Uncommon Bond Quotes

Amazing how we push away what we most want to hold close. Humans.

I had often wondered how a single human heart could hold great love—it is so tiny, and love so vast. The answer is simple: it doesn’t. It spills over. It becomes the everything.

Society was built on a foundation of fear, not authenticity. I get too numb when I join the world. I lose my openness, my access to the divine.

There is beauty outside of beauty and there is hope within hopelessness.

You don’t measure love in time. You measure love in transformation.

That’s the thing about great love. It elevates everything around it. You walk through a forest together and it becomes a great temple. You eat a meal together and you sit at God’s banquet table. You merge your bodies and all heaven breaks loose. That’s why we can’t stop singing about love. Every verse is a cry for wholeness.

Sometimes I feel crazy being this dramatic about a love that only lasted a few months and...” She interrupted me. “Nothing crazy about it. You don’t measure love like that. You measure it by its effects. It doesn’t matter how long it lasted. It’s how much it grows you that matters.

We froze. Neither of us moving, simply staring at each other, wondering if the other was going to move first. "You are," he whispered, "uncommonly stirring." He closed his eyes then, as if he had to in order to break the bond between us, then lifted me to the saddle and stared at the ground as he guided my feet into the stirrups.

There are few things more confusing than going to war with parents who are diminishing you, particularly when you are very young. If you fight for your dignity, you risk losing the love you need from them to develop. If you don’t fight back, you lose your self-respect

Look, I told you before—you can’t heal your heart with your mind. You can only heal your heart with your heart.

It was one thing to be vulnerable when alone, something else entirely to trust another to hold my heart safe.

There was no question in my mind. This state of complete and utter love is our collective birthright, the state we are born to inhabit, the way of being that is eagerly awaiting humanity at the end of a long, perilous journey. We either walk toward love as a way of being, or we walk away from it. There are only two directions. This decision shapes our life and our world.

It isn’t for the faint of heart, nor is it ever to be taken lightly. Real love is heartcore.

At some point, a wave of repressed emotion broke through my armor, demanding expression and release. As I plumbed the depths of my despair, I shed one layer of pain after another. My inner world was like a series of reservoirs, each holding a different wave of emotional memory behind them. When one reservoir burst, another soon appeared. This phase went on for many months—the first of many essential release phases.

With one gaze into her eyes, all words fell away. And it didn’t matter at all. In this place of hearticulation, there was no need for words. This love spoke a language all its own, a grammarless lexicon of longing and union. Who needs syllables when you can hear each other’s souls?

The more open something is, the more difficulty it has with society.

May we learn to love ourselves in the absence of the lover.

Many survivors have such profound deficiencies in self-protection that they can barely imagine themselves in a position of agency or choice. The idea of saying no to the emotional demands of a parent, spouse, lover or authority figure may be practically inconceivable. Thus, it is not uncommon to find adult survivors who continue to minister to the needs of those who once abused them and who continue to permit major intrusions without boundaries or limits. Adult survivors may nurse their abusers in illness, defend them in adversity, and even, in extreme cases, continue to submit to their sexual demands.

Stop looking for answers outside yourself. Don’t ask God, BE GOD. You’re the sculptor of your own reality—don’t hand your tools to anyone else. Even the Big G!

What the heart cares about is resonance. Resonance that opens it, Resonance that enlivens it, Resonance that calls it home. And when it finds it, the transformation begins...

To Each Their Path

It goes to show you. You can look for relationship but you can’t look for love.

However love arrives at your door, it is always a brave path.

Everything in me was transforming again. How beautiful, I didn’t even need to be in a relationship for that to happen.

The Unavailable Available Pattern.” It’s where you convince yourself (and others) that you are available for relationship, but you always find a way to stop short. That stopping short can manifest in many ways: choosing unavailable people, looking for excuses to run, focusing on a lover’s imperfections rather than their appealing qualities, getting lost in the excitement of ecstatic possibility until the first glimpse of real vulnerability sends you packing. It’s the addiction to possibility and the fear of intimacy all rolled into one.

