The Line Becomes A River Quotes

Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since – on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to displace with your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!

You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since-on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with.

I don’t know if you have ever seem a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island; for the Neverland is always more or less and island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.

I had as yet no notion that life every now and then becomes literature—not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.

There are days when I feel I am becoming good at what I do. And then I wonder, what does it mean to be good at this?

I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads on the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with sex elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate-pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine threepence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still. Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingos flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents...

You spent nearly four years on the border, she said. You weren’t just observing a reality, you were participating in it. You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison. And let me tell you, it isn’t something that’s just going to slowly go away. It’s part of who you’ve become. So what will you do? All you can do is try to find a place to hold it, a way to not lose some purpose for it all.

Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first [met you]. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since,—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I associate you only with the good; and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may.

As I swam toward a bend in the canyon, the river became increasingly shallow. In a patch of sunlight, two longnose gars, relics of the Paleozoic era, hovered in the silted waters. I stood to walk along the adjacent shorelines, crossing the river time and again as each bank came to an end, until finally, for one brief moment, I forgot in which country I stood. All around me the landscape trembled and breathed as one.

Compassion,” Susan Sontag famously declared, “is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

So you see, if you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you're doing, then you become aware also in the same moment and at the same time that you're not only beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun. Why? Because the process of your bodily existence and its rhythms is a process, an energy system which is continuous with the shining of the sun, just like the East River, here, is a continuous energy system, and all the waves in it are activities of the whole East River, and that's continuous with the Atlantic Ocean, and that's all one energy system and finally the Atlantic ocean gets around to being the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, etc., and so all the waters of the Earth are a continuous energy system. It isn't just that the East River is part of it. You can't draw any line and say 'Look, this is where the East River ends and the rest of it begins,' as if you can in the parts of an automobile, where you can say 'This is definitely part of the generator,here, and over here is a spark plug.' There's not that kind of isolation between the elements of nature.

Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration — expended effort weaves us into a task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of love. The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with painful subjects or working out formal problems, and there are times when suffering’s only open path is through an immersion in what is. The eighteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib described the principle this way: ‘For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river — / Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.’ “Difficulty then, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre called genius ‘not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.’ Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist’s concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work. Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance — a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue’s draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows.

For in the popular way of thinking, history draws a time “line,” as if time marched in lockstep in only one direction. Some people say that time is a river into which we can step but once, as it flows in a straight path to the sea. But Nanabozho’s people know time as a circle. Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again.

Jung went so far as to assert that it had become “a political and social duty” to perceive “the other as the very devil, so as to fascinate the outward eye and prevent it from looking at the individual life within.

You are part of my existence, part of myelf. You have been in every line I ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since - on the river, ont he sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy, that my mind has ever become aquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence you have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil" (Pip to Estalla)

Jung asserts that when we come to perceive “the other” as someone to be feared and shunned, we risk the inner cohesion of our society, allowing our personal relationships to become undermined by a creeping mistrust. By walling ourselves off from a perceived other, we “flatter the primitive tendency in us to shut our eyes to evil and drive it over some frontier or other, like the Old Testament scapegoat, which was supposed to carry the evil into the wilderness.

Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don't be afraid. I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers - your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and damned rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

In this way, the U.S. is making criminals out of those who could become its very best citizens.

Subsequent studies revealed that about one-third of the world’s male population carry the warrior gene, the expression of which can be triggered by childhood exposure to trauma.

A name is everything.

Count them all. Name them so as to say: this body could be mine. The body of one of my own. So as not to forget that all the bodies without names are our lost bodies.

The word began to filter down the lines, and the grumbling stopped, there was something new about this march, something these men had never been a part of before. If the fight in the Wilderness had not gone their way—the most optimistic called it a draw—they were not doing what this army had always done before, they were not going back above the river. If they had never said much about Grant, had never thought him any different from the ones who had come before, if they had become so used to the steady parade of failure, this time there was a difference. Some wanted to cheer, but were hushed by nervous officers. So along the dusty roads hats went up and muskets were held high, a silent salute to this new commander. This time, they were marching south.

The number of border deaths, just like the number of drug war homicides....does little to account for all the ways that violence rips and ripples through a society, through the lives and minds of its inhabitants.

Some politicians in the United States think that if a mother or father is deported, this will cause the entire family to move back to Mexico. But in fact, the mothers and fathers with the best family values will want their family to stay in the U.S., they will cross the border again and again to be with them. So you see, these same people, the ones with the most dedication to their family, they begin to build up a record of deportation, they have more and more problems with the government, and it becomes harder and harder for them to ever become legal. In this way, the U.S. is making criminals out of those who could become its very best citizens.

All these years, I told her, it’s like I’ve been circling beneath a giant, my gaze fixed upon its foot resting at the ground. But now, I said, it’s like I’m starting to crane my head upward, like I’m finally seeing the thing that crushes.

I realized, too, that despite my small role within the system, despite hours of training and studying at the academy, I had little inkling of what happened to those I arrested after I turned over their paperwork and went home from my shift.

Have you ever been to the beach and wanted to feed the seagulls? The problem is you tear off a little crust from your sandwich and toss it to one, and ten more show up. Toss a little more and a flock descends. You start to wonder: if I run out of bread, will I become the meal? Turkeys are different. They startle easily and run for the barn. In the wild, they run for the hills. Of course, they’re very tasty. Benjamin Franklin thought them majestic enough to be an emblem for our country. I’m sorry, but Thanksgiving would be downright depressing. There’s our national symbol lying stuffed and roasted and ready to carve up for hungry guests. And then we have the eagles. Our forefathers were trained in the Bible. […]They would have known Isaiah 40:31. “Those who wait upon the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary.” They were making war on the greatest power in the world of the time; the world was watching them. What could this band of commoners do? What troubles me about our country today is how many seagulls there are, scrambling for more. Remember the movie “Finding Nemo”? “Mine, mine, mine!” And we sure have a lot of gutless turkeys running for the barn whenever hard decisions have to be made; like how to keep our country solvent so our children won’t be in soup lines… Where are the eagles? That’s what I want to know. Please, God, we need us some eagles!

I came with the others for the bodies of our people. Antígona González asks: “What thing is the body when someone strips it of a name, a history, a family name? . . . When there is no face or trail or traces or signs . . . What thing is the body when it’s lost?

That which for all time construction shall determine I have laid out; Away from Eridu, where dry land begins, my quarters shall be, Laarsa will be its name, a place for directing it shall become. On the banks of the Burannu, the River of Deep Waters, will it be located, A twin thereof a city shall in future arise, Lagash I shall name it. Between the two on the plans a line have I drawn, Sixty leagues thereafter a healing city shall come into being, A city of your own it shall be, Shurubak, the Haven City, I shall name it.

You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hours of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil.

