Contentment

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 Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  She laughed loud, with great enthusiasm, and spit to the side in a way I had never seen a grown woman do before. On summer nights Raylene kept old truck tires from the county dump smoldering in the yard to drive the mosquitoes away. The smoke rose in a thick stinking brown fog, drifting toward the river, where the men came to fish in the cool of the evening, and where Aunt Raylene kept the weeds cut back to discourage bugs and give her a clear view of the banks. “I like to watch things pass,” she told me in her lazy whiskery drawl. “Time and men and trash out on the river. I just like to watch it all go around the bend.” She spoke softly, smelling a little of alcohol and pepper, chow-chow and home brew, and the woodsmoke tang that clung to her skin all the time. I watched her shift her hips in her overalls. She was as big around as Aunt Alma but moved as easily and gracefully as a young boy, squatting on her heels to pull weeds and swinging her arms as she walked around her yard. Uncle Earle had said she’d loved to dance when she was young, and she looked as if she still could. Aunt Raylene’s house was scrubbed clean, but her walls were lined with shelves full of oddities, old tools and bird nests, rare dishes and peculiarly shaped rocks. An amazing collection of things accumulated on the river bank below her house. People from Greenville tossed their garbage off the highway a few miles up the river. There it would sink out of sight in the mud and eventually work its way down to Aunt Raylene’s, where the river turned, then rise to get caught in the roots of the big trees along the bank. Aunt Raylene said the garbage drew the fish in, and it was true that the fishing at her place was the best in the county. The uncles went to Aunt Raylene’s to catch carp and catfish and big brown unnamed fish with rotting eyes and gilded fins that people were afraid to eat. Uncle Earle and Uncle Beau would put out their poles with little bells on the lines and stand in the tire smoke to drink whiskey and tell dirty stories. The bells would tinkle now and then, but they didn’t always stop to go get their catch. Sometimes the whiskey and the stories were too good. Raylene offered me a glass of lemon tