The House Of Hidden Meanings Quotes

I’ve hidden from everyone but you,” Mustang says. “It keeps me alive and ticking.” “What’s your plan?” I ask. She laughs at herself. “To be alive and ticking.” “You’re better at it than I am.” “How do you mean?” “No one in your House would have betrayed you.” “Because I didn’t rule like you,” she says. “You have to remember, people don’t like being told what to do. You can treat your friends like servants and they’ll love you, but you tell them they’re servants and they’ll kill you. ...

Time to grow up. Time to stop bawling. Time to do SOMETHING. And that means, if I'm not sleeping, my nerd-herd isn't sleeping either-sun or no sun.

And life reminds me, again and again: You have to dismantle the old to make the space for something new.

Idris had been green and gold and russet in the autumn, when Clary had first been there. It had a stark grandeur in the winter: the mountains rose in the distance, capped white with snow, and the trees along the side of the road that led back to Alicante from the lake were stripped bare, their leafless branches making lace-like patterns against the bright sky. Sometimes Jace would slow the horse to point out the manor houses of the richer Shadowhunter families, hidden from the road when the trees were full but revealed now. She felt his shoulders tense as they passed one that nearly melded with the forest around it: it had clearly been burned and rebuilt. Some of the stones still bore the black marks of smoke and fire. “The Blackthorn manor,” he said. “Which means that around this bend in the road is …” He paused as Wayfarer summited a small hill, and reined him in so they could look down to where the road split in two. One direction led back toward Alicante — Clary could see the demon towers in the distance — while the other curled down toward a large building of mellow golden stone, surrounded by a low wall. “ … the Herondale manor,” Jace finished. The wind picked up; icy, it ruffled Jace’s hair. Clary had her hood up, but he was bare-headed and bare-handed, having said he hated wearing gloves when horseback riding. He liked to feel the reins in his hands. “Did you want to go and look at it?” she asked. His breath came out in a white cloud. “I’m not sure.

If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a nontrivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces that we never suspect. Focus on the larger, shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate. Recall the historical lessons of how often the truly malignant Thems keep themselves hidden and make third parties the fall guy. And in the meantime, give the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker, and remind everyone that we’re all in it together against Lord Voldemort and the House Slytherin.

Life was just one big fucking joke. Anyone who was taking it seriously was missing the point.

he was keeping track of time. It was nearly two hours since he had last looked at his watch, but he knew what time it was to within about twenty seconds. It was an old skill, born of many long wakeful nights on active service. When you're waiting for something to happen, you close your body down like a beach house in winter and you let your mind lock onto the steady pace of the passing seconds. It's like suspended animation. It saves energy and it lifts the responsibility for your heartbeat away from your unconscious brain and passes it on to some kind of a hidden clock. Makes a huge black space for thinking in. But it keeps you just awake enough to be reach for whatever you need to be ready for. And it means you always know what time it is.

What the hell's wrong with mimosas?' Aphrodite was saying. 'Orange juice is for breakfast.' 'What about the champagne part? That's alcohol,' Stevie Rae said. 'It's pink Veuve Clicquot. That means its good champagne, which cancels out the alcohol part,

But as incentives go, commissions are tricky. First of all, a 6 percent real-estate commission is typically split between the seller’s agent and the buyer’s. Each agent then kicks back roughly half of her take to the agency. Which means that only 1.5 percent of the purchase price goes directly into your agent’s pocket. So on the sale of your $300,000 house, her personal take of the $18,000 commission is $4,500. Still not bad, you say. But what if the house was actually worth more than $300,000? What if, with a little more effort and patience and a few more newspaper ads, she could have sold it for $310,000? After the commission, that puts an additional $9,400 in your pocket. But the agent’s additional share—her personal 1.5 percent of the extra $10,000—is a mere $150. If you earn $9,400 while she earns only $150, maybe your incentives aren’t aligned after all.

Much as we seek power in every corner of our lives, it's always already in us. It's impossible to be powerless. If you recognized it, you yourself are power. Life is power.

Life was just like this, sometimes. You think you’re going to sail off into the sunset with Prince Charming, and instead you end up listening to a stranger getting his dick sucked on a Greyhound bus.

When he heard that Sanshiro was going to school forty hours a week, his eyes popped. "You idiot! Do you think it would 'satisfy' you to eat what they serve at your rooming house ten times a day?" "What should I do?" Sanshiro pleaded. "Ride the streetcar," Yojiro said. Sanshiro tried to find Yojiro's hidden meaning, without success. "You mean a real streetcar?" he asked. Yojiro laughed uncontrollably. "Get on the streetcar and ride around Tokyo ten or fifteen times. After a while it will just happen by itself- you will become satisfied. "Why?" "Why? Well, look at it this way. Your head is alive, but if you seal it up inside dead classes, you're lost. Take it outside and get the wind into it. Riding the streetcar is not the only way to get satisfaction, of course, but it's the first step, and the easiest.

Between the roof of the shed and the big plant that hangs over the fence from the house next door I could see the constellation Orion. People say that Orion is called Orion because Orion was a hunter and the constellation looks like a hunter with a club and a bow and arrow, like this: But this is really silly because it is just stars, and you could join up the dots in any way you wanted, and you could make it look like a lady with an umbrella who is waving, or the coffeemaker which Mrs. Shears has, which is from Italy, with a handle and steam coming out, or like a dinosaur. And there aren't any lines in space, so you could join bits of Orion to bits of Lepus or Taurus or Gemini and say that they were a constellation called the Bunch of Grapes or Jesus or the Bicycle (except that they didn't have bicycles in Roman and Greek times, which was when they called Orion Orion). And anyway, Orion is not a hunter or a coffeemaker or a dinosaur. It is just Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and Alnilam and Rigel and 17 other stars I don't know the names of. And they are nuclear explosions billions of miles away. And that is the truth. I stayed awake until 5:47. That was the last time I looked at my watch before I fell asleep. It has a luminous face and lights up if you press a button, so I could read it in the dark. I was cold and I was frightened Father might come out and find me. But I felt safer in the garden because I was hidden. I looked at the sky a lot. I like looking up at the sky in the garden at night. In summer I sometimes come outside at night with my torch and my planisphere, which is two circles of plastic with a pin through the middle. And on the bottom is a map of the sky and on top is an aperture which is an opening shaped in a parabola and you turn it round to see a map of the sky that you can see on that day of the year from the latitude 51.5° north, which is the latitude that Swindon is on, because the largest bit of the sky is always on the other side of the earth. And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don't even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means that they are so small you don't have to take them into account when you are calculating something. I didn't sleep very well because of the cold and because the ground was very bumpy and pointy underneath me and because Toby was scratching in his cage a lot. But when I woke up properly it was dawn and the sky was all orange and blue and purple and I could hear birds singing, which is called the Dawn Chorus. And I stayed where I was for another 2 hours and 32 minutes, and then I heard Father come into the garden and call out, "Christopher...? Christopher...?

Imagine this: Instead of waiting in her tower, Rapunzel slices off her long, golden hair with a carving knife, and then uses it to climb down to freedom. Just as she’s about to take the poison apple, Snow White sees the familiar wicked glow in the old lady’s eyes, and slashes the evil queen’s throat with a pair of sewing scissors. Cinderella refuses everything but the glass slippers from her fairy godmother, crushes her stepmother’s windpipe under her heel, and the Prince falls madly in love with the mysterious girl who dons rags and blood-stained slippers. Imagine this: Persephone goes adventuring with weapons hidden under her dress. Persephone climbs into the gaping chasm. Or, Persephone uses her hands to carve a hole down to hell. In none of these versions is Persephone’s body violated unless she asks Hades to hold her down with his horse-whips. Not once does she hold out on eating the pomegranate, instead biting into it eagerly and relishing the juice running down her chin, staining it red. In some of the stories, Hades never appears and Persephone rules the underworld with a crown of her own making. In all of them, it is widely known that the name Persephone means Bringer of Destruction. Imagine this: Red Riding Hood marches from her grandmother’s house with a bloody wolf pelt. Medusa rights the wrongs that have been done to her. Eurydice breaks every muscle in her arms climbing out of the land of the dead. Imagine this: Girls are allowed to think dark thoughts, and be dark things. Imagine this: Instead of the dragon, it’s the princess with claws and fiery breath who smashes her way from the confines of her castle and swallows men whole.

All I wanted was to feel something real, something beyond all these mistaken priorities that I was sure didn’t matter.

What do you think he saw?" Damn--I regret the awed way I phrased that and the hushed voice I used. As if I think acid is a "religious" experience, a visionary thing. "Himself," Josh says. "You always see your true self on acid. You just usually see more than you want to see. So it all seems disorted." See what I mean? He's not your normal stoner. The guy should become a poet, a psychologist, a scientist. We pull up near Greg's house and stare at it like it's a damn fortress. "You don't think he needs to go to the hospital?" I ask. "Nope," Josh says. "For a while, I thought maybe, yeah. But he's good now, he's off it, he's not hallucinating anymore." "You're sure?" "Yeah." "'Cuz you can die on LSD-" "That's such anti-drug propaganda bullshit, Dan," Josh interrupts. "Nobody's ever died from an LSD overdose. Ever. As long as you keep people from doing stupid things while they're tripping, it's all good man, man. Why do you think I babysat him?" He reaches into the backseat and punches my shoulder. "LSD isn't your dad's smack. So stop worrying." I scrunch down in the seat. How'd he know about that? "Right. What's the plan?" "I'd ask him if ther was a key hidden under a rock," Josh says, "but he's not gonna be much help. Watch." He pokes Greg in the leg, prods him on the shoulder, grabs his cheeks and smushes them together, the way parents do to a baby, and says, " Ootchi googi Greggy, did ums have a good trippy? Did ums find out itty-bitty singies about oos-self zat oos didn't likeums?" Yup... Greg was in his own little world...

