Surface Tension Quotes

Love, whether it's friendship or more, is like a cup. It fills up drop by drop, until one last drop and the cup is full. The liquid hangs there almost above the rim, hangs there on surface tension alone and you know that one more drop and it will spill over.

We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface hidden tension that is already alive

Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship’s more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.

Like water, I have no skin...only surface tension. (Gretel Ehrlich)

Like water, I have no skin...only surface tension.

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.

The secret enemy, though, will react with anger. Any strong emotion and you will know that there’s something boiling under the surface. Often the best way to get people to reveal themselves is to provoke tension and argument.

This is only one of the reasons why a strong friendship is critical. A surface-level relationship might snap under the tension of disagreement, but by living our lives together, we were forced to reconcile.

There is a moment of surface tension when a knife blade presents its demand and the flesh honors it. An instant of pressure before the puncture, the rip before the slide, a small eternity easy to miss but impossible to ignore if you’ve felt it before. I lived in that moment a great while for the small sliver of time it was there.

Racial and ethnic tensions simmer just below the surface in virtually all multiethnic societies, but it usually takes an economic crisis to blow off the lid of civility and allow deep-seated hatred to degenerate into violence.

He had nerve damage: input could not penetrate. The world stalled out at his edges. Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension.

Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry; an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God. It is this spot of grace that issues peace. Psychologists call this spot the Psyche, Theologians call it the Soul, Jung calls it the Seat of the Unconscious, Hindu masters call it Atman, Buddhists call it Dharma, Rilke calls it Inwardness, Sufis call it Qalb, and Jesus calls it the Center of our Love. To know this spot of Inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core. When the film is worn through, we have moments of enlightenment, moments of wholeness, moments of Satori as the Zen sages term it, moments of clear living when inner meets outer, moments of full integrity of being, moments of complete Oneness. And whether the film is a veil of culture, of memory, of mental or religious training, of trauma or sophistication, the removal of that film and the restoration of that timeless spot of grace is the goal of all therapy and education. Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God

But theirs had always been a broken country. It had never been unified, not truly; it had only ever been held tightly together by steel and blood, a facade of internal unity, while factions always threated to split from within. Rin had forced those tensions to the surface, and then to their breaking point. She'd forced the Nikara to confront the greatest lie it had ever told about itself — that there had been a united Nikara Empire at all.

To the extent that you actually realize that you are not, for example, your anxieties, then your anxieties no longer threaten you. Even if anxiety is present, it no longer overwhelms you because you are no longer exclusively tied to it. You are no longer courting it, fighting it, resisting it, or running from it. In the most radical fashion, anxiety is thoroughly accepted as it is and allowed to move as it will. You have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, by its presence or absence, for you are simply watching it pass by. Thus, any emotion, sensation, thought, memory, or experience that disturbs you is simply one with which you have exclusively identified yourself, and the ultimate resolution of the disturbance is simply to dis-identify with it. You cleanly let all of them drop away by realizing that they are not you--since you can see them, they cannot be the true Seer and Subject. Since they are not your real self, there is no reason whatsoever for you to identify with them, hold on to them, or allow your self to be bound by them. Slowly, gently, as you pursue this dis-identification "therapy," you may find that your entire individual self (persona, ego, centaur), which heretofore you have fought to defend and protect, begins to go transparent and drop away. Not that it literally falls off and you find yourself floating, disembodied, through space. Rather, you begin to feel that what happens to your personal self—your wishes, hopes, desires, hurts—is not a matter of life-or-death seriousness, because there is within you a deeper and more basic self which is not touched by these peripheral fluctuations, these surface waves of grand commotion but feeble substance. Thus, your personal mind-and-body may be in pain, or humiliation, or fear, but as long as you abide as the witness of these affairs, as if from on high, they no longer threaten you, and thus you are no longer moved to manipulate them, wrestle with them, or subdue them. Because you are willing to witness them, to look at them impartially, you are able to transcend them. As St. Thomas put it, "Whatever knows certain things cannot have any of them in its own nature." Thus, if the eye were colored red, it wouldn't be able to perceive red objects. It can see red because it is clear, or "redless." Likewise, if we can but watch or witness our distresses, we prove ourselves thereby to be "distress-less," free of the witnessed turmoil. That within which feels pain is itself pain-less; that which feels fear is fear-less; that which perceives tension is tensionless. To witness these states is to transcend them. They no longer seize you from behind because you look at them up front.

. . . But I was convinced that I was special, and I was searching for the thing that set me apart from everyone else . . . when I look back on it now, I tell myself . . . ''I was so young back then.'' But that's just a justification. So now . . . I spend my days living in fear of something spilling out of my heart . . . like water from a bowl, escaping the limits of surface tension. Mr. Onodera . . . are you happy now? I have acceptance . . . but not satisfaction. Really . . . I just want to be able to focus on my pottery . . . that's all. But as you get older . . . you become afraid of losing things, even if they're worthless.

I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely. Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems. In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death. For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age. At least you used to. But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.

Understanding our personalities doesn’t eliminate the tension that results when people with different needs, motivations, and preferences come together or, especially, live together. But understanding things beneath the surface–why people act the way they act and prefer the things they prefer–helps us at least make sense of what’s going on. These people are not out to get us or trying to ruffle our feathers; they’re just different–a different kind of normal.

It's not an honest face. It's not a kind face. It's a face made of anger and secrets and lies. From the tight, guarded mouth to the clenched, square jaw to the glossy shimmer of I-dare-you that coats the surface of her eyes, Aimee's face is a scary place for Meghan's gaze to rest. But beneath the gloss, behind the sharpness and tension, deep at Aimee's core, Meghan can see something warm and real. It's the same unnameable thing she saw in the sickroom on the first day of school. It's the same thing she feels pulsing softly deep in her own chest.

[David Riesman] had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend.

A choking dry-ice smog of disappointment, pooling in the drops and troughs of suddenly uncertain ground. Mudyards, wit here and there the smoking wrecks of ideologies, their wheels and radios gone. River of litter rustling in a swollen course below the sky's black drag and in the ditches mustard gas, a mulch of sodden colouring books, imploded television sets. These are the fretful margins of twentieth century, the boomtowns ragged edge, out past the sink estates, the human landfill, where the wheelchair access paving quakes, gives way like sphagnum moss beneath our feet. It’s 1999, less like date than like a number we restore to in emergencies. pre-packaged in its national front hunting. It’s millennial mummy-wraps. The zeitgeist yawns, as echoing and hollow as the Greenwich dome. It’s April 10th; we find ourselves in red lion square....caught in the crosshairs of geography and time like sitting ducks, held always by surface tension of the instant, by the sensory dazzle. Constant play of light on neural ripples. Fluttering attention pinned to where and when and who we are. The honey-trap of our personal circumstance, of our familiar bodies restless in these chairs.

Sophie, what will you do to help Josh,to save him, to bring him back?" Tsagaglalal asked. "Anything. Everything." Perenelle leaned forward to place both forearms on the table. Her hands were tightly locked together, knuckles white with tension. "And Sophie, what do you think I will do to help my husband?" "Anything," Sophie said again. "Everything." "We will do anything-everything-to help those we love. That is what seperates the humani from the Next Generation of the Elders or those who came before them. That is what makes us human.That is why the race thrives; it is why the race will always survive." "But that type of love requires sacrifice," Tsagaglalal said slowly. "Sometimes extraordinary sacrifices..." The old woman's gray eyes suddenly swam with huge tears. And Sophie had a flickering memory of a woman-younger, so much younger, but with the same high cheekbones and gray eyes of Tsagaglalal-turning away from a tall golden statue. The woman stopped and looked back, and Sophie discovered that the statue's bright gray eyes were alive and were following the woman. Then Tsagaglalal turned and raced down endless glass stairs. She was clutching a book in both hands: the Codex. And her tears dripped onto the metal surface.

it would see a huge hemisphere of water. The hemisphere of water does not collapse because surface tension acts like a net that holds the droplet together. In our world, surface tension of water is quite small, so we don’t notice it. But on the scale of an ant, surface tension is proportionately huge, so rain beads up into droplets.

