Sound Vibration Quotes

You want to watch the world burn?" "Let me guess, you'll set it on fire?" I ask. He chuckles, the sound vibrating through me settling into my bones. "No, darling. I'll hand you the match, and stand at your back, watching you become queen of the ashes.

At times, silence can be a welcoming and hospitable partner when we can let loose, and the flow of time is sending a comforting wave of sound vibrations gently opening the skyline. ("A gap of silence")

Through living in a space that we do not understand, everything may become meaningless, incoherent, and forcefully scary. If fear rules our lives, we lose the core of our being, since 'fear' disrupts the schedule of our existence and blocks the soothing waves of the sound vibrations. (“Because the world has corona”)

Emotional illiterates, who don’t recognize the sound of a broken heart, will never be able to hear the subtle vibrations of love reverberating through the rustling flora of life. ("Love as dizzy as a cathedral”)

Om is not just a sound or vibration. It is not just a symbol. It is the entire cosmos, whatever we can see, touch, hear and feel. Moreover, it is all that is within our perception and all that is beyond our perception. It is the core of our very existence. If you think of Om only as a sound, a technique or a symbol of the Divine, you will miss it altogether. Om is the mysterious cosmic energy that is the substratum of all the things and all the beings of the entire universe. It is an eternal song of the Divine. It is continuously resounding in silence on the background of everything that exists.

His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.

There was a loud scraping noise as five chairs slid backward. The men rose as a unit. And started coming for her. She looked to the faces of the two she knew, but their grave expressions weren't encouraging. And then the knives came out. With a metallic whoosh, five black daggers were unsheathed. She backed up frantically, hands in front of herself. She slammed into a wall and was about to scream for Wrath when the men dropped down on bended knees in a circle around her. In a single movement, as if they'd been choreographed, they buried the daggers into the floor at her feet and bowed their heads. The great whoomp of sound as steel met wood seemed both a pledge and a battle cry. The handles of the knives vibrated. The rap music continued to pound. They seemed to be waiting for some kind of response from her. "Umm. Thank you," she said. The men's heads lifted. Etched into the harsh planes of their faces was total reverence. Even the scarred one had a respectful expression. And then Wrath came in with a squeeze bottle of Hershey's syrup. "Bacon's on the way." He smiled. "Hey, they like you." "And thank God for that," she murmured, looking down at the daggers.

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

Be music always. Keep changing the keys, tones, pitch, and volume of each of the songs you create along your life's journey and play on.

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born. . . .

Always that same LSD story, you've all seen it. 'Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy.' What a dick! Fuck him, he’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn’t he take off on the ground first? Check it out. You don’t see ducks lined up to catch elevators to fly south—they fly from the ground, ya moron, quit ruining it for everybody. He’s a moron, he’s dead—good, we lost a moron, fuckin’ celebrate. Wow, I just felt the world get lighter. We lost a moron! I don’t mean to sound cold, or cruel, or vicious, but I am, so that’s the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought. How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn't that be news-worthy, just the once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition and lies? I think it would be news-worthy. 'Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves' . . . 'Here's Tom with the weather.

Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss and now too distant ever to be recaptured!...What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds?

Do you want to suck face or not?” “Suck face?” His head fell back and he laughed, his chest vibrating against me. It was a lusty, full-bodied sound and my toes curled at hearing it. Gideon laughed so rarely. My hands slid under his sweater and glided over that warm skin. My lips moved over his jaw. “Is that a no?” “Angel, I’ll suck on any part of your body I can get my mouth on.

I am the Cosmic Ocean of sound and the little wave of the body vibration in it.

Each asana is like a sound or letter in an alphabet. Every letter in an alphabet produces a unique sound vibration. Each asana vibrates at a specific frequency. When asanas are performed in sequence, beautiful phrases or sutras result, producing a mystical language.

Myrnin was silent for a beat, and then he said, “Bob would be very disappointed in you.” “Bob the spider?” “He looks at you like a mother, you know. I’m surprised at your lack of work ethic. Think of the example you set for—” She hung up on him and turned the phone on vibrate and relaxed in Shane’s arms. “You’re not leaving,” he said. He sounded surprised. “You always leave when he calls.” “Not now,” she said. And kissed him again, sweetly and gently.

You want to watch the world burn?” “Let me guess, you’ll set it on fire?” I ask. He chuckles, the sound vibrating through me and settling into my bones. “No, darling. I’ll hand you the match, and stand at your back, watching you become queen of the ashes.

He’s supposed to look out for you.” “I do!” Kieran sounded offended. “You should be proud of her. Hart requested her presence personally at the Drake coronation.” I closed my eyes briefly. We were doomed. “You went to a vampire ceremony?” Grandpa asked evenly. “He didn’t know?” Kieran asked. “No, he didn’t.” “Sorry.” Grandpa vibrated with rage. “I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in my family!” “It’s different now,” Kieran tried to assuage him. “I’m dating Solange Drake. They’re a good family.” Grandpa went red, then purple. Kieran took a step back. I whacked Grandpa between the shoulder blades. “Grandpa, breathe!

Animals can always read your vibration, and if you are intent on empowering your life, they will often gift you by making special melodies of sound to balance your chakras and tune up your body.

My name...my name is Mary. I'm here with a friend.' Rhage stopped breathing. His heart skipped a beat and then slowed. "Say that again,' he whispered. 'Ah, my name is Mary Luce. I'm a friend of Bella's...We came here with a boy, with John Matthew. We were invited.' Rhage shivered, a balmy rush blooming out all over his skin. The musical lilt of her voice, the rhythm of her speech, the sound of her words, it all spread through him, calming him, comforting him. Chaining him sweetly. He closed his eyes. 'Say something else.' 'What?' she asked, baffled. 'Talk. Talk to me. I want to hear your voice.' She was silent, and he was about to demand that she speak when she said, 'You don't look well. Do you need a doctor?' He found himself swaying. The words didn't matter. It was her sound: low, soft, a quiet brushing in his ears. He felt as if here being stroked on the inside of his skin. 'More,' he said, twisting his palm around to the front of her neck so he could feel the vibrations in her throat better. 'Could you... could you please let go of me?' 'No.' He brought his other arm up. She was wearing some kind of fleece, and he moved the collar aside, putting his hand on her shoulder so she couldn't get away from him. 'Talk.' She started to struggle. 'You're crowding me.' 'I know. Talk.' 'Oh for God's sake, what do you want me to say?' Even exasperated, her voice was beautiful. 'Anything.' 'Fine. Get your hand off my throat and let me go or I'm going to knee you where it counts.' He laughed. Then sank his lower body into her, trapping her with his thighs and hips. She stiffened against him, but he got an ample feel of her. She was built lean, though there was no doubt she was female. Her breasts hit his chest, her hips cushioned his, her stomach was soft. 'Keep talking,' he said in her ear. God, she smelled good. Clean. Fresh. Like lemon. When she pushed against him, he leaned his full weight into her. Her breath came out in a rush. 'Please,' he murmured. Her chest moved against his as if she were inhaling. 'I... er, I have nothing to say. Except get off of me.' He smiled, careful to keep his mouth closed. There was no sense showing off his fangs, especially if she didn't know what he was. 'So say that.' 'What?' 'Nothing. Say nothing. Over and over and over again. Do it.' She bristled, the scent of fear replaced by a sharp spice, like fresh, pungent mint from a garden. She was annoyed now. 'Say it.' "Fine. Nothing. Nothing.' Abruptly she laughed, and the sound shot right through to his spine, burning him. 'Nothing, nothing. No-thing. No-thing. Noooooothing. There, is that good enought for you? Will you let me go now?

