Woven Sayings And Quotes

When I was young and bold and strong, The right was right, the wrong was wrong. With plume on high and flag unfurled, I rode away to right the world. But now I’m old - and good and bad, Are woven in a crazy plaid. I sit and say the world is so, And wise is s/he who lets it go.

I will say this once, angel, for I feel you should be warned. No man alive has ever loved a woman the way that I love you, and I would rather die, damned as I am, than disgrace us both with the pitiful, unrequited performance of my heart.

Catalina says that people are like books. Some you want to read and enjoy; some you hate before you've even read a word.

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers. And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.

Are you some kind of Diviner?” “No.” “A monster, then?” He almost smiled. “Don’t say you’ve been speaking with my mother?

Why should her lover, just because he is male, be in a position to judge her against other women? Why must she need to know her position and hate needing to, and hate knowing? Why should his reply have such exaggerated power? And it does. He does not know that what he says will affect the way she feels when they next make love. She is angry for a number of good reasons that may have nothing to do with this particular man's intentions. The exchange reminds her that, in spite of a whole fabric of carefully woven equalities, they are not equal in this way that is so crucial that its snagged thread unravels the rest.

Your job then, should you choose to accept it, is to keep searching for the metaphors, rituals and teachers that will help you move ever closer to divinity. The Yogic scriptures say that God responds to the sacred prayers and efforts of human beings in any way whatsoever that mortals choose to worship—just so long as those prayers are sincere. I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. I think you are free to search for any metaphor whatsoever which will take you across the worldly divide whenever you need to be transported or comforted. It's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's the history of mankind's search for holiness. If humanity never evolved in its exploration of the divine, a lot of us would still be worshipping golden Egyptian statues of cats. And this evolution of religious thinking does involve a fair bit of cherry-picking. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light. The Hopi Indians thought that the world's religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm. More contemporarily, the Dalai Lama has repeated the same idea, assuring his Western students repeatedly that they needn't become Tibetan Buddhists in order to be his pupils. He welcomes them to take whatever ideas they like out of Tibetan Buddhism and integrate these ideas into their own religious practices. Even in the most unlikely and conservative of places, you can find sometimes this glimmering idea that God might be bigger than our limited religious doctrines have taught us. In 1954, Pope Pius XI, of all people, sent some Vatican delegates on a trip to Libya with these written instructions: "Do NOT think that you are going among Infidels. Muslims attain salvation, too. The ways of Providence are infinite." But doesn't that make sense? That the infinite would be, indeed ... infinite? That even the most holy amongst us would only be able to see scattered pieces of the eternal picture at any given time? And that maybe if we could collect those pieces and compare them, a story about God would begin to emerge that resembles and includes everyone? And isn't our individual longing for transcendence all just part of this larger human search for divinity? Don't we each have the right to not stop seeking until we get as close to the source of wonder as possible? Even if it means coming to India and kissing trees in the moonlight for a while? That's me in the corner, in other words. That's me in the spotlight. Choosing my religion.

He laughed a little, like he was drunk. "I do say it a lot." "What?" she said, going briefly still. "Your name," he said, and closed his eyes. He nearly fell over, catching himself at the last second. "I didn't know your name for so long, angel. I love the way it feels in my mouth.

Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful. And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain. Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your rainment. For the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of life is in the wind. Some of you say 'It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear.' And I say, 'Ay, it was the north wind, but shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.' And when his work was done he laughed in the forest. Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean. And when the unclean shall be no more, what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling of the mind? And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Then, O King! the God, so saying, Stood, to Pritha's Son displaying All the splendour, wonder, dread Of His vast Almighty-head. Out of countless eyes beholding, Out of countless mouths commanding, Countless mystic forms enfolding In one Form: supremely standing Countless radiant glories wearing, Countless heavenly weapons bearing, Crowned with garlands of star-clusters, Robed in garb of woven lustres, Breathing from His perfect Presence Breaths of every subtle essence Of all heavenly odours; shedding Blinding brilliance; overspreading- Boundless, beautiful- all spaces With His all-regarding faces; So He showed! If there should rise Suddenly within the skies Sunburst of a thousand suns Flooding earth with beams undeemed-of, Then might be that Holy One's Majesty and radiance dreamed of!

Say you came back for me," he whispered. There was a thread of desire in his voice that threatened the good sense in her head, her very composure. "Tell me you came to find me. That you changed your mind." "How--how can you even say such things," she said, her hands beginning to tremble, "on an evening you are meant to choose another as your bride?" "I choose you," he said simply. "I want you.

It stunned me. I had never said it before. I knew that I would never say it again, not really; that you only get one shot at in a lifetime. I got mine out of nowhere on a misty autumn evening, under a street lamp shining yellow streaks on the wet pavement, with Rosie's strong pliable fingers woven through mine.

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps, And here you are the mothers' laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. ... What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

When ink joins with a pen, then the blank paper can say something. Rushes and reeds must be woven to be useful as a mat. If they weren't interlaced, the wind would blow them away.

You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Out myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of evil.

Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, ‘Look at my beautiful home! Isn’t it fine?’ And not, ‘Look at the home so-and-so has built.’ Thus we shouldn’t cry, ‘Look what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!’ But rather, ‘Look at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave?

I fear you might regret saying that,” he said, even as he almost smiled. “Be warned, Kamran. The terms of our agreement are nonnegotiable. Lift a finger against her prematurely and I won’t hesitate to kill you myself.

...he liked his transcendence out in plain sight where he could keep an eye on it -- say, in a nice stained-glass window -- not woven through the fabric of life like gold threads through a brocade.

I can see that you go through life athwart it. You see the flow of events, you are able to tell how you could most easily fit yourself into it. But you dare to oppose it. And why? Simply because you look at it and say, 'this fate does not suit me. I will not allow it to befall me.'" Amber shook her head, but her small smile made it an affirmation. "I have always admired people who can do that. So few do. Many, of course, will rant and rave against the garment fate has woven for them, but they pick it up and on it all the same, and most wear it to the end of their days. You... you would rather go naked into the storm.

As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.

My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear-a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The “I” in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable. I would not have thee believe in what I say nor trust in what I do-for my words are naught but thy own thoughts in sound and my deeds thy own hopes in action. When thou sayest, “The wind bloweth eastward,” I say, “Aye it doth blow eastward”; for I would not have thee know that my mind doth not dwell upon the wind but upon the sea. Thou canst not understand my seafaring thoughts, nor would I have thee understand. I would be at sea alone. When it is day with thee, my friend, it is night with me; yet even then I speak of the noontide that dances upon the hills and of the purple shadow that steals its way across the valley; for thou canst not hear the songs of my darkness nor see my wings beating against the stars-and I fain would not have thee hear or see. I would be with night alone. When thou ascendest to thy Heaven I descend to my Hell-even then thou callest to me across the unbridgeable gulf, “My companion, my comrade,” and I call back to thee, “My comrade, my companion”-for I would not have thee see my Hell. The flame would burn thy eyesight and the smoke would crowd thy nostrils. And I love my Hell too well to have thee visit it. I would be in Hell alone. Thou lovest Truth and Beauty and Righteousness; and I for thy sake say it is well and seemly to love these things. But in my heart I laughed at thy love. Yet I would not have thee see my laughter. I would laugh alone. My friend, thou art good and cautious and wise; nay, thou art perfect-and I, too, speak with thee wisely and cautiously. And yet I am mad. But I mask my madness. I would be mad alone. My friend, thou art not my friend, but how shall I make thee understand? My path is not thy path, yet together we walk, hand in hand.

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind...The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamor of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn. His sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books written, and marble hewn into form.

Song of myself A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World If the gods bring to you a strange and frightening creature, accept the gift as if it were one you had chosen. Say the accustomed prayers, oil the hooves well, caress the small ears with praise. Have the new halter of woven silver embedded with jewels. Spare no expense, pay what is asked, when a gift arrives from the sea. Treat it as you yourself would be treated, brought speechless and naked into the court of a king. And when the request finally comes, do not hesitate even an instant---- stroke the white throat, the heavy trembling dewlaps you'd come to believe were yours, and plunge in the knife. Not once did you enter the pasture without pause, without yourself trembling, that you came to love it, that was the gift. Let the envious gods take back what they can.

It’s this thing I have. I’m sorry if it scared you. I feel other people’s feelings. I imagine crumbling insides and splitting hearts, goodbyes that hang in the air before they break into tiny pieces. I hear words that aren’t said, the echoes of lonely hallways and hollow footsteps. I hear sobs that soak pillowcases when all the lights are out and the world is sleeping. I carry this inside of me, all of it. I knew you paced the floor at night, trying to walk over all the things you didn’t want me to know. But I felt every wound you ever endured when I rested against you. I felt the ache that I have, deep inside of me, on your lips. Every time we kissed, I tasted a lifetime of tangled paths and bumpy roads woven with joined hands. Love isn’t blind, you see. I felt everything you were and could be, if only you stopped hiding in the same darkness you sheltered me from. I knew who you could become if someone loved you just right. I’m sorry if that scared you. Just in case you were wondering, I still love you and I'll keep the lights dim. Come home.

It sounds absurd, like a fairy tale to remind children of their parents' love. But Shifu always says that there is truth woven into our stories, passed down from fathers to sons, mothers to daughters. One only needs to believe that a truth does exist.

Yeah, just dizzy.” “Don’t worry,” Caspian says. “That’s a common side effect of staring into my eyes.

How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky, how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you, even your eyes, even your imagination. The Soul at Last The Lord’s terrifying kindness has come to me. It was only a small silvery thing—say a piece of silver cloth, or a thousand spider webs woven together, or a small handful of aspen leaves, with their silver backs shimmering. And

Race is a by-product of racism. In fact, race doesn’t exist.” Damaras said this in the way a person might say water is wet. “Some of you look surprised.” She adjusted her feet and straightened her back. “It’s a social construct. There has never been any scientific or genetic evidence to back up the concept of race. Despite it being false, it has woven its way into the fabric of all of our societies.

You’ve seen that. Now look at this. Don’t be disturbed. Uncomplicate yourself. Someone has done wrong … to himself. Something happens to you. Good. It was meant for you by nature, woven into the pattern from the beginning. Life is short. That’s all there is to say. Get what you can from the present—thoughtfully, justly. Unrestrained moderation.

She can’t bring herself to say the goodbye she feels coming out loud. They are so old now—maybe it doesn’t need to be said. Maybe it’s already woven into each moment they share. Someone will be left behind; this is what love costs.

Eurydice Speaks” How will I know you in the underworld? How will we find each other? We lived for so long on the physical earth— Our skies littered with actual stars Practical tides in our bay— What will we do with the loneliness of the mythical? Walking beside ditches brimming with dactyls, By a ferryman whose feet are scanned for him On the shore of a river written and rewritten As elegy, epic, epode. Remember the thin air of our earthly winters? Frost was an iron, underhand descent. Dusk was always in session And no one needed to write down Or restate, or make record of, or ever would, And never will, The plainspoken music of recognition, Nor the way I often stood at the window— The hills growing dark, saying, As a shadow became a stride And a raincoat was woven out of streetlight I would know you anywhere.

Alizeh was no longer smiling. Her heart was beating so hard she thought it might bruise. "What shall I say, then?" "Your name. I want to hear it from your lips." She took a breath. Released it slowly. "My name," she said, "is Alizeh. I am Alizeh of Saam, the daughter of Siavosh and Kiana. Though you may know me better as the lost queen of Arya." He stiffened at that, went silent. Finally he moved, one hand capturing her face, his thumb grazing her cheek in a fleeting moment, there and gone again. His voice was a whisper when he said, "Do you wish to know my name, too, Your Majesty?" "Kamran," she said softly, "I already know who you are." She was unprepared when he kissed her, for the darkness had denied her a warning before their lips met, before he claimed her mouth with a need that stole from her an anguished sound, a faint cry that shocked her.

I think that sometimes our souls must tell us they are having a hard time trying to keep up with all of our worldly festivities and plans. Quiet moments, such as when we weave, or in times of sleep, are when we hear what our inner selves have to say.

And if someone were to ask, Noah, what’s the most important aspect of story? I would most likely answer, character, but I’m not sure that’s true, because my favorite books contain my favorite places. I do not say, I love Harry Potter, or I love Frodo Baggins; I say, I love Hogwarts, and I love Middle-earth. Thoreau’s Walden is less about the book, more about the pond. The woods. And so setting, I think, is the secret weapon of storytelling. I always want to meet new people until I’ve met them. I think if I spend enough time with a person so we get woven together like an old basket, eventually we’ll think in similar patterns until our various histories are apples and oranges spilling over the edge of the basket, and I think this kind of shared history is dangerous. I think it’s okay to recognize a thing’s faults and still like that thing. Because apples and oranges spilling from a basket can be beautiful too. I think I’m whatever personality hates personality tests. I think nostalgia is just a soul’s way of missing a thing, and like long-distance love, nostalgia grows deeper with time until the reality of what a thing actually was gets blurred to the point you miss the idea of the thing more than the thing itself. I like the idea of hot cocoa more than drinking

When you read The Arabian Nights you accept Islam. You accept the fables woven by generations as if they were by one single author or, better still, as if they had no author. And in fact they have one and none. Something so worked on, so polished by generations is no longer associated with and individual. In Kafka's case, it's possible that his fables are now part of human memory. What happened to Quixote could happen to to them. Let's say that all the copies of Quixote, in Spanish and in translation, were lost. The figure of Don Quixote would remain in human memory. I think that the idea of a frightening trial that goes on forever, which is at the core of The Castle and The Trial (both books that Kafka, of course, never wanted to publish because he knew they were unfinished), is now grown infinite, is now part of human memory and can now be rewritten under different titles and feature different circumstances. Kafka's work now forms a part of human memory.

My friend tells me that memory fails me in part because nature mercifully wishes to hide from us things which are painful. The spider-web of protective forgetfulness is woven over the mouth of the cave which conceals the raw head and bloody bones of our misfortunes. "But the greatest men," says King Lamus, "are those that refuse to be treated like squalling children, who insist on facing reality in every form, and tear off ruthlessly the bandages from their own wounds.

My poetry lives in the spaces of time, in between time, in time out. It is not a constant vibe; I catch it like the incoming tide, going out again. It will not let me say what I want to say for words cannot be woven together to express me that way. My words have learned to be patient for nothing. Now is my time out.

We choose this. This place. This life. What it will be, and how we live it. We are not slaves to gods, or fate, or destinies woven in veils of smoke. We choose the people we want to be, and we choose the shape of the world in which we live. Nothing worthwhile comes without sacrifice. There is nothing so easy as swimming with the current, nothing so difficult as being the first to stand up. To say no. To point at a thing wrong and name it so. There are none so brave as those who choose to stand, when all others are content to kneel. None so worthy of the title 'hero' as those who fight when there are none to see it. Who choose a life bereft of accolade or fanfare, a life of struggle for the idea that we are all the same. Every one of us. And every one of us has the right to be happy. To know peace. To know love.

And we leave home and go to live with this person forever; not because we are sure that he is the right person: in fact we are not entirely sure, and we always suspect that the right person for us is hiding away goodness knows where in the city. But we don’t want to know where he is hiding; we feel that we have by now very little to say to him, because we say everything to this person—who is not perhaps the right person—with whom we now live; and we want to receive the good and the evil of our lives from this person and with him. Every now and then violent differences between us and this person erupt into the open; and yet they are unable to destroy the infinite peace we have within us. After many years, only after many years, after a thick web of habits, memories and violent differences has been woven between us, we at last realize that he is, in truth, the right person for us, that we could not have put up with anyone else, that it is only from him that we can ask everything that the heart needs. Now,

May you see light where there was only darkness, hope where there seemed nothing but despair, may your fear be replaced with faith and insight, may you feel some victory in the defeat and a sense of the sacred web into which we are all woven. Most of all may you stay in tune with your capacity to love life even as you are engulfed by death.

Eventually everyone came out of the water and for hours and hours and hours we lay under the tree and talked and read and occasionally someone got up to throw a stick for the dogs and Piper played with Ding and made tiny woven wreaths of poppies and daisies to decorate his baby horns and Isaac whistled back and forth to a robin and Edmond just lay there smoking and telling me he loved me without saying anything out loud and if there ever was a more perfect day in the history of time it isn't one I've heard about. The sun waited to go down longer than usual that day so we kept putting off the moment we had to leave and the boys and dogs swam in the river again and eventually we all headed back practically in the dark, dog-tired and too happy to talk much. I guess there was a war going on somewhere in the world that night but it wasn't one that could touch us.

26. You’ve seen that. Now look at this. Don’t be disturbed. Uncomplicate yourself. Someone has done wrong … to himself. Something happens to you. Good. It was meant for you by nature, woven into the pattern from the beginning. Life is short. That’s all there is to say. Get what you can from the present—thoughtfully, justly. Unrestrained moderation.

