Truth Always Surfaces Quotes

The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.

The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

One cannot seperate truth from actions...Physically inevitable or not, truth stands above all things. It is independant of who has the best army, who can deliver the longest sermons, or even who has the most priests. It can be pushed down, but it will always surface. Truth is the one thing you can never intimidate.

He said the truth is like that water: it doesn't matter how hard you try to bury it; it'll always find some way back to the surface. It's resilient.

Captivity is always captivity, no matter how gentle the jailer.

The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channeled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.

During the Age of Glass, everyone believed some part of him or her to be extremely fragile. For some it was a hand, for others a femur, yet others believed it was their noses that were made of glass. The Age of Glass followed the Stone Age as an evolutionary corrective, introducing into human relations a new sense of fragility that fostered compassion. This period lasted a relatively short time in the history of love-about a century-until a doctor named Ignacio da Silva hit on the treatment of inviting people to recline on a couch and giving them a bracing smack on the body part in question, proving to them the truth. The anatomical illusion that had seemed so real slowly disappeared and-like so much we no longer need but can't give up-became vestigial. But from time to time, for reasons that can't always be understood, it surfaces again, suggesting that the Age of Glass, like the Age of Silence, never entirely ended.

The past lies beneath the surface, intransigent truth. Remembered or not, what we say and do remains, always.

He said the truth is like that of water: it doesn't matter how hard you try to bury it; it'll always find it's way to the surface. It's resilient.

As a lie can be buried, the truth will always bloom.

Like a lotus plunging to the surface of a pond to embrace the light from its muddy darkness, truth always rises with time.

He was the same as everyone else: he carried his past inside him. There was no escape from it. No matter how hard you push it down, the truth always comes to the surface.

Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Royce took out his dagger and drove it into the table, where it stood upright. “Look at the blade. Is it bright or dark?” Hadrian narrowed his eyes suspiciously. The brilliant surface of Alverstone was dazzling as it reflected the candlelight. “Bright.” Royce nodded. “Now move your head over here and look from my perspective.” Hadrian leaned over, putting his head on the opposite side of the blade, where the shadow made it black as chimney soot. “It’s the same dagger,” Royce explained, “but from where you sat it was light while I saw it as dark. So who is right?” “Neither of us,” Hadrian said. “No,” Royce said. “That’s the mistake people always make, and they make it because they can’t grasp the truth.” “Which is?” “That we’re both right. One truth doesn’t refute another. Truth doesn’t lie in the object, but in how we see it.

He said the truth is like that water: it doesn’t matter how hard you try to bury it; it’ll always find some way back to the surface. It’s resilient.

Secrets are a sneaky little seed. You can hide them, you can bury them, you can disguise them, and cover them up. But then just when you think your secret has rotted away and decayed into nothing, it stirs back to life. It sprouts roots and stems, crawls its way through the mud and muck, growing and climbing, and bursting through the surface, blooming for everyone to see. That's the lesson here. The truth always comes out eventually.

A lifetime of quiet watchfulness had convinced her that the truth about people was seldom to be found in the things they freely admitted. There was always more below the surface than above.

Sand as far as the eye can see, between the last hills and the sea -- the sea -- in the cold air of an afternoon almost past, and blessed by the wind that always blows from the north. The beach. And the sea. It could be perfection -- an image for divine eyes -- a world that happens, that's all, the mute existence of land and water, a work perfectly accomplished, truth --truth -- but once again it is the redeeming grain of a man that jams the mechanism of that paradise, a bagatelle capable on its own of suspending all that great apparatus of inexorable truth, a mere nothing, but one planted in the sand, an imperceptible tear in the surface of that sacred icon, a minuscule exception come to rest on the perfection of that boundless beach. To see him from afar he would be no more than a black dot: amid nothingness, the nothing of a man and a painter's easel. The easel is anchored by slender cords to four stones placed on the sand. It sways imperceptibly in the wind that always blows from the north. The man is wearing waders and a large fisherman's jacket. He is standing, facing the sea, twirling a slim paintbrush between his fingers. On the easel, a canvas.

Physically inevitable or not, truth stands above all things. It is independent of who has the best army, who can deliver the longest sermons, or even who has the most priests. It can be pushed down, but it will always surface. Truth is the one thing you can never intimidate.

I knew how stupid and melodramatic it sounded, but with him, it was always so hard to rein myself in, to say anything but the absolute truth of how I felt. And worst of all, I hadn’t even known that was how I felt until this moment. Alex’s presence had a way of drawing the truth right to my surface

Reality is what we notice on the surface – what we feel or see, what superficial perspectives we might gain, for example, from television's evening news. Truth is much larger. It encompasses everything that genuinely is going on. The reality might be that our world looks totally messed up, that war and economic chaos seem to control the globe. But the truth is much deeper – that Jesus Christ is still (since His ascension) Lord of the cosmos, and the Holy Spirit is empowering many people to work for peacemaking and justice building as part of the Trinity's purpose to bring the universe to its ultimate wholeness. The reality might be that you do not feel God, but the truth is that God is always present with you, perpetually forgiving you, and unceasingly caring for you with extravagant grace and abundant mercy. Not only that, but the very process of dealing with our lack of feelings and our resultant doubts about God is one of the ways by which our trust in the Trinity is deepened.

Strong is beautiful, beautiful is not always strong

There are many different stories to tell. It's never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is always believed, no matter what. The seeds from which the garden has grown.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that, I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been.

She wanted to think she had become another person altogether that night before, but she knew the horrible truth, that Nightbitch had always been there, not even that far below the surface.

They say that wisdom is a dying flower, and I disagree. In a world covered in mud, the lotus still continues to grow. Even after mankind washes itself away from the surface of the earth, knowledge will still remain. Look no further than the bosom of Nature. It offers all the solutions needed to cure and unite humanity. Wise men only exist as interpreters and transmitters of Truth. Their time on earth is limited, but Nature's existence is eternal. Open books shall always exist for those with an opened eye and pure heart; for Truth can only be seen by those with truth in them.

As he was speaking, he kept reminding himself that he was going to a rendezvous and that not a living soul knew about it, or, probably, ever would. He led a double life--one in public, in the sight of all whom it concerned, full of conventional truth and conventional deception, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances, and another which flowed in secret. And, owing to some strange, possibly quite accidental chain of circumstances, everything that was important, interesting, essential, everything about which he was sincere and never deceived himself, everything that composed the kernel of his life, went on in secret, while everything that was false in him, everything that composed the husk in which he hid himself and the truth which was in him--his work at the bank, discussions at the club, his 'lower race,' his attendance at anniversary celebrations with his wife--was on the surface. He began to judge others by himself, no longer believing what he saw, and always assuming that the real, the only interesting life of every individual goes on as under cover of night, secretly. Every individual existence revolves around mystery, and perhaps that is the chief reason that all cultivated individuals insisted so strongly on the respect due to personal secrets.

Franz Kafka observed that “the truth is always an abyss. One must—as in a swimming pool—dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order later to rise again—laughing and fighting for breath—to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

Look beneath the surface. Things are usually very different from how they initially appeared, and ignorance, which didn't look beneath the surface, turns to disillusion when it penetrates to the interior. Falsehood always arrives first; it drags along fools with their endless vulgarity. Truth always arrives last, and late, limping along with Time.

When it happens and it hits hard, we decide certain things, and realize there's truth in all those dark, lonely days" He had an instantaneous look about him, a glimmer and a glint over those eyes, he knew how the world worked, and took pleasure in its wickedness. He would give a dime or two to those sitting on the street, he would tell them things like: "It won't get any better," and "Might as well use this to buy your next fix," and finally "It's better to die high than to live sober," His suit was pressed nicely, with care and respect, like the kind a corpse wears, he'd say that was his way of honoring the dead, of always being ready for the oncoming train, I liked him, he never wore a fake smile and he was always ready to tell a story about how and when "We all wake up alone," he said once, "Oftentimes even when sleeping next to someone, we wake up before them and they are still asleep and suddenly we are awake, and alone." I didn't see him for a few days, a few days later it felt like it'd been weeks, those weeks drifted apart from one another, like leaves on a pond's surface, and became like months. And then I saw him and I asked him where he'd been, he said, "I woke up alone one day, just like any other, and I decided I didn't like it anymore.