They began to tune up, and suddenly the auditorium was filled with a single sound - the most alive, three-dimensional thing I had ever heard. It made the hairs on my skin stand up, my breath catch in my throat....I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn't just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen...It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

We're just bits of light Trying to illuminate We're just sound vibrations With a unique pace Wading in the waves, oh Sailing through this sea Making divine consecrations Of the life we live

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

You want to watch the world burn?" "Let me guess, you'll set it on fire?" I ask. He chuckles, the sound vibrating through me settling into my bones. "No, darling. I'll hand you the match, and stand at your back, watching you become queen of the ashes.

Nice piano," I said. "Do you play?" "oh no, but Edwart does!" Eva Mullen said. "A little," Edwart said sheepishly. "Go ahead, play!" Eva said. She picked up the triangle that was lying on the piano and handed it to Edwart. He started banging on it. It sounded like construction work very early in the morning. "Whoops. I messed up. Let me start over," he said. He started banging again. "Wait. Uh. I haven't practiced in a while. Let me start over." Edwart continued to bang the triangle. Eva closed her eyes and raised her arms, swaying rhythmically to Edwart's music. Edwart held the triangle up high, in what appeared to be a grand finish, but then he brought it down hard, hitting the top of the piano. He continued to bang the piano, putting the entire force of his slim body into each smash. The piano shook. The room vibrated. When he finished I subtly removed my hands from my ears. "I wrote that for you," Edwart murmured, drawing me close. "It's called Belle's Lullaby.

Colors are vibrating light energies, each “color ray” produces a sound that affects matter.

Loving music had pushed all of us off the track- away from the normal pursuit of career, mate, and family, on an endless quest for that vibrating high, the plunge beyond time that comes only when you submerge yourself beneath the waterline of amplified sound. We were addicts, in a way, but also adept, enlightened by a noise most people considered no more than a pleasant distraction. What was left for us but to practice our art of listening?

I would give you the world. You simply have to ask. You want kids? Done.” He presses his lips to my jaw. My stomach tightens. “You want to stay here and never work again?” Another kiss, this time just beneath my ear. “Done.” My core flutters, heat spreading through me. “You want to watch the world burn?” “Let me guess, you’ll set it on fire?” I ask. He chuckles, the sound vibrating through me and settling into my bones. “No, darling. I’ll hand you the match and stand at your back, watching you become queen of the ashes.

The simplest and the most incredible thing in the world had come true again: two people speaking to each other, each for himself; and sounds, called words, shaped the same images and feelings in that palpitating mass behind the skull, and out of meaningless vibrations of the vocal chords and their unexplainable reactions in the viscous gray convolutions, skies suddenly grew again in which were mirrored clouds, brooks, past times, growth and decay and hard-won wisdom.

Her laughter vibrated along my neck and beneath my skin. I'd never heard her make such a goofy, indelicate sound. Another one of her walls I'd penetrated. Victory surged warm and sharp in my chest, and for a brief pulse I wanted to yell out the window that she was letting me in.

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of realities fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny silver of an immense world.

The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills life again and eternalizes it.

And then he pressed into her. First his thighs, then his middle, his chest, and finally his mouth. She made a whimpering sound, but its definition was unclear even to her, until she realized that her arms had gone around him instinctually, and that she was clutching his back, his shoulders, her hands restless and greedy for the feel of him. He kissed her openmouthed, using his tongue, and when she kissed back, she felt the hum that vibrated deep inside his chest. It was the kind of hungry sound she hadn’t heard in a long time. Masculine and carnal, it thrilled and aroused her.

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

Music is sound, sound consists of vibrations in the air, and these particular vibrations resonated with the marrow of my bones, with the tissues of my heart. - Addison Goodheart pg. 199

Without sound, There would be no music. And without music, There would be no life. And without a life force, There would be no matter. But it does not matter - Because what is matter, If there is no light?

And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the center of the dark below. And dove. Case's sensory input warped with their velocity. His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue. His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sounds of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice.

Indeed ... but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes. But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right ... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it ... howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica ... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge ... The Edge ... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others -- the living -- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

Ask me for money, Peter.” I grabbed his wrists and pushed him against the wall. He looked everywhere but at me, no attempt to free himself. He was definitely stronger than I, but right that second I didn’t care if he was being patronizing. If it forced him to answer me, then patronizing I’d take. “No,” he murmured. “Ask me for money, goddamn you.” I punctuated it with a slam of his wrists, hard enough to jar, but not painful—I hoped. The next time my shirt wouldn’t be there to cushion it. I was that pissed. “I have!” He spat back, easily extricating his hands and pushing me away. I grabbed his arm, turning him around. “For Cai. For sex. Not for you. You’d rather go fuck a bunch of strangers—” “I don’t fuck anyone but Darryl anymore,” he denied. “It’s just a show for a bunch of voyeurs. No one gets hurt.” “I get hurt!” “I don’t have any other way, Austin.” “You have me. Ask me,” I said, hating the pleading sound in my voice. “No.” “Jesus Christ, why the fuck not?” “Because I don’t want you to be a fucking trick!” The shout was so loud I felt the vibrations along my spine.

God speaks to you all the time ~ Have you tuned in to the cosmic vibrations of love, harmony, peace, and truth? Unless you quieten that blabbering little mind of yours, you won’t be able to listen to the Divine music that plays on and on... Just for one heavenly second, shut your eyes, ears, and mind to the cacophonous noises of this physical, illusionary, temporary world. Exit all the drama. Just for that one heavenly second, stay quiet and simply listen. Listen to the ambrosial sound. It vibrates with joy. You can have more of this soulful peace in your life, if only you choose to align yourself with the Source of Love and Light. The more you stay attuned to "Home", the less you’d wander in-vain.

everyone is interdependent. Everyone is vulnerable. Everyone is penetrable, and everyone is penetrated incessantly by the vibrations of sound traveling into the inner ear.

O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear!

Let the sounds of nature amplify your vibrations of peace.

Jin made a sound as high pitched as a tea kettle as his spherical body vibrated with excitement. "Pirate hunters. We're going to be pirate hunters." Damn it. She'd lost him. Jin bobbed up and down, looking like a jack in the box. "I never say this, but be yourself, Kira, and we can realize our lifelong dream." Jin screamed to himself as he careened in a circle. "We'll get a big fancy hat and an artificial leg. This is going to be great.

You can learn to enjoy your sensuality in each and every moment. Right now, listening to music, let the music vibrate the pores of your skin. Washing dishes, let the suds bathe your hands. Walking the dog, learn to enjoy being pulled. Every day there are hundreds of things you can enjoy. You can enjoy the leisureliness of a stroll, or the sweat of jogging, or the tang of a breeze. Every moment can be an experience that lets you grow in sensuality. Right now you can feel this paper, this book, this space, the sounds around you, even your own breathing. Being open to all that and with all that will gradually turn you on to life more and more.