Style is not how you write. It is how you do not write like anyone else. * * * How do you know if you're a writer? Write something everyday for two weeks, then stop, if you can. If you can't, you're a writer. And no one, no matter how hard they may try, will ever be able to stop you from following your writing dreams. * * * You can find your writer's voice by simply listening to that little Muse inside that says in a low, soft whisper, "Listen to this... * * * Enter the writing process with a childlike sense of wonder and discovery. Let it surprise you. * * * Poems for children help them celebrate the joy and wonder of their world. Humorous poems tickle the funny bone of their imaginations. * * * There are many fine poets writing for children today. The greatest reward for each of us is in knowing that our efforts might stir the minds and hearts of young readers with a vision and wonder of the world and themselves that may be new to them or reveal something already familiar in new and enlightening ways. * * * The path to inspiration starts Beyond the trails we’ve known; Each writer’s block is not a rock, But just a stepping stone. * * * When you write for children, don't write for children. Write from the child in you. * * * Poems look at the world from the inside out. * * * The act of writing brings with it a sense of discovery, of discovering on the page something you didn't know you knew until you wrote it. * * * The answer to the artist Comes quicker than a blink Though initial inspiration Is not what you might think. The Muse is full of magic, Though her vision’s sometimes dim; The artist does not choose the work, It is the work that chooses him. * * * Poem-Making 101. Poetry shows. Prose tells. Choose precise, concrete words. Remove prose from your poems. Use images that evoke the senses. Avoid the abstract, the verbose, the overstated. Trust the poem to take you where it wants to go. Follow it closely, recording its path with imagery. * * * What's a Poem? A whisper, a shout, thoughts turned inside out. A laugh, a sigh, an echo passing by. A rhythm, a rhyme, a moment caught in time. A moon, a star, a glimpse of who you are. * * * A poem is a little path That leads you through the trees. It takes you to the cliffs and shores, To anywhere you please. Follow it and trust your way With mind and heart as one, And when the journey’s over, You’ll find you’ve just begun. * * * A poem is a spider web Spun with words of wonder, Woven lace held in place By whispers made of thunder. * * * A poem is a busy bee Buzzing in your head. His hive is full of hidden thoughts Waiting to be said. His honey comes from your ideas That he makes into rhyme. He flies around looking for What goes on in your mind. When it is time to let him out To make some poetry, He gathers up your secret thoughts And then he sets them free.

I love you, Farron.”“In the starlight way,” he says. “In the starlight way.

You are my mate,” I say. “Submit to me. Let me claim you as mine. And in return, I will show you our love has always been inevitable.

Brave,” he says at last. “Determined. Intelligent. Unsure. Lost and angry. Sad, too, I think. But

And I think, OK. So a dog isn't the most important thing. But a dog like Honey loves one person completely, unwaveringly, with perfect faith. That has to be more important than most things. And Gabriel, I say. He has Gabriel too. Gil says nothing but I know the answer. The answer is that Gabriel can't save Matthew any more than Gil can, or Honey. Or Jake. But we are all woven together, like a piece of cloth, and we all support each other, for better or worse. Gabriel is just a baby but eventually he will see the world and his father as they are: imperfect, dangerous, peppered with betrayals and also with love.

Thankfully, our disappointments matter to God, and He has a way of taking even some of the bitterest moments we go through and making them into something of great significance in our life. It’s hard to understand it at the time. Not one of us wants that thread when it is being woven in. Not one of us says, 'I can hardly wait to see where this is going to fit.' We all say at that moment, 'This is not the pattern I want.

Farewell," she whispered. "Our time together has come to an end. We will never meet again. Our worlds will never again collide. "Don't say that," he said, suddenly serious. His hand moved to her wait, traveled up the curve of her rib cage. "Say anything but that." Alizeh was no longer smiling, Her heart was beating so hard she thought it might bruise. "What shall I say, then?" "Your name. I want to hear it from your lips.

A lifetime is woven from moments—from beginnings and endings, joys and misfortunes, and the choices we make. Each moment holds opportunities to grow. to try again — to say “Thank you,” or “I’m so sorry.” And every day counts.

A drawing is a translation. That is to say each mark on the paper is consciously realted, not only to the real or imagined "model", but also to every mark and space already set out on the paper. Thus a drawn or painted image is woven together by the energy (or the lassitude, wen the drawing is weak) of countless judgements [sic]. Every time a figuration is evoked in a drawing, everything about it has been mediated by consciousness, either intuitively or systematically.

Everything that they say in a language the common man understands is a well-woven myth. The important truths and hardcore facts, uncomfortable things, will always be said in legal-jargon-filled language which the common man cannot comprehend.

The Veteran When I was young and bold and strong, Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong! My plume on high, my flag unfurled, I rode away to right the world. “Come out, you dogs, and fight!” said I, And wept there was but once to die. But I am old; and good and bad Are woven in a crazy plaid. I sit and say, “The world is so; And he is wise who lets it go. A battle lost, a battle won- The difference is small, my son.” Inertia rides and riddles me; The which is called Philosophy.

And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.

We are falling back into allegory," said the Captain, interrupting him. "If you mean by all that that the body is the most solid of realities, then say so." "No, not exactly," Zeno explained. "This body, our kingdom, sometimes seems to me to be made of a fabric as loosely woven and as evanescent as a shadow. I should hardly be more astonished to see my mother again (who is dead) than to come upon you around a corner as I did, your face grown older and its substance recomposed more than once in twenty years' time, with its color altered by the seasons and its form somewhat changed, but your mouth still knowing my name. Think of the grain that has grown and the creatures that have lived and died in order to sustain that Henry who is and is not the one I knew twenty years ago.

Omid, don’t forget to use the bathroom before we go!” “Yes, all right,” he said, scowling. “You don’t need to keep reminding me to use the bathroom.” “You say that now,” countered Kamran. “But we all know you need to be reminded or else you inconvenience everyone at the worst possible hour—” “Only the one time!

I ruined my shirt,” he says quietly. “No you didn’t,” Roman says before I even have a chance to say anything. “We can soak it if it’s a big deal to you, but if not, it can be thrown away, and we can get you more.” Fresh tears well up in Eli’s eyes. “It was the first thing you got me, though.” Oh my fucking heart.

The swamp roses, Gillie. It was the mare found them. She—if she hadn't run off—it was almost as if she meant me to see them." "Are you saying? . . ." "I don't know what I’m saying. Yes," she cried, a gay silliness taking her. Drunk with the music and the dancing, drunk with his closeness, she laughed up at him. It was just as in the stories, a kind of magic just like . . ." and then she stared at him, confounded.  "Just like what?"  "But in the stories . . ."  "In the stories . . . what?”  "In the stories . . ."  "In the stories there’s a prince," Gillie answered quietly. He held her away then. "So the story has come true.

Dear lady,' says a faerie, coming toward us from a shop that sells jewels. He has the eyes of a snake and forked tongue that darts out when he speaks. 'This hairpin looks as though it were made for you.' It's beautiful, woven gold and silver in the shape of a bird, a single green bead in its mouth. Had it been in a display, my eyes would have passed over it as one of a dozen unobtainable things. But as he holds it out, I can't help imaging it as as mine. 'I have no money and little to trade,' I tell him regretfully, shaking my head. The shopkeeper's gaze goes to Oak. I think he believes the prince is my lover. Oak plays the part, reaching out his hand for the pin. 'How much is it? And will you take silver, or must it be the last wish of my heart?' 'Silver is excellent.' The shopkeeper smiles as Oak fishes through his bag for some coins. Part of me wants to demur, but I let him buy it, and then I let him use it to pin back my hair. His fingers on my neck are warm. It's only when he lets go that I shiver. He gives me a steady look. 'I hope you're not about to tell me that you hate it and you were just being polite.' 'I don't hate it,' I say softly. 'And I am not polite.' He laughs at that. A delightful quality. I admire the hairpin in every reflective surface we pass.

I mean to say that life is brimming with beautiful thing but nevertheless poor, very poor in beautiful moments and in the unveilings of those things. But perhaps that is the strongest magic of life: it is covered by a veil of beautiful possibilities, woven with threads of gold -- promising, resisting, bashful, mocking, compassionate, and seductive.

I mean to say that the world is brimming with beautiful things but nevertheless poor, very poor in beautiful moments and in the unveilings of those things. But perhaps that is the strongest magic of life: it is covered by a veil of beautiful possibilities, woven with threads of gold -- promising, resisting, bashful, mocking, compassionate, and seductive.

she said, when I wear these boots no one fucks with me when I tie my past like a scarf around my throat I can freeze the blood of every naive and unabashed up-and-comer when I slide on my desire like glowing black stockings I can make the uninitiated beg for the feel of raw and stinging wood and when I slip my angry black leather belt from its rusty hook the ambitious and guileless cower like a thousand condemned souls when I close my fist, my rings golden with a youth well spent the warriors of Gilead surrender with a breathless whimper and when my shoulders feel the rough comfort of my serape woven with the fibers of a fierce and relentless vengeance you will soon realize these are not my clothes after all, she says, they are warning signs

With the veil removed by the rending of Jesus' flesh, with nothing on God's side to prevent us from entering, why do we tarry without? Why do we consent to abide all our days just outside the Holy of Holies and never enter at all to look upon God? We hear the Bridegroom say, `Let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is comely.' (Song of Sol 2:14) We sense that the call is for us, but still we fail to draw near, and the years pass and we grow old and tired in the outer courts of the tabernacle. What doth hinder us? The answer usually given, simply that we are `cold,' will not explain all the facts. There is something more serious than coldness of heart, something that may be back of that coldness and be the cause of its existence. What is it? What but the presence of a veil in out hearts? A veil not taken away as the first veil was, but which remains there still shutting out the light and hiding the face of God from us. It is the veil of our fleshly fallen nature living on, unjudged within us, uncrucified and unrepudiated. It is the close- woven veil of the self-life which we have never truly acknowledged, of which we have been secretly ashamed, and which for these reasons we have never brought to the judgment of the cross. It is not too mysterious, this opaque veil, nor is it hard to identify. We have but to look in our own hearts and we shall see it there, sewn and patched and repaired it may be, but there nevertheless, an enemy to our lives and an effective block to our spiritual progress. This veil is not a beautiful thing and it is not a thing about which we commonly care to talk, but I am addressing the thirsting souls who are determined to follow God, and I know they will not turn back because the way leads temporarily through the blackened hills. The urge of God within them will assure their continuing the pursuit. They will face the facts however unpleasant and endure the cross for the joy set before them. So I am bold to mane the threads out of which this inner veil is woven. It is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit. They are not something we do, they are something we are, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power.

As she slipped back into the house, Travis mumbled, “It’s about time.” Everett Hayes had the gall to wink at him. “Better get used to it, Archer. Things are never the same after you install a woman in your house.” “That is true,” the parson said as he pushed up out of his chair, his expression slightly censorious as he glanced at Everett. “But if the Lord is installed, as well, the changes can bring blessing to a man.” He shifted his attention and peered at Travis. “Marriage is a sacred union, son, and not something to dread. As Ecclesiastes says, ‘Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. . . . A threefold cord is not quickly broken.’ Keep God woven into your relationship and this union will make you stronger. But if you treat it as a burden, it will become one.

A Marxist historian would say that industries grew up and remained in an area because there was a plentiful supply of a certain necessary item. The existence of coal and steel in the Midlands led to the engineering industry being based there, a humid climate meant cotton was woven in Lancashire, and finance was located in the City of London because of a plentiful supply of hard-hearted and cruel individuals.

It is a single perfect memory. A goodbye that gives me peace and courage. Her courage. If I ever have a sliver of it, I will be lucky. Be brave. It was the last thing she said to me in this world, and I wish I'd told her that her courage would always guide me. In my dreams, I say I love you. I tell her every day how she shaped me, how she taught me to stand up and find my woman's voice, even in this man's world. This is how my love for her goes on: in moments remembered and moments imagined. It's how I keep her alive. Hers is the voice in my conscience. I see the world, at least in part, through her eyes. Her story- which is the story of a time and land and the indomitable will of a people- is my story; two lives woven together, and like any good story, ours will begin and end and being again. Love is what remains.

Born in the East, and clothed in Oriental form and imagery, the Bible walks the ways of all the world with familiar feet, and enters land after land to find its own everywhere. It has learned to speak in hundreds of languages to the heart of man. It comes into the palace to tell the monarch that he is the servant of the Most High, and into the cottage to assure the peasant that he is the son of God. Children listen to its stories with wonder and delight, and wisemen ponder them as parables of life. It has a word of peace for the time of peril, the hour of darkness. Its oracles are repeated in the assembly of the people, and its counsels whispered in the ear of the lonely. The wise and the proud tremble at its warnings, but to the wounded and penitent it has a mother's voice. The wilderness and the solitary place have been made glad by it, and the fire on the hearth has lighted the reading of its well-worn pages. It has woven itself into our deepest affections, and colored our dearest dreams; so that love and friendship, sympathy and devotion, memory and hope, put on the beautiful garments of its treasured speech, breathing of frankincense and myrrh. Above the cradle and beside the grave its great words come to us uncalled. They fill our prayers with power larger than we know, and the beauty of them lingers in our ear long after the sermons which they have adorned have been forgotten. They return to us swiftly and quietly, like birds flying from far away. They surprise us with new meanings, like springs of water breaking forth from the mountain beside a long-forgotten path. They grow richer, as pearls do when they are worn near the heart. No man is poor or desolate who has this treasure for his own. When the landscape darkens and the trembling pilgrim comes to the valley named the shadow, he is not afraid to enter; he takes the rod and staff of Scripture in his hand; he says to friend and comrade, "Good-by, we shall meet again"; and comforted by that support, he goes toward the lonely pass as one who climbs through darkness into light.

Further reports indicate that due to the ghastly circumstances surrounding the king’s death, the noble houses of Ardunia will begin talks today to decide whether retribution against the southern empire is necessary. Should they decide in the affirmative, their decision would mark the end of an unprecedented seven years of peace time, launching what officials say could be the bloodiest war in recent history. . . .

Hoonie used to listen carefully to all the men who brought him news, and he would nod, exhale resolutely, and then get up to take care of the chores. "No matter," he would say, "no matter." Whether China capitulated or avenged itself, the weeds would have to be pulled from the vegetable garden, rope sandals would need to be woven if they were to have shoes, and the thieves who tried often to steal their few chickens had to be kept away.

SEEN ACROSS TEN MILES OF sunlit water, Lorbanery was green, green as the bright moss by a fountain’s rim. Nearby, it broke up into leaves, and tree-trunks, and shadows, and roads, and houses, and the faces and clothing of people, and dust, and all that goes to make up an island inhabited by men. Yet still, over all, it was green: for every acre of it that was not built or walked upon was given up to the low, round-topped hurbah trees, on the leaves of which feed the little worms that spin the silk that is made into thread and woven by the men and women and children of Lorbanery. At dusk the air there is full of small grey bats who feed on the little worms. They eat many, but are suffered to do so and are not killed by the silk-weavers, who indeed account it a deed of very evil omen to kill the grey-winged bats. For if human beings live off the worms, they say, surely small bats have the right to do so.

Asking a writer why they like to write {in the theoretical sense of the question} is like asking a person why they breathe. For me, writing is a natural reflex to the beauty, the events, and the people I see around me. As Anais Nin put it, "We write to taste life twice." I live and then I write. The one transfers to the other, for me, in a gentle, necessary way. As prosaic as it sounds, I believe I process by writing. Part of the way I deal with stressful situations, catty people, or great joy or great trials in my own life is by conjuring it onto paper in some way; a journal entry, a blog post, my writing notebook, or my latest story. While I am a fair conversationalist, my real forte is expressing myself in words on paper. If I leave it all chasing round my head like rabbits in a warren, I'm apt to become a bug-bear to live with and my family would not thank me. Some people need counselors. Some people need long, drawn-out phone-calls with a trusted friend. Some people need to go out for a run. I need to get away to a quiet, lonesome corner--preferably on the front steps at gloaming with the North Star trembling against the darkening blue. I need to set my pen fiercely against the page {for at such moments I must be writing--not typing.} and I need to convert the stress or excitement or happiness into something to be shared with another person. The beauty of the relationship between reading and writing is its give-and-take dynamic. For years I gathered and read every book in the near vicinity and absorbed tale upon tale, story upon story, adventures and sagas and dramas and classics. I fed my fancy, my tastes, and my ideas upon good books and thus those aspects of myself grew up to be none too shabby. When I began to employ my fancy, tastes, and ideas in writing my own books, the dawning of a strange and wonderful idea tinged the horizon of thought with blush-rose colors: If I persisted and worked hard and poured myself into the craft, I could create one of those books. One of the heart-books that foster a love of reading and even writing in another person somewhere. I could have a hand in forming another person's mind. A great responsibility and a great privilege that, and one I would love to be a party to. Books can change a person. I am a firm believer in that. I cannot tell you how many sentiments or noble ideas or parts of my own personality are woven from threads of things I've read over the years. I hoard quotations and shadows of quotations and general impressions of books like a tzar of Russia hoards his icy treasures. They make up a large part of who I am. I think it's worth saying again: books can change a person. For better or for worse. As a writer it's my two-edged gift to be able to slay or heal where I will. It's my responsibility to wield that weapon aright and do only good with my words. Or only purposeful cutting. I am not set against the surgeon's method of butchery--the nicking of a person's spirit, the rubbing in of a salty, stinging salve, and the ultimate healing-over of that wound that makes for a healthier person in the end. It's the bitter herbs that heal the best, so now and again you might be called upon to write something with more cayenne than honey about it. But the end must be good. We cannot let the Light fade from our words.