After what felt like an eternity, we started to walk the trails. I looked at my watch. We had only been by the river for 30 minutes. So strange. Time lasts forever when you are actually in the moment.

I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, - and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart." I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

The universe had something to do with it, didn’t it?” “Sure, but you were the originator of this.

Only a small few can hold the gate open when profound love enters. A blessed and courageous few.

Is love partnership for everyone? Is it essential to a life well lived, or is that just a cultural myth?

Every relationship was a world unto itself.

Relationship is always a spiritual practice, even when we imagine it otherwise.

Every path is a journey to God. We just have to remember to open our heart again and again...

For the record, even a turkey vulture won’t eat a processed chicken nugget. I stopped buying them for my son when I saw the vultures picking around them.

He paused for a while and then looked me in the eye. “Then you are blessed by her absence. Can’t make someone ready to walk a path they aren’t ready for. Just don’t work.” “Sometimes people push each other along...” “No, they got to want it. Listen buddy, if one person doesn’t want the relationship, then it’s simply not a fit. No sense trying to figure out why they don’t want it. No

wish I could say that it all seemed fantastical. But it wasn’t like that at all. I had just entered an unmistakably deepened reality, one where the terms of engagement are beyond the grasp of the rational mind—one where the soul’s journey is paramount, where essence isn’t a concept but a felt experience.

God knows I wasn’t ready to actually do any healing, but I was ready to write about it. Funny how that works. Funny how we come at things conceptually first, before life pushes us to experience them in real time.

We have a natural tendency to assume that

The petty details fell away, the essentials emerged.

The more time we spent together, the holier the world became.

sensed that I had just penned a reflection of my true destiny: perpetual singlehood. There wasn’t going to be another beloved. My path lay elsewhere.

Real love is no easy path: Readiness is everything.

Why do we turn against ourselves when we most need to give ourselves comfort?

Common hatred can bond uncommon individuals.

I began to explore more body-centered approaches to emotional healing in the hopes of excavating deeper layers of unresolved material. The exploration began with a massage therapist who adeptly worked through layers of holding in my musculature for two hours per week. Although I was by no means muscle-bound, I was heavily armored, like an impenetrable fortress. As she peeled the armor, older and older memories emerged, muscles with a story that needed to be told.

How do we hold this safe, Lowen?” Sarah wondered aloud. The question struck me. “What do you mean?” I inquired tentatively. “Just being with you is enough. I feel so close to you already. Maybe if we keep it simple, we will avoid the upsets.

The kind of trust that is necessary to build a great team is what I call vulnerability-based trust. This is what happens when members get to a point where they are completely comfortable being transparent, honest, and naked with one another, where they say and genuinely mean things like “I screwed up,” “I need help,” “Your idea is better than mine,” “I wish I could learn to do that as well as you do,” and even, “I’m sorry.” When everyone on a team knows that everyone else is vulnerable enough to say and mean those things, and that no one is going to hide his or her weaknesses or mistakes, they develop a deep and uncommon sense of trust. They speak more freely and fearlessly with one another and don’t waste time and energy putting on airs or pretending to be someone they’re not. Over time, this creates a bond that exceeds what many people ever experience in their lives and,

Just as the online mystics suggest, I have been makkng offerings to vultures in thanks for their guidance. The freezer, for me, is the place where good food goes to die, it lies in state, with occassional viewings, until a major power outage thaws it and gives me permission to toss it out to the middle of the field, where Turkey vultures have a field day sampling sausages, steaks, roasts, chicken thighs, and breaded nuggets. For the record,even a turkey vulture won't eat a chicken nugget. I stopped buying them when I saw the vultures picking around them.

