “it’s your croc.

Once we understand Hillary as single-mindedly pursuing her own interest and financial gain, we can for the first time make sense of recent Clinton scandals. Consider the email scandal. What we know is that Hillary created and maintained an entirely private email server, insulated from her State Department requirements. This took great effort and required the collaboration of a whole team of aides as well as State Department bureaucrats. Why did Hillary do this? Her official explanation is convenience. Hillary simply wanted to get things done, and she was a little careless about how she went about doing them. She claims she got into all this trouble because she didn’t want to have to carry two phones.1 But setting up a parallel email system is actually very inconvenient. Far from being careless, Hillary was careful to do it in a manner that would allow her to carry on private communications that would not show up on an official network, rendering the Freedom of Information Act useless. By doing this, in essence she stole the people’s property. Sending classified and secret information through a private network is not merely harmful to the national security; it is also illegal. Former CIA director John Deutch, former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, and General David Petraeus were all punished for doing it. Their offenses pale before Hillary’s. Moreover, Hillary, in the middle of a government investigation, went through her private emails, deleting thousands of them that she didn’t want the government or the public to see. Normal people who do such things end up in prison. Hillary, clearly, sees herself as politically protected by the Obama gang. She acts like she’s above the law, and so far she has been proven correct.

Simone Simmons Simone Simmons works as an energy healer, helping her patients through empowering them rather than creating a dependency on the healer. She specializes in absent healing, mainly with sufferers of cancer and AIDS. She met Diana four years before her death when the Princess came to her for healing, and they became close friends. In 2005, Simone wrote a book titled Diana: The Last Word. I realized Diana had been born with an extraordinary ability, which had only been waiting to be released. By 1996, when she was fully in control of her life for the first time, she was able to give a great deal of consolation and encouragement to so many people. She received scant attention for this at the time. Everyone seemed to concentrate on the negative aspects. Instead of seeing how genuinely caring she was, they accused her of doing it for the publicity. That was utterly untrue. I often joined her when she returned from a day’s work, and she would be so exhausted, she found relief in crying. She was anxious about what she had seen and experienced and was determined to find something she could do to help. Her late-night visits to hospitals were supposed to be private. She knew how frustrating it is to be alone in a hospital; the staff and patients were always very surprised and pleased to see her. She used to make light of it and say, “I just came round to see if anyone else couldn’t sleep!” Although Diana saw the benefits of the formal visits she also made, and she did get excited when money poured in for her charities, she much preferred these unofficial occasions. They allowed her to talk to people and find out more about their illness and how they were feeling about themselves, in a down-to-earth way without a horde of people noting her every word. She wasn’t trying to fill a void or to make herself feel better. To her, it was not a therapy to help other people: It was a commitment born of selflessness. Diana was forever on the lookout for new projects that might benefit from her involvement. Her attention was caught by child abuse and forced prostitution in Asia. We had both seen a television program showing how little children were being kidnapped and then forced to sell themselves for sex. Diana told me she wanted to do everything she could to eradicate this wicked exploitation taking place in India, Pakistan, and most prevalently in Thailand. As it turned out, it was one of her final wishes. She didn’t have any idea of exactly how she was going to do it, and hadn’t got as far as formulating a plan, but she would have found a way. When Diana put her mind to something, nothing was allowed to stand in her way. As she said, “Because I’ve been given the gift to shine a light into the dark corners of this world, and get the media to follow me there, I have to use it,” and use it she did--to draw attention to a problem and in a very practical way to apply her incredible healing gifts to the victims. In her fight against land mines, she did exactly that. If anyone ever doubted her heartfelt concern for the welfare of others, this cause must surely have dispelled it. It needed someone of her fame and celebrity to bring the matter to the world’s attention, and her work required an immense amount of personal bravery. She faced physical peril and endured public ridicule, but Diana would have seen the campaign to get land mines banned as her greatest legacy. Helping others was her calling in life--right to the very end.