Life comes in seasons. There are the seasons where you are driving through a snowstorm, just trying to keep your eye on the road ahead to stay alive. Your ego stands in the doorway of every good idea, keeping them from you. We avoid the pain. We put our blinders on and stay focused on what’s right ahead, turning away from the thing we need to see in our periphery, because we know accepting it will force us to question everything we hold so tightly. But then there are those seasons when the snow globe is being shaken all around you, and you’re standing in place, looking up to try to see where the scattered world is all going to fall. When it finally settles, that’s when you find yourself in the house of hidden meanings. You study the patterns that keep coming up. You allow them to show you something different, even if it’s the thing you’ve been running from your whole life. You run into the fire, run through the pain, trusting that the only way out is through.

In many ways, the heart does resemble a house. It is divided into multiple chambers, separated by doors. The walls have a characteristic texture. The house is old, designed over many millennia. Hidden from view are the wires and pipes that keep it functioning. And though the house has no intrinsic meaning, it carries meaning because of the meanings we attribute to it.

Life is full of dualities: night and day, black and white, yin and yang, good and evil, birth and death, love and fear. You can't have one without the other. It takes two to create the magnetic pull to generate energy in the first place. This is the natural order: that everything, in contrast, hangs in perfect balance.

You’ll learn, girl. These aren’t scars. They’re nothing. The scars you carry with you? The ones that never leave? They’re all in here.” She’d tapped her chest. “Regret,” she said softly, “for the things you didn’t do. Or the things you couldn’t do. They haunt you enough, and you see things like this,” and she put her hand to her neck, “and they mean nothing.

…there are those seasons when the snow globe is being shaken all around you, and you’re standing in place, looking up to try to see where the scattered world is all going to fall.

Often when people get together because of sex or some animal magnetism and that wears off, they end up thinking: I don’t like this motherfucker.

By wanting something as vast and untamable as the ocean, I had revealed my own desire to experience the fullness of life.

You have to dismantle the old to make the space for something new.

From the time I learned to love Jade and was drawn into the life of the Butterfield house, straight through to the wait for my case to come before the judge, there was nothing in my life that wasn't alive with meaning, that wasn't capable of suggesting weird and hidden significances, that didn't carry with it the undertaste of what for lack of anything better to call it I’ll call The Infinite. If being in love is to be suddenly united with the most unruly, the most outrageously alive part of yourself, this state of piercing consciousness did not subside in me, as I've learned it does in others, after a time. If my mind could have made a sound, it would have burst a row of wineglasses. I saw coincidences everywhere; meanings darted and danced like overheated molecules. Everything was terrifyingly complex; everything was terrifyingly simple. Nothing went unnoticed and everything carried with it a kind of drama.

A man selling Vaseline Petroleum Jelly had gone around a number of houses in town a week before and had left some samples, asking people to see if they could find an ingenious use for it. Now he went around to the same houses, asking what uses they had found for Vaseline. The man in the first house, a wealthy city gent, said, "I used it for medicinal purposes. Whenever my children scraped their elbows or knees, I would rub it on." The man in the second house said, "I used it for mechanical purposes, such as greasing the bearings of my bicycles and lawnmower." The man in the third house, a scruffy, unshaven, working class fellow, said, "I used it for sexual purposes." In a shocked voice the salesman asked, "What do you mean?" "Well," said the scruffy man, "I put a whole lot of it on the handle of my bedroom door to keep the kids out!" You can give the same thing to different people and they will come out with different uses, according to their own unconsciousness. But if they are conscious, they will find only one use.

All great, simple images reveal a psychic state. The house, even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy. Psychologists generally, and Francoise Minkowska in particular, together with those whom she has succeeded interesting in the subject, have studied the drawing of houses made by children, and even used them for testing. Indeed, the house-test has the advantage of welcoming spontaneity, for many children draw a house spontaneously while dreaming over their paper and pencil. To quote Anne Balif: "Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations." It will have the right shape, and nearly always there will be some indication of its inner strength. In certain drawings, quite obviously, to quote Mme. Balif, "it is warm indoors, and there is a fire burning, such a big fire, in fact, that it can be seen coming out of the chimney." When the house is happy, soft smoke rises in gay rings above the roof. If the child is unhappy, however, the house bears traces of his distress. In this connection, I recall that Francoise Minkowska organized an unusually moving exhibition of drawings by Polish and Jewish children who had suffered the cruelties of the German occupation during the last war. One child, who had been hidden in a closet every time there was an alert, continued to draw narrow, cold, closed houses long after those evil times were over. These are what Mme. Minkowska calls "motionless" houses, houses that have become motionless in their rigidity. "This rigidity and motionlessness are present in the smoke as well as in the window curtains. The surrounding trees are quite straight and give the impression of standing guard over the house". Mme. Minkowska knows that a live house is not really "motionless," that, particularly, it integrates the movements by means of which one accedes to the door. Thus the path that leads to the house is often a climbing one. At times, even, it is inviting. In any case, it always possesses certain kinesthetic features. If we were making a Rorschach test, we should say that the house has "K." Often a simple detail suffices for Mme. Minkowska, a distinguished psychologist, to recognize the way the house functions. In one house, drawn by an eight-year-old child, she notes that there is " a knob on the door; people go in the house, they live there." It is not merely a constructed house, it is also a house that is "lived-in." Quite obviously the door-knob has a functional significance. This is the kinesthetic sign, so frequently forgotten in the drawings of "tense" children. Naturally, too, the door-knob could hardly be drawn in scale with the house, its function taking precedence over any question of size. For it expresses the function of opening, and only a logical mind could object that it is used to close as well as to open the door. In the domain of values, on the other hand, a key closes more often than it opens, whereas the door-knob opens more often than it closes. And the gesture of closing is always sharper, firmer, and briefer than that of opening. It is by weighing such fine points as these that, like Francoise Minkowska, one becomes a psychologist of houses.

Roe sinks his head into his hands, pushing his hair back off his face to reveal two pearl earrings. “What am I going to do?” “You can come to my house. Pat has clothes you can borrow before going home.” “No, I mean, what am I going to do?” he says, his voice breaking. He gestures to himself in his ripped red velvet. “How am I supposed to live?

It’s one thing building a cloister to reflect the 768 of the numerological Bismillah, it’s another planning a giant alphabet out of an entire city before you’ve even built your first mosque.’ ‘It is, but remember, Sinan was chief architect and city planner at the time of the conquest of Cairo. He practised on that city; demolishing and building where he liked. I have no doubt that he was already forming the idea of a sacred geometry. His first building as Architect of the Abode of Felicity was the Haseki Hürrem Mosque for the Kadin Roxelana. Not his greatest work by any means, and he was working from existing designs, but it was identifiable as his first mature work. There’s a story in his autobiography Tezkiretül Bünyan that while he was surveying the site he noticed that children were pulling live fish from a grating in the street. When he went to investigate he discovered an entire Roman cistern down there. Perhaps it was this that inspired him to realize his vision. Hidden water. The never-ceasing stream of Hurufism.

There are ideological precepts that people will fight or even kill for. But those things are never really what they seem to be. As much as people will claim a hard moral line, that line becomes very blurry depending on what their needs are at any given moment - like the conservative politician who's opposed to abortion, unless it's for his mistress.

While both men were very helpful and informative, they were evasive whenever I probed too deeply into certain areas. I suppose this is not surprising, given that Masons are sworn to secrecy under blood oaths of horrific repercussion, including having their throats slit, eyeballs pierced, tongues torn out, feet flayed, bodies hacked into pieces, and so on if they give up the wrong information. Perhaps this is why at one point, one of the men I conferred with became visibly nervous as soon as I started asking specific questions about Masonic religious practices, which would include secret rituals that are performed in the Temple Room on the third floor at the House of the Temple, and the hidden meaning behind the name of their deity—the Great Architect of the Universe.

From other stories that have been handed down to me I know that my people, like many others in the slave states, went to church with their slaves, were baptized with them, and presumably expected to associate with them in heaven. Again, I have been years realizing what this means, and what it has cost. First, consider the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used. He thus placed his body, if not his mind, at the very crux of the deepest contradiction of his life. How could he presume to own the body of a man whose soul he considered as worthy of salvation as his own? To keep this question from articulating itself in his thoughts and demanding an answer, he had to perfect an empty space in his mind, a silence, between heavenly concerns and earthly concerns, between body and spirit. If there had ever opened a conscious connection between the two claims, if the two sides of his mind had ever touched, it would have been like building a fire in a house full of gunpowder: somewhere down deep in his mind he always knew of the danger, and his nerves were always alert to it.

All the Black people in our neighborhood were transplants from the South, and so they had inherited a kind of slave mentality, which was based on fear. When you hear stereotypes about Black people who can't swim or are afraid of dogs, it's because for so many generations, they were afraid of swimming across bodies of water to flee, or afraid of dogs because they were scared of being chased. Those fears are epigenetic - they burrow deep into the subconscious, creating an internal paradigm of rules that you forget can be broken. Systemic oppression created walls that can feel impossible to scale, but so, too, does the inherited belief that you are victim. People hold on to that victim mentality so fiercely; it becomes a defining feature of their identity. Nobody's going to take that away from them. It runs too deeply to take out and examine under the light.