Now you are divesting your energy from that familiar past and predictable future. You are no longer firing and wiring the same circuits in the same way, and you are no longer regulating and signaling the same genes in the same way by feeling the same emotions. If you keep doing this process, you are continuously calling all that energy back to you by breaking the energetic bonds that keep you connected to your past-present reality. This happens because you are taking your attention and your energy off your outer world and placing it instead on your inner world, and you’re building your own electromagnetic field surrounding your body. Now you have available energy that you can use to create something new.

On the Republican side, the emotional bonds of family launched a major social organization led by nietos, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. Late in 2000 Emilio Silva and Santiago Macías began a personal search for the unmarked graves of their Republican ancestors. [...] Descendants of executed Republicans told a journalist that “without the body, the pain never ceases.” “Never,” she reported, “have they spoken of vengeance, of revenge, or of anything that resembles that. In an exhumation, they never raise their eyes from the ground. They are not thinking of reopening wounds, but of closing, for once, their own.” This journalist, Natalia Junquera, also quoted a distinguished professor of psychiatry who said, “The hatred dies, it is extinguished, but the necessity of putting a name to the dead, of honoring them, no. There always comes a moment in which one has to put an end to this interminable trauma.” [63]

To see how we separate, we first have to examine how we get together. Friendships begin with interest. We talk to someone. They say something interesting and we have a conversation about it. However, common interests don’t create lasting bonds. Otherwise, we would become friends with everyone with whom we had a good conversation. Similar interests as a basis for friendship doesn’t explain why we become friends with people who have completely different interests than we do. In time, we discover common values and ideals. However, friendship through common values and ideals doesn’t explain why atheists and those devout in their faith become friends. Vegans wouldn’t have non-vegan friends. In the real world, we see examples of friendships between people with diametrically opposed views. At the same time, we see cliques form in churches and small organizations dedicated to a particular cause, and it’s not uncommon to have cliques inside a particular belief system dislike each other. So how do people bond if common interests and common values don’t seem to be the catalyst for lasting friendships? I find that people build lasting connections through common problems and people grow apart when their problems no longer coincide. This is why couples especially those with children tend to lose their single friends. Their primary problems have become vastly different. The married person’s problems revolve around family and children. The single person’s problem revolves around relationships with others and themselves. When the single person talks about their latest dating disaster, the married person is thinking I’ve already solved this problem. When the married person talks about finding good daycare, the single person is thinking how boring the problems of married life can be. Eventually marrieds and singles lose their connection because they don’t have common problems. I look back at friends I had in junior high and high school. We didn’t become friends because of long nights playing D&D. That came later. We were all loners and outcasts in our own way. We had one shared problem that bound us together: how to make friends and relate to others while feeling so “different”. That was the problem that made us friends. Over the years as we found our own answers and went to different problems, we grew apart. Stick two people with completely different values and belief systems on a deserted island where they have to cooperate to survive. Then stick two people with the same values and interests together at a party. Which pair do you think will form the stronger bond? When I was 20, I was living on my own. I didn’t have many friends who were in college because I couldn’t relate to them. I was worrying about how to pay rent and trying to stretch my last few dollars for food at the end of the month. They were worried about term papers. In my life now, the people I spend the most time with have kids, have careers, are thinking about retirement and are figuring out their changing roles and values as they get older. These are problems that I relate to. We solve them in different ways because our values though compatible aren’t similar. I feel connected hearing about how they’ve chosen to solve those issues in a way that works for them.

The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly allowance for themselves and their fellow-slaves, were peculiarly enthusiastic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this, when leaving home. They would then sing most exultingly the following words:— "I am going away to the Great House Farm! O, yea! O, yea! O!" This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,—and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart." I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned that upon first breaking ground in the whale’s back, the blubber-hook was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the monster’s back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the whale till the whole flensing or stripping operation is concluded. The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the Highland costume—a shirt and socks—in which to my eyes, at least, he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to observe him, as will presently be seen. Being the savage’s bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead whale’s back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by a long cord. Just so, from the ship’s steep side, did I hold Queequeg down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his waist. It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at both ends; fast to Queequeg’s broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed. So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering—while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam him—still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.