They’re woven to the ground out here,” she says quietly as the pair behind us continues sparring. “Think of an umbrella. The wardstone is the stem, and the wards take the shape of a dome over Navarre.” She motions with her hands, forming the shape. “But just like an umbrella’s spokes are strongest at the stem, by the time the wards reach the ground, they’re too weak to do much without a boost.” “Provided by the alloy,” I whisper. My heart starts to pound. “And the dragons.

The man who desires women only to deceive them, who loves them only to possess them, who takes them only to betray them, and who scorns them when they no longer please him...the man for whom nothing is sacred when it comes to seducing them, and who triumphs only in order to disgrace them—will such a man, I say, ever feel the happiness of finding a virtuous woman, someone who could repair the disorder of his desires, and replace that shameful frivolity with the sweetness of those ties that bind when woven by marriage?

The differences between religions are reflected very clearly in the different forms of sacred art: compared with Gothic art, above all in its “flamboyant” style, Islamic art is contemplative rather than volitive: it is “intellectual” and not “dramatic”, and it opposes the cold beauty of geometrical design to the mystical heroism of cathedrals. Islam is the perspective of “omnipresence” (“God is everywhere”), which coincides with that of “simultaneity” (“Truth has always been”); it aims at avoiding any “particularization” or “condensation”, any “unique fact” in time and space, although as a religion it necessarily includes an aspect of “unique fact”, without which it would be ineffective or even absurd. In other words Islam aims at what is “everywhere center”, and this is why, symbolically speaking, it replaces the cross with the cube or the woven fabric: it “decentralizes” and “universalizes” to the greatest possible extent, in the realm of art as in that of doctrine; it is opposed to any individualist mode and hence to any “personalist” mysticism. To express ourselves in geometrical terms, we could say that a point which seeks to be unique, and which thus becomes an absolute center, appears to Islam—in art as in theology—as a usurpation of the divine absoluteness and therefore as an “association” (shirk); there is only one single center, God, whence the prohibition against “centralizing” images, especially statues; even the Prophet, the human center of the tradition, has no right to a “Christic uniqueness” and is “decentralized” by the series of other Prophets; the same is true of Islam—or the Koran—which is similarly integrated in a universal “fabric” and a cosmic “rhythm”, having been preceded by other religions—or other “Books”—which it merely restores. The Kaaba, center of the Muslim world, becomes space as soon as one is inside the building: the ritual direction of prayer is then projected toward the four cardinal points. If Christianity is like a central fire, Islam on the contrary resembles a blanket of snow, at once unifying and leveling and having its center everywhere.

He is the butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says! Off come my clothes. He makes his whistles out of an elder twig and that is what he uses to call the birds out of the air - all the birds come; and the sweetest singers he will keep in cages. He could thrust me into the seed-bed of next year's generation and I would have to wait until he whistled me up from my darkness before I could come back again. His skin is the tint and texture of sour cream, he has stiff, russet nipples ripe as berries. Like a tree that bears bloom and fruit on the same bough together, how pleasing, how lovely. I feel your sharp teeth in the subaqueous depths of your kisses. You sink your teeth into my throat and make me scream. His embraces were his enticements and yet, oh yet! they were the branches of which the trap itself was woven. I shall take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair as he lies half dreaming, half waking, and wind them into ropes, very softly, so he will not wake up, and, softly, with hands as gentle as rain, I shall strangle him with them.

Many today insist that music is amoral, that there is nothing innately good or bad about music itself. They say it is neutral, and only its use determines whether it is good or evil. To a degree this is true, but in a very real way music ceases to be neutral the moment those little black-and-white notes begin to be woven together to produce a certain combinations of sounds that result in the message or world-view that the composer of the music wants to get across. The music itself becomes a statement, even when words are not attached to its message.

What shall I say, what word, what cry recall, What god invoke, what charm, what amulet, To make a sonnet pay a hopeless debt, Or heal a bruised soul with a madrigal? O vanity of words! my cup of gall O'erflows with this, I have no phrase to set, And all my agony and bloody sweat Comes to this issue of no words at all. This is my book, and in my book my soul With its two woven threads of joy and pain, And both were yours before they were begun. Oh! that this dream would like a mist unroll, That I might look upon your face again, And hear your kind voice say: 'This was well done.

That my father killed your parents. And you killed mine.” I can’t believe it all fits in exactly ten words. Our pasts, woven together. One—no, four more reasons we could never work. As though we needed them. They come with a garbled mess of questions that I haven’t even begun to wrangle free. Do I resent him? Does he hate me? Am I angry? How much of this is his fault? Should I carry my parents’ sins? Can I forgive? Can he? Is there anything to forgive here? He’s just as stumped. Fiddling with these impossible thoughts. Gives me a stuck, resigned look and says, “Couple goals, am I right?

This is a very serious thing, Edith,” he replied. “Our pig is completely out of the ordinary.” “What’s unusual about the pig?” asked Mrs. Zuckerman, who was beginning to recover from her scare. “Well, I don’t really know yet,” said Mr. Zuckerman. “But we have received a sign, Edith—a mysterious sign. A miracle has happened on this farm. There is a large spider’s web in the doorway of the barn cellar, right over the pigpen, and when Lurvy went to feed the pig this morning, he noticed the web because it was foggy, and you know how a spider’s web looks very distinct in a fog. And right spang in the middle of the web there were the words ‘Some Pig.’ The words were woven right into the web. They were actually part of the web, Edith. I know, because I have been down there and seen them. It says, ‘Some Pig,’ just as clear as clear can be. There can be no mistake about it. A miracle has happened and a sign has occurred here on earth, right on our farm, and we have no ordinary pig.” “Well,” said Mrs. Zuckerman, “it seems to me you’re a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider.” “Oh, no,” said Zuckerman. “It’s the pig that’s unusual. It says so, right there in the middle of the web.” “Maybe

Loving the Hands I could make a wardrobe with tufts of wool caught on thistle and bracken. Lost - the scraps I might have woven whole cloth. "Come watch," the man says, shearing sheep with the precision of long practice, fleece, removed all of a piece, rolled in a neat bundle. I've been so clumsy with people people who've loved me. Straddling a ewe, the man props its head on his foot, leans down with clippers, each pass across the coat a caress. His dogs, lying nearby, tremble at every move - as I do, loving the hands that have learned to gentle the life beneath them.

I cannot hope to make you understand how the world is truly made,' he told her. 'Metaphor, then: the world is a weave, like threads woven into cloth.' His hand came out of his sleeve with a strip of his red ribbon. 'If you say so.' 'Everything, stone, trees, beasts, the sky, the waters, all are a weave of fabric,' he said patiently. 'But when you think, it is different. Your thinking snarls the fabric, knots it. If you were a magician, you could use the knot of your mind to pull on other threads. That is magic, and now you see how every simple it is. I wonder everyone does not become an enchanter.

Ah, but the Third Hallow is a true Cloak of Invisibility, Miss Granger! I mean to say, it is not a traveling cloak imbued with a Disillusionment Charm, or carrying a Bedazzling Hex, or else woven from Demiguise hair, which will hide one initially but fade with the years until it turns opaque. We are talking about a cloak that really and truly renders the wearer completely invisible, and endures eternally, giving constant and impenetrable concealment, no matter what spells are cast at it. How many cloaks have you ever seen like that, Miss Granger?” Hermione opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again,

Some kinds of instruction in prayer used to say, at the beginning, ‘Put yourself in the presence of God.’ But I often wonder whether it would be more helpful to say, ‘Put yourself in the place of Jesus.’ It sounds appallingly ambitious, even presumptuous, but that is actually what the New Testament suggests we do. Jesus speaks to God for us, but we speak to God in him. You may say what you want – but he is speaking to the Father, gazing into the depths of the Father’s love. And as you understand Jesus better, as you grow up a little in your faith, then what you want to say gradually shifts a bit more into alignment with what he is always saying to the Father, in his eternal love for the eternal love out of which his own life streams forth. That, in a nutshell, is prayer – letting Jesus pray in you, and beginning that lengthy and often very tough process by which our selfish thoughts and ideals and hopes are gradually aligned with his eternal action; just as, in his own earthly life, his human fears and hopes and desires and emotions are put into the context of his love for the Father, woven into his eternal relation with the Father – even in that moment of supreme pain and mental agony that he endures the night before his death.

In the course of my new work I had occasion to go roaming about the whole construction site and time to sit on the ceiling of the eighth floor of our building, in other words, as if on the roof. And from there we prisoners had a panoramic view of Moscow. ... But no matter how much of a greenhorn I was in champing at the bit to be out "in freedom," this city did not arouse in me envy or the wish to soar down onto its streets. All the evil holding us prisoner had been woven here. This arrogant city had never before provided such a justification as it did now after the war for the saying: "Moscow turns its back on tears!

Just as summer-killed meat draws flies, so the court draws spurious sages, philosophists, and acosmists who remain there as long as their purses and their wits will maintain them, in the hope (at first) of an appointment from the Autarch and (later) of obtaining a tutorial position in some exalted family. At sixteen or so, Thecla was attracted, as I think young women often are, to their lectures on theogony, thodicy, and the like, and I recall one particularly in which a phoebad put forward as an ultimate truth the ancient sophistry of the existence of three Adonai, that of the city (or of the people), that of the poets, and that of the philosophers. Her reasoning was that since the beginning of human consciousness (if such a beginning ever was) there have been vast numbers of persons in the three categories who have endeavored to pierce the secret of the divine. If it does not exist, they should have discovered that long before; if it does, it is not possible that Truth itself should mislead them. Yet the beliefs of the populace, the insights of the rhapsodists, and the theories of the metaphysicians have so far diverged that few of them can so much as comprehend what the others say, and someone who knew nothing of any of their ideas might well believe there was no connection at all between them. May it not be, she asked (and even now I am not certain I can answer), that instead of traveling, as has always been supposed, down three roads to the same destination, they are actually traveling toward three quite different ones? After all, when in common life we behold three roads issuing from the same crossing, we do not assume they all proceed toward the same goal. I found (and find) this suggestion as rational as it is repellent, and it represents for me all that monomaniacal fabric of argument, so tightly woven that not even the tiniest objection or spark of light can escape its net, in which human minds become enmeshed whenever the subject is one in which no appeal to fact is possible. As a fact the Claw was thus an incommensurable. No quantity of money, no piling up of archipelagoes or empires could approach it in value any more than the indefinite multiplication of horizontal distance could be made to equal vertical distance. If it was, as I believed, a thing from outside the universe, then its light, which I had seen shine faintly so often, and a few times brightly, was in some sense the only light we had. If it were destroyed, we were left fumbling in the dark.

I stare at the writing on the wall. Hypnotised. Can’t look away. The author has a strong hand. Each letter energetic; bold strokes. Such funny shapes. Such jagged, edged lines. A patchwork woven in the deepest black ink. I reach out to touch its upright, elegant beauty. I gasp as it starts to grow. Big and threatening. Its lines stretch into long, long legs. Its shapes swell into mouths with sharp teeth that transform into gigantic knives. It jumps off the wall, out at me. I scream. Try to run away. Too late. A blade slashes me in the back. I fall. Agonising pain rips through me. I beg for mercy. The knife is a huge needle now heading for my face…

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them; It may be you are from old people and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mother’s laps, And here you are the mother’s laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colorless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues! And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. What do you think has become of the young and old men? What do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere; The smallest sprouts show there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceased the moment life appeared. All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but from that which then I shall be.

And just as Catskin went to the ball, and Cendrillon, and Aschenputtel, so must you. The ball that will be given soon in the palace; I've heard talk of it in the kitchens. The servants say one is held each year. Have you never gone?" She shook her head. "Then you must go this year dressed in a fine gown as it is done in the stories." She sat staring at him. "Me, Gillie? I don’t belong at the ball." "As much as Cinderella did." "But they are only stories; they’re not things that can happen." She studied him for a long time. He did not seem to be making a joke. "It's what you dream, Thursey. You should do what you dream of doing, else where is the good in dreaming?

Southerners have a lot to be proud of. We have survived, and we have overcome. Southern women, especially, have learned to be proud of what they have and patient for what they want--even revenge. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, as the old saying goes, and darlin’, there is just no way to ever kill the pride and joy of being a Grits. Wisdom, courage, sacrifice, and determination are the lessons of our history. Southerners know and understand our past as a people, which is why we are all connected, no matter our status in life. We recognize kinship as the golden threads that are woven through our past: the struggles, the pain, and the power of overcoming.

Well, this time I'll be honest with you and let you in on it. Listen, in dreams and particularly in nightmares, caused perhaps by indigestion or whatever, a man may think up such artistic creations, such complex and realistic visions, events or even a whole world of events woven into a plot of such astounding details that even Leo Tolstoi himself could not invent them. And yet people who have such dreams don't have to be novelists but can be the most ordinary civil servants, newspapermen, priests, or anything . . . It creates, in fact, a most interesting problem: once, for instance, I heard a member of the government say that his best ideas came to him when he was asleep.

You say hope leads to disaster, but I say from disaster comes hope. You were married and I thought I'd never learn your name. Now I know you love sea turtles and snorkeling, you're fiercely devoted to your friends, and you take your coffee with a lot of cream but will add sugar when the mood strikes. Before you, I didn't think life could get better; a great family, the best home, and so much time to enjoy my life. What more could I want? You've upended my world and become woven into every part of it. I can't carve a nisse without thinking about what might amuse you. Every time I make a kringle, I wonder if you'll like it. I never want to look at the stars again without you to guide my gaze.

Relax—it’s just Marella,” Sophie told them, dropping her voice before she added, “She’s the one whose mom saw Cyrah the day she faded.” “And she’s not staring at us,” Biana corrected. “She’s checking out Tam.” Tam’s eyebrows shot up, and he stole another glance. Marella tossed her long blond hair—which always had a few tiny braids woven in—and gave him her flirtiest smile. “Huh,” he said. “That’s all you have to say?” Biana pressed. “I don’t know.” Tam blushed brighter than Sophie would’ve thought possible, given his general surly demeanor. “What am I supposed to say?” “She’s not his type,” Linh jumped in. “He likes brunettes.” “Gross, why do you know that?” Tam asked. Linh smirked. “Because you’re not as sly as you think.

When he awakened from sleep, he said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it.... This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:16–17). In the Celtic world that gateway is present everywhere. In every place is the immediacy of heaven. In every moment we can glimpse the Light that was in the beginning and from which all things have come. As Oliver says, “The threshold is always near.”3 We can step over this threshold and back again in the fleeting span of a second. In a single step we can find ourselves momentarily in that other world, the world of eternal Light, which is woven inseparably through this world—the world of matter that is forever unfolding like a river in flow.

You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall.

The marriage coverlet is woven and embroidered for the happy pair, the house is built in a few summer weeks by the meitheal of neighbours, the last twist and stitch is put to the thatch, and in they go, the fortunate couple, with strength and purpose – and at length the house is desolate and empty with only rain for a roof, the stranger comes and opens the rotted hope chest, and puts their fingers to the folded coverlet, which falls from their hand in mouldy fragments. And that’s all we can say about it, the shortness, the swiftness, and the strange unimportance of life. But when June is queen, eternally in the grasses, in the wood pigeons, in the dank rooks, in the potato gardens, in the cabbage patches, wild dreams are given birth to with all the mighty energy of the full-blowing year.

An Irishman tried to convert me to belief in Christ; he would repeat, over and over, the goyim's saying: All roads lead to Rome. At night, my delirium would grow fat upon that metaphor: I sensed that the world was a labyrinth, impossible to escape— for all roads, even if they pretended to lead north or south, returned finally to Rome, which was also the rectangular prison where my brother lay dying, and which was also the Villa Triste-le-Roy. During those nights, I swore by the god that sees with two faces, and by all the gods of fever and of mirrors, to weave a labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother. I have woven it, and it has stood firm: its materials are a dead heresiologue, a compass, an eighthcentury cult, a Greek word, a dagger, the rhombuses of a paint factory....