Richard Kay Richard Kay became friends with Diana, Princess of Wales, through his job as royal correspondent for London’s Daily Mail. After her separation in 1992, he used his knowledge to give a penetrating and unique insight into Diana’s troubled life, and they remained friends until the end. Richard is now diary editor or the Daily Mail and lives in London with his wife and three children. Over the years, I saw her at her happiest and in her darkest moments. There were moments of confusion and despair when I believed Diana was being driven by the incredible pressures made on her almost to the point of destruction. She talked of being strengthened by events, and anyone could see how the bride of twenty had grown into a mature woman, but I never found her strong. She was as unsure of herself at her death as when I first talked to her on that airplane, and she wanted reassurance about the role she was creating for herself. In private, she was a completely different person form the manicured clotheshorse that the public’s insatiable demand for icons had created. She was natural and witty and did a wonderful impression of the Queen. This was the person, she told me, that she would have been all the time if she hadn’t married into the world’s most famous family. What she hated most of all was being called “manipulative” and privately railed against those who used the word to describe her. “They don’t even know me,” she would say bitterly, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her apartment in Kensington Palace and pouring tea from a china pot. It was this blindness, as she saw it, to what she really was that led her seriously to consider living in another country where she hoped she would be understood. The idea first emerged in her mind about three years before her death. “I’ve got to find a place where I can have peace of mind,” she said to me. She considered France, because I was near enough to stay in close touch with William and Harry. She thought of America because she--naively, it must be said--saw it as a country so brimming over with glittery people and celebrities that she would be able to “disappear.” She also thought of South Africa, where her brother, Charles, made a home, and even Australia, because it was the farthest place she could think of from the seat of her unhappiness. But that would have separated her form her sons. Everyone said she would go anywhere, do anything, to have her picture taken, but in my view the truth was completely different. A good day for her was one where her picture was not taken and the paparazzi photographers did not pursue her and clamber over her car. “Why are they so obsessed with me?” she would ask me. I would try to explain, but I never felt she fully understood. Millions of women dreamed of changing places with her, but the Princess that I knew yearned for the ordinary humdrum routine of their lives. “They don’t know how lucky they are,” she would say. On Saturday, just before she was joined by Dodi Al Fayed for their last fateful dinner at the Ritz in Pairs, she told me how fed up she was being compared with Camilla. “It’s all so meaningless,” she said. She didn’t say--she never said--whether she thought Charles and Camilla should marry. Then, knowing that as a journalist I often work at weekends, she said to me, “Unplug your phone and get a good night’s sleep.

Brute force outraged her, I think, because it was outside her beloved realm of language, and in response to it she really had nothing to say. Despite her revolutionary stylings I don't think my mother would have been very useful in a real revolution, not once the talking and the meetings were over and the actual violence began. There was a sense in which she couldn't quite believe in violence, as if it were, in her view, too stupid to be real. I knew--from Lambert only--that her own childhood had been full of violence, emotional and physical, but she rarely referred to it other than calling it "that nonsense," or sometimes "those ridiculous people," because when she ascended to the life of the mind everything that was not the life of the mind stopped existing for her. Louie as a sociological phenomenon or a political symptom or a historical example or simply a person raised in the same grinding rural poverty she'd known herself--a person whom she recognized, and I believe intimately understood--that Louie my mother could deal with. But the look of utter forsakenness on her face as the firemen led her to a far corner of the shed to show her the spot where the fire had been started, by someone who she knew personally, had tried to reason with, but who, despite this, had chosen to violently destroy what she'd lovingly created--this look is something I've never forgotten.