The reach of vibrations is according to the fineness of the plane of their starting-point. To speak more plainly, the word uttered by the lips can only reach the ears of the hearer; but the thought proceeding from the mind reaches far, shooting from mind to mind. The vibrations of mind are much stronger than those of words. The earnest feelings of one heart can pierce the heart of another; they speak in the silence, spreading out into the sphere, so that the very atmosphere of a person's presence proclaims his thoughts and emotions. The vibrations of the soul are the most powerful and far-reaching, they run like an electric current from soul to soul.

Helium is widely recognized as an over-the-counter, low-density gas that, when inhaled, temporarily increases the vibrational frequency of your windpipe and larynx, making you sound like Mickey Mouse.

The organist was almost at the end of the anthem’s long introduction, and as the crescendo increases the cathedral began to glitter before my eyes until I felt as if every stone in the building was vibrating in anticipation of the sweeping sword of sound from the Choir. The note exploded in our midst, and at that moment I knew our creator had touched not only me but all of us, just as Harriet had touched that sculpture with a loving hand long ago, and in that touch I sensed the indestructible fidelity, the indescribable devotion and the inexhaustible energy of the creator as he shaped his creation, bringing life out of dead matter, wresting form continually from chaos. Nothing was ever lost, Harriet had said, and nothing was ever wasted because always, when the work was finally completed, every article of the created process, seen or unseen, kept or discarded, broken or mended – EVERYTHING was justified, glorified and redeemed.

From the sounds of it, the Militia intended to simply knock the gates over with a battering ram. Boom. Rin felt stone vibrating beneath her feet. “How old are those gates?” She wondered out loud. Boom. “Older than this province,” said Venka. “Maybe as old as the Red Emperor. Lot of architectural value.” “That’s a pity.” “Isn’t it?

A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head.

Smoke puffed from the open V of his shirt. And still the humming of the electricity went on and on, filling my head, vibrating in there. I think it's the sound mad people must hear, that or something like it.

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn’t allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren’t noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor’s steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one’s sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence.

The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.

You're going to have to take care of yourself," Karrin said quietly. "Over the next few weeks. Rest. Give yourself a chance to heal. Keep the wound on your leg clean. Get to a doctor and get that arm into a proper cast. I know you can't feel it, but it's important that--" I stood, leaned over the bed, and kissed her on the mouth. Her words dissolved into a soft sound that vibrated against my lips. Then her good arm slid around my neck, and there wasn't any sound at all. It was a long kiss. A slow kiss. A good one. I didn't draw away until it came to its end. I didn't open my eyes for a moment after. "...oh...," she said in a small voice. Her hand slid down my arm to lie upon mine. "We do crazy things for love," I said quietly, and turned my hand over, fingers curling around hers.

How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses - with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or too distant, such as the beings who live on a star or the creatures which live in a drop of water... with ears that deceive us by converting vibrations of the air into tones that we can hear, for they are sprites which miraculously change movement into sound, a metamorphosis which gives birth to harmonies which turn the silent agitation of nature into song... with our sense of smell, which is poorer than any dog's... with our sense of taste, which is barely capable of detecting the age of a wine! Ah! If we had other senses which would work other miracles for us, how many more things would we not discover around us!

I got out of the car and slammed its door. How matter-of-fact, how square that slam sounded in the void of the sunless day! Woof, commented the dog perfunctorily. I pressed the bell button, it vibrated through my whole system. Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne. From what depth this re-nonsense? Woof, said the dog. A rush and a shuffle, and woosh-woosh went the door. Couple of inches taller. Pink-rimmed glasses. New, heaped-up hairdo, new ears. How simple! The moment, the death that I had kept conjuring up for three years was as simple as a bit of dry wood. She was frankly and hugely pregnant. Her head looked smaller (only two seconds had passed really, but let me give them as much wooden duration as life can stand), and her pale-freckled cheeks were hollowed, and her bare shins and arms had lost all their tan, so that the little hairs showed. She wore a brown, sleeveless felt dress and sloppy felt slippers. 'We-e-ell!' she exhaled after a pause with all the emphasis of wonder and welcome. 'Husband at home?' I croaked, fist in pocket. I could not kill her, of course, as some have thought. You see I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother's heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother's ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born. And this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother. We all share the blood of the first mother. We are truly children of one blood.

Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us. [Was He Mad?]

The human voice vibrates naturally - but in such a way - to such a degree that it all sounds beautiful - it is the nature of the voice. We imitate such effects not only on wind instruments, but also with violins - even on clavier - but as soon as you go beyond the natural limits, it no longer sounds beautiful - because it is contrary to nature.

He’s all over me, kissing like a man who isn’t practiced with this. It’s wild and messy, and so unbelievably perfect. He can’t decide whether he wants to suck on my tongue or bite it. His sounds are unreal, low and throaty, vibrating against my lips. I’m practically in his lap, swallowing him alive. I don’t care how inappropriate I look right now. I don’t care if this building goes up in flames. I’m going to continue kissing . . .

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.

Okay, time to get serious. I let my smile fade slowly and lowered my pitch, as no human woman could have. “I’m not joking this time. If I see it, it’s mine, and you won’t get it back at the end of the school year.” I growled, deep and long, savoring the feel of the vibrations in my throat, as if the sound alone could save me. It wasn’t quite a cat’s growl but it was damn close. And it was his last warning. Miguel dismissed my threat with an easy smile, and my stomach clenched. Oh, yeah, Faythe. You have Puss shaking in his boots, all right.

According to Hindu mythology, the universe was created with a sound: “om.” It is a syllable that contains within it everything that ever was and everything that will be. When the Arecibo telescope is pointed at the space between stars, it hears a faint hum. Astronomers call that the cosmic microwave background. It’s the residual radiation of the Big Bang, the explosion that created the universe fourteen billion years ago. But you can also think of it as a barely audible reverberation of that original “om.” That syllable was so resonant that the night sky will keep vibrating for as long as the universe exists. When Arecibo is not listening to anything else, it hears the voice of creation.

The belfry of St Cloud slowly emitted ten strokes from its broad sonorous jaws. There was something melancholy in that voice of bronze, which thus breathed its lamentations in the night. But each of those sounds, which told the hour he sighed for, vibrated harmoniously in the heart of the young man.

But my whole body is one pain. I cannot stand on my legs anymore. I stagger. I fall back on my bed. My eyes close and fill with smarting tears. I want to be crucified on the wall, but I cannot. My body becomes heavier and heavier and filled with sharper pain. My flesh is enraged against me. I hear voices through the wall. The next room vibrates with a distant sound, a mist of sound which scarcely comes through the wall. I shall not be able to listen anymore, or look into the room, or hear anything distinctly. And I, who have not cried since my childhood, I cry now like a child because of all that I shall never have. I cry over lost beauty and grandeur. I love everything that I should have embraced.

How to Meditate 1. Sit comfortably, with your spine erect, either in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion. 2. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and feel the points of contact between your body and the chair or the floor. Notice the sensations associated with sitting—feelings of pressure, warmth, tingling, vibration, etc. 3. Gradually become aware of the process of breathing. Pay attention to wherever you feel the breath most distinctly—either at your nostrils or in the rising and falling of your abdomen. 4. Allow your attention to rest in the mere sensation of breathing. (You don’t have to control your breath. Just let it come and go naturally.) 5. Every time your mind wanders in thought, gently return it to the breath. 6. As you focus on the process of breathing, you will also perceive sounds, bodily sensations, or emotions. Simply observe these phenomena as they appear in consciousness and then return to the breath. 7. The moment you notice that you have been lost in thought, observe the present thought itself as an object of consciousness. Then return your attention to the breath—or to any sounds or sensations arising in the next moment. 8. Continue in this way until you can merely witness all objects of consciousness—sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, even thoughts themselves—as they arise, change, and pass away.