Not Everything Can Be Hidden Some nice accessories makeup and a new outfit won't hide how abused i've been And a large house glass doors and a nice little garden can't hide how broken this family is Just because something has a nice expensive new looking exterior doesn't mean the interior isn't broken and bent Not everything can be hidden behind a pair of nice glass doors, you know. after all The doors are transparent and so are the people trying to hide behind them

An author who integrates alien signs into the medial surface of his own texts—signs behind which we presume the existence of other powerful, submedial subjects “as authors”—does not increase the comprehensibility of that text. Yet nonetheless, he increases the magical effectiveness this text exudes. Such quotations lead us to presume that the text houses a dangerous, manipulative subject, a magician with enough power to manipulate the signs of other powerful magicians and able to use them strategically for his own purposes. Thus an author who quotes alien signs conveys a stronger impression of powerful authorship than one who ad- vocates precisely his so-called own ideas—which do not interest anybody precisely because they are only his own. It is also well known that one may not quote the same author too often, in which case quoting gradu- ally looses its magical power and begins to irritate the reader. The reason for this gradual decrease of a quote’s magical effectiveness is that it looses its strangeness over time and gets integrated into the medial surface of a text, thereby becoming a proper part of it. In order to maintain their magical effect, quotes have to be exchanged constantly so as to continue to maintain the same appearance of foreignness and freshness. The quote functions as a magical fetish that lends the entire text a hidden, submedial power beyond its superficial meaning.

English civilisation... for us... is a misfit... the Irish... qualities are hidden, besmirched, by that what has been imposed upon us, just as the fine, splendid surface of Ireland is besmirched by our towns and villages – hideous medleys of contemptible dwellings and mean shops and squalid public houses. We are now free in name. The extent to which we become free in fact and secure our freedom will be the extent to which we become Gaels again... The biggest task will be the restoration of the language.

Go get her,' Amren hissed. 'Right now.' 'No,' I said, and hated the word. They gaped at me, and I wanted to roar at the sight of the blood coating them, at my unconscious and suffering brothers on the carpet before them. But I managed to say to my cousin, 'Weren't you listening to what Feyre said to him? She promised to destroy him- from within.' Mor's face paled, her magic flaring on Azriel's chest. 'She's going into that house to take him down. To take them all down.' I nodded. 'She is now a spy- with a direct line t me. What the King of Hybern does, where he goes, what his plans are, she will know. And report back.' Far between us, faint and soft, hidden so none might find it... between us lay a whisper of colour, and joy, of light and shadow- a whisper of her. Our bond. 'She's your mate,' Amren bit at me. 'Not your spy. Go get her.' 'She is my mate. And my spy,' I said too quietly. 'And she is the High Lady of the Night Court.' 'What?' Mor whispered. I caressed a mental finger down that bond now hidden deep, deep within us, and said, 'If they had removed her other glove, they would have seen a second tattoo on her right arm. The twin to the other. Inked last night, when we crept out, found a priestess, and I swore her in as my High Lady.' 'Not- not consort,' Amren blurted, blinking. I hadn't seen her surprised in... centuries. 'Not consort, not wife. Feyre is High Lady of the Night Court.' My equal in every way; she would wear my crown, sit on a throne beside mine. Never sidelined, never deigned to breeding and parties and child-rearing. My queen. As if in answer, a glimmer of love shuddered down the bond. I clamped down on the relief that threatened to shatter any calm I feigned having. 'You mean to tell me,' Mor breathed, 'that my High Lady is now surrounded by enemies?' A lethal sort of calm crept over her tear-stained face. 'I mean to tell you,' I said, watching the blood clot on Cassian's wings with Amren's tending. Beneath Mor's own hands. Azriel's bleeding at least eased. Enough to keep them alive until the healer got here. 'I mean to tell you,' I said again, my power building and rubbing itself against my skin, my bones, desperate to be unleashed upon the world, 'that your High Lady made a sacrifice for her court- and we will move when the time is right.' Perhaps Lucien being Elain's mate would help- somehow, I'd find a way. And then I'd assist my mate in ripping the Spring Court, Ianthe, those mortal queens, and the King of Hybern to shreds. Slowly. 'Until then?' Amren demanded. 'What of the Cauldron- of the book?' 'Until then,' I said, staring toward the door as if I might see her walk through it, laughing and vibrant and beautiful, 'we got to war.

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

If I Were Another If I were another on the road, I would not have looked back, I would have said what one traveler said to another: Stranger! awaken the guitar more! Delay our tomorrow so our road may extend and space may widen for us, and we may get rescued from our story together: you are so much yourself ... and I am so much other than myself right here before you! If I were another I would have belonged to the road, neither you nor I would return. Awaken the guitar and we might sense the unknown and the route that tempts the traveler to test gravity. I am only my steps, and you are both my compass and my chasm. If I were another on the road, I would have hidden my emotions in the suitcase, so my poem would be of water, diaphanous, white, abstract, and lightweight ... stronger than memory, and weaker than dewdrops, and I would have said: My identity is this expanse! If I were another on the road, I would have said to the guitar: Teach me an extra string! Because the house is farther, and the road to it prettier— that's what my new song would say. Whenever the road lengthens the meaning renews, and I become two on this road: I ... and another!

Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off—the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest. Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. There is no painting and scarcely any carving in the bazaars. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.

The day came when my travels took me to Pyrrha. As soon as I set foot there, everything I had imagined was forgotten; Pyrrha had become what is Pyrrha; and I thought I had always known that the sea is invisible from the city, hidden behind a due of the low, rolling coast; that the streets are long and straight; that the houses are clumped at intervals, not high, and they are separated by open lots with stacks of lumber and with sawmills; that the wind stirs the vanes of the water pumps. From that moment on the name Pyrrha has brought to my mind this view, this light, this buzzing, this air in which a yellowish dust flies: obviously the name means this and could mean nothing but this.

The Choir And Music Of Solitude And Silence - Silence is a great blue bell Swinging and ringing, tinkling and singing, In measure’s pleasure, and in the supple symmetry of the soaring of the immense intense wings glinting against All the blue radiance above us and within us, hidden Save for the stars sparking, distant and unheard in their singing. And this is the first meaning of the famous saying, The stars sang. They are the white birds of silence And the meaning of the difficult famous saying that the sons and daughters of morning sang, Meant and means that they were and they are the children of God and morning, Delighting in the lights of becoming and the houses of being, Taking pleasure in measure and excess, in listening as in seeing. Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love. So that when the great blue bell of silence is stilled and stopped or broken By the babel and chaos of desire unrequited, irritated and frustrated, When the heart has opened and when the heart has spoken Not of the purity and symmetry of gratification, but action of insatiable distraction’s dissatisfaction, Then the heart says, in all its blindness and faltering emptiness: There is no God. Because I am hope. And hope must be fed. And then the great blue bell of silence is deafened, dumbed, and has become the tomb of the living dead.

The very last moment of Beit Nuba’s existence comes to life in his articulate writings (Kenan would become one of Israel’s foremost novelists in later years): Elegant stone houses, orchards of fruit trees around each house – olives, peach and vine trees – and next to them cedars. All the orchards nicely cultivated and maintained . . . In the morning the first bulldozer arrived and demolished the first house. In ten minutes, the house, the orchard and the trees were all gone. The house and its contents were destroyed . . . After the third house was destroyed, the refugees’ convoy began to make its way towards Ramallah. The three picturesque villages are now hidden by Canada Park – a pine forest of the kind planted in the aftermath of the 1948 ethnic cleansing as a means of covering such atrocities, and part of Beit Nuba’s land now forms a new colony named Beit Horon.

Home, I know, is right in this moment—in this body. We have houses everywhere. So I keep my bags packed, to make me resourceful such that I can make magic wherever I am. I let go of my mother’s hand. I go off to school. I go to work. I go out onstage. I leave home, over and over again, and then I come back. I sit on that porch, waiting for my father, knowing that he will never come, and then I let him go, time after time. I say goodbye. How could he be so cruel as to leave me waiting there on that stoop? But I project onto him the consciousness that I have now. I would never make my child wait for me on the front porch—it would be cruel, and I know better. But he didn’t know any better. It never would have occurred to him, because he wasn’t awake. Unlike my mother, who saw me, my father could not. The number one evil that we face is unconsciousness. And now that I am older, I understand the wisdom that was always waiting for me, so simple and so obvious but so hard to learn— His loss.

Circular thinking is related to obsession, but with more steps involved. Instead of chewing over a single notion like “the house isn’t clean enough” or “I have to be perfect,” the person is imprisoned in false logic. An example would be someone who feels unlovable. No matter how much people express love for them, the circular thinkers do not feel lovable because inside their minds they are saying, “I want to get love, and this person is saying he loves me, but I can’t feel it, which must mean I am unlovable, and the only way I can fix that is to get love.” Circular logic afflicts those who never become successful enough, never feel safe enough, never feel wanted enough. The initial premise that drives them to act (“I’m a failure,” “I’m in danger,” “I’m in need”) doesn’t change because every result from the outside, whether good or bad, reinforces the original idea. These examples bring us to the “paradox of now”: The faster you run in place, the further you are from the present moment.

