Never judge someone's character based on the words of another. Instead, study the motives behind the words of the person casting the bad judgment. An honest woman can sell tangerines all day and remain a good person until she dies, but there will always be naysayers who will try to convince you otherwise. Perhaps this woman did not give them something for free, or at a discount. Perhaps too, that she refused to stand with them when they were wrong — or just stood up for something she felt was right. And also, it could be that some bitter women are envious of her, or that she rejected the advances of some very proud men. Always trust your heart. If the Creator stood before a million men with the light of a million lamps, only a few would truly see him because truth is already alive in their hearts. Truth can only be seen by those with truth in them. He who does not have Truth in his heart, will always be blind to her.

Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.

It's in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.

They want us to be afraid. They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes. They want us to barricade our doors and hide our children. Their aim is to make us fear life itself! They want us to hate. They want us to hate 'the other'. They want us to practice aggression and perfect antagonism. Their aim is to divide us all! They want us to be inhuman. They want us to throw out our kindness. They want us to bury our love and burn our hope. Their aim is to take all our light! They think their bricked walls will separate us. They think their damned bombs will defeat us. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that my soul and your soul are old friends. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that when they cut you I bleed. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that we will never be afraid, we will never hate and we will never be silent for life is ours!

One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling.Werner’s head swivels lightly on his neck. The wind is strong and gusting stronger, and the corners of the tent strain against their guy ropes, and where the flaps at the two ends come up, he can see trees buck and sway. Everything rustles. Werner zips his old notebook and the little house into his duffel and the man beside him murmurs questions to himself and the rest of the ruined company sleeps. Even Werner’s thirst has faded. He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters. Out there, through the open flaps of the tent, clouds hurtle above treetops. Toward Germany, toward home.Silver and blue, blue and silver.Sheets of paper tumble down the rows of cots, and in Werner’s chest comes a quickening. He sees Frau Elena kneel beside the coal stove and bank up the fire. Children in their beds. Baby Jutta sleeps in her cradle. His father lights a lamp, steps into an elevator, and disappears.The voice of Volkheimer: What you could be.Werner’s body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed.“Ernst,” says the man beside him. “Ernst.” But there is no Ernst; the men in the cots do not reply; the American soldier at the door of the tent sleeps. Werner walks past him into the grass.The wind moves through his undershirt. He is a kite, a balloon.Once, he and Jutta built a little sailboat from scraps of wood and carried it to the river. Jutta painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality. But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and the flat black water swallowed it. Jutta blinked at Werner with wet eyes, pulling at the battered loops of yarn in her sweater.“It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.”Did they? He hopes they did. He seems to remember a little boat—a more seaworthy one—gliding down a river. It sailed around a bend and left them behind. Didn’t it?The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass.Why doesn’t the wind move the light?Across the field, an American watches a boy leave the sick tent and move against the background of the trees. He sits up. He raises his hand.“Stop,” he calls.“Halt,” he calls.But Werner has crossed the edge of the field, where he steps on a trigger land mine set there by his own army three months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth.

On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible.Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds. It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.

Dad, will they ever come back?""No. And yes." Dad tucked away his harmonica. "No not them. But yes, other people like them. Not in a carnival. God knows what shape they'll come in next. But sunrise, noon, or at the latest, sunset tomorrow they'll show. They're on the road.""Oh, no," said Will."Oh, yes, said Dad. "We got to watch out the rest of our lives. The fight's just begun."They moved around the carousel slowly."What will they look like? How will we know them?""Why," said Dad, quietly, "maybe they're already here."Both boys looked around swiftly.But there was only the meadow, the machine, and themselves.Will looked at Jim, at his father, and then down at his own body and hands. He glanced up at Dad.Dad nodded, once, gravely, and then nodded at the carousel, and stepped up on it, and touched a brass pole.Will stepped up beside him. Jim stepped up beside Will.Jim stroked a horse's mane. Will patted a horse's shoulders.The great machine softly tilted in the tides of night.Just three times around, ahead, thought Will. Hey.Just four times around, ahead, thought Jim. Boy.Just ten times around, back, thought Charles Halloway. Lord.Each read the thoughts in the other's eyes.How easy, thought Will.Just this once, thought Jim.But then, thought Charles Halloway, once you start, you'd always come back. One more ride and one more ride. And, after awhile, you'd offer rides to friends, and more friends until finally...The thought hit them all in the same quiet moment....finally you wind up owner of the carousel, keeper of the freaks...proprietor for some small part of eternity of the traveling dark carnival shows....Maybe, said their eyes, they're already here.

