Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  A dozen hands reached up to snatch them.There were calls for an encore, then; but we, of course, had none to make. We could only dance back beneath the dropping curtain while the crowd still cheered and the chairman called for order. The next act - a couple of trick-cyclists - was pushed hurriedly on to take our place; but even at the end of their set there were still one or two voices calling for us.We were the hit of the evening.Back stage, with Kitty’s lips upon my cheek, Walter’s arm about my shoulders, and exclamations of delight and praise greeting me from every corner, I stood quite stunned, unable either to smile at the compliments or modestly disclaim them. I had passed perhaps seven minutes before that gay and shouting crowd; but in those few, swift minutes I had glimpsed a truth about myself, and it had left me awed and quite transformed.The truth was this: that whatever successes I might achieve as a girl, they would be nothing compared to the triumphs I should enjoy clad, however girlishly, as a boy.I had, in short, found my vocation. Next day, rather appropriately, I got my hair cut off, and changed my name.The hair I had barbered at a house in Battersea, by the same theatrical hairdresser who cut Kitty’s. He worked on me for an hour, while she sat and watched; and at the end of that time I remember he held a glass to his apron and said warningly: ‘Now, you will squeal when you see it - I never cropped a girl before who didn’t squeal at the first look,’ and I trembled in a sudden panic.But when he turned the glass to show me, I only smiled to see the transformation he had made. He had not clipped the hair as short as Kitty‘s, but had left it long and falling, Bohemian-like, quite to my collar; and here, without the weight of the plait to pull it flat and lank, it sprang into a slight, surprising curl. Upon the locks which threatened to tumble over my brow he had palmed a little macassar-oil, which turned them sleek as cat’s fur, and gold as a ring. When I fingered them - when I turned and tilted my head - I felt my cheeks grow crimson. The man said then, ‘You see, you will find it queer,’ and he showed me how I might wear my severed plait, as Kitty wore hers, to disguise his barbering.I said nothing; but it was not with regret that I had blushed. I had blushed because my new, shorn head, my naked neck, felt saucy. I had blushed because - just as I had done when I first pulled on a pair of trousers - I had felt myself stir, and grow warm, and want Kitty.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  There. It was huge. It must be a goshawk. They look identical. Goshawks are bigger , that’s all. Just bigger . No. In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats . Bigger , yes . But bulkier , bloodier , deadlier , scarier and much , much harder to see . Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they’re the birdwatchers’ dark grail. You might spend a week in a forest full of gosses and never see one, just traces of their presence. A sudden hush, followed by the calls of terrified woodland birds, and a sense of something moving just beyond vision. Perhaps you’ll find a half-eaten pigeon sprawled in a burst of white feathers on the forest floor . Or you might be lucky: walking in a foggy ride at dawn you’ll turn your head and catch a split-second glimpse of a bird hurtling past and away, huge taloned feet held loosely clenched, eyes set on a distant target. A split second that stamps the image indelibly on your brain and leaves you hungry for more. Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how. But you have a slightly better chance on still, clear mornings in early spring, because that’s when goshawks eschew their world under the trees to court each other in the open sky. That was what I was hoping to see. I slammed the rusting door, and set off with my binoculars through a forest washed pewter with frost. Pieces of this place had disappeared since I was last here. I found squares of wrecked ground; clear-cut, broken acres with torn roots and drying needles strewn in the sand. Clearings. That’s what I needed. Slowly my brain righted itself into spaces unused for months. For so long I’d been living in libraries and college rooms, frowning at screens, marking essays, chasing down academic references. This was a different kind of hunt. Here I was a different animal. Have you ever watched a deer walking out from cover? They step, stop, and stay, motionless, nose to the air, looking and smelling. A nervous twitch might run down their flanks. And then, reassured that all is safe, they ankle their way out of the brush to graze. That morning, I felt like the deer. Not that I was sniffing the air, or standing in fear – but like the deer, I was in the grip of very old and emotional ways of moving through a landscape, experiencing forms of attention and deportment beyond conscious control. Something inside me ordered me how and where to step without me knowing much about it. It might be a million years of evolution, it might be intuition, but on my goshawk hunt I feel tense when I’m walking or standing in sunlight, find myself unconsciously edging towards broken light, or slipping into the narrow, cold shadows along the wide breaks between pine stands.