Nonviolent conflict allows activists to highlight the systemic violence that exists in society and that usually goes unrecognized—the violence, for example, of routine and persistent police brutality, of economic displacement and exploitation, of wanton environmental destruction, or of racist criminalization and imprisonment of entire communities. As Martin Luther King Jr. argued, nonviolent direct action allows activists to “bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.” Yet, if activists turn to violence themselves, it allows authorities to institute expanded repression in the name of restoring a state of “peace” in which systemic abuses are once again submerged.32

Fear will give you Fight Fight will give you Freedom Dive in and Swim

You're a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven't the thousand obstacles a woman has in front of her.

Quotations from ‘“THE STRENGTH IN KNOWING” *** Convey to others more compassion, sensitivity, understanding rather than judgementalism” To find pity shall enable forgiveness to surface There are good bones in everyone’s body, what varies are the number Cause and effect from the very smallest act by one individual can change mankind for all time Devastation can be a reward, and a path to regeneration Emotions May Inhibit our Ability to Find Peace One must conquer One’s insensitivity to sensitivity True peace maintains strength and calm in the face of discord and tension Wisdom is not guranteed to be achieved with age but rather realized with ones sensitiviy to man and the universe Opposites create duality. The ego creates opposites. Therefore, the ego creates duality One should not permit his or her life path to be influenced by the expectations of others. Doubt is the archenemy of the purity of thought and it inhibits the essence of all that is Our, emotions and perceptions determine our attitudes and ultimately our choices Don’t do it later; do it now. True love is unconditional and everlasting and it cannot cease. Reframing from negative speech is a path to reduction of negative thought Uncontaminated understanding and awareness is the purity of essence and the essence of purity

The scientist would look at a sphere, measure the surface in great detail, categorize the skin qualities and components, then predict evolving surface tensions and potentials. The use of that sphere, however, along with its beauty and potential would not be of interest. Science would count the bricks of a house, but not care about living in it, thus missing the point – but thinking that, by quantifying the physical, everything had been covered.

Nature’s ultimate goal is to foster the growth of the individual from absolute dependence to independence — or, more exactly, to the interdependence of mature adults living in community. Development is a process of moving from complete external regulation to self-regulation, as far as our genetic programming allows. Well-self-regulated people are the most capable of interacting fruitfully with others in a community and of nurturing children who will also grow into self-regulated adults. Anything that interferes with that natural agenda threatens the organism’s chances for long-term survival. Almost from the beginning of life we see a tension between the complementary needs for security and for autonomy. Development requires a gradual and ageappropriate shift from security needs toward the drive for autonomy, from attachment to individuation. Neither is ever completely lost, and neither is meant to predominate at the expense of the other. With an increased capacity for self-regulation in adulthood comes also a heightened need for autonomy — for the freedom to make genuine choices. Whatever undermines autonomy will be experienced as a source of stress. Stress is magnified whenever the power to respond effectively to the social or physical environment is lacking or when the tested animal or human being feels helpless, without meaningful choices — in other words, when autonomy is undermined. Autonomy, however, needs to be exercised in a way that does not disrupt the social relationships on which survival also depends, whether with emotional intimates or with important others—employers, fellow workers, social authority figures. The less the emotional capacity for self-regulation develops during infancy and childhood, the more the adult depends on relationships to maintain homeostasis. The greater the dependence, the greater the threat when those relationships are lost or become insecure. Thus, the vulnerability to subjective and physiological stress will be proportionate to the degree of emotional dependence. To minimize the stress from threatened relationships, a person may give up some part of his autonomy. However, this is not a formula for health, since the loss of autonomy is itself a cause of stress. The surrender of autonomy raises the stress level, even if on the surface it appears to be necessary for the sake of “security” in a relationship, and even if we subjectively feel relief when we gain “security” in this manner. If I chronically repress my emotional needs in order to make myself “acceptable” to other people, I increase my risks of having to pay the price in the form of illness. The other way of protecting oneself from the stress of threatened relationships is emotional shutdown. To feel safe, the vulnerable person withdraws from others and closes against intimacy. This coping style may avoid anxiety and block the subjective experience of stress but not the physiology of it. Emotional intimacy is a psychological and biological necessity. Those who build walls against intimacy are not self-regulated, just emotionally frozen. Their stress from having unmet needs will be high.

I don’t want to talk about me. We never talk about you. I probably don’t know anything about you. He laces his fingers into mine and rests our hands on his stomach. I move my fingertips in tiny circles and he sighs indulgently. “Sure you do. Go on, list everything.” “I know surface things. The color of your shirts. Your lovely blue eyes. You live on mints and make me look like a pig in comparison. You scare three-quarters of B and G employees absolutely senseless, but only because the other quarter haven’t met you yet.” He smirks. “Such a bunch of delicate sissies.” I keep ticking things off. “You’ve got a pencil you use for secret purposes I think relate to me. You dry clean on alternate Fridays. The projector in the boardroom strains your eyes and gives you headaches. You’re good at using silence to scare the shit out of people. It’s your go-to strategy in meetings. You sit there and stare with your laser-eyes until your opponent crumbles.” He remains silent. “Oh, and you’re secretly a decent human being.” “You definitely know more about me than anyone else.” I can feel a tension in him. When I look at his face, he looks shaken. My stalking has scared the ever-loving shit out of him. Unfortunately, the next thing I say sounds deranged. I want to know what’s going on in your brain. I want to juice your head like a lemon.

I believe all problems can be solved. It’s that simple. And most people don’t. Most people just want to wallow in it, but they don’t want it fixed, especially if the fix requires the acceptance of personal responsibility and personal change.

The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world. We swim through a sea of people -- a social version of Middle World. We are evolved to second-guess the behavior of others by becoming brilliant, intuitive psychologists. Treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate, but it's a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next. The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal-seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame-worthiness. Personification and the imputing of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans, it's hardly surprising the same modeling software often seizes control when we're trying to think about entities for which it's not appropriate, like Basil Fawlty with his car or like millions of deluded people with the universe as a whole. If the universe is queerer than we can suppose, is it just because we've been naturally selected to suppose only what we needed to suppose in order to survive in the Pleistocene of Africa? Or are our brains so versatile and expandable that we can train ourselves to break out of the box of our evolution? Or, finally, are there some things in the universe so queer that no philosophy of beings, however godlike, could dream them? Thank you very much.

It might seem counterintuitive, but bringing conflicts to light is the charismatic thing to do.  Have the courage to call out when there is tension beneath the surface of an interaction. Let people know when they transgress boundaries, even when you want their favor.

When a plot resolves, readers are satisfied, but what they remember of a novel is what they felt while reading it. Hooks may hook, twists may intrigue, tension may turn pages, and prose may dazzle, but all of those effects fade as quickly as fireworks in a night sky. Ask readers what they best remember about novels and most will say the characters, but is that accurate? It’s true that characters become real to us but that is because of what they cause us to feel. Characters aren’t actually real; only our own feelings are. Emotional

Viewed nostalgically from the perspective of the early interwar years, Germany before 1914 seemed to many to have been a haven of peace, prosperity and social harmony. Yet beneath its prosperous and self-confident surface, it was nervous, uncertain and racked by internal tensions.

Despite all their surface diversity, most jokes and funny incidents have the following logical structure: Typically you lead the listener along a garden path of expectation, slowly building up tension. At the very end, you introduce an unexpected twist that entails a complete reinterpretation of all the preceding data, and moreover, it's critical that the new interpretation, though wholly unexpected, makes as much "sense" of the entire set of facts as did the originally "expected" interpretation. In this regard, jokes have much in common with scientific creativity, with what Thomas Kuhn calls a "paradigm shift" in response to a single "anomaly." (It's probably not coincidence that many of the most creative scientists have a great sense of humor.) Of course, the anomaly in the joke is the traditional punch line and the joke is "funny" only if the listener gets the punch line by seeing in a flash of insight how a completely new interpretation of the same set of facts can incorporate the anomalous ending. The longer and more tortuous the garden path of expectation, the "funnier" the punch line when finally delivered.

But the moment you realize that it’s useless to fight the tension between us, I will have you spread open on every fucking surface of this penthouse. I’ll prove to you just how much you deserve to be worshiped. You’ll find out very quickly how exquisite it’d be if not everything in this agreement was fake.

Nonviolent coercion always brings tension to the surface. This tension, however, must not be seen as destructive. There is a kind of tension that is both healthy and necessary for growth. Society needs nonviolent gadflies to bring its tensions into the open and force its citizens to confront the ugliness of their prejudices and the tragedy of their racism. It is important for the liberal to see that the oppressed person who agitates for his rights is not the creator of tension....How strange it would be to condemn a physician who, through persistent work and the ingenuity of his medical skills, discovered cancer in a patient. Would anyone be so ignorant as to say he caused the cancer? Through the skills and discipline of direct action we reveal that there is a dangerous cancer of hatred and racism in our society. We did not cause the cancer; we merely exposed it. Only through this kind of exposure will the cancer be cured.

In some sense, a broken marriage is due to the unresolved tension between two tribal identities. All marriages are crosscultural, so a good therapist will help raise to the surface the issues and resources of each culture in the relationship and then help the two conflicting cultures come together as complements.

Those, final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quiet-ness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing that produce a friendship's more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.

Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes. There they branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and fraternize there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes Socinius by the hair. But nothing arrests nor interrupts the tension of all these energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous activity, which goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in these obscurities, and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms the top and the bottom and the inside and the outside. Society hardly even suspects this digging which leaves its surface intact and changes its bowels. There are as many different subterranean stages as there are varying works, as there are extractions. What emerges from these deep excavations? The future.

feelings, if left unacknowledged and unaddressed, can eventually surface as pain of some kind. Then the pain, in turn, causes us to narrow-focus on distractions, from television to the Internet or a range of things. By using narrow-focus avoidance to hold back our unwanted thoughts and feelings, our nervous system goes into overarousal, creating muscle tension and blood flow disturbances, which lead to the production of auxiliary pain.

Yet when she returned to the house, Sarsine had a smile on her face. “Go into the salon,” she said. Her piano. Its surface gleamed like wet ink. An emotion flooded through Kestrel, but she didn’t want to name it. It wasn’t right that she should feel it, simply because Arin had given back to her something that he had more or less taken. Kestrel shouldn’t play. She shouldn’t sit on that familiar velvet bench or think about how transporting a piano across the city was no mean feat. It meant people. Pulleys. Horses straining to haul a cart. She shouldn’t wonder how Arin had found the time and begged his people’s goodwill to bring her piano here. She shouldn’t touch the cool keys, or feel that delicious tension between silence and sound. She remembered that Arin had refused to sing for who knows how long. Kestrel didn’t have that particular kind of strength. She sat and played.

The crisis in their souls begins at the moment when they either recognize that they have tremendous potentialities not yet exercised or begin to yearn for a religious life which will make greater demands on them. Up to that moment of crisis, they have lived on the surface of their souls. The tension deepens as they realize that, like a plant, they have roots which need greater spiritual depths and branches meant for communion with the heavens above.

I don't know how you hear music. I imagine that if you like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting space as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture. Speaking for myself, I used to hear "buildings"... three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not "see" these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them. These forms had "floors", "walls", "roofs", "windows", "cellars". They expressed volume. Music to me has always been a handsome three-dimensional container, a vessel, as real in its way as a Scout hut or a cathedral or a ship, with an inside and an outside and subdivided internal spaces. I'm absolutely certain that this "architecture" had everything to do with why music has always exerted such a hold over me. I think music was the structure in which I learned to contain and then examine emotion.

The ghost was not a ghost at all, or so it claimed - it claimed to be a psychic energy baby, birthed in some ethereal dimension, and pulled into the phone by the powerful magnetism of phone signals. It remembered with perfect clarity how it came to be - remembered coalescing from the membranous surface of the world, streaked with reflected light, humming with surface tension under the pressure of emptiness underneath. The Psychic Energy Baby found form among the emanations of people's minds and the susurrus of their voices, it found flesh in the shapes of their lips and eyes made, the surprise of 'o's and the sibilations of 's's; its skin stretched taut like a soap bubble, forged from the wet sound of lips touching; its thoughts were the musky smells and the nerves twined around the transparent water balloons of the muscles like stems of toadflax, searching restlessly for every available crevice, stretching along cold rough surfaces. Its veins, tiny rivers, pumped heartbeats striking in unison, the dry dallying of billions of ventricular contractions. And it spoke, spoke endlessly, it spokes words that tasted of dark air and formic acid. It could speak long before it took it's final shape. And when it happened, when all the sounds and smells and words in the world, when all the thoughts had aligned so that it could become - then it found itself pulled into the wires, surrounded by taut copper and green and red and yellow insulation; twined and quartered among the cables, rent open by millions of voices that shouted and whispered and pleaded and threatened, interspersed with the rasping of breaths and tearing laughter. It traveled through the criss-crossing of the wires so fast that it felt itself being pulled into a needle, head spearing into the future while its feet infinitely receded into the past, until it came into a dark quiet pool of the black rotary phone, where it could reassemble itself and take stock.

Suppressed energy doesn’t go away, and even dark or disowned energy cannot be destroyed. It needs to move, to become, to transmute; it must find an expression. In this way, unconscious material rises again and again to the surface, seeking to be met, detoxed, and clarified. Until trauma has been acknowledged, felt, and released, it will be experienced from without in the form of repetition compulsion and projection and from within as tension and contraction, reduction of life flow, illness or disease.

In the past few years, more and more passionate debates about the nature of SFF and YA have bubbled to the surface. Conversations about race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, romance, bias, originality, feminism and cultural appropriation are getting louder and louder and, consequently, harder to ignore. Similarly, this current tension about negative reviews is just another fissure in the same bedrock: the consequence of built-up pressure beneath. Literary authors feud with each other, and famously; yet genre authors do not, because we fear being cast as turncoats. For decades, literary writers have also worked publicly as literary reviewers; yet SFF and YA authors fear to do the same, lest it be seen as backstabbing when they dislike a book. (Small wonder, then, that so few SFF and YA titles are reviewed by mainstream journals.) Just as a culture of sexual repression leads to feelings of guilt and outbursts of sexual moralising by those most afflicted, so have we, by denying and decrying all criticism that doesn’t suit our purposes, turned those selfsame critical impulses towards censorship. Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA

The white liberal must rid himself of the notion that there can be a tensionless transition from the old order of injustice to the new order of justice. Two things are clear to me, and I hope they are clear to white liberals. One is that the Negro cannot achieve emancipation through violent rebellion. The other is that the Negro cannot achieve emancipation by passively waiting for the white race voluntarily to grant it to him. The Negro has not gained a single right in America without persistent pressure and agitation. However lamentable it may seem, the Negro is now convinced that white America will never admit him to equal rights unless it is coerced into doing it. Nonviolent coercion always brings tension to the surface. This tension, however, must not be seen as destructive. There is a kind of tension that is both healthy and necessary for growth. Society needs nonviolent gadflies to bring its tensions into the open and force its citizens to confront the ugliness of their prejudices and the tragedy of their racism. It is important for the liberal to see that the oppressed person who agitates for his rights is not the creator of tension. He merely brings out the hidden tension that is already alive.