Am I staring? Forgive me. It's only that I adore the way you laugh." Pandora blushed up to her hairline. She went to the nearest target and began to jerk out arrows. "Please don't compliment me." Gabriel went to the next target. "You don't like compliments?" "No, they make me feel awkward. They never seem true." "Perhaps they don't seem true to you, but that doesn't mean they're not." After sliding his arrows into a leather quiver, Gabriel came to help collect hers. "In this case," Pandora said, "it's definitely not true. My laugh sounds like a serenading tree frog swinging on a rusty gate." Gabriel smiled. "Like silver wind chimes in a summer breeze." "That's not at all how it sounds," Pandora scoffed. "But thats how it makes me feel." The intimate note in his voice seemed to vibrate along the network of fine, taut nerves strung all through her.

You think The Darkling is powerful?" I asked, startled by the icy clarity of my voice. "You have no idea what he is capable of. Only I have seen what he can do. Only I have faced him and lived to tell about it." I sounded like a stranger to my own ears, but I felt the echo of my power vibrating through me, and I pushed on. I turned slowly, meeting each stunned gaze. "I don't care if you think I'm a Saint or a fool or the Darkling's whore. If you want to remain at the Little Palace, you will follow me. And if you don't like it, you will be gone by tonight, or I will have you in chains. I am a soldier. I am the Sun Summoner. And I'm the only chance you have.

So here we are, in the family planning aisle with a cart full of sports drinks and our hands full of . . . “Trojans, Ramses, Magnum . . . Jeez, these are worse than names for muscle cars,” Jase observes, sliding his finger along the display. “They do sound sorta, well, forceful.” I flip over the box I’m holding to read the instructions. Jase glances up to smile at me. “Don’t worry, Sam. It’s just us.” “I don’t get what half these descriptions mean . . . What’s a vibrating ring?” “Sounds like the part that breaks on the washing machine. What’s extra-sensitive? That sounds like how we describe George.” I’m giggling. “Okay, would that be better or worse than ‘ultimate feeling’—and look—there’s ‘shared pleasure’ condoms and ‘her pleasure’ condoms. But there’s no ‘his pleasure.’” “I’m pretty sure that comes with the territory,” Jase says dryly. “Put down those Technicolor ones. No freaking way.” “But blue’s my favorite color,” I say, batting my eyelashes at him. “Put them down. The glow-in-the-dark ones too. Jesus. Why do they even make those?” “For the visually impaired?” I ask, reshelving the boxes. We move to the checkout line. “Enjoy the rest of your evening,” the clerk calls as we leave. “Do you think he knew?” I ask. “You’re blushing again,” Jase mutters absently. “Did who know what?” “The sales guy. Why we were buying these?” A smile pulls at the corners of his mouth. “Of course not. I’m sure it never occurred to him that we were actually buying birth control for ourselves. I bet he thought it was a . . . a . . . housewarming gift.” Okay, I’m ridiculous. “Or party favors,” I laugh. “Or”—he scrutinized the receipt—“supplies for a really expensive water balloon fight.” “Visual aids for health class?” I slip my hand into the back pocket of Jase’s jeans. “Or little raincoats for . . .” He pauses, stumped. “Barbie dolls,” I suggest. “G.I. Joes,” he corrects, and slips his free hand into the back pocket of my jeans, bumping his hip against mine as we head back to the car.

I can hear. Hear them. It. Don’t you hear?” It was a struggle to speak, to form coherent thoughts. The call here was different; not the beehive sound of Craigh na Dun, but a hum like the vibration of the air following the striking of a great bell. I could feel it ringing in the long bones of my arms, echoing through pectoral girdle and spine. Jamie

Hey what's the matter baby? said my wife, propped up on the bed. I'm a fucking vampire! I cried, thinking of Bryan Ferry and his bursting flowers and his prancing horses and his flight of swallows and his hedged swimming pool and his lovely wife. No, you're not. Come here, she said. I crawled onto the bed and she pulled the covers away. Listen, she said. I put my ear against her distended stomach, her knapsack, and listened. I could hear little trapped people swimming around within. They are eating me from the inside, she said. Lucky them, I said. I'm serious, she said. But she had fallen asleep and I crawled off the bed across the floor, up the wainscot and along the paneled ceiling. I pressed my ear to the ceiling and listened. I could hear people gathering on the floor above. The ceiling vibrated. I recognized the voices as past collaborators, going back many years. They sounded fatigued as if depleted of oxygen, maybe, or as if someone has siphoned their blood away. I could hear them sobbing and cursing and consoling each other. I fell asleep.

Using only her index finger, Juliette slowly played the opening notes of the Mozart tune. One measure, two, three, and at the end of the fourth, a barely audible click came, sending a vibration through her fingers, and a small door opened on the side of the pianoforte. A weak thump sounded as a fabric-wrapped parcel fell out of the now open compartment onto the rug.

After dinner, Holden took a long, slow tour of his new ship. He opened every door, looked in every closet, turned on every panel, and read every readout. He stood in engineering next to the fusion reactor and closed his eyes, getting used to the almost subliminal vibration she made. If something ever went wrong with it, he wanted to feel it in his bones before any warning ever sounded.

She was pulling a rope out of the water and knew it was coming to the end when the barnacles started to appear and they became more think and clustered. Then it was strangely peaceful and the sound was turned off. She stood at the bow of a ship. If only she could have stood this way above the water and really breathed and let the waves go by like pages being turned and watched everything more closely and chosen things more carefully then she might have been able to read the spirit within herself and would not have spent her life as if she were only halfway in it. For a moment she felt an astonishing brilliance and heat and light and all of herself flared up and the vibration after sixty-five years was not weakened by time but more dense then suddenly it was as if the flame had caught the flimsiest piece of paper for it flickered up and flew into the air then quickly sank down withered into a thin cinder of ash which blew off, inconsequential. Her life had not been long enough for her to know the whole of herself, it had not been long enough or wide.

When a husky laugh echoed behind her, Lily's stomach absolutely fell to her feet. She knew how a rattlesnake sounded in the brittlebush on the ranch and the raspy croak of a passing raven. She knew the trickling of water in a spring and the impatient huff of Bonnie when she was done for the day. And Lily knew—even after all this time—the deep, vibrating sound of Leo Grady's voice in the morning, the way it warmed up slowly, from rocks to gravel to a smooth, polished stone.