Nights with bright pivots, departure, matter, uniquely voice, uniquely naked each day. Upon your breasts of still current, upon your legs ofharshness and water, upon the permanence and pride of your naked hair, I want to lie, my love, the tears now cast into the raucous basket where they gather, I want to lie, my love, alone with a syllable of destroyed silver, alone with a tip of your snowy breast.   It is not now possible, at times, to win except by falling, it is not now possible, between two people, to tremble, to touch the river’s flower: man fibers come like needles, transactions, fragments, families of repulsive coral, tempests and hard passages through carpets of winter.   Between lips and lips there are cities of great ash and moist crest, drops of when and how, indefinite traffic: between lips and lips, as if along a coast of sand and glass, the wind passes.   That is why you are endless, gather me up as if you were all solemnity, all nocturnal like a zone, until you merge with the lines of time.   Advance in sweetness, come to my side until the digital leaves of the violins have become silent, until the moss takes root in the thunder, until from the throbbing of hand and hand the roots come down.

Men may perish, but the world will neither celebrate nor mourn. It will go on.' His smile thinned. 'Would you like to know how?' 'No.' 'Animals will swell to fill the void left by men," he told her. 'And over-swell it, perhaps. There will be other extinctions and other recoveries. The sky will clear, but those who see it will not marvel at its many colors. Those ruins will collapse, burying treasures like this-' He waved at the walls. '-and this-' He picked up the spoon from her coffee tray and tossed it down again with a clatter. '-forever, but the world will go on. Years become centuries so easily when no one is there to count them. Centuries become millennia. The forests will reclaim the lands that Men have razed. Rivers will carve canyons across the scars left by this fallen cities. Mountains will rise up, trapping seas to dry under and uncaring sun and leaving the bones of whales to bleach in the newborn deserts for no one to find, no one to be inspired by thoughts of giants and dragons. And still the worlds will go on, and I will go on with it through ages that can only be measured by the coming and going of glaciers. The stars themselves will shift in the heavens and no one will be there to invent names for their new alignments or remember the stories of the old ones, no one but me. In time, the sun itself will begin to cool. Here on Earth, the world goes on and on as its remaining life passes through its last changes and dies away. It will be quiet. And lonely.' His mouth curved into a bitter line. 'But I'll live.' 'Stop it,' Lan whispered through numb lips. 'I read once that the sun will someday swell and engulf this world before it burns itself out. Perhaps I will finally die with it. Or perhaps I' will continue to endure... my ashes pulled eternally apart through the frozen vacuum of space, and I with no more mouth to scream... still alive.

For years, walking round London, I had been aware of the actual land, lying concealed but not entirely changed or destroyed, beneath the surface of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city. It has been said that 'God made the country and man made the town', but that is not true: the town is simply disguised countryside. Main roads, some older than history itself, still bend to avoid long-dried marshes, or veer off at an angle where the wall of a manor house once stood. Hills and valleys still remain; rivers, even though entombed in sewer pipes, still cause trouble in the foundations of neighbouring buildings and become a local focus for winter mists. Garden walls follow the line of hedgerows; the very street-patterns have been determined by the holdings of individual farmers and landlords, parcels of land some of which can be traced back to the Norman Conquest. The situation of specific buildings - pubs, churches, institutions - often dates from long distant decisions and actions on the part of men whose names have vanished from any record.

José is unique. Sure there might be thousands or millions of people in his position, but it’s because of him that their situation is no longer abstract to you. You are no longer severed from what it means to send someone back across the border. You know what’s keeping him away, what keeps him from his family. It’s something close to you, something that’s become a part of you.

Many of the streams that feed the river of culture are polluted, and the soil this river should be watering is thus parched and fragmented. Most of these we know, but let me briefly touch on some of the fault lines in the cultural soil (starving the soul) as well as some of the sources of the poisons in the water (polluting the soul).   Starving the cultural soul   One of the most powerful sources of cultural fragmentation has grown out of the great successes of the industrial revolution. Its vision, standards, and methods soon proliferated beyond the factory and the economic realm and were embraced in sectors from education to government and even church. The result was reductionism. Modern people began to equate progress with efficiency. Despite valiant and ongoing resistance from many quarters—including industry—success for a large part of our culture is now judged by efficient production and mass consumption. We often value repetitive, machine-like performance as critical to “bottom line” success. In the seductive industrialist mentality, “people” become “workers” or “human resources,” who are first seen as interchangeable cogs, then treated as machines—and are now often replaced by machines.

I’ll eat grass, I’ll eat bushes, I’ll eat cactus, I’ll drink filthy cattle water, I’ll drink nothing at all. I’ll run and hide from la migra, I’ll pay the mafias whatever I have to. They can take my money, they can rob my family, they can lock me away, but I will keep coming back. I will keep crossing, again and again, until I make it, until I am together again with my family. No, no me quedo aquí. Voy a seguir intentando pasar.

As bureaucracies accumulate power, they become immune to their own mistakes. Instead of changing their stories to fit reality, they can change reality to fit their stories. In the end, external reality matches their bureaucratic fantasies, but only because they forced reality to do so. For example, the borders of many African countries disregard river lines, mountain ranges and trade routes, split historical and economic zones unnecessarily, and ignore local ethnic and religious identities. The same tribe may find itself riven between several countries, whereas one country may incorporate splinters of numerous rival clans. Such problems bedevil countries all over the world, but in Africa they are particularly acute because modern African borders don’t reflect the wishes and struggles of local nations. They were drawn by European bureaucrats who never set foot in Africa.

Four Rivers was special for reasons the living population had all but forgotten. It was, in the most general sense, magic-adjacent. There are locations all over the world where power is so concentrated that it becomes the meeting ground for good and evil. Call them nexuses. Call them lay lines. Call them Eden. Over the centuries, as Four Rivers lost it's water sources, it's magic faded, too, leaving only a weak pulse beneath it's dry mountain plains. That pulse was enough.

I was standing alone, at bank of a river Singing a song of a dishearten seraph Wind blows throw me, wild and cold Freezing my eyes to capture the knock I was staring at a glimpse straight to my sight Ignoring the glamour and beauty of life I saw someone in the blurred flight Circling over me to focus the light My mind become brighter and so am I Oh! He was there for so long I find I was never as solo as my night I have a perfect one to be on my side I was once weak and disappointed by my journey I was angry and mad on my unfaithful company I tried hard to be stronger and tougher than I mean And now I am determined and full of virtuous deeds I was bored of hectic normal life of mine And couldn’t find anyone to guide on my line I alone discovered what I meant to be My talents, my path and my desired needs I am ready to face the world that I've known To uncover those skills I learned on my own To make a place of acts, not of just words A place of liberty and love to be heard

You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since--on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithful hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God Bless you, God forgive you!

To be honest, I am still grateful to the United States. If I am arrested crossing the border, I understand it’s part of the system. I realize that I am crossing illegally. But it’s complicated, you see. I know I’m breaking the rules, but it is necessary because my family is there. I don’t want to cause harm to the country, but I have to break the law. I have to. Es una necesidad. It is a situation of emotion, of love. Those who accept staying apart from their family are without love. Their children grow up without love. So I must fight against this.

His mind was completely occupied with the image of Aline by the river, the rich mass of her pinned-up hair, the exquisite lines of her body and throat. Time had only made Aline's beauty more eloquent. Her body was ripe and fully developed, the form of a woman in her prime. With maturity, her face had become more delicately sculpted, the nose thinner, the lips faded from deep rose to the pale shade of pink that tinted the inside of a seashell. And there was that damned, never-forgotten beauty mark, the festive dark fleck that lured his attention to the tender corner of her mouth.