The great majority of those who, like Frankl, were liberated from Nazi concentration camps chose to leave for other countries rather than return to their former homes, where far too many neighbors had turned murderous. But Viktor Frankl chose to stay in his native Vienna after being freed and became head of neurology at a main hospital in Vienna. The Austrians he lived among often perplexed Frankl by saying they did not know a thing about the horrors of the camps he had barely survived. For Frankl, though, this alibi seemed flimsy. These people, he felt, had chosen not to know. Another survivor of the Nazis, the social psychologist Ervin Staub, was saved from a certain death by Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who made Swedish passports for thousands of desperate Hungarians, keeping them safe from the Nazis. Staub studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away, choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers. For Frankl, the “not-knowing” he encountered in postwar Vienna was regarding the Nazi death camps scattered throughout that short-lived empire, and the obliviousness of Viennese citizens to the fate of their own neighbors who were imprisoned and died in those camps. The underlying motive for not-knowing, he points out, is to escape any sense of responsibility or guilt for those crimes. People in general, he saw, had been encouraged by their authoritarian rulers not to know—a fact of life today as well. That same plea of innocence, I had no idea, has contemporary resonance in the emergence of an intergenerational tension. Young people around the world are angry at older generations for leaving as a legacy to them a ruined planet, one where the momentum of environmental destruction will go on for decades, if not centuries. This environmental not-knowing has gone on for centuries, since the Industrial Revolution. Since then we have seen the invention of countless manufacturing platforms and processes, most all of which came to be in an era when we had no idea of their ecological impacts. Advances in science and technology are making ecological impacts more transparent, and so creating options that address the climate crisis and, hopefully, will be pursued across the globe and over generations. Such disruptive, truly “green” alternatives are one way to lessen the bleakness of Earth 2.0—the planet in future decades—a compelling fact of life for today’s young. Were Frankl with us today (he died in 1997), he would no doubt be pleased that so many of today’s younger people are choosing to know and are finding purpose and meaning in surfacing environmental facts and acting on them.

I'm sure we'll need some- oof!" She was never to finish the thoughts she was startled by a creature that came bounding swiftly around the side of the carriage. A glimpse of floppy ears and jolly brown eyes filled her vision before the enthusiastic canine pounced so eagerly that she toppled backward from her squatting position. She landed on her rump, the impact knocking her hat to the ground. A swath of hair came loose and slid over her face, while a young tan-and black retriever leapt around her as if he were on springs. She felt a huff of dog breath on at her ear and the swipe of a tongue on her cheek. "Ajax, no," she heard Ivo exclaim. Realizing what a mess she'd become, all in a matter of seconds, Pandora experienced a moment of despair, followed by resignation. Of course this would happen. Of course she would have to meet the duke and duchess after tumbling on the drive like a half-witted carnival performer. It was so dreadful that she began to giggle, while the dog nudged his head against hers. In the next moment, Pandora was lifted to her feet and caught firmly against a hard surface. The momentum threw her off balance, and she clung to St. Vincent dizzily. He kept her anchored securely against him with an arm around her back. "Down, idiot," St. Vincent commanded. The dog subsided, panting happily. "He must have slipped past the front door," Ivo said. St. Vincent smoothed Pandora's hair back from her face. "Are you hurt?" His gaze ran over her swiftly. "No... no." Helpless giggles kept bubbling up as her nervous tension released. She tried to smother the giddy sounds against his shoulder. "I was... trying so hard to be ladylike..." A brief chuckle escaped him, and his hand moved over her upper back in a calming circle. "I would imagine it's not easy to be ladylike in the midst of a dog mauling.

We're not in Khlong Prem Prison yet. So let's assume we're winning." But inwardly, Anderson wonders. There are too many variables in play, and it makes him nervous. He remembers a time in Missouri when the Grahamites rioted. There had been tension, some small speeches, and then it had simply erupted in field burning. No one had seen the violence coming. Not a single intelligence officer had anticipated the cauldron boiling beneath the surface. Anderson had ended up perched atop a grain silo, choking on the smoke of HiGro fields going up in sheets of flame, firing steadily at rioters on the ground with a spring rifle he'd salvaged from a slow-moving security guard, and all the while he had wondered how everyone had missed the signs. They lost the facility because of that blindness. And now it is the same. A sudden eruption, and the surprise of realizing that the world he understands is not the one he actually inhabits.

Authors like Shakespeare and Goethe have glorious monologues that flood the theater with words. This endless verbalizing is a lie. This perfect harmony between heart and tongue exists only on a stage. I wanted to use language realistically to dramatize the tension that arises when the correspondence between feelings and language breaks down. Even Brecht swindled when it comes to language. His peasants speak more intelligently and more beautifully than any university professor. I wanted to smash this convention of stage language. I do not believe that people can heave their hearts into their mouths and speak their inner torments trippingly on the tongue. Language should not be the central element in drama. Language exists only on the surface of our consciousness. The great human struggles are played out in silence and in the inability to express oneself. Language should have the same function in the theater that it has in reality.

First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens' Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

My morning schedule saw me first in Cannan’s office, conferring with my advisor, but our meeting was interrupted within minutes by Narian, who entered without knocking and whose eyes were colder than I had seen them in a long time. “I thought you intended to control them,” he stated, walking toward the captain’s desk and standing directly beside the chair in which I sat.” He slammed a lengthy piece of parchment down on the wood surface, an unusual amount of tension in his movements. I glanced toward the open door and caught sight of Rava. She stood with one hand resting against the frame, her calculating eyes evaluating the scene while she awaited orders. Cannan’s gaze went to the parchment, but he did not reach for it, scanning its contents from a distance. Then he looked at Narian, unruffled. “I can think of a dozen or more men capable of this.” “But you know who is responsible.” Cannan sat back, assessing his opposition. “I don’t know with certainty any more than you do. In the absence of definitive proof of guilt on behalf of my son and his friends, I suggest you and your fellows develop a sense of humor.” Then the captain’s tone changed, becoming more forbidding. “I can prevent an uprising, Narian. This, you’ll have to get used to.” Not wanting to be in the dark, I snatched up the parchment in question. My mouth opened in shock and dismay as I silently read its contents, the men waiting for me to finish. On this Thirtieth Day of May in the First Year of Cokyrian dominance over the Province of Hytanica, the following regulations shall be put into practice in order to assist our gracious Grand Provost in her effort to welcome Cokyri into our lands--and to help ensure the enemy does not bungle the first victory it has managed in over a century. Regulation One. All Hytanican citizens must be willing to provide aid to aimlessly wandering Cokyrian soldiers who cannot on their honor grasp that the road leading back to the city is the very same road that led them away. Regulation Two. It is strongly recommended that farmers hide their livestock, lest the men of our host empire become confused and attempt to mate with them. Regulation Three. As per negotiated arrangements, crops grown on Hytanican soil will be divided with fifty percent belonging to Cokyri, and seventy-five percent remaining with the citizens of the province; Hytanicans will be bound by law to wait patiently while the Cokyrians attempt to sort the baffling deficiency in their calculations. Regulation Four. The Cokyrian envoys assigned to manage the planting and farming effort will also require Hytanican patience while they slowly but surely learn what is a crop and what is a weed, as well as left from right. Regulation Five. Though the Province Wall is a Cokyrian endeavor, it would be polite and understanding of Hytanicans to remind the enemy of the correct side on which to be standing when the final stone is laid, so no unfortunates may find themselves trapped outside with no way in. Regulation Six. When at long last foreign trade is allowed to resume, Hytanicans should strive to empathize with the reluctance of neighboring kingdoms to enter our lands, for Cokyri’s stench is sure to deter even the migrating birds. Regulation Seven. For what little trade and business we do manage in spite of the odor, the imposed ten percent tax may be paid in coins, sweets or shiny objects. Regulation Eight. It is regrettably prohibited for Hytanicans to throw jeers at Cokyrian soldiers, for fear that any man harried may cry, and the women may spit. Regulation Nine. In case of an encounter with Cokyrian dignitaries, the boy-invader and the honorable High Priestess included, let it be known that the proper way in which to greet them is with an ass-backward bow.