This was rural Mexico, almost as impoverished and ignored as the worst of what I had seen when reporting on Haiti. It infuriated me to know that the Mexican political party that had run the nation for most of this century had called itself something like the People’s Revolutionary Party and had loudly preached social justice for all, winning election after election on that windy promise, but when installed, had proved itself to be a callous oligarchy. A small group of buddies had passed the presidency from one to another, each coming into office with modest means and leaving after six years with hundreds of millions, usually hidden in Swiss banks. The so-called revolutionaries stole the country blind, allowing or even forcing the peasants to sink deeper and deeper into abject poverty. Few nations had been ruled so cynically, which was why so many peasants wanted to escape to the good jobs, houses and food in the United States. I was not proud of what my country had accomplished during my lifetime.

Said he the fact of the matter is I am a rat charmer. Thats very nice but do you want the flour or not I can't stand here all day discussing it. I'll give you my two pennies said the old fellow and the benefit of my rat charming. I have no rats. Thats for me to know. What do you mean by that you stinky old galoot do you think I do not know my own house and what is in it? Never you mind what I mean my name is Kevin the Rat Charmer and that is a name you won't be forgetting in a hurry I will send a plague upon your shebeen. Will you now? I will begot and ye will be praying to the Virgin that you had relented of your penny. And with that he turned away. If he had a swag it were hidden somewhere up the track for my mother never seen it and if he had baby rats riding in his pocket they was cleverly concealed for my mother detected nothing astir on his person. He were just a stinky old man in a woollen coat he went off down the muddy track to the creek then cut down in the direction of Winton. She never saw him again but he were correct that she would remember the name of Kevin the Rat Charmer for many a day.

The word “collect” has a very special definition, according to the Department of Defense. It doesn’t mean collect; it means that a person looks at, or analyzes, the data. In 2013, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper likened the NSA’s trove of accumulated data to a library. All those books are stored on the shelves, but very few are actually read. “So the task for us in the interest of preserving security and preserving civil liberties and privacy is to be as precise as we possibly can be when we go in that library and look for the books that we need to open up and actually read.” Think of that friend of yours who has thousands of books in his house. According to this ridiculous definition, the only books he can claim to have collected are the ones he’s read. This is why Clapper asserts he didn’t lie in a Senate hearing when he replied “no” to the question “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” From the military’s perspective, it’s not surveillance until a human being looks at the data, even if algorithms developed and implemented by defense personnel or contractors have analyzed it many times over.

Dex squinted at the palace. “Their queen is a white-haired lady, right? I think I saw some pictures of her when I was researching about the cameras.” “Yeah, Queen Elizabeth,” Sophie said. “I don’t know much about her. Just that she likes little dogs and wears a lot of hats. And I think that flag means she’s actually here right now.” She pointed to the red, gold, and blue standard flying from a pole in the center of the palace, instead of the British Union Jack. “Same with the fact that there are four of those guys instead of two.” She nudged her chin toward the four members of the queen’s guard, standing stolid and motionless in what appeared to be narrow blue houses. The soldier’s faces looked blank, but Sophie had no doubt their eyes were seeing everything, and it made her hope the obscurer was keeping them hidden—especially when she noticed their guns. “So wait—the dorky guys in the red coats with the big furry hats are important?” Dex asked, covering his mouth to block a giggle. “And you had the nerve to complain about our Foxfire uniforms!” “Hey—I never had to wear anything like that. That’s strictly a British soldier thing!” “Soldier?” Dex repeated, frowning at the guards. “So… is that uniform supposed to be intimidating? Because I feel like if a dude marched up to an army of ogres wearing that, he’d mostly get laughed at.” “Goblins definitely wouldn’t be able to suppress their snickers,” Sandor noted, his lips twitching with a smile.

How?” Dr. Tuttle asked. “Slit her wrists,” I lied. “Good to know.” Her hair was red and frizzy. The foam brace she wore around her neck had what looked like coffee and food stains on it, and it squished the skin on her neck up toward her chin. Her face was like a bloodhound’s, folded and drooping, her sunken eyes hidden under very small wire-framed glasses with Coke-bottle lenses. I never got a good look at Dr. Tuttle’s eyes. I suspect that they were crazy eyes, black and shiny, like a crow’s. The pen she used was long and purple and had a purple feather at the end of it. “Both my parents died when I was in college,” I went on. “Just a few years ago.” She seemed to study me for a moment, her expression blank and breathless. Then she turned back to her little prescription pad. “I’m very good with insurance companies,” she said matter-of-factly. “I know how to play into their little games. Are you sleeping at all?” “Barely,” I said. “Any dreams?” “Only nightmares.” “I figured. Sleep is key. Most people need upwards of fourteen hours or so. The modern age has forced us to live unnatural lives. Busy, busy, busy. Go, go, go. You probably work too much.” She scribbled for a while on her pad. “Mirth,” Dr. Tuttle said. “I like it better than joy. Happiness isn’t a word I like to use in here. It’s very arresting, happiness. You should know that I’m someone who appreciates the subtleties of human experience. Being well rested is a precondition, of course. Do you know what mirth means? M-I-R-T-H?” “Yeah. Like The House of Mirth,” I said. “A sad story,” said Dr. Tuttle. “I haven’t read it.” “Better you don’t.

what happens if you're in a relationship with someone and you trust them, then you make certain assumptions about the past, and you make certain assumptions about the present, and you make certain assumptions about the future. And everything's stable, so you're standing on solid ground. And the chaos, it's like you're standing on thin ice. The chaos is hidden. The shark beneath the waves isn't there. You're safe, you're in the lifeboat. But then if the person betrays you — like if you're in an intimate relationship and the person has an affair and you find out about it — then you think, one moment you're one in one place, right? You're where everything is secure because you've predicated your perception of the world on the axiom of trust, and the next second — really, the next second — you're in a completely different place. And not only is that place different right now, the place you were years ago is different, and the place you're going to be in the future years hence is different. And so, all of that certainty that strange certainty that you inhabit can collapse into incredible complexity. And you say, well if someone betrays you, you think: "Okay, who were you? Because you weren't who I thought you were. And I thought I knew you. But I didn't know you at all. And I never knew you, and so all the things we did together, those weren't the things that I thought were happening. Something else was happening! And you're someone else. That means I'm someone else because I thought I knew what was going on, and clearly I don't. I'm some sort of blind sucker, or the victim of a psychopath or someone who's so naive that they can barely live. And I don't understand anything about human beings, and I don't understand anything about myself, and I have no idea where I am now. I thought I was at home, but I'm not. I'm in a house and it's full of strangers. I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow, or next week, or next year.

It makes you worry about what people think about who you married, or if your new house you bought is less expensive than the last one you bought, or that your husband may have a roving eye.” Amanda felt a sudden twinge of sympathy, and ruthlessly tried to quell it. She really didn’t want to feel it for the mayor at all. “Doesn’t excuse her bad behavior, I know, but thought it would help for you to hear a bit about her. My Dad says she used to be really well-liked in town. She didn’t always push people around like this.” Amanda thought about that, trying to imagine the mayor as a carefree bride, hopeful for her future. It wasn’t easy. She needed some time to think about it. Maybe the mayor changed because she thought she had to change, or because she was afraid what would happen to her world if she didn’t. Maybe she was just trying to survive. Amanda subdued any twinges of compassion as she furiously cleaned in the corner between the wall and the massive bed. Yes, people change, she thought, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to treat other people like garbage. Just because she had a bad life doesn’t mean she can act like she rules everyone else. She saw the corner of the torn envelope the moment she flipped back the corner of the rug. She picked it up and was just going to toss it into the small garbage can she was dragging with her through the room, when her eyes caught some writing on the outside. YOU HAVE TWO HOURS Big dark letters, written in an angry scrawl across the front. Amanda’s blood ran cold. This wasn’t a piece of mail carelessly left. This was something that had been deliberately hidden, and that was much more personal and angry. She glanced sideways at James, who was busy ripping down the heavy velvet curtains, a cloud of dust poofing around his head. It took only a moment for Amanda to fold the envelope in half and stuff it into her pocket. She patted it hard to ensure there’d be no telltale bulge, and pulled the

When we think of the historic struggles and conflicts of the current and past century, we naturally think of famous leaders: men who governed nations, commanded armies, and inspired movements in the defense of liberty, or in the service of ideologies which have obliterated liberty. Yet today, in this hour of human history, when the forces arrayed against the free spirit of man are more powerful, more brutal, and potentially more deadly than ever before, the single figure who has raised the highest flame of liberty heads no state, commands no army, and leads no movement that our eyes can see. But there is a movement—a hidden movement of human beings who have no offices and no headquarters, who are not represented in the great halls where nations meet, who every day risk or suffer more for the right to speak, to think, and to be true to themselves than any of us here are likely to risk in our lifetime. We heed this voice, not because it speaks for the left or the right or for any faction, but because it hurls truth and courage into the teeth of total power when it would be so much easier and more comfortable to submit to and embrace the lies by which that power lives. What is the strength of this voice? How has it broken through to us when others have been silenced? Its strength is art. Art illuminates the truth. It is, in a sense, subversive: subversive of hypocrisy, subversive of delusion, subversive of untruth. Few combinations in all of history have demonstrated the power of the pen coupled with the courage of free men’s minds. We need that power desperately today. We need it to teach the new and forgetful generations in our midst what it means to be free. Freedom is not an abstraction, neither is the absence of freedom. Art is a unique gift. It cannot be transmuted to another. But let us pray that this courage is contagious. We need echoes of this voice. We need to hear echoes in the White House. We need to hear the echoes in Congress and in the State Department and in the universities and media. The American ethos, from its conception to the contemporary, has been dedicated to the firm, unyielding belief in freedom. Freedom for all mankind, as well as for ourselves. It is in this spirit that we live our lives.