I thought again of the mountain climbers we had met as we traveled. They were young and wore brightly colored clothing so as to be easily spotted should they become lost in the snow. They knew the right path to follow to the peaks. The heights were already festooned with aluminum pins; all they had to do was attach their lines to them, and they could climb safely. They were there for a holiday adventure, and on Monday they would return to their jobs with the feeling that they had challenged nature and won. But this wasn't really true. The adventurous ones were those who had climbed there first, the ones who had found the routes to the top.

Nights with bright pivots, departure, matter, uniquely voice, uniquely naked each day. Upon your breasts of still current, upon your legs ofharshness and water, upon the permanence and pride of your naked hair, I want to lie, my love, the tears now cast into the raucous basket where they gather, I want to lie, my love, alone with a syllable of destroyed silver, alone with a tip of your snowy breast.   It is not now possible, at times, to win except by falling, it is not now possible, between two people, to tremble, to touch the river’s flower: man fibers come like needles, transactions, fragments, families of repulsive coral, tempests and hard passages through carpets of winter.   Between lips and lips there are cities of great ash and moist crest, drops of when and how, indefinite traffic: between lips and lips, as if along a coast of sand and glass, the wind passes.   That is why you are endless, gather me up as if you were all solemnity, all nocturnal like a zone, until you merge with the lines of time.   Advance in sweetness, come to my side until the digital leaves of the violins have become silent, until the moss takes root in the thunder, until from the throbbing of hand and hand the roots come down.   VALS Yo toco el odio como pecho diurno, yo sin cesar, de ropa en ropa, vengo durmiendo lejos.

The part of you that is capable of violence, she said, maybe you wish to be rid of it, to wash yourself of it, but it’s not that easy. I sat back in my seat and stared up at the ceiling, listening to my mother’s voice. You spent nearly four years on the border, she said. You weren’t just observing a reality, you were participating in it. You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison. And let me tell you, it isn’t something that’s just going to slowly go away. It’s part of who you’ve become. So what will you do? All you can do is try to find a place to hold it, a way to not lose some purpose for it all.

Listening to Fournier's flowing, dignified cello, Hoshino was drawn back to his childhood. He used to go to the river every day to catch fish. Nothing to worry about back then, he reminisced. Just live each day as it came. As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the line it all changed. Living turned me into nothing. Weird... People are born in order to live, right? But the longer I've lived, the more I've lost what's inside me--and ended up empty. And I bet the longer I live, the emptier, the more worthless, I'll become. Something's wrong with this picture. Life isn't supposed to turn out like this! Isn't it possible to shift direction, to change where I'm headed?

Listening to Fournier's flowing, dignified cello, Hoshino was drawn back to his childhood. He used to go to the river every day to catch fish. Nothing to worry about back then, he reminisced. Just live each day as it came. As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the line it all changed.   Living turned me into nothing. Weird... People are born in order to live, right? But the longer I've lived, the more I've lost what's inside me—and ended up empty. And I bet the longer I live, the emptier, the more worthless, I'll become. Something's wrong with this picture. Life isn't supposed to turn out like this! Isn't it possible to shift direction, to change where I'm headed?

It happens surprisingly fast, the way your shadow leaves you. All day you’ve been linked by the light, but now that darkness gathers the world in a great black tide, your shadow joins the sea of all other shadows. If you stand here long enough, you, too, will forget your lines and merge with the tall grass and old trees, with the crows and the flooding river—all these pieces of the world that daylight has broken into objects of singular loneliness. It happens surprisingly fast, the drawing in of your shadow, and standing in the field, you become the field, and standing in the night, you are gathered by night, Invisible birds sing to the memory of light but then even those separate songs fade, tiny drops of ink in an infinite spilling. — Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “Still Life at Dusk,” Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyllis Cole-Dai & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)

You choose this moment to act like the Abnegation?” His voice fills the room and makes fear prickle in my chest. His anger seems too sudden. Too strange. “All that time you spent insisting that you were too selfish for them, and now, when your life is on the line, you’ve got to be a hero? What’s wrong with you?” “What’s wrong with you? People died. They walked right off the edge of a building! And I can stop it from happening again!” “You’re too important to just…die.” He shakes his head. He won’t even look at me--his eyes keep shifting across my face, to the wall behind me or the ceiling above me, to everything but me. I am too stunned to be angry. “I’m not important. Everyone will do just fine without me,” I say. “Who cares about everyone? What about me?” He lowers his head into his hand, covering his eyes. His fingers are trembling. Then he crosses the room in two long strides and touches his lips to mine. Their gentle pressure erases the past few months, and I am the girl who sat on the rocks next to the chasm, with river spray on her ankles, and kissed him for the first time. I am the girl who grabbed his hand in the hallway just because I wanted to. I pull back, my hand on his chest to keep him away. The problem is, I am also the girl who shot Will and lied about it, and chose between Hector and Marlene, and now a thousand other things besides. And I can’t erase those things. “You would be fine.” I don’t look at him. I stare at his T-shirt between my fingers and the black ink curling around his neck, but I don’t look at his face. “Not at first. But you would move on, and do what you have to.” He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me against him. “That’s a lie,” he says, before he kisses me again. This is wrong. It’s wrong to forget who I have become, and to let him kiss me when I know what I’m about to do. But I want to. Oh, I want to. I stand on my tiptoes and wrap my arms around him. I press one hand between his shoulder blades and curl the other one around the back of his neck. I can feel his breaths against my palm, his body expanding and contracting, and I know he’s strong, steady, unstoppable. All things I need to be, but I am not, I am not. He walks backward, pulling me with him so I stumble. I stumble right out of my shoes. He sits on the edge of the bed and I stand in front of him, and we’re finally eye to eye. He touches my face, covering my cheeks with his hands, sliding his fingertips down my neck, fitting his fingers to the slight curve of my hips. I can’t stop. I fit my mouth to his, and he tastes like water and smells like fresh air. I drag my hand from his neck to the small of his back, and put it under his shirt. He kisses me harder. I knew he was strong; I didn’t know how strong until I felt it myself, the muscles in his back tightening beneath my fingers. Stop, I tell myself. Suddenly it’s as if we’re in a hurry, his fingertips brushing my side under my shirt, my hands clutching at him, struggling closer but there is no closer. I have never longed for someone this way, or this much. He pulls back just enough to look into my eyes, his eyelids lowered. “Promise me,” he whispers, “that you won’t go. For me. Do this one thing for me.” Could I do that? Could I stay here, fix things with him, let someone else die in my place? Looking up at him, I believe for a moment that I could. And then I see Will. The crease between his eyebrows. The empty, simulation-bound eyes. The slumped body. Do this one thing for me. Tobias’s dark eyes plead with me. But if I don’t go to Erudite, who will? Tobias? It’s the kind of thing he would do. I feel a stab of pain in my chest as I lie to him. “Okay.” “Promise,” he says, frowning. The pain becomes an ache, spreads everywhere--all mixed together, guilt and terror and longing. “I promise.