To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect. There is never any awareness -- of himself, of his condition, of his society -- for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events. We already have mentioned man's inability to consider several facts or events simultaneously and to make a synthesis of them in order to face or to oppose them. One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but be does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man's capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandist, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks. Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and -- to the extent that he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person -- against inconsistencies. The best defense here is to forget the preceding event. In so doing, man denies his own continuity; to the same extent that he lives on the surface of events and makes today's events his life by obliterating yesterday's news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented. This situation makes the "current-events man" a ready target for propaganda. Indeed, such a man is highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents; lacking landmarks, he follows all currents. He is unstable because he runs after what happened today; he relates to the event, and therefore cannot resist any impulse coming from that event. Because he is immersed in current affairs, this man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist. No confrontation ever occurs between the event and the truth; no relationship ever exists between the event and the person. Real information never concerns such a person. What could be more striking, more distressing, more decisive than the splitting of the atom, apart from the bomb itself? And yet this great development is kept in the background, behind the fleeting and spectacular result of some catastrophe or sports event because that is the superficial news the average man wants. Propaganda addresses itself to that man; like him, it can relate only to the most superficial aspect of a spectacular event, which alone can interest man and lead him to make a certain decision or adopt a certain attitude. But here we must make an important qualification. The news event may be a real fact, existing objectively, or it may be only an item of information, the dissemination of a supposed fact. What makes it news is its dissemination, not its objective reality.

He’d set down his drink and leaned in. “Fine. You want me to elaborate, I will. Here’s the deal: I’m a guy. Generally speaking, we’re pretty simple folk. I know women always want to think we have these deep, romantic, and emotionally angsty thoughts going on in our heads, but in reality? Not so much. You women have layers and you’re complicated and mysterious and you say one thing, but you really mean another, and it’s this whole tricky package that intrigues us and scares us and challenges us all at the same time. But men aren’t like that. You talk about me not letting you in, but maybe what you don’t realize is this: there is no in.” He pointed to himself. “It’s all right here on the surface, Jessica. What you see is what you get.

As far as boyfriends were concerned, I dated, had a lot of meaningless relationships and that was pretty much it. It was really hard to find a decent guy. A guy that would be worthwhile. They were all great in the beginning, sweet and caring, sensitive and romantic. But if you scratched deeper, you would find NOTHING. Plenty of nothing. Sometimes one might even be surprised just how much nothing there was, but not me. No. Somehow, I had learned to brace myself for the worst. But, to be honest, it wasn’t always the case. Some of the guys weren’t that empty beneath the surface, some even proved to be quite the opposite. True-Prince-charming kind of guys... And their girlfriends! They were even more charming princesses when they found out. Well, I guess we all have our little flaws... So, after some time, I was finally coming to terms with the genuine truth that there was no such thing as a perfect boyfriend. On the other hand, Melina was waiting for her prince on a white horse, and was honestly expecting him to show up single. No matter how many times I’d tried to convince her that all a girl gets from that prince-on-a-white-horse fairytale is actually and inevitably a horse and no prince, she never believed that.

Our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us, the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.

You say that an emotion is the mind’s reflection in the body. But sometimes there is a conflict between the two: the mind says “no” while the emotion says “yes,” or the other way around. If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time. Conflict between surface thoughts and unconscious mental processes is certainly common. You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can become aware.

People, like houses, hold their secrets. Sometimes the secrets inhabit them, and sometimes people inhabit their secrets. They wrap their arms tight to hug them close, twist their lying tongues around the truth. But, like gravy left overnight, the truth is a thin layer of film that forms and covers the surface. The truth prevails, rises above all else. It squirms and wriggles inside, grows until the swollen tongue can’t wrap itself around the lie any longer, until the time comes when it needs to spit the words out and send truth flying through the air and crashing into the world like…well, like a frozen dead bird through a living room window. Truth and time always work alongside each other.

How can I put it poetically? Time is the life jacket of truth; it always brings it to the surface

truth may be stretched thin and not break, and it always floats on the surface of the lie, like oil on water.

Stories were made up and spun in the evenings in rooms smelling of melting lard and fried onions, village halls, smoky taverns, roadhouses, crofts, tar kilns, forest homesteads and border watchtowers. Tales were spun and told. About war. About heroism and chivalry. About friendship and hatred. About wickedness and betrayal. About faithful and genuine love, about the love that always triumphs. About the crimes and punishments that always befall criminals. About justice that is always just. About truth, which always rises to the surface like oil. Tales were told; people rejoiced in them. Enjoyed the fairy-tale fictions. Because, indeed, all around, in real life, things happened entirely back to front.

See that stream over there?" I stretch an arm to point out the small branch coming off the lake. "It's fed off the mountain thaw. So is this lake. There's kind of a funny story to it. the stream runs all the way down into our neighbors property. Our neighbor, Mr Fitzgerald-he's gone now- didn't like it so close to their barn. For years, he'd try to stop it. My granddad would hep him. they'd dump gravel and dirt. One year, they built a dam. But every single spring, the water would find it's way onto the Fitzgerald property." I chuckle, remembering the two old men standing over the stream, scratching their beards in wonder. "finally they just gave up and let it be. Realized there was no stopping it. The water was going to go where it was meant to go." I feel a smile touch my lips. "My granddad used to tell us that story every spring, when we came out here after the thaw. Of course, it wasn't just a story to him. He turned it into a life lesson about telling the truth. I had a problem with lying when I was little," I admit, sheepishly. "He said the truth is like water: it doesn't matter how hard you try to bury it; it'll always find someway back to the surface. It's resilient.

Witch-sign, they said. Little eddies, like miniature storms breaking the surface of the ocean. Witch-signs rise up in great numbers, last a few minutes, and then disappear. When the whirlpools are gone, all that’s left is floating petals. Black sea roses. Anomalies. I’m not afraid. A queer chill settles into my bones, and I huddle, pulling my knees closer to my chest. What if Ilven’s death really did raise something up out of the waters? But those stories Nala is talking about—they’re just … fancies. There’s no real truth to them, they’re Hob tales. That’s what our House crake taught me. Of course, Ilven always did find the old stories fascinating and told me how she secretly wished that they were still real, that there was more to magic than just the scriv-forced power of the Houses. Oh Ilven. Bound now below the sea, caught in the kelp forests, nibbled at, her hair full of crabs and little ghost shrimp, a ghost herself. I choke on a sadness so sharp that it has sliced me in two.

If she was lying to me, the lie would surface eventually. They always did. Usually families lied out of some misguided belief that it might affect how I did my job; as if my performance was based on how picture-perfect their life was. But the truth was, no life was perfect. Everyone had secrets. It’s just some were buried deeper than others.

...this, he thinks, is the true curve of the world—now I glimpse it: all things are blended under the surface like the mass of us were blended in the water, it’s the separateness of skin and rock and mind that is the great illusion. We are not discrete; we are not solid. People and things and even cities are meant to flow together, they are meant to connect, and this is why we’re always full of longing, the way I long for the girl, and the girl longs for truth, and the truth longs for volume, and volume longs for people to hear it, and people long for—what?—for everything, air, home, violence, chaos, beauty, hope, flight, sight, each other. Always, whether to stroke or maim, each other, above all.

Within each one of us there is a healer. Healing has always been a way and a deep source of joy for me. Healing is basically our own energy, which overflows from our inner being, from the meditative quality within, from the inner silence and emptiness. Healing is pure love in essence. Love is what creates healing. Love is the strongest force there is. The sheer presence of love is, in itself, healing. It is more the absence of love – than the presence of love –, which creates problems. Healing is a quality, which we can freely share without any ownership. Healing is not something that we can claim as our own; healing is to be a medium, a channel, for the whole. Healing is a medium through which we can develop our inner qualities of presence, love, joy, intuition, truth, silence, wisdom, creativity and inner wholeness. Healing comes originally from the silence within, where we are already in contact with the whole, with the divine. Healing is what makes us spread our inner wings of love and silence and soar high on the sky of consciousness and touch the stars. Healing is to be in service of God. People who have a quality of heart and sensitivity are naturally healing. With some people that we meet, we feel naturally uplifted and inspired. With other people that we meet, we become tired and heavy. With people, who can listen without judging and evaluating, it is easy to find the right words to share problems and difficulties. And with other people, it seems almost impossible to find the right words. People, who have a healing presence and quality, can support our own inner source of love, truth and silence through their presence. These people also seem to have an intuitive sensitivity to saying the right words, which lift and inspires us. This is the people whose presence can mirror the inner truth, which we already know deep within ourselves. The human heart is a healer, which heals others and ourselves. It is the hearts quality of love, acceptance and compassion, plus communication through words, that creates healing. A word that comes from the heart creates healing. A silent listening with a quality of presence and an accepting attitude creates space for healing to happen. Without love it is only possible to reach the personality of the other person, to reach the surface and periphery of the other person The gift of healing comes when we see the other person with love and compassion. It is the quality of heart, which creates the love and the genuine caring for the other person. When our words are carried by the quality of heart, you can say almost anything to the other person and he will still be able to be open and receptive. But if our words lack the quality of heart, it also becomes difficult for the other person to continue to be open and receptive. Even if a therapist is very skilful, technically, or has a clear clairvoyant ability, and still lacks the natural roots in the soil of the heart, then his words will not touch the heart of the other person.