PSALM 139 O LORD, you have  p searched me and known me! 2    You  q know when I sit down and when I rise up;         you  r discern my thoughts from afar. 3    You search out my path and my lying down         and are acquainted with all my ways. 4    Even before a word is on my tongue,         behold, O LORD,  s you know it altogether. 5    You  t hem me in, behind and before,         and  u lay your hand upon me. 6     v Such knowledge is  w too wonderful for me;         it is high; I cannot attain it.     7  x Where shall I go from your Spirit?         Or where  y shall I flee from your presence? 8     z If I ascend to heaven, you are there!          a If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! 9    If I take the wings of the morning         and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 10    even there your hand shall  b lead me,         and your right hand shall hold me. 11    If I say,  c “Surely the darkness shall cover me,         and the light about me be night,” 12     d even the darkness is not dark to you;         the night is bright as the day,         for darkness is as light with you.     13 For you  e formed my inward parts;         you  f knitted me together in my mother’s womb. 14    I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. [1]      g Wonderful are your works;         my soul knows it very well. 15     h My frame was not hidden from you,     when I was being made in secret,         intricately woven in  i the depths of the earth. 16    Your eyes saw my unformed substance;     in your  j book were written, every one of them,         the days that were formed for me,         when as yet there was none of them.

It is a single perfect memory. A goodbye that gives me peace and courage. Her courage. If I have even a sliver of it, I will be lucky. Be brave. It was the last thing she said to me in this world, and I wish I'd told her that her courage will always guide me. In my dreams, I say I love you. I tell her every day how she shaped me, how she taught me to stand up and find my woman's voice, even in this man's world. This is how my love for her goes on: in moments remembered and moments imagined. It's how I keep her alive. Hers is the voice in my head, my conscience. I see the world, at least in part, through her eyes. Her story- which is the story of a time and land and the indomitable will of a people- is my story; two lives woven together, and like any good story, ours will begin and end and begin again. Love is what remains.

ON 26 July 1926, Vita Sackville-West gave the Woolfs a cocker spaniel puppy which they named Pinka (or Pinker). She ate holes in Virginia’s skirt and devoured Leonard’s proofs. “But”, writes Virginia, “she is an angel of light. Leonard says seriously she makes him believe in God . . . and this after she has wetted his floor 8 times in one day”. For nine years Pinka was the much loved companion of both Leonard and Virginia, though in time she became essentially Leonard’s dog. Loved as she was, the pattern of her life naturally became woven into the pattern of theirs. The daily habits; her walk with Leonard round Tavistock Square garden in the morning before the day’s work began. Her joke of extinguishing, with her paw, Virginia’s match when she lit a cigarette, and so on. Virginia mentions her again and again in letters and diaries.

But overprotection is just one part of a larger trend that we call problems of progress. This term refers to bad consequences produced by otherwise good social changes. It’s great that our economic system produces an abundance of food at low prices, but the flip side is an epidemic of obesity. It’s great that we can connect and communicate with people instantly and for free, but this hyperconnection may be damaging the mental health of young people. It’s great that we have refrigerators, antidepressants, air conditioning, hot and cold running water, and the ability to escape from most of the physical hardships that were woven into the daily lives of our ancestors back to the dawn of our species. Comfort and physical safety are boons to humanity, but they bring some costs, too. We adapt to our new and improved circumstances and then lower the bar for what we count as intolerable levels of discomfort and risk. By the standards of our great-grandparents, nearly all of us are coddled. Each generation tends to see the one after it as weak, whiny, and lacking in resilience. Those older generations may have a point, even though these generational changes reflect real and positive progress. To repeat, we are not saying that the problems facing students, and young people more generally, are minor or “all in their heads.” We are saying that what people choose to do in their heads will determine how those real problems affect them. Our argument is ultimately pragmatic, not moralistic: Whatever your identity, background, or political ideology, you will be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed in pursuing your own goals if you do the opposite of what Misoponos advised.

Neliss, why is this rug wet?” Legna peeked around the corner to glance at the rug in question, looking as if she had never seen it before. “We have a rug there?” “Did you or did you not promise me you were not going to practice extending how long you can hold your invisible bowls of water in the house? And what on earth is that noise?” “Okay, I confess to the water thing, which was an honest mistake, I swear it. But as for a noise, I have no idea what you are talking about.” “You cannot hear that? It has been driving me crazy for days now. It just repeats over and over again, a sort of clicking sound.” “Well, it took a millennium, but you have finally gone completely senile. Listen, this is a house built by Lycanthropes. It is more a cave than a house, to be honest. I have yet to decorate to my satisfaction. There is probably some gizmo of some kind lying around, and I will come across it eventually or it will quit working the longer it is exposed to our influence. Even though I do not hear anything, I will start looking for it. Is this satisfactory?” “I swear, Magdelegna, I am never letting you visit that Druid ever again.” “Oh, stop it. You do not intimidate me, as much as you would love to think you do. Now, I will come over there if you promise not to yell at me anymore. You have been quite moody lately.” “I would be a hell of a lot less moody if I could figure out what that damn noise is.” Legna came around the corner, moving into his embrace with her hands behind her back. He immediately tried to see what she had in them. “What is that?” “Remember when you asked me why I cut my hair?” “Ah yes, the surprise. Took you long enough to get to it.” “If you do not stop, I am not going to give it to you.” “Okay. I am stopping. What is it?” She held out the box tied with a ribbon to him and he accepted it with a lopsided smile. “I do not think I even remember the last time I received a gift,” he said, leaning to kiss her cheek warmly. He changed his mind, though, and opted to go for her mouth next. She smiled beneath the cling of their lips and pushed away. “Open it.” He reached for the ribbon and soon was pulling the top off the box. “What is this?” “Gideon, what does it look like?” He picked up the woven circlet with a finger and inspected it closely. It was an intricately and meticulously fashioned necklace, clearly made strand by strand from the coffee-colored locks of his mate’s hair. In the center of the choker was a silver oval with the smallest writing he had ever seen filling it from top to bottom. “What does it say?” “It is the medics’ code of ethics,” she said softly, taking it from him and slipping behind him to link the piece around his neck beneath his hair. “And it fits perfectly.” She came around to look at it, smiling. “I knew it would look handsome on you.” “I do not usually wear jewelry or ornamentation, but . . . it feels nice. How on earth did they make this?” “Well, it took forever, if you want to know why it took so long for me to make good on the surprise. But I wanted you to have something that was a little bit of me and a little bit of you.” “I already have something like that. It is you. And . . . and me, I guess,” he laughed. “We are a little bit of each other for the rest of our lives.” “See, that makes this a perfect symbol of our love,” she said smartly, reaching up on her toes to kiss him. “Well, thank you, sweet. It is a great present and an excellent surprise. Now, if you really want to surprise me, help me find out what that noise is.

I’m sorry,” she said, wishing she could say something more meaningful. “I’m not. If he’d been a good uncle, I’d have stayed in Boston. Never would have found my way to San Francisco,” he said. Camille knew where the rest of his story led and grinned. “And you never would have rescued my father from a pickpocket,” she added. He started to laugh, a quiet, almost personal chuckle, like he was thinking about some funny memory. Camille caught the bug of laughter and wanted to join in. “What is it?” she asked. “Your father didn’t need a rescuer. He caught the pickpocket himself,” Oscar answered, a hand on his abdomen from all his laughter. “And then he invited him inside for dinner.” Her smile fell flat. She stared at him, trying to comprehend what he’d just said. “You?” she asked, dumbfounded. “You were the pickpocket?” Oscar nodded, scratching the back of his head. “Yeah. I wasn’t very good at it.” Her father could have had him arrested or shooed him away without thinking twice. But he’d invited Oscar inside. He gave him work, food…a real chance. “Why didn’t he tell me?” she asked, feeling like she’d been duped once again. All the lies her father had woven to cover up his secrets had become so frayed, Camille wondered if she had truly known him at all. “To give me a clean slate with everyone. Even you.” Oscar moved toward her in cautious, deliberate steps. “We’re alone. We should talk.” The pantry was cramped and dismal despite the oil lamp, and Camille had a sudden urge to flee. “About what?” she asked, her ears burning. She still reeled with the knowledge that the pickpocket story hadn’t been real, just like her mother’s story hadn’t been real. Oscar stopped within a few inches from her and reached a hand around her waist. “About our night together, Camille,” he answered, his dimples forming. “There’s a lot to say.

But our ill fortune did not afflict the Portuguese in our town: they still shipped gold and wool to Porto and still sent hanbals, kiswas and other woven goods to Guinea. If anything, the drought and famine we were experiencing had only made their trade more profitable, because the price of the wool had fallen so low that they could purchase larger quantities of it. That year, a strange thing happened. The farmers who had neither the funds to pay the Portoguese tax nor grain to sell at marked had to give their children as payment. Girls of marriagable age were worth two arrobas of wheat; boys twice as that. A custom official of my acquaintance swore that he had seen three Portuguese caravels leave Azzemur, each carrying two hundred girls and women, who would be transported to Seville, where they would be sold as domestics and concubines. From that blighted time came the saying: when bellies speak, reason is lost.

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands, How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Tenderly will I use you curling grass, It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps, And here you are the mothers' laps. This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers, Darker than the colourless beards of old men, Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps. What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceas'd the moment life appear'd. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Jesus said, "When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth; that thine alms may be in secret." This is the "secret virtue" of Buddhism. But when the account goes on to say that "Thy Father who seeth in secret shall recompense thee", we see a deep cleavage between Buddhism and Christianity. As long as there is any thought of anybody, be he God or devil, knowing of our doings and making recompense, Zen would say, "You are not yet one of us." Deeds that are the product of such thought leave "traces" and "shadows". If a spirit is tracing your doings, he will in no time get hold of you and make you account for what you have done; Zen will have none of it. The perfect garment shows no seams, inside and outside; it is one complete piece and nobody can tell where the work began, or how it was woven. In Zen, therefore, no traces of self-conceit or self-glorification are to be left behind even after the doing of good, much less the thought of recompense, even by God.

Paint in several colors was squeezed out of tubes and mixed and applied to woven fabric stretched on a wooden frame so artfully we say we see a woman hanging out a sheet rather than oil on canvas. Ana Teresa Fernandez’s image on that canvas is six feet tall, five feet wide, the figure almost life-size. Though it is untitled, the series it’s in has a title: Telaraña. Spiderweb. The spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught; the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven. Woven now by a machine, but before the industrial revolution by women whose spinning and weaving linked them to spiders and made spiders feminine in the old stories. In this part of the world, in the creation stories of the Hopi, Pueblo, Navajo, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples, Spider Grandmother is the principal creator of the universe. Ancient Greek stories included an unfortunate spinning woman who was famously turned into a spider as well as the more powerful Greek fates, who spun, wove, and cut each person’s lifeline, who ensured that those lives would be linear narratives that end. Spiderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats. There’s a German painting from the nineteenth century of women processing the flax from which linen is made. They wear wooden shoes, dark dresses, demure white caps, and stand at various distances from a wall, where the hanks of raw material are being wound up as thread. From each of them, a single thread extends across the room, as though they were spiders, as though it came right out of their bellies. Or as though they were tethered to the wall by the fine, slim threads that are invisible in other kinds of light. They are spinning, they are caught in the web. To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.

Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories. The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as ‘fictions’, ‘social constructs’, or ‘imagined realities’. An imagined reality is not a lie. I lie when I say that there is a lion near the river when I know perfectly well that there is no lion there. There is nothing special about lies. Green monkeys and chimpanzees can lie. A green monkey, for example, has been observed calling ‘Careful! A lion!’ when there was no lion around. This alarm conveniently frightened away a fellow monkey who had just found a banana, leaving the liar all alone to steal the prize for itself. Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world. Some sorcerers are charlatans, but most sincerely believe in the existence of gods and demons. Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights.

Little girl, who gave you permission to--Oh!” She bit off her words the moment that she noticed how well I was dressed, to say nothing of the two guards attending me. Her expression transformed from sour to sweet with stunning speed. “Ah, noble lady, I see that you have a keen eye for quality,” she cried. “You won’t find better cloth anywhere in Delphi--warm in winter, light in summer, tightly woven, and proof against wind and rain. And just look at those colors!” I did. They were all drab grays and browns. I held the first cloth up to the sunlight. If that was what she called a tight weave, so was a fishing net. “I want a cloak,” I told her, tossing the cloth aside. “Something long and heavy. It’s for him.” I nodded at Milo. “Of course, just as you wish, I have exactly what you want, wait right here,” she chattered. “I’ll bring out the best I have, something worthy of the noble lord.” She raised her hands to Milo in a gesture of reverence before ducking back into her house. “‘The noble lord’?” the tall guard repeated, incredulous. He and his companion snickered. Milo looked miserable. “Ignore them,” I told him, speaking low. “I promise you, before today is over, you’ll be the one laughing at them.

In Being and Event and elsewhere throughout his philosophy, Alain Badiou grants love an evental status, locating it among what he calls the four truth procedures. This inclusion of love seems anomalous. In comparison with the other three truth procedures, love doesn’t fit in. When one reads Being and Event for the first time, one can’t help but feel that the conception of the love event represents a philosophical misstep on Badiou’s part, a case where he allowed his own private emotions to have an undue impact on his philosophy. Though Badiou may like the feeling of being in love, this hardly justifies its status as a truth procedure. Unlike politics, art, and science, love seems to be an isolated phenomenon. A love event—the relationship of Jill and Dave, for instance—doesn’t have the same world-historical impact as the French Revolution or the invention of twelve-tone music (examples of the political and artistic event from Badiou). Even a love event that garners great attention, like the affair between Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abélard, fails to produces the type of substantive changes accomplished by the storming of the Bastille. But Badiou classifies love alongside the other truth procedures for its disruptiveness of everyday life and—which is in some sense to say the same thing—for its ability to arouse the subject’s passion. Love may be an anomalous truth procedure, but perhaps this is because it is the paradigmatic truth procedure. Love’s disruption of our everyday life is much more palpable than that of politics, art, or science. The subject in love feels as if it can’t exist without the beloved, while even Galileo himself didn’t feel this strongly about the scientific event in which he participated. It is much easier to imagine subjects dying for the sake of love than for the sake of the twelve-tone system of modern music. This is because love has a disruptiveness that transcends the other truth procedures. The cynical approach to love fails to register this disruptiveness. According to Badiou, the cynic contends that “love is only a variant of generalized hedonism,” and this cynicism enables one to avoid “every profound and authentic experience of otherness from which love is woven.” Dismissing the reality of love—seeing it as just a capitalist plot—is a way of avoiding the transformation that it demands, but it also leaves one’s existence bereft of significance. The passion that love arouses impels subjects to continue to go on.

At the time the Constitution was adopted, Lincoln pointed out, “the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the principle, and toleration, only by necessity,” since slavery was already woven into the fabric of American society. Noting that neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” was ever mentioned in the Constitution, Lincoln claimed that the framers concealed it, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.” As additional evidence of the framers’ intent, Lincoln brought his audience even further back, to the moment when Virginia ceded its vast northwestern territory to the United States with the understanding that slavery would be forever prohibited from the new territory, thus creating a “happy home” for “teeming millions” of free people, with “no slave amongst them.” In recent years, he said, slavery had seemed to be gradually on the wane until the fateful Nebraska law transformed it into “a sacred right,” putting it “on the high road to extension and perpetuity”; giving it “a pat on its back,” saying, “ ‘Go, and God speed you.’ ” Douglas

I worked on a new dish while you were away. A pudding." She ties her apron tight around her waist. "Milk, cream, vanilla, eggs, and sugar." "Oh," I say, slightly unsettled at the jauntiness of her tone, at its certainty. "A custard? Did it curdle?" She ignores my question and tells me that she garnished her pudding with branches of preserved barberries. She asks if I would like to see it. But before I can answer she scuttles to the pantry, returning with a clean pudding cloth over one arm, and my best platter----on which wobbles a custard as large and pale as a harvest moon. Atop are woven branches of barberries that wink like garnets. For a second I am speechless. Her creation---for it is nothing less---is picture-perfect. She offers me an egg spoon and jabs at the platter. "Go on, Miss Eliza. I saved it for you to taste first." I dip the spoon into the custard's wrinkled rind and lift it swiftly, curiously, to my lips. As I do so, I'm aware of a sense of serenity washing through me. My anguish over dedications, the lurking accusatory voice that lives inside my head, all of it slips away. And there is only cream and vanilla. It occurs to me that although this glorious pudding is her creation, Ann is partly my creation, and I am partly her creation. Cooking and tasting have provided their own stage and we are performing on it at this very moment.

