Her mother had once told her that one could run away from home, from husband, from children, from trouble, but it was impossible to run away from oneself. "You always have to take yourself with you," she said. And now, bending towards her mother, Hop...
Nearly everywhere I've been, popular wisdom has it that the location of humanity's original planet is unknown, mysterious. In fact it isn't, as anyone who troubles to read on the subject will discover, but it very, very, far away from nearly anywhere...
Sometimes you will not be able to see where you are going; every step will seem uncertain. But know that as long as you follow your intuition and take baby steps, your soul’s inner GPS will guide you home. You will find that you will be the right p...
Sexually active? Sexually ? Patrick and I hadn't even learned the fine points of kissing yet! I marched on down. 'For your information,' I said from the doorway, as both Dad and Lester jerked to attention, 'I am about as sexually active as a bag of s...
Drawing from 1.7 million Gallup surveys collected between 2008 and 2012, researchers Angus Deaton and Arthur Stone found that parents with children at home age fifteen or younger experience more highs, as well as more lows, than those without childre...
It is interesting how one word can spark memories that one believes she has buried beyond recognition. War reminded me of the sharp and bittersweet smell of burning homes, temples, and palaces. It made my eyes cloud over with a haze of dense smoke, k...
Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, r...
The students adore your father,' a perfumed woman said to me. 'Aren't you lucky to live with such a charming man!' 'He's even more charming at home,' Mom said. 'Isn't he, Bea? He rides a unicycle through the house -' '- even up and down the stairs,' ...
It is...difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows. [E]very memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in t...
A rose lay open in full bloom and, looking from my garden room, I watched the sun-baked flower fill with rain. It seemed so fragile, resting there, and such a silence filled the air, the beauty of the moment caused me pain. "What more?" I thought. "T...
You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names. Sometimes someone came popping around a corner a...
Years later, after other experiences with dogs, I wondered if their species were shaped and charmed to serve as four-legged guides able to assist in leading humanity back to our first—and lost—home. By the example of their joy and humility, by wa...
Ivanov: Once I worked hard and thought a lot but I never got tired; now I do nothing and think of nothing, but I'm tired in body and spirit. My conscience aches day and night, I feel deeply guilty but I don't understand where I am actually at fault. ...
The serious reader in the age of technology is a rebel by definition: a protester without a placard, a Luddite without hammer or bludgeon. She reads on planes to picket the antiseptic nature of modern travel, on commuter trains to insist on individua...
I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly-- almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on ...
Guidance, like all God's acts of blessing under the covenant of grace, is a sovereign act. Not merely does God will to guide us in the sense of showing us his way, that we may tread it; he wills also to guide us in the more fundamental sense of ensur...
When I look at a child, I see a living, breathing person, made in God's image, for whom God has a plan. As parent educators, we need to embrace a new notion of learning...we need to engage the hearten order to effectively educate the child. Our visio...
Underground, in the dark wet hole that was home to the spiders and the rats, something moved. It had no right to be down there but it belonged nowhere else. Half drowned half alive it pushed the water ahead of it into the culverts and drains as it pa...
We men have always fought to protect others... since the ancient times. Even though we were naked, and only had sticks and stones to defend ourselves... we still had the elderly, the young, our wives, friends, family, and homes... and to protect all ...
Surely, though, I must have stolen into the future and landed in an H.G. Wells-style world - a horrific, fantastic society in which people's faces contained only eyes, millions of healthy young adults and children dropped dead from the flu, boys got ...
We depend on this planet to eat, drink, breathe, and live. Figuring out how to keep our life support system running needs to be our number-one priority. Nothing is more important than finding a way to live together - justly, respectfully, sustainably...