Because there’s such an unbelievable amount that we’re all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You’re supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you’re supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We’re not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we’re normal, that we’re reasonably well educated, that we understand “amortization levels” and “inflation rates.” That we know how sex works. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads, and it always takes us four tries to get those little buggers in. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round, there! In!) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. And we really don’t know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.

a real teacher never wishes to make another individual dependent on him or her -- rather, the intention is always to help an individual develop the person's own spiritual sense of taste or dhawk concerning interior events so that one can learn to distinguish truth from falsehood and so that one can learn how to trust one's essential Self (as opposed to one's surface self which is rooted in an unredeemed nafs).

Making the decision to honor the wisdom of one's soul isn't always easy. It can bring into question our very sense of who we are. If we really listen to the truth bubbling up beneath the surface of our lives, things might change. We might have to face the fact that our inner wisdom and that which we have come to accept as true, safe and popular may be very different--a process that can be rather disconcerting, to say the least.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been. The word games, the winning and losing games are finished; at the moment there are no others but they will have to be invented, withdrawing is no longer possible and the alternative is death.

People who hear the words “I’m sorry” and observe what appears, on the surface, to be a new kind of response must remember the deceptive nature of abuse. While you should always hope for truth and advocate for change, you should expect deception and consider the possibility that these new words and actions do not reflect a genuine apology but are the predictable next steps in the direction the abuser has always been moving—a course that takes the abuser as far away from shame and as close to legitimacy as possible.

Omin smiled again. “You act as if truth were something to be influenced by persistence, Hrathen.” “I’m not speaking of truth or falsehood; I am simply referring to physical inevitability. You cannot stand against Fjorden—and where Fjorden rules, Shu-Dereth teaches.” “One cannot separate truth from actions, Hrathen,” Omin said with a shake of his bald head. “Physically inevitable or not, truth stands above all things. It is independent of who has the best army, who can deliver the longest sermons, or even who has the most priests. It can be pushed down, but it will always surface. Truth is the one thing you can never intimidate.

A society coming apart at top and bottom, or passing over into another form, contains just as many possibilities for revelation as a society running along smoothly in its own rut. The individual is thrust out of the sheltered nest that society has provided. He can no longer hide his nakedness by the old disguises. he learns how much of what he has taken for granted was by its own nature neither eternal nor necessary but thoroughly temporal and contingent. He learns that the solitude of the self is an irreducible dimension of human life no matter how completely that self had seemed to be contained in its social milieu. In the end, he sees each man as solitary and unsheltered before his own death. Admittedly, these are painful truths, but the most basic things are always learned with pain, since our inertia and complacent love of comfort prevent us from learning them until they are forced upon us. It appears that man is willing to learn about himself only after some disaster; after war, economic crisis, and political upheaval have taught him how flimsy is that human world in which he thought himself so securely grounded. What he learns has always been there, lying concealed beneath the surface of even the best-functioning societies; it is no less true for having come out of a period of chaos and disaster. But so long as man does not have to face up to such a truth, he will not do so.

This looked to me like another one of those fork-in-the-road cases in which I had to choose between one of two seemingly essential but mutually exclusive options: 1) being radically truthful with each other including probing to bring our problems and weaknesses to the surface so we could deal with them forthrightly and 2) having happy and satisfied employees. And it reminded me that when faced with the choice between two things you need that are seemingly at odds, go slowly to figure out how you can have as much of both as possible. There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t figured out yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.

This story is always yours for the telling. This has always been yours. You can expand to fill it all or take up the smallest corner. You can write in invisible ink. You can tell your story in red wine stains and spilled ink and bite marks. You can only write in pencil so it can always be erased. You can write in layers, and turn the page and write sideways. You can spin spiral and make your words dance. You can ink it on the surface of your skin or x-ray vision the story onto the blank canvas of your bones. You can write a novel and then let the whole thing dissolve in the waves. You can write the truth and bury it in the ground, throw it in the fire, fold it into paper airplanes and watch it fly, roll it into a note in a bottle and toss it in the ocean and let it find its own way home. Or, you share it with the whole fucking world. You can care and not care and care-not-care all at once. But you get to write. And you get to choose the story you tell. And there’s no freedom bigger or bolder or braver than that.

I thought a lot about death. My death. I got used to the idea of dying. I always imagined it’d be peaceful, with slow-motion scenes and a nice background melody… like in a movie. But I was wrong. I was lost in the eerie quiet. It was cold and dark. My hair floated lightly in the air. No, not in the air, but in the water. Water surrounded me from every side. Frozen water that seemed to burn in my lungs. I was drowning and couldn’t breathe. I tried to swim. Desperately, I kicked my legs and waved my hands, but I wasn’t able to reach the surface. I felt all my energies slowly leave me. It was too dark, and I was tired, but I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t want to die. I tried to push harder with my feet, hoping to feel something solid underneath me, but there was nothing but the fluctuating light and darkness. It swallowed me and I didn’t know what to do. I had always been afraid of two things in my life, water and darkness, so I wondered how the hell I had ended up here. My head was spinning due to the lack of oxygen. I kept fighting, but every cell in my body screamed to let it go. I had to breathe, so I opened my mouth and inhaled strongly. Water came into my lungs, but it had stopped hurting. I no longer felt anything when my body became numb and the darkness devoured me.

Describe the defeated ones,” said a merchant, when he saw that the Copt had finished speaking. And he answered: The defeated are those who never fail. Defeat means that we lose a particular battle or war. Failure does not allow us to go on fighting. Defeat comes when we fail to get something we very much want. Failure does not allow us to dream. Its motto is: “Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed.” Defeat ends when we launch into another battle. Failure has no end; it is a lifetime choice. Defeat is for those who, despite their fears, live with enthusiasm and faith. Defeat is for the valiant. Only they will know the honor of losing and the joy of winning. I am not here to tell you that defeat is part of life; we all know that. Only the defeated know Love. Because it is in the realm of Love that we fight our first battles—and generally lose. I am here to tell you that there are people who have never been defeated. They are the ones who never fought. They managed to avoid scars, humiliations, and feelings of helplessness, as well as those moments when even warriors doubt the existence of God. Such people can say with pride: “I never lost a battle.” On the other hand, they will never be able to say: “I won a battle.” Not that they care. They live in a universe in which they believe they are invulnerable; they close their eyes to injustices and to suffering; they feel safe because they do not have to deal with the daily challenges faced by those who risk stepping out beyond their own boundaries. They have never heard the words “good-bye” or “I’ve come back. Embrace me with the fervor of someone who, having lost me, has found me again.” Those who were never defeated seem happy and superior, masters of a truth they never had to lift a finger to achieve. They are always on the side of the strong. They’re like hyenas, who eat only the leavings of lions. They teach their children: “Don’t get involved in conflicts; you’ll only lose. Keep your doubts to yourself and you’ll never have any problems. If someone attacks you, don’t get offended or demean yourself by hitting back. There are more important things in life.” In the silence of the night, they fight their imaginary battles: their unrealized dreams, the injustices to which they turned a blind eye, the moments of cowardice they managed to conceal from other people—but not from themselves—and the love that crossed their path with a sparkle in its eyes, the love God had intended for them, but which they lacked the courage to embrace. And they promise themselves: “Tomorrow will be different.” But tomorrow comes and the paralyzing question surfaces in their mind: “What if it doesn’t work out?” And so they do nothing. Woe to those who were never beaten! They will never be winners in this life.

She could envision Shakespeare's sister. But she imagined a violent, an apocalyptic end for Shakespeare's sister, whereas I know that isn't what happened. You see, it isn't necessary. I know that lots of Chinese women, given in marriage to men they abhorred and lives they despised, killed themselves by throwing themselves down the family well. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm only saying that isn't what usually happens. It it were, we wouldn't be having a population problem. And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape or kill her; you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don't even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week. Shakespeare's sister did...follow her brother to London, but she never got there. She was raped the first night out, and bleeding and inwardly wounded, she stumbled for shelter into the next village she found. Realizing before too long that she was pregnant, she sought a way to keep herself and her child safe. She found some guy with the hots for her, realized he was credulous, and screwed him. When she announced her pregnancy to him, a couple months later, he dutifully married her. The child, born a bit early, makes him suspicious: they fight, he beats her, but in the end he submits. Because there is something in the situation that pleases him: he has all the comforts of home including something Mother didn't provide, and if he has to put up with a screaming kid he isn't sure is his, he feels now like one of the boys down at the village pub, none of whom is sure they are the children of the fathers or the fathers of their children. But Shakespeare's sister has learned the lesson all women learn: men are the ultimate enemy. At the same time she knows she cannot get along in the world without one. So she uses her genius, the genius she might have used to make plays and poems with, in speaking, not writing. She handles the man with language: she carps, cajoles, teases, seduces, calculates, and controls this creature to whom God saw fit to give power over her, this hulking idiot whom she despises because he is dense and fears because he can do her harm. So much for the natural relation between the sexes. But you see, he doesn't have to beat her much, he surely doesn't have to kill her: if he did, he'd lose his maidservant. The pounds and pence by themselves are a great weapon. They matter to men, of course, but they matter more to women, although their labor is generally unpaid. Because women, even unmarried ones, are required to do the same kind of labor regardless of their training or inclinations, and they can't get away from it without those glittering pounds and pence. Years spent scraping shit out of diapers with a kitchen knife, finding places where string beans are two cents less a pound, intelligence in figuring the most efficient, least time-consuming way to iron men's white shirts or to wash and wax the kitchen floor or take care of the house and kids and work at the same time and save money, hiding it from the boozer so the kid can go to college -- these not only take energy and courage and mind, but they may constitute the very essence of a life. They may, you say wearily, but who's interested?...Truthfully, I hate these grimy details as much as you do....They are always there in the back ground, like Time's winged chariot. But grimy details are not in the background of the lives of most women; they are the entire surface.

