Summer Essentials Quotes

If we never experience the chill of a dark winter, it is very unlikely that we will ever cherish the warmth of a bright summer’s day. Nothing stimulates our appetite for the simple joys of life more than the starvation caused by sadness or desperation. In order to complete our amazing life journey successfully, it is vital that we turn each and every dark tear into a pearl of wisdom, and find the blessing in every curse.

The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, like most things, so very simple—was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go.

And I thought about the color and I realized what blue it was. It was the soft and changeable, essential blue of a well-worn pair of pants. Pants = Love

In the short summer night she learned so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame... She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked an unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how onself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds. Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…” Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds— promising untold opportunities—beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.

We expect random acts of violence from men. Men are the people who brought us the golden hits of war, genocide, rape, drones, and foot-ball. We do not expect murder, pain, and sadism from women, but we are co-opted idiots. Our unshakeable belief in women's essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing... It's as if none of us ever had mothers who ever acted cruelly and we all did. Some more than others.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

He had to get inside. It was essential that he know everything, the routes she took, her schedule, and the lay of the land. The silver moon glowed overhead, mocking him. Somewhere in the trees an owl hooted its laughter at his failure. Randy--from Spring Cleaning--Coming Summer 2012

Believing in love isn’t like believing in flying reindeer. It’s like believing in rain. Or summer. Or Christmas. Love is real and steady and absolutely essential to any kind of life. Not believing in it doesn’t make it any less so.

Borderline means you’re one of those girls… …who walk around wearing long sleeves in the summer because you’ve carved up your forearms over your boyfriend. You make pathetic suicidal gestures and write bad poetry about them, listen to Ani DiFranco albums on endless repeat, end up in the emergency room for overdoses, scare off boyfriends by insisting they tell you that they love you five hundred times a day and hacking into their email to make sure they’re not lying, have a police record for shoplifting, and your tooth enamel is eroded from purging. You’ve had five addresses and eight jobs in three years, your friends are avoiding your phone calls, you’re questioning your sexuality, and the credit card companies are after you. It took a lot of years to admit that I was exactly that girl, and that the diagnostic criteria for the disorder were essentially an outline of my life.

In the spring and summer I watched my plants flower, but it was, perhaps, in winter that I loved them best, when their skeletons were exposed. Then I felt they had more to say to me, were not simply dressing themselves for the crowds. Stripped of their leaves, their identities showed forth stark, essential.

It's easy, given the times we live in and the implicit messages we absorb each day, to equeate a good life with having a lot and doing a lot. So it's also easy to fall into believing that our children, if they are to succeed in life, need to be terrific at everything, and that it's up to us to make sure that they are-to keep them on track through tougher course loads, more activities, more competitive sports, more summer programs. But in all our well-intentioned efforts to do the right thing for our children, we may be failing to provide them with something that is truly essential-the time and space they need to wake up to themselves, to grow acquainted with their own innate gifts, to dream their dreams and discover their true natures.

In all nature there seemed to be a feeling of hopelessness and pain. The earth, like a ruined woman sitting alone in a dark room and trying not to think of the past, was brooding over memories of spring and summer and apathetically waiting for the inevitable winter. Wherever one looked, on all sides, nature seemed like a dark, infinitely deep, cold pit from which neither Kirilov nor Abogin nor the red half-moon could escape....

Let me begin with a heartfelt confession. I admit it. I am a biblioholic, one who loves books and whose life would seem incomplete without them. I am an addict, with a compulsive need to stop by nearly any bookstore I pass in order to get my fix. Books are an essential part of my life, the place where I have spent many unforgettable moments. For me, reading is one of the most enjoyable ways to pass a rainy afternoon or a leisurely summer day. I crave the knowledge and insights that truly great books bring into my life and can spend transported hours scouring used book stores for volumes which "I simply must have". I love the smell and feel of well-loved books and the look of a bookcase full of books waiting to be taken down and read.

He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity . . . and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away, only, eventually, to deliver himself — utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials — into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying an order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers and flayers of skin, where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity, without a single possibility of any way back to life, because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters who had marked the cards and who would, in the end, strip him even of his last means of defense, of that hope of someday finding his way back home.

Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night--hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe?

Anything else?” Yes, my body can dissolve other magic on contact. I’m essentially a battering ram against magic. “No, that’s it.” Kai turned in place, his eyes scanning the scene. “Something feels wrong here.” The magic-dissolving battering ram standing next to you.

Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.

Rape and other acts of violence, up to and including murder, as well as threats of violence, constitute the barrage some men lay down as they attempt to control some women, and fear of that violence limits most women in ways they’ve gotten so used to they hardly notice–and we hardly address. There are exceptions: last summer someone wrote to me to describe a college class in which the students were asked what they do to stay safe from rape. The young women described the intricate ways they stayed alert, limited their access to the world, took precautions, and essentially thought about rape all the time (while the young men in the class, he added, gaped in astonishment). The chasm between their worlds had briefly and suddenly become visible.

In America, our girlfriends teach us what love, trust, and desire are; they hold our hands as we navigate the Scylla of sex and the Charybdis of culture. With them we are our truest, most essential selves. We don’t have to be pretty, but we heap praise upon one another when we are. We don’t have to be nice, and we forgive each other when we aren’t. With our friends, our guard tumbles like acrobats, falls like leaves, and swirls in glittery, dusty eddies. That face we keep up in front of everyone else—family, lovers, husbands, or children—we let slide. Our friends see the frailties, the insecurities, the unattractive bits that we have to keep hidden from the rest of the world because—and this is the meat of the matter—it’s hard work to be a woman.

XXVII" Naked, you are simple as a hand, smooth, earthy, small...transparent, round. You have moon lines and apple paths; Naked, you are slender as the wheat. Naked, Cuban blue midnight is your color, Naked, I trace the stars and vines in your hair; Naked, you are spacious and yellow As a summer's wholeness in a golden church. Naked, you are tiny as your fingernail; Subtle and curved in the rose-colored dawn And you withdraw to the underground world As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores: your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves, And becomes a naked hand again.

A quality that always amazed him about trees: the constancy of their temperature. In winter, trees are never cold to the touch, and in summer they give off no acquired solar heat. It spoke to their essential aliveness. They were not rocks growing warm in the midday sun or streams that froze over; they were as self-regulating as the human body. It was a small leap to imagine that trees had souls.

Stepan Arkadyevitch had gone to Petersburg to perform the most natural and essential official duty—so familiar to everyone in the government service, though incomprehensible to outsiders—that duty, but for which one could hardly be in government service, of reminding the ministry of his existence—and having, for the due performance of this rite, taken all the available cash from home, was gaily and agreeably spending his days at the races and in the summer villas.

Stephan Arkadyevitch had gone to Petersburg to perform the most natural and essential official duty — so familiar to everyone in the government service, though incomprehensible to outsiders — that duty, but for which one could hardly be in government service, of reminding the ministry of his existence — and having, for the due performance of this rite, taken all the available cash from home, was gaily and agreeably spending his days at the races and in the summer villas.

If you live in Boston, Samuel Adams draft beer (Summer Ale) and Dunkin’ Donuts are essentials of life. But I discovered to my delight that even these indulgences can be offset by persistent exercise.

I know more about my father than I used to know: I know he wanted to be a pilot in the war but could not, because the work he did was considered essential to the war effort… I know he grew up on a farm in the backwoods of Nova Scotia, where they didn’t have running water or electricity. This is why he can build things and chop things… He did his high school courses by correspondence, sitting at the kitchen table and studying by the light by a kerosene lamp; he put himself through university by working in lumber camps and cleaning out rabbit hutches, and was so poor he lived in a tent in the summers to save money… All this is known, but unimaginable. Also I wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible. Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you. It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.

Conservatism is far from what I’m aiming at in proclaiming the establishment of a Sethian left-hand path tradition in the West as one of the first missions of the SLM. In fact, in establishing such a tradition, true to the spirit of sacred transgression and holy subversion that is essential to both Seth and the left-hand path, we are opening a door that enlightens through endangerment, that awakens through risk and peril: this is a radical (from Latin radix, root, implying how deep a change is required) enterprise that is the very opposite of conservatism.” --“From the Eye of the Storm” (Zeena's column as Hemet-Neter Tepi Seth for the SLM), Volume I - Summer Solstice issue (2003): "Building a Sethian Left-Hand Path Tradition in the West.