There are no specific memories of the first time I used ketamine, which was around age 17 or 18. The strongest recollection of ketamine use regarded an instance when I was concurrently smoking marijuana and inhaling nitrous oxide. I was in an easy chair and the popular high school band Sublime was playing on the CD player. I was with a friend. We were snorting lines of ketamine and then smoking marijuana from a pipe and blowing the marijuana smoke into a nitrous-filled balloon and inhaling and exhaling the nitrous-filled balloon until there was no more nitrous oxide in the balloon to achieve acute sensations of pleasure, [adjective describing state in which one is unable to comprehend anything], disorientation, etc. The first time I attempted this process my vision behaved as a compact disc sound when it skips - a single frame of vision replacing itself repeatedly for over 60 seconds, I think. Everything was vibrating. Obviously I couldn't move. My friend was later vomiting in the bathroom a lot and I remember being particularly fascinated by the sound of it; it was like he was screaming at the same time as vomiting, which I found funny, and he was making, to a certain degree, demon-like noises. My time 'with' ketamine lasted three months at the most, but despite my attempts I never achieved a 'k-hole.' At a party, once, I saw a girl sitting in bushes and asked her what she was doing and she said "I'm in a 'k-hole.'" While I have since stopped doing ketamine because of availability and lack of interest, I would do ketamine again because I would like to be in a 'k-hole.

It is impossible to express the experiences you have below the surface with words, when water gently caresses your face and body, the pulse decreases and your brain relaxes. You are immediately cut off from the stress and hustle of everyday life when you are below the surface – there are no noisy telephones or SMS messages, no inboxes full of mail, no electrical bills, or other trivialities of everyday life taking up time and energy. There is nothing connecting you to the surface but the same withheld breath that connects you to life. There is only you and a growing pressure on your chest that feels like a loving hug and the vibrations from the deep quiet tone of the sea. It is quite possible that this deep quiet tone is none other than the mantra Om, the sound of the universe, trickling life into every cell of your body.

With a sudden flash of anger, she blurted, "Lash wasn't impotent, all right? He wasn't ... impotent-" The temperature in the room plummeted so fast and so far, her breath came out in clouds. And what she saw in the mirror made her swing around and take a step back from John: His blue eyes glowed with an unholy light and his upper lip curled up to reveal fangs that were sharp and so long they looked like daggers. Objects all around the room began to vibrate: the lamps on the bed stands, the clothes on their hangers, the mirror on the wall. The collective rattling crescendoed to a dull roar and she had to steady herself on the bureau or run the risk of being knocked on her ass. The air was alive. Supercharged. Electric. Dangerous. And John was the center of the raging energy, his hands cranking into fists so tight his forearms trembled, his thighs grabbing onto his bones as he sank down into fighting stance. John's mouth stretched wide as his head shot forward on his spine... and he let out a war cry- Sound exploded all around her, so loud she had to cover her ears, so powerful she felt the blast against her face. For a moment, she thought he'd found his voice- except it wasn't vocal cords making that bellowing noise. The glass in the sliders blew out behind him, the sheets shattering into thousands of shards that blasted free of the house, the fragments bouncing on the slate and catching the light like raindrops... Or like tears.

It is the state of vibrations to which man is tuned that accounts for his soul's note. The different degrees of these notes form a variety of pitch divided by the mystics into three distinct grades. First the grade which produces power and intelligence, and may be pictured as a calm sea. Secondly, the grade of moderate activity which keeps all things in motion, and is a balance between power and weakness which may be pictured as the sea in motion. Thirdly, the grade of intense activity, which destroys everything and causes all weakness and blindness; it may be pictured as a stormy sea.

Somewhere, a book said once, all the talk ever talked, all the songs ever sung, still lived, had vibrated way out in space and if you could travel to Far Centauri you could hear George Washington talking in his sleep or Caesar surprised at the knife in his back. So much for sounds. What about light then? All things, once seen, they didn't just die, that couldn't be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly's gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers.

What’s wrong?” Before I could stop myself, I mumbled, “I’m used to resting my head on a warm tiger-fur pillow is what’s wrong.” He grunted, “Hmm, let me see what I can do.” Panicky, I squeaked out, “No, really. I’m okay. Don’t bother.” He ignored my protests, scooped up my mummy-wrapped self, and set me down again on his side of the fire. He turned me on my side so I faced the fire, lay down behind me, and slid an arm under my neck to cradle my head. “Is that more comfortable for you?” “Uh, yes and no. My head can definitely rest better in this position. Unfortunately, the rest of me is feeling the complete opposite of relaxed.” “What do you mean? Why can’t you relax?” “Because you’re too close for me to relax.” Bemused, he said, “Me being too close never bothered you when I was a tiger.” “The tiger you and the man you are two completely different things.” He put his arm around my waist and tugged me closer so we were spooned together. He sounded irritated and disappointed when he muttered, “It doesn’t feel different to me. Just close your eyes and imagine I’m still a tiger.” “It doesn’t exactly work like that.” I lay stiffly in his arms, nervous, especially when he began nuzzling the back of my neck. He said softly, “I like the smell of your hair.” His chest rumbled against my back, sending massaging vibrations through my body as he purred. “Ren, can you not do that right now?” He lifted his head. “You like it when I purr. It helps you sleep better.” “Yes, well, that only works with the tiger. How can you do that as a man anyway?” He paused, and said, “I don’t know. I just can,” then buried his face in my hair again and stroked my arm. “Uh, Ren? Explain to me how you plan to keep watch like this.” His lips grazed my neck. “I can hear and smell the Kappa, remember?” I twitched and shivered, with nerves, or anticipation, or something else, and he noticed. He stopped kissing my neck and lifted his head to peer at my face in the flickering firelight. His voice was solemn and calm. “Kells, I hope you know that I would never hurt you. You don’t need to be afraid of me.” Rolling toward him, I lifted my hand and touched his cheek. Looking into his blue eyes, I sighed. “I’m not afraid of you, Ren. I trust you with my life. I’ve just never been close to someone like this before.” He kissed me softly and smiled. “I haven’t either.” He shifted, lying down again. “Now, turn around and go to sleep. I’m warning you that I plan to sleep with you in my arms all night long. Who knows when, or if, I’ll ever get to do it again. So try to relax, and for heaven’s sake, don’t wiggle!” He pulled me back against his warm chest, and I closed my eyes. I ended up sleeping better than I had in weeks.

I say so strange a dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.

I ask about the Quakers’ silent services. She describes them as “not so much the absence of talking as the presence of god.” Interesting. Hers is a more poetic, more profound description than what I call it: room tone. But a synonym for “room tone” is in fact “presence,” the sound of a room that audio engineers record for editing purposes. Every place on earth at any given moment has unique acoustics based on who and what is there. So actors, broadcasters, and musicians always have to stop and be still for a minute while a recording is made of what seems like emptiness but is actually the barely audible vibrations of life itself. I

Had my parents allowed me, when I read a book, to pay a visit to the region it described, I should have felt that I was making an enormous advance towards the ultimate conquest of truth. For even if we have the sensation of being always enveloped in, surrounded by our own soul, still it does not seem a fixed and immovable prison; rather do we seem to be borne away with it, and perpetually struggling to transcend it, to break out into the world, with a perpetual discouragement as we hear endlessly all around us that unvarying sound which is not an echo from without, but the resonance of a vibration from within. We try to discover in things, which become precious to us on that account, the reflection of what our soul has projected on to them; we are disillusioned when we find that they are in reality devoid of the charm which they owed, in our minds, to the association of certain ideas; sometimes we mobilise all our spiritual forces in a glittering array in order to bring our influence to bear on other human beings who, we very well know, are situated outside ourselves where we can never reach them.