Sow the seeds of hard work and you will reap the fruits of success. Find something to do, do it with all your concentration. You will excel.Show the world you are not here to just pass through. Leave great footprints wherever you pass and be remembered for the change you initiated.Flow wherever you go. You can’t be limited. Dare to rise above all limitations and become better than you were. Strive to arrive at the top.Glow wherever you go and let the light of God reflect in the world around you. You carry the light of God and wherever you pass, darkness must flee.Grow your talents and skills through a consistent practice and progressive learning. Learn to relearn and unlearn. Raise the bar for yourself always.Blow out all negative attitudes and live true to your dreams. Talks less and act more. Be confident and see yourself wining even before the victory comes.Know God and let Him be known. You were saved by grace for greater works apportioned for you even before you were born. Share the good news.I am proud of you because greater things that eyes have not seen yet, the Lord will do through you.

One day, it will all make sense, it will all be revealed. Until then, we learn to live and accept our shadows, our Déjà vu's, our dreams, our intuition that takes us to places that our minds never conceived, our bodies only perceived and our souls gladly remembered. Conversations and experiences amuse me, for I am experimenting with my feelings in ways that I can only do down here. Language makes up for a very interesting, yet bizarre way of putting thoughts into spoken form for the sound to move on in other peoples' ears, but every language, every sound, every word carries with it a long history, a deep culture and the souls of the many people who have previously used it throughout the centuries. Our hearts give us direction, hope and the passion to keep moving forward.. But what we do when they're frozen, broken, torn apart by an unhealthy way of living is what gives us new strength to push forward or kills us completely. Deep inside, we feed the entities that empower the fight between our internal demons and angels. We feed them with our thoughts, our emotions, our self-talk and the external talk that we lower our shields to at times. Whether good or bad, this brings about a change internally and at times there isn't much we can do to protect ourselves. At times, we need to let things be and go along with it. Of course, we're all worried, stressed, confused and lacking direction at times and we're in the same way at peace, stable and walking in the right direction once we get things sorted. Give it some time, give it some light, give it some love. You're not very far away.

Maybe we're just falling stars, we once danced in the same skyline looking down at the world. And we've fallen like all others, from near and far, we've gathered together, but separated by time and space, keeping a part of that light that we've came with and spreading it in this dark world that we've chosen to live in, in order to shine some light and love around. Maybe we've chosen to believe one truth today, and find it to be false tomorrow. Maybe we're trying to not get attached to the idea that we now know it all. At night, we see the truth of where we've fallen from, gazing in that night sky full of distant stars, constellations, planets, the reflection of the sun on the moon, all with their own stories to tell. Sometimes we wonder why would we leave such a mysterious place, with an infinite amount of stories and wonders. Maybe it's because as stars we could've only seen each other's light from afar, but here we can listen more carefully to each other's story, embrace each other and kiss, discover more and more of what can be seen when infinite star dust potential is put into one body and given freedom to walk the Earth and wander, love and enjoy every moment until coming back. Maybe in the morning, we'll only see one star shining up there and forget the others. Maybe that is also how life and death is, and the beauty of the sunrise and sunset that come in between, our childhood years and old years, when we reflect on the stars that we once were and that we will once again be. Maybe, just maybe.