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Night fell quickly, the wind making swift tracks through the darkness. Bernard, Roy, and I went to the water tank and bathed ourselves in the open air, our soapy bodies glowing from the light of an almost full moon. When we returned to the house, the food was waiting for us, and we ate purposefully, without words. After dinner, Roy left, muttering that he had some people he wanted to visit. Yusuf went to his hut and brought back an old transistor radio that he said had once belonged to our grandfather. Fiddling with the knob, he caught a scratchy BBC newscast, fading in and out of range, the voices like hallucinatory fragments from another world. A moment later we heard a strange, low-pitched moan off in the distance. “The night runners must be out tonight,” Auma said. “What are night runners?” “They’re like warlocks,” Auma said. “Spirit men. When we were children, these people here”—she pointed at Granny and Zeituni—would tell us stories about them to make us behave. They told us that in daylight the night runners are like ordinary men. You might pass them in the market, or even have them to your house for a meal, and never know their true natures. But at night they take on the shape of leopards and speak to all the animals. The most powerful night runners can leave their bodies and fly to faraway places. Or hex you with only a glance. If you ask our neighbors, they will tell you that there are still many night runners around here.” “Auma! You act as if it is not true!” In the flickering light of the kerosene lamp, I couldn’t tell if Zeituni was joking. “Let me tell you, Barry,” she said, “When I was young the night runners caused people many problems. They would steal our goats. Sometimes they took even our cattle. Only your grandfather was not afraid of them. I remember one time he heard his goats bleating in their pen, and when he went to check on them, he saw what looked like a huge leopard standing on its hind legs, like a man. It had a baby goat in its jaws, and when it saw your grandfather, it cried out in Luo before running into the forest. Your grandfather chased it deep into the hills, but just as he was about to strike it with his panga, the night runner flew up into the trees. Luckily, it dropped the goat when it jumped, and the goat suffered only a broken leg. Your grandfather brought the goat back to the compound and showed me how to make a splint. I cared for that goat myself until it was back to health.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  As a snake he learns of history. He hears the trees speak, and sees the birth of the world through the eyes and ears of an owl. He discusses mankind’s role in God’s plan with a donnish badger in a comfortably furnished sett. And at the end, his education complete, the Wart pulls the sword from the stone, learns he is the son of Uther Pendragon and is crowned King Arthur. It is a glorious dream of wish-fulfilment for White. He writes himself into the character of the Wart, the boy of unacknowledged royal blood who runs wild around the castle just as he had raced about West Hill House in St Leonards-on-Sea, wild, and happy, and free. White had been torn from safety and sent away to school, but he saves the Wart from such a fate. There would be no beatings in his education. But even so, his lessons are full of cruelty. I did not understand quite how cruel a book it was when I was young. But I responded to that cruelty all the same. Because my favourite part of the book was the Wart’s ordeal as a hawk. It was truly terrifying. I’d read it and squirm, and curl my toes, then read it all over again. Merlyn turns the Wart into his namesake, a merlin, and looses him in the castle mews at night. And as a new officer in the cadre of the castle’s trained hawks, the Wart must undergo the customary ordeal. He is ordered to stand next to Colonel Cully the goshawk until the rest of the hawks ring their bells three times. It is an exquisitely dangerous initiation, for the colonel is insane. As the ordeal begins the goshawk glowers and mutters. He quotes broken snatches of Shakespeare and Webster, run all together in a fugue of rising horror. After the bells ring once the goshawk begs for the test to end, cries, ‘I can’t hold off much longer.’ The bells ring twice. He moves towards the Wart, stamping the perch convulsively: ‘He was terrified of the Wart, not triumphing, and he must slay.’ In that awful ordeal, White is the Wart, the boy who must be brave. But he is not just the Wart, and the boy is not the only one imperilled. There’s a sad passage in Olivia Laing’s book The Trip to Echo Spring that reminds me of this desperate scene. She quotes the writer John Cheever, whose alcoholism was intimately bound up with his erotic desires for men. He hated his homosexuality and felt himself in constant danger. ‘Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy,’ he wrote in his journals, ‘was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.’