What does that story tell us about the Cardinal? It tells us that he could soften or harden his flesh at will. How did he do that? For a long time I had no idea. Then I listened to the stories again, and noticed how many of the translucent gods screamed like the Cardinal, or sang like the Gathergeist. They used sound - vibrations - to change their own bodies." It crossed Hark's mind that people could be softened the same way. You said the right thing, and struck the right chord, and then they were easier to manipulate. Bringing up Vyne's great success seemed to have sounded the right note. "That is the trick of it," remarked Vyne. "Listening to someone's story, and hearing what lies behind it. People always tell you more than they realize.

Maybe I should make the first move,” I whispered, wrapping my fingers around his wrist. “But what if he thinks I’m too easy?” “He’ll be too busy thinking he’s damned lucky.” “Well, then …” I wriggled around to face him. “Howdy, neighbor.” He traced my eyebrow with the tip of his finger. “Hi. I really like the view around here.” “The hospitality isn’t bad, either.” “Oh? Plenty of towels?” I pushed at his shoulder. “Do you want to suck face or not?” “Suck face?” His head fell back and he laughed, his chest vibrating against me. It was a lusty, full-bodied sound and my toes curled at hearing it. Gideon laughed so rarely. My hands slid under his sweater and glided over warm skin. My lips moved over his jaw. “Is that a no?” “Angel, I’ll suck on any part of your body I can get my mouth on.

One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out I rested a while on a boulder and then thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors - for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company - both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic - one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

The conductor stepped up, tapped twice on the rostrum, and a great hush descended. I felt the stillness, the auditorium alive, expectant. Then he brought down his baton and suddenly everything was pure sound. I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn’t just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen. Will hadn’t described any of it like this. I had thought I might be bored. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. And it made my imagination do unexpected things; as I sat there, I found myself thinking of things I hadn’t thought of for years, old emotions washing over me, new thoughts and ideas being pulled from me as if my perception itself were being stretched out of shape. It was almost too much, but I didn’t want it to stop.

How long Archibald slept he could not have said. He woke some hours later with a vague feeling that a thunderstorm of unusual violence had broken out in his immediate neighborhood. But this, he realized as the mists of slumber cleared away, was an error. The noise which had disturbed him was not thunder but the sound of someone snoring. Snoring like the dickens. The walls seemed to be vibrating like the deck of an ocean liner.... His spirit was not so completely broken as to make him lie supinely down beneath that snoring. The sound filled him, as snoring fills every right-thinking man, with a seething resentment and a passionate yearning for justice, and he climbed out of bed with the intention of taking the proper steps through the recognized channels. It is the custom nowadays to disparage the educational methods of the English public school and to maintain that they are not practical and of a kind to fit the growing boy for the problems of afterlife. But you do learn one thing at a public school, and that is how to act when somebody starts snoring. You jolly well grab a cake of soap and pop in and stuff it down the blighter's throat. And this is what Archibald proposed - God willing - to do.

Our insect musicians are roused to their greatest activity during the monsoons. At dusk the air seems to tinkle and murmur to their music. To the shrilling of the grasshoppers is added the staccato notes of the crickets, while in the grass and on the trees myriads of lesser artistes are producing a variety of sounds. As musicians, the cicadas are in a class of their own. Throughout the monsoons their screaming chorus rings through the forest. A shower, far from dampening their ardour, only rouses them to a deafening crescendo of effort. As with most insect musicians, the males do the performing, the females remain silent. This moved one chauvinistic Greek poet to exclaim: ‘Happy the cicadas, for they have voiceless wives!’ To which I would respond by saying, ‘Pity the female cicadas, for they have singing husbands!’ Probably the most familiar and homely of insect singers are the crickets. I won’t attempt to go into detail on how the cricket produces its music, except to say that its louder notes are produced by a rapid vibration of the wings, the right wing usually working over the left, the edge of one acting on the file of the other to produce a shrill, long-sustained note, like a violinist gone mad. Cicadas, on the other hand, use their abdominal muscles to produce their sound.

Something nudged Mollie’s shoulder. With the nudge came a reminder of the pain. She tried to snuggle back down into the darkness that had cushioned her from the agony in her head, but then someone called her name. Someone she knew. Jacob. He sounded far away. Surely he wouldn’t mind if she just slipped back into the warm darkness for a little while. “Mollie Tate. Don’t you dare leave me.” Goodness, he sounded demanding. And worried. And perhaps just a tad panicked. Mollie frowned at that. Or she would have if she could’ve remembered how. The darkness made everything fuzzy. But one thing she did remember—Jacob never panicked. She’d never met a man so calm in a crisis. So what had him rattled? Hands roamed over her arms and legs. They prodded and probed and seemed to jab every sore spot on her body. She wanted to scream at them to stop, but she only managed a pitiful little whining sound that barely even vibrated her throat. The hands must have heard it, though, for they stilled. “Mollie? Can you hear me?” Jacob. Heavens, how she loved that man. She’d gladly be his nurse for the rest of her days just to be close to him.

Matteo didn't lick a woman's pussy because he felt obligated, or at the very least not mine. I might have argued he enjoyed it more than I did if he wasn't so damn good at it. That talented tongue explored every part of me, thrusting in and out until I whimpered. When he turned his attention to my clit, it was so he could slide a finger inside me. I clenched around him on a cry, feeling the way he moaned in response vibrate through me. He withdrew that finger, only to add a second and curl them to stroke that spot inside me that made me quiver. "Teo," I whimpered, and the sound of his name seemed to push him over the edge. He wrapped his lips around the bundle of nerves at the apex of my thigh, sucking gently. My legs tightened around his head; my hand buried in his hair to hold him exactly where I wanted him as I shattered in a blinding orgasm that stole my ability to function. I laid there, panting and trying to regain my ability to move. When I opened my eyes, it was to Matteo shoving his own underwear down his legs and kicking them off. He pulled his fingers free of me and spread my legs wide from where they'd wrapped around his head. Sliding up my body, his hips lined up with mine so he could grind his length against my wet core. His lips found mine in a bruising, claiming kiss that seemed even more primal because he tasted like me. He reached down, sliding himself through my wet and notching his head at my entrance. Pulling away from my lips, he groaned, "Tell me you're mine." Still recovering from my orgasm, I nodded in a daze. "Words, Angel. Give me the words." "Yours," I murmured, cupping his cheek with a delirious smile and tugging him down to kiss him again. He slid inside me slowly, filling me until there wasn't a single inch that couldn't feel him. "Fuck," he groaned against my mouth. He reached down, wrapping my legs around his hips. Our foreheads pressed together; our mouths not quite touching as he started to move inside me. Even without his lips on mine, I could taste him, taste me in his breath on my face. One of his hands grabbed mine, our fingers intertwining while he wrapped his other under my shoulder to hold me where he wanted me. He slid in and out in slow, hard thrusts.