I guess that sometimes it just takes a long walk through the darkness, a long walk through the darkest shadows and corners of your soul to realize that those are a part of you as well, that you've created through your experiences and thoughts those parts within yourself and as much as you can choose to fear them and repress them, they will require your attention one day, they will need your care and acceptance before you can clean them away and turn the lights on. For you refuse to shine the light on something that is imperfect, because you fear judgement and rejection, but you can always choose to look towards the light as the only source of true beauty and love that can help you in the cleaning process. Healing, after a long time of struggle and mess is a complex process, but a necessary one nevertheless. We are so overwhelmed by the amount of work it requires that we so often choose to run away from the light, hide in our dark corner and hope that we will never be found, hope that we will never be seen, or desperately look outwards for that love and compassion that we can no longer find within ourselves, for our soul's light no longer shines as it used to. And sometimes we just find those people that can see the light beneath all that dust and darkness that's been pilled up, those kind of light workers that understand our broken souls and manage to pick us up and see the beauty within us, when we find it so hard to see it ourselves. Sometimes I get so tired of separation, of division, of groups and different religions and belief systems. Even if you do find the truth, once you've put it into words, books and rules it already becomes distorted by the mind into something that is no longer truth. So I no longer hope for understanding, no longer hope for the opinion of a judgemental mind, but I hope to find the words that touch the soul before the mind, I hope to find the touch that warms the heart from deep inside, and hope to find that far away abandoned part of me which I've left behind.

A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky’s stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off. At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin that it passes a faint pink light. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone. But I’ll not go northing this year. I’ll stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I wait, struck, on forest paths and meadow’s fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing as a gift. The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow’s seeded grasses and pokes it chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming.

All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down. The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam’s waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hovered over the ripening pawpaw fruit and staggered up the steep faced terrace. It jerked, floated, rolled, veered, swayed. The thistle down faltered down toward the cottage and gusted clear to the woods; it rose and entered the shaggy arms of pecans. At last it strayed like snow, blind and sweet, into the pool of the creek upstream, and into the race of the creek over rocks down. It shuddered onto the tips of growing grasses, where it poised, light, still wracked by errant quivers. I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place in this moment, with the air so light and wild? The same fixity that collapses stars and drives the mantis to devour her mate eased these creatures together before my eyes: the thick adept bill of the goldfinch, and the feathery coded down. How could anything be amiss? If I myself were lighter and frayed, I could ride these small winds, too, taking my chances, for the pleasure of being so purely played. The thistle is part of Adam’s curse. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.” A terrible curse: But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom. I was weightless; my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that if I inhaled too deeply, my shoulders and head would waft off. Alleluia.

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, and spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready-for what? I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf. “For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,” says Ruysbroeck, “and that is why He is ever saying to our inmost spirit one deep unfathomable word and nothing else.” But what is the word? Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred, it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note but I couldn’t catch the consonant that shaped it into sense.

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there.I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving; time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I see shatters. “Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless. But there is more to the present than a series of snapshots. We are not merely sensitized film; we have feelings, a memory for information and an eidetic memory for the imagery of our pasts. Our layered consciousness is a tiered track for an unmatched assortment of concentrically wound reels. Each one plays out for all of life its dazzle and blur of translucent shadow-pictures; each one hums at every moment its own secret melody in its own unique key. We tune in and out. But moments are not lost. Time out of mind is time nevertheless, cumulative, informing the present. From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt- older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath. But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can’t recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees.

Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. “He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.

And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun’s surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the now. Spring is seeping north, towards me and away from me, at sixteen miles a day. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in black clusters like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance. Somewhere east of me, on another continent, it is sunset, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; within each case, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and curve inward, align, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now?

You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo? You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex?” When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella. You are a sculptor. You climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder around the entire pine…and pour wet plaster over and inside the pine. Now open the walls, split the plaster, saw down the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is ready: this is the shape of part of the air. You are a chloroplast moving in water heaved one hundred feet above ground. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in a ring around magnesium…you are evolution; you have only begun to make trees. You are god- are you tired? Finished?

Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back.A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank space high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman’s tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of dots. At length I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn’t find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn’t make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at that very moment with great emotion, in intricate, detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which wholly worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, “that was a good time then, a good time to be living.” And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water. I saw white-faced cattle lowing and wading in creeks. I saw May apples in forests, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided, and apples grew spotted and striped in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wild ducks flew with outstretched necks, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remember the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean’s shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, “yes, that’s how it was then, that part there was called France.” I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes. We all ought to be able to conjure up sights like these at will, so that we can keep in mind the scope of texture’s motion in time.

I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems. So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one…The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.

It's through the cross that we reach the resurrection. We should be absolutely sure of this truth, and we should keep this cross hidden and not place it on the shoulders of others. It is our cross we have to carry. It is the one God has given us to go through into His resurrection. This is the one we should keep hidden.But there are crosses and crosses, some of our own making. These we should immediately discard. Some permitted by God for our sanctification. These we can share for they are also for the sanctification of others. True, we can help to carry other people's crosses and they can help to carry our crosses, but the operative word is "hidden."The Lord said, "So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honoured by men," and "When you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to men that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." (Mt 6:16-18)Our very hiddenness becomes a light if we do not complain, if we carry our cross manfully, ready to help in the carrying of other people's crosses. Then we become a light to our neighbour's feet because we become an icon of Christ—shining!

The love that I believe in is something that goes beyond the physical aspects of this world. The love that I believe is one that extends its energy and power through the beautiful souls that I encounter along the way, a love that can be seen in the eyes of a little dog or in the confusion of a cute lost cat who wants to be worshiped like a Goddess. This kind of love goes through a divine crafting of a person's inner self, through personal experience and thousands of years of tears and strength, that can only be seen in the familiar eyes of old souls, the eyes that recognize each other even after long times of separation, the eyes that find themselves familiar with places they have probably been to before, but that nevertheless bring great memories with every visit. This kind of love sees hope in the eyes of new-born children that know way much more than they are capable of putting into words and that bring with their innocence a smile on each person's face who'd wish they could start again. The love that I see when I look at you is a love which has roots deep inside each of us, but that needs care and light to grow and unfold its branches so that they can reach outside of ourselves and even further beyond the skies.

WHAT IS TRUTH?Truth is not a thingOr a concept.It is as multidimensionalIn its meaningAs it is in its reflection.It is both invisibleAnd visible.It carries tons of weight,But can be carried.It is understood first through the spiritBefore science,And felt in the heart,Before the mind.Truth is not always heard by reason,Because reason sometimesIgnores Truth.Always listen to your conscience.Your conscience is your heartAnd reason is your mind.Your mind is simply there to reasonWith your heart.But remember,Truth is in your heart,And only through your heartCan you connect to the light of God.He who is not motivated by his heartWill not see Truth,And he who thinks only with his mindWill be blind to Truth.He who does not thinkWith his conscience,Does not stand by God,For the language of lightCan only be decoded by the heart.He who reads and recites words of GodAlso does not stand by God –If he merely understandsWords with his mindBut not his heart.Truth is black and white,And the entire spectrumOf colors in-between.It can have many parts,But has a solid foundation.Truth lacks perfection,For it is the reflection of all,Yet its reflection as a whole,Is more beautifulThan the accumulated flawsOf the small.Truth is the only brandWorth breathingAnd believing.So stand for truthIn everything you do,And only thenDoes your life haveMeaning.Poetry by Suzy Kassem