Doctrinal formulae are neither a set of neat definitions nor some sort of affront to the free-thinking soul; they are words that tell us enough truth to bring us to the edge of speech, and words that sustain enough common life to hold us there together in worship and mutual love... I learned to rethink Hegel and to grasp that what he was concerned with was not a system that could be projected on to some detached reality 'out there', but a habit of thinking that always sought to understand itself as a process of self-questioning and self-dissolution in the process of discovering *real* language - and thus real thinking. It is the energy of surpassing the settled individual self in the journey to truth... The Hegelian point (as I understand it) is that meaning does not come in the gaps between words or things, but in the way in which the structure and the surface of the world and speech can be so read and heard as to lead us into new and strange configurations of understanding - how words and things always deliver more than themselves, more than a series of objects and labels, and so both undermine and re-establish appearances. Hans Urs von Balthasar... developed an aesthetic of extraordinary depth in which some of the same themes may be discerned. His 'dramatic' construal of the world is meant to remind us that we do not start from intuitions of spiritual truth and then embody them in some way in practices and words. First we are addressed and engaged by what is utterly outside our capacity; we are forced towards new horizons. For Balthasar, this is how we establish on the firmest basis the recognition of the gap between what we can achieve or understand and what God makes known to us... God is free from obligation to our good deeds, free from confinement in our categories; God defines who he is by what he says and does, in revelation.

In the future, white supremacy will no longer need white people,” the artist Lorraine O’Grady said in 2018, a prognosis that seemed, at least on the surface, to counter what James Baldwin said fifty years ago, which is that “the white man’s sun has set.” Which is it then? What prediction will hold? As an Asian American, I felt emboldened by Baldwin but haunted and implicated by O’Grady. I heard the ring of truth in her comment, which gave me added urgency to finish this book. Whiteness has already recruited us to become their junior partners in genocidal wars; conscripted us to be antiblack and colorist; to work for, and even head, corporations that scythe off immigrant jobs like heads of wheat. Conscription is every day and unconscious. It is the default way of life among those of us who live in relative comfort, unless we make an effort to choose otherwise. Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it’s internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence. Even if we’ve been here for four generations, our status here remains conditional; belonging is always promised and just out of reach so that we behave, whether it’s the insatiable acquisition of material belongings or belonging as a peace of mind where we are absorbed into mainstream society. If the Asian American consciousness must be emancipated, we must free ourselves of our conditional existence. But what does that mean? Does that mean making ourselves suffer to keep the struggle alive? Does it mean simply being awake to our suffering? I can only answer that through the actions of others. As of now, I’m writing when history is being devoured by our digital archives so we never have to remember. The administration has plans to reopen a Japanese internment camp in Oklahoma to fill up with Latin American children. A small band of Japanese internment camp survivors protest this reopening every day. I used to idly wonder whatever happened to all the internment camp survivors. Why did they disappear? Why didn’t they ever speak out? At the demonstration, protester Tom Ikeda said, “We need to be the allies for vulnerable communities today that Japanese Americans didn’t have in 1942.” We were always here.

So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. Especially if you have other people you’re trying to be a reasonably good human being for. Because there’s such an unbelievable amount that we’re all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You’re supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you’re supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We’re not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we’re normal, that we’re reasonably well educated, that we understand “amortization levels” and “inflation rates.” That we know how sex works. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads, and it always takes us four tries to get those little buggers in. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round, there! In!) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. And we really don’t know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow. Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn’t feel like it’s ours. Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don’t know how, because it’s so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up. Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight, but which felt like the only way out at the time.

If you choose to push through this often painful process of personal evolution, you will naturally “ascend” to higher and higher levels. As you climb above the blizzard of things that surrounds you, you will realize that they seem bigger than they really are when you are seeing them up close; that most things in life are just “another one of those.” The higher you ascend, the more effective you become at working with reality to shape outcomes toward your goals. What once seemed impossibly complex becomes simple. a. Go to the pain rather than avoid it. If you don’t let up on yourself and instead become comfortable always operating with some level of pain, you will evolve at a faster pace. That’s just the way it is. Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life—you have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion. The irony is that if you choose the healthy route, the pain will soon turn into pleasure. The pain is the signal! Like switching from not exercising to exercising, developing the habit of embracing the pain and learning from it will “get you to the other side.” By “getting to the other side,” I mean that you will become hooked on: • Identifying, accepting, and learning how to deal with your weaknesses, • Preferring that the people around you be honest with you rather than keep their negative thoughts about you to themselves, and • Being yourself rather than having to pretend to be strong where you are weak. b. Embrace tough love. In my own life, what I want to give to people, most importantly to people I love, is the power to deal with reality to get what they want. In pursuit of my goal to give them strength, I will often deny them what they “want” because that will give them the opportunity to struggle so that they can develop the strength to get what they want on their own. This can be difficult for people emotionally, even if they understand intellectually that having difficulties is the exercise they need to grow strong and that just giving them what they want will weaken them and ultimately lead to them needing more help.23 Of course most people would prefer not to have weaknesses. Our upbringings and our experiences in the world have conditioned us to be embarrassed by our weaknesses and hide them. But people are happiest when they can be themselves. If you can be open with your weaknesses it will make you freer and will help you deal with them better. I urge you to not be embarrassed about your problems, recognizing that everyone has them. Bringing them to the surface will help you break your bad habits and develop good ones, and you will acquire real strengths and justifiable optimism. This evolutionary process of productive adaptation and ascent—the process of seeking, obtaining, and pursuing more and more ambitious

‌* When the coughing stopped, there was nothing but the nothingness of life moving on with a shuffle, or a near-silent twitch. ‌* Mistakes, mistakes, it’s all I seem capable of at times ‌*No matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the abandonment. ‌*It’s much easier, she realized, to be on the verge of something than to actually be it ‌*When death captures me,” the boy vowed, “he will feel my fist on his face.”. ‌*he’d turned for one last look at his family as he left the apartment. Perhaps then the guilt would not have been so heavy. No final goodbye. No final grip of the eyes. Nothing but goneness. ‌ *Wrecked, but somehow not torn into pieces. ‌*Life had altered in the wildest possible way, but it was imperative that they act as if nothing at all had happened. ‌*“If we gamble on a Jew,” said Papa soon after, “I would prefer to gamble on a live one,” and from that moment, a new routine was born. *‌you should know it yourself—a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn.” ‌*The fire was nothing now but a funeral of smoke, dead and dying, simultaneously. ‌*Even death has a heart.. ‌* In truth, I think he was afraid. Rudy Steiner was scared of the book thief’s kiss. He must have longed for it so much. He must have loved her so incredibly hard. So hard that he would never ask for her lips again and would go to his grave without them. ‌*There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone. *‌That damn snowman,” she whispered. “I bet it started with the snowman—fooling around with ice and snow in the cold down there.” Papa was more philosophical. “Rosa, it started with Adolf.” *‌There were broken bodies and dead, sweet hearts. Still, it was better than the gas ‌*They were French, they were Jews, and they were you. ‌*Sometimes she sat against the wall, longing for the warm finger of paint to wander just once more down the side of her nose, or to watch the sandpaper texture of her papa’s hands. If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter and bread with only the scent of jam spread out on top of it. *‌Himmel Street was a trail of people, and again, Papa left his accordion. Rosa reminded him to take it, but he refused. “I didn’t take it last time,” he explained, “and we lived.” War clearly blurred the distinction between logic and superstition. ‌*Silence was not quiet or calm, and it was not peace. ‌*“I should have known not to give the man some bread. I just didn’t think.” “Papa, you did nothing wrong.” “I don’t believe you. ‌ * I’m an idiot.” No, Papa. You’re just a man.. ‌*What someone says and what happened are usually two different things ‌* despised by his homeland, even though he was born in it ‌ *“Of course I told him about you,” Liesel said. She was saying goodbye and she didn’t even know it. ‌*Say something enough times and you never forget it ‌*robbery of his life? ‌*Those kinds of souls always do—the best ones. The ones who rise up and say, “I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come.” Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out. More of them have already found their way to other places ‌*One could not exist without the other, because for Liesel, both were home. Yes, that’s what Hans Hubermann was for Liesel Meminger ‌*DEATH AND LIESEL It has been many years since all of that, but there is still plenty of work to do. I can promise you that the world is a factory. The sun stirs it, the humans rule it. And I remain. I carry them away.