The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my mind. With the gathering force of an essential thing realizing itself out of early ground, I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing—to put away all thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on snowshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows—a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.

More than anything though, I wanted to have a man's suit, male in every particular. Was I 'butch' as a little girl? No - I simply wanted not to have to wear dresses. Now, I adore the little summer frocks I have, always made to the same pattern. There is a subtle difference between a frock and a dress. Mine are all 'frocks'. They've all been made for me by various wardrobe mistresses on every film and play I've ever done. I look like a throwback to the 1950s but they're comfy and suit me and they ALL have pockets. Pockets are essential in my life, and every garment I own must have them.

People make themselves unhappy by desiring and praising only one thing, by becoming too one-sided in trying to find contentment. If we were just in harmony with ourselves we would enjoy the things of this world much more. But when we have an inordinate amount of desires and aspirations, we only listen to them, we are incapable of understanding the essential innocence of things outside ourselves. Unfortunately, we often term those things important that are the objects of our emotions, and those things that have no relation to our desires are called unimportant; however, many times it is exactly the opposite.

I was sitting on my mom's couch that summer, staring into the so-called abyss, seeing the endless and incomprehensible nothingness where Josh's friendship used to be, when I came to the startling realization that if there really is no reason to do anything, then there is also no reason to not do anything; that in the face of the inevitability of death,there is no reason to ever give in to one's fear or embarrassment or shame, since it's all just a bunch of nothing anyway; and that by spending the majority of my short life avoiding what was painful and uncomfortable, I had essentially been avoiding being alive at all.

Helen found ways to sneak summer into the dark months of the year, canning and freezing the fruit off their trees in July and August and using it extravagantly throughout the winter- apple chutney with the Thanksgiving turkey, raspberry sauce across the top of a December pound cake, blueberries in January pancakes.

In the summer of 2007, I was sitting in a studio in Dublin, debating with a lay spokesman of the Roman Catholic Church who turned out to be the only believing Christian on a discussion panel of five people. He was a perfectly nice and rather modest logic-chopping polemicist, happy enough to go for a glass of refreshment after the program, and I suddenly felt a piercing stab of pity for him. A generation ago in Ireland, the Church did not have to lower itself in this way. It raised its voice only slightly, and was instantly obeyed by the Parliament, the schools, and the media. It could and did forbid divorce, contraception, the publication of certain books, and the utterance of certain opinions. Now it is discredited and in decline. Its once-absolute doctrines appear ridiculous:

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.

But for the Count, his philosophical leanings had always been essentially meteorological. Specifically, he believed in the inevitable influence of clement and inclement weathers. He believed in the influence of early frosts and lingering summers, of ominous clouds and delicate rains, of fog and sunshine and snowfall. And he believed, most especially, in the reshaping of destinies by the slightest change in the thermometer.

My parents struggled to get me into a private school in Englewood, New Jersey, in fourth grade. It was essentially, as I understand it, a feeder school for Vassar. So I applied. My parents really didn’t want me to go there. They knew why I wanted to go.  I was in love. I was chasing a girl. She went to Vassar. I skipped junior year, I accelerated, going to summer school so I could go to Vassar at the same time as her. For no other reason did I go there.

I like flowers because they are presentable, birds because they are musical, trees because they are natural, plants because they are beneficial, dogs because they are loyal, foxes because they are guileful, wolves because they are forceful, lions because they are royal, sharks because they are remarkable, crocodiles because they are formidable, bees because they are exceptional, spiders because they are artful, ants because they are responsible, chameleons because they are colorful, hawks because they are special, falcons because they are noble, owls because they are watchful, eagles because they are regal, streams because they are peaceful, rivers because they are predictable, lakes because they are crucial, oceans because they are beautiful, skies because they are delightful, stars because they are celestial, planets because they are spiritual, galaxies because they are incredible, winters because they are essential, summers because they are enjoyable, autumns because they are graceful, and springs because they are wonderful.

Since 2005, it has been the law in California that flat roofs, which cover mainly industrial and commercial buildings, have to be white. And, since the summer of 2009, even sloping roofs put on new residential buildings have had to be “light-colored cool-roof colors, if not white.” Such mandates were motivated by the fact that “a 1,000 square foot area of rooftop painted white has about the same one-time impact on global warming as cutting 10 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.” This is so because of the amount of sunlight reflected back

With them we are our truest, most essential selves. We don’t have to be pretty, but we heap praise upon one another when we are. We don’t have to be nice, and we forgive each other when we aren’t. With our friends, our guard tumbles like acrobats, falls like leaves, and swirls in glittery, dusty eddies. That face we keep up in front of everyone else—family, lovers, husbands, or children—we let slide. Our friends see the frailties, the insecurities, the unattractive bits that we have to keep hidden from the rest of the world because—and this is the meat of the matter—it’s hard work to be a woman.

I was sitting on my mom’s couch that summer, staring into the so-called abyss, seeing the endless and incomprehensible nothingness where Josh’s friendship used to be, when I came to the startling realization that if there really is no reason to do anything, then there is also no reason to not do anything; that in the face of the inevitability of death, there is no reason to ever give in to one’s fear or embarrassment or shame, since it’s all just a bunch of nothing anyway; and that by spending the majority of my short life avoiding what was painful and uncomfortable, I had essentially been avoiding being alive at all.

ultimately, most of us would choose a rich and meaningful life over an empty, happy one, if such a thing is even possible. “Misery serves a purpose,” says psychologist David Myers. He’s right. Misery alerts us to dangers. It’s what spurs our imagination. As Iceland proves, misery has its own tasty appeal. A headline on the BBC’s website caught my eye the other day. It read: “Dirt Exposure Boosts Happiness.” Researchers at Bristol University in Britain treated lung-cancer patients with “friendly” bacteria found in soil, otherwise known as dirt. The patients reported feeling happier and had an improved quality of life. The research, while far from conclusive, points to an essential truth: We thrive on messiness. “The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan is the great unheralded geographer of our time and a man whose writing has accompanied me throughout my journeys. He called one chapter of his autobiography “Salvation by Geography.” The title is tongue-in-cheek, but only slightly, for geography can be our salvation. We are shaped by our environment and, if you take this Taoist belief one step further, you might say we are our environment. Out there. In here. No difference. Viewed that way, life seems a lot less lonely. The word “utopia” has two meanings. It means both “good place” and “nowhere.” That’s the way it should be. The happiest places, I think, are the ones that reside just this side of paradise. The perfect person would be insufferable to live with; likewise, we wouldn’t want to live in the perfect place, either. “A lifetime of happiness! No man could bear it: It would be hell on Earth,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, in his play Man and Superman. Ruut Veenhoven, keeper of the database, got it right when he said: “Happiness requires livable conditions, but not paradise.” We humans are imminently adaptable. We survived an Ice Age. We can survive anything. We find happiness in a variety of places and, as the residents of frumpy Slough demonstrated, places can change. Any atlas of bliss must be etched in pencil. My passport is tucked into my desk drawer again. I am relearning the pleasures of home. The simple joys of waking up in the same bed each morning. The pleasant realization that familiarity breeds contentment and not only contempt. Every now and then, though, my travels resurface and in unexpected ways. My iPod crashed the other day. I lost my entire music collection, nearly two thousand songs. In the past, I would have gone through the roof with rage. This time, though, my anger dissipated like a summer thunderstorm and, to my surprise, I found the Thai words mai pen lai on my lips. Never mind. Let it go. I am more aware of the corrosive nature of envy and try my best to squelch it before it grows. I don’t take my failures quite so hard anymore. I see beauty in a dark winter sky. I can recognize a genuine smile from twenty yards. I have a newfound appreciation for fresh fruits and vegetables. Of all the places I visited, of all the people I met, one keeps coming back to me again and again: Karma Ura,

Hm? These cherry tomatoes... they've been dried. Right, Tadokoro?" "Y-yes, sir! Back home, winter can be really long. In the summer we harvest a lot of vegetables and preserve them so we can have them in winter too. Mostly by sun drying them. When I was little, I'd help with that part. That's when my Ma -um, I mean, my mother- taught me how to dry them in the oven. You cut the cherry tomatoes in half, sprinkle them with rock salt and then slowly dry them at a low temperature, around 245* F. I, um... thought they'd make a nice accent for the terrine..." "Right. Tomatoes are rich in the amino acid glutamate essential in umami. Drying them concentrates the glutamate, greatly increasing the amount of sweetness the tongue senses. In Shinomiya's case... ... his nine-vegetable terrine focused on fresh vegetables, with their bright and lively flavors. But this recette accentuates the savory deliciousness of vegetables preserved over time. Both dishes are vegetable terrines... ... but one centers on the delicacy of the fresh... ... while the other on the savory goodness of the ripe and aged. They are two completely different approaches to the same ingredient- vegetables!" "Mmm! This is the flavor that warms the soul. You can feel my darling Megumi's kindness in every bite." "For certain. If Shinomiya is the "Vegetable Magician"... ... I would say Megumi is... a modest spirit who gifts you with the bounty of nature. a Vegetable Colobuckle!" *A tiny spirit from Ainu folklore said to live under butterbur leaves* "No, that's not what she is! Megumi is a spirit who brings happiness and tastiness... a Vegetable Warashi!" *Childlike spirits from Japanese folklore said to bring good fortune* "Or perhaps she is that spirit which delivers the bounty of vegetables from the snowy north... a Vegetable Yukinoko!" *Small snow sprites* "It's not winter, so you can't call her a snow sprite!" "How come all of you are picking spirits from Japanese folklore anyway?

She speaks reverently of her summers here. This is her favorite place in the world, she tells him, and he understands that this landscape, the water of this particular lake in which she first learned to swim, is an essential part of her, even more so than the house in Chelsea. This was where she lost her virginity, she confesses, when she was fourteen years old, in a boathouse, with a boy whose family once summered here. He thinks of himself at fourteen, his life nothing like it is now... He realizes that this is a place that will always be here for her. It makes it easy to imagine her past, and her future, to picture her growing old. He sees her with streaks of gray in her hair, her face still beautiful, her long body slightly widened and slack, sitting on a beach chair with a floppy hat on her head. He sees her returning here, grieving, to bury her parents, teaching her children to swim in the lake, leading them with two hands into the water, showing them how to dive cleanly off the dock.

Plants and animals don't fight the winter; they don't pretend it's not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that's where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but it's crucible. Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on sparse beauty. It's a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing those deeply unfashionable things - slowing down, letting your spare time expand, resting, is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you'll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you'll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don't then that skin will harden around you. It's one of the most important choices you'll ever make.

When your mind parts from your body, the visions of pure reality will shine forth, shimmering like a summer mirage on the plains. They are subtle yet clear; distinctly experienced, they will fill you with fear and anxiety. Do not be fearful or afraid of them! Do not be anxious! They are the glowing radiance of your reality so recognize them as such! A great roar of noise will reverberate forth from within the light, like the sound of a thousand crashes of thunder rumbling at the same time. This is the natural sound of your reality so do not be fearful or afraid of it! Do not be anxious! You now have an astral body generated by the energy of your habitual tendencies, not a physical one of flesh and blood. No matter what sounds, dazzling colors, or radiant luminosity occur, they cannot hurt you or cause your death. Just recognize them as your own projections and all will be well. Know that this is the reality phase of death. No matter what religious practices you did during your life, if you have not received these instructions and do not recognize these experiences to be your own projections, then you will be terrified by the luminosity, alarmed by the sounds and frightened by the dazzling colors. If you don't comprehend the essential point of this instruction, you will wander lost in cyclical existence, no having understood the luminosity, the sounds, and dazzling colors for what they are.

FACT 3 – In 1969, the combined agencies of the CIA, Army and FBI were put into full operational use. The Sharon Tate-La Bianca murders were committed in August 1969. The Altamont violence occurred four months later. CIA The CIA prepared for defense against domestic unrest in 1965, coinciding with Camelot and Politica. The CIA joined forces with the FBI and the Army. By August 1967, a special operations group went after the youth. By July 1968, Operation Chaos, identical to the Chilean “Chaos,” clamped down on “restless youth.” This wasn’t a study. It was an attack. Mid-summer of 1969, one month before the Manson Family massacres, Operation Chaos entered a phase of tight security. From 1956-63, the Agency had produced enough LSD to incite every violent act associated with the chaos in Los Angeles or at Altamont. It was identical to handing out poison candy at Halloween. LSD was the moving force, the cause for the Sharon Tate-La Bianca slaughters. It was a steady diet at the Spahn ranch. LSD was the catalyst of the Altamont killing. Thousands of tablets were distributed to the Hell’s Angels, who then went totally berserk and started cracking skulls. FBI May 1964, after the JFK assassination, the FBI instituted COINTELPRO. July 1968, explicit orders went out to proceed, accompanied with instructions, to neutralize segments of American society, including those “restless youth.” By 1969, the Special Services Staff (SSS) of the FBI teamed up with the Justice Department and the CIA’s Operation Chaos.

When I met Dr. Phil Zimbardo, the former president of the American Psychological Association, for lunch, I knew him primarily as the mastermind behind the famous Stanford prison experiment.7 In the summer of 1971, Zimbardo took healthy Stanford students, assigned them roles as either “guards” or “inmates,” and locked them in a makeshift “prison” in the basement of Stanford University. In just days, the “prisoners” began to demonstrate symptoms of depression and extreme stress, while the “guards” began to act cruel and sadistic (the experiment was ended early, for obvious reasons). The point is that simply being treated like prisoners and guards had, over the course of just a few days, created a momentum that caused the subjects to act like prisoners and guards. The Stanford prison experiment is legendary, and much has been written about its many implications. But what I wondered was this: If simply being treated in a certain way conditioned these Stanford students to gradually adopt these negative behaviors, could the same kind of conditioning work for more positive behavior too? Indeed, today Zimbardo is attempting a grand social experiment along those lines called the “Heroic Imagination Project.”8 The logic is to increase the odds of people operating with courage by teaching them the principles of heroism. By encouraging and rewarding heroic acts, Zimbardo believes, we can consciously and deliberately create a system where heroic acts eventually become natural and effortless. We have a choice. We can use our energies to set up a system that makes execution of goodness easy, or we can resign ourselves to a system that actually makes it harder to do what is good. Ward’s Positive Tickets system did the former, and it worked. We can apply the same principle to the choices we face when designing systems in our own lives.

It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system. In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell functioning of the caregivers was significantly suppressed, even in those whose spouses had died as long as three years previously. The caregivers who reported lower levels of social support also showed the greatest depression in immune activity — just as the loneliest medical students had the most impaired immune systems under the stress of examinations. Another study of caregivers assessed the efficacy of immunization against influenza. In this study 80 per cent among the non-stressed control group developed immunity against the virus, but only 20 per cent of the Alzheimer caregivers were able to do so. The stress of unremitting caregiving inhibited the immune system and left people susceptible to influenza. Research has also shown stress-related delays in tissue repair. The wounds of Alzheimer caregivers took an average of nine days longer to heal than those of controls. Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing. Dental students had a wound deliberately inflicted on their hard palates while they were facing immunology exams and again during vacation. In all of them the wound healed more quickly in the summer. Under stress, their white blood cells produced less of a substance essential to healing. The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however, the flight-fight reaction is triggered in situations where it is neither necessary nor helpful, since we no longer face the same mortal threats to existence. The body’s physiological stress mechanisms are often triggered inappropriately, leading to disease. There is another way to look at it. The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all.