If Nixon set out to be the man who redefined the Republican political center in the post–New Deal, post–Fair Deal age, he did not, nor did any other young Republican politician, dare campaign by suggesting a return to the America that had existed before the New Deal. The phrase “creeping socialism” was about as close as they got to attacking the New Deal on its domestic reforms. Rather, the catchphrases were about a need to return to Americanism. It was better to attack Communism and speak of domestic treason than it was to be specific about reversing the economic redistribution of the New Deal. In fact, Nixon’s essential response to all issues was to raise the specter of Communism: “The commies,” Nixon told the Chicago Tribune’s Seymour Korman during his harsh 1950 senatorial campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, “don’t like it when I smash into Truman for his attempted cover-up of the Hiss case ... but the more the commies yell, the surer I am that I’m waging an honest American campaign.” He was, he liked to say, the number one target of the Communists in America. In those early campaigns, he was, it seemed, a man who needed an enemy and who seemed almost to feel that he functioned best when the world was against him. Such men, almost surely, eventually do get the enemies they so desperately want. If the leaders of a nation as powerful as the United States needed, above all, personal confidence—Oliver Wendell Holmes once said of the young Franklin Roosevelt that he had a third-rate intellect but a first-rate temperament—Nixon was ill-prepared for his long journey in American politics. Emotional strength and self-confidence were missing from him. Everything with Nixon was personal. When others disagreed with him, it was as if they wanted to strip away his hard-won veneer of success and reduce him to the unhappy boy he had once been. In political terms that had bitter consequences: He would lash out at others in attacks that seemed to go far beyond the acceptable norms of partisanship; if others struck back at him, he saw himself as a victim. Just beneath the surface of this modern young politician was a man who, in Bob Taft’s phrase, seemed “to radiate tension and conflict.” He was filled with the resentments of class one would have expected in a New Deal Democrat.

God was still smiling when he went into the guest room for his suitcase. He looked in the closet and under the perfectly made bed. He even pulled out the drawers of the one armoire on the far side of the room, but couldn’t find it. He was about to go back downstairs and ask Day when he turned down the long hall and walked into Day’s master bedroom. His suitcase was tucked neatly in the corner. He pulled it out but immediately knew it was empty. He looked in the first dresser but those were Day’s clothes. The second identical dresser was on the other side and God did a double take at his few toiletries that were neatly aligned on top. God rubbed his hand on the smooth surface and felt his heart clench at how domestic this looked. His and his dressers…really. God yanked off his T-shirt and threw it in the hamper along with Day’s items. He washed up quickly and went back to his dresser to put on a clean shirt. His mouth dropped when he pulled out the dresser drawer. His shirts were neatly folded and placed in an organized arrangement. God went through all five drawers. His underwear, socks, shirts, sweats, all arranged neatly and in its own place. He dropped down on the bed and thought for a minute. At first he was joking, but Day really was domesticating him. Was God ready for that? Sure he loved Day, he’d take a bullet for him, but was he ready to play house? He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and middle finger at the slight tension forming behind his eyes. God had been completely on his own since he was eighteen. He’d never shared space with anyone—hell, no one had ever wanted to. Fuck. Just last night Day was getting ready to fuck mini Justin Bieber, now he was cooking and cleaning for him and doing his damn laundry. He tried his best to shake off his anxiety. He never used the word love lightly. He meant what he’d said last night. God had only loved three people his entire life and for the past four years only one of them returned that love. Should he really tuck tail and run just because this was new territory? Hell no. All he did was unpack my suitcase. No big deal. He was just being hospitable. Damn sure is better than that seedy hotel. “My boyfriend’s just trying to make me comfortable.” He smirked and tried the term on his tongue again. “I have a boyfriend.” “Get your ass down here and stop overthinking shit! Dinner is getting cold!” Day yelled from the bottom of the stairs.

Drat. Daisy pulled back with a frown. She felt guilty that she had enjoyed the kiss so little. And it made her feel even worse when it appeared Llandrindon had enjoyed it quite a lot. “My dear Miss Bowman,” Llandrindon murmured flirtatiously. “You didn’t tell me you tasted so sweet.” He reached for her again, and Daisy danced backward with a little yelp. “My lord, control yourself!” “I cannot.” He pursued her slowly around the fountain until they resembled a pair of circling cats. Suddenly he made a dash for her, catching at the sleeve of her gown. Daisy pushed hard at him and twisted away, feeling the soft white muslin rip an inch or two at the shoulder seam. There was a loud splash and a splatter of water drops. Daisy stood blinking at the empty spot where Llandrindon had been, and then covered her eyes with her hands as if that would somehow make the entire situation go away. “My lord?” she asked gingerly. “Did you… did you just fall into the fountain?” “No,” came his sour reply. “You pushed me into the fountain.” “It was entirely unintentional, I assure you.” Daisy forced herself to look at him. Llandrindon rose to his feet, water streaming from his hair and clothes, his coat pockets filled to the brim. It appeared the dip in the fountain had cooled his passions considerably. He glowered at her in affronted silence. Suddenly his eyes widened, and he reached into one of his water-laden coat pockets. A tiny frog leaped from the pocket and returned to the fountain with a quiet plunk. Daisy tried to choke back her amusement, but the harder she tried the worse it became, until she finally burst out laughing. “I’m sorry,” she gasped, clapping her hands over her mouth, while irrepressible giggles slipped out. “I’m so— oh dear—” And she bent over laughing until tears came to her eyes. The tension between them disappeared as Llandrin don began to smile reluctantly. He stepped from the fountain, dripping from every surface. “I believe when you kiss the toad,” he said dryly, “he is supposed to turn into a prince. Unfortunately in my case it doesn’t seem to have worked.” Daisy felt a rush of sympathy and kindness, even as she snorted with a few last giggles. Approaching him carefully, she placed her small hands on either side of his wet face and pressed a friendly, fleeting kiss on his lips. His eyes widened at the gesture. “You are someone’s handsome prince,” Daisy said, smiling at him apologetically. “Just not mine. But when the right woman finds you… how lucky she’ll be.

I found myself telling her about an evening some years before, when I was alone at home with my two sons. It was winter; it had been dark since mid-afternoon and the boys were becoming restless. Their father was out, driving back from somewhere. We were waiting for him to come home. I membered the feeling of tension in the room, which seemed to be related to the provisionality of the situation, the fact that we were waiting. The boys kept asking when he would be back and I too kept looking at the clock, waiting for time to pass. Yet I knew that nothing different or particularly important would happen when he got back. It was merely that something was being stretched to breaking point by his absence, something to do with belief: it was as though our ability to believe in ourselves, in our home and our family and in who we said we were, was being worn so thin it might give way entirely. I remembered the pressing feeling of reality, just under the surface of things, like a secret I was struggling to contain. I realized that I didn’t want to be there, in that room. I wanted to go out and walk across the fields in the dark, or go to a city where there was excitement and glamour, or be anywhere where the compulsion of waiting wasn’t lying on me like lead. I wanted to be free. The boys began to argue and fight, in the way that they often did. And this too seemed all at once like a form that could be broken, could be suddenly and shockingly transgressed. We were in the kitchen and I was making something for them to eat at the long stone counter. The boys were at the other end, sitting on stools. My younger son was pestering the older one, wanting him to play with him, and the older one was becoming increasingly irritated. I stopped what I was doing, intending to intervene in their fight, when I saw my older son suddenly take his brother’s head in his hands and drive it down hard against the countertop. The younger one fell immediately to the floor, apparently unconscious, and the older one left him there and ran out of the room. This show of violence, the like of which had never happened in our house before, was not simply shocking – it also concretised something I appeared already to know, to the extent that I believed my children had merely acted in the service of this knowledge, that they had been driven to enact something that they themselves didn’t realise or understand. It was another year before their father moved out of the house, but if I had to locate the moment when the marriage had ended it would be then, on that dark evening in the kitchen, when he wasn’t even there.