The battle of good versus evil is the oldest and most re-occurring story tale in the book of life. It never ends because no matter how you cut off the tail of evil, it will always grow back again and again. This old story will always continue into infinity until we closely examine our past errors to prevent giving the snake a new head in the future. You can destroy a demon, but a new one will always come back later in time. You can bring down a corrupt leader, but another one will rise up again with time. As long as the ego overcomes the heart of a man, evil will always exist, and the enemies of God will continue to multiply and thrive. If a tree is bearing bad fruit, you do not destroy the tree by cutting off its branches or eliminating its fruit, but by destroying its roots. I want you to look at the world as this poisoned tree. Even if we eliminate our enemies today, we will create new ones tomorrow. The forumla to cut off the head of the snake once and fall is very simple, and this basic solution is written in all your holy books — 'LOVE IS THE ANSWER'. The strongest counterspell to destroy all forces of black magic is love. Pure unconditional love. However, to be able to emit the right frequency of love, one must first succeed in their own personal battle of good versus evil: heart (conscience) vs. mind (ego). Once you learn how to use your heart to embrace all living things as you do your own reflection, and use your heart to detect truths and dictate your actions, your heart will not be fully activated to love all of mankind the right way. Where there is love, there will be truth and light. Take away the love or truth, and we will forever remain in the dark. Truth, light and love must all co-exist in perfect harmony to overcome evil on earth. And they cannot just be secluded to one part of the world, but reign as divine royalty across the entire globe.

When he placed a candle on the shelf across the room from him and lit its wick, he came to realize that in fact everything he saw was a flat surface, like a screen – that in fact dimension was an illusion. Everything was a flat surface and the pinpoints of light, whether from a candle on the shelf or a gaslamp above the street, were punctures in that surface – gashes made by somebody behind the screen. He realized then that beyond everything he saw there was an entire realm of blazing sunfire, and that colors were only the silhouettes of people in that realm – walking, eating, dancing, doing whatever they were doing behind the screen. “It astonished Adolphe that everyone failed to realize they were just figures on a tapestry, the shadows of something else. He was therefore amused by the conceit of women, for instance, who who admired the creamy color of their skin when in fact it was only the haze of some other woman behind the vast screen staring into a mirror. Adolphe could explain all of this to himself but he could not explain Janine: Janine wasn't the same as the others. Janine was like their mother; and Adolphe decided Lulu was from this place beyond the surface, and she had, perhaps when she was a little girl, slipped through. “Adolphe wondered why Lulu hadn't told them about this, and then realized she probably would when she thought they were old enough to understand it. He could see it wasn't something one would want to tell a child too soon.

Hunter’s entire body writhed and squirmed.The side of his head was partly gone. A creature, like some monstrous melding of insect and eel, protruded from Hunter’s shoulder and as they stood there rooted in horror it took a vicious bite of Hunter’s flesh.Taylor was suddenly gone.Dekka’s face was grim, her eyes wet.“I tried . . . ,” Hunter said. He held up his hands, mimicked pressing them against his head. “It didn’t work.”“I can do it,” Sam said softly.“I’m scared,” Hunter said.“I know.”“It’s ’cause I killed Harry. God has to punish me. I tried to be good but I’m bad.”“No, Hunter,” Sam said gently. “You paid your dues. You fed the kids. You’re a good guy.”“I’m a good hunter.”“The best.”“I don’t know what’s happening. What’s happening, Sam?”“It’s just the FAYZ, Hunter,” Sam said.“Can the angels find me here so I can go to heaven?”Sam didn’t answer. It was Dekka who spoke. “Do you still remember any prayers, Hunter?”The insectlike creature was almost completely emerged from Hunter’s shoulder. Legs were becoming visible. It had wings folded against its body. It looked like a gigantic ant, or wasp, but silver and brass and covered with a sheen of slime.It was emerging like a chicken breaking out of an egg. Being born. And as the creature was born, it fed on Hunter’s numbed body.Jerky movements beneath Hunter’s shirt testified to more of the larvae emerging.“Do you remember ‘now I lay me down to sleep’?” Dekka asked.“Now I lay me down to sleep,” Hunter said. “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”Sam raised his hands, palms out.“If I should die—”Twin beams of light hit Hunter’s chest and face. His shirt caught fire. Flesh melted. He was dead before he could feel anything.Sam played the light up and down Hunter’s body. The smell was sickening. Jack wanted to look away, but how could he?Sudden darkness as Sam terminated the light.Sam lowered his hands to his side.They stood there in the darkness. Jack breathed through his mouth, trying not to smell the burned flesh.Then they heard a sound. Many sounds.Sam raised his hands and pale light glowed.Hunter was all but gone.The things that had been inside him were still there.