Jay's downstairs waiting." With her father on one side, and the handrail on the other, Violet descended the stairs as if she were floating. Jay stood at the bottom, watching her, frozen in place like a statue. His black suit looked as if it had been tailored just for him. His jacket fell across his strong shoulders in a perfect line, tapering at his narrow waist. The crisp white linen shirt beneath stood out in contrast against the dark, finely woven wool. He smiled appreciatively as he watched her approach, and Violet felt her breath catch in her throat at the striking image of flawlessness that he presented. "You...are so beautiful," he whispered fervently as he strode toward her, taking her dad's place at her arm. She smiled sheepishly up at him. "So are you." Her mom insisted on taking no fewer than a hundred pictures of the two of them, both alone and together, until Violet felt like her eyes had been permanently damaged by the blinding flash. Finally her father called off her mom, dragging her away into the kitchen so that Violet and Jay could have a moment alone together. "I meant it," he said. "You look amazing." She shook her head, not sure what to say, a little embarrassed by the compliment. "I got you something," he said to her as he reached inside his jacket. "I hope you don't mind, it's not a corsage." Violet couldn't have cared less about having flowers to pin on her dress, but she was curious about what he had brought for her. She watched as he dragged out the moment longer than he needed to, taking his time to reveal his surprise. "I got you this instead." He pulled out a black velvet box, the kind that holds fine jewelry. It was long and narrow. She gasped as she watched him lift the lid. Inside was a delicate silver chain, and on it was the polished outline of a floating silver heart that drifted over the chain that held it. Violet reached out to touch it with her fingertip. "It's beautiful," she sighed. He lifted the necklace from the box and held it out to her. "May I?" he asked. She nodded, her eyes bright with excitement as he clasped the silver chain around her bare throat. "Thank you," she breathed, interlacing her hand into his and squeezing it meaningfully. She reluctantly used the crutches to get out to the car, since there were no handrails for her to hold on to. She left like they ruined the overall effect she was going for. Jay's car was as nice on the inside as it was outside. The interior was rich, smoky gray leather that felt like soft butter as he helped her inside. Aside from a few minor flaws, it could have passed for brand-new. The engine purred to life when he turned the key in the ignition, something that her car had never done. Roar, maybe-purr, never. She was relieved that her uncle hadn't ordered a police escort for the two of them to the dance. She had half expected to see a procession of marked police cars, lights swirling and sirens blaring, in the wake of Jay's sleek black Acura. Despite sitting behind the wheel of his shiny new car, Jay could scarcely take his eyes off her. His admiring gaze found her over and over again, while he barely concentrated on the road ahead of him. Fortunately they didn't have far to go.

One of the mystics in India, Kabir, was a weaver. He had thousands of followers and still he continued to weave clothes. Even kings were his followers. The king of Varanasi asked him, "Master, it doesn't look good, it makes us feel embarrassed. We can take care of you. There is no need for you to weave clothes and every week on market day, go into the market to sell your clothes. Just think of us: people laugh at us." Kabir said, "I can understand your problem but I have only one talent and that is to weave beautiful clothes. If I stop doing it, who will do it? And God comes in different faces, in different bodies, to purchase clothes every week in the marketplace." He used to address every customer, "Lord, be very careful of the cloth. I have been weaving it, not just like any other weaver -- my songs are in it and my soul is in it. I have poured my whole being in it. Be careful, use it with tenderness and love and remember: Kabir has woven it especially for you, Lord." And it was not something that he was addressing to anybody in particular -- any customer! This was his contribution. He used to say to his disciples, "What else can I do? I am doing my best: I can weave, I can sing, I can dance -- and I am immensely contented." Whatever you are doing, if there is contentment and a feeling that this whole existence is nothing but the manifestation of godliness, that we are traveling on holy earth, that whomever you are meeting, you are meeting God -- there is no other way; only faces are different, but the inner reality is the same -- all your tensions will disappear. And the energy that is involved in tensions will start becoming your grace, your beauty. Then life will not be just an ordinary, routine, day-to-day existence, but a dance from cradle to grave. And existence will be immensely enriched by your grace, by your relaxation, by your silence, by your awareness.

Can anything possibly be salvaged from it?” Wherever you are right now in the story, I am going to interrupt you with Isaiah 35. The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. (verses 1–2) There is nothing wrong with a desert that a little rain can’t fix. Dry land is not inherently barren; the dirt itself is not evil. We are after all “formed…of dust from the ground” (Genesis 2:7). And no one’s life is apart from that basic ground from which God can bring his purposes to blossom. There are stretches of time when nothing is growing, but all the while nutrients are in the soil and seeds embedded just beneath the surface. A moment will come when the necessary moisture will bring faith to flower. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you.” (verses 3–4) You think that you have all you can take? That you can’t lift another burden? That you can’t manage another challenge? Well, “Be strong…! Behold, your God.” God comes. He comes in “vengeance.” He will take care, decisively and completely, of all that is wrong with the story. He comes with “recompense.” He will provide everything to make you whole and mature. The word recompense has a root meaning of “weaning from the mother’s breast.” A happy time, for it means you are making a transition from being a weak and dependent infant, but it’s a terrifying time too, for it means you are no longer treated indulgently as an innocent. “He will come and save you.” Everything God does is woven into the plot for your salvation—the judgments on your sin, the weaning from your innocence, the gifts of maturity. At the end of the story, for you who choose to be his people, you will have a put-together life, a life vibrant with health, a life whole and solid in love.

All beauty calls you to me, and you seem, Past twice a thousand miles of shifting sea, To reach me. You are as the wind I breathe Here on the ship's sun-smitten topmost deck, With only light between the heavens and me. I feel your spirit and I close my eyes, Knowing the bright hair blowing in the sun, The eager whisper and the searching eyes. Listen, I love you. Do not turn your face Nor touch me. Only stand and watch awhile The blue unbroken circle of sea. Look far away and let me ease my heart Of words that beat in it with broken wing. Look far away, and if I say too much, Forget that I am speaking. Only watch, How like a gull that sparking sinks to rest, The foam-crest drifts along a happy wave Toward the bright verge, the boundary of the world. I am so weak a thing, praise me for this, That in some strange way I was strong enough To keep my love unuttered and to stand Altho' I longed to kneel to you that night You looked at me with ever-calling eyes. Was I not calm? And if you guessed my love You thought it something delicate and free, Soft as the sound of fir-trees in the wind, Fleeting as phosphorescent stars in foam. Yet in my heart there was a beating storm Bending my thoughts before it, and I strove To say too little lest I say too much, And from my eyes to drive love’s happy shame. Yet when I heard your name the first far time It seemed like other names to me, and I Was all unconscious, as a dreaming river That nears at last its long predestined sea; And when you spoke to me, I did not know That to my life’s high altar came its priest. But now I know between my God and me You stand forever, nearer God than I, And in your hands with faith and utter joy I would that I could lay my woman’s soul. Oh, my love To whom I cannot come with any gift Of body or of soul, I pass and go. But sometimes when you hear blown back to you My wistful, far-off singing touched with tears, Know that I sang for you alone to hear, And that I wondered if the wind would bring To him who tuned my heart its distant song. So might a woman who in loneliness Had borne a child, dreaming of days to come, Wonder if it would please its father’s eyes. But long before I ever heard your name, Always the undertone’s unchanging note In all my singing had prefigured you, Foretold you as a spark foretells a flame. Yet I was free as an untethered cloud In the great space between the sky and sea, And might have blown before the wind of joy Like a bright banner woven by the sun. I did not know the longing in the night– You who have waked me cannot give me sleep. All things in all the world can rest, but I, Even the smooth brief respite of a wave When it gives up its broken crown of foam, Even that little rest I may not have. And yet all quiet loves of friends, all joy In all the piercing beauty of the world I would give up– go blind forevermore, Rather than have God blot from out my soul Remembrance of your voice that said my name. For us no starlight stilled the April fields, No birds awoke in darking trees for us, Yet where we walked the city’s street that night Felt in our feet the singing fire of spring, And in our path we left a trail of light Soft as the phosphorescence of the sea When night submerges in the vessel’s wake A heaven of unborn evanescent stars.

All beauty calls you to me, and you seem” All beauty calls you to me, and you seem, Past twice a thousand miles of shifting sea, To reach me. You are as the wind I breathe Here on the ship's sun-smitten topmost deck, With only light between the heavens and me. I feel your spirit and I close my eyes, Knowing the bright hair blowing in the sun, The eager whisper and the searching eyes. Listen, I love you. Do not turn your face Nor touch me. Only stand and watch awhile The blue unbroken circle of the sea. Look far away and let me ease my heart Of words that beat in it with broken wing. Look far away, and if I say too much, Forget that I am speaking. Only watch, How like a gull that sparkling sinks to rest, The foam-crest drifts along a happy wave Toward the bright verge, the boundary of the world. I am so weak a thing, praise me for this, That in some strange way I was strong enough To keep my love unuttered and to stand Altho' I longed to kneel to you that night You looked at me with ever-calling eyes. Was I not calm? And if you guessed my love You thought it something delicate and free, Soft as the sound of fir-trees in the wind, Fleeting as phosphorescent stars in foam. Yet in my heart there was a beating storm Bending my thoughts before it, and I strove To say too little lest I say too much, And from my eyes to drive love's happy shame. Yet when I heard your name the first far time It seemed like other names to me, and I Was all unconscious, as a dreaming river That nears at last its long predestined sea; And when you spoke to me, I did not know That to my life's high altar came its priest. But now I know between my God and me You stand forever, nearer God than I, And in your hands with faith and utter joy I would that I could lay my woman's soul. Oh, my love To whom I cannot come with any gift Of body or of soul, I pass and go. But sometimes when you hear blown back to you My wistful, far-off singing touched with tears, Know that I sang for you alone to hear, And that I wondered if the wind would bring To him who tuned my heart its distant song. So might a woman who in loneliness Had borne a child, dreaming of days to come, Wonder if it would please its father's eyes. But long before I ever heard your name, Always the undertone's unchanging note In all my singing had prefigured you, Foretold you as a spark foretells a flame. Yet I was free as an untethered cloud In the great space between the sky and sea, And might have blown before the wind of joy Like a bright banner woven by the sun. I did not know the longing in the night-- You who have waked me cannot give me sleep. All things in all the world can rest, but I, Even the smooth brief respite of a wave When it gives up its broken crown of foam, Even that little rest I may not have. And yet all quiet loves of friends, all joy In all the piercing beauty of the world I would give up--go blind forevermore, Rather than have God blot from out my soul Remembrance of your voice that said my name. For us no starlight stilled the April fields, No birds awoke in darkling trees for us, Yet where we walked the city's street that night Felt in our feet the singing fire of spring, And in our path we left a trail of light Soft as the phosphorescence of the sea When night submerges in the vessel's wake A heaven of unborn evanescent stars.

If the distinction between subject and object is blurred in my body (and no doubt the distinction between noesis and noema as well?), it is also blurred in the thing, which is the pole of my body's operations, the terminus its exploration ends up in, and which is thus woven into the same intentional fabric as my body. When we say that the perceived thing is grasped 'in person' or 'in the flesh' (leibhaft}, this is to be taken literally: the flesh of what is perceived, this compact particle which stops exploration, and this optimum which terminates it аll reflect my own incarnation and are its counterpart. Here we have a type of being, a universe with its unparalleled 'subject' and 'object,' the articulation each in terms of the other, and the definitive definition of an 'irrelative' of all the 'relativities' of perceptual experience, which is the 'legal basis' for all the constructions of understanding. All understanding and objective thought owe their life to the in augural fact that with this color (or wit h whatever the sensible element in question may be ) I have perceived, I have had, a singular existence which suddenly stopped my glance yet promised it an indefinite series of experiences, which was a concretion of possibles real here and now in the hidden sides of the thing , which was a lapse of duration given all at once. The intentionality that ties together the stages of my exploration, the aspects of the thing , and the two series to each other is neither the mental subject's connecting activity nor the ideal connections of the object. It is the transition that as carnal subject I effect from one phase of movement to another, a transition which as a matter of principle is always possible for me because I am that animal of perceptions and movements called a body.

I mean to say, it is not a travelling cloak imbued with a Disillusionment Charm, or carrying a Bedazzling Hex, or else woven from Demiguise hair, which will hide one initially but fade with the years until it turns opaque. We are talking about a cloak that really and truly renders the wearer completely invisible, and endures eternally, giving constant and impenetrable concealment, no matter what spells are cast at it. How many cloaks have you ever seen like that, Miss Granger?

Of course not,” she says. “We’re human. How can we fully know the ways of the gods? For now we must be open and listen, and be thankful for their gifts.

little miffed about it. But you only need two out of three votes. Just do the best you can.” The Council didn’t know about her? Then why did Fitz say they’d been looking for her for twelve years? Before she could ask, they arrived at another clearing, and all coherent thoughts vanished. Dozens of squat, earth-toned creatures with huge gray eyes and bright green thumbs and teeth tended a garden that belonged in a fairy tale. Lush plants grew up and down and sideways and slantways. One of the females shuffled by in a dress woven from grass, carrying a basket filled with twinkling purple fruit. “What?” It was the only word Sophie could come up with.

Often they are connected to our schedule or calendars, such as: • Meals • Bedtime routines • Words you say as your kids start the day, head to school, or return home Rituals and traditions are often connected to the regular things a family inevitably navigates together: • Family mantras can help us persevere through a challenge or remember who we are. • A template can guide how you ask for and offer forgiveness to one another. Some are born from a desire to lean into special experiences and connect them to important ideas: • Holiday traditions for Christmas and Easter help us enter into God’s great work in the world, not only as it happened in the past, but as it continues today. • Birthday celebrations are a chance to bless a family member for simply being who they are, honoring them as a gift from God and expressing gratitude for them. Repetition is the very thing that empowers any of these practices.

After an exploratory conversation, the next step of the approach is to help a child respond using this key question: As I consider how God is X, or does Y, what would I like to say or do now? Responses can take many different forms. A child might: • Share a doubt or question • Make art, sing, or dance around • Share how they’re feeling and why • Show kindness or care for someone else • Try a Christian practice like lectio divina or imaginative prayer • Talk to God And yes, at times, a child might: • Take a step of faith in action

He liked one tapestry in particular that depicted a marvelously appointed griffin frozen in the act of putting a company of foot soldiers to flight. It was supposed to symbolize the triumph of some group of long-dead people over some other group of long-dead people whom nobody had liked, but for some reason the griffin had cocked its head to one side in the midst of its rampage and was gazing directly out of its woven universe at the viewer as if to say, yes, granted, I’m good at this. But is it really the best use of my time?

Faith doesn’t work by formula, so we are not going to either. Faith, as much as it pains me to say so, is not CrossFit, because God, I think it’s safe to say, doesn’t do burpees. And also doesn’t boss us around. Which means I cannot dictate your core movements. This is another reason we are going to be guided by a spider’s web: No two are alike. Each is a custom design reflecting not only the species of spider but also the environment in which the spider finds itself.

As a guide, then, the key question of explore is: What does this story say about who God is or what God does? As you explore a story, you might do the following: • Read, paraphrase, or listen to a Bible story. • Look for who God is and what God is like. • Offer a key detail about the context of the story to help it make more sense in our time. • Invite interruptions from your kid and encourage their questions. • Notice the emotions of God and the humans at different points along the way. • See if you can connect pieces of this story to other stories in the Bible. • Try asking one question, such as: ○ What was your favorite part of this story? ○ What was the strangest part of this story to you? ○ How do you think people felt at the beginning, the middle, and the end? ○ What did you notice about who God is or what God’s like in this story?

In the realm of boundless skies I soar, With the fire of beginnings, I implore, Though thorns may pierce, and darkness may loom, I'll test my strength in thunder's fierce boom. For high above, I seek my place, In the heavens, a name to embrace, Yet every breath fuels my might, As I brave the storms, take flight in the night. In the face of dust, my resolve remains, Despite the wounds, and life's crushing pains, I stand unbroken, my spirit's ablaze, In the crucible, I'll burn and amaze. Though I may stumble, and falter, and strain, In my heart, the desire remains untamed, With sparks in my eyes, and hope in my veins, I'll rise from the ashes, through trials and gains. For I've etched in my fists, a star's radiant gleam, In the city's uproar, I'll conquer, it seems, Though darkness may fall in an infinite stream, My end won't be falling; it's more than it seems. On my face, I may wear the marks of the fight, With a broken resolve, a fractured light, But within my core, strength takes its flight, And from the embers, I'll emerge in the night. Though breaths may shatter, and heartbeats may sway, In the depths of my being, I'll find my way, With fiery gaze, and a steadfast say, I'll conquer the tempest, come what may. I've woven a star in the palm of my hand, Let the drums of the city resound, understand, Though shadows may gather, like grains of sand, My fall is not final, I'll rise and expand. In the realm of boundless skies, I roam, With a heart unyielding, I'll find my home, Through trials and triumphs, I'll ceaselessly roam, My end isn't falling; it's where I'll become.