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Lolo shrugged and looked down at me. “The boy should know where his dinner is coming from. What do you think, Barry?” I looked at my mother, then turned back to face the man holding the chicken. Lolo nodded again, and I watched the man set the bird down, pinning it gently under one knee and pulling its neck out across a narrow gutter. For a moment the bird struggled, beating its wings hard against the ground, a few feathers dancing up with the wind. Then it grew completely still. The man pulled the blade across the bird’s neck in a single smooth motion. Blood shot out in a long, crimson ribbon. The man stood up, holding the bird far away from his body, and suddenly tossed it high into the air. It landed with a thud, then struggled to its feet, its head lolling grotesquely against its side, its legs pumping wildly in a wide, wobbly circle. I watched as the circle grew smaller, the blood trickling down to a gurgle, until finally the bird collapsed, lifeless on the grass. Lolo rubbed his hand across my head and told me and my mother to go wash up before dinner. The three of us ate quietly under a dim yellow bulb—chicken stew and rice, and then a dessert of red, hairy-skinned fruit so sweet at the center that only a stomachache could make me stop. Later, lying alone beneath a mosquito net canopy, I listened to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the last twitch of life that I’d witnessed a few hours before. I could barely believe my good fortune. “The first thing to remember is how to protect yourself.” Lolo and I faced off in the backyard. A day earlier, I had shown up at the house with an egg-sized lump on the side of my head. Lolo had looked up from washing his motorcycle and asked me what had happened, and I told him about my tussle with an older boy who lived down the road. The boy had run off with my friend’s soccer ball, I said, in the middle of our game. When I chased after him, the boy picked up a rock. It wasn’t fair, I said, my voice choking with aggrievement. He had cheated. Lolo had parted my hair with his fingers and silently examined the wound. “It’s not bleeding,” he said finally, before returning to his chrome. I thought that had ended the matter. But when he came home from work the next day, he had with him two pairs of boxing gloves. They smelled of new leather, the larger pair black, the smaller pair red, the laces tied together and thrown over his shoulder. He now finished tying the laces on my gloves and stepped back to examine his handiwork. My hands dangled at my sides like bulbs at the ends of thin stalks. He shook his head and raised the gloves to cover my face.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She worked quickly and carefully, but distractedly; and as she rubbed at her face she held my gaze in the glass. She looked at my new hat and said, ‘What a pretty bonnet!’ Then she asked how I knew Tony - was he my beau? I was shocked at that and said, ‘Oh, no! He is courting my sister’; and she laughed. Where did I live? she asked me then. What did I work at?‘I work in an oyster-house,’ I said.‘An oyster-house!’ The idea seemed to tickle her. Still rubbing at her cheeks, she began to hum, and then to sing very low beneath her breath.‘As I was going down Bishopgate Street, An oyster-girl I happened to meet -’A swipe at the crimson of her lip, the black of her lashes.‘Into her basket I happened to peep, To see if she’d got any oysters ...’She sang on; then opened one eye very wide, and leaned close to the glass to remove a stubborn crumb of spit-black - her mouth stretching wide, out of a kind of sympathy with her eyelids, and her breath misting the mirror. For a second she seemed quite to have forgotten me. I studied the skin of her face and her throat. It had emerged from its mask of powder and grease the colour of cream - the colour of the lace on her chemise; but it was darkened at the nose and cheeks - and even, I saw, at the edge of her lip - by freckles, brown as her hair. I had not suspected the existence of the freckles. I found them wonderfully and inexplicably moving.She wiped her breath from the glass, then, and gave me a wink, and asked me more about myself; and because it was somehow easier to talk to her reflection than to her face, I began at last to chat with her quite freely. At first she answered as I thought an actress should - comfortably, rather teasingly, laughing when I blushed or said a foolish thing. Gradually, however - as if she was stripping the paint from her voice, as well as from her face - her tone grew milder, less pert and pressing.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  While the body positivity movement began in 1969 with the fat acceptance movement, and undoubtedly continues to do some incredible work to this day, others have shared that the messaging “love my body” feels impossible to grasp. 95 While I still believe it can be a helpful framework for tying in self- compassion, I also get that the idea of unconditionally loving your body, though it sounds nice, can feel disingenuous. That’s why body neutrality—where you practice accepting your body for what it is and what it can do, rather than what it looks like—can be a more passable entry point, especially if you struggle with body dysmorphia and/or an eating disorder. I love how Anuschka Rees, author and body neutrality activist, describes this difference in perspective in her book Beyond Beautiful. She suggests that while body positivity hopes to change the definition of beauty in our society, body neutrality centers on changing the value of beauty of our society. 