Everything in Nature ran according to its own nature; the running of grass was in its growing, the running of rivers their flowing, granite bubbled up, cooled, compressed and crumbled, birds lived, flew, sang and died, everything did what it needed to do, each simultaneously running its own race, each by living according to its own nature together, never leaving any other part of the universe behind. The world’s Holy things raced constantly together, not to win anything over the next, but to keep the entire surging diverse motion of the living world from grinding to a halt, which is why there is no end to that race; no finish line. That would be oblivion to all. For the Indigenous Souls of all people who can still remember how to be real cultures, life is a race to be elegantly run, not a race to be competitively won. It cannot be won; it is the gift of the world’s diverse beautiful motion that must be maintained. Because human life has been give the gift of our elegant motion, whether we limp, roll, crawl, stroll, or fly, it is an obligation to engender that elegance of motion in our daily lives in service of maintaining life by moving and living as beautifully as we can. All else has, to me, the familiar taste of that domineering warlike harshness that daily tries to cover its tracks in order to camouflage the deep ruts of some old, sick, grinding, ungainly need to flee away from the elegance of our original Indigenous human souls. Our attempt to avariciously conquer or win a place where there are no problems, whether it be Heaven or a “New Democracy,” never mind if it is spiritually ugly and immorally “won” and taken from someone who is already there, has made a citifying world of people who, unconscious of it, have become our own ogreish problem to ourselves, our future, and the world. This is a problem that we cannot continue to attempt to competitively outrun by more and more effectively designed technological approaches to speed away from the past, for the specter of our own earth-wasting reality runs grinning competitively right alongside us. By developing even more effective and entertaining methods of escape that only burn up the earth, the air, animals, plants, and the deeper substance of what it should mean to be human, by competing to get ahead, we have created a brakeless competition that has outrun our innate beauty and marked out a very definite and imminent “finish” line. Living in and on a sphere, we cannot really outrun ourselves anyway. Therefore, I say, the entire devastating and hideous state of the world and its constant wounding and wrecking of the wild, beautiful, natural, viable and small, only to keep alive an untenable cultural proceedance is truly a spiritual sickness, one that will not be cured by the efficient use of the same thinking that maintains the sickness. Nor can this overly expensive, highly funded illness be symptomatically kept at bay any longer by yet more political, environmental, or social programs. We must as individuals and communities take the time necessary to learn how to indigenously remember what a sane, original existence for a viable people might look like. Though there are marvellous things and amazing people doing them, both seen and unseen, these do not resemble in any way the general trend of what is going on now. To begin remembering our Indigenous belonging on the Earth back to life we must metabolize as individuals the grief of recognition of our lost directions, digest it into a valuable spiritual compost that allows us to learn to stay put without outrunning our strange past, and get small, unarmed, brave, and beautiful. By trying to feed the Holy in Nature the fruit of beauty from the tree of memory of our Indigenous Souls, grown in the composted failures of our past need to conquer, watered by the tears of cultural grief, we might become ancestors worth descending from and possibly grow a place of hope for a time beyond our own.

You see actually, now it occurs to me, my writing, my writing is also a guard against suicide, as if I run from myself in my writing, but at the same time I ask, what's to become of me? The person I was before and who I am right now, the writing helps cure, the way confession cures Catholics, the way the Wailing Wall cures Jews, the way confessing doubts and secrets and worries to a mute old willow would cure our forbears, and when all's said and done, the way relaxing and talking about whatever's on their mind cures Freud's patients . . Actually that writing of mine is like I run line to line, all so clearly beautiful on the typewriter, I never know what I've written, I'm always chasing some thought, there beyond my reach, I want to catch up to it, but it's always one step ahead of me, just as when I raced to catch the train to Grandma's as a child, as I raced home from school, as I raced out of the house at home, out of myself, along the river, and for that matter as I always did run wherever I happened to be, out and away, ran from girlfriends to buddies to play cards, only to run from the buddies after a while, into the darkness, and when I stopped, I saw I needed to keep running, always from myself, because neither as a child nor as a young man did I ever, ever find any aims, and all my jobs, always jobs that kept me on the run...

Those of us who hope to be their allies should not be surprised, if and when this day comes, that when those who have been locked up and locked out finally have the chance to speak and truly be heard, what we hear is rage. The rage may frighten us; it may remind us of riots, uprisings, and buildings aflame. We may be tempted to control it, or douse it with buckets of doubt, dismay, and disbelief. But we should do no such thing. Instead, when a young man who was born in the ghetto and who knows little of life beyond the walls of his prison cell and the invisible cage that has become his life, turns to us in bewilderment and rage, we should do nothing more than look him in the eye and tell him the truth. We should tell him the same truth the great African American writer James Baldwin told his nephew in a letter published in 1962, in one of the most extraordinary books ever written, The Fire Next Time. With great passion and searing conviction, Baldwin had this to say to his young nephew: This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it …. It is their innocence which constitutes the crime …. This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity …. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp on reality. But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what it must become. It will be hard, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off …. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, and Godspeed.67

A MAP IN THE hands of a pilot is a testimony of a man’s faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader — even whose author, perhaps — must allow in his mind a recess for doubt. A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.’ And indeed you are. Were all the maps in this world destroyed and vanished under the direction of some malevolent hand, each man would be blind again, each city be made a stranger to the next, each landmark become a meaningless signpost pointing to nothing. Yet, looking at it, feeling it, running a finger along its lines, it is a cold thing, a map, humourless and dull, born of calipers and a draughtsman’s board. That coastline there, that ragged scrawl of scarlet ink, shows neither sand nor sea nor rock; it speaks of no mariner, blundering full sail in wakeless seas, to bequeath, on sheepskin or a slab of wood, a priceless scribble to posterity. This brown blot that marks a mountain has, for the casual eye, no other significance, though twenty men, or ten, or only one, may have squandered life to climb it. Here is a valley, there a swamp, and there a desert; and here is a river that some curious and courageous soul, like a pencil in the hand of God, first traced with bleeding feet. Here is your map. Unfold it, follow it, then throw it away, if you will. It is only paper. It is only paper and ink, but if you think a little, if you pause a moment, you will see that these two things have seldom joined to make a document so modest and yet so full with histories of hope or sagas of conquest.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined. On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the ideal friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past? In Zürich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Banks and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zürich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be searched for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zürich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Münsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction? A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic? In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective. Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. . . . It is their innocence which constitutes the crime. . . . This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. . . . You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp on reality. But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what it must become. It will be hard, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off. . . . We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, and Godspeed.