You okay?” she asked. “Wild dreams.” “Yah, me too. We bring up everything in each other.” “How do you mean?” “I mean: the brighter the love, the darker the

Human lifetimes are time documented by time, employment is compensated by documented time for work; and the value of life is expensive. No one is wealthy enough to buy time for infinity...so why let them waste yours! #Studypeople who do not value the #expense of life & time...gain old, but common #wisdom. #Studypeople who value the expense of life & time...gain new but uncommon wisdom. Last year will never repeat in your #lifetime, neither will the New Year. Consider how you manage the #destiny #distraction of #timewasters... I reset my #NewYear clock with an alarm to signal the entry of expensive time wasters, so I can kindly show them back to the exit point. People who consciously care to connect their active purpose with others who value share them, are more likely to make most of time's expense, rather than waste time, as if forever could be spared.

By the way, if you do this work well and manage to call your energy back to you, it will most likely be uncomfortable at first, even a little chaotic. Get ready, because certain areas of your life may fall apart. But don’t worry. That’s supposed to happen because you’re breaking the energetic bonds between yourself and your same past reality. Anything that is no longer in a vibrational match between you and your future is going to fall away. Let it. Don’t try to put your old life back together because you’re going to be way too busy with the new destiny you’re calling to yourself.

Let’s take the example of life insurance. How can life insurance companies—some of the most conservative companies in America—insure people’s lives when they know they’re all going to die? • It’s risk they’re aware of. They know everyone’s going to die. Thus they factor this reality into their approach. • It’s risk they can analyze. That’s why they have doctors assess applicants’ health. • It’s risk they can diversify. By ensuring a mix of policyholders by age, gender, occupation and location, they make sure they’re not exposed to freak occurrences and widespread losses. • And it’s risk they can be sure they’re well paid to bear. They set premiums so they’ll make a profit if the policyholders die according to the actuarial tables on average. And if the insurance market is inefficient—for example, if the company can sell a policy to someone likely to die at age eighty at a premium that assumes he’ll die at seventy—they’ll be better protected against risk and positioned for exceptional profits if things go as expected. We do exactly the same things in high yield bonds, and in the rest of Oaktree’s strategies.

The result is a capital market line of the sort that has become familiar to many of us, as shown in figure 6.1. Figure 6.1 A big problem for investment returns today stems from the starting point for this process: The riskless rate isn’t 4 percent; it’s closer to 1 percent.... Typical investors still want more return if they’re going to accept time risk, but with the starting point at 1+ percent, now 4 percent is the right rate for the ten-year (not 6 percent). They won’t go into stocks unless they get 6 to 7 percent. And junk bonds may not be worth it at yields below 7 percent. Real estate has to yield 8 percent or so. For buyouts to be attractive they have to appear to promise 15 percent, and so on. Thus, we now have a capital market line like the one shown in figure 6.2, which is (a) at a much lower level and (b) much flatter. Figure 6.2 The lower level of the line is explained by the low interest rates, the starting point for which is the low riskless rate.

When two people marry, each spouse becomes “holy” to each other by way of “holy matrimony.” This means no other person in the whole world is supposed to enjoy this level of commitment and endearment from you. Your relationship is like no other. You each commit to sharing physical intimacy with only her, only him. You establish a home with this person. You bear your children with this person. Your heart, possessions, and life are to be beautifully interwoven in the uncommon bond you share with this one individual. This is by God’s design and should be your daily goal and desire. Is that the way it is in your marriage? Would your husband say you honor and respect him? Do you consider your wife to be set apart and highly prized? Holy?