ONCE YOU’VE HOOKED readers, your next task is to put your early chapters to work introducing your characters, settings, and stakes. The first 20-25% of the book comprises your setup. At first glance, this can seem like a tremendous chunk of story to devote to introductions. But if you expect readers to stick with you throughout the story, you first have to give them a reason to care. This important stretch is where you accomplish just that. Mere curiosity can only carry readers so far. Once you’ve hooked that sense of curiosity, you then have to deepen the pull by creating an emotional connection between them and your characters. These “introductions” include far more than just the actual moment of introducing the characters and settings or explaining the stakes. In themselves, the presentations of the characters probably won’t take more than a few scenes. After the introduction is when your task of deepening the characters and establishing the stakes really begins. The first quarter of the book is the place to compile all the necessary components of your story. Anton Chekhov’s famous advice that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired” is just as important in reverse: if you’re going to have a character fire a gun later in the book, that gun should be introduced in the First Act. The story you create in the following acts can only be assembled from the parts you’ve shown readers in this First Act. That’s your first duty in this section. Your second duty is to allow readers the opportunity to learn about your characters. Who are these people? What is the essence of their personalities? What are their core beliefs (even more particularly, what are the beliefs that will be challenged or strengthened throughout the book)? If you can introduce a character in a “characteristic moment,” as we talked about earlier, you’ll be able to immediately show readers who this person is. From there, the plot builds as you deepen the stakes and set up the conflict that will eventually explode in the Inciting and Key Events. Authors sometimes feel pressured to dive right into the action of their stories, at the expense of important character development. Because none of us wants to write a boring story, we can overreact by piling on the explosions, fight sequences, and high-speed car chases to the point we’re unable to spend important time developing our characters. Character development is especially important in this first part of the story, since readers need to understand and sympathize with the characters before they’re hit with the major plot revelations at the quarter mark, halfway mark, and three-quarters mark. Summer blockbusters are often guilty of neglecting character development, but one enduring exception worth considering is Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. No one would claim the film is a leisurely character study, but it rises far above the monster movie genre through its expert use of pacing and its loving attention to character, especially in its First Act. It may surprise some viewers to realize the action in this movie doesn’t heat up until a quarter of the way into the film—and even then we have no scream-worthy moments, no adrenaline, and no extended action scenes until halfway through the Second Act. Spielberg used the First Act to build suspense and encourage viewer loyalty to the characters. By the time the main characters arrive at the park, we care about them, and our fear for their safety is beginning to manifest thanks to a magnificent use of foreshadowing. We understand that what is at stake for these characters is their very lives. Spielberg knew if he could hook viewers with his characters, he could take his time building his story to an artful Climax.

That summer, Lee Harvey Oswald handed out pro-Castro literature stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, a commercial building. This was a blunder because Oswald actually was under the control of an anti-Castro operation headquartered there. W. Guy Banister, his controller, had connections in military intelligence, the CIA and a section of the World Anti-Communist League set up by Willoughby and his Far Pacific intelligence unit in Taiwan. In The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Krüger disclosed that the International Fascista was “not only the first step toward fulfilling the dream of Skorzeny, but also of his close friends in Madrid, exile Jose Lopez Rega, Juan Peron’s grey eminence, and prince Justo Valerio Borghesé, the Italian fascist money man rescued from justice at the hands of the World War II Italian resistance by future CIA counterintelligence whiz James J. Angleton.

…the garden gleams with summer jewelry. We live vy simply—but with all the essentials of life well understood & well provided for—hot baths, cold champagne, new peas, & old brandy.

Yet in at least three situations, a touch of jerkiness can be helpful. The first is if your job, or some element of it, involves a series of onetime encounters in which reputational blowback has minimal effect. The second is in that evanescent moment after a group has formed but its hierarchy has not. (Think the first day of summer camp.) The third—not fully explored here, but worth mentioning—is when the group’s survival is in question, speed is essential, and a paralyzing existential doubt is in the air. It was when things got truly desperate at Apple, its market share having shrunk to 4 percent, that the board invited Steve Jobs to return (Jobs then ousted most of those who had invited him back). But here is where we

The idea for the convention did not originate with Clay—early that summer, William Henry Harrison’s Ohio supporters were urging one to nominate their man—but Clay approved of it as a way to fend off Webster.9 The idea made political sense, because it was the best way to avoid the chaotic multiple candidacies of 1836. Yet

...some student asked if he [Larry Summers] didn’t have essentially the same relationship with Bob Rubin. Wasn’t Summer’s opposition to capital controls just a sop to Wall Street banks, which wanted to recoup their risky investments regardless of how doing so affected the country in which they had invested? “Summers just lost it,” said one audience member, a business school student. “he looked at the person and said, “you don’t know what you’re talking about and how dare you ask this question of the president of Harvard?

Indeed, for the first two years of the Depression, the CPD didn’t even log (or, at least, didn’t make publicly available) what are called “offenses known to the police”— essentially, reported crime.

The writer of fiction—and I include in this all the works of the imagination, poetry, plays, realistic novels, fantasy—may never tell; he must show, and show through the five senses. “Describe this room in which we’re sitting,” I say, “and make use of all five of your senses. Don’t tell us. Show us.” The beginning writer finds this difficult. I have to repeat and repeat: fiction is built upon the concrete. A news article is essentially transitory and may be built upon sand. The house of fiction must be built upon rock. Feel, smell, taste, hear, see: show it. Dante says: “You cannot understand what I write unless you understand it in a fourfold way: on the literal level, the moral level, the allegorical level, and the anagogical level.

The majority of good jobs are advertised in late summer and fall,

I A. A violent order is a disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.) II If all the green of spring was blue, and it is; If all the flowers of South Africa were bright On the tables of Connecticut, and they are; If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon, and they do; And if it all went on in an orderly way, And it does; a law of inherent opposites, Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port, As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough, An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand. III After all the pretty contrast of life and death Proves that these opposite things partake of one, At least that was the theory, when bishops' books Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that. The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, If one may say so . And yet relation appears, A small relation expanding like the shade Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill. IV A. Well, an old order is a violent one. This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more Element in the immense disorder of truths. B. It is April as I write. The wind Is blowing after days of constant rain. All this, of course, will come to summer soon. But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed. . . . A great disorder is an order. Now, A And B are not like statuary, posed For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see. V The pensive man . . . He sees the eagle float For which the intricate Alps are a single nest. -Wallace Stevens, "Connoisseur of Chaos

Finally, and then I promise to say no more, Carl Sagan said it better than anyone: ‘For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds. Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds—promising untold opportunities—beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.

Reading is the solitary essential pastime to which all summer houses are peculiarly dedicated. I became a foreigner. For myself, that is what a writer is - a man living on the other side of a frontier.

The key architects of the nation’s economic policy in the Clinton era (Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers) allowed the build-up of forces that would eventually blow the housing and banking industries sky-high. These forces were then multiplied by the reckless fiscal policy of the Bush Administration that enlarged the size of the national debt and set the stage for an economic train wreck.

Imagine this: summer leaves are blanketing the park under a cloudless sky and a gentle breeze is lifting along the shouts and laughter of children. Some children are running around tirelessly while others are just hanging around talking or engaged in some activity that only other children fully understand. Amidst this typical scenario, one can almost always find a parent chasing a child who is seemingly full of boundless energy, as he races around, going up and down the slide over and over, climbing the monkey bars, and clowning around with almost everyone despite the repeated warnings and reminders from the exhausted parent. But the child appears to not even hear the warnings and reminders, or chooses to ignore them. Eventually, the poor parent cannot keep up anymore, as she has run around until she has gotten so tired, that she feels like smacking her head against a tree or brick wall.

After the United States entered World War I, Southern landowners had a new means of ensuring their laborers remained on plantations—the threat of the draft. In the summer of 1918 the army’s provost marshal, General Enoch Crowder, issued a “Work or Fight” order to all local exemption boards, allowing them to draft men who were not engaged in employment. Crowder’s order essentially federalized the local vagrancy laws that were already pervasive throughout the South. It was now up to the small-town sheriff, mayor, constable, and justice of the peace to identify “vagrants” and turn them in to the local exemption board to be shipped off to war. In the Delta, local defense councils adopted an identification system that required all blacks to carry a card listing their place of employment. The defense council requested national support in forcing “our negro labor to stay on the job six days in the week or they will be inducted into service.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome,’ he wrote. ‘The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition . . . Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom that passes. The rhizome remains’ (MDR 18). The great secret is to embody something essential in our lives. Then, undefeated by age, we can proceed with dignity and meaning, and, as the end approaches, be ready ‘to die with life’. For the goal of old age is not senility, but wisdom.

