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Quote by Lily Gardner

“Bad news. If you can see it coming, you brace yourself; you weigh the outcome. But there's always that niggling voice, that voice of hope whispering, 'Maybe it's good news.' Whether you can admit it or not, that little whisper is a potent thing.”

Quote by Lily Gardner

Book:Betting Blind
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Betting Blind

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Lily Gardner

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“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.”

SoulPhilosophyGodLightScienceJoySpiritPoetryReligionFaithBeliefEnergyGrowthNatureFreedomPrayerConsciousnessWonderBeautyPowerFireGraceFateSeeingMysteryCreationHumilityPoetPrayingWalkingPoemMindfulnessPraiseCuriositySeekingToleranceFearlessExplorationGapsJoyfulFreeIlluminationDisbeliefEpiphanyPrayersAmenMultiplicityJoyfulnessHallelujahWatchingIntricacyReligious DiversityLife ForceLiving In The Present MomentEnoughnessPhilosopher S StoneExultantStalking The GapsThe Tree With The Lights In ItRing The Bells
Book:PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK
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“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.”

SoulPhilosophyGodLightScienceJoySpiritPoetryReligionFaithBeliefEnergyGrowthNatureFreedomPrayerConsciousnessWonderBeautyPowerFireGraceFateSeeingMysteryCreationHumilityPoetPrayingWalkingPoemMindfulnessPraiseLongingCuriositySeekingToleranceFearlessExplorationGapsJoyfulFreeIlluminationDisbeliefEpiphanyPrayersAmenMultiplicityJoyfulnessHallelujahWatchingIntricacyReligious DiversityLife ForceLiving In The Present MomentEnoughnessPhilosopher S StoneExultantStalking The GapsThe Tree With The Lights In ItRing The Bells
Book:PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK
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“What was glimpsed in Aquarius—what was envisioned, believed in, prophesied, predicted, doubted, and forewarned—is made, in Pisces, manifest. Those solitary visions that, but a month ago, belonged only to the dreamer, will now acquire the form and substance of the real. We were of our own making, and we shall be our own end. And after Pisces? Out of the womb, the bloody birth. We do not follow: we cannot cross from last to first. Aries will not admit a collective point of view, and Taurus will not relinquish the subjective. Gemini's code is an exclusive one. Cancer seeks a source, Leo, a purpose, and Virgo, a design; but these are projects undertaken singly. Only in the zodiac's second act will we begin to show ourselves: in Libra, as a notion, in Scorpio, as a quality, and in Sagittarius, as a voice. In Capricorn we will gain memory, and in Aquarius, vision; it is only in Pisces, the last and oldest of the zodiacal signs, that we acquire a kind of selfhood, something whole. But the doubled fish of Pisces, that mirrored womb of self and self-awareness, is an ourobouros of mind—both the will of fate, and the fated will—and the house of self-undoing is a prison built by prisoners, airless, door-less, and mortared from within. These alterations come upon us irrevocably, as the hands of the clock-face come upon the hour.”

FateMysteriousAstrologyGreat WritingOmniscientEleanor CattonThe LuminariesGreat PassageThe House Of Self Undoing
Book:The Luminaries
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“It looked as though the leaves of the autumn forest had taken flight, and were pouring down the valley like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, all the leaves of the hardwoods from here to Hudson’s Bay. It was as if the season’s colors were draining away like lifeblood, as if the year were molting and shedding. The year was rolling down, and a vital curve had been reached, the tilt that gives way to headlong rush. And when the monarch butterflies had passed and were gone, the skies were vacant, the air poised. The dark night into which the year was plunging was not a sleep but an awakening, a new and necessary austerity, the sparer climate for which I longed. The shed trees were brittle and still, the creek light and cold, and my spirit holding its breath.”

SoulPhilosophyGodLightScienceJoySpiritPoetryReligionFaithBeliefEnergyGrowthNatureFreedomPrayerConsciousnessWonderBeautyPowerFireGraceFateSeeingMysteryCreationHumilityPoetPrayingWalkingPoemMindfulnessPraiseCuriositySeekingToleranceFearlessExplorationGapsJoyfulFreeIlluminationDisbeliefEpiphanyPrayersAmenMultiplicityJoyfulnessHallelujahWatchingIntricacyReligious DiversityLife ForceLiving In The Present MomentEnoughnessPhilosopher S StoneExultantStalking The GapsThe Tree With The Lights In ItRing The Bells
Book:PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK
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