There is another reason I’m starting with God’s goodness. It’s where the Bible starts. Before the world existed, God existed, which means love and goodness have always been, and will always be. And to emphasize this point, the creation narrative declares, over and over again, “God is good. God is good. God is good.” When I tell kids the creation story from Genesis 1–2, I tell it like this: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. There had been nothing at all, and God’s Spirit hovered over the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” God spoke and there was… Light and dark. Day and night. God spoke and sky and land were made. God spoke and plants were made. The sun, moon, and stars. God spoke and land animals, birds, and ocean creatures were made. Every time, God says just a word and things are made. God can create with just Their voice. God speaks, and there is goodness all around. We know it’s good because there used to be chaos, but God gave things order. There used to be emptiness, but God started filling it up. For the people who first knew God and gave us God’s story in the Bible, these were clues that led to a very important truth.

Every now and then, as we welcome the morning this way, my husband or I will say, “God could have chosen to start the day any way They wanted to. Isn’t it great that God chose the most beautiful option?

What I believe, not what we believe. Describe the ways you disagree, the differences in theological understanding, or the distinctions between another worldview and your own as just that: your own. Adults sometimes say to kids, “This person or group believes X, but we believe Y.” However, your child is growing into what they believe. What’s more, your child’s love for you can make them feel pressured to align with you, and shut down the curious conversation that actually helps them determine their own views. Instead you can say, “I believe Y is true because… and I’m so glad you asked about this, because I’m here to help you figure out if Y is true too. What other questions do you have right now?” • Important history. Has this tradition or group been the subject of discrimination or violence historically, especially at the hands of politically or culturally powerful Christians? Share this information with them, so they understand why care and respect are so critical. This might sound like, “We always want to treat people kindly, of course. But it’s also important that you know that [group] has been treated especially poorly in the past. Sometimes when people feel sure they are right, they think that makes it okay to be mean to folks they’re ‘sure’ are wrong. This has been especially true when a group feels sure they are right and they have a lot of power. But even when we hold very different views, it’s important that everyone be safe, and for us to be part of not just kindness, but protection for all people.

I do say it a lot.'' ''What?'' she said, going briefly still. ''Your name,'' he said, and closed his eyes. He nearly fell over, catching himself at the last second. ''I didn't know your name for so long, angel. I love the way it feels in my mouth.

Roses and they She had shown him many things, She had made him feel joys of many springs, They had been to many places together, They had found love in each other, He had believed in her and her every word, He had erected on the highways of his heart her every memories’ billboard, She had travelled on them for many years, She had never let time’s brevity be the reason for her fears, So they felt every passing day, they experienced life of love, So much, that they even felt loved by the feeling of love, She waited for him in every moment, She felt it was him whenever a leaf fell or she felt some movement, He too felt the same; the way she felt, He too with her in his own heart dwelt, They lived a life that was unlamented by all virtues, They were kissed by life’s joys and and beauty’s all possible hues, He was unremitting when it came to loving her, He always wanted to be with her, forever together, Then one day they slept under a rose bush in full bloom, Then I beheld them being woven together on the life’s loom, He now lives within her and she lives within him, She is the rose bush that radiates with a different light under the moonlight dim, He is these roses which only bloom for her, And she is the rose bush that only grows for him forever!

In a quiet abode, where shadows weep, Lived the saddest grandmother, her sorrow ran deep. Once a home filled with laughter and cheer, Now echoes silence, a symphony of tears. Her eyes, like windows to a weathered soul, Glistened with memories that took their toll. A tale unfolded of love's sweet refrain, Now stained with loss, an enduring pain. Beside the hearth where warmth once thrived, Loneliness lingered, love deprived. A husband's absence, a void untold, Left her heart shattered, bitter and cold. Her family, once a vibrant bouquet, Now scattered petals, drifting away. The echoes of laughter, a distant sound, In the vast emptiness that sorrow found. Photographs whispered of days long past, A love that forever seemed to last. But time, a cruel and relentless stream, Carved lines of grief in a once joyous dream. Through tear-stained letters and faded attire, The saddest grandmother stoked love's dwindling fire. A matriarch cradled in solitude's embrace, Longing for the touch of her love's warm grace. Her children, grown and scattered like leaves, Each carried a piece of the pain she conceives. Yet, united by grief, a bittersweet thread, Bound by the love that time hadn't shed. In twilight's embrace, she wept in despair, A tapestry woven with threads of wear. The saddest grandmother, weathered and gray, Whispered to the wind the words she couldn't say. For in the echoes of her silent plea, Lingered the remnants of love's decree. A tale of loss, etched in the lines, Of the saddest grandmother, where sorrow resigns.

Prayer Postures • Reach up: What is something we love about God? • Reach out: What is something happening in our world that we want God to help with? • Hold hands: Who is someone we know that we want to pray for? • Hands to heart: What do you want to say to God or ask God about today?

Category Prayers Start here: Give your child a category to pray for and take turns naming something that fits in. You might say, “Let’s take turns thanking God for things in nature! I’ll name something, then you name something, and we’ll see how many we can think of.” When the list winds down, offer a simple closing, “God, You’ve made an amazing world. Thank You! Amen.

• If school is difficult, you could pray a set prayer right before they go in that says, “God, as kiddo is in school today, help them know You are near and You care.” • If a sibling relationship is rocky, your child could pray a set prayer for the relationship like, “God, I don’t always get along with [sibling]. You are patient and slow to get mad. Help me practice that, too, and when I’m not, thanks for helping us mend things and try again.” • If your child has a stumper of a faith question that won’t be answered easily, you could have a set prayer about that very thing. In fact, this is what we did after that car conversation about proof. At bedtime, we had a set prayer of “God, Riley is having a hard time trusting that You’re here when You can’t be seen, touched, or heard like he hears me now. Would You help him know that’s okay, and would You help him get to know You as he grows?

A message, like a fortune cookie, dropped into my inbox yesterday. It said: “Everything I touch sparkles, my energy is contagious & all those connected to me – wins… I can’t say for sure if it’s true, but thank you from the bottom of my heart for such sentiments. Darling listen – I want you to also take a moment today to reach out to someone who’s been a lucky charm in your life. Send them a carrier pigeon with a Thank-You note! Sweetheart, your vibes, energy & touch also have incredible power. Think about the people you care about & the ones whose lives you’re woven into. Are you making them feel lucky to have you around? Are your thoughts, words & actions adding sunshine to their day or leaving them feeling like they accidentally stepped into a grumpy cloud. Let you always strive to become the person whose presence brings joy, whose thoughts inspire, whose actions make a difference. Let you make people laugh in grocery stores, dance in small gatherings & to sing in elevators. Let your journey be meaningful & your impact undeniable. Blessings!

Letter To An Immortal They're not going to understand the lightning in your veins. They'll expect you to apologize for the wildflowers you've planted in your bones. You planted them there because even bones should grow flowers. They will question the mountain ranges around your heart, say that they should be let in, say that you're not allowed to have borders. They are going to want apologies for the rivers and brooks flowing through your veins and for the way you call to eagles, for how you swim with elephants. They'll expect you to make yourself understood, as if you owe them that. Everyone thinks that forces of nature don't come in human form; they'll want you to explain yourself. You won't have to, you don't have to. The first time it rained; it is they who learnt to build houses and to take cover; it is not the rain which stopped to study their patterns. The first time flowers grew out of cave walls, it is they who marvelled; no flower has said, that it must have grown in the wrong place at the wrong time! It is they who have died atop mountain ranges, no mountain has fallen for anyone! The very first time lightning hit a tree, they were given the gift of fire. The first time a man drowned in a river, they learnt of its currents and depths, but also, they chartered maps to new worlds beyond their own horizons. You are your own territory, not born on account of them but born as the planets are born, born as nature itself is born. Your dreams are the blueprints, the stories you are woven from. Let them learn, let them move according to the lands and the skies you inhabit.

Bridges Life did not appear to breathe here, It was covered in endless rounds of thread of fear, So it tread quietly along the fringes, Scared that it might be the cause of collapsing bridges, Bridges that connected life with hope, And it watched these bridges from a distance placing itself on a discreet slope, But it dared not cross them, none of them, It looked at them in desperation, especially some, For it often crossed them to renew its reserves of liveliness, But now it feels pervaded by a deep feeling of sadness, Life here seems to be a part of some sort of purgatory, Waiting to cross over and leave behind this existence derogatory, It may not be a perspicuous show of feelings, But here these are life’s daily dealings, And I wonder what about life’s own posterity, Because in this land of death life somehow loses all its virility, Tamed by some obnoxious devil, Who has had a diabolic conception and then raised by some heinous evil, Maybe that is why the bridges look so frail and hopeless themselves, Bearing stacks of hopelessness displayed on hope’s own shelves, For when life does not cross the bridges of hope, It is death that forsakes life and then time withdraws its rope, That maintains the perfect cohesion, Between beginnings and ends , between fission and fusion, And when this balance is lost anywhere, Life is cast into a place where there exists life everywhere, But nothing else nowhere, Just life, no hopes, no beauty, no bliss, no summer, a life that becomes its own prisoner in this infinity somewhere, However, now the bridges have fallen, but few still stand, And life that is tired of living without hope, feels the dying hope’s hand, And like the rope of time it pulls it unto itself, and makes life cross the bridge, Thus, life once again walks on the happy ridge, Hoping to live another day, feel life in a better and different way, For living the same moment of time begets no joy, if it is lived the same way everyday, And time weaves its threads of mystery and surprises around it, Then death too gets woven somewhere in this loop of time, and life finally says, “so be it!” And it jumps into the sea of time and collects its moments of myriad experiences, While time registers all these instances, And when the loop of death unwinds, In it a new loop of life it always finds, Now, even if the bridges may fall and time may end, Life has learned to create moments of happiness that never end!

Roses and they She had shown him many things, She had made him feel joys of many springs, They had been to many places together, They had found love in each other, He had believed in her and her every word, He had erected on the highways of his heart her every memories’ billboard, She had travelled on them for many years, She had never let time’s brevity be the reason for her fears, So they felt every passing day, they experienced life of love, So much, that they even felt loved by the feeling of love, She waited for him in every moment, She felt it was him whenever a leaf fell or she felt some movement, He too felt the same; as she felt, He to with her in his own heart dwelt, They lived a life that was unlamented by all virtues, They were kissed by life’s joys and and beauty’s all possible hues, He was unremitting when it came to loving her, He always wanted to be with her, forever together, Then one day they slept under a rose bush in full bloom, Then I beheld them being woven together on the life’s loom, He now lives within her and she lives within him, She is the rose bush that radiates with a different light under the moonlight dim, He is the roses which only bloom for her, And she is the rose bush that only grows for him forever!

Research for this book has made me aware of aspects of Christianity I find disturbing. During the past several years, rereading the gospels, I was struck by how their vision of supernatural struggle both expresses conflict and raises it to cosmic dimensions. This research, then, reveals certain fault lines in Christian tradition that have allowed for the demonizing of others throughout Christian history—fault lines that go back nearly two thousand years to the origins of the Christian movement. While writing this book I often recalled a saying of Søren Kierkegaard: "An unconscious relationship is more powerful than a conscious one." For nearly two thousand years, for example, many Christians have taken for granted that Jews killed Jesus and the Romans were merely their reluctant agents, and that this implicates not only the perpetrators but (as Matthew insists) all their progeny in evil. Throughout the centuries, countless Christians listening to the gospels absorbed, along with the quite contrary sayings of Jesus, the association between the forces of evil and Jesus’ Jewish enemies. Whether illiterate or sophisticated, those who heard the gospel stories, or saw them illustrated in their churches, generally assumed both their historical accuracy and their religious validity. Especially since the nineteenth century, however, increasing numbers of scholars have applied literary and historical analysis to the gospels—the so-called higher criticism. Their critical analysis indicated that the authors of Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source from which to construct their amplified gospels. Many scholars assumed that Mark was the most historically reliable because it was the simplest in style and was written closer to the time of Jesus than the others were. But historical accuracy may not have been the gospel writers’ first consideration. Further analysis demonstrated how passages from the prophetic writings and the psalms of the Hebrew Bible were woven into the gospel narratives. Barnabas Lindars and others suggested that Christian writers often expanded biblical passages into whole episodes that “proved,” to the satisfaction of many believers, that events predicted by the prophets found their fulfillment in Jesus’ coming.

This is not Penelope's heart breaking. She has woven so much rope around her heart, tied it and tied it and tied it shut, that though it shatters, yet it cannot fall apart. Not yet. This is not the sound of her world falling apart, for every morning she stands upon Ithaca's soil and says to herself, I am here, and I will do what is done.

There’s beauty to the storm, isn’t there? Something wild and uninhibited.” “You mean dangerous,” I say. “Or is it only perceived that way? Storms renew ecosystems, enrich the soil, and help prevent fires. The calamity of a storm heals.” She leans against me, pushing herself into my bulge. “Imagine being that way: wild and unafraid, if only while the rain falls.” “A stroke of lightning,” I murmur, my hands moving around her body. “A flash, and then it’s gone.” “But what a flash it could be.” Her voice is low, hungry.

Catalina says that people are like books. Some you want to read and enjoy; some you hate before you’ve even read a word.

We had no need of voices to say the truth in that moment, for we were linked mind and body and soul, attuned, attached, One. Merged. Enmeshed. A tree growing from one root, split into two trunks, entwined and woven one around the other, reaching together heavenward.

He laughed a little, like he was drunk. "I do say it a lot." "What?" she said, going briefly still. "Your name," he said, closing his eyes. He nearly fell over catching himself at the last second. "I didn't know your name for so long, angel. I love the way it feels on my mouth.

Nothing, perhaps. But there is no saying how events in one place may affect what happens elsewhere, for the tapestry of history is woven of many threads. We needs must study the whole warp and weft of it to predict the pattern on the loom.

Let’s say you’re in a book club. You’ve been meeting for years and years. Sometimes you can no longer remember which ideas were yours and which were someone else’s. You come to see that all your conversations over the years have been woven together into one long conversation. It’s almost as if the club has its own distinct voice, one greater than the individual voice of each member. Two sorts of knowledge have been generated here. The first kind, of course, is a deeper understanding of the books. The second kind of knowledge is more subtle and important. It’s knowledge about the club. It’s each member’s awareness of the dynamics of the group, what role each member tends to take in the conversations, what gifts each member brings. Maybe it’s misleading to use the word “knowledge” here. Maybe it’s more accurate to call this second kind of knowledge an “awareness.” It’s the highly attuned

Correspondence and succession, the two principles which permeate all mathematics—nay, all realms of exact thought — are woven into the very fabric of our number system,” he observes. So, indeed, are they woven into the very fabric of Western logic and philosophy. We have already seen how the phonetic technology fostered visual continuity and individual point of view, and how these contributed to the rise of uniform Euclidean space. Dantzig says that it is the idea of correspondence which gives us cardinal numbers. Both of these spatial ideas — lineality and point of view — come with writing, especially with phonetic writing; but neither is necessary in our new mathematics and physics. Nor is writing necessary to an electric technology.

Many of the verbal expressions that cause people to be detained on "mental health" grounds are — should be — protected speech. People who say things considered incomprehensible or illogical by the police or "mental health" workers are given ostensibly medical diagnoses and imprisoned for a limited time. That is, people who speak in a way those in authority disapprove of are punished, even if the speaker breaks no law. This blatant and often exercised limit on free speech is a "for your own good" exception to the First Amendment. There should be no such exception. But it is so woven into the fabric of American society and jurisprudence that virtually nobody objects. You can refuse a lifesaving treatment for cancer, but you cannot refuse to be jailed for saying something like, "I am Jesus" to the police when they are doing a "welfare check," a euphemism if there ever was one.

You’ve been quiet the past few nights.” “Just…thinking.” She can’t bring herself to say the goodbye she feels coming out loud. They are so old now—maybe it doesn’t need to be said. Maybe it’s already woven into each moment they share. Someone will be left behind; this is what love costs.