96 I find that incredibly powerful. Thinking about what it would be like to live in a world where our bodies could just be bodies and our worth isn’t attached to how they look—it gives me goose bumps. So that’s where we started with Casey. Rather than encouraging her to practice disingenuous self-talk (e.g., “I love how my stomach looks!”), we instead integrated mindfulness to simply build awareness of her body and what it could do for her. An example of this included helping Casey acknowledge how her stomach helps her digest food so that she has enough energy to get through her day. By shifting this focus, Casey was even able to integrate a sense of gratitude for her body. It didn’t mean that she loved how she looked, but she was beginning to understand that her body actually did a lot for her each day. Here again we’re holding the dialectic of the both/and: you can both appreciate what your body can do and not love how it looks—and that’s all okay. I think it’d be helpful to lean into an exercise to practice for yourself some body neutrality. I invite you to list three parts of your body (perhaps name some parts of your body that you struggle to love at times) and note how those parts help you currently or have served you in the past. PART OF YOUR BODY: WHAT HAS THIS PART OF YOUR BODY DONE FOR YOU OR HOW DOES IT HELP YOU CURRENTLY? How did that exercise feel for you? Did you notice any shift in perspective? If not, that’s okay. Be patient with yourself in the process.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  I had been reading the gospel according to Matthew, letting the familiar words of his story slip through my mind like a gentle stream, when suddenly the holy voice I had first heard on the rooftop returned and shook me awake in my spirit. You have just read the first vision quest of Jesus. I smile now because I can remember scrambling to come awake when those words caught me off guard. I consider this voice to be from God because it appears from some place other than my own consciousness. It announces itself. It speaks in a clear, simple, uncomplicated way. When I have attempted to explain this experience to others I have often laughed at myself because the voice I hear sounds as if it is speaking to a small child. I do not receive long and elaborate messages from God, probably because God is not sure I could understand them. Instead, I get the brief, direct words needed by a prophet with a short attention span. One of my images of God is that of Grandmother, the wise old Native woman with gray hair and eyes as ancient as the Earth. She takes my face gently in her hands and holds me in Her gaze as She tells me what She thinks I need to know, forming the words slowly so I can remember them and let them sink in. I embrace this feminine image in the same way Hebrew tradition refers to the voice of God as the bat kol, the daughter of the voice. It is that mysterious presence that comes from some source beyond, a communication that defies our ability to categorize. Therefore, like the theologians of ancient Israel, I give the voice a female personification because I experience it in that way. I suspect many, if not most, of us are more than a little shy about admitting we hear “voices.” When I was a postulant for Holy Orders (a person being screened to see if he or she is a suitable candidate for ordination) I remember laughing with my peers about the psychiatric examination required in the process. Part of that examination was a series of written questions that had to be answered yes or no – among them were questions such as, “do you hear voices?” Any sane person, or at least anyone sane enough to understand what it would mean to the psychiatrist if you replied yes, would check off no. But the choice can be an odd one for people who believe they have a call from God to become ordained. Men and women preparing for seminary are usually fairly well versed in the Bible, and in that book there are numerous examples of human beings hearing the voice of God.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I was a scrawny, too-tall child with ink on my fingers, binoculars around my neck, and legs covered in plasters. I was shy, pigeon-toed, knock-kneed, fantastically clumsy, hopeless at sport, and allergic to dogs and horses. But I had an obsession. Birds. Birds of prey most of all. I was sure they were the best things that had ever existed. My parents thought this obsession would go the way of the others: dinosaurs, ponies, volcanoes. It didn’t. It worsened. When I was six I tried to sleep every night with my arms folded behind my back like wings. This didn’t last long, because it is very hard to sleep with your arms folded behind your back like wings. Later, when I saw pictures of the ancient Egyptian falcon-headed god Horus, all faience and turquoise and with a perfect moustachial stripe below his wide, haunting eyes, I was stricken with a strange religious awe. This was my god, not the one we prayed to at school: he was an old man with a white beard and drapes. For weeks, in secret heresy, I whispered Dear Horus instead of Our Father when we recited the Lord’s Prayer at school assemblies. It was a suitably formal address, I thought, having learned it from writing birthday thank-you notes. Hawk habits, hawk species, hawk scientific names; I learned them all, stuck pictures of raptors on my bedroom walls, and drew them, over and over again, on the edges of newspapers, on scraps of notepaper, on the margins of my school exercise books, as if by so doing I could conjure them into existence. I remember a teacher showing us photographs of the cave paintings at Lascaux and explaining that no one knew why prehistoric people drew these animals. I was indignant. I knew exactly why, but at that age was at a loss to put my intuition into words that made sense even to me.