As I tooled north back to Los Angeles I tried to keep an open mind. Just because someone looks like a liar and acts like a liar doesn’t mean that he is a liar. It doesn’t even mean he’s a liar when his story is full of holes. Even the truth has been known to have holes. Of course, when his story doesn’t make sense it becomes a little more difficult to swallow. I could see Angela Rossi’s side of it, but not LeCedrick Earle’s. Rossi’s report said that she followed Earle to his house because he only had the single hundred-dollar bill on his person and she knew that he could plead innocent to a knowledge of its being counterfeit; she reasoned that if he had more at home as he stated, he couldn’t reasonably deny knowledge and the intent to defraud, and the arrest would stick. LeCedrick Earle said that she followed him to his home where she produced a hidden amount of counterfeit money and made the arrest. He opined that she might’ve done this so that there would be no witnesses, yet Mrs. Louise Earle had been there and Rossi apparently consummated the arrest. Rossi’s version made sense and LeCedrick Earle’s didn’t.

The good news is that we can sometimes control the “circles” around us, moving toward smaller circles that boost our relative happiness. If we are at our class reunion, and there's a “big circle” in the middle of the room with a drink in his hand, boasting of his big salary, we can consciously take several steps away and talk with someone else. If we are thinking of buying a new house, we can be selective about the open houses we go to, skipping the houses that are above our means. If we are thinking about buying a new car, we can focus on the models that we can afford, and so on. We

Cancer and the autoimmune diseases of various sorts are, by and large, diseases of civilization. While industrialized society organized along the capitalist model has solved many problems for many of its members — such as housing, food supply and sanitation — it has also created numerous new pressures even for those who do not need to struggle for the basics of existence. We have come to take these stresses for granted as inevitable consequences of human life, as if human life existed in an abstract form separable from the human beings who live it. When we look at people who only recently have come to experience urban civilization, we can see more clearly that the benefits of “progress” exact hidden costs in terms of physiological balance, to say nothing of emotional and spiritual satisfaction. Hans Selye wrote, “Apparently in a Zulu population, the stress of urbanization increased the incidence of hypertension, predisposing people to heart accidents. In Bedouins and other nomadic Arabs, ulcerative colitis has been noted after settlement in Kuwait City, presumably as a consequence of urbanization.” The main effect of recent trends on the family under the prevailing socioeconomic system, accelerated by the current drive to “globalization,” has been to undermine the family structure and to tear asunder the connections that used to provide human beings with a sense of meaning and belonging. Children spend less time around nurturing adults than ever before during the course of human evolution. The nexus previously based in extended family, village, community and neighbourhood has been replaced by institutions such as daycare and school, where children are more oriented to their peers than to reliable parents or parent substitutes. Even the nuclear family, supposedly the basic unit of the social structure, is under intolerable pressure. In many families now, both parents are having to work to assure the basic necessities one salary could secure a few decades ago. “[The] separation of infants from their mothers and all other types of relocation which leave few possibilities for interpersonal contact are very common forms of sensory deprivation; they may become major factors in disease,” wrote the prescient Hans Selye.

My first ten years were spent in a suburb of Melbourne so quiet that I believed no people could have survived on the far side of their trimmed privet hedges unless their wardrobes and cupboards were stuffed with rubber or clay or painted tokens of another world altogether, a world that poked up into Melbourne in the dark corners of bedrooms and the shadowy spaces under fruit-trees and behind fowl sheds in backyards wholly hidden from the street. On many a Sunday afternoon when my mother took me on long trips by tram to visit some aunt or great-aunt and I had to sit for the first half-hour in the front room, I looked around me for some detail of a painted landscape on the wall or some gesture made by a porcelain figure in the crystal-cabinet or some pattern in the threads of an anti-macassar that seemed the nearest sign of the other world. Then, when I was allowed to go outside , I would always find a certain kind of place - the patch of rotting leaves under the treefern on the blind side of the house; the clump of arum lilies between the garden shed and the back fence; the corner of lawn just beyond the last flagstone in a path that had seemed likely to lead to something much more definite. I would stand in that place and stare, and wonder what word I had to learn the meaning of or what other person I had to turn myself into before I could recognise the doorway that must have been somewhere just in front of me.

INTELLECTUAL

I set a fast pace back towards the House and their footsteps followed close behind me, punctuated with hissed fragments of conversation as they tried to figure out what to do. As we closed in on the glass building, the boy declared that he was going to seek out Darcy and left us, his feet hitting the path at a thumping pace as he ran. I ignored them both and kept going all the way back to the House, taking the stairs two at a time before striding through the common room. I received several curious glances as we passed but most people had headed to their rooms already and the look I threw the others was enough to stop them from taking photographs or asking questions. I made it to my bedroom door before Sofia caught up to me again and she was even brave enough to grab my arm to halt me. “What?” I asked, lacing my voice with a bit of threat. Sofia blanched at my tone but didn’t back down and I found myself equally surprised and impressed by the devotion of this nothing little Fae to the girl in my arms. “Why are you taking her to your room?” she demanded. “I’ve got her bag right here with her key and-” “And while she’s in this state she could lose control again and burn the whole House down,” I replied. “I’ll have to stay with her tonight until she sleeps off the alcohol you watched her consume.” There was more than a hint of accusation in my tone but the girl didn’t even flinch this time. “And that’s all you’re going to do?” Sofia demanded. “You’re not going to play some trick on her or hurt her or...” She didn’t finish that accusation but her gaze flickered to the point where my hand was gripping Roxy’s bare thigh as I held her. “I’m not a fucking rapist,” I snapped. “I can have any girl I want in my bed any night of the week, why would I want to molest an unconscious one who hates me?” Sofia backed off instantly, seeming satisfied by whatever she’d seen in my eyes as her shoulders sagged a little. “Okay, I didn’t mean to imply...just...look after her,” she said, frowning at Roxy again with concern as she passed me her bag and backed up. I made to turn away from her then an idea occurred to me. “Wait…Sofia, right?” I asked, trying to sound vaguely friendly. It wasn’t something I attempted often and the frown she gave me said I was terrible at it. “Yes…” “I er, have this… cousin. Third cousin actually, who just emerged as a Pegasus…” “Good for her. Why are you telling me this?” she asked suspiciously. “It’s a him. He’s called…Phillip.” “Phillip?” She looked at me like no one in the world was actually called Phillip and I had to admit I’d never met one. Dammit. Why did I pick that fucking name? “Yeah. Well, as you can imagine in a family of pure blooded Dragons, Phillip isn’t coping so well with the shame of-” “Shame of what?” she asked, a clear challenge in her eyes for me to dare to finish that sentence. And in hindsight implying her Order was shameful probably wasn’t the best way to get her to help me. I shifted Roxy in my arms and sighed, wondering if I should just abandon this idea. But this girl had impressed me tonight despite her weakness and I didn’t really have anyone else to ask so I barrelled on. “I’ll level with you. Me calling your Order shameful is about the closest to a compliment he’d get from a member of my family on the subject. He’s been locked in his house, hidden away from the world, his father has actually considered killing him to conceal his true nature. He’s…alone. And he could really use someone of his Order to talk to…” My throat felt tight, I didn’t know if this was a terrible idea but Xavier had sounded so broken on the phone earlier, so desperate, I just wanted to try and help him. And maybe having another Pegasus to talk to would help him see some good in what he was. (Darius POV)

A tree is a memory keeper. Tangled beneath our roots, hidden inside our trunks, are the sinews of history, the ruins of wars nobody came to win, the bones of the missing. The water sucked up through our boughs is the blood of the earth, the tears of the victims, and the ink of truths yet to be acknowledged. Humans, especially the victors who hold the pen that writes the annals of history, have a penchant for erasing as much as documenting. It remains to us plants to collect the untold, the unwanted. Like a cat that curls up on its favourite cushion, a tree wraps itself around the remnants of the past. When Lawrence Durrell, having fallen in love with Cyprus, decided to plant cypresses behind his house and took his spade to the soil, he found skeletons in his garden. Little did he know that this was by no means unusual. All around the world, wherever there is, or has ever been, a civil war or an ethnic conflict, come to the trees for clues, because we will be the ones that sit silently in communion with human remains.

Not if you start talking the sort of talk that might get me burnt for my trouble. The only way I could possibly listen to you would be if somehow the fireman structure itself could be burnt. Now if you suggest that we print extra books and arrange to have them hidden in firemen's houses all over the country, so that seeds of suspicion would be sown among these arsonists, bravo, I'd say!” “Plant the books, turn in an alarm, and see the firemen's houses burn, is that what you mean?

Many astrology books relate the twelfth house Venus with clandestine love affairs, which just means secret or hidden from others. You might experience situations where you fall in love with someone who is not free such as loving someone you can’t be with because they are married, a coworker, your supervisor, someone much younger or older than you or someone inappropriate in society’s eyes. You can experience a barrier that prevents you from expressing your true feelings for someone.