I want you too.” Her words are no more than a whisper “I want you. And Jadi,” she admits, and there’s a raw vulnerability in those simple words that I don’t understand. “I shouldn’t, should I? Want you both, I mean? Like that?” I roll to my side to stare at her in disbelief. With how close I am to her, the move has my face coming dangerously close to her own. “You want me?” “Why?” I ask. But I already know the answer. Because no one knows where Astarte’s arrow will strike, but when she aims, she strikes true. Because the gods are cruel and love to toy with their half-mortal children even more than they love to play with the mortals. Because Adrienne’s fate is somehow woven with mine and Jadi’s. Jadi told me that, he told me, and –fool that I am – I ignored him. “I’m sorry,” I say, trying to soften my voice. To curb the mocking, defensive bite in my words. “I just don’t see how you could. Not after how I’ve treated you.” Adrienne gives me a lopsided grin, then reaches over to lightly pat my shoulder. “You not that bad.” Her smile falls, expression growing serious. “I don’t know how explain it. I just feel… it feels…” she trails off, brow furrowing in frustration. She tucks her hands under her chin, and without thinking about it, I grasp them in my own. “I know.” The words come out in a low rumble. “I know. You don’t have to explain.” Because I feel it too. The pull towards her. It’s more than a physical attraction. More than desire – though that is certainly part of it. And now that I’m looking at her, with her mouth close to my own and her hands in mine and the heat of her body mixing with my own beneath the blankets. It feels right, and there’s no room for hesitation. Only action. I lean forward, slowly enough that she has time to object, my eyes never leaving her own. My nose brushes against hers for a brief moment, and then she’s pushing forward, her lips pressing against mine with a raw urgency that has fire racing through my veins and lust clouding my vision. It’s too much. Too much. I pull back, angling my body over hers, keeping my weight on my elbows as I cup her face in one hand, my thumb stroking the underside of her jaw, fingers tangling in her loose hair. I stare down at her – at her dilated pupils and sleep-mussed hair. At her parted lips and the delicate line of her throat. I can see her pulse thundering beneath the skin, and the rosy flush spreading down her neck. She’s so delicate. I’m torn between wanting to worship her and devour her. Carefully, I brush my mouth against hers, then trace the shape of her lips with my teeth and tongue. My hands tremble where they grip her face, keeping her from chasing my teasing kisses. It’s almost embarrassing, the way I’m quaking like an autumn leaf above her. She lets out a frustrated whimper, and I deepen the kiss, swallowing up the sound as I tangle my tongue with her own. When her own kisses become more insistent, I pull back, waiting for her to retreat before delving forward again. “Good,” I murmur, my thumb stroking her pulse point when she relaxes beneath me. “There’s no rush.” I’m speaking more to myself than to her. Because more than anything, I want to feel myself buried deep inside her. I want to push the fabric between us aside and feel her wet and clenching around me. I want to bury my head between her thighs and taste her, to turn those faint whimpers into wild, throaty cries. But now isn’t the time for that. I kiss her again, slowly this time. Deep. Controlled. I need to be controlled. Take this slow. Her thighs part, long limbs twining with mine, the heels of her feet pressing against the backs of my legs. Pulling me towards her, until my cock is pressed against her core and I can practically feel the heat of her, even with our clothes between us. She rocks against me, her faint mewling cry swallowed up by my mouth, and it’s like something in me snaps. Something primal and hungry and dark. Something that’s only come out with Jadi.

When I say that your family needs to weave your own web, this is how you get there. It’s intentional and ordinary. It’s spiritual and also simple. Such is the power of weaving your own web. You get to partner with the Holy Spirit to craft a way of living life that is joyful, sustainable, and anchored to the character of God. Instead of trying to shove your family into a box, you let your web take on the unique shape and structure it needs to help you all know and trust God more and more. All the while, it feels like you, the way that weaving is ordinary for the spider. And ordinary is enough.

The value of life is immeasurable, intricately woven into the fabric of each decision we make daily to enrich the lives of others.

Love is a shade woven from infinite languages

Her life was a tapestry woven together with stories of joy and sadness moments of pain but also hope— and within those threads of life she created herself in every stitch of colored string.

older man brought up a hand to start stroking Jon’s side, gliding his fingers up over the hard muscles of Tom’s arm and back down again to Jon’s hip. Now that their passions were slaked, the room felt cool, and Jon was glad for Tom’s constant heat. He nuzzled up under the big man’s jaw. I missed you, he wanted to say, among other things, but he didn’t want to push his luck with the captain here. Sex was one thing, emotions were another, and Jon was curious to see how things would settle in the end. He couldn’t tell if it was the effects of the drug or the mind-blowing sex, but he thought he could sense strands pulling the three of them together. It was as if their talents, strengths, desires, and weaknesses were woven into a three-sided tapestry.

I had the opportunity to edit this book for the author, and I have to say it is one of the best novels I have ever read. Tremendously insightful and full of all sorts of fascinating characters and surprise plot twists. Many plot threads that start out seemingly separate are eventually woven together into a stunning story and will cause you to reflect on the path your own life is taking and why. Highly recommended." - D. A. Cartier, Amazon customer

How is it that you have such dark eyebrows and yet your hair is golden?" "Oh, that," Eleanor says, tucked up into the corner of the love seat with a shawl draped over her legs. She's still recovering from her own encounter with Lord Downpike. "Hadn't you guessed?" You already discovered he uses a very potent charm spell. It's woven into his hair. Some would consider constantly charming everyone a bit of an excess, but Lord Ackerly needs all the help he can get." "Such vanity." I tsk, trying to hold back a smile. No wonder his hair was both so enchanting and so aggravating.

Twenty-three D," he said, as a boarding-pass spooled from a different slot. He pulled her passport out and handed it to her, along with her ticket and the boarding pass. "Gate fifty-two, blue concourse. Checking anything?" "No." "Passengers who've cleared security may be subject to noninvasive DNA sampling," he said, the words all run together because he was only saying it because it was the law that he had to. She put her passport and ticket away in the special pocket inside her parka. She kept the boarding pass in her hand. She went looking for the blue concourse. She had to go downstairs to find it, and take one of those trains that was like an elevator that ran sideways. Half an hour later she was through security, looking at the seals they'd put on the zippers of her carry-on. They looked like rings of rubbery red candy. She hadn't expected them to do that; she'd thought she could find a pay-station in the departure lounge, link up, and give the club an update. They never sealed her carry-on when she went to Vancouver to stay with her uncle, but that wasn't really international, not since the Agreement. She was riding a rubber sidewalk toward Gate 52 when she saw the blue light flashing, up ahead. Soldiers there, and a little barricade. The soldiers were lining people up as they came off the sidewalk. They wore fatigues and didn't seem much older than the guys at her last school. "Shit," she heard the woman in front of her say, a big-haired blond with obvious extensions woven in.

God’s world is set up with laws and principles. Spiritual realities are as real as gravity, and if you do not know them, you will discover their effects. Just because we have not been taught these principles of life and relationships does not mean they will not rule. We need to know the principles God has woven into life and operate according to them.

You needn’t establish rules for why it may or may not be appropriate to wear, say, yoga pants to the grocery store. Your yoga pants were made by someone. They were designed, they were stitched, they were seamed, they were dyed, they were woven, they were packaged. Wear them to buy your milk. Wear them wherever you’d like. Shopping

Ugh, mi fa incazzare a bestia.” He glances at me, black brows drawn tightly together over blazing blue eyes. “It makes me very angry,” he says. “Mi fa incazzare a bestia,” I echo, and Luca’s expression changes in a flash, from furious to open and laughing. He jumps toward me and puts one hand over my mouth. “No!” he says, laughing. “You must not repeat! Bad words! Bestemmie! I must not teach you bad words!” His fingertips are light against my lips, more a caress than a constraint. The bracelet dangles off the knobs of his wrist bones; I dart my eyes down and see that it’s woven with black rubber in between the steel links. I don’t dare to move. I don’t want him to stop touching me. But I can’t just sit here like an idiot. What I really want to do is kiss his hand, but I’m not brave enough for that. I wish I were.

As they tramped in, Temo turned from the big stone barbecue with a long grilling fork in his hand. He froze at the sight of Dayna. Once more, it was as though the two of them were alone in the sunny ramada with its roof of woven grass and the light filtering through on their faces. No one else mattered. A short woman with her hair piled on her head hurried from behind the barbecue with a platter of tacos in her hand. “Temo, aren’t you going to introduce me to your new friends?” she asked with a smile. “Temo, what is wrong? Are you sick?” “No, Madre,” Temo muttered, but he still couldn’t take his eyes off Dayna. Dayna’s mother, Brenda Regis, picked that exact moment to stride in from the spa. “Howdy, everybody,” she crooned. “Hope you’re all hungry as coyotes.” She glanced at her daughter, who was still gazing at Temo with lovesick eyes. “Dayna, what’s the matter with you, honey?” She looked Dayna up and down, then her eyes went to Temo, and then to Temo’s mother. The two women stiffened. Say something, Sophie prayed silently to Dayna. Order Temo around in that bossy voice of yours. Quick, before your mother and his mother figure this out. But Dayna stood stunned, incapable of speech. Sophie gave Liv a nudge. “Follow my lead,” she whispered and then in a louder voice shouted, “Hey, is this a good time to break the piñata?” She dived forward to snatch the long fork from Temo’s hand. “Whee!” she shouted. “Fun! Come on, everybody. Let’s see what’s inside!” She poked at the paper horse. Liv grabbed a barbecue brush and bashed at it too. Cheyenne and Hailey joined in with shouts of glee. The paper horse flew to pieces, scattering small objects and cactus candy all over the picnic table. Some fell into the punch bowl with a splash. More landed in the salad plate. Laughter and confusion broke the spell of tension in the air as they all dived for the piñata’s. Dayna snapped out of her trance. “Look what I’ve got!” She held up a plastic whistle, then blew a shrill note. “Time to eat, everybody.” Temo turned back to the barbecue. The spell was broken, the danger past. His mother, Marita, gave him another frightened glance, but went on laying food on the table. Dayna’s mother picked a piece of candy out of her hair and said, “Well! We usually break the piñata after the meal, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

Education must be largely self-initiated, a tapestry woven out of broad experience, constant introspection, ability to concentrate on one’s purpose in spite of distractions, a combination of curiosity, patience, and intense watchfulness, and it requires substantial trial and error risk-taking, along with a considerable ability to take feedback from the environment — to learn from mistakes. I once heard someone in my own family, who I once loved very much, say,“I don’t take criticism well,” as if it were a boast, and I knew at that instant there was no way at all for her to grow in mind or character with that self-destructive attitude.

As we walk out to the street my friend points out a sign on the other side of the road, which instructs people to beware of shelling. The reminders of the Great Patriotic War remain. “During the Nazi siege of Leningrad, one million out of the two million people who lived here died.” She looks at me as if that experience is woven into the very fabric of her being. And yet she would have been born just after the war. “It amazes me how people can survive in a completely annihilated environment like that. How do they do it?” I ask. “Hope. We have a saying. Hope is the last thing you lose.” “I guess that’s right.” If anyone knows about hope it has to be the eternally down-trodden Russian.

Some days I'm sure I'll be unravelled, That I'm just a piece of thread, Woven from everything I've heard And every book I've ever read. That someone will find my ending Or a spot where I've worn thin, And they'll pull me right apart Back to the place where I begin, Until they've found that every fibre Isn't one to call my own, Its from the thoughts and works of others Thats I've been so crudely sewn. And there's nothing I can make Or think or do or be or say, That isn't someone else Woven in just a different way. Then once I come undone, Once who I thought I was grows small, What if I look at all that's left And there is nothing there at all?

I knew the Tam were already a success by the greeting I got. The women in their canoes in the middle of the lake called out loud hellos that I heard over my engine, and a few men and children came down to the beach and gave me big floppy Tam waves. A noticeable shift from the chary welcome we’d received six weeks earlier. I cut the engine and several men came and pulled the boat to shore, and without my having to say a word two swaybacked young lads with something that looked like red berries woven in their curled hair led me up a path and down a road, past a spirit house with an enormous carved face over the entryway—a lean and angry fellow with three thick bones through his nose and a wide open mouth with many sharp teeth and a snake’s head for a tongue. It was much more skilled than the Kiona’s rudimentary depictions, the lines cleaner, the colors—red, black, green, and white—far more vivid and glossy, as if the paint were still wet. We passed several of these ceremonial houses and from the doorways men called down to my guides and they called back. They took me in one direction then, as if I wouldn’t notice, turned me around and doubled back down the same road past the same houses, the lake once again in full view. Just when I thought their only plan was to parade me round town all day, they turned a corner and stopped before a large house, freshly built, with a sort of portico in front and blue-and-white cloth curtains hanging in the windows and doorway. I laughed out loud at this English tea shop encircled by pampas grass in the middle of the Territories. A few pigs were digging around the base of the ladder. From below I heard footsteps creaking the new floor. The cloth at the windows and doors puffed in and out from the movement within. ‘Hallo the house!’ I’d heard this in an American frontier film once. I waited for someone to emerge but no one did, so I climbed up and stood on the narrow porch and knocked on one of the posts. The sound was absorbed by the voices inside, quiet, nearly whispery, but insistent, like the drone of a circling aeroplane. I stepped closer and pulled the curtain aside a few inches. I was struck first by the heat, then the smell. There were at least thirty Tam in the front room, on the floor or perched oddly on chairs, in little groups or even alone, everyone with a project in front of them. Many were children and adolescents, but

The key to clinical attunement is to be willing to say “I don’t know” and “tell me more.” Your intention to help, a neural stance of positive regard likely involving the social engagement system and having a desire to connect and to assist, is woven together with an interest in supporting another with kindness and

Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It’s one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can’t see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something. Galileo thought that comets were an optical illusion. This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they’re not, we can look at what scientists are saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming castellated cities hung upside-down over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger.

is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit. They are not something we do, they are something we are, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power. To be specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a part of our natures to come to our attention till the light of God is focused upon them. The grosser manifestations of these sins, egotism, exhibitionism, self-promotion, are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. They are so much in evidence as actually, for many people, to become identified with the gospel. I trust it is not a cynical observation to say that they appear these days to be a requisite for popularity in some sections of the Church visible. Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice.

I turned my wrist over and smiled at my very own butterfly imbedded artfully and permanently into my skin. It was simple…just a black outline...a cookie cutter tattoo.  At least that was what Max had called it. Gently I traced the outline and remembered the day I got it. I was just eighteen, and scared to death, but I wanted it so badly. To make me feel better, Max decided to get one as well. It would be his sixth tattoo…not his first time under the ink gun. He was a pro in my eyes and so having him there helped. He teased me about my choice saying I was too girly, but when the work was done, he had looked at me with admiration. “It suits you,” he had whispered. “It’s pretty and uncomplicated…just like you.” He’d leaned in and kissed me gently. I can still feel the scrape of his stubble and the warmth of his lips. The hazel eyes were earnest, as he pulled away. “What did you get?” I had asked, still overwhelmed by him. That crooked grin set the butterflies to flight in my stomach. He’d chuckled and went for the hem of his shirt, lifting it up on the left side. I’d seen the beautiful angel he had gone back time and time again to be finished. It was a twist of wings and shadows and it raveled down the entire rib cage ending just at his hip. It was a masterpiece.  I had admired it for an instant before I noticed the change. I had covered my mouth and gasped in surprise. Woven into one of the angel’s wings was my name.

Do not ever attempt to leave me again, Tempest,” he murmured so softly that she barely caught the words. There was an unguarded ache in his voice that brought a fresh flood of tears to her eyes. In her life, no one had ever wanted her. No one had ever needed her. Certainly no one had ever been so loving and caring toward her. For all his overbearing, dominating ways, she couldn’t ever say he didn’t put her first. She couldn’t say her heart wasn’t totally captivated. He had woven a spell around her so strong, she didn’t think the tie could ever be broken. As

In other words, particles may know so much about the future because they have already been to the future … although again, a more correct way of looking at it is that they are halfway “in” the future already. Think back to that glass block of Minkowski: Every particle is really a spaghetti strand snaking across time. Or better yet, imagine particles as colored threads on a vast and chaotic loom; everywhere a thread entwines with another thread is an interaction (or “measurement”), and the patterns woven by the zig-zagging, criss-crossing threads as they are stretched between both sides of that loom would not appear random at all if we could take a higher, Archimedean vantage point outside of time, as Price recommends.24 From a viewpoint that could grasp the whole cloth, it would be strange—indeed, ridiculously biased—to privilege one side, or one direction of causation, over the other. It would be like saying the pattern created by the interwoven colored threads in a blanket is “caused” by its lefthand side, with a component of capriciousness in the threads’ turnings as we scan the blanket from left to right, and the righthand side of the blanket exerting no “leftward” influence on the pattern at all. With retrocausation, we can no longer privilege the past, as though causation is only a matter of “pushing” (sometimes called efficient causation). The real mystery becomes why those efficient causes are so much more apparent and intuitively understood, and why influences propagating in reverse give us headaches to even think about. This is a mystery that physics alone might not be able to solve, but the first step toward finding a solution may be to train ourselves to “think backwards” about events.