In another invaluable service to the Allies, the resistance movements in every captive country helped rescue and spirit back to England thousands of British and American pilots downed behind enemy lines, as well as other Allied servicemen caught in German-held territory. In Belgium, for example, a young woman named Andrée de Jongh set up an escape route called the Comet Line through her native country and France, manned mostly by her friends, to return Britons and Americans to England. De Jongh herself escorted more than one hundred servicemen over the Pyrenees Mountains to safety in neutral Spain. As de Jongh and her colleagues knew, being active in the resistance, regardless of gender, was far more perilous than fighting on the battlefield or in the air. If captured, uniformed servicemen on the Western front were sent to prisoner of war camps, where Geneva Convention rules usually applied. When resistance members were caught, they faced torture, the horrors of a German concentration camp, and/or execution. The danger of capture was particularly great for those who sheltered British or American fighting men, most of whom did not speak the language of the country in which they were hiding and who generally stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. As one British intelligence officer observed, “It is not an easy matter to hide and feed a foreigner in your midst, especially when it happens to be a red-haired Scotsman of six feet, three inches, or a gum-chewing American from the Middle West.” James Langley, the head of a British agency that aided the European escape lines, later estimated that, for every Englishman or American rescued, at least one resistance worker lost his or her life. Andrée de Jongh managed to escape that fate. Caught in January 1943 and sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany, she survived the war because, although she freely admitted to creating the Comet Line, the Germans could not believe that a young girl had devised such an intricate operation. IN

Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticizes her throughout their long relationship for being unfaithful to him and for longing for the social life which his jealousy bars her from and for being ‘a career woman’. This woman who, throughout the five years of their affair in fact never looks at another man, never goes out, and neglects her career becomes everything he has criticized her for being at that moment when he drops her. She becomes promiscuous, lives only for parties and is ruthless about her career, sacrificing her men and her friends for it. The point of the story is that this new personality has been created by him; and that everything she does — sexual acts, acts of betrayal for the sake of her career, etc., are with the revengeful thought: There, that’s what you wanted, that’s what you wanted me to be. And, meeting this man again after an interval, when her new personality is firmly established, he falls in love with her again. This is what he always wanted her to be; and the reason why he left her was in fact because she was quiet, compliant and faithful. But now, when he falls in love with her again, she rejects him and in bitter contempt: what she is now is not what she ‘really’ is. He has rejected her ‘real’ self. He has betrayed a real love and now loves a counterfeit. When she rejects him, she is preserving her real self, whom he has betrayed and rejected. Ella does not write this story. She is afraid that writing it might make it come true.

once a willful child who, like many willful children, felt most secure at home, has grown into an extravagantly social and nonconforming adult, one who creates camaraderie out of bus timetables, refuses to trouble herself when people look askance at her—and, in a buoyant refutation of the notion that mental retardation equals sluggishness, zips about jauntily to her own inner beat. My sister (my sister! I boast to myself) maneuvers through the world with the confidence of a museum curator walking approvingly through her galleries, and, far from bemoaning her otherness, she exults in it.

The fledgling Kundalini as it awakens can be likened to a hungry baby bird in the nest. It’s the teacher’s job to feed it, and the fact that he or she may be slicing you up in the process is only because you won’t do it yourself. This is the power of Shak, the vital force that has created you as a vehicle for Her own freedom. You must surrender to the energy that’s awakened in you, which is the Goddess Kundalini Herself who got the email from Shiva that says, “Come on home.