Let any man make a calculation of his existence, subtracting the hours in which he has been thoroughly happy—really and entirely at his ease, without one arriere pensée to mar his enjoyment—without the most infinitesimal cloud to overshadow the brightness of his horizon. Let him do this, and surely he will laugh in utter bitterness of soul when he sets down the sum of his felicity, and discovers the pitiful smallness of the amount. He will have enjoyed himself for a week or ten days in thirty years, perhaps. In thirty years of dull December, and blustering March, and showery April, and dark November weather, there may have been seven or eight glorious August days, through which the sun has blazed in cloudless radiance, and the summer breezes have breathed perpetual balm. How fondly we recollect these solitary days of pleasure, and hope for their recurrence, and try to plan the circumstances that made them bright; and arrange, and predestinate, and diplomatize with fate for a renewal of the remembered joy. As if any joy could ever be built up out of such and such constituent parts! As if happiness were not essentially accidental—a bright and wandering bird, utterly irregular in its migrations; with us one summer's day, and forever gone from us on the next!

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MY MOTHER’S PHLOX To send this to you toward the end of summer, I was forced to rebuild my desktop. Not in the old-fashioned way, With saw and eye laid alongside the board With some rue in my fingers, But I wanted to create phlox. Although, god knows, it can’t be done In three dimensions, as the earth Has so easily done it, but who can compete With the earth? No, I wanted only the words And they have lost themselves in the fields Or along the gravel road. It’s just as well. (Floks) n. pl. various plants of the genus Phlox, Having opposite leaves and flowers, With variously colored salverform corolla. Over the years the phlox have spread Even into the fields beyond the barn, Into the edge of the woods, inventions Of themselves in endless designs… They exhale their faint perfume summer after summer, And summer after summer it was my nightlong Intoxicant. It was my potion, my ragged butterfly, My faulty memory of my mother Who was the same age then, as I am now. As then, I was the same age you are now, When my mother planted these phlox in my garden. I’m sending them to you by UPS, Wrapped in plastic in a proper box. Take them out and stick them in water; Dig a good bed and spread the roots. They need almost no care. They cast their seed; they thrive on neglect. Later, they may change like the faces you love, Ravaged and ravishing from year to year.

SPECULATION In the coolness here I care Not for the down-pressed noises overhead, I hear in my pearly bone the wear Of marble under the rain; nothing is truly dead, There is only the wearing away, The changing of means. Nor eyes I have To tell how in the summer the mourning dove Rocks on the hemlock’s arm, nor ears to rend The sad regretful mind With the call of the horned lark. I lie so still that the earth around me Shakes with the weight of day; I do not mind if the vase Holds decomposed cut flowers, or if they send One of their kind to tidy up. Such play I have no memories of, Nor of the fire-bush flowers, or the bark Of the rough pine where the crows With their great haw and flap Circle in kinned excitement when a wind blows. I am kin with none of these, Nor even wed to the yellowing silk that splits; My sensitive bones, which dreaded, As all the living do, the dead, Wait for some unappointed pattern. The wits Of countless centuries dry in my skull and overhead I do not heed the first rain out of winter, Nor do I care what they have planted. At my center The bone glistens; of wondrous bones I am made; And alone shine in a phosphorous glow, So, in this little plot where I am laid.

1. Spring equinox to summer solstice: the growing tide 2. Summer solstice to autumn equinox: the reaping tide 2. Autumn equinox to winter solstice: the resting tide 3. Winter solstice to spring equinox: the cleansing tide

Even as the leaves are falling, the buds of next year’s crop are already in place, waiting to erupt again in spring. Most trees produce their buds in high summer, and the autumn leaf fall reveals them, neat and expectant, protected from the cold by thick scales. We rarely notice them because we think we’re seeing the skeleton of the tree, a dead thing until the sun returns./ The tree is waiting. It has everything ready. It’s fallen leaves are mulching the forest floor, and its roots are drawing up the extra winter moisture, providing a firm anchor against seasonal storms. Its ripe cones and nuts are providing essential food in this scarce time for mice and squirrels, and its bark is hosting hibernating insects and providing a source of nourishment for hungry deer. It is far from dead. It is in fact the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with it quietly. It will not burst into life in the spring. It will just put on a new coat and face the world again.

The unsayable! It was mysteriously linked, I now understood, to the essential. The essential was unsayable. Incommunicable. And everything in the world that tortured me with its silent beauty, everything that needed no words, seemed to be essential. The unsayable was essential.

Once every few weeks, beginning in the summer of 2018, a trio of large Boeing freighter aircraft, most often converted and windowless 747s of the Dutch airline KLM, takes off from Schiphol airport outside Amsterdam, with a precious cargo bound eventually for the city of Chandler, a western desert exurb of Phoe­nix, Arizona. The cargo is always the same, consisting of nine white boxes in each aircraft, each box taller than a man. To get these pro­foundly heavy containers from the airport in Phoenix to their des­tination, twenty miles away, requires a convoy of rather more than a dozen eighteen-wheeler trucks. On arrival and family uncrated, the contents of all the boxes are bolted together to form one enormous 160-ton machine -- a machine tool, in fact, a direct descendant of the machine tools invented and used by men such as Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay and Henry Royce and Henry Ford a century and more before. "Just like its cast-iron predecessors, this Dutch-made behemoth of a tool (fifteen of which compose the total order due to be sent to Chandler, each delivered as it is made) is a machine that makes machines. Yet, rather than making mechanical devices by the pre­cise cutting of metal from metal, this gigantic device is designed for the manufacture of the tiniest of machines imaginable, all of which perform their work electronically, without any visible mov­ing parts. "For here we come to the culmination of precision's quarter­millennium evolutionary journey. Up until this moment, almost all the devices and creations that required a degree of precision in their making had been made of metal, and performed their vari­ous functions through physical movements of one kind or another. Pistons rose and fell; locks opened and closed; rifles fired; sewing machines secured pieces of fabric and created hems and selvedges; bicycles wobbled along lanes; cars ran along highways; ball bearings spun and whirled; trains snorted out of tunnels; aircraft flew through the skies; telescopes deployed; clocks ticked or hummed, and their hands moved ever forward, never back, one precise sec­ond at a time."Then came the computer, then the personal computer, then the smartphone, then the previously unimaginable tools of today -- and with this helter-skelter technological evolution came a time of translation, a time when the leading edge of precision passed itself out into the beyond, moving as if through an invisible gateway, from the purely mechanical and physical world and into an immobile and silent universe, one where electrons and protons and neutrons have replaced iron and oil and bearings and lubricants and trunnions and the paradigm-altering idea of interchangeable parts, and where, though the components might well glow with fierce lights send out intense waves of heat, nothing moved one piece against another in mechanical fashion, no machine required that mea­sured exactness be an essential attribute of every component piece.

It was two packets of powdered “Breakfast Essentials” (strawberry in my case), two packets of “Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal,” and a little less than a liter of water mixed in.

Of course, like Eiheiji in Japan, Tassajara was not supposed to be a permanent refuge from the world for anyone. It was a training monastery; however, a few facts mitigated this concept. First, almost no one who arrived at Tassajara had any previous training, so it was clear that a year or two would not make them masters, capable of starting and sustaining their own Zen temples. Second, there was nowhere else in America for students to be trained, and very few had had the wit or the wherewithal to get themselves to Japan. Third, Tassajara needed a reliable labor pool for year-round restoration and building projects, as well as competent staff for the summer guest season, which was essential to the monastery's viability.

As Mother, the Goddess is the birther, caretaker and sustainer of all that She brings forth. She is the embodiment of maternal concern, protectiveness, nurturance, tenderness and love. She bestows her blessings, pours out Her nourishment, much as we expect Her human counterparts to do. But the Great Mother is not only benevolent and tender. She does not only pour forth the sustenance upon which the world depends. To see Her fully, to image this great a Mother, is also to see Her as depriver and destroyer. She is the gorgon who terrifies and petrifies the, earth who is fertilized by blood, the vulture who feeds on the dead. She gives birth to Her children but She also devours them. She is the Goddess of Life but also the Goddess of Death. The Great Mother is essentially bi-valent, embodying both a 'good' and a 'terrible' aspect. Even the most benevolent of Her images have a darker, more savage side or a destructive 'sister.' Yet this ambivalence is not a static either/or; it expresses one of the most profound and deeply held beliefs of the Old Religion—that life is essentially a process, 'becoming' instead of 'being,' and that this process follows a cyclical pattern that endlessly repeats itself. Just as autumn and winter inevitably follow summer and then give rise to a new spring, just as decaying fruit produces from its dying the medium that enables the hidden seeds within it to sprout, so it was a 'given' to the ancients that the Mother of All embodied this basic and implacable natural way. So the Goddess created life, sustained it, destroyed it, and took it back into Herself in death, only to recycle what She had killed back into new life once more.

You have a lovely figure. You should show it off more, not hide it beneath those tatty jeans and T-shirts you're always wearing." Maggie turns in front of the mirror, pushing back her shoulders, feeling the soft fabric move about her bare legs. She doesn't feel like herself. "It's not very me." "You look beautiful." "But probably a little much... you know, for what is essentially just standing around in a field with a lot of other people drinking tea and admiring vegetables?" Lillian laughs. "Why should you care what other people think? Worrying about them will only stifle your own life. Trust me, everyone is far too wrapped up in themselves to worry about you, Maggie Oberon. You'll see." There is a force to her grandmother's words that surprises Maggie. "You will never be as young or as beautiful as you are today. Be bold. Seize the life that was meant to be yours. Make it magnificent.

And so we visit the past as tourists. Sometimes this is literally so, when we take in Colonial Williamsburg and Plymouth Plantation, or travel around to Civil War battlefields. But it is also true in a metaphorical sense. The past has become a strange and distant country, full of odd people and mysterious customs. And thought seeing how these people built their homes or raised their children can broaden the mind, most of us don’t go back home determined to learn how to use an axe or a hickory stick. Knowledge about those strange customs might be interesting, but it is not essential–it does not change our way of doing things. In the end we will always prefer our own land in the present. At the end of the tour there is an air-conditioned car and a comfortable hotel room waiting, complete with cable television and refrigerated food. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with enjoying the past this way–it can be a lot of fun, in fact. But it could be so much more. The thousands of people who visit Boston and have only a few days to walk the Freedom Trail, visit Fenway Park, and eat a lobster dinner cannot even scratch the surface of what the city is really like. They have not inhaled the comforting mixture of exhaust fumes and roasted cashews that hangs in the city subways on humid summer days, or learned to love the particular slant of the New England sun on a winter afternoon. The same would be true of a Bostonian on a day trip to Chicago, Tokyo, Budapest, or Khartoum. The visit would be exciting, but would not make them cosmopolitan. Becoming something more than a casual time-tourist requires a willingness to be challenged and changed, just as living in India or Ghana or Peru will upend any American’s assumptions about money and wealth. (pp 26-27)

During Biden’s long period of flailing, I had feared that he had missed his chance to avert the worst consequence of climate change—and that another opportunity to protect the planet wouldn’t come around for years, after it was far too late. But then in the summer of 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a banally named bill that will transform American life. Its investments in alternative energy will ignite the growth of industries that will wean the economy from its dependence on fossil fuels. That achievement was of a piece with the new economics that his presidency had begun to enshrine. Where the past generation of Democratic presidents was deferential to markets, reluctant to challenge monopoly, indifferent to unions, and generally encouraging of globalization, Biden went in a different direction. Through a series of bills—not just his investments in alternative energy, but also the CHIPS Act and his infrastructure bill—he erected a state that will function as an investment bank, spending money to catalyze favored industries to realize his vision, where the United States controls the commanding heights of the economy of the future. The critique of gerontocracy is that once politicians become senior citizens, they will only focus on the short term, because they will only inhabit the short term. But Biden, the oldest president in history, pushed for spending money on projects that might not come to fruition in his lifetime. His theory of the case—that democracy will succeed only if it delivers for its citizens—compelled him to push for expenditures on unglamorous but essential items such as electric vehicle charging systems, crumbling ports, and semiconductor plants, which will decarbonize the economy, employ the next generation of workers, and prevent national decline.

The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my mind. With the gathering force of an essential thing realizing itself out of early ground, I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing—to put away thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on showshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows—a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could. JOHN HAINES,

Our unshakeable belief in women's essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we act as starry-eyed as Margaret Keane paintings about the eternal sunshine of the spotless female mind. It's as if none of us ever had mothers who ever acted cruelly, and we all did. Some more than others.

Oxford and Cambridge had offered degrees with music since the mid-fifteenth century which mostly focused on musical theory. Music was perceived as a gentlemanly pastime rather than as a serious part of a student’s studies. The best secular opportunity for employment for a musician other than court was as a city wait. Waits were essentially watchmen who patrolled cities and played instruments to assure people all was well. By the mid-sixteenth century they were officially municipal musicians who played at civic occasions and were available for private hire. London owned six waits who, from 1548, were allowed two apprentices each. Waits possessed summer and winter livery of blue gowns and red caps. They wore silver chains and a silver badge displaying the arms of the city. The musicians were in great demand for weddings and an important citizen might employ them when impressing

There was a bustle of people in the street as I made my way to La Bonbonnière, which is, quite simply, the most beautiful candy store in the world. The best thing about La Bonbonnière is that it's all windows. Before I even walk through the door I am greeted by a fuzzy three-foot-high statue of a polar bear trying to dip his paws into a copper cauldron filled with marrons glacés--- whole candied chestnuts. Each one was meticulously wrapped in gold foil, a miniature gift in and of itself. If nothing else, Christmas in Provence reminds you of a time when sugar was a luxury as fine and rare as silk. Back to my assignment: I needed two kinds of nougat: white soft nougat made with honey, almonds, and fluffy egg whites (the angel's part) and hard dark nougat--- more like honey almond brittle--- for the devil. Where are the calissons d'Aix? There they are, hiding behind the cash register, small ovals of almond paste covered with fondant icing. Traditional calissons are flavored with essence of bitter almond, but I couldn't resist some of the more exotic variations: rose, lemon verbena, and génépi, an astringent mountain herb. Though I love the tender chew of nougat and the pliant sweetness of marzipan, my favorite of the Provençal Christmas treats is the mendiant--- a small disk of dark or milk chocolate topped with dried fruit and nuts representing four religious orders: raisins for the Dominicans, hazelnuts for the Augustinians, dried figs for the Franciscans, and almonds for the Carmelites. When Alexandre is a bit older, I think we'll make these together. They seem like an ideal family project--- essentially puddles of melted chocolate with fruit and nut toppings. See, as soon as you say "puddles of melted chocolate," everyone's on board. Though fruits confits--- candied fruit--- are not, strictly speaking, part of les trieze desserts, I can't resist. I think of them as the crown jewels of French confiserie, and Apt is the world capital of production. Dipped in sugar syrup, the fruits become almost translucent; whole pears, apricots, and strawberries glow from within like the gems in a pirate's treasure chest. Slices of kiwi, melon, and angelica catch the light like the panes of a stained-glass window. All the dazzling tastes of a Provençal summer, frozen in time.

Situated on a road on the outskirts of the town and with only the marshes between it and the sea, it was essentially an overgrown beach hut and utterly charming when the sun shone. It was only really intended for summer use and Amy knew its thin clapboard walls and huge windows would provide scant protection against the elements in the coming winter.