THE BASIC LYING-DOWN POSTURE Begin by lying on your back on the floor or ground—a comfortable surface (firm, but not too hard)—with your knees up, your feet flat on the floor, and a yoga strap tied just above the knees. The strap should be tied tight enough so the knees are just touching or almost touching. We’re creating a triangle between the knees, the feet, and the floor, so that you can relax your thighs, lower back, and pelvic area. Your feet should be comfortably spread apart so that you feel stable and can fully relax. You may also want something supporting your head, such as a folded towel, a sweater, or a small pillow, to raise it slightly. Cross your hands at or over your lower belly with the left hand under the right hand, little fingers down toward the pubic bone, thumbs up toward the navel. This gathers your energy and awareness toward the core of the body. Feel the earth under you and let your body sink down as if into the earth. The more you can allow yourself to feel supported by the earth, the more fully you will be able to relax. Check the comfort of your position. You want to be really relaxed, so your body’s not being strained in any particular way. You should be holding yourself so you can completely relax the muscles in the lower back and the inner thighs and so there’s no effort of holding at all. You’re really relaxed: the triangle of your knees, two feet, and the floor should be very restful for you. Then, put your awareness in your body, and just let yourself continue to relax. Soon after you begin doing these practices, you’ll notice that any time you lie down in this way, in the same position with the intention to do body work, the body responds very quickly. This is the one time in our life when our body actually becomes the focus of attention. We’re not using the body for something else. We’re simply making a relationship with it as it is. It’s the only occasion when we ever do this, including in our sleep. The body begins to respond, to relax, to develop a sense of well-being, even in just taking this position. So just take a few minutes, and let your body completely relax. As you’re just lying there, you’ll notice that your body begins to let go. A muscle here, a muscle there, a tendon here, a joint there: it begins to release the tension in various places. It’s a very living situation. You might think, “Why am I here? There’s not much happening.” That’s not true at all. As long as you’re attentive and you put your awareness into your body, there’s a very dynamic, very lively process of relaxation that the body goes through. But you have to be present. You have to be in your body. You have to be intentionally and deliberately feeling your body for this to work.

Long hours spent in the study of any text will reveal inner, unseen contours, an abstract architecture. This is as true of sacred books as of those poems written in pursuit of courtly or earthly love, or even of language itself. The ancient Mosaic law had accommodated this insight to the disadvantage of the surface layer, of images, while the Roman Catholic Church, akin to the preliterate cultural forms from which it in part arose, allows for the existence of a mystical understanding and experience of these abstractions. The careful scholar cannot but help but become aware of the conflict: when one speaks of the word, or Word, what is one truly speaking of? Who is the architect, man, and---or---a---God? Attempts to apprehend this new reality, these tensions, went initially by the names of philosophy, theology, science. What is it to know deeply? Is knowledge not always a form of power that, taken too far, cannot be turned against itself?

Every child's first lesson in reflection, refraction, surface tension, colloidal solutions, fluid dynamics, and what not, begins with a pool of water on the road. //All in a child's play

I’ll be damned if I have to win her approval before making decisions about my estate.” “Unlike either of us, she has a conscience. It won’t hurt you at all to hear her opinion. Especially since she happens to be right.” “You just said you agreed with my position!” “From a practical standpoint. Morally, Kathleen is right.” West watched as his brother prowled away from the table and back again, pacing like a caged tiger. “You have to understand something about her,” he said. “She’s spirited on the surface, but sensitive at the core. If you show her just a little consideration--” “I don’t need you to explain her to me.” “I know her better than you,” West said sharply. “I’ve been living with her, for God’s sake.” That earned him a chilling glance. “Do you want her?” Devon asked brusquely. West was baffled by the question, which seemed to have come from nowhere. “Want her? In the biblical sense? Of course not, she’s a widow. Theo’s widow. How could anyone…” His voice faded as he saw that Devon had resumed pacing, his expression murderous. Thunderstruck, West realized what the most likely reason was for all the free-floating hostility and high-riding tension between Devon and Kathleen. He closed his eyes briefly. This was bad. Bad for everyone, bad for the future, just bloody awful compounding badness in all directions.

Beliefs, like mules and centaurs, are fundamentally hybrid creatures: we experience them half in public society, half in the private heart. In the best outcome, these two domains keep each other in check. The people around us prevent us from believing things that are (as Penn Jillette put it) "fucking nuts", while our own inner voice keeps rising up and breaking the surface tension that could otherwise turn a community into a bubble.

For example,when a conflict surfaces in a dialogue people are likely to realize that there is a tension, but the tension arises, literally, from our thoughts. People will say, “It is our thoughts and the way we hold on to them that are in conflict, not us.

They pictured the uranium nucleus as a liquid drop gone wobbly with the looseness of its confinement and imagined it hit by even a barely energetic slow neutron. The neutron would add its energy to the whole. The nucleus would oscillate. In one of its many random modes of oscillation it might elongate. Since the strong force operates only over extremely short distances, the electric force repelling the two bulbs of an elongated drop would gain advantage. The two bulbs would push farther apart. A waist would form between them. The strong force would begin to regain the advantage within each of the two bulbs. It would work like surface tension to pull them into spheres. The electric repulsion would work at the same time to push the two separating spheres even farther apart. Eventually the waist would give way. Two smaller nuclei would appear where one large nucleus had been before—barium and krypton, for example:

301. Wetter Water Firefighters use wetting agents to make water wetter. The chemicals reduce the surface tension of plain water so it’s easier to spread and soak into objects, which is why it’s known as “wet water.

Tension throbbed under the surface of my skin, and I marveled that God could have created my character in such opposition to my mother’s. It was almost comical. Except it was not.

The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.

FROM OTHER SOURCES Pre–race and Venue Homework Get hold of any history of past events at the venue, plus any information that the conducting club may have about weather and expected conditions. Go to the weather bureau and get history for the area. Speak to sailors from your class who have this venue as their home club or who have sailed there on a number of occasions. Boat, Sails, Gear Preparation Checklist Many times the outcome of a race is as dependent on what you have done prior to the race as to what you do out on the course. Sometimes no matter how good your tactics and strategy are a simple breakage could render all that useless. Hull – make sure that your hull is well sanded and polished, centreboard strips are in good condition, venturis if fitted are working efficiently, buoyancy tanks are dry and there are no extraneous pieces of kit in your boat which adds unwanted weight. Update any gear that looks tired or worn especially control lines. Mast, boom and poles – check that all halyards, stays and trapeze wires are not worn or damaged and that pins are secure, knots tight and that anything that can tear a sail or injure flesh is taped. Mark the full hoist position on all halyards. Deck hardware – check all cam cleats for spring tension and tape anything that may cause a sail tear or cut legs hands and arms. Check the length of all sheets and control lines and shorten anything that is too long. This not only reduces weight but also minimises clutter. Have marks on sheets and stick or draw numbers and reference scales for the jib tracks, outhaul and halyards so that you can easily duplicate settings that you know are fast in various conditions. Centreboard and rudder – ensure that all nicks and gouges are filled and sanded and the surfaces are polished and most importantly that rudder safety clips are working. Sails – select the correct battens for the day’s forecast. Write on the deck, with a china graph pencil, things like the starting sequence, courses, tide times and anything else that will remind you to sail fast. Tools and spares – carry a shackle key with screwdriver head on your person along with some spare shackles and short lengths of rope or different diameters. A tool like a Leatherman can be very useful to deal with unexpected breakages that can occur even in the best prepared boat.