Turning and climbing, the double helix evolved to an operation which had always existed as a possibility for mankind, the eating of light. The appetite for light was ancient. Light had been eaten metaphorically in ritual transubstantiations. Poets had declared that to be is to be a variable of light, that this peach, and even this persimmon, is light. But the peach which mediated between light and the appetite for light interfered with the taste of light, and obscured the appetite it aroused.The appetite for actual light was at first appeased by symbols. But the simple instruction, promulgated during the Primordification, to taste the source of the food in the food, led to the ability to eat light. Out of the attempt to taste sources came the ability to detect unpleasant chemicals. These had to be omitted. Eaters learned to taste the animal in the meat, and the animal's food and drink, and to taste the waters and sugars in the melon. The discriminations grew finer - children learned to eat the qualities of the pear as they ate its flesh, and to taste its slow ripening in autumn sunlight. In the ripeness of the orange they recapitulated the history of the orange. Two results occurred. First, the children were quick to surpass the adults, and with their unspoiled tastes, and their desire for light, they learned the flavor of the soil in which the blueberry grew, and the salty sweetness of the plankton in the sea trout, but they also became attentive to the taste of sunlight. Soon there were attempts to keep fruit of certain vintages: the pears of a superbly comfortable autumn in Anjou, or the oranges of Seville from a year so seasonless that their modulations of bouquet were unsurpassed for decades. Fruit was eaten as a retrospective of light. Second, children of each new generation grew more clearly, until children were shaped as correctly as crystals. The laws governing the operations of growth shone through their perfect exemplification. Life became intellectually transparent. ("Desire")

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.

After many years the woman died, of natural causes. And a few years after that, the ogre died. Eventually, his mistresses died, down on the ground, in the people village, over decades. The war men and women died. The human girl who had escaped her early death died, across the land, over by the ocean, in her shack of blue bowls and rocking chairs. The witch, who had originally made the cake and made up up the spell and given it as a gift to her beloved ogre friend, died. The cake went on and on. Time passed...And the cake, always wanting to please, the cake who had found a way to survive its endlessness by recreating its role over and over again, tried to figure out, in its cake way, what this light-dappled object might want to eat. So it became darkness, a cake of darkness. It did not have to be human food. It did not have to be digestible through a familiar tract. It lay there on the dirt, waiting, a simmering cake of darkness. Through time, and wind, and earthquakes, and chance. At last the cloak fell out of the tree and blew across the land and happened upon the cake where it ate its darkness and extinguished its own dappled light. The cloak disappeared into night and was not seen again, as it was only a piece of coat shaped darkness now and could not be spotted so easily, had there been any eyes left to see it. It floated and joined with nowhere. Darkness was overtaking everything, anyway, pouring over the land and sky. The cake itself, still in the shape of darkness, sat on the hillside. 'What's left?' said the cake. It thought in blocks of feeling. It felt the thick darkness all around it. 'What is left to eat me, to take me in?'Darkness did not want to eat more darkness, not especially. Darkness did not care for carrot cake, or apple pie. Darkness did not seem interested in a water cake or a cake of money. Only when the cake filled with light did it come over. The darkness circling around the light, devouring the light. But the cake kept refilling, as we know. This is the spell of the cake. And the darkness eating light, and again, light, and again, light, lifted.