This was the only sensation in my little life that activated me. I watched the speedometer tick up, I felt the pedal beneath my feet, the bass throb through the speakers. I belonged to no one but myself. This moment and this beat; that was enough.

Every time I heard disco, anywhere, I was transported by the groove.

the only way out is through.

Vasana is determinism that feels like free will. I’m reminded of my friend Jean, whom I’ve known for almost twenty years. Jean considers himself very spiritual and went so far in the early nineties as to walk way from his job with a newspaper in Denver to live in an ashram in western Massachusetts. But he found the atmosphere choking. “They’re all crypto Hindus,” he complained. “They don’t do anything but pray and chant and meditate.” So Jean decided to move on with his life. He’s fallen in love with a couple of women but has never married. He doesn’t like the notion of settling down and tends to move to a new state every four years or so. (He once told me that he counted up and discovered that he’s lived in forty different houses since he was born.) One day Jean called me with a story. He was on a date with a woman who had taken a sudden interest in Sufism, and while they were driving home, she told Jean that according to her Sufi teacher, everyone has a prevailing characteristic. “You mean the thing that is most prominent about them, like being extroverted or introverted?” he asked. “No, not prominent,” she said. “Your prevailing characteristic is hidden. You act on it without seeing that you’re acting on it.” The minute he heard this, Jean became excited. “I looked out the car window, and it hit me,” he said. “I sit on the fence. I am only comfortable if I can have both sides of a situation without committing to either.” All at once a great many pieces fell into place. Jean could see why he went into an ashram but didn’t feel like he was one of the group. He saw why he fell in love with women but always saw their faults. Much more came to light. Jean complains about his family yet never misses a Christmas with them. He considers himself an expert on every subject he’s studied—there have been many—but he doesn’t earn his living pursuing any of them. He is indeed an inveterate fence-sitter. And as his date suggested, Jean had no idea that his Vasana, for that’s what we’re talking about, made him enter into one situation after another without ever falling off the fence. “Just think,” he said with obvious surprise, “the thing that’s the most me is the thing I never saw.” If unconscious tendencies kept working in the dark, they wouldn’t be a problem. The genetic software in a penguin or wildebeest guides it to act without any knowledge that it is behaving much like every other penguin or wildebeest. But human beings, unique among all living creatures, want to break down Vasana. It’s not good enough to be a pawn who thinks he’s a king. We crave the assurance of absolute freedom and its result—a totally open future. Is this reasonable? Is it even possible? In his classic text, the Yoga Sutras, the sage Patanjali informs us that there are three types of Vasana. The kind that drives pleasant behavior he calls white Vasana; the kind that drives unpleasant behavior he calls dark Vasana; the kind that mixes the two he calls mixed Vasana. I would say Jean had mixed Vasana—he liked fence-sitting but he missed the reward of lasting love for another person, a driving aspiration, or a shared vision that would bond him with a community. He displayed the positives and negatives of someone who must keep every option open. The goal of the spiritual aspirant is to wear down Vasana so that clarity can be achieved. In clarity you know that you are not a puppet—you have released yourself from the unconscious drives that once fooled you into thinking that you were acting spontaneously.

In most markets, savvy investors can take a contrarian position when prices depart too much from fundamental value. In the housing market (as well as in the market to take firms private), few opportunities exist for investors to take a short position—that is, sell houses they do not have so as to make a killing when prices fall. This typically means that the optimist, who buy housing, tend to have undue influence.14 So house prices, and more generally, asset prices, can rise excessively, and their reacquaintance with reality can be brutal indeed.

the car into gear and drives through the gate. Dede closes the gate behind them, taking another look across the street and seeing nothing. “That’s the thing, though,” she says when she reenters the car. “He wasn’t walking. He was just watching us. I mean, I think. With the headlights, I couldn’t really see. It could just be my eyes playing tricks.” Annie pulls the Beetle onto the grass next to the massive detached garage, hidden from sight. She lets out a sigh. “Good to be home,” she says. “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like—” “Would you shut up?” As they walk toward the back entrance, they see the ladder the hot tool-belt guy used yesterday, broken down and lying in the grass. “Noah was cute,” Annie says. “Was he? Was he cute?” Dede throws another elbow. “Now, now, dearest, I only have eyes for you.

Oh, God, it's early," he groaned. "Hell. Well, at least I can grab the bathroom first." Claire jumped to her feet. "What time is it?" "Nine," he said, and yawned again. She reached over him, pushed the hidden button, dashed past him to the door, barely remembering to shed the afghan on the way. "Hey! Dibs on the bathroom! I mean it!" She grabbed her clothes and jumped in the bathroom just as Shane, still yawning, stumbled out of the hidden room. "But I called dibs!" he said, and knocked on the door. "Dibs! Damn girls don't understand the rules....

hidden. Many astrology books relate the twelfth house Venus with clandestine love affairs, which just means secret or hidden from others. You might experience situations where you fall in love with someone who is not free such as loving someone you can’t be with because they are married, a coworker, your supervisor, someone much younger or older than you or someone inappropriate in society’s eyes. You can experience a barrier that prevents you from expressing your true feelings for someone.

But in that time the RuPaul idea was born, and people outside of my world were inspired to talk about me and androgyny and drag in a way that was unprecedented. Not long after that, the questions came: Why you? Drag had been around forever. Why had I been able to crack the code after so many false starts and almosts?

We all have that magic within us - But it's the faculty to harness it - to turn something seemingly meaningless into something special, to be loose and spontaneous with it - that makes life most worth living.

Sometimes the thing we are not able to let go of isn't benevolent. Sometimes we hang on to past hurts and old ideas. We refuse to let those die, that old darkness. But we have to let go - both of the things we despise and, often, the things that we love. Every ascended master will tell you the same thing: It's the ego that grips, and nonattachment is the path to freedom. But it never stops being difficult to let go - to say goodbye.

Even when I didn't have a dime, I always felt rich, because I knew that I had imagination. Having money to me was like having a tank full of gas—it didn't mean much if you didn't know where you were going or didn't have the curiosity to enjoy the ride. Money made things easier—much easier. But no matter how poor I'd been, I had never felt as impoverished as the rich people I knew who had no imagination, whose capacity for fun was stunted.

Unlike my mother, who saw me, my father could not. The number one evil that we face is unconsciousness. And now that I am older, I understand the wisdom that was always waiting for me, so simple and so obvious but so hard to learn— His loss.

Not long after that, the questions came: Why you? Drag had been around forever. Why had I been able to crack the code after so many false starts and almosts? But I knew they would never understand the delicate choreography I’d done to make it all work. I’d mastered the art of naughty-lite: two spoonfuls of Diana Ross, a pinch of Cher, a shake of Dolly Parton, all sealed with Walt Disney’s family-friendliness. Before, I had been blurry—confusing, a thing that only some people could understand. Finally, I had snapped into focus, just in time for the whole world to see. The eighties, with all its excess and opulence, had also been marred by darkness: the heaviness of crack cocaine, the AIDS epidemic, the crashes of S&Ls in the markets. There was a yearning for levity in the culture, the very same irreverence and sense of play that had animated me my whole life. A window opened. I stepped through it.

They attempted to steal this map from us.” I looked closer at the map. Different nations had different symbols on them. I realized, slowly, that many of the symbols corresponded with nations that had been attacked. The House of Stone. The House of Reeds. Even Yithara. “What do these mean?” I asked, pointing to the marks that adorned each of those nations. “Even my husband is several hundred years too young to have ever known the true purpose of this map.” Her brow furrowed. “But myths claim that it marks hidden pools of magic, specific places where it is stronger. Or perhaps, where magical artifacts are hidden. The stories vary.” She shook her head. “To be honest, I suspect that they are all more fiction than fact. But I’m not certain how much that matters. All that matters is that the humans are desperate, and they believe it could be true. Even a sliver of a chance is enough to drive them to…“ “Genocide?” Caduan said, quietly. And Athalena was so still, so silent, for such a long moment that I wondered if perhaps she wouldn’t answer. “Heinous things,” she whispered, at last. “Heinous things. The humans that we welcomed into our walls…” Her voice broke. “They murdered one of my children. I heard the screams, and I ran into my daughter’s room to find them pinning her to the ground. There was blood—” Here, she choked, as if her words were too sharp to swallow. Still, she did not lift her eyes from the table. “There was blood everywhere. They cut open her wrists. There were two Wielders, a Valtain and a Solarie, and they were doing some spell, something to— to harness her, to turn my sweet child into something—

I hated that job. My true calling was getting high and going to clubs.

Once we have put the civilized space behind us, we literally enter the other world: that of the land spirits who preside over the various domains and who are hidden everywhere. A very lively German legend tells how one of these beings became the spirit of a place. In order to build his farm, a peasant cut down some trees and the spirit entered the house when the beams were brought in. If it is treated well—meaning if it is shown respect and given offerings on specific dates—the spirit becomes a valuable assistant, but it can be mischievous at times and sow such disorder in the household that the inhabitants will try to get rid of it. As long as a farm possesses an even-tempered spirit, the estate will prosper. Here we have caught a glimpse of the origin of the household spirit.

What if that - that need to love - was the best thing about me?

Truth which lives since the beginning is sown everywhere; many see the sowing, few know the reaping. Some claim that Mary’s conception was immaculate. They’re mistaken; women cannot conceive from the Holy Spirit, which is feminine. It means that Mary wasn’t defiled by dark powers, which defile themselves. Jesus said to his disciples, “Bring gifts to your Father’s house; don’t steal from there.” Jesus is our Lord’s secret name, Christ is his revealed name. In Syriac it is Messiah. The Nazarene is he who reveals the hidden. Those who claim our Lord first died then ascended, are wrong! He ascended, then died.

Consider the parents of an eight-year-old girl named, say, Molly. Her two best friends, Amy and Imani, each live nearby. Molly’s parents know that Amy’s parents keep a gun in their house, so they have forbidden Molly to play there. Instead, Molly spends a lot of time at Imani’s house, which has a swimming pool in the backyard. Molly’s parents feel good about having made such a smart choice to protect their daughter. But according to the data, their choice isn’t smart at all. In a given year, there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. (In a country with 6 million pools, this means that roughly 550 children under the age of ten drown each year.) Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 millionplus guns. (In a country with an estimated 200 million guns, this means that roughly 175 children under ten die each year from guns.) The likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isn’t even close: Molly is far more likely to die in a swimming accident at Imani’s house than in gunplay at Amy’s. But most of us are, like Molly’s parents, terrible risk assessors. Peter Sandman, a self-described “risk communications consultant” in Princeton, New Jersey, made this point in early 2004 after a single case of mad-cow disease in the United States prompted an antibeef frenzy. “The basic reality,” Sandman told the New York Times, “is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.

They believe that every human is an individual, whose worth does not depend on what other people think of him or her. Each of us has within ourselves a brilliant ray of light that gives value and meaning to our lives. In modern Western schools teachers and parents tell children that if their classmates make fun of them, they should ignore it. Only they themselves, not others, know their true worth. In modern architecture, this myth leaps out of the imagination to take shape in stone and mortar. The ideal modern house is divided into many small rooms so that each child can have a private space, hidden from view, providing for maximum autonomy. This private room almost invariably has a door, and in some households it may be accepted practice for the child to close, and perhaps lock, the door. Even parents may be forbidden to enter without knocking and asking permission. The room is usually decorated as the child sees fit, with rock-star posters on the wall and dirty socks on the floor. Somebody growing up in such a space cannot help but imagine himself ‘an individual’, his true worth emanating from within rather than from without.

Jesiba huffed a soft laugh. The enchantress who’d defected from her witch-clan and sworn allegiance to the House of Flame and Shadow still lurked around Lunathion, but Bryce hadn’t seen her in months. Not since the day Jesiba had found Bryce poking around the watery ruins of the gallery library and told her not to come back. Not in a mean way. Just in a This gallery is now permanently closed, and those books you’re looking for are hidden away where no one will ever find them sort of manner.

I was born to an unwed female in a settlement that makes Windhaven look like a tolerant, welcoming paradise. She was shunned for bearing a child out of wedlock, and forced to give birth to me alone in a tent in the dead of winter.' Horror lurched through her. She'd known Cassian was low-born, but that level of cruelty because of it... 'What of your father?' 'You mean the piece of shit who forced himself on her and then went back to his wife and family?' Cassian let out a cold laugh that she rarely heard. 'There were no consequences for him.' 'There never are,' Nesta said coolly. She blocked out the image of Tomas's face. 'There are here,' Cassian growled, as if he sensed the direction of her thoughts. Cassian gestured to the city below, hidden by the mountain and the House blocking the view. 'Rhys changed the laws here in the Night Court, and in Illyria.' His face hardened further. 'But it still requires the survivor to come forward. And in places like Illyria, they make life a living hell for any female who does. They seem it a betrayal.' 'That's outrageous.' 'We're all Fae. Forget the High Fae or Lesser Fae bullshit. We're all immortal or close to it. Change comes slowly for us. What humans accomplish in decades takes us centuries. Longer, if you live in Illyria.' 'Then why do you bother with the Illyrians?' 'Because I fought like hell to prove my worth to them.' His eyes glittered. 'To prove that my mother brought some good into this world.' 'Where is she now?' He'd never spoken of her. His eyes shuttered in a way she had not witnessed before. 'I was taken away from her when I was three. Thrown out into the snow. And in her so-called disgraced state, she became prey to other monsters.' Nesta's stomach twisted with each word. 'She did their backbreaking labour until she died, alone and...' His throat worked. 'I was at Windhaven by then. I wasn't strong enough to return to help her. To bring her somewhere safe. Rhys wasn't yet High Lord, and none of us could do anything.' ... 'It's a story for another time. But what I meant to try to explain is that through it all, through every awful thing, the training centred me. Guided me. When I had a shit day, when I was spat on or pummelled or shunned, when I led armies and lost good warriors, when Rhys was taken by Amarantha- through all of that, the training remained. You said the other day the breathing helped you. It helps me, too. It helped Feyre.' She watched the wall rise in his eyes, word after word. As if he waited for her to rip it down. Rip him down. 'Make of that what you will, but it's true.' Oily shame slithered through her. She'd done that- brought this level of defensiveness in him. Heaviness weighed on her. Started gnawing on her insides. So Nesta said, 'Show me another set of movements.' Cassian scanned her face for a heartbeat, his gaze still shuttered, and began his next demonstration.

Duck Decoy Buckinghamshire In London at low tide it is still possible to find traces of Saxon fish and eel traps in the Thames, and near Brill in Buckinghamshire the National Trust has preserved what might be described as their avian equivalent. Today the word decoy has a wider meaning, but its origins are Dutch and originally described a type of wicker enclosure introduced to Britain from the Netherlands in the seventeenth century.[7] After landing on a lake or pond, waterfowl were encouraged into these enclosures by dogs specially trained for the purpose. The ruse works because ducks can become victims of their own curiosity. Faced with a likely predator, a duck will often keep it under observation rather than fly away. Mistaking a hunter’s dog for a fox, birds could thus be tricked into remaining on the water and gently led along the course of the decoy. Thereafter, the chances of escape would be reduced by narrowing the width of the enclosure as the birds paddled farther into it, and by giving it a curved shape that cut off the view of the pond. Once trapped in this way, the birds could be easily caught and killed; the meat all the better for being free of lead shot. As a source of nutrition, the decoys proved relatively cheap and efficient and soon hundreds were being constructed around the country. By the late nineteenth century, however, the number had slumped to a few dozen and today there are just four which, if they are used at all, play a role in trapping animals for ringing rather than for the pot. Hidden away in woodland, the Boarstall duck decoy is beautifully preserved and fairly typical of the late seventeenth century, although iron hoops suggest it might have been of above-average quality. With three separate enclosures or ‘pipes’, it includes hurdles behind which the decoyman could hide, perhaps throwing grain onto the surface of the water to further tempt the birds to their doom. Originally serving the kitchens of a now-vanished medieval manor house – to which the National Trust’s Boarstall Tower is the old gatehouse – this simple but ingenious device remained in use until the 1940s.

In the first case, you fear setting the price too low; in the second, you fear setting it too high. It is the job of your real-estate agent, of course, to find the golden mean. She is the one with all the information: the inventory of similar houses, the recent sales trends, the tremors of the mortgage market, perhaps even a lead on an interested buyer. You feel fortunate to have such a knowledgeable expert as an ally in this most confounding enterprise. Too bad she sees things differently. A real-estate agent may see you not so much as an ally but as a mark. Think back to the study cited at the beginning of this book, which measured the difference between the sale prices of homes that belonged to real-estate agents themselves and the houses

River searched the world for her girls. She dug up every anthill she could find. The army ants were too frightened to tell her what they'd done, but they did tell her that the ant god had gone to live among the humans. River searched for Ant. She dug through entire lineages trying to find him. When, after three hundred years, the sky god dared to mention the neglected waters of the world, she dried up entire countries out of spite. This is our River, one god reminded the other, our sweet River. Let us help, not hinder. And so they sent emissaries from every spirit realm, second daughters and minor spirits of similar powers, godlings all, promising their aid for a hundred years. But River's grief became their own. They forgot their mothers and their brothers and the lovers they'd promised to return to; they forgot that they'd had a past before this grief removed everything form inside of them. How, they wondered, can a body feel full to bursting with grief but also hollow? These godlings of land and air and memory resisted this loss of themselves, but River's sorrow drowned them. Their husbands, their children, their homes became like reflections in a rough stream, fractured beyond recognition. They tore the world apart. Unprecedented rains. Earthquakes that ravaged every region. One godling who had come from the house of flames sent an entire cite on fire trying to find River's girls. It was a dark century for humankind and godkind alike. Then the female godlings got craftier in their search. They made themselves visible to human eyes, tempting men and women, threatening men and women, building a network of spies across the globe who lit candles and prayed to them and passed this new religion on to their children. Every new convert was a new set of eyes in the world, a new set of ears to catch whispers of men who didn't seem to fit in, or men who rose to ungodly success but never seemed to pray. Many a good man was lost to angry godlings who peeled his skin away, searching for the god that might be hidden inside. But after seven hundred fruitless years and countless human believers in her service, it dawned on River that she might never see her twins again. She collapsed where she stood, and every emissary lay down as well. Dust settled on them, then grime and so much debris that they became part of the earth, hills of hips and buttocks and woe. All but one. That only one who felt the rage of River, multiplied by that most powerful feeling that won't let a person rest: guilt. River's sister, not quite goddess. The guilt turned in her belly like a ship in a storm. She'd slept while her sister's children were taken. Blame, so like a god itself, shadowed her, occupied her bed like a lover, whispered to her like a dearest friend. Her name was eventually forgotten.