truth.—Things exist in precise and definite relations. Events take place according to fixed and immutable laws. Truth is the perception of things just as they are. Between truth and falsehood there is no middle ground. Either a fact is so, or it is not. "Truth," says Ruskin, "is the one virtue of which there are no degrees. There are some faults slight in the sight of love, some errors slight in the estimation of wisdom; but truth forgives no insult, and endures no stain." Truth does not always lie upon the surface of things. It requires hard, patient toil to dig down beneath the superficial crust of appearance to the solid rock of fact on which truth rests. To discover and declare truth as it is, and facts as they are, is the vocation of the scholar. Not what he likes to think, not what other people will be pleased to hear, not what will be popular or profitable; but what as the result of careful investigation, painstaking inquiry, prolonged reflection he has learned to be the fact;—this, nothing less and nothing more, the scholar must proclaim. Truth is fidelity to fact; it plants itself upon reality; and hence it speaks with authority. The truthful man is one whom we can depend upon. His word is as good as his bond. "He sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not." The truthful man brings truth and man together. THE VIRTUE. Veracity has two foundations: one reverence for truth; the other regard for one's fellow-men.—Ordinarily these two motives coincide and re-enforce each other. The right of truth to be spoken, and the benefit to men from hearing it, are two sides of the same obligation.

The truth is that she was always much more forgiving of animals than people...Her sympathy for the underdog--or the underwasp, underrat, undercat, undersnail, underbird, underspider, undermouse, undergecko, undercentipede--was limitless. In the depths of a gloomy London winter she would trudge to the park with a bag of snacks--stale bread specially sautéed in drippings--for the poor freezing seagulls and ducks. At the height of a Provencal summer she would fill a shallow bowl with water, put it on the terrace, and watch, transfixed, as the poor thirsty wasps hovered just above the surface to take a restorative sip or two. Dogs and cats slept in her bed, baby birds were fed warm milk with eyedroppers, spiders were fished out of baths, and a colony or red ants, which feasted on honey and scurried around inside a special box with a glass lid, lived on the kitchen table in London for many years.

How we handle our disappointment with God reveals the heart of our idolatry. But that is the very point! The dryness God ushers in to our lives is for the very purpose of bringing these idolatries to the surface. This is why dryness is not a problem to be fixed. This is not a season to work through. This is the high calling of God to be present with him wherever he leads, and to utilize this season to be with him who is always with us, even when we feel like he has abandoned us.

What I hope I have done is to show you, to show you what lies beneath all this corruption. Others want you to see, or hear, or speak their truths. I offer you no values, no workbooks, no catechisms. “Peel back the unblemished flesh that covers the face of reality, and then you’ll see the real truth pulsing beneath. More than that, you’ll feel it, and that’s my lesson for you—always reach for what you desire, what you truly desire. Your wishes lie like fish beneath the water’s surface. Call to them and they’ll come to you, and you’ll understand and be alive.

Truth and oil always come to the surface.

spent most of my life trying to figure out to be good enough.  Now I had to learn how to be me.  I had to learn that my way of being was acceptable.  In fact, my way of being was beyond acceptable.  God had made me this way on purpose. My way of being was not a defect, a weakness, or something we just had to learn to work around.  It was, instead, a strength, and a resource that our marriage desperately needed.  Our marriage had had a lot of life on the surface, a lot of motion and production, but it badly needed a richer emotional life.  Without that, in the long run, it satisfied neither of us.  I had thought that Andy’s way was the best way, so I had tried to be Andy.  I denigrated and devalued myself as a result.  And that, I came to see, was a constant slap in the face of God, as if He had made me wrong and I had to fix myself. I had to learn to accept and welcome my own true self, the self that feels first and always.  I had to learn that, for me, feeling IS thinking.  When I accept my feelings, I find that they are telling me some kind of truth.  When I start with my feelings, I can follow them down deep into my soul, where Love lives and moves and has its being inside me.  My feelings are valuable, because they are attached to that deep understanding.

Feminist 'sisterhood' toward the purpose of increasing white range and amplified social, cultural, economic mobility, is an exercise in service of supremacy - for white women only. This is the ugly side of the movement: one where we acknowledge that while feminism is a challenge to power, not everyone has always been on the same page about who that power is for and how it should be used as a means of progress. Progress for whom? Thus, American abolitionist, women's right activist, and freed slave Sojourner Truth's question 'Ain't I a woman?' asked in 1851 continues to be painfully resonant even today, surfacing the ever-urgent reality of who is brought into the definition of womanhood and, via extension, who is truly recognized as being fully human.

It is sometimes helpful for the magickian to stand the world on its head. This helps to bring forth the Hidden Reality. The magickian is always seeking to go beyond Surface Reality. Therefore, many great magickians will deliberately work for the opposite of that which they wish to manifest, knowing that the mind is a trickster and when you ask it for one thing, it will often give you the exact opposite of what you want. Jean Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Along with other avant-garde artists of his generation, Cocteau grappled with the algebra of verbal codes old and new. He revealed 'I am a lie who always speaks the truth.' This is why it is so important to get rid of any raw needs, demands, and insistence within you.

There’s a reason why Black women my age can recite lines from The Color Purple at will. The film is iconic because it dared, following Alice Walker’s lead, to suggest to America that Black women were the heroes and not the villains of the American national story. It dared to suggest to a watching world that the baggage we carry is not of our own stitching. And while we Black girls always recite these lines to each other in a humorous context, it is mostly humorous because just underneath the surface, the truth of what we say in jest leaps at us with the clarity of an Alvin Ailey performance.

Christopher reached out to pet Hector, who nuzzled against his hand. His gentleness with the animal was reassuring. Perhaps, Beatrix thought hopefully, he wasn’t as angry as she had feared Taking a deep breath, she said, “The reason that I named him Hector--” “No,” Christopher moved with startling swiftness, trapping her against the post of the stall. His voice was low and rough. “Let’s start with this: did you help Prudence to write those letters?” Beatrix’s eyes widened as she looked into his shadowed face. Her blood surged, a flush rising to the surface of her skin. “No,” she managed to say, “I didn’t help her.” “Then who did?” “No one helped her.” It was the truth. It just wasn’t the entire truth. “You know something,” he insisted. “And you’re going to tell me what it is.” She could feel his fury. The air was charged with it. Her heart thrummed like a bird’s. And she struggled to contain a swell of emotion that was almost more than she could bear. “Let me go,” she said with exceptional calm. “You’re doing neither of us any good with this behavior.” His eyes narrowed dangerously. “Don’t use your bloody dog-training voice on me.” “That wasn’t my dog-training voice. And if you’re so intent on getting at the truth, why aren’t you asking Prudence?” “I have asked her. She lied. As you are lying now.” “You’ve always wanted Prudence,” Beatrix burst out. “Now you can have her. Why should a handful of letters matter?” “Because I was deceived. And I want to know how and why.” “Pride,” Beatrix said bitterly. “That’s all this is to you…your pride was hurt.” One of hands sank into her hair, gripping in a gentle but inexorable hold. A gasp slipped from her throat as he pulled her head back. “Don’t try to diver the conversation. You know something you’re not telling me.” His free hand came to the exposed line of her throat. For a heart-stopping moment she thought he might choke her. Instead he caressed her gently, his thumb moving in a subtle swirl in the hollow at the base. The intensity of her own reaction astonished her. Beatrix’s eyes half closed. “Stop,” she said faintly. Taking her responsive shiver as a sign of distaste or fear, Christopher lowered his head until his breath fanned her cheek. “Not until I have the truth.” Never. If she told him, he would hate her for the way she had deceived and abandoned him. Some mistakes could not be forgiven. “Go to hell,” Beatrix said unsteadily. She had never used such a phrase in her life. “I am in hell.” His body corralled hers, his legs intruding amid the folds of her skirts. Drowning in guilt and fear and desire, she tried to push his caressing hand away from her throat. His fingers delved into her hair with a grip just short of painful. His mouth was close to hers. He was surrounding her, all the strength and force and maleness of him, and she closed her eyes as her senses went quiet and dark in helpless waiting. “I’ll make you tell me,” she heard him mutter. And then he was kissing her. Somehow, Beatrix thought hazily, Christopher seemed to be under the impression she would find his kisses so objectionable that she would confess anything to make him desist. She couldn’t think how he had come by such a notion. In fact, she couldn’t really think at all.

Dear Christopher, This is the perfume of March: rain, loam, feathers, mint. Every morning and afternoon I drink fresh mint tea sweetened with honey. I’ve done a great deal of walking lately. I seem to think better outdoors. Last night was remarkably clear. I looked up at the sky to find the Argo. I’m terrible at constellations. I can never make out any of them except for Orion and his belt. But the longer I stared, the more the sky seemed like an ocean, and then I saw an entire fleet of ships made of stars. A flotilla was anchored at the moon, while others were casting off. I imagined we were on one of those ships, sailing on moonlight. In truth, I find the ocean unnerving. Too vast. I must prefer the forests around Stony Cross. They’re always fascinating, and full of commonplace miracles…spiderwebs glittering with rain, new trees growing from the trunks of fallen oaks. I wish you could see them with me. And together we would listen to the wind rushing through the leaves overhead, a lovely swooshy melody…tree music! As I sit here writing to you, I have propped my stocking feet much too close to the hearth. I’ve actually singed my stockings on occasion, and once I had to stomp out my feet when they started smoking. Even after that, I still can’t seem to rid myself of the habit. There, now you could pick me out of a crowd blindfolded. Simply follow the scent of scorched stockings. Enclosed is a robin’s feather that I found during my walk this morning. It’s for luck. Keep it in your pocket. Just now I had the oddest feeling while writing this letter, as if you were standing in the room with me. As if my pen had become a magic wand, and I had conjured you right here. If I wish hard enough… Dearest Prudence, I have the robin’s feather in my pocket. How did you know I needed token to carry into battle? For the past two weeks I’ve been in a rifle pit, sniping back and forth with the Russians. It’s no longer a cavalry war, it’s all engineers and artillery. Albert stayed in the trench with me, only going out to carry messages up and down the line. During the lulls, I try to imagine being in some other place. I imagine you with your feet propped near the hearth, and your breath sweet with mint tea. I imagine walking through the Stony Cross forests with you. I would love to see some commonplace miracles, but I don’t think I could find them without you. I need your help, Pru. I think you might be my only chance of becoming part of the world again. I feel as if I have more memories of you than I actually do. I was with you on only a handful of occasions. A dance. A conversation. A kiss. I wish I could relive those moments. I would appreciate them more. I would appreciate everything more. Last night I dreamed of you again. I couldn’t see your face, but I felt you near me. You were whispering to me. The last time I held you, I didn’t know who you truly were. Or who I was, for that matter. We never looked beneath the surface. Perhaps it’s better we didn’t--I don’t think I could have left you, had I felt for you then what I do now. I’ll tell you what I’m fighting for. Not for England, nor her allies, nor any patriotic cause. It’s all come down to the hope of being with you.

They say watch the breathing, watch the diet and for God’s sake make that kid go quiet. But they never say: “I am wrong and you are right”, because the self –pride they always want to hide! But in time, like the truth it shall come to surface and all those lies, that awful misery they always boast about will be extinct, whilst their conscience filled with guilt.

The practice of deception is foolishness because the truth always eventually surfaces.

Peace. Warm yourself, warrior, while I tell you of peace. History is unerring, and even the least observant mortal can be made to understand, through innumerable repetition. Do you see peace as little more than the absence of war? Perhaps, on a surface level, it is just that. But let me describe the characteristics of peace, my young friend. A pervasive dulling of the senses, a decadence afflicting the culture, evinced by a growing obsession with low entertainment. The virtues of extremity — honour, loyalty, sacrifice — are lifted high as shoddy icons, currency for the cheapest of labours. The longer peace lasts, the more those words are used, and the weaker they become. Sentimentality pervades daily life. All becomes a mockery of itself, and the spirit grows… restless. Is this a singular pessimism? Allow me to continue with a description of what follows a period of peace. Old warriors sit in taverns, telling tales of vigorous youth, their pasts when all things were simpler, clearer cut. They are not blind to the decay all around them, are not immune to the loss of respect for themselves, for all that they gave for their king, their land, their fellow citizens. The young must not be abandoned to forgetfulness. There are always enemies beyond the borders, and if none exist in truth, then one must be fashioned. Old crimes dug out of the indifferent earth. Slights and open insults, or the rumours thereof. A suddenly perceived threat where none existed before. The reasons matter not — what matters is that war is fashioned from peace, and once the journey is begun, an irresistible momentum is born. The old warriors are satisfied. The young are on fire with zeal. The king fears yet is relieved of domestic pressures. the army draws its oil and whetstone. Forges blast with molten iron, the anvils ring like temple bells. Grain-sellers and armourers and clothiers and horse-sellers and countless other suppliers smile with the pleasure of impending wealth. A new energy has gripped the kingdom, and those few voices raised in objection are quickly silenced. Charges of treason and summary execution soon persuade the doubters. Peace, my young warrior, is born of relief, endured in exhaustion, and dies with false remembrance. False? Ah, perhaps I am too cynical. Too old, witness to far too much. Do honour, loyalty and sacrifice truly exist? Are such virtues born only from extremity? What transforms them into empty words, words devalued by their overuse? What are the rules of the economy of the spirit, that civilization repeatedly twists and mocks? Withal of the Third City. You have fought wars. You have forged weapons. You have seen loyalty, and honour. You have seen courage and sacrifice. What say you to all this?" "Nothing," Hacking laughter. "You fear angering me, yes? No need. I give you leave to speak your mind." "I have sat in my share of taverns, in the company of fellow veterans. A select company, perhaps, not grown so blind with sentimentality as to fashion nostalgia from times of horror and terror. Did we spin out those days of our youth? No. Did we speak of war? Not if we could avoid it, and we worked hard at avoiding it." "Why?" "Why? Because the faces come back. So young, one after another. A flash of life, an eternity of death, there in our minds. Because loyalty is not to be spoken of, and honour is to be endured. Whilst courage is to be survived. Those virtues, Chained One, belong to silence." "Indeed. Yet how they proliferate in peace! Crowed again and again, as if solemn pronouncement bestows those very qualities upon the speaker. Do they not make you wince, every time you hear them? Do they not twist in your gut, grip hard your throat? Do you not feel a building rage—" "Aye. When I hear them used to raise a people once more to war.

No matter how deep the lies, truth will always surface. For truth is unyielding; it will strive for the light, year after year after year.

When I am talking to somebody there are always two conversations going on. The first is on the surface; it is about politics or music or whatever it is our mouths are saying. The other is beneath the surface, on the level of the heart, and my heart is either communicating that I like the person I am talking to or I don’t. God wants both conversations to be true. That is, we are supposed to speak truth in love. If both conversations are not true, God is not involved in the exchange, we are on our own, and on our own, we will lead people astray

Even though he drove her crazy, made her so angry, she loved him. It was his wildness, his burning desire to chase what he wanted. He was fearless. Self-confident. But she never realized that what he pursued would take such a toll, almost cost them everything. Still, she loved him. His fury gave her the courage to chase her own dreams. She always believed her love for him could endure anything. She needed him and always would. The truth was that even though she wanted him to quit reporting, she feared his passion would be switched off and the sadness she saw in her mother’s eyes would surface in his.

In a college commencement address he delivered three years before his suicide, David Foster Wallace asked his audience to “think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth,” he said. “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master.

It’s not always as it appears on the surface you know, John. People lie or get things wrong for all sorts of reasons. Everyone is economical with the truth occasionally if it prevents someone they care about being hurt. How often have you told a girlfriend she looks nice in a particular dress even though you don’t like it at all? Sometimes people simply tell us what they think we want to hear to avoid getting into trouble themselves and they disregard the consequences for others. Sometimes they’ll lie to get what they want, like Rose Spicer may have.

My father used to say that no matter how deep the lies, truth will always surface. For truth is unyielding; it will strive for the light year after year after year.