This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's socket. Through peacocked lashes I saw the dazzling diamond reflection of the low sun on the round back of a parked automobile. To all kinds of things a vivid pictorial sense had been restored by the sponge of the thaw. Water in overlapping festoons flowed down one sloping street and turned gracefully into another. With ever so slight a note of meretricious appeal, narrow passages between buildings revealed treasures of brick and purple. I remarked for the first time the humble fluting - last echoes of grooves on the shafts of columns - ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the rippling upon its lid - circles diverging from a fantastically ancient center. Erect, dark-headed shapes of dead snow (left by the blades of a bulldozer last Friday) were lined up like rudimentary penguins along the curbs, above the brilliant vibration of live gutters. I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into a delicately dying sky, and finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the town. Night had fallen without sound or ceremony when I came out again. ("The Vane Sisters")

It was awfully quiet. Chicago only gets this quiet when it snows, he thought. And then he flipped open the phone, pressed the voice button, and said “Katherine.” He said it softly, reverently. Five rings and then her voice mail. Hey, it’s Katherine, he heard, and in the background cars rushed by. They’d been walking home together from the RadioShack when she recorded the message. I’m not, uh. And she uhed, he remembered, because he’d goosed her butt as she tried to talk. Uh, at my cell phone, I guess. Leave me a message and I’ll call you back. And he remembered everything about it, and also everything about everything else, and why couldn’t he forget and beep. “Hey, it’s Col. I’m standing in a soybean field outside of Gutshot, Tennessee, which is a long story, and it’s hot. K. I’m standing here sweating like I had hyperhidrosis, that disease where you sweat a lot. Crap. That’s not interesting. But anyway, it’s hot, and so I’m thinking about cold to stay cool. And I was remembering walking through the snow coming back from the ridiculous movie. Do you remember that, K? We were on Giddings, and the snow made it so quiet, I couldn’t hear a thing in the world but you. And it was so cold then, and so silent, and I loved you so much. Now it’s hot, and dead quiet again, and I love you still.” Five minutes later, he was trudging back when his phone began vibrating. He raced back to the spot with good reception and, breathless answered. “Did you listen to the message?” he asked immediately. “I don’t think I need to,” she answered. “I’m sorry, Colin. But I think we made a really good decision.” And he didn’t even care to point out that they hadn’t made a decision, because the sound of her voice felt so good –well not good exactly. It felt like the mysterium tremedum et fascinans, the fear and the fascination. The great and terrible awe.

NAMING THE EARTH (a poem of light for national poetry day) And the world will be born again in circles of steaming breath and beams of light as each one of us directs our inner eye upon its name. Hear the cry of wings, the sigh of leaves and grass, smell the new sweet mist rising as the pathway is cleared at last. Stones stand ready - they have known since ages and ages ago that they were not alone. Water carries the planet's energy into skies and down to earth and bones. The cold parts steadily as we come together, bodies and hearts warm, hands tingling. We are silent but our eyes are singing. We look, we feel, we know, we trust each other's souls, we have no need to speak. Not now, but later, when the time is right, the name will ring within the iron core of each other's listening - and the very earth's being. Every creature, every plant, will hear it calling, tolling like a bell - a sound we've always felt but never dared to hope to hear reverberating - true at last, at every level of existence. The poets come together to open the intimate centre. Believe in life and air - breathe the light itself, for these are the energies and rhythms that we need to see, to touch, to reach, to identify, to say, the NAME. Colours on your skin fuse and dissolve - leave the river clean for pure space and time to enter and flow in. We all become one fluid stream of stillness and motion, of flaring thought pulses discovering weird pools and twists within where darkness hides from the flames in our eyes but will not snare us. We probe deeper still, journeying towards a unity which will be more raw and yet also more formed than anything written or spoken before. Our fragile bodies fall away - and the trees, and the roots of trees, guide us - lead us away from the faces we remember seeing each day in the mirror - into an ocean of dreams seething with warmth, love, where the beginning is real, ripe, evolving. And the world is born again in circles of steaming breath and beams of light. An ache - a signal - a trembling moment - and the time is right to say the name. We sing as one whole voice of the universal - all the words, the names of every tiny thirsting thing, and they ring out together as one sound, one energy, one sense, one vibration, one breath. And the world listens, beats, shines, glows - IS - Exists!

Now let me tell you something. I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers. I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously. I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten. I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends. I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the Rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the Bat and the belling roar of the Red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard Wolves baying at a winter’s moon, Red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes. I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things. But— All this I did without you. This was my loss. All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain. All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever-surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.

According to Shaivism, anupaya may also be reached by entering into the infinite blissfulness of the Self through the powerful experiences of sensual pleasures. This practice is designed to help the practitioner reach the highest levels by accelerating their progress through the sakta and sambhava upayas. These carefully guarded doctrines of Tantric sadhana are the basis for certain practices, like the use of the five makaras (hrdaya) mentioned earlier. The experience of a powerful sensual pleasure quickly removes a person’s dullness or indifference. It awakens in them the hidden nature and source of blissfulness and starts its inner vibration. Abhinavagupta says that only those people who are awakened to their own inner vitality can truly be said to have a heart (hrdaya). They are known as sahrdaya (connoisseurs). Those uninfluenced by this type of experiences are said to be heartless. In his words: “It is explained thus—The heart of a person, shedding of its attitude of indifference while listening to the sweet sounds of a song or while feeling the delightful touch of something like sandalpaste, immediately starts a wonderful vibratory movement. (This) is called ananda-sakti and because of its presence the person concerned is considered to have a heart (in their body) (Tantraloka, III.209-10). People who do not become one (with such blissful experiences), and who do not feel their physical body being merged into it, are said to be heartless because their consciousness itself remains immersed (in the gross body) (ibid., III.24).” The philosopher Jayaratha addresses this topic as well when he quotes a verse from a work by an author named Parasastabhutipada: “The worship to be performed by advanced aspirants consists of strengthening their position in the basic state of (infinite and blissful pure consciousness), on the occasions of the experiences of all such delightful objects which are to be seen here as having sweet and beautiful forms (Tantraloka, II.219).” These authors are pointing out that if people participate in pleasurable experiences with that special sharp alertness known as avadhana, they will become oblivious to the limitations of their usual body-consciousness and their pure consciousness will be fully illumined. According to Vijnanabhairava: “A Shiva yogin, having directed his attention to the inner bliss which arises on the occasion of some immense joy, or on seeing a close relative after a long time, should immerse his mind in that bliss and become one with it (Vijnanabhairava, 71). A yogin should fix his mind on each phenomenon which brings satisfaction (because) his own state of infinite bliss arises therein (ibid., 74).” In summary, Kashmir Shaivism is a philosophy that embraces life in its totality. Unlike puritanical systems it does not shy away from the pleasant and aesthetically pleasing aspects of life as somehow being unspiritual or contaminated. On the contrary, great importance has been placed on the aesthetic quality of spiritual practice in Kashmir Shaivism. In fact, recognizing and celebrating the aesthetic aspect of the Absolute is one of the central principles of this philosophy. — B. N. Pandit, Specific Principles of Kashmir Shaivism (3rd ed., 2008), p. 124–125.