But rather than deal with labels, I want to deal with substance. There are two prerequisites for peace. First, the Palestinians must recognize the Jewish state. They have to stop calling and educating their people for Israel’s destruction. Second, in any peace agreement Israel must retain the overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River. If we don’t we’ll get another radical Islamic terrorist state in the Palestinian areas which will explode the peace and explode the Middle East. Unfortunately, the Palestinians vehemently reject both prerequisites for peace. They even deny, Mr. President, our historical connection to our homeland. Why are Jews called Jews? The Chinese are called Chinese because they come from China. The Japanese are called Japanese because they come from Japan. Well, Jews are called Jews because they come from Judea. This is our ancestral homeland. Jews are not foreign colonialists in Judea. LEAVING WASHINGTON, I realized I had a problem. The president of the United States opposed the Iran nuclear deal, as I did, but he had also become convinced that I was the obstacle to a Palestinian-Israeli peace that Mahmoud Abbas was ready for. I had to hand it to the Palestinians. They outflanked me by embracing a friend from whom I had grown apart, promising him that he would be the great peacemaker. Trump had known this person for many years and considered him a reliable source on the Middle East. How could I not see that coming? Admittedly, I wasn’t so much worried that Trump would cozy up to the Palestinians with the same vindictive zeal as Obama. Most of the senior officials in his administration did not buy the Palestinian line. Besides, I knew that Trump would come to appreciate the great support Israel and I had in the evangelical community, the most important element of his political base.

If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again, he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of his Firelily, the black corpse impaled on a thorn tree in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design for a world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate parables for, but a design whose first fumbling sketches he thought must have been done the year after Jacob Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach between Luderitzbucht and the cemetery was actually littered each morning with a score of identical female corpses, an agglomeration no more substantial-looking than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where the soul's passage was more a mass migration across that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone, from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple integration with the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single line of track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally, humanity was reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments he could almost believe was only Deutsch-Sudwestafrika's (actually he knew better), out of a confrontation the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make, humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor enemies, enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of rock, the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns; the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog.

Watching the defendants shuffle to the front of the room to stand before the bench, I realized that I had never before seen so many men and women in shackles, that I had never laid eyes on a group of people so diminished. I had apprehended and processed countless men and women for deportation, many of whom I sent without thinking to pass through this very room—but there was something dreadfully altered in their presence here between towering and cavernous walls, lorded over by foreign men in colored suits and black robes, men with little notion of the dark desert nights or the hard glare of the sun, with little sense for the sweeping expanses of stone and shale, the foot-packed earthen trails, the bodies laid bare before the elements, the bones trembling from heat, from cold, from want of water. It dawned on me that in my countless encounters with migrants at the hard end of their road through the desert, there was always the closeness of the failed journey, the fading but still-hot spark from the last flame of the crossing. But here, in the stale and swirling air of the courthouse, it was clear that something vital had gone missing in the days since apprehension, some final essence of the spirit had been stamped out or lost in the slow crush of confinement.

understand, he assured me, I just want to know if there is something I can do while I wait, something to help. I can take out the trash or clean out the cells. I want to show you that I’m here to work, that I’m not a bad person. I’m not here to bring in drugs, I’m not here to do anything illegal. I want to work. I looked at him. I know that, I said.

His dreams were getting more frightful—rising black swirls of water, cars floating by like river bugs—but he didn’t know much about how to build a boat. The steam box was a start, even if he couldn’t tell Annie, even though the line between faith and becoming unhinged seemed perilously narrow.

You choose this moment to act like the Abnegation?” His voice fills the room and makes fear prickle in my chest. His anger seems too sudden. Too strange. “All that time you spent insisting that you were too selfish for them, and now, when your life is on the line, you’ve got to be a hero? What’s wrong with you?” “What’s wrong with you? People died. They walked right off the edge of a building! And I can stop it from happening again!” “You’re too important to just…die.” He shakes his head. He won’t even look at me--his eyes keep shifting across my face, to the wall behind me or the ceiling above me, to everything but me. I am too stunned to be angry. “I’m not important. Everyone will do just fine without me,” I say. “Who cares about everyone? What about me?” He lowers his head into his hand, covering his eyes. His fingers are trembling. Then he crosses the room in two long strides and touches his lips to mine. Their gentle pressure erases the past few months, and I am the girl who sat on the rocks next to the chasm, with river spray on her ankles, and kissed him for the first time. I am the girl who grabbed his hand in the hallway just because I wanted to. I pull back, my hand on his chest to keep him away. The problem is, I am also the girl who shot Will and lied about it, and chose between Hector and Marlene, and now a thousand other things besides. And I can’t erase those things. “You would be fine.” I don’t look at him. I stare at his T-shirt between my fingers and the black ink curling around his neck, but I don’t look at his face. “Not at first. But you would move on, and do what you have to.” He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me against him. “That’s a lie,” he says, before he kisses me again. This is wrong. It’s wrong to forget who I have become, and to let him kiss me when I know what I’m about to do. But I want to. Oh, I want to. I stand on my tiptoes and wrap my arms around him. I press one hand between his shoulder blades and curl the other one around the back of his neck. I can feel his breaths against my palm, his body expanding and contracting, and I know he’s strong, steady, unstoppable. All things I need to be, but I am not, I am not. He walks backward, pulling me with him so I stumble. I stumble right out of my shoes. He sits on the edge of the bed and I stand in front of him, and we’re finally eye to eye. He touches my face, covering my cheeks with his hands, sliding his fingertips down my neck, fitting his fingers to the slight curve of my hips. I can’t stop. I fit my mouth to his, and he tastes like water and smells like fresh air. I drag my hand from his neck to the small of his back, and put it under his shirt. He kisses me harder. I knew he was strong; I didn’t know how strong until I felt it myself, the muscles in his back tightening beneath my fingers. Stop, I tell myself. Suddenly it’s as if we’re in a hurry, his fingertips brushing my side under my shirt, my hands clutching at him, struggling closer but there is no closer. I have never longed for someone this way, or this much. He pulls back just enough to look into my eyes, his eyelids lowered. “Promise me,” he whispers, “that you won’t go. For me. Do this one thing for me.” Could I do that? Could I stay here, fix things with him, let someone else die in my place? Looking up at him, I believe for a moment that I could. And then I see Will. The crease between his eyebrows. The empty, simulation-bound eyes. The slumped body. Do this one thing for me. Tobias’s dark eyes plead with me. But if I don’t go to Erudite, who will? Tobias? It’s the kind of thing he would do. I feel a stab of pain in my chest as I lie to him. “Okay.” “Promise,” he says, frowning. The pain becomes an ache, spreads everywhere--all mixed together, guilt and terror and longing. “I promise.

Do/Do Not I sniff the blooming tiger lily, two tongues sprung open from one mouth. I poison the river unintentionally. I walk on the designated paths. I splice the mountain, its body and mouth gaping. I collect rainwater in a wheelbarrow. I line the whale’s belly with gifts until they rupture its stomach. I water the strawberries. Again I fill my gas tank with dead things, generations spun together until shiny. I feed the ducks fresh lettuce. I maneuver the dead squirrel on the road, mark the moment when creature becomes meat. I accept that my love is a poisonous flower, routinely fatal. I calculate the force of loving in each glittering death. All day on this land, in the deep forest, the electric greens and still-wet mud writhe with life. The pond gurgles and whispers. Everyone here knows to shudder when they see me coming. The mangos arrive unbruised at the grocery store. The wolves should start running.

Life every now and then becomes literature [...] long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.

theory of the wétiko psychosis, writes that “the responsibility for holding destructive institutions—more broadly systems, and more broadly yet cultures—accountable falls on each of us . . . This means that all of us who care about life need to force accountability onto those who do not; we must learn to be accountable to ourselves, our consciences, our neighbors, and the nonhuman members of our community . . . rather than be loyal to political, economic, religious, penal, educational, and other institutions that do not serve us well.” With regard to our borders and the crises of migrant death and disappearance across the globe, we must thus declare loyalty to human life over shifting and mutable laws and policies, and we must remain attuned to these loyalties so as not to return to indifference.