Effort in the Calvinist doctrine had still another psychological meaning. The fact that one did not tire in that unceasing effort and that one succeeded in one's moral as well as one's secular work was a more or less distinct sign of being one of the chosen ones. The irrationality of such compulsive effort is that the activity is not meant to create a desired end but serves to indicate whether or not something will occur which has been determined beforehand, independent of one's own activity or control. This mechanism is a well-known feature of compulsive neurotics. Such persons when afraid of the outcome of an important undertaking may, while awaiting an answer, count the windows of houses or trees on the street. If the number is even, a person feels that things will be alright; if it is uneven, it is a sign that he will fail. Frequently this doubt does not refer to a specific instance but to a person's whole life, and the compulsion to look for "signs" will pervade it accordingly. Often the connection between counting stones, playing solitaire, gambling, and so on, and anxiety and doubt, is not conscious. A person may play solitaire out of a vague feeling of restlessness and only an analysis might uncover the hidden function of his activity: to reveal the future. In Calvinism this meaning of effort was part of the religious doctrine. Originally it referred essentially to moral effort, but later on the emphasis was more and more on effort in one's occupation and on the results of this effort; that is, success or failure in business. Success became the sign of God's grace; failure, the sign of damnation.

As the battle began Ivo Taillefer, the minstrel knight who had claimed the right to make the first attack, advanced up the hill on horseback, throwing his lance and sword into the air and catching them before the English army. He then charged deep into the English ranks, and was slain. The cavalry charges of William’s mail-clad knights, cumbersome in manœuvre, beat in vain upon the dense, ordered masses of the English. Neither the arrow hail nor the assaults of the horsemen could prevail against them. William’s left wing of cavalry was thrown into disorder, and retreated rapidly down the hill. On this the troops on Harold’s right, who were mainly the local “fyrd”, broke their ranks in eager pursuit. William, in the centre, turned his disciplined squadrons upon them and cut them to pieces. The Normans then re-formed their ranks and began a second series of charges upon the English masses, subjecting them in the intervals to severe archery. It has often been remarked that this part of the action resembles the afternoon at Waterloo, when Ney’s cavalry exhausted themselves upon the British squares, torn by artillery in the intervals. In both cases the tortured infantry stood unbroken. Never, it was said, had the Norman knights met foot-soldiers of this stubbornness. They were utterly unable to break through the shield-walls, and they suffered serious losses from deft blows of the axe-men, or from javelins, or clubs hurled from the ranks behind. But the arrow showers took a cruel toll. So closely, it was said, were the English wedged that the wounded could not be removed, and the dead scarcely found room in which to sink upon the ground. The autumn afternoon was far spent before any result had been achieved, and it was then that William adopted the time-honoured ruse of a feigned retreat. He had seen how readily Harold’s right had quitted their positions in pursuit after the first repulse of the Normans. He now organised a sham retreat in apparent disorder, while keeping a powerful force in his own hands. The house-carls around Harold preserved their discipline and kept their ranks, but the sense of relief to the less trained forces after these hours of combat was such that seeing their enemy in flight proved irresistible. They surged forward on the impulse of victory, and when half-way down the hill were savagely slaughtered by William’s horsemen. There remained, as the dusk grew, only the valiant bodyguard who fought round the King and his standard. His brothers, Gyrth and Leofwine, had already been killed. William now directed his archers to shoot high into the air, so that the arrows would fall behind the shield-wall, and one of these pierced Harold in the right eye, inflicting a mortal wound. He fell at the foot of the royal standard, unconquerable except by death, which does not count in honour. The hard-fought battle was now decided. The last formed body of troops was broken, though by no means overwhelmed. They withdrew into the woods behind, and William, who had fought in the foremost ranks and had three horses killed under him, could claim the victory. Nevertheless the pursuit was heavily checked. There is a sudden deep ditch on the reverse slope of the hill of Hastings, into which large numbers of Norman horsemen fell, and in which they were butchered by the infuriated English lurking in the wood. The dead king’s naked body, wrapped only in a robe of purple, was hidden among the rocks of the bay. His mother in vain offered the weight of the body in gold for permission to bury him in holy ground. The Norman Duke’s answer was that Harold would be more fittingly laid upon the Saxon shore which he had given his life to defend. The body was later transferred to Waltham Abbey, which he had founded. Although here the English once again accepted conquest and bowed in a new destiny, yet ever must the name of Harold be honoured in the Island for which he and his famous house-carls fought indomitably to the end.

someone who said she was Jim’s mother. I was dating Jim at the time. But it was actually Tim’s mother, one of my close friends. She was asking me for dinner. It wasn’t until the very end of the phone conversation that I realized who I was really talking to. I would have absolutely died had I showed up at Jim’s house for dinner!” “Not sure it was a matter of Danielle misunderstanding the girl,” Brian said. “I’m sure she’s okay. Kids love to play those kinds of tricks on adults,” Joe said. The next moment Carla showed up to take their drink order. Like she had with Adam’s table, one of her first questions was, “Have you been to the haunted house yet?” “We went Saturday night,” Kelly told her. “It was fun. Pretty sophisticated haunted house, if you ask me.” Carla looked at Brian. “How did you like it?” Brian shook his head. “I’m not going. Haunted houses really are not my thing.” “You and Adam Nichols,” Carla said with a laugh. “What do you mean?” Brian asked. “He doesn’t want to go either. But you really should. Well worth the money. I hope they do it again next year,” Carla said. “It’s a good setting for a haunted house,” Brian muttered. “It’s a natural.” Carla turned to Kelly and said, “What did you think about the dead body in the hidden staircase? Did it freak you out, or did

Short means abbreviated, which indicates the omission of critical details. Truth should be spoken or hidden, never said half free on the careless waggle of a tongue.

RECOMMENDED READING Brooks, David. The Road to Character. New York: Random House, 2015. Brown, Peter C., Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014. Damon, William. The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life. New York: Free Press, 2009. Deci, Edward L. with Richard Flaste. Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation. New York: Penguin Group, 1995. Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. New York: Random House, 2012. Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006. Emmons, Robert A. Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. Ericsson, Anders and Robert Pool. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Heckman, James J., John Eric Humphries, and Tim Kautz (eds.). The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Kaufman, Scott Barry and Carolyn Gregoire. Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind. New York: Perigee, 2015. Lewis, Sarah. The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. Matthews, Michael D. Head Strong: How Psychology is Revolutionizing War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. McMahon, Darrin M. Divine Fury: A History of Genius. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. New York: Little, Brown, 2014. Oettingen, Gabriele. Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. New York: Penguin Group, 2014. Pink, Daniel H. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009. Renninger, K. Ann and Suzanne E. Hidi. The Power of Interest for Motivation and Engagement. New York: Routledge, 2015. Seligman, Martin E. P. Learned Optimism: How To Change Your Mind and Your Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Steinberg, Laurence. Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Tetlock, Philip E. and Dan Gardner. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. New York: Crown, 2015. Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Willingham, Daniel T. Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009.

The big lie of our lives is that we are powerless—that we need something else, like a job, or a partner, or fame, or the dopamine hijack of a hit of cocaine, or the chilly metallic weight of a gun—to grant us power. We mistake easy pleasure, or a rush of adrenaline, for power. But real power isn’t a high: It’s something else, grounded and secure. Much as we seek power in every corner of our lives, it’s always already in us; it’s impossible to be powerless if you recognize that you yourself are power. Life is power.

Christmas is about bread. It’s hidden in plain sight on the first pages of the New Testament. Think about bread through these three words: Jesus, Bethlehem, Manger. Say them aloud with me. Jesus. Bethlehem. Manger. As we will see, all three words are related to bread, and connecting the dots will deepen your understanding of the Christmas story. First, consider the name Jesus. In John’s gospel, Jesus disclosed his identity through seven “I am” statements. One of the seven ways Jesus referred to himself was as Bread. To his disciples he said, “I am the Bread of Life. Those who feast on him will not go hungry.” Hold on to that idea. Next, consider the town of Bethlehem. In Hebrew, Bethlehem is a compound word, which simply means the word can be broken down into two separate words. Bethlehem = “Beit-lehem.” “Beit” means house. “Lechem” means bread. Bethlehem therefore means “House of Bread”. Hold on to that idea as well. Finally, consider the word Manger. Mangers are not wooden beds filled with pillows in the form of hay. A manger in the time of Jesus was cut from stone and served as a trough to hold feed for animals. In the cold winter months, animals, and mangers were sometimes placed within the front section of a home. … When we put the puzzle pieces together, we see that the New Testament is telling a story about the arrival of a man named Jesus (the Bread of Life) who is born in a town called Bethlehem (the House of Bread) and immediately placed in a manger (a feeding trough). So the Bread of Life was born in the House of Bread and placed in a feeding trough to satisfy the hunger of every human heart. That is the meaning of Christmas and we must never settle for less. We don’t need new stories from Hollywood on Christmas Day. Instead, we must reclaim the ancient depth and wonder of the Jesus Story. Christ our Savior is the Bread of Life. Let us keep the feast.

INTELLECTUAL 301 to 450 The hidden meaning of your name reveals that you are wise and intellectual, the Others take advice and ideas from you. You observe every situation closely and impartially. You are also introverted and don’t have many friends. You like people from whom you can learn new things and gain more knowledge. You are likely to be the brains behind new theories.