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Lolo drew a peanut from his pocket and handed it to the animal’s grasping fingers. “His name is Tata,” he said. “I brought him all the way from New Guinea for you.” I started to step forward to get a closer look, but Tata threatened to lunge, his dark-ringed eyes fierce and suspicious. I decided to stay where I was. “Don’t worry,” Lolo said, handing Tata another peanut. “He’s on a leash. Come—there’s more.” I looked up at my mother, and she gave me a tentative smile. In the backyard, we found what seemed like a small zoo: chickens and ducks running every which way, a big yellow dog with a baleful howl, two birds of paradise, a white cockatoo, and finally two baby crocodiles, half submerged in a fenced-off pond toward the edge of the compound. Lolo stared down at the reptiles. “There were three,” he said, “but the biggest one crawled out through a hole in the fence. Slipped into somebody’s rice field and ate one of the man’s ducks. We had to hunt it by torchlight.” There wasn’t much light left, but we took a short walk down the mud path into the village. Groups of giggling neighborhood children waved from their compounds, and a few barefoot old men came up to shake our hands. We stopped at the common, where one of Lolo’s men was grazing a few goats, and a small boy came up beside me holding a dragonfly that hovered at the end of a string. When we returned to the house, the man who had carried our luggage was standing in the backyard with a rust-colored hen tucked under his arm and a long knife in his right hand. He said something to Lolo, who nodded and called over to my mother and me. My mother told me to wait where I was and sent Lolo a questioning glance. “Don’t you think he’s a little young?”

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  When researchers studied awe and beauty, they found an interesting connection: when we experience awe, we move toward others in beneficial ways. When we are overcome by the grandeur of a snowy mountain peak or delighted by a beautiful song, when we sit silently in an old church and marvel at the way the sunlight seeps through the stained-glass windows, or when we’re delighted by our children’s squeals as they run through the sprinkler in the backyard, we let go of our “it’s all about me” fixation. We are freed from being the center of our own worlds for just a moment, and in doing so, we become more invested in the well-being of others, more generous, less entitled.2 Have you experienced this? It’s the moment when your heart swells and feels as if it might explode trying to take in how beautiful something is. Cynicism says, “I’m surrounded by incompetence, fraudsters, and disappointment.” Delight in God and His goodness tears down our walls and allows hope, trust, and worship to flood in. And guess how worship springs up in us? When we look to the source of all delight—God Himself—instead of our temporary problems. Consider Paul’s description of what happens when we, like the Israelites, turn our gaze away from the things that fade and look to the eternal God: Whenever, though, they turn to face God as Moses did, God removes the veil and there they are—face-to-face! They suddenly recognize that God is a living, personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. And when God is personally present, a living Spirit, that old, constricting legislation is recognized as obsolete. We’re free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.3 Just as Moses’s face shone when he descended from the mountain where God had allowed him to see His glory, when God enters our lives, He works in us and makes our lives “brighter and more beautiful.” LIE : People are not trustworthy, and life will not work out. TRUTH : God is trustworthy and will, in the end, work all things together for good. We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.4 I CHOOSE TO DELIGHT IN GOD AND SIGNS OF HIS WORK IN THE WORLD AROUND ME. [image file=Image00041.jpg] The Bitter Taste of Cynicism Now, if you are a true cynic, you aren’t buying one word I am saying. And I get it because I am a recovering skilled cynic. In the months of my doubt, I picked up and practiced the skill of cynicism with precision.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  myn Nu 24°" Ez 13';—vision, in the ecstatic state SY NIN (|| AID ODP) Ez 137 of the false prophets; ‘I’ מַחְזֶה‎ Nu 24* (JE; poems of Balaam); מה‎ DIAS הִיָה דְבַר י'‎ Gn r51(R) the word of ”» came unto Abram in a vision. Toma n.f. light, place of seeing, win- dow, אֶלדְמַחזָה‎ MM Light over against light כ‎ : 1 מַחזִיאת‎ n.pr.m. (visions) 1 Ch 25* (but on this list cf. RS OM: e248) מחזיאות=-‎ 1 Ch 25°" a Hemanite chief of a course of singers. IL. FUT (of foll.; Ar. 195 un, His be opposite, \i> front, Lane ;"ל"‎ y, Lg?%® Dr8%®, ef. Sab. חדית‎ prep. opposite: DHM in MV). t MMM .גמ ג‎ "77 breast of animals (Aram. seas, NITN)—abs. ח'‎ Ex 20"+ 4 t.; estr. M0 Ex 29" + 5 +; pl. nit Ly 9°1—breast, only P, and only of sacrificial animals; always as wave- offering; of ram of installation Ex 29”? Ly 8”, of peace-offering Lv 7*°* 91, of Nazirite sacrif. Nu 6”; perquisite of Aaron and his sons Ly 7°14 to cf גו‎ Tn n.pr.m. son of Nahor Gn 22”, G A¢av (cf. As. n.pr.loc. 270600, mentioned with Bazt חזז (v. m1. 82) by Esar. 13[5997: 2518595 COT on Gn 227; also Di). of foll.; Ar. (= cut cr notch; (=‏ /) חזז pierce (Frey)).‏ 1 [חזיז]‎ n.{m.| thunder-bolt, lightning- flash (N H mn; Aram. רִזְיזָא‎ shening cloud)— only estr. MM and pl. DMA; לזיו קלות‎ FN Jb 28% and a way for thunder-bolis = 38”; inn י' עה‎ Ze x0 )[ BYE). pin a vb. be or grow firm, strong, strengthen (NH id.; Aram. hs: PIN bind on or about, gird on, cf. Ar. Gj> bind, squeeze) —tQal Pf ’n Gn41%4+4t.; PIN 2 Ch 26"; sf. PIN 2 Ch 28% ete.; Jmpf. Pin’ 2 Ch 287