For the gaming fishermen there was the Whatoosie River and its native cocka-snoek, the main game fish of the resident Skegg’s Valley Dynamite Fishing Club. Cocka-snoek were wily and tough and rather too bright for mere fish. You wouldn’t catch much with a rod around here. Many inexperienced visitors would find the bait stolen from their hooks, which punctuated the discovery that their lines had somehow got snagged and tangled irretrievably around some underwater obstruction – sometimes tied together with neat little bows. Often, several direct hits with hand grenades were needed to stun the creatures long enough just to catch them, gut them and fry them, but these former military types had become experts at it. For a modest fee, tours could be arranged via the booking office, which included an overnight stay on the banks of the river where one could drop off to a great night’s sleep after a satisfying meal of cocka-snoek done on an open fire, and the sound the bits of shrapnel made rattling in your stomach.

Thing is, I’ve decided what I’m going to do next. I have to go back to the university, of course. Next semester, I’m cutting back my schedule. I need more freedom. I’m going to transition out, sneak up on retirement. I’m going to get myself one of these!” he exclaimed, smacking the steering wheel. “Mary’s sons are married and have children—they’re great kids, superior stepsons. One lives in Texas, one in Florida. I’m going to put my house on the market and retire by the end of school, just in time to begin traveling. I’m going to see this country one state at a time, and I’m going to drop in on those boys. They both have amazing wives. One has three children, one has two—and even though I’m a stepfather, they call me Papa instead of Grandpa. I’m going to visit them occasionally while I’m traveling, then move on to other sights, then check back in. What do you think of that idea?” Her smile was alive. “It sounds wonderful. You’ll enjoy that. Maybe I’ll even see you now and then in Virgin River.” “Or, you could come along,” he said. “You have all those military boys all over the place. We could check on them, as well. And believe me, once a couple of them get married and have children, the others fall in line. I’ve seen it a million times. As soon as I get an offer on the house—which is a good house and should bring a nice price even in a depressed economy—I’m going to start shopping for a quality RV. I’ve been looking at pictures online. Maureen, you have no idea how high tech these things have become! They now come with expandable sides, two people showers, freezers, big screens in the living room and bedroom, Whirlpool tubs—you name it! How’d you like to have a hot tub on wheels, Maureen?” She looked over at him. He was so excited by his idea, he was actually a little flushed, and she found herself hoping it wasn’t high blood pressure. If the moment ever presented itself, she’d ask about that. But after all his rambling about his future RV, all she could say was, “Come along?” “A perfect solution for both of us,” he said. “We’d have time together, we’d have fun together. We’d see the families, travel…” “George, that’s outrageous. We’ve had a few lunches—” “And we’ll have a few more! We’ll also e-mail, talk on the phone, get together occasionally—in Virgin River, but also in Phoenix and Seattle. We’ll spend the next six months figuring out if we fit as well as it seems we do.” “Long distance? Occasional visits?” she asked doubtfully. “It’ll give you time to look over my accounts to be sure you’re not getting conned out of your retirement.” He laughed at his own joke, slapping his knee. “Of course, with five brawny, overprotective sons you’re relatively safe from a dangerous guy like me.” He glanced at her and his expression was playful. “We’re not young, Maureen. We should be sure we’re attracted to each other and that we get along, but we shouldn’t waste a lot of time. Every day is precious.

I know that many people including our President insist that it be called the Christmas Season. I’ll be the first in line to say that it works for me however that’s not what it is. We hint at its coming on Halloween when the little tykes take over wandering the neighborhood begging for candy and coins. In this day and age the idea of children wandering the streets threatening people with “Trick or Treat!” just isn’t a good idea. In most cases parents go with them encouraging their offspring’s to politely ask “Anything for Halloween.” An added layer of security occurs when the children are herded into one room to party with friends. It’s all good, safe fun and usually there is enough candy for all of their teeth to rot before they have a chance to grow new ones. Forgotten is the concept that it is a three day observance of those that have passed before us and are considered saints or martyrs. Next we celebrate Thanksgiving, a national holiday (holly day) formally observed in Canada, Liberia, Germany Japan, some countries in the Caribbean and the United States. Most of these countries observe days other than the fourth Thursday of November and think of it as a secular way of celebrating the harvest and abundance of food. Without a hiccup we slide into Black Friday raiding stores for the loot being sold at discounted prices. The same holds true for Cyber Monday when we burn up the internet looking for bargains that will arrive at our doorsteps, brought by the jolly delivery men and women, of FedEx, UPS and USPS. Of course the big days are Chanukah when the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, regained control of Jerusalem. It is a time to gather the family and talk of history and tell stories. Christmas Eve is a time when my family goes to church, mostly to sing carols and distribute gifts, although this usually continued on Christmas day. This is when the term “Merry Christmas” is justified and correct although it is thought that the actual birthday of Christ is in October. The English squeezed another day out of the season, called Boxing Day, which is when the servants got some scraps from the dinner the day before and received a small gift or a dash of money. I do agree that “Xmas” is inappropriate but that’s just me and I don’t go crazy over it. After all, Christmas is for everyone. On the evening of the last day of the year we celebrate New Year’s Evening followed by New Year’s Day which many people sleep through after New Year’s Eve. The last and final day of the Holiday Season is January 6th which Is Epiphany or Three Kings Day. In Tarpon Springs, the Greek Orthodox Priest starts the celebration with the sanctification of the waters followed by the immersion of the cross. It becomes a scramble when local teenage boys dive for the cross thrown into the Spring Bayou as a remembrance of the baptism of Jesus Christ in the Jordan River. This tradition is now over a century old and was first celebrated by the Episcopal Church by early settlers in 1903.

**Verse 1:** There's a whisper in the willow, a sigh in the pine, A story of healing, line by line. The wounds we carry, hidden from sight, Begin to mend in the morning light. **Chorus:** Healing's a road, long and winding, Through the hills, a silver lining. With every step, the pain decreases, In the heart's quiet, we find our pieces. **Verse 2:** The river flows, it knows no end, Like the spirit's break, it starts to mend. The scars we wear, badges of the past, Become the strength that will forever last. **Chorus:** Healing's a journey, not a race, A gentle touch, a warm embrace. With time's soft hand, we start to see, In the mirror, who we're meant to be. **Bridge:** In the darkest night, there's a flame that glows, A seed of hope, that steadily grows. The pain we knew, starts to fade, In the tapestry of life, newly made. **Chorus:** Healing's a gift, it's ours to take, A new dawn's promise, as we awake. With each breath in, let go of grief, In healing's grace, we find relief. **Outro:** So here's to the broken, now on the mend, To the journey of healing, that never ends. May we all find peace, in the love we keep, In the quiet of healing, where the soul runs deep. May this song bring comfort and hope to anyone on the path to recovery and renewal.