Always she liked to imagine herself as subtly different from everyone else, enjoying the tension and mystique of being ordinary on the surface but with a radical, original interior life.

But it’s only when you jump,” I said, “that you know for sure whether you really want to fall, and by then there’s no returning; and there are those seconds before things go dark when you’re very much alive, when you’re simply falling and waiting for velocity and surface tension to break you.” He said nothing, so I went on. “And then, you’ll never know whether things might have become better. You’ll never know who else you might have loved.

Petyr’s skin had gone colorless—pale as the surface of the lake. “Nightmare!” His nostrils flared. He looked down at the Maiden Card in Ravyn’s hand. “Make him use it.” Ravyn didn’t question it. He shoved the Maiden Card into Petyr’s hand, curling his fingers to tap it once—twice—three times. Petyr’s eyes widened and his mouth fell open. He took in a ragged gasp, then another. The putrid blood stopped. Beneath Jespyr’s shaking hands, Ravyn could see Petyr’s wound… closing. Petyr took another breath, and the color in his face returned. Another, and the tension in his body eased. On the fifth breath, he opened his eyes and looked up at Wik, then Ravyn. “I—I can’t feel the pain anymore.

As stable as it may seem on the surface to some, the current configuration of the global economy and the financial system is getting harder to maintain. Below the façade of the unusual calm of the last few years, interrupted by relatively few bouts of instability since 2008–09, tensions are rising and the effectiveness of central banks is coming under stress, so much so as to raise serious questions about the durability of the current path that the global economy is on.

I see movies in my head when I think and

AN ANSWER TO OUR QUESTION Places of worship embody the aspirations of their architects, and the communities they represent, to ideal beauty. Their chosen means of expression feature color, geometry, and symmetry. Consider, in particular. the magnificent plate HH. Here the local geometry of the ambient surfaces and the local patterns of their color change as our gaze surveys them. It is a vibrant embodiment of anamorphy and anachromy-the very themes that our unveiling of Nature's deep design finds embodied at Nature's core. Does the world embody beautiful ideas? There is our answer, before our eyes: Yes. Color and geometry, symmetry, anachromy, and anamorphy, as ends in themselves, are only one branch of artistic beauty. Islam's injunction against representational art played an important part in bringing these forms of beauty to the fore, as did the physical constraint of structural stability (we need columns to support the weight of ceilings, and the arches and domes to distribute tension). Depictions of human faces, bodies, emotions, landscapes, historic scenes, and the like, when they are allowed, are far more common subjects for art than those austere beauties. The world does not, in its deep design, embody all forms of beauty, nor the ones that people without special study, or very unusual taste, find most appealing. But the world does, in its deep design, embody some forms of beauty that have been highly prized for their own sake, and have been intuitively associated with the divine.

Practice: Seeking Your Heart’s Desire Desires play a key role in discernment; they help us bring our whole selves to God. Here you will begin to identify your heart’s most basic desires. Prepare yourself to pray by attending first to your body, to any tensions, fatigue, lightness, or energy that it carries. Then attend to your mind, with its busy humming and noisy chatter, its naming, judging, and planning. Invite your body to relaxed attentiveness and invite your mind to take a break for the next few minutes. Paying gentle attention to your own breathing, without trying to change it, may assist your efforts regarding both your body and your mind. 1. Dedicate this time to God. Ask for the light of the Holy Spirit to notice your deepest desires, to name them accurately, and to respond appropriately to what you find. 2. When you are ready, ask yourself, as you sit quietly in the presence of God, “What do I want, right this minute?” 3. When you recognize what it is that you want, give it a name and jot it down in your journal. Return to the relaxed attentiveness. Ask again: “What do I want, right this minute?” 4. Again, notice, name, and jot it in your journal. (Repeat this process, until no more desires surface. After each, return to your relaxed attentiveness.) 5. Now look at all the desires you have named. Notice which seem to be

I know you’ve been hurt in the past, Tori.” She closed her eyes against the compassion radiating from the man beside her, fumbling for the shield that used to fortify her so well. She couldn’t relive the past now. Not when her emotions were closer to the surface than they’d been in years. “I know you’re afraid of being hurt in the future.” She could feel him looking at her. Feel his gaze like a caress against her sleeve. Her cheek. Her hair. “I’ll never ask you for details,” he continued, and a tiny coil of tension unwound inside her. “Your secrets are yours to keep or to share as you will. But know that whether we remain simply business partners or someday move to a more personal relationship, I will never think less of you for what you’ve gone through. Whatever happened, you will always hold a place of highest esteem in my eyes.” The

explanation

I’ve always loved morning. It’s just that I usually sleep through it.

She glanced around the room, her attention settling on the door. “I should go back to bed.” “Stay.” His hand tightened on her leg. “Please.” She pressed her lips together, propriety and desire warring inside her. “To sleep,” he added quickly, as he ran his hand up her thigh. “I like the way you feel next to me.” A shiver ran through her. The bed had plush, down pillows, a rich, velvety comforter, and Mitch. He’d be strong and warm. Wrong and right collided and merged into one insurmountable temptation. Their eyes met and that delicious hint of sexual tension spiked between them. She gave up the virtuous fight. “All right.” He swung back the covers and she climbed in. The tribal tattoo rippled as he leaned over to flick off the Tiffany light on the bedside table. He scooted down, his solid body sliding against hers. He turned toward her, smiling in the pale moonlight cast through the window. “Maybe you’d better face away or I’ll risk getting carried away.” She rushed to turn over, the ache he evoked warming her belly. His arm slid over her waist, and he pulled her close. Out of nowhere, the urge to weep swept over her. In the darkness, emotion swelled to the surface, and she blinked back fresh tears. Behind her, his breath was slow and steady. She placed her arm on top of his and automatically their fingers tangled. His leg slid against hers. The tickle of his hair against the smoothness of her skin was delicious. He kissed her temple, and the covers rustled as he put his head on a pillow. She was in bed with another man, and it didn’t feel wrong the way it should. It felt all too right. She

I believe you make your own life. You decide what it is that you want, and then the universe gives it to you. It’s not that you don’t have to work for it, but the law of least effort applies more often than not.

a pill or a syringe. I mean real

A surface-level relationship might snap under the tension of disagreement, but by living our lives together, we were forced to reconcile.

Promise in haste, repent at leisure,

seeking happiness is the most important quest, and achieving it is life’s best goal.

real happiness that comes from obtaining your life’s desires. It’s hard to achieve happiness because real happiness is so often confused with things. You look for a new house or a new job or a new relationship, because you think those things will make you happy. Really, the opposite is true. If you’re happy, you’ll enjoy your job or your house or your relationship, and all good things will flow to you.

What you see is what you get.

Maybe money corrupts absolutely.

emotional conflict undermines physical health and absence of stress promotes health.

Goal setting and visualization

made a mental note to look up whether

trouble. I felt my muscles tense with anticipation and anxiety. Sought understanding.