You are the lifemate of a senstive, modern male. Julian's lazy amusement warmed her further, confirming what she already suspected, that he often stayed a shadow in her mind. How fortunate for me. Desari smiled at herself in the mirror. Her dark hair cascaded in waves down her back. There was a sparkle in her eyes. She knew Julian had made her feel more alive than she had ever been. Sensitive, modern men are so to my liking. Men? I am certain I did not hear my lifemate use the word men.The plural.No man is allowed to be to your liking other than myself. He sounded stern, the fierce Carpathian male at his most menacing. Desari laughed aloud. I suppose I can see your point, Julian, but really, it is so difficult to keep from noticing all of those handsome hunks in the audience. Handsome hunks? His voice dropped low with the affront. They are more like lovesick fops. If they could feel the vibrations in the air, they would show sense and run for their lives. It is bad enough to read their fantasies and hear them talk their trash, cara,but it is altogether worse to hear that my woman is looking back. One smile at the wrong man, lifemate, and trouble will find the man quickly. You sound jealous,she accused him, amusement curving her soft mouth. The first rule for all women to know and never forget is that Carpathian makes do not share their lifemates. Your brother has much to answer for that this was not drilled into you since birth.It was his job to prepare you for my coming. It was said somewhere between jest and complaint. Desari drew in her breath sharply, finding herself wavering between laughter and exasperation. My brother had no idea of your existence, you arrogant male. Besides, how could he possibly prepare me for your total ignorance of women? More likely, had he known you were coming to speak your ritual words, he would have been waiting to ambush you.I myself would have burrowed deep within the ground until you passed beyond my surroundings. You would have burst from the ground staight into my arms,cara mia, and you know this to be true. Now he was laughing, that smug, taunting, male amusement that should have set her teeth on edge but instead made her laugh. I think you are trying to find something to dictate to me about just so you do not lose your ability. Go away and practice this male art form on someone else. You will be singing to me tonight, piccola,and to no other man. You are a spoiled little boy,not a grown man. Should I come show you what a grown man I am? His voice was suddenly low and warm, so sexy she felt a rush of answering heat. She could feel the brush of his fingers against her throat, trailing down the valley between her suddenly aching breasts. Go away,Julian, she laughed in answer. I cannot have you getting me hot and bothered just now. As long as I know you re hot and bothered for me, I will do as you request and go back to work. I can only hope.

Historically, holism had been a break from the reductionist methods of science. Holism (...) is a way of viewing the universe as a web of interactions and relationships. Whole systems (and the universe can be seen as an overarching system of systems) have properties beyond those of their parts. All things are, in some sense, alive, or a part of a living system; the real world of mind and matter, body and consciousness, cannot be understood by reducing it to pieces and parts. 'Matter is mind' – this is perhaps the holists' quintessential belief. The founding theories of holism had tried to explain how mind emerges from the material universe, how the consciousness of all things is interconnected. The first science, of course, had failed utterly to do this. The first science had resigned human beings to acting as objective observers of a mechanistic and meaningless universe. A dead universe. The human mind, according to the determinists, was merely the by-product of brain chemistry. Chemical laws, the way the elements combine and interact, were formulated as complete and immutable truths. The elements themselves were seen as indivisible lumps of matter, devoid of consciousness, untouched and unaffected by the very consciousnesses seeking to understand how living minds can be assembled from dead matter. The logical conclusion of these assumptions and conceptions was that people are like chemical robots possessing no free will. No wonder the human race, during the Holocaust Century, had fallen into insanity and despair. Holism had been an attempt to restore life to this universe and to reconnect human beings with it. To heal the split between self and other. (...) Each quantum event, each of the trillions of times reality's particles interact with each other every instant, is like a note that rings and resonates throughout the great bell of creation. And the sound of the ringing propagates instantaneously, everywhere at once, interconnecting all things. This is a truth of our universe. It is a mystical truth, that reality at its deepest level is an undivided wholeness. It has been formalized and canonized, and taught to the swarms of humanity searching for a fundamental unity. Only, human beings have learned it as a theory and a doctrine, not as an experience. A true holism should embrace not only the theory of living systems, but also the reality of the belly, of wind, hunger, and snowworms roasting over a fire on a cold winter night. A man or woman (or child) to be fully human, should always marvel at the mystery of life. We each should be able to face the universe and drink in the stream of photons shimmering across the light-distances, to listen to the ringing of the farthest galaxies, to feel the electrons of each haemoglobin molecule spinning and vibrating deep inside the blood. No one should ever feel cut off from the ocean of mind and memory surging all around; no one should ever stare up at the icy stars and feel abandoned or alone. It was partly the fault of holism that a whole civilization had suffered the abandonment of its finest senses, ten thousand trillion islands of consciousness born into the pain and promise of neverness, awaiting death with glassy eyes and murmured abstractions upon their lips, always fearing life, always longing for a deeper and truer experience of living.

He opened his eyes then, white fire flaring hotly within them. “Send me home, Legna,” he commanded her, his voice hoarse with suppressed emotion. She moved her head in affirmation even as she leaned toward him to catch his mouth once more in a brief, territorial kiss, her teeth scoring his bottom lip as she broke away. It was an incidental wound, one he could heal in the blink of an eye. But he wouldn’t erase her mark on him, and they both knew it. Finally, she stepped back, closed her eyes, and concentrated on picturing his home in her thoughts. She had been in his parlor dozens of times as a guest, always accompanied by Noah. His library, his kitchen, even the grounds of the isolated estate were well known to her. She could have sent him to any of those locations. But as she began to focus, her mind’s eye was filled with the image of a dark, elegant room she had never seen before. Hand-carved ebony-paneled walls soared up into a vast ceiling, enormous windows of intricate stained glass spilled colored light over the entire room as if a multitude of rainbows had taken up residence. It all centered around an enormous bed, the coverlet’s color indistinguishable under the blanket of colorful dawn sunlight that streamed into the room. She could feel the sun’s warmth, ready and waiting to cocoon any weary occupant who thrived on sleeping in the heat of the muted daylight sun. It was a beautiful room, and she knew without a doubt that it was Gideon’s bedroom and that he had shared the image of it with her. If she sent him there, it would be the first time she had ever teleported someone to a place she had not first seen for herself. The ability to take images of places from others’ minds for teleporting purposes was an advanced Elder ability. “You can do it,” he encouraged her softly, all of his thoughts and his will completely full of his belief in that statement. Legna kept his gaze for one last long moment, and with a flick of a wrist sent him from the room with a soft pop of moving air. She exhaled in wonder, everything inside of her knowing without a doubt that he had appeared in his bedroom, safe and sound, that very next second. Legna turned to look at her own bed and wondered how she would ever be able to sleep. Nelissuna . . . go to bed. I will help you sleep. Gideon’s voice washed through her, warming her, comforting her in a way she hadn’t thought possible. This was the connection that Jacob and Isabella shared. For the rest of the time both of them lived, each would be privy to the other’s innermost thoughts. She realized that because he was the more powerful, it was quite possible he would be able to master parts of himself, probably even hide things from her awareness and keep them private—at least, until she learned how to work her new ability with better skill. After all, she was a Demon of the Mind. It was part of her innate state of being to figure the workings of their complex minds. She removed her slippers and pushed the sleeves of her dress from her shoulders so that it sheeted off her in one smooth whisper of fabric. She closed her eyes, avoiding looking in the mirror or at herself, very aware of Gideon’s eyes behind her own. His masculine laughter vibrated through her, setting her skin to tingle. So, you are both shy and bold . . . he said with amusement as she quickly slid beneath her covers. You are a source of contradictions and surprises, Legna. My world has begun anew. As if living for over a millennium is not long enough? she asked him. On the contrary. Without you, it was far, far too long. Go to sleep, Nelissuna. And a moment after she received the thought, her eyes slid closed with a weight she could not have contradicted even if she had wanted to. Her last thought, as she drifted off, was that she had to make a point of telling Isabella that she might have been wrong about what it meant to have another to share one’s mind with.