There's a whisper in the willow, a sigh in the pine, A story of healing, line by line. The wounds we carry, hidden from sight, Begin to mend in the morning light. Healing's a road, long and winding, Through the hills, a silver lining. With every step, the pain decreases, In the heart's quiet, we find our pieces. The river flows, it knows no end, Like the spirit's break, it starts to mend. The scars we wear, badges of the past, Become the strength that will forever last. Healing's a journey, not a race, A gentle touch, a warm embrace. With time's soft hand, we start to see, In the mirror, who we're meant to be. In the darkest night, there's a flame that glows, A seed of hope, that steadily grows. The pain we knew, starts to fade, In the tapestry of life, newly made. Healing's a gift, it's ours to take, A new dawn's promise, as we awake. With each breath in, let go of grief, In healing's grace, we find relief. So here's to the broken, now on the mend, To the journey of healing, that never ends. May we all find peace, in the love we keep, In the quiet of healing, where the soul runs deep.

There’s a fine line between support and need, and it becomes blurred all the time.

Now I look at artificial boundaries—lines that can stop no current of air or drought or polluted river—and mourn the violence lavished on defending them. Long ago, in times suspiciously set aside as “prehistory,” we were mostly nomadic peoples who claimed nothing but crisscrossing migratory paths. Cultures were the richest where different peoples and paths were most intermingled. We’re still a nomadic species; indeed, we move and travel on this earth more than ever before. Yet we insist on the destructive fiction of nationalism, one that becomes even more dangerous when it joins with religions that try to create nationalistic gods.

Listening to Fournier’s flowing, dignified cello, Hoshino was drawn back to his childhood. He used to go to the river every day to catch fish. Nothing to worry about back then, he reminisced. Just live each day as it came. As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the line it all changed. Living turned me into nothing. Weird . . . People are born in order to live, right? But the longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve lost what’s inside me—and ended up empty. And I bet the longer I live, the emptier, the more worthless, I’ll become. Something’s wrong with this picture. Life isn’t supposed to turn out like this! Isn’t it possible to shift direction, to change where I’m headed?

Not a single nation,” he went on, as though reading it line by line, still gazing menacingly at Stavrogin, “not a single nation has ever been founded on principles of science or reason. There has never been an example of it, except for a brief moment, through folly. Socialism is from its very nature bound to be atheism, seeing that it has from the very first proclaimed that it is an atheistic organisation of society, and that it intends to establish itself exclusively on the elements of science and reason. Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be till the end of time. Nations are built up and moved by another force which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and inexplicable: that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one’s own existence, and a denial of death. It’s the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it, ‘the river of living water,’ the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse. It’s the æsthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, the ethical principle with which they identify it, ‘the seeking for God,’ as I call it more simply. The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened that all, or even many, peoples have had one common god, but each has always had its own. It’s a sign of the decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common. When gods begin to be common to several nations the gods are dying and the faith in them, together with the nations themselves. The stronger a people the more individual their God. There never has been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil. When the same conceptions of good and evil become prevalent in several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear. Reason has never had the power to define good and evil, or even to distinguish between good and evil, even approximately; on the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a disgraceful and pitiful way; science has even given the solution by the fist. This is particularly characteristic of the half-truths of science, the most terrible scourge of humanity, unknown till this century, and worse than plague, famine, or war. A half-truth is a despot … such as has never been in the world before. A despot that has its priests and its slaves, a despot to whom all do homage with love and superstition hitherto inconceivable, before which science itself trembles and cringes in a shameful way..." Stavrogin observed cautiously... "The very fact that you reduce God to a simple attribute of nationality …” “I reduce God to the attribute of nationality?” cried Shatov. “On the contrary, I raise the people to God. And has it ever been otherwise? The people is the body of God. Every people is only a people so long as it has its own god and excludes all other gods on earth irreconcilably; so long as it believes that by its god it will conquer and drive out of the world all other gods. Such, from the beginning of time, has been the belief of all great nations, all, anyway, who have been specially remarkable, all who have been leaders of humanity. There is no going against facts. The Jews lived only to await the coming of the true God and left the world the true God. The Greeks deified nature and bequeathed the world their religion, that is, philosophy and art. Rome deified the people in the State, and bequeathed the idea of the State to the nations.

Massive round-ups of strays have been replaced by daily intake and elimination, the large crate full of dead dogs replaced by a steady trickle of bodies. Euthanasia has become assembly-line work, performed by an army of euthanasia technicians and animal control officers. The mass killing of animals is no longer a public spectacle as it was that day in 1877 along the banks of the East River. It is all but invisible to pet owners, who therefore don’t have to feel discomfort or moral outrage. The slow bleed of our shelter system is one of the saddest aspects of our pet obsession.

And yet the line was there, drawn on all the maps. Or rather, it was the upper edge of all the maps, with nothing shown beyond it. Since people—at least, before Google Earth came along—could not actually hover miles above the ground and see the world as birds and gods did, they had to make do with maps, which substituted for actually seeing things; and, in that way, the imaginary figments of surveyors and the conventions of cartographers could become every bit as real as rocks and rivers. Perhaps even more so, since you could look at the map any time you wanted, whereas going to look at the physical border involved a lot of effort. So perhaps it might as well be the end of the world, as far as some of the locals were concerned, and might affect the way they thought accordingly. But now that they were actually riding up into those hills she found that human beings, and what they thought and did and built, were the least part of the place. It didn’t matter how odd the locals were when there were so few of them, scattered over so much space that was so difficult to move around in.

become right now. I will find work and there will be money to send home and there will be food for them.” His name was David Garcia and he was thin with a slight curve to his back and a bush of black hair that needed to be cut. He had the high, strong cheekbones and straight lines of his dead father, killed in a fight of honor, and his eyes were a quiet, serious gray. His arms were corded and tough, as were his legs, and he wore a tired-looking cap with CAT across the front and he carried a worn old army knapsack as old as the Second World War. In the knapsack were a pair of socks, two oranges he had taken from a stand in Juárez when the wind was right for taking them, and nothing else. Nothing. He had come up from Chihuahua by stealing a ride on the train, had crossed the boundary river at night without the aid of coyotes—those who helped people cross for money and sometimes stole from them or, worse, killed them—and he felt pride that he had done it alone. He was making his way north, far north, because it was early summer and all the work was in the north now. Men who came back told of the work in the northern states in the early summer. There were sugar beets to thin with the hoe, and the farmers paid much money for the work and would hire anybody who was willing to do it. “For every hour you are paid three dollars,” the men said in the cantina when they drank the warm beer and talked. “That is how it works out. For every hour you are paid three dollars American and there is food, frijoles with some meat for one meal a day, and a place to sleep. A dry place to sleep. And you don’t have to be too careful about the authorities in those northern states.

Long confused with PTSD, moral injury is a more subtle wound, characterized not by flashbacks or a startle complex but by “sorrow, remorse, grief, shame, bitterness, and moral confusion” that manifest not in physical reactions but in emotional responses as subtle as dreams and doubts.

Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong.

Likewise, moral injury is a wound that sets in slowly, something that occurs, as one Iraq veteran wrote, “when a person has time to reflect on a traumatic experience.