We go back to our silent fishing, but I'm smiling the whole time. The tension has dimmed. Well, until Blake shoves Graham into the river. A gasp leaves me, my mouth hanging open as I watch my roommate sputter to the surface of the dirty water. I drop my fishing pole, frozen in place. My dad mutters, “What the hell?” Blake throws his head back and laughs like I have never seen nor heard him laugh before. The loud and hearty sound is cut off short when Graham comes barreling out of the water, his body aimed straight for him, his eyes daggers of retribution. He lunges for his brother, wrapping his arms around his stomach and heaving him toward the water. Blake stumbles back, landing on his rear just inside the water. The sound of jeans smacking into water is sharp. He swipes water out of his eyes as Graham smirks at him. “What is wrong with you two?” I demand, more annoyed than worried. They seem to be getting along, even if they are being brutish about it. Suddenly I have the attention of two wet men, twin calculating gleams in their eyes. Graham is closest, his steps slow and purposeful as he approaches me. “Don't even think about it.” I put my hands out in front of me to ward him off. His grin deepens as he reaches me. Water drips from his hair down his face to become one with his soggy clothes. “Don't think about what?” A glance over my shoulder tells me a tree, the first form of cover I think of, is too far away. Not one to give up, I move for it anyway, but a wet, strong hand grabs the back of my shirt and pulls me away from where I want to go until I am flush with a cold chest. Cold clothes; warm body, I should say. His skin is burning through the dampness of his shirt. “Graham, I swear, if you throw me in that water, I will never speak to you again.” His voice is low and close as he says, “You make it sound like that wouldn't be a good thing.” I haven't even finished my sound of incredulity before I am gathered into his arms, my arms unconsciously going around his neck to anchor me to him. His touch is gentle, his eyes are smiling. “I mean it. This won't be good for you.” “Oh, I don't know about that.” His arms swing out, and I tighten my hold on him, threatening him even as he is laughing at me. He does it again as we move closer to the water and I glare all my irk at him. “If I go, you go.” He tilts his head as he studies me. His voice is unnaturally sober as he tells me, “That's fine with me.” I don't have time to process that before he lets go of me. I hit the water, refusing to let go of his neck, and we both go under. Lucky for me, the water is only a couple feet deep. Unlucky for Graham, I twist around until I am straddling him, keeping him down with my weight so the only thing above water is his head. I give him a sweet smile. He doesn't return it. “Hi,” I purr. He grunts in response. “Fancy meeting you here.” “What can I say? Where you go, I follow.” I pat his cheek. “That's so sweet.” “I'm a sweet guy.” “So sweet,” I agree. “Hey! You're scaring the fish away.” This from Blake, who is now standing near my father. “The fish love me!” I declare, sweeping my arms out wide and losing my balance. I splash into the water, first laughing, and then choking as water goes down my throat. Graham lifts me out of the water by my shirt. “The weight of your arrogance obviously tipped you over.” “It was more like the air couldn't handle all my splendor.” Half of his mouth lifts. “Something like that.” “Fishing with the three of you is impossible,” Dad grumbles and stomps to the cooler, opening a can of soda and gulping it down

Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture

Who in this crowd picks her over me?” And that’s when Jack raised his hand. “I do,” he said. Then he added, “In a heartbeat.” Then he turned and met my eyes, his expression soft. “I absolutely do.” And as soon as he’d broken the surface tension, another hand went up. Hank’s. “So do I.” And then, in a beautiful cascade, everybody else joined in—stepping forward and raising their hands: Amadi, then Glenn, then Kelly, then—after an elbow to the ribs from her—Doghouse. A chorus of “I do,” “So do I,” “Me, too,” and “Team Hannah” rose up. Even Doc and Connie jumped in, waving their arms to make sure their votes counted. Folks put their hands up and kept them there—until, at last, Jack looked around and made the call: “Unanimous.

The whole of meditation practice can be essentialized into these three crucial points: bring your mind home, and release, and relax. Each phrase contains meanings that resonate on many levels. To bring your mind home means to bring the mind into the state of Calm Abiding through the practice of mindfulness. In its deepest sense, to bring your mind home is to turn your mind inward and to rest in the nature of mind. This itself is the highest meditation. To release means to release mind from its prison of grasping, since you recognize that all pain and fear and distress arise from the craving of the grasping mind. On a deeper level, the realization and confidence that arise from your growing understanding of the nature of mind inspire the profound and natural generosity that enables you to release all grasping from your heart, letting it free itself, to melt away in the inspiration of meditation. Finally, to relax means to be spacious and to relax the mind of its tensions. More deeply, you relax into the true nature of your mind, the state of Rigpa. The Tibetan words that evoke this process suggest the sense of “relaxing upon the Rigpa.” It is like pouring a handful of sand onto a flat surface; each grain settles of its own accord. This is how you relax into your true nature, letting all thoughts and emotions naturally subside and dissolve into the state of the nature of mind.

The earth, the rocks, the sky and I interpenetrate. We are one. I feel a deep, beatific relaxation. The boundaries that I think of as me are suddenly no more than illusion. My body’s limits are a product of the same surface tension that allows a water bug to skate on top of the pond. Now, as I lie here, the tension is released, the illusion suspended. The vaired personalities and centers of energy that make up my hillside merge, and all of life flows into and out of one another. Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson

We will be stronger for this, But only if it forces us To reach out. Corona Barry Marks “…normally only visible during a solar eclipse” Of course I’m crazy there are no sharks in swimming pools, just like there were none in freshwater lakes and rivers all those years when boys and dogs and a horse or two disappeared and everyone knew it was a haint, not some biological U-Boat stalking Little Bear Creek for 400 million years. Yes, I watch for periscopes, dorsal fins, Indian signs whispering something is down there, beneath the surface tension: angle of reflection, angle of refraction, invisible geometry making you squint and not see, making you not see. Go ahead, tell me I’m crazy with my stock of masks and toilet paper, bottled water and ammo; I know this immigrant air is from Mexico, maybe Wuhan before that, and the things I can’t see are the ones trying to pry my ribs open to let the ghost-you-can’t-see out of its cage. I know things under the air, behind the darkness, within the water are real because so am I and I believe the myth of electricity and the fable of fluoridation, that the sun can be lethal and meds can mend a Stockholm Syndrome childhood. I believe my vote and my opinion count. I believe in germs and viruses, and not going out with a wet head, and the new normal and the old one, too. I believe it is the unseen things that kill us, the small things: a moment’s distraction, the hole a virus shoots through a body. I cannot believe the dead will forgive us for being too slow to believe in what we did not want to see.

A strange calmness had overcome her with her realization that she no longer cared. A tension inside her head had been released, an enigmatic, ticking mechanism had ceased to operate, and now she floated in the pool of circumstances that had drowned her desires, was held fast in it, like scum on the surface of a pond.

Great-grandma Elisa Ramires was a promising cook at an inn. The job was her only opportunity to raise Grandma on her own, so she made herself famous with a buttery, delicately savory fubá cake recipe. Dona Elizabete Molina had been at the inn longer than Great-grandma, and she was also famous for her own recipe. Milk pudding. It was said to be so smooth it slid on your tongue. The two were often at odds. They each wanted to prove to the neighborhood who was the best cook in town, and the opportunity came about with a cooking contest. The night before the contest, Great-grandma and Dona Elizabete were busy preparing their entry dishes and tending to the many guests at the inn. It was a busy night, with many tourists in town for Carnival. Nerves frazzled, shoulder to shoulder, and vying for space in the small kitchen, the story goes that the cooks accidentally tripped each other and sent their cake and pudding flying off the trays. Miraculously, the layers stacked up. Dona Elizabete's milk pudding landed atop Great-grandma's fubá cake. Maybe Dona Elizabete held the tray at the right angle until the last second and the pudding had enough surface tension to just slide off the right way without breaking. Maybe Great-grandma's cake was firm enough to hold the delicate layer of pudding atop. Whatever the case, they tried this new, accidental two-layered cake and realized that their recipes complemented each other beautifully. When they passed samples around to the guests, their reaction was proof that they'd produced perfection. No one remembers if they still entered the contest. Because from that moment on, the only thing everyone could talk about was their new recipe, the one they called "Salt and Sugar". One layer fubá cake, one layer pudding.