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  adj.gent. Ephrathite. 1. Eph-‏ אפַרְתִיז 1.Jur2° 181" (of ancestor‏ אֶפַרְתָה raimite, cf,‏ of Elkanah) 1K 11" (of Jerob.) 2. from’ 2;‏ S17” (of Jesse); pl. OMAN‏ 1 א' one mand‏ n> n’a Ru 1”.‏ (meaning dub. / whence Ar. Sl‏ אפת calamity, & also wonder, portent ; acc. to Thes‏ Ar. 4/ =i! suffer evil).‏ Tnpn n.m.””” wonder, sign, portent מוּפַת-- (מַאפַת=)‎ Ex 7°+14t.; DNB Ez12"; מוּפָתִים‎ Dt 4*+- 4%.; Ona Dt6”+ ot.; מוּפְתִי‎ Ex7? 11°; YEW 78%; VNB 1 016% y- 105° —1. wonder, as special display of God’s power Ex 73 11° y105° 1 Ch16" Jo 3°; by Moses and Aaron Ex 4” 11% cf. 7° (in mouth of \\ אצבון Pharaoh), by false proph. Dt 137° (אות||)‎ usually || אות‎ Dt 4* 6” 7° 26° 297 34" ש‎ 78% 105” 135° Je 32” Neg”; applied to effect of Yahweh’s curse Dt 28* (|| (אות‎ ; to one pro- tected by " yp 717. 2. sign or token of future event (cf. nix) 1 K 13"%5 2Ch 32%; symbolic act Is 20° (|| (אות‎ ; as such the term is applied to persons 18 8% )|| (אות‎ Ez 12°"! 247: cf. מ'‎ WIS Ze 3° men who serve as a symbol or sign.—Vb. used, of divine act, is נתן‎ Ex 7° etc., שים‎ Je 32%; שים‎ also of entrusting to human power Ex 4”, cf. 137 1 K 13°; of human agency עשה‎ Ex 47 11% נתן‎ 1 K 13%”. Tiare n.pr.m. 1. j2¥8 asonof Gad(Sam. (ש0000]30 ₪ ,אצבעון‎ Gn אְָנִי=46%‎ Nu 26" (G *Aeve, ACav), this shorter form less probable. 2. אֶצְבּון‎ a grandson of Benjamin 1 Ch 77 (G *AacBar, *EooeBov). YARN v. 11. צבע‎ א prob. i.q. 2 to join (cf. on the‏ ואצלז ay ae‏ Te byt subst. conjunction, proximity; with sf. DYN, byt etc.; only used as a prep. a. (as an implicit accus.) in proximity to (as though 05 Lag®*®), beside: מ3)‎ 397" 41° and stood הפרות‎ SYN beside the kine, ז‎ 5 5? {127 O38 beside Dagon, ד‎ K 13%” 21' Pr 8% Ez 1° 33 39”; oft. in phrase (” (מ'‎ Mayen dys Ly 5 Dt167 1K 2" Am 2*+ ; of a locality (cf. 11. אֶת‎ 2) Dt 11° beside the terebinths of Moreh, 1 K 1° 4" 16 41. After avb. of motion (late) Dn 877; of. 2 61 28"%. |. with J, O¥ND from proaimity to, from beside (cf. ND, OYD): +18 20" (read with @ 23983 מַאֶצַל‎ From beside the mound); Ez 40’ contiguous to, beside (}2 3 0( ; with suff, 1S 17% מַאֶצְלוּ‎ 2D") and he turned about from beside him, ד‎ K 3” 20" Ez 10%. vb. denom. lay aside, reserve,‏ ְמצַל]1 withdraw, withhold—Qal P/. HO¥8 Gn27*;‏ Ec 2). ADEN cons. Nu 11";—,reserve,‏ אֶצַלְתִּי מְְְהָרוּה Gn 27"; (withdraw), set apart‏ לי 7372 withhold OF ₪29. WNiph. Pf‏ ;"זז טא D383 Ez 42° be withdrawn, i.e. shortened or‏ Nur1 (Ké"™)‏ ולאצל narrowed. Hiph. Impf.‏ "זז טא =Qal‏

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  פלוא 7 יפות 117 כ1) ,בצק ג דל רא 1 ;—son of Reuben Gn 46° Ex 6% Nu‏ (פלה D.pr.‏ Ch 5%, addov(s), etc.; v. also noe.‏ 1 *26° toyds adj. gent. of foregoing, c. art. as‏ n.coll., Nu 26°.‏ [be] v. following.‏ adj. wonderful, incomprehen-‏ [פַּלְאי]+ sible ;—m. ‘Nop (i.e. *NDB) Kt, Ju 138 (name‏ (ie.‏ פלאיה דַעַת ]£52 ; (פלי(א) of 9 S79; > Qr‏ God’s knowledge ; > Qr Awd,‏ 139° ץש mPNDB)‏ tooxbe n.pr.m. Ne 87 10%, GL @adauas.‏ a.pram. (late As. Pi-lidma Hilpr‏ פלירה 1 Pe. Exp. ix. e) ;—1 Ch 3™, Sapa, Sadaa, Sadia.‏ ו t [asda] n.f. wondrous work (si vera‏ 1.);—-pl. estr. niNdED Jb 37°° (of providence ;‏ but read probably NNDB Bu SS, ef. Di).‏ T[ 75] vb. split, divide (NH chiefly in‏ _ secondary meanings and deriv.; Ar. 13 divide,‏ split ; Aram. 228, XX divide; Eth. £7:‏ ravine, stream; As. palgu, canal) ;—WNiph.‏ Gn 10” the earth was divided.‏ ִפַלֶנָה ו Pi. 1. Pf. 3 ms. 332 71.38% cleave a channel‏ ו for rain. 2. Imv. ms. 233 (Ges§")‏ divide their speech (their counsels).‏ abs n.m.¥®:" (cleft) channel, (artif.)‏ 2 Is30°(+ pYD722") 3 estr.‏ ָּלְנִים canal;—usu. pl.‏ DY" 398 y 1% sim. Is 32? Pr 21', metaph. 57% of‏ (i.e. irrigating‏ 46° ץצ 1208 119% tears La 3% y‏ canals fr. river, metaph.); Towa Jb 29° (fig.‏ poet. of‏ ,"65 ש 208 of prosperity); sg. pbs‏ channel for rain (cf. Jb 38”).‏ yi. 355 n.pr.m. son of Eber, fare, GL‏ 7Ch 18, 228 Gni1".‏ בל ד Gn ro”‏ : 6 t[rzbe] n.f. 1. stream. 2. division ;—‏ streams Jb20". 2. divisions,‏ .1 : לת pil.‏ sections of tribe, “5 estr. Ju 5°" (read perhaps‏ nisdB, v. following), > streams.‏ tirade] n.f. division (=np>no q-v.), of‏ Ch 35°.‏ 2 ִּלְת priests, for service ;—pl. estr.‏ [Faber] ns. ia.; plabs.ned89 2Ch 35".‏ + wade by n.f. concubine (N H 2‏ פלגש perhaps influenced by Gk.‏ פּלְקְתָא) ִּילקְתָּא ד ma\\aki, Taddakis (prop. young girl), Lat. pellex ;‏ 811 פלני orig. Gk. word acc. to /₪68%7%% cf. also Lewy Fremdw. 95: on poss. Hittite origin v. Jen™"¢**# Cs), 468.) -_/5 abs. 2S 37, estr. 211, “B abs. Gn 36” Jurg', estr.Gn357+ 4 t.; sf. wads 2244, -שהוּ‎ Jurg*; W- 20*+ 2 t.; pl. ּלנשים‎ 2 + 2 6, “B Gn 25°45 +.; estr. wads 28 1672; sf. PADS פּלְנשיף ל‎ 2 5% pws Ez 23”;—1. concubine Gn 22% 25°95? 367 ta 8 19'+ rot.Jurg, 20, 2537 +7 28,1 K 11° 1 Ch 1°+6 t. Ch, Est 21 Ct 6°°. 2. either = paramour (perhaps contempt.; 6 wa\Aaé = youth), or <concubinage Ez 23” (fig. of Jeru- salem doting on Babylon).