What did Jonathan Edwards mean in sending word to his wife that their union was “uncommon”? Was it that? And how was a union that had issued in eleven offspring “spiritual”? Of one thing we may be sure: Jonathan Edwards was not using his last words carelessly. This “major artist and chief American philosopher” (Miller, 1949:225) had not yet discarded his palette. His message to her had—all his words had—an exact, uncoded meaning, Lockean in its empirical force, that is there for us to recover if we will attend. Our path is to discover if we can the substance of this “uncommon” and “spiritual” union that was at the same time unquestionably an erotic bond. Something greater than curiosity is at stake for us here. Jonathan Edwards is preeminently a theologian of the heart and of the affections; to discover the kind of love that was central between these two may provide an exact clue to his own theological ethics—a bonus not to be disdained.

You do not make it through SEAL training without the support and encouragement of the guys around you. It is in the crucible of training that the bond—the uncommon commitment—of the SEAL brotherhood is built.

Luit never came out of the anesthesia. He paid dearly for having stood up to two other males, frustrating them by his steep ascent. Those two had been plotting against him in order to take back the power they had lost. The shocking way they did so opened my eyes to how deadly seriously chimpanzees take their politics. Two-against-one maneuvering is what lends chimpanzee power struggles both their richness and their danger. Coalitions are key. No male can rule by himself, at least not for long, because the group as a whole can overthrow anybody. Chimpanzees are so clever about banding together that a leader needs allies to fortify his position as well as the greater community’s acceptance. Staying on top is a balancing act between forcefully asserting dominance, keeping supporters happy, and avoiding mass revolt. If this sounds familiar, it’s because human politics works exactly the same. Before Luit’s death, the Arnhem colony was ruled jointly by Nikkie, a young upstart, and Yeroen, an over-the-hill conniver. Barely adult at seventeen, Nikkie was a brawny character with a dopey expression. He was very determined, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He was supported by Yeroen, who was physically not up to the task of being a leader anymore, yet who wielded enormous influence behind the scenes. Yeroen had a habit of watching disputes unfold from a distance, stepping in only when emotions were flaring to calmly support one side or the other, thus forcing everybody to pay attention to his decisions. Yeroen shrewdly exploited the rivalries among younger and stronger males. Without going into the complex history of this group, it was clear that Yeroen hated Luit, who had wrested power from him years before. Luit had defeated Yeroen in a struggle that had taken three hot summer months of daily tensions involving the entire colony. The next year, Yeroen had gotten even by helping Nikkie dethrone Luit. Ever since, Nikkie had been the alpha male with Yeroen as his right-hand man. The two became inseparable. Luit was unafraid of either one of them alone. In one-on-one encounters in the night cages, Luit dominated every other male in the colony, taking away their food or chasing them around. No single one of them could possibly have kept him in his place. This meant that Yeroen and Nikkie ruled as a team, and only as a team. They did so for four long years. But their coalition eventually began to unravel, and as is not uncommon among men, the divisive issue was sex. Being the kingmaker, Yeroen had enjoyed extraordinary sexual privileges. Nikkie would not let any other males get near the most attractive females, but for Yeroen he had always made an exception. This was part of the deal: Nikkie had the power, and Yeroen got a slice of the sexual pie. This happy arrangement ended only when Nikkie tried to renegotiate its terms. In the four years of his rule, he had grown increasingly self-confident. Had he forgotten who had helped him get to the top? When the young leader began to throw his weight around, interfering with the sexual adventures not only of other males but also of Yeroen himself, things got ugly. Infighting within the ruling coalition went on for months, until one day Yeroen and Nikkie failed to reconcile after a spat. With Nikkie following him around, screaming and begging for their customary embrace, the old fox finally walked away without looking back. He’d had it. Luit filled the power vacuum overnight. The most magnificent chimpanzee male I have known, both in body and spirit, quickly grew in stature as the alpha male. Luit was popular with females, a mighty arbiter of disputes, protector of the downtrodden, and effective at disrupting bonding among rivals in the divide-and-rule tactic typical of both chimp and man. As soon as Luit saw other males together he would either join them or perform a charging display to disband them.

My mother’s words Trust the sea surged through my veins alongside her blood and the bond that no death could ever steal away.