She had always told me stories about how poor a country Argentina was, being the reason for her girlfriend, Caterina, to move to Spain, which she said was the 13th richest country on the planet. Perhaps Martina's perception of Spain itself was crooked or surrealistic. She didn't realize that the country might be the 13th richest country in the world, but Spain was seriously broke and the people were desperately impoverished since 2007, the economic crisis had never ended, yet Martina seemed oblivious to all that. In her eyes, Spain was a rich country compared to Argentina. Martina perceived Europe and its various nationalities and countries in a surrealistic way, removed from reality; as if all Europeans were the same and equally trustworthy, just like non-Europeans in Spain, and she could not distinguish between people or groups of people coming from different places, with no reservations. This sounds very liberal, but there was only selfish capitalist interest behind it all and sometimes it showed for a moment or two that money was the main reason for her being in Europe in the first place, under the guise of a cover-up not being so much of a secret from me time to time. As if Spain were a playground for children or criminals, which wasn't too far from reality. But I noticed that she saw different false shadows under the same light casting shade of the same crap; she was confident in her beliefs, but at the same time seemingly questioning herself as to whether she was right or wrong, and if it mattered at all. Nonetheless, she was completely unaware of the dangers and trusted people too easily. She had no fear and appeared like a cool kid from the streets of even more dangerous places. Yet, considering her well-educated nature, and the fact that she could also be quite normal, she saw things differently than a European person, almost like a child from the favelas of Brazil, ready to kill for daily nutrition, making it an interesting paradox to observe her personality and her vibes changing like a kaleidoscope beneath the surface for those looking from the right angle. Martina didn't realize that Italy was Romania vol. 2, or what that meant--how history lives on, how the gypsies who died with the Jews never received a country of their own. I was not acutely aware of the fact that Spain was Romania vol. 3. The prospect of warm weather and easy money had been attracting criminals from all corners of the planet. She seemed to be the typical Libra she actually was, quite consciously quite lost and always trying to find her own balance unsuccessfully as if she was dizzy, never managing to attain the perfect measure, making mistakes and constantly questioning her own results and the actions that led to them. She attempted to conceal her lack of confidence with at times an exaggerated display of confidence. She vacillated between being too shy and too cool, never seeming authentic. I attempted to impart Herder's philosophy to her, explaining how opposing things can settle into harmony, where the truth is likely to be found in moderation and synthesis, hoping she would find it easier to maintain her inner balance amidst all the bad people and bad vibes coming from all directions.

can never be burned; truth will always emerge from the ashes and find its way to the surface of our consciousness.

Anyone would think he was miserable to be here, but the truth is, he always looks this way. Only Cobar and I would know that beneath his surface… he is truly miserable here.

And of course, [Boris Johnson will] never get questioned like this over at the BBC while the political editor remains a fully paid-up member of the Boris Johnson Admiration Society. So how does he get away with it? Andrew points out that factory resets obviously weren't covered in the technology lessons that Boris Johnson received from Jennifer Arcuri. Again, it's a funny joke. It's a good line, but he was the Prime Minister, and everyone knew he was a liar. Is it all about that guy that rang in when Donald Trump was here. That I always remember saying ‘but you must know he's lying’. Donald Trump was giving a speech in London about the size of the crowds outside the building he was in. And we had a camera outside the building he was in. We were looking at no crowds. And that simple juxtaposition of rhetorical claim by a politician with observable reality was chilling. It was spine tingling. I can claim that there are huge crowds, huge crowds, the biggest crowds, the greatest crowds outside this building. And I said, ‘how does it work? How does that happen?’ And someone rang me and said, ‘I know he's a liar, but it really upsets people like you and Sadiq Khan.’ And at the time I laughed but maybe that's all there is. Maybe your life - and sorry this is going to sound quite rude - but maybe your life is so weird, and your personality is so twisted that you find the frustration of people who care about the truth the closest you ever get to feeling joy. Is that it? Nadine Dorries watches Boris Johnson lie and claims that he's the most trustworthy person on the planet. What is wrong with her? It's not really a question about what's wrong with him; what's wrong with her? Whatever transpires at this inquiry or whatever emerges during these hours of evidence, I can tell you this: there will be a significant number of people who think that Boris Johnson has done nothing wrong or that he is somehow the victim of another witch hunt. You remember? It was a witch hunt when he was caught banged to rights by a parliamentary committee containing a majority of conservatives after even Chris Bryant had stepped down to avoid any accusations or allegations - false allegations – really, of impartiality. And they still called it a witch hunt. It would have been a witch on unless the committee consisted entirely of 14 Nadine Dorries clones. That's the only circumstances in which those people would have claimed that he could receive a fair trial. Where do you even begin today? Do you begin with the 5,000 WhatsApp messages that a man who was in charge of the nuclear code somehow doesn't understand and can't find? I don't know. So, what is your theory now because I don't think I've got one any more. I watch him now, and I feel something very new, very different to what I thought when he was in power because when he was in power there is an urgency to the situation. There is a desperate need to share with the population the awfulness that they apparently can't see. Just now that he's not in power any more, it's almost as if I've allowed the full horror of what he represents to bubble to the surface. It’s now that he can't actually break anything, it's a retrospective reflection upon the abject awfulness of him. I mean the unbelievable awfulness of this man, the things that he's done. You can begin with Brexit. The lies that he's told, the damage that he's done. The contempt in which he holds all the things we're raised to believe are important: rules, obligations, standards, behaviours, fidelity, honesty, kindness, friendship, loyalty, all of these things we teach our children matter. And Boris Johnson teaches us that you can become the most powerful person in the country by treating all of those things with absolute contempt.

I had become in my convictions and new life. I always struggled with confidence and being able to vocalize my wants and desires appropriately. Terrified of being viewed as different, I kept them locked up tight in my mind and cowered whenever they tried to surface. When I removed myself from other's expectations and stepped into my truth, it felt liberating and empowering to live the way I want, although it was the universe that gave me the go-ahead.

We said earlier that you experience three things inside yourself: the world coming in, the thoughts of your mind, and the emotions of your heart. Truth is, there’s a fourth thing you experience in there. It’s in there all the time, but most people are so lost in the first three they don’t focus on this fourth object of consciousness. Nevertheless, there is a very powerful energy flow inside of you. In different cultures it has been called by different names, such as shakti, chi, or spirit. For the purposes of our discussion, we will use the traditional yogic term shakti. Once you quiet down enough, you will realize this energy is constantly flowing inside of you. You sometimes even make reference to it when your energy level suddenly changes. You say things like, “When she told me she loved me, I got so filled with energy I was floating on a cloud. I could feel it rushing through me for days.” In other situations, you say, “When she told me it was over, I hardly had the energy to drive home. It left me so drained I couldn’t go to work for a week.” These statements are referring to the surface level of the energy we’re discussing. There is a much deeper, core flow that you will experience as you transcend your personal self. It is this deeper energy flow passing through the open heart that you experience as the sensation of love. Because the energy can only go as high as you let it, this beautiful love experience does not happen that often for most people. Nonetheless, there is almost always some energy flowing through your heart creating your normal emotional state. The reason the energy flowing through the heart fluctuates so much is because of the samskaras you’ve stored inside. You inwardly shoved away the experiences you didn’t like having and clung to the ones you did. These unfinished energy patterns are real, and they act as blockages to your inner energy flow. When your energy tries to flow up, and it is always trying to flow up, it cannot because it hits these blockages. The energy of the shakti flow is much subtler than that of the samskaras—so the shakti can go no higher.

But I didn’t despise the Christian girls. No, for some strange reason it was precisely them I fell for. How could I explain that to Hilde? And although I, like her, always tried to see beneath the surface, on the basis of a fundamental yet unstated tenet that what lay beneath was the truth or the reality, and, like her, always sought meaning, even if it were only to be found in an acknowledgment of meaninglessness, it was actually on the glittering and alluring surface that I wanted to live, and the chalice of meaninglessness I wanted to drain – in short I was attracted by all the town’s discos and nightspots, where I wanted nothing more than to drink myself senseless and stagger around chasing girls I could fuck, or at least make out with. How could I explain that to Hilde? I couldn’t, and I didn’t. Instead I opened a new subdivision in my life. “Booze and hopes of fornication” it was called, and it was right next to “insight and sincerity,” separated only by a minor garden-fence-like change of personality.

Need to Be Honest about My Issues Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (PSALM 139:23 – 24) Thought for the Day: Avoiding reality never changes reality. Mostly I’m a good person with good motives, but not always. Not when I just want life to be a little more about me or about making sure I look good. That’s when my motives get corrupted. The Bible is pretty blunt in naming the real issue here: evil desires. Yikes. I don’t like that term at all. And it seems a bit severe to call my unglued issues evil desires, doesn’t it? But in the depths of my heart I know the truth. Avoiding reality never changes reality. Sigh. I think I should say that again: Avoiding reality never changes reality. And change is what I really want. So upon the table I now place my honesty: I have evil desires. I do. Maybe not the kind that will land me on a 48 Hours Mystery episode, but the kind that pull me away from the woman I want to be. One with a calm spirit and divine nature. I want it to be evident that I know Jesus, love Jesus, and spend time with Jesus each day. So why do other things bubble to the surface when my life gets stressful and my relationships get strained? Things like … Selfishness: I want things my way. Pride: I see things only from my vantage point. Impatience: I rush things without proper consideration. Anger: I let simmering frustrations erupt. Bitterness: I swallow eruptions and let them fester. It’s easier to avoid these realities than to deal with them. I’d much rather tidy my closet than tidy my heart. I’d much rather run to the mall and get a new shirt than run to God and get a new attitude. I’d much rather dig into a brownie than dig into my heart. I’d much rather point the finger at other people’s issues than take a peek at my own. Plus, it’s just a whole lot easier to tidy my closet, run to the store, eat a brownie, and look at other people’s issues. A whole lot easier. I rationalize that I don’t have time to get all psychological and examine my selfishness, pride, impatience, anger, and bitterness. And honestly, I’m tired of knowing I have issues but having no clue how to practically rein them in on a given day. I need something simple. A quick reality check I can remember in the midst of the everyday messies. And I think the following prayer is just the thing: God, even when I choose to ignore what my heart is saying to me, You know my heart. I bring to You this [and here I name whatever feeling or thoughts I have been reluctant to acknowledge]. Forgive me. Soften my heart. Make it pure. Might that quick prayer help you as well? If so, stop what you are doing —just for five minutes — and pray these or similar words. When I’ve prayed for the Lord to interrupt my feelings and soften my heart, it’s amazing how this changes me. Dear Lord, help me to remember to actually bring my emotions and reactions to You. I want my heart reaction to be godly. Thank You for grace and for always forgiving me. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

