Being tough isn’t in and of itself a bad thing. Looking back on it, though, I can see I was too used to being strong, and never tried to understand those who were weak. I was too used to being fortunate, and didn’t try to understand those less fo...
I shrugged uncomfortably, leaning my head against hers, almost forgetting Mr. Gardner’s presence as Mo and I fell into that sort of exclusionary, near-telepathic best-friends communion. She knew that I would argue that I wasn’t ashamed, but that ...
That's what scares me the most, Paul. That I'll just pass through life and all the people I know will just disappear, without a trace, without me ever telling them how much they mean to me, no matter how small the time spent was or how great the frie...
Now, with regard to the people who have done things we call "terrorism," I'm confident they have been expressing their pain in many different ways for thirty years or more. Instead of our empathically receiving it when they expressed it in much gentl...
Having bad experiences sometimes helps; it makes it clearer what it is you should be doing. I know that sounds very Pollyannaish but it’s true. People who have had only good experiences aren’t very interesting. They may be content, and happy afte...
Life works on the same principle as a boomerang. It's simple, really—what you send out you get back. A smiling face receives many smiles. Friendliness finds itself surrounded by friends. Giving hugs creates hugs. Offered help is reciprocated. In co...
It's natural for a man to defend what's dear to him: his own life, his home, his family. But in order to make him fight on behalf of his rulers, the rich and powerful who are too cunning to fight their own battles-in short to defend not himself but p...
I’m not the only kid who grew up this way. Surrounded by people who used to say that rhyme about sticks and stones. As if broken bones hurt more than the names we got called, and we got called them all. So we grew up believing no one would ever fal...
But then, Phillip reminded me of something that happened so long ago, I had completely forgotten it. He reminded of when we were ten, and he gave me my first kiss. We were on the swings out behind school, and right after he kissed me, he got up and r...
No daylight to separate us. Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, movi...
Before I lost my father, I never understood the rituals surrounding funerals: the wake, the service itself, the reception afterward,the dinners prepared by well-meaning friends and delivered in plastic containers, even the popular habit of making pos...
No, I don't believe it," Joseph said. "From listening to my father and grandfather talk about El Shaddai, I think he's different from the gods of Egypt. I think that none of us could ever be good enough for God. I think of Him as being so good that a...
Did you ever want to set someone's head on fire, just to see what it looked like? Did you ever stand in the street and think to yourself, I could make that nun go blind just by giving her a kiss? Did you ever lay out plans for stitching babies and st...
First, however, I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show, deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmf...
J_Doe032692 wrote: I am not a thin person. However this does not give people the right to taunt me, calling me ugly and worthless, telling me to kill myself because no one will ever want me, or to make up songs about why I am so fat and how much food...
Female Mercenary. This will be a companion on your Tour. She is usually tall, thin and wiry, silent, and neurotic. Sex scares her. This is because she either came from a nunnery or was raped as a child. Or both. Somehow this inspired her to become a ...
Eating is an agricultural act,' as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the wor...
Here You always belonged here. You were theirs, certain as a rock. I’m the one who worries if I fit in with the furniture and the landscape. But I “follow too much the devices and desires of my own heart.” Already the curves in the road are fam...
If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labour per day. But if the field were turne...
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up peopl...
And as if by magic - and it may have been magic, for I believe America is the land of magic, and that we, we now past Americans, were once the magical people of it, waiting now to stand to some unguessable generation of the future as the nameless pre...