Jung urges us, instead, to recognize the selfsame nature of the other, to declare, “I am guilty with the rest,” to understand that “none of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow,” and ultimately to accept evil as something “lodged in human nature itself . . . as the equal and opposite partner of good.

For Jung, understanding dreams was an essential part of this process. “Dreams are the guiding words of the soul,” he wrote. “Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language.

In order to begin a true reckoning with our inner situation, “we have to expose ourselves to the animal impulses of the unconscious without identifying with them and without ‘running away.

When grappling with a loss that is incomplete and unending, “there are some who search as a way to refuse to remain in the silence to which they’ve been relegated. There are some who inquire time and time again as a means to confront their misfortune.

Snyder implores his readers to view the staggering number of deaths—fourteen million—as fourteen million times one. “Each record of death,” he writes, “suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life. We must be able not only to reckon the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual.” Snyder explains that “to join in a large number after death is to be dissolved into a stream of anonymity. To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history.

In Antígona González, Sara Uribe writes: Count them all. Name them so as to say: this body could be mine. The body of one of my own. So as not to forget that all the bodies without names are our lost bodies.

What I’m saying is that we learn violence by watching others, by seeing it enshrined in institutions. Then, even without choosing it, it becomes normal to us, it even becomes part of who we are.

You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison. And let me tell you, it isn’t something that’s just going to slowly go away. It’s part of who you’ve become. So what will you do? All you can do is try to find a place to hold it, a way to not lose some purpose for it all.

You know, my mother said, it’s not just your safety I worry about. I know how a person can become lost in a job, how the soul can buckle when placed within a structure. You asked me once how it felt looking back on my career. Well, the Park Service is an institution, an admirable one, but an institution nonetheless. If I’m honest, I can see now that I spent my career slowly losing a sense of purpose even though I was close to the outdoors, close to places I loved. You see, the government took my passion and bent it to its own purpose. I don’t want that for you.

A lot of people in the immigration system lose sight of people’s humanity

I tell you, Walter said, the Border Patrol, the marshals, it’s like they forget about kindness. I’ve almost never seen these guys express any humanity, any emotion. I don’t know how they do it. How do you come home to your kids at night when you spend your day treating other humans like dogs?

From Alan Thein Duening: Picture North America from space. Look at the upper left and start an imaginary line on the rugged coast of southern Alaska. Climb the ridges that encircle Prince William Sound. Cross the snowy teeth of the Chugach Mountains and descend through kettle-pond country to the feet of the towering Alaska Range. Rise again to the bitter heights and turning southeast along the crest, clip the corner of the Yukon Territory. Enter British Columbia and veer east through its folding north. Turn your line south when you reach the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains. Follow the divide down the thousand-mile spine of British Columbia, across Montana, along the buttressed ridges of the Idaho border and into Wyoming as far as Jackson Hole. There, leave the divide and turn westward toward the coast. Following the swells and benches that limit the Columbia Basin, dip southward into Utah and Nevada, then northward again around the high desert of central Oregon. When you approach the Cascade Mountains, veer southwest through the tangled topography of northern California to the crest of the Coast Range. Just north of San Francisco Bay, descend to the shores of the Pacific. The line you have drawn is an unfamiliar one. You won’t find it on maps. But it shows a geographical unit more real, in ecological sense, than any of the lines governments draw. You have drawn a biological region, a bioregion. Specifically, you have outlines the watersheds of rivers flowing into the Pacific Ocean through North America’s temperate rain forest zone with a fifteen-hundred-mile belt of rain forests along the coast. The unity of this diverse bioregion is the movement of its water; every ounce of moisture that the ocean throws into the sky and the sky hurls down on the land inside this region’s borders tumbles toward the rain forest coast. If it does not evaporate or get trapped in underground aquifers along the way, water will reach that dripping shoreline through one of several hundred swift, cold rivers. Most likely, it will travel through the Columbia or the Fraser rivers, home to the Earth’s greatest population of migrating salmon. This place, defined by water running to woodlands, has no perfect name. You can call it Rain Forest Province, the North Pacific Slope, or Cascadia… Natural units of place such as this have always mattered more to people than has humanity in general or the planet in its entirety. Indeed, history is unequivocal; people will sacrifice for villages, homelands, or nations, even giving their lives. But humans seem unwilling to sacrifice for their planet, despite the fact that it is now suffering proportionately greater losses from social decay and environmental destruction than most countries at war.

You cannot give up just because you think someone is against you, because it is difficult to face them.

These contingents often worked out of new settlements along the border, and the commission’s report noted “the grasping and overreaching action of the United States settlers” and “the kindness and courtesy of the Mexican officials.

Dr. Fallon does not specify the environmental conditions that might lead to the activation of the warrior gene, nor does he suggest whether large-scale trauma, enacted over decades across an entire society, might trigger the ceaseless perpetuation of violence. He does not indicate how long our subconscious can absorb terror and fear—how long we can live in proximity to aggression and cruelty—before slipping into madness.

better? But what would become of me if I didn’t write what I can, however inferior it may be to what I am? In my ambitions I’m a plebeian, because I try to achieve; like someone afraid of a dark room, I’m afraid to be silent. I’m like those who prize the medal more than the struggle to get it, and savour glory in a fur-lined cape. For me, to write is self-deprecating, and yet I can’t quit doing it. Writing is like the drug I abhor and keep taking, the addiction I despise and depend on. There are necessary poisons, and some are extremely subtle, composed of ingredients from the soul, herbs collected from among the ruins of dreams, black poppies found next to the graves of our intentions, the long leaves of obscene trees whose branches sway on the echoing banks of the soul’s infernal rivers. To write is to lose myself, yes, but everyone loses himself, because everything gets lost. I, however, lose myself without any joy – not like the river flowing into the sea for which it was secretly born, but like the puddle left on the beach by the high tide, and its water sinks into the sand, never returning to the sea.

A lot of people in the immigration system lose sight of people’s humanity. I see it every day here. He gestured at the air all around him. The Border Patrol agents, the marshals I see here day in and day out, they objectify these people all the time.

The surveyors described the landscape as bare and ragged, desolate and rough, punctuated by rocky hills and steep, narrow-ridged mountains of stratified limestone and porphyry, red basalt and igneous rock thrust upward alongside empty craters and extinct volcanos surrounded by broken lava.

was released. There were no rises to be seen any longer, though fish rose fairly well to our own flies, until we had six. Then the whole factory shut down and nothing would persuade a trout to rise again. While it had lasted, all of British Columbia that existed had been the few square inches around my dry-fly. With the rise over, the world began to reappear: trees, lake, river, village, wet clothes. It is this sort of possession you look for when angling. To watch the river flowing, the insects landing and hatching, the places where trout hold, and to insinuate the supple, binding movement of tapered line until, when the combination is right, the line becomes rigid and many of its motions are conceived at the other end.

In 1993, after fifteen years of investigation, researchers identified a deficiency in a gene that encodes an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A, or MAOA, a key regulator of impulse control. Individuals with low levels of MAOA, it seemed, were predisposed to violence, and researchers came to refer to them as carriers of a “warrior gene.

The same people who control the drug smuggling control the human trafficking, so in some places if you want to get across, you have to carry a load. I’ve even heard that sometimes they will kill you if you refuse.