I long for the smells of my mother’s kitchen, the safety of home, but also the warmth of my husband’s embrace. It has been so long since I felt his breath on my neck or his fingers in my hair. He says my hair is like silk woven by God, which always makes me smile because I know he is just saying that—it is nothing of the sort.

have been asked if I’ve needed help so many times that I have been allowed to forget the question, the significance of it. I see, now, the way the love in my life has woven into a tapestry that I’ve been blessed enough to get to ignore. But not now, not anymore. “Yes,” I tell her. She says she will email David, she will make sure we get refunds where we can. She will handle the returns and the calls. She is my mother. She will help. That is what she does. I go back upstairs. Jill is gone. Aaron is in the other

Jamie got back to her apartment in nineteen minutes and forty-nine seconds.  It wasn’t a personal best for a five-kilometre run, but it was still fast.  She showered and dressed, pulled on her boots, and was out the door in seventeen minutes flat. Which probably was close to a personal best.  She was wearing jeans she picked up from a supermarket. She liked them because they had a three percent lycra content woven into the denim, which stretched a little and meant that she could more easily crouch, walk, and kick someone in the side of the head if the situation called for it. It hadn’t yet, but she had a long career ahead of herself, she hoped.  She jumped into her car — a small and economical hybrid hatchback which squeezed around the city easily — and headed north towards the Lea.  It took nearly forty minutes to get there in rush hour traffic, and by the time she pulled up, Roper was leaning against the bonnet of his ten-year-old Volvo saloon, smoking a cigarette. He was tall with thinning, short hair, and a face that looked like he was always squinting into a stiff wind.  His long black coat was pinned to his right leg in the breeze and his shirt looked like it’d been pulled out of the laundry hamper rather than a clean drawer. He was perpetually single, and it showed. There was no one to hold him accountable when he decided it was okay to skip a morning shower for an extra ten minutes sleeping off his hangover. What she hated most about him, beyond the cigarette stink and the pissed-at-life attitude, was that she always had to look twice to make sure he wasn’t her father.  Her mother had dragged her away from him in Sweden, and now, she’d been thrown together with a guy who seemingly had inherited all his bad habits. Her mum said it was because all detectives were like it if they did the job long enough. They saw too much and didn’t talk about it enough. Which led inevitably to drink, and drugs, and other women. She’d spoken from experience of course. And Jamie knew she hadn’t exaggerated.  Though moving them both to Britain seemed like a bit of a dramatic reaction. But then again, her father had given her mother gonorrhoea and couldn’t say which woman he’d gotten it from. So Jamie figured it was reasonable.  He would have turned sixty-one this year. Roper pushed off the Volvo and ground out his cigarette under the heel of his battered Chelsea boot. Jamie looked at it, stopping short of his odour-radius. ‘You gonna just leave that there?’ He looked between his feet, rolling onto the outsides of them as he inspected the flattened butt. ‘It’ll wash away in the rain.’ ‘Into the ocean, yeah, where some poor fish is going to eat it,’ Jamie growled, coming to a stop in front of him.

I manage a low growl, then stop when a sigh echoes in my head. “Hey,” I say softly. “I appreciate what you’ve done. When I’m yelling at the face in the mirrors, I’m not yelling at you. It’s not you I’m angry at. You know that, right?” I know it now. A pause. I am, essentially, the metal and circuitry you persist in seeing. Sometimes it is difficult for me to tell at whom you are directing your disgust and hatred. I thank you for considering my feelings. Is that what I just did? Yeah, I guess it was. I’ve acknowledged VC1’s capacity for emotions in the past, but I don’t think I’ve ever taken them into consideration when I’ve acted before now. I allow myself a small grin. “I’ll try to do better with that. You are so much more than metal and circuitry.” So are you.

Catalina says that people are like books. Some you want to read and enjoy; some you hate before you've read a word.

Catalina says that people are like books. Some you want to read and enjoy; some you hate before you’ve even read a word. Rumi has become a book I want to read.

Virtue is honorably rewarded, and the wrongdoers are suitably punished. We tend to strive for the improvement of our nature, with what you call the moral lessons that are woven into our hearts. If that were true, would there be any wrongdoers, such as myself? Would you say that perhaps I am an exception to your virtuous belief in man, only that I have scathed myself amidst the growth of those morals?” (Joseph Vladamir) “Fancy language aside, in my eyes, you are nothing but an utter psychopath.” (Darwin) “I am only pointing out the special treatment I am receiving for being a prisoner. All of this security, just for me! My previous guards would slumber with their handguns resting on their cigar-burned desks. Such fools trusting me enough to dream under my eye, you are a much smarter fool.” {The Latent Identities Of Darwin}

I asked my wife Noël if there was anything she wanted me to say at this point when I was preaching on this subject. She said, “You cannot say too often that marriage is a model of Christ and the church.” I think she is right, and there are at least three reasons: 1) This lifts marriage out of the sordid sitcom images and gives it the magnificent meaning God meant it to have; 2) this gives marriage a solid basis in grace, since Christ obtained and sustains his bride by grace alone; and 3) this shows that the husband’s headship and the wife’s submission are crucial and crucified. That is, they are woven into the very meaning of marriage as a display of Christ and the church, but they are both defined by Christ’s self-denying work on the cross so that their pride and slavishness are canceled. We spent the first two chapters on the first of these reasons: giving the foundation for marriage as a display of the covenant love of God. Marriage is a covenant between a man and a woman in which they promise to be a faithful husband and a faithful wife in a new one-flesh union as long as they both shall live. This covenant, sealed with solemn vows, is designed to showcase the covenant-keeping grace of God.

Of course, it wouldn't have been a 9 to 5 event without a survey, and this one was no exception. Among the questions posed were these: What do you have to say to today's activists and organizers? What do women need to do today to win rights and respect? Here's a sample of what we answered: Have fun. Be creative. Approach the problem as systemic, not individual. Collective action and solutions are key. Remember that the goal is power-building. Talk to your coworkers, be ready with workable solutions, then collectively bring issues to decision makers. Most importantly, don't accept no for an answer! Focus on lifting the floor, not just the ceiling. Decelerate. Do everything in the time it takes, not necessarily at the speed of light. Take care of each other. Never give up. Even your losses will help you win in the future. Remember the heroes who paved the way in the struggles that came before. Always remember sisterhood and solidarity, especially in the face of sexism, racism, and other forms of hatred. We are what we are. We all carry the ideas and experiences of those who came before. We will not have a just and sustainable economy until we eradicate the long-standing inequalities deeply woven into the fibers of our economy, in which some jobs are still undervalued based on the color of our skin or our gender. Remember there is strength in numbers. Find common ground. Challenge the bosses for a say over your job, your community, your country, your democracy. Reach out to another woman outside of your comfort zone - she's been waiting for you! Keep telling the 9 to 5 story.

To understand the gospel correctly, we must see the cross as a means to the end of restored relationship with God. To take it in isolation is to miss the point it served. To put it another way, if we say the gospel centers on the cross, we overemphasize the forgiveness of sins while underemphasizing the relationship that forgiveness restores. Once again, just as in Isaiah chapter 59, we see righteousness, justice and salvation all woven together into a unity and aiming at reconciliation, which is justice language.

This is not to say that “what we do” is tantamount to “who we are,” but for most of us, work is an important source of personal meaning and social definition. Work activities and relationships are tightly woven into the fabric of our lives. In fact, work often provides the defining framework within which we set priorities and make decisions about other important facets of our lives. It is no wonder we feel so lost when that framework is in question.

If you say so, Daddy.

But after you’ve spent months living in a castle with a bunch of shapeshifting faeries, at some point, you just have to say fuck it.

WHAT WE SAY matters. We’ve each felt the power that words have to heal, soothe, or uplift us. Even one caring remark can make the difference between giving up and finding the strength to face life’s challenges. We each also know something of the great harm that can be inflicted through speech. Sharp words laced with anger or cruelty can break a relationship and burn for years. Language can be used to manipulate and coerce on a mass scale, to fuel fear, war, and oppression, and to advance political agendas of genocide or terror. Few things so powerful are also so commonplace. Words are woven into the fabric of our lives. Your first love. Your first job. Your last goodbye to someone you love. Our beginnings and endings and the countless moments in between are punctuated by a play of words as we share our thoughts, feelings, and desires.

there is no saying how events in one place may affect what happens elsewhere, for the tapestry of history is woven of many threads.

I keep this my dirty little secret for years, he was my true first, yet it was not the most romantic yet it was something, now looking back now how is the loser, it did it long before, yet it was with him so it was not cool, I never- ever said this to anyone, that he took me. Yet play around like that with a boy that was me, he wanted to know so I said okay. It was the first time seeing all that- you know, at least mine was real, and not like time two at a party. This thing is so high- I get sick of feeling so short at like four-foot, on top that I can see the world by looking down, and they are looking up at me, my mom and grandmother were all the same size also, if not shorter, or so they say. The car is old and dusty and looks like no one has been in it for years on the outside, it is just blacked and crusty, the only car other than the coal car behind the locomotive, and it too is rusted reddish orange. They used to have tripped over this thing and park it on the bridge, and you spent the night up in the stars, and so that is what we did on a big full moon night. In the big bed looking out the one side of all those old windows. The car and train sit here for there was a fire or something on that line, and this becomes the new home of the serving remanences about half a mile in, the train was going over and was near the end on the one said when the wind took it all down, and all the cars but one fall all the many feet to the ground below, yet it never steamed over again. There sits the old Pullman car. It's red and has black, with yellow writing on it, up till now I am not sure what it says. It was a custom car made just for spending the night on top of the linked- mountains. The train is all the same color for what I can make out, dating around the 1800s or so, that what my dad said anyway we and he were up here, oh so long ago. We both walked up to her and me on the left, tacking him on the right hand-woven tight. The grass tall the track worn, and feet sore, from the journey there. Over smaller yet high crossings that have known side rails. Inside you can see it is in touch, and all dark wood, I light one of the old lanterns, I thought down a towel, and we had juice pouches and P-P and J. Romantic- No! It’s all good, he tried. It wasn’t about that anyway. The bed is off to the back and looks like a five-star hotel room to us, there is a living room spot, where ass naked in the big old sofas… or next to it, we were playing house, and loving it. We were young but we feel- we were on the bed all night long. Looking out over… see the tree sway below. it was cold in the car, yet he keeps me warm, I was fogging up the windows, with my breath Moan it out in a sweet- yet sensual way, I was pressed upon it looking out as I was on top, he was looking up at me, yet I was looking out and at his eyes, at definite times. I even kissed the glass to leave something behind, I wonder if it’s still there, and my name is covered in the old wood, next to his.

I didn't create the system- I was born into it," I say at last. It feels like a fair thing to say. His face seems to be at war. A flash of anger, a sharp narrowing of his gaze, then a slight pull of his eyebrows- exasperation maybe, but smoothed away to make room for a clenched jaw. "Please stop talking before I do something I regret. Por favor." "What did I say that was so terrible?" My hands fly to my hips. "If you don't explain it to me, how am i supposed to know-" "I'm a little tired of explaining myself," Rumi says flatly. "Have been for years. And you all never listen. Do your own reading on the subject, why don't you? And then come back and we'll discuss whatever you like.

For two decades, our escape defined me. It dominated my personality and compelled my every decision. By college, half my life had led up to our escape and the other half was spent reliving it, in churches and retreats where my mother made it a hagiograpihc journey, on college applications where it was a plea, at sleepovers where it was entertainment, and in discussion groups after public viewings of xenophobic melodrama like China Cry and Not Without my Daughter, films about Christian women facing death and escaping to America. Our story was a sacred thread woven into my identity. Sometimes people asked, But don't a lot of Christians live there? or Couldn't your mother just say she was Muslim? It would take me a long time to get over those kinds of questions. They felt like a bad grade, like a criticism of my face and body...Once in an Oklahoma church, a woman said, "Well, I sure do get it. You came for a better life." I thought I'd pass out -- a better life? In Isfahan, we had yellow spray roses, a pool. A glass enclosure shot up through our living room, and inside that was a tree. I had a tree inside my house; I had the papery hand of Morvarid, my friend nanny, a ninety-year-old village woman; I had my grandmother's fruit leather and Hotel Koorosh schnitzels and sour cherries and orchards and a farm - life in Iran was a fairytale. In Oklahoma, we lived in an apartment complex for the destitute and disenfranchised. Life was a big gray parking lot with cigarette butts baking in oil puddles, slick children idling in the beating sun, teachers who couldn't do math. I dedicated my youth and every ounce of my magic to get out of there. A better life? The words lodged in my ear like grit. Gradually, all those retellings felt like pandering. The skeptics drew their conclusions based on details that I had provided them: my childhood dreams of Kit Kats and flawless bananas. My academic ambitions. I thought of how my first retelling was in an asylum office in Italy: how merciless that with the sweat and dust of escape still on our brows, we had to turn our ordeal into a good, persuasive story or risk being sent back. Then, after asylum was secured, we had to relive that story again and again, to earn our place, to calm casual skeptics. Every day of her new life, the refugee is asked to differentiate herself from the opportunist, the economic migrant... Why do the native-born perpetuate this distinction? Why harm the vulnerable with the threat of this stigma? ...To draw a line around a birthright, a privilege. Unlike economic migrants, refugees have no agency; they are no threat. Often, they are so broken, they beg to be remade into the image of the native. As recipients of magnanimity, they can be pitied. But if you are born in the Third World, and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, your dreams are suspicious. You are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief. You are reaching above your station.

Two of us sat side by side in my head, woven together, inseparable. She didn't even have a name; she was just She. Really, it was hard to say where She ended and I began. But food was not shared with her. She did not play tag and never required a seat. She was, by her very essence, nothing like these imaginary friends. She was just there. One was not proud of her, in the same way as one is not proud of a liver, and there was no need to show her off, nor tell anyone She existed.

i know i am in love again when" light shakes into the cobwebs woven over all the empty doorframes. when a nearby car’s bass is a feigned serenade & the moon seems like a dirty thing. passing fuselage & hospital lights glint & i’m turned on thinking they flash for me. me, whose favorite window features a view that’s mostly ground. me, who’s quiet, swaddled, blanket-borne in the fucking eve, waiting on a call from my only lover, or a friend six states away. the space between saying how much i miss everyone i know & pressing my forehead to my knee is usually smaller than i think. the closest body of water calls itself a river, but it’s stagnant. i call myself a lot to give, but that’s an exaggeration. walking the bank, i trace ripples—lamp-lit contours that fade into murk. i am two breaths away from saying i don’t understand happiness when the voice on the other end of the line asks if it’s okay to hang up now. what is the opposite of blank noise? insert that excess here. i want to live off it. Raena Shirali, No More Potluck. Issue 33: Solitude

They say we’re the sum of our memories, that these fragments are woven into an elaborate fabric known as our identity. But how are we formed by things we’ve forgotten, suppressed, or never truly understood? How do we fill those voids? With stories. That’s one response. The other is: by letting time pass.

Between the past and the future of an event (for example, between the past and the future for you, where you are, and in the precise moment in which you are reading), there exists an “intermediate zone,” an “extended present”; a zone that is neither past nor future. This is the discovery made with special relativity. The duration of this “intermediate zone,”* which is neither in your past nor in your future, is very small and depends on where an event takes place relative to you, as illustrated in figure 3.2: the greater the distance of the event from you, the longer the duration of the extended present. At a distance of a few meters from your nose, the duration of what for you is the “intermediate zone,” neither past nor future, is no more than a few nanoseconds: next to nothing (the number of nanoseconds in a second is the same as the number of seconds in thirty years). This is much less than we could possibly notice. On the other side of the ocean, the duration of this “intermediate zone” is a thousandth of a second, still well below the threshold of our perception of time, the minimum amount of time we perceive with our senses, which is somewhere on the order of a tenth of a second. But on the moon, the duration of the “extended present” is a few seconds, and on Mars it is a quarter of an hour. This means we can say that on Mars there are events that in this precise moment have already happened, events that are yet to happen, but also a quarter-of-an-hour of events during which things occur that are neither in our past nor in our future. They are elsewhere. We had never before been aware of this “elsewhere” because next to us this “elsewhere” is too brief; we are not quick enough to notice it. But it exists, and is real. This is why it is impossible to hold a smooth conversation between here and Mars. Say I am on Mars and you are here; I ask you a question and you reply as soon as you’ve heard what I said; your reply reaches me a quarter of an hour after I had posed the question. This quarter of an hour is time that is neither past nor future to the moment you’ve replied to me. The key fact that Einstein understood is that this quarter of an hour is inevitable: there is no way of reducing it. It is woven into the texture of the events of space and of time: we cannot abbreviate it, any more than we can send a letter to the past. It’s strange, but this is how the world happens to be.

And she’s not staring at us,” Biana corrected. “She’s checking out Tam.” Tam’s eyebrows shot up, and he stole another glance. Marella tossed her long blond hair—which always had a few tiny braids woven in—and gave him her flirtiest smile. “Huh,” he said. “That’s all you have to say?” Biana pressed. “I don’t know.” Tam blushed brighter than Sophie would’ve thought possible, given his general surly demeanor

Ezryn gives a tight yank on my hair, and I fall against his hard metal frame. “Careful what you say next, Petal.

He lit woven strands of sweet grass and waved the smoke among them. This ceremony honors our ancestors and opens us up to their wisdom. Native spirituality and beliefs say that your ancestors will help you along your path in life after they've moved on. Craig has now become our ancestor, our grandfather, and yes, he is our guide. Our job is to keep his spirit alive by passing along his stories to each other and to future generations.