Mencius said: “In good years, young men are mostly fine. In bad years, they’re mostly cruel and violent. It isn’t that Heaven endows them with such different capacities, only that their hearts are mired in such different situations. Think about barley: if you plant the seeds carefully at the same time and in same place, they’ll all sprout and grow ripe by summer solstice. If they don’t grow the same – it’s because of inequities in richness of soil, amounts of rainfall, or the care given them by farmers. And so, all members belonging to a given species of thing are the same. Why should humans be the lone exception? The sage and I – surely we belong to the same species of thing. “That’s why Master Lung said: Even if a cobbler makes a pair of sandals for feet he’s never seen, he certainly won’t make a pair of baskets. Sandals are all alike because feet are the same throughout all beneath Heaven. And all tongues savor the same flavors. Yi Ya was just the first to discover what our tongues savor. If taste differed by nature from person to person, the way horses and dogs differ by species from me, then how is it people throughout all beneath Heaven savor the tastes Yi Ya savored? People throughout all beneath Heaven share Yi Ya’s tastes, therefore people’s tongues are alike throughout all beneath Heaven. “It’s true for the ear too: people throughout all beneath Heaven share Maestro K’uang’s sense of music, therefore people’s ears are alike thoughout all beneath Heaven. And it’s no less true for the eye: no one throughout all beneath Heaven could fail to see the beauty of Lord Tu. If you can’t see his beauty, you simply haven’t eyes. “Hence it is said: All tongues savor the same flavors, all ears hear the same music, and all eyes see the same beauty. Why should the heart alone not be alike in us all? But what is it about our hearts that is alike? Isn’t it what we call reason and Duty? The sage is just the first to discover what is common to our hearts. Hence, reason and Duty please our hearts just like meat pleases our tongues.

was sitting on my mom’s couch that summer, staring into the so-called abyss, seeing the endless and incomprehensible nothingness where Josh’s friendship used to be, when I came to the startling realization that if there really is no reason to do anything, then there is also no reason to not do anything; that in the face of the inevitability of death, there is no reason to ever give in to one’s fear or embarrassment or shame, since it’s all just a bunch of nothing anyway; and that by spending the majority of my short life avoiding what was painful and uncomfortable, I had essentially been avoiding being alive at all.

People who don’t read science fiction, but who have at least given it a fair shot, often say they’ve found it inhuman, elitist, and escapist. Since its characters, they say, are both conventionalized and extraordinary, all geniuses, space heroes, superhackers, androgynous aliens, it evades what ordinary people really have to deal with in life, and so fails an essential function of fiction. However remote Jane Austen’s England is, the people in it are immediately relevant and revelatory—reading about them we learn about ourselves. Has science fiction anything to offer but escape from ourselves? The cardboard-character syndrome was largely true of early science fiction, but for decades writers have been using the form to explore character and human relationships. I’m one of them. An imagined setting may be the most appropriate in which to work out certain traits and destinies. But it’s also true that a great deal of contemporary fiction isn’t a fiction of character. This end of the century isn’t an age of individuality as the Elizabethan and the Victorian ages were. Our stories, realistic or otherwise, with their unreliable narrators, dissolving points of view, multiple perceptions and perspectives, often don’t have depth of character as their central value. Science fiction, with its tremendous freedom of metaphor, has sent many writers far ahead in this exploration beyond the confines of individuality—Sherpas on the slopes of the postmodern. As for elitism, the problem may be scientism: technological edge mistaken for moral superiority. The imperialism of high technocracy equals the old racist imperialism in its arrogance; to the technophile, people who aren’t in the know/in the net, who don’t have the right artifacts, don’t count. They’re proles, masses, faceless nonentities. Whether it’s fiction or history, the story isn’t about them. The story’s about the kids with the really neat, really expensive toys. So “people” comes to be operationally defined as those who have access to an extremely elaborate fast-growth industrial technology. And “technology” itself is restricted to that type. I have heard a man say perfectly seriously that the Native Americans before the Conquest had no technology. As we know, kiln-fired pottery is a naturally occurring substance, baskets ripen in the summer, and Machu Picchu just grew there. Limiting humanity to the producer-consumers of a complex industrial growth technology is a really weird idea, on a par with defining humanity as Greeks, or Chinese, or the upper-middle-class British. It leaves out a little too much. All fiction, however, has to leave out most people. A fiction interested in complex technology may legitimately leave out the (shall we say) differently technologized, as a fiction about suburban adulteries may ignore the city poor, and a fiction centered on the male psyche may omit women. Such omission may, however, be read as a statement that advantage is superiority, or that the white middle class is the whole society, or that only men are worth writing about. Moral and political statements by omission are legitimated by the consciousness of making them, insofar as the writer’s culture permits that consciousness. It comes down to a matter of taking responsibility. A denial of authorial responsibility, a willed unconsciousness, is elitist, and it does impoverish much of our fiction in every genre, including realism.

...running simply because my feet had to keep moving or I might lose my mind - I realized that, in the span of a summer, Ev's family had swallowed all knowledge I had of who I was and what I believed. I wasn't whole anymore, I thought, before realizing, with chagrin, that I hadn't really ever felt whole. This terrible realization stopped my feet short. I was young, still so young, that I thought my lack of wholeness was somehow my fault. I had no idea everyone feels this way — that the most essential part of growing up is figuring out where your empty places are and learning how to fill them by, and for, yourself.

Woodstock, summer of 1969, was the turning point of rock festivals. Time magazine described this happening as “one of the most significant political and sociological events of the age.” One half-million American youth assembled for a three-day rock concert. They were non-violent, fun-loving hippies who resembled the large followings of Mahatma Gandhi in India and Rev. Martin Luther King in the USA, both strong advocates of non-violence. Both assassinated. It is important to understand the kinds of drugs and chemical agents available to stifle dissent, the mentality of people hell-bent on changing the course of history, to comprehend that cultures and tastes can be moved in directions according to game plans in the hands of a few people. Adolf Hitler’s first targets in Nazi Germany were Gypsies and the students. LSD was a youth-oriented drug perfected in the laboratory. When it was combined with other chemicals and given wide distribution, all that remained were marching orders to go to war.

Marco Cirrini had been skiing on the north face of Bald Slope Mountain since he was a boy, using the old skis his father brought with him from Italy. The Cirrinis had shown up out of nowhere, walking into town in the middle of winter, their hair shining like black coal in the snow. They never really fit in. Marco tried, though. He tried by leading groups of local boys up the mountain in the winter, showing them how to make their own skis and how to use them. He charged them pennies and jars of bean chutney and spiced red cabbage they would sneak out of their mothers' sparse pantries. When he was nineteen, he decided he could take this one step further. He could make great things happen in the winter in Bald Slope. Cocky, not afraid of hard work and handsome in that mysterious Mediterranean way that excluded him from mountain society, he gathered investors from as far away as Asheville and Charlotte to buy the land. He started construction on the lodge himself while the residents of the town scoffed. They were the sweet cream and potatoes and long-forgotten ballads of their English and Irish and Scottish ancestors, who settled the southern Appalachians. They didn't want change. It took fifteen years, but the Bald Slope Ski Resort was finally completed and, much to everyone's surprise, it was an immediate success. Change was good! Stores didn't shut down for the winter anymore. Bed-and-breakfasts and sports shops and restaurants sprouted up. Instead of closing up their houses for the winter, summer residents began to rent them out to skiers. Some summer residents even decided to move to Bald Slope permanently, moving into their vacation homes with their sleeping porches and shade trees, thus forming the high society in Bald Slope that existed today. Marco himself was welcomed into this year-round society. He was essentially responsible for its formation in the first place, after all. Finally it didn't matter where he came from. What mattered was that he saved Bald Slope by giving it a winter economy, and he could do no wrong. This town was finally his.

Larry King Larry King is one of the premier figures in American broadcasting, and his show, Larry King Live, on CNN, is one of the longest-running television programs currently on the air. The summer of 2007 will mark his fiftieth anniversary in broadcasting. I first met Princess Diana at a party in Los Angeles. As at so many parties in LA, there were famous people from all walks of life--actors, broadcasters, executives, authors, politicians, journalists. But there was only one princess, and she stood out from the crowd, talking and smiling and taking the time to give each person some personal attention. I kept her in the corner of my eye, waiting for an opportunity to talk to her. But she was spending so much time with every guest! Eventually, I made my way over to where she stood, and waited for a chance to finally meet this illustrious lady. Her pictures did not do her justice. I had seen her many times on TV and in the papers, of course, but seeing her in person was a whole new experience. She was absolutely beautiful. Her face was radiant, animated and full of life. She had honesty in her eyes, which made her approachable, and she had this uncanny ability to make everyone around her comfortable. I have interviewed thousands of people in my career, and this is a quality that I’ve always known is essential for a broadcaster. But for Diana, it seemed to come completely naturally. Within the first five seconds of meeting her, I felt like we had been friends for years. It was a big party and she was the star. Everybody wanted to talk to her. Not a big surprise--after all, she had interesting things to say about so many different topics. I always respected her work with land mines and AIDS, I knew her importance to the fashion world, and her role as a princess in the Royal Family made her one of the hottest topics of the tabloids. Yet she chatted about her sons and her friends with everybody--Diana was an extraordinary woman with an unassuming air, and it was an absolute pleasure to be in her presence. When we were introduced, her eyes lit up and she grabbed my hand. She said, “Oh, you’re Larry from the telly!” We laughed and spoke for a little while about our families, and I was amazed at how well she remembered all of the little details I mentioned. After all of the people she had met that night, she was bright-eyed and curious about everything. My only regret from the first time we met was that we didn’t have a few more hours to talk! I blushed when she mentioned a few interviews I had done earlier in the year. I didn’t know she had seen me on CNN. It was a warm, friendly greeting that I will never forget.

