How strange it is to be anything at all.
The battle fever. He had never thought to experience it himself, though Jamie had told him of it often enough. How time seemed to blur and slow and evenstop, how the past and the future vanished until there was nothing but the instant, how fear fled,...
Inside Critics The critical voices in our own heads are far more vicious than what we might hear from the outside. Our "inside critics" have intimate knowledge of us and can zero in on our weakest spots. You might be told by the critics that you're t...
It was darker in the tower than any place Devnee had ever been. The dark had textures, some velvet, some satin. The dark shifted positions. The dark continued to breathe. The breath of the tower lifted her clothing like the flaps of a tent, and sound...
Just by breathing deeply on your anger, you will calm it. You are being mindful of your anger, not suppressing it...touching it with the energy of mindfulness. You are not denying it at all. When I speak about this to psychotherapists, I have some di...
The importance of falling in love lies not in how it feels, but in what it perceives. And as always with our feelings, the key moral issue is how truthful the perception is... Falling in love is a sign that this might be someone with whom you could m...
Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a she...
I never knew him. We both knew this place, apparently, this literal small backwater, looked at it long enough to memorize it, our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved, or its memory is (it must have changed a lot). Our visions coincided--'v...
There was nothing wrong with having an expensive home, nothing wrong at all. There’s a pride in building something up, working hard to achieve something. But it shouldn’t have been his manhood that increased with each new success, it should have ...
A man protects his fish from rats by keeping it under a cat's watch. How wise! Another buys a gun for security reasons, but decides to kill a ghost with it. How smart! One prays to God for safety, as he climbs a palm tree with sewing thread. How inte...
From time to time I try to imagine this world of which he spoke--a culture in whose mythology words might be that precious, in which words were conceived as vessels for communications from the heart; a society in which words are holy, and the challen...
Points to Ponder 1. What does it mean to “grow up unto the Lord” (Helaman 3:21)? 2. How often do I think about what kind of man I want to be? How often do I think about what others will remember most about me? What kind of priesthood legacy am I ...
Every Princess has one Prince to share the loves and joys of life, and do you know how that Princess knows which Prince is hers?” “How Mommy?” “From the kiss.” “But how?” “The very first kiss with your Prince will change your life. Wh...
How did Ixtel become real for me? The world is full of Ixtels who I can help without hurting my father. Why this one? How was it her suffering that touched me? Father. I feel connected to her through my father's actions. I feel an obligation to right...
How do text messages make you feel existential? I start thinking about exactly that: how people can edit a thought before sending it out to the world. They can make themselves seem more well spoken than they are, or funnier, smarter. I start thinking...
How's the blood-stream, my dear, invaluable little woman? How's the blood-stream?"... "It's quite comfortable, sir...I think, sir, thank you."... "Aha!"..."a comfortable stream, is it? Aha! v-e-r-y good. V-e-r-y good. Dawdling 'twixt hill and hill, n...
Abby stood nervously before her Master in the classic submissive pose: fully nude, legs apart, wrists placed behind her back; deeply ashamed of her evident arousal. Worse, she had to recount in exact detail the proceedings of her last whipping. The w...
All my life, I thought I was this independent woman. I was on all the right committees, made speeches for all the right causes, traveled all over the world. I had my little part-time job, I made all my own decisions, but . . . there was always someon...
Are there times in our lives when we come across a problem, and we look for our own solution? Are there times when perhaps we try to figure out how WE can solve a problem, rather than taking it to God? Perhaps we like to think we are doing a good thi...
How can I begin to tell you how much I miss you without using those three common words that can't even start to express the magnitude nor the depth of my emotions. How can I write in my own blood while wanting to revert its color. The color of blood ...
He dropped his voice, so low that Tessa wasn’t sure if what he said next was real or part of the dream darkness rising to claim her, though she fought against it. “I’ve never minded it,” he went on. “Being lost, that is. I had always though...