• While a female flight attendant was serving food from the meal cart, a female passenger thrust a small bundle of trash toward her. “Take this,” the passenger demanded. Realizing that the trash was actually a used baby diaper, the attendant instructed the passenger to take it to the lavatory herself and dispose of it. “No,” the passenger replied. “You take it!” The attendant explained that she couldn’t dispose of the dirty diaper because she was serving food—handling the diaper would be unsanitary. But that wasn’t a good enough answer for the passenger. Angered by her refusal, the passenger hurled the diaper at the flight attendant. It struck her square in the head, depositing chunks of baby dung that clung like peanut butter to her hair. The two women ended up wrestling on the floor. They had to be separated by passengers. • Passengers on a flight from Miami to San Juan, Puerto Rico, were stunned by the actions of one deranged passenger. He walked to the rear of the plane, then charged up the aisle, slapping passengers’ heads along the way. Next, he kicked a pregnant flight attendant, who immediately fell to the ground. As if that weren’t enough, he bit a young boy on the arm. At this point the man was restrained and handcuffed by crew members. He was arrested upon arrival. • When bad weather closed the Dallas/Fort Worth airport for several hours, departing planes were stuck on the ground for the duration. One frustrated passenger, a young woman, walked up to a female flight attendant and said, “I’m sorry, but I have to do this.” The passenger then punched the flight attendant in the face, breaking her nose in the process. • A flight attendant returning to work after a double-mastectomy and a struggle with multiple sclerosis had a run-in with a disgruntled passenger. One of the last to board the plane, the passenger became enraged when there was no room in the overhead bin above his seat. He snatched the bags from the compartment, threw them to the floor and put his own bag in the space he had created. After hearing angry cries from passengers, the flight attendant appeared from the galley to see what the fuss was all about. When the passengers explained what happened, she turned to the offending passenger. “Sir, you can’t do that,” she said. The passenger stood up, cocked his arm and broke her jaw with one punch. • For some inexplicable reason, a passenger began throwing peanuts at a man across the aisle. The man was sitting with his wife, minding his own business. When the first peanut hit him in the face, he ignored it. After the second peanut struck him, he looked up to see who had thrown it. He threw a harsh glance at the perpetrator, expecting him to cease immediately. When a third peanut hit him in the eye, he’d had enough. “Do that again,” he warned, “and I’ll punch your lights out.” But the peanut-tossing passenger couldn’t resist. He tossed a salted Planter’s one last time. The victim got out of his seat and triple-punched the peanut-tosser so hard that witnesses heard his jaw break. The plane was diverted to the closest airport and the peanut-tosser was kicked off. • During a full flight between New York and London, a passenger noticed that the sleeping man in the window seat looked a bit pale. Sensing that something was wrong yet not wanting to wake him, the concerned passenger alerted flight attendants who soon determined that the sleeping man was dead. Apparently, he had died a few hours earlier because his body was already cold. Horrified by the prospect of sitting next to a dead man, the passenger demanded another seat. But the flight was completely full; every seat was occupied. Finally, one flight attendant had an inspiration. She approached a uniformed military officer who agreed to sit next to the dead man for the duration of the flight.

Only two people knew this side of her—herself, and the one who had created it; the one who made her secretly loathe herself, made her feel used and dirty and broken—like tarnished scraps of silver. These night-time reminders made her too aware that like those silver scraps, even if she were somehow melded into something whole, she would be new—never the same as she once was. Never unbroken.

It was another watershed event for a woman who had for so long believed herself worthless, with little to offer the world other than her sense of style. Her life in the royal family had been directly responsible for creating this confusion. As her friend James Gilbey says: “When she went to Pakistan last year she was amazed that five million people turned out just to see her. Diana has this extraordinary battle going on in her mind. ‘How can all these people want to see me?’ and then I get home in the evening and lead this mouse-like existence. Nobody says: ‘Well done.’ She has this incredible dichotomy in her mind. She has this adulation out there and this extraordinary vacant life at home. There is nobody and nothing there in the sense that nobody is saying nice things to her--apart of course from the children. She feels she is in an alien world.” Little things mean so much to Diana. She doesn’t seek praise but on public engagements if people thank her for helping, it turns a routine duty into a very special moment. Years ago she never believed the plaudits she received, now she is much more comfortable accepting a kind word and a friendly gesture. If she makes a difference, it makes her day. She has discussed with church leaders, including the Archbishop or Canterbury and several leading bishops, the blossoming of this deep seated need within herself to help those who are sick and dying. “Anywhere I see suffering, that is where I want to be, doing what I can,” she says. Visits to specialist hospitals like Stoke Mandeville or Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children are not a chore but deeply satisfying. As America’s First Lady, Barbara Bush, discovered when she joined the Princess on a visit to an AIDS ward of the Middlesex Hospital in July 1991 there is nothing maudlin about Diana’s attitude towards the sick. When a bed-bound patient burst into tears as the Princess was chatting to him, Diana spontaneously put her arms around him and gave him an enormous hug. It was a touching moment which affected the First Lady and others who were present. While she has since spoken of the need to give AIDS sufferers a cuddle, for Diana this moment was a personal achievement. As she held him to her, she was giving in to her own self rather than conforming to her role as a princess.