2. The soft “no” (or the “no but”). I recently received an e-mail inviting me to coffee. I replied: “I am consumed with writing my book right now :) But I would love to get together once the book is finished. Let me know if we can get together towards the end of the summer.” E-mail

Essential advice for the gardener: grow peas of mind, lettuce be thankful, squash selfishness, turnip to help thy neighbour and always make thyme for loved ones.’ Corny but very apt, I thought.

As Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t, points out, “ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don’t light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Häagen-Dazs.” Of course, it’s no surprise that correlation isn’t the same as causality. But although most organizations know that, I don’t think they act as if there is a difference. They’re comfortable with correlation. It allows managers to sleep at night. But correlation does not reveal the one thing that matters most in innovation—the causality behind why I might purchase a particular solution. Yet few innovators frame their primary challenge around the discovery of a cause. Instead, they focus on how they can make their products better, more profitable, or differentiated from the competition. As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do? For me, this is a neat idea. When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem. Every day stuff happens to us. Jobs arise in our lives that we need to get done. Some jobs are little (“ pass the time while waiting in line”), some are big (“ find a more fulfilling career”). Some surface unpredictably (“ dress for an out-of-town business meeting after the airline lost my suitcase”), some regularly (“ pack a healthy, tasty lunch for my daughter to take to school”). Other times we know they’re coming. When we realize we have a job to do, we reach out and pull something into our lives to get the job done. I might, for example, choose to buy the New York Times because I have a job to fill my time while waiting for a doctor’s appointment and I don’t want to read the boring magazines available in the lobby. Or perhaps because I’m a basketball fan and it’s March Madness time. It’s only when a job arises in my life that the Times can solve for me that I’ll choose to hire the paper to do it. Or perhaps I have it delivered to my door so that my neighbors think I’m informed—and nothing about their ZIP code or median household income will tell the Times that either.

There was one day in my life, just one, when I no longer wanted to live. I was hungry, and as I had no money it was absolutely essential for me to work if I was to eat. It was as if I had forgotten that this was as true of everyone as of me. That day I felt quite unused to life and there seemed no point in going on living because I couldn’t see why things should go on for me as they did for other people. It took me a whole day to get over this feeling. Then, of course, I took my suitcase to the market and afterwards I had a meal and things went on as they had before. But with this difference, that ever since that day I find that any thought of the future—and after all thinking of a refrigerator is thinking of the future—is much more frightening than before.

He then introduced a second, more delicate subject. Not only in villages, but also in towns, he had seen women cover their faces and their eyes as his party passed by. This habit, which caused particular discomfort in the heat of the summer, was, at least to some extent, the result of male selfishness, of scruples for purity. ‘But, friends, our women have minds too.’ So teach them morals and then stop being selfish. ‘Let them show their faces to the world, and see it with their eyes … Don’t be afraid. Change is essential, so much so that, if need be, we are prepared to sacrifice lives for its sake.

But then, during the first days of January in 2000, the West Power Clearing Model began to produce some very strange numbers. It seemed that there was a supply crunch looming in California. The state had not built a new power plant in about a decade, and demand had been rising steadily. Water reservoirs were getting low, thanks to a dry year with little rainfall. A hot summer seemed to be on the way. Demand was high and supplies were tight, which meant that prices would soon be rising. This was essentially the same analysis that Brenden O’Neill was seeing on the natural gas desk. There would be a spike in both gas and electricity prices, which were closely connected. There was a small problem, however. California’s day-ahead market on the Power Exchange had a price cap on it. This created a potential distortion in the market: the real price of power might float higher than the capped price, which would force producers to trade at a loss. There seemed to be some gaming going on in this market in response to the price caps—it looked like some utility companies were intentionally underscheduling their loads in the day-ahead market to try and evade the price caps. The traders believed that California’s new system was imperfectly deregulated because of the price caps, and they also seemed to believe that the state’s political leaders were too dumb to recognize the fact or change it. The traders weren’t sympathetic to the idea that they should abide by the price caps if the market dictated otherwise. The thinking of Enron traders was captured in recorded phone calls, later obtained by investigators, which included gems such as: “Grandma Millie, man . . . now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you’ve charged . . . jammed right up her ass for fucking two hundred fifty dollars a megawatt-hour.

The organs and elements either generate or destroy each other in a particular pattern. This idea is a reflection of the Chinese principle of restoring equilibrium through balancing opposites (yin-yang) or of wuxing, which refers to the interlocking nature of the five elements. The idea of wuxing explains that each element exerts a generative and subjugative influence on one another. Wood will generate (or feed) fire and fire will generate new earth. Elements also subjugate or destroy each other. A practitioner diagnoses which elements might need to be generated or decreased and will figure treatment accordingly. Understanding this cycle is the key to creating balance within the system. GENERATIVE INTERACTIONS wood feeds fire fire creates earth earth bears metal metal collects water water nourishes wood DESTRUCTIVE INTERACTIONS These are often called “overcoming” interactions, as they involve one element being destroyed or changed by another: wood parts earth earth takes in water water quenches fire fire melts metal metal chops wood The ancient Chinese had a different idea of anatomy than Western physicians. Instead of being characterized by their position in the body, the organs were understood by the role they played within the overall system. They were therefore described by their interdependent relationships and connection to the skin via the blood (xue), fluids, meridians, and the three vital treasures described below. Just as organs flow in five phases, so do the seasons and points on the compass. There are four directions, with China representing the fifth (at the center). Unlike the Western compass, the Chinese compass emphasizes the south. This is summer, the hottest time of the year. It is appropriately linked to fire. West is the setting of the sun and is associated with autumn and metal, while north is winter and water (the opposite of the south). East, the rising sun, is linked with spring and wood. Earth is related to the center of the compass and late summer. If any of these phases are out of balance, the entire system is unbalanced. Blocks or stagnation anywhere can result in problems, as can excess or lack. A proper diagnosis will integrate all of these factors. FIGURE 4.20 THE FIVE CHINESE ELEMENTS THE THREE VITAL TREASURES The Three Treasures, sometimes called the Three Jewels, are keystones in traditional Chinese medicine. From the Taoist perspective, these three treasures constitute the essential forces of life, which are considered to be three forms of the same substance. These three treasures are: •​Jing, basic or nutritive essence, seen as represented in sperm, among other substances. •​Chi, life force connected with air, vapor, breath, and spirit. •​Shen, spiritual essence linked with the soul and supernaturalism. Most often, jing is related to body energy, chi to mind energy, and shen to spiritual energy. These three energies cycle, with jing serving as the foundation for life and procreation, chi animating the body’s performance, and shen mirroring the state of the soul.

One thing most people don’t fully comprehend is that the USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture, is for all intents and purposes run by big agro. Let me put it another way: the USDA is a giddy dystopian wonderland designed for the pleasure of big agribusiness. There are only a handful of American agribusiness corporations, and they essentially dictate what Americans eat because they essentially control the USDA. For example, the USDA created the nutritional pyramid first and foremost to serve agribusiness’s interests—not human physical needs. And thus the meals served to schools and to prisons reflect not what the bodies of growing boys and girls or aging men and women need to thrive and/or survive; rather, these meals, planned and vetted and carefully created by lockstep scads of bureaucratic drones, work to buttress the agribusiness economy—while costing the State (or the corporation running the institution) as little as possible.