The hoard here is just as regimented, kept hidden from prying eyes by its obsessive use of containers. But I know from looking in that cupboard that inside those cardboard boxes is a wormhole to a world of chaos. That is what she was always like, I suppose, rigid control on the surface, and the howling void beneath. That's why so many people cling so desperately to their semblances of discipline, their habits, schedules, routines, diets, personal trainers, personal grooming, theories of morality. It's all about the fear of the chaos beneath. It's certainly true of India, nothing in her life is real unless it's been ticked off on a list. For us, the recognition of the void came so early that we were always going to go one of two ways, spend our lives fighting valiantly to hold back the tide the way she does, or, like me, accept the truth and let the chaos reign.

One cannot separate truth from actions. Physically inevitable or not, truth stands above all things. It is independent of who has the best army, who can deliver the longest sermons, or even who has the most priests. It can be pushed down, but it will always surface. Truth is the one thing you can never intimidate.

There is no good or evil. Evil is only what we call those who oppose us.” Royce took out his dagger and drove it into the table, where it stood upright. “Look at the blade. Is it bright or dark?” Hadrian narrowed his eyes suspiciously. The brilliant surface of Alverstone was dazzling as it reflected the candlelight. “Bright.” Royce nodded. “Now move your head over here and look from my perspective.” Hadrian leaned over, putting his head on the opposite side of the blade, where the shadow made it black as chimney soot. “It’s the same dagger,” Royce explained, “but from where you sat it was light while I saw it as dark. So who is right?” “Neither of us,” Hadrian said. “No,” Royce said. “That’s the mistake people always make, and they make it because they can’t grasp the truth.” “Which is?” “That we’re both right. One truth doesn’t refute another. Truth doesn’t lie in the object, but in how we see it.

The artifacts are often what people latch on to most in a church, though they are expressions of so much beneath the surface. Imagine growing up in a healthy church. The church is generous, kind, nurturing, full of truth, and loving. You grow up loving your church. This church happens to have some programs that have deeply impacted you. Maybe it was a children’s program or a great worship ministry. In your mind, even without realizing it, your affinity for belief of the church is connected to the visible expressions of the church. Now, years long past that first church experience, artifacts that seem nearest to those original expressions will just feel right. Because of this, people are often really attached to the artifacts. While changing actual beliefs is the most difficult task, changing artifacts often creates the most pain. In order to understand culture, it is critical to recognize the differences in the layers. It is faster to correct unwanted behaviors or artifacts in a culture, but only addressing behavior is insufficient. Unless all the layers of culture are addressed, other deviant behaviors will pop up in the place of recently addressed ones. This game of behavioral whack-a-mole becomes an endless cycle of battling unnamed enemies underneath the surface. The unwanted behaviors are symptoms; an unhealthy culture is the sickness. Wherever we find stubborn sticking points in a church culture, there is always inconsistency between the actual beliefs and values and the stated ones. If there are deeply held assumptions and beliefs within the culture that are incompatible with the desired future that leaders are leading toward, then the beliefs beneath the surface must be addressed. If our churches are going to have strong cultures, there must be actual beliefs driven deeply into the church that are articulated and then expressed in artifacts. There will be harmony and congruence between all three layers of culture. The church won’t settle for mere alignment between the articulated values and the artifacts. The leaders will push for the actual beliefs to be deeply rooted in the church. The true beliefs and assumptions of a church culture are not only written on signs, posters, and e-mail footers. The truly embraced convictions of a local church are written in the lives of believers as they interact with one another and the world. Church leaders often

Prepare with pen and paper. Always have your notebook and something to write with nearby when you read. Your goal is to be prepared for insight. In addition to reading for pleasure, you will now use words as research and write down what you learn. If you prefer, you can dictate into a recorder or type into the Notes section of your phone. Immerse. Get inside the words, the sentences, the story arc. Don't simply stay on the surface of what you're reading, no matter how shallow it seems. Go deep. Examine. If that cereal box makes you excited to eat the sugar doodles, ask yourself what it is about the words and their formatting is doing that for you. If you read that redwood plaque and walk away feeling smart, ask yourself how it pierced your busy mind. If—especially if—you're reading a novel, and you connect with a character, or you find yourself yanked out of the story, or you read a sentence twice to savor the citrus taste of it, or anything else of note happens, study that situation like a lover's face. Write down what you think is happening (“ main character makes stupid choices,” “too many adverbs,” “lots of smells make me feel like I'm right there,” “each chapter ends with a hook,” etc.) because transcribing information flips a switch in our brain, waking up the records guy who then goes over to pick up what you wrote and file it somewhere so you can access it later.

Beauty is everywhere and the ability to observe the very sight or presence of it is our natural birthright. It is how we appreciate beautiful things and what type of thought pattern we are associating with it that determines what you can take from it. Beauty therefore in our minds can either be a façade, highly desirable for what it seems to be, albeit lacking substance teaching us to see beauty only on a surface level; or something genuine representing fullness and abundance, teaching us to see the beauty within the depths of everything that comes into our awareness. But the most important observation I have made about this now is, that our current societal behaviours are transforming one way or another and slowly stirring the truth in with the rest of the chaos. To conclude, life always takes that ugly turn for most earlier in their lives and we as humans tend to build acquired tastes for the objects of which we truly desire, which is not a horrible thing, however determining what is and isn't beautiful, is.

If the two of us had shared a typical bond, I would have turned to my sister for help. I’d always hated that we weren’t close, always assuming it was my fault instead of hers. In truth, it was no one’s fault. We were simply different. There was a gulf in our personalities that was too wide to overcome. I was like my mother, always feeling too much, wanting too much, needing too much. Like my father, my sister had wants and needs, too, but they were surface pleasures. Cars and clothes and societal approval from snobs just like them. They held no emotion other than ambition.

She had always told me stories about how poor a country Argentina was, being the reason for her girlfriend, Caterina, to move to Spain, which she said was the 13th richest country on the planet. Perhaps Martina's perception of Spain itself was crooked or surrealistic. She didn't realize that the country might be the 13th richest country in the world, but Spain was seriously broke and the people were desperately impoverished since 2007, the economic crisis had never ended, yet Martina seemed oblivious to all that. In her eyes, Spain was a rich country compared to Argentina. Martina perceived Europe and its various nationalities and countries in a surrealistic way, removed from reality; as if all Europeans were the same and equally trustworthy, just like non-Europeans in Spain, and she could not distinguish between people or groups of people coming from different places, with no reservations. This sounds very liberal, but there was only selfish capitalist interest behind it all and sometimes it showed for a moment or two that money was the main reason for her being in Europe in the first place, under the guise of a cover-up not being so much of a secret from me time to time. As if Spain were a playground for children or criminals, which wasn't too far from reality. But I noticed that she saw different false shadows under the same light casting shade of the same crap; she was confident in her beliefs, but at the same time seemingly questioning herself as to whether she was right or wrong, and if it mattered at all. Nonetheless, she was completely unaware of the dangers and trusted people too easily. She had no fear and appeared like a cool kid from the streets of even more dangerous places. Yet, considering her well-educated nature, and the fact that she could also be quite normal, she saw things differently than a European person, almost like a child from the favelas of Brazil, ready to kill for daily nutrition, making it an interesting paradox to observe her personality and her vibes changing like a kaleidoscope beneath the surface for those looking from the right angle. Martina didn't realize that Italy was Romania vol. 2, or what that meant--how history lives on, how the gypsies who died with the Jews never received a country of their own. I was not acutely aware of the fact that Spain was Romania vol. 3. The prospect of warm weather and easy money had been attracting criminals from all corners of the planet. She seemed to be the typical Libra she actually was, quite consciously quite lost and always trying to find her own balance unsuccessfully as if she was dizzy, never managing to attain the perfect measure, making mistakes and constantly questioning her own results and the actions that led to them. She attempted to conceal her lack of confidence with at times an exaggerated display of confidence. She vacillated between being too shy and too cool, never seeming authentic. I attempted to impart Hegel's philosophy to her, explaining how opposing things can settle into harmony, where the truth is likely to be found in moderation and synthesis, hoping she would find it easier to maintain her inner balance amidst all the bad people and bad vibes coming from all directions.