NAMING THE EARTH(a poem of light for national poetry day)And the world will be born againin circles of steaming breathand beams of lightas each one of us directsour inner eyeupon its name.Hear the cry of wings,the sigh of leaves and grass,smell the new sweet mist risingas the pathway is cleared at last.Stones stand ready -they have knownsince ages and ages agothat they were not alone.Water carries the planet's energyinto skies and down to earth and bones.The cold parts steadily as we come together,bodies and hearts warm,hands tingling.We are silentbut our eyes are singing.We look, we feel, we know,we trust each other's souls,we have no need to speak.Not now, but later,when the time is right,the name will ringwithin the iron coreof each other's listening -and the very earth's being.Every creature, every plant,will hear it calling,tolling like a bell -a sound we've always feltbut never dared to hopeto hear reverberating -true at last, at every levelof existence.The poets come togetherto open the intimate centre.Believein life and air -breathe the light itself,for these are the energiesand rhythms that we needto see, to touch, to reach,to identify, to say, the NAME.Colours on your skinfuse and dissolve -leave the river cleanfor pure space and timeto enter and flow in.We all become one fluid streamof stillness and motion,of flaring thoughtpulses discoveringweird pools and twists withinwhere darkness hidesfrom the flames in our eyesbut will not snare us.We probe deeper still,journeying towards a unitywhich will be more rawand yet also more formedthan anything writtenor spoken before.Our fragile bodiesfall away -and the trees, and the roots of trees,guide us -lead us awayfrom the faces we rememberseeing each day in the mirror -into an oceanof dreamsseething with warmth,love,where the beginningis real,ripe, evolving.And the world is born againin circles of steaming breathand beams of light.An ache - a signal -a trembling moment -and the time is rightto say the name.We sing as one wholevoice of the universal -all the words, the namesof every tiny thirsting thing,and they ring out togetheras one sound,one energy, one sense,one vibration, one breath.And the world listens,beats, shines, glows -IS -Exists!

In the wake of my broken dreamsIn the dirt and the dust and the days that felt like weeks.I found the person that I’m meant to be‘Cause when I felt like giving upWhen death was closing inI shut my eyesAnd black out the darkness with light from insideI’ve given moreThan what I’ve gotI’ve given allOf what I’m notI’ve watched this war consume all that we could becomeFacing my fears in the darkBut if I dieBefore it’s donePlease take these wordsMy final thoughtsThe only way to shine your light is in the dark.Never let life kill your sparkThis is the falloutYeah it’s the end of the worldWe’ll spread the noise to everyone and let them all know you heardA system meltdownIt’s time we exposeThe 'cause of chaos is our ownI’ve given moreThan what I’ve gotI’ve given allOf what I’m notI’ve watched this war consume all that we could becomeFacing my fears in the darkBut if I dieBefore it’s donePlease take these wordsMy final thoughtsThe only way to shine your light is in the dark.Never let life kill your sparkNever let life kill your sparkNever let life kill your sparkFacing my fears in the darkI’ve given moreThan what I’ve gotI’ve given allOf what I’m notI’ve watched this war consume all that we could becomeIf I dieBefore it’s donePlease take these wordsMy final thoughtsThe only way to shine your light is in the dark.Never let life kill your spark..

as architect of choosing...choose. to. live.awakened. entirely. wholly.wildly powerful, deeply masterful, authentically creative,thriving. this is not a hoped-for possible self.[reminder: this is an immutable Law of your being]needing not to learn the skill of being whole, the antidote is to unlearn the habit of living incompletelyhere’s the practice:‘know thyself‘—its about spirit righteousness is underratedelevate connection with the changeless essenceseek similitude with the will of Source and will of self'choose thyself'—its about substancesacred. sagacious. spacious.in thought, word and deed—intend to: honor virtue. innovate enthusiastically. master integrity.'become who you are'—its about style a human, being an entrepreneur of life experiencesa human, being a purveyor of preferencesbeing-well with the known experience of soul, in serviceyour relationship with insecurities, contradictions, & failures?obstacles or...invitations to grow?[mindset forms manifestation]emotions are messengers are giftsdata for discernment: dare to deconstruct them your fearsa belief renovation: fear.less. & aspire towards ascendance, anywaysupport your shinelean into the Lightbe.come.incandescentas architect of choosing, I choose... to disrupt the energy of the status quo,to eclipse the realms of ordinary,& to live--a life-well lived.w/ spirit, substance & style.