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I yawned; the word had lost its charge for me, rather. ‘What is it, Diana?’‘It’s a suit.’‘What kind of suit?’‘A coming-out suit.’‘Coming-out -?’I went at once.Now, since my very first trouser-wearing days at Mrs Dendy’s, I had sported a wonderful variety of gentlemen’s suits. From the plain to the pantomimic, from the military to the effeminate, from the brown broad-cloth to the yellow velveteen - as soldier, sailor, valet, renter, errand-boy, dandy and comedy duke - I had worn them all, and worn them wisely and rather well. But the costume that awaited me in my bedroom that day in Diana’s villa in Felicity Place was the richest and the loveliest I ever wore; and I can remember it still, in all its marvellous parts.There was a jacket and trousers of bone-coloured linen, and a waistcoat, slightly darker, with a silken back. These came wrapped together in a box lined with velvet; in a separate package I found three piqué shirts, each a shade lighter than the one before it, and each so fine and closely woven it shone like satin, or like the surface of a pearl.Then there were collars, white as a new tooth; studs, of opal, and cuff-links of gold. There was a neck-tie and a cravat of an amber-coloured, watered silk: they gleamed and rippled as I drew them from their tissue, and slithered from my fingers to the floor like snakes. A flat wooden case held gloves - one pair of kid, with covered buttons, the other of doe-skin and fragrant as musk. In a velvet bag I found socks and drawers and under-shirts - not of flannel, as my linen had been till now, but of knitted silk. For my head there was a creamy homburg with a trim that matched the neckties; for my feet there was a pair of shoes - a pair of shoes of a chestnut leather so warm and rich I felt compelled at once to apply my cheek to it, and then my lips; and finally, my tongue.A last, flimsy package I almost overlooked: this held a set of handkerchiefs, each one as fine and fragile as the pique shirts and each embroidered with a tiny, flowing N.K. The suit, in all its parts, with all its delicate, harmonising textures and hues, enchanted me; but this last detail, and the unmistakable stamp of permanence it conferred upon my relations with the passionate and generous mistress of my curious new home - well, this last detail satisfied me most of all.I bathed then, and dressed before the glass; and then I threw back the window-shutters, lit a cigarette, and gazed upon myself as I stood smoking. I looked - I think I can say without vanity - a treat. The suit, like all expensive clothes, had a bearing and a lustre all of its own: it would have made more or less anyone look handsome. But Diana had ordered wisely.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Then I see it. The bare field we’d flown the hawk upon is covered in gossamer, millions of shining threads combed downwind across every inch of soil. Lit by the sinking sun the quivering silk runs like light on water all the way to my feet. It is a thing of unearthly beauty, the work of a million tiny spiders searching for new homes. Each had spun a charged silken thread out into the air to pull it from its hatch-place, ascending like an intrepid hot-air balloonist to drift and disperse and fall. I stare at the field for a long time. It reminds me of an evening last autumn on that trip to Uzbekistan. I’d been sitting on the ground outside my tent wondering if the terrible smell was a decomposing cow, or something much worse. Before me were miles of marsh and desert and in the far distance the Fergana Mountains, fading into haze. Then I saw the strangest things hanging in the air, and I could not work out what they were. They looked like white question marks, and they disobeyed the laws of physics alarmingly. There was no wind at all, yet they hovered, and sank, and rose with supernatural slowness. What the hell? I ran after one. I walked up to it so that it was within six inches of my nose, and I still couldn’t understand what it was. It was as long as my hand from wrist to fingertip; it was white, and squiggly like the doodle you make with a running-out pen, and made of some material I couldn’t identify. I thought of manna, and soda, of ash and silly string. And then I looked very, very closely, as it rose very, very slowly upwards, and there, from the base of this white frothy squiggle, was an almost-invisible line. And right at the bottom of the line was a spider exactly this size, the size of the word Ah.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  [image file=image_rsrc5JZ.jpg] Yajnavalkya was the personal philosopher of King Janaka of Videha, who was himself a leading exponent of the new spirituality. Like all the Upanishadic sages, Yajnavalkya was convinced that there was, as it were, an immortal spark at the core of the human person, which participated in—was of the same nature as—the immortal brahman that sustained and gave life to the entire cosmos. This was a discovery of immense importance and it would become a central insight in every major religious tradition. The ultimate reality was an immanent presence in every single human being. It could, therefore, be discovered in the depths of the self, the atman. The Brahmanas had already concluded that the core of the human being—variously identified as breath, water, or fire—was identical to the sacrifice, and that the power at the heart of the sacrifice was brahman, the essence of everything that existed. Yajnavalkya and the other Upanishadic sages developed this concept and freed it from external ritual. The atman was no longer simply the breath, which gave life to the human being, but that which inhaled and exhaled; it was the agent behind all the senses and was, therefore, beyond description. “You can’t see the Seer who does the seeing,” Yajnavalkya explained. “You can’t hear the Hearer who does the hearing; you can’t think with the Thinker who does the thinking; and you can’t perceive the Perceiver who does the perceiving. The Self within the All [brahman] is this atman of yours.”12 For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness. By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds. They were becoming fully “self-conscious.” Because the self was identical with the immortal, unchangeable brahman, it was also “beyond hunger and thirst, sorrow and delusion, old age and death.”13 It was, Yajnavalkya explained to his wife, Maitreyi, “imperishable . . . indestructible.” But like the brahman itself, it was transcendent, “ungraspable.” It was only possible to define or comprehend something when there was duality. A person can see, taste, or smell something that is separate and apart from him- or herself. But when “the whole [brahman] has become a person’s very self [atman], then who is there for him to see and by what means? Who is there for me to think of and by what means?”14 It was impossible to perceive the perceiver within oneself. So you could only say neti . . . neti (“not this”). The sage affirmed the existence of the atman while at the same time denying that it bore any similarity to anything known by the senses.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Gramps stops to take another nip from his flask before continuing. “Well, now, your dad was gracious enough to wait until his friend stopped coughing before he told him to climb over the railing and bring the pipe back. The man took one peek down this ninety-degree incline and told Barack that he’d buy him a replacement—” “Quite sensibly,” Toot says from the kitchen. (We call my grandmother Tutu, Toot for short; it means “grandparent” in Hawaiian, for she decided on the day I was born that she was still too young to be called Granny.) Gramps scowls but decides to ignore her. “—but Barack was adamant about getting his pipe back, because it was a gift and couldn’t be replaced. So the fella took another look, and shook his head again, and that’s when your dad picked him clear off the ground and started dangling him over the railing!” Gramps lets out a hoot and gives his knee a jovial slap. As he laughs, I imagine myself looking up at my father, dark against the brilliant sun, the transgressor’s arms flailing about as he’s held aloft. A fearsome vision of justice. “He wasn’t really holding him over the railing, Dad,” my mother says, looking to me with concern, but Gramps takes another sip of whiskey and plows forward. “At this point, other people were starting to stare, and your mother was begging Barack to stop. I guess Barack’s friend was just holding his breath and saying his prayers. Anyway, after a couple of minutes, your dad set the man back down on his feet, patted him on the back, and suggested, calm as you please, that they all go find themselves a beer. And don’t you know, that’s how your dad acted for the rest of the tour—like nothing happened. Of course, your mother was still pretty upset when they got home. In fact, she was barely talking to your dad. Barack wasn’t helping matters any, either, ’cause when your mother tried to tell us what had happened he just shook his head and started to laugh. ‘Relax, Anna,’ he said to her—your dad had this deep baritone, see, and this British accent.” My grandfather tucks his chin into his neck at this point, to capture the full effect. “ ‘Relax, Anna,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to teach the chap a lesson about the proper care of other people’s property!’ ” Gramps would start to laugh again until he started to cough, and Toot would mutter under her breath that she supposed it was a good thing that my father had realized that dropping the pipe had just been an accident because who knows what might have happened otherwise, and my mother would roll her eyes at me and say they were exaggerating. “Your father can be a bit domineering,” my mother would admit with a hint of a smile. “But it’s just that he is basically a very honest person. That makes him uncompromising sometimes.”

