Then I felt something inside me break and music began to pour out into the quiet. My fingers danced; intricate and quick they spun something gossamer and tremulous into the circle of light our fire had made. The music moved like a spiderweb stirred b...
I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later—or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather...
Ohlen stood and walked around the clearing, examining the ground as he went. "I see only one set of tracks..." his voice trailed off as he knelt, inspecting the footprints more closely. "I've seen these before. This is the cru’gan.” Ahmahn came o...
I tell of hearts and souls and dances... Butterflies and second chances; Desperate ones and dreamers bound, Seeking life from barren ground, Who suffer on in earthly fate The bitter pain of agony hate, Might but they stop and here forgive Would break...
He made a small sigh, as he swallowed the first blood, then his mouth closed over my earlobe, mouth working at the wound, tongue coaxing blood from the wound. He pressed his body the length of mine, one hand cupping my turned head, the other playing ...
But above and beyond there's still one name left over, And that is the name that you never will guess; The name that no human research can discover-- But the cat himself knows, and will never confess. When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The...
We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy in it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a d...
Where everything is words, you'd think I'd have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all of life a vicious debate, conversations in...
I hope you never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to fit in your ears. They belong to some strange, heavy, powerful language that pounds away at the side of your head, a wrecking ball coming ...
Our route had now obviously been completely blotted out and here I reckoned less of our chances of survival. We’re like a voyage ship veered off course by a ruthless storm now left with no radar or compass. Ours is a sorry tale of an unpredictable ...
Jesus, I’m not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they’re gonna do. I’m just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.” “Huh?” I asked. “You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth...
... that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we have to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seem...
Whenever doubts become a crime... whenever parents become afraid their children might turn them in; a country where the power of the government is mired inextricably with the jurisdiction and the executive, where you have three secret polices spying ...
It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness,...
Some people would say it's a bad idea to bring a fire-spider into a public library. Those people would probably be right, but it was better than leaving him alone in the house for nine hours straight. The one time I tried, Smudge had expressed his di...
In Italy there are about 60 million people and we know how high is the percentage of morons on national soil. However, in China there are about 1.4 billion people and in India almost 1.3 billion. Therefore I wonder then, if more or less all the world...
Eve hugged her, hard. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “What happened to the old frosting?” Shane, sitting at the table, raised his hand. “Took one for the team.” “Jesus, you ate it? All of it?” “Nah.” He held up the bowl that was si...
When the management iceberg is shaped like a huge phallus, you know that there are a lot of tossers that the top penguin has had to climb over to reach the tip and that there is no shortage of the same caliber of penguin in the balls and shaft of the...
If I have any expertise, it is in the realm of spiritual darkness: fear of the unknown, familiarity with divine absence, mistrust of conventional wisdom, suspicion of religious comforters, keen awareness of the limits of all language about God and at...
I lived through all these times, these great events, without caring very much, concerned with my own aging rather than the world's. Most of us do likewise. History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially int...
Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there's music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who've read Paul...