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Cara. Wow. Get the fuck out. Get out. I always wondered where she was. That’s amazing. So I was studying with her. And she very much embodied “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” She really put us in the practice of knowing our bodies. As part of theatrical performance. How do you explore, as big bodies, small bodies, Black bodies, queer bodies? How do you expand and contract? And take up space, and show pleasure, show fear, show anger? And then, very much, Rhodessa Jones. I had an inkling of time with her, who very similarly pushed me to my edges. And Adrienne Kennedy. She’s a Black British playwright. And she was really getting popular during the nineties. And Aishah Rahman. Just incredible Black playwrights and poets. And you could see how they were integrating the spiritual, the spirit, with Black women’s narratives. And it felt very healing. To not only lift up the story but to understand that we are surrounded by ancestors and to ask, where is our practice and our connection to holding a generational history of trauma? I didn’t have a language for it, but, boy, was I writing it. I was writing about how we unpack, unravel, how we disassociate from ourselves with these incredible histories of colonialist violence and genocide. And I think that when I came into theater, I walked through it and came out on the other side, and was like, oh, this is about something else. This is about vibration. This is about how we transform the frequencies we’re living inside. I started doing work in my mid-twenties with Black women who had tumors because I was steeped in reproductive health and justice and it made sense to me: Let us honor what is happening to our bodies, the histories of trauma we are holding in our bodies that block us from desire. I worked with some women with diabetes, or different illnesses, asking that we consider these illnesses as manifestations of oppression and slavery, self-hatred, and attempted genocide. And how do you transform these very dense masses in the body into feeling that you can fly, and you can move, and have different shapes? I know you know working with shapes in the body.41 And I started to work with sound. In particular with Black women. And, mind you, I was also very cognizant that we had a lot of folks, in many different cultures, in Asia, in Latin America, using sound. I didn’t practice, I didn’t have a teacher. I just kind of went with it using my performance to lead me into, oh, vibration is vibration.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  We decided to stay in that night, cooking stew and catching up on each other’s news. The next morning we walked into town and wandered without any particular destination in mind, just taking in the sights. The city center was smaller than I’d expected, with much of the colonial architecture still intact: row after row of worn, whitewashed stucco from the days when Nairobi was little more than an outpost to service British railway construction. Alongside these buildings, another city emerged, a city of high-rise offices and elegant shops, hotels with lobbies that seemed barely distinguishable from their counterparts in Singapore or Atlanta. It was an intoxicating, elusive mixture, a contrast that seemed to repeat itself wherever we went: in front of the Mercedes-Benz dealership, where a train of Masai women passed by on the way to market, their heads shaven clean, their slender bodies wrapped in red shukas, their earlobes elongated and ringed with bright beads; or at the entrance to an open-air mosque, where we watched a group of bank officers carefully remove their wing-tipped shoes and bathe their feet before joining farmers and ditchdiggers in afternoon prayer. It was as if Nairobi’s history refused to settle in orderly layers, as if what was then and what was now fell in constant, noisy collision. We wandered into the old marketplace, a cavernous building that smelled of ripe fruit and a nearby butchery. A passage to the rear of the building led into a maze of open-air stalls where merchants hawked fabrics, baskets, brass jewelry, and other curios. I stopped in front of one of them, where a set of small wooden carvings was set out for display. I recognized the figures as my father’s long-ago gift to me: elephants, lions, drummers in tribal headdress. They are only small things, the Old Man had said …. “Come, mister,” the young man who was minding the stall said to me. “A beautiful necklace for your wife.” “This is my sister.” “She is a very beautiful sister. Come, this is nice for her.” “How much?” “Only five hundred shillings. Beautiful.” Auma frowned and said something to the man in Swahili. “He’s giving you the wazungu price,” she explained. “The white man’s price.” The young man smiled. “I’m very sorry, sister,” he said. “For a Kenyan, the price is three hundred only.” Inside the stall, an old woman who was stringing glass beads together pointed at me and said something that made Auma smile. “What’d she say?” “She says that you look like an American to her.” “Tell her I’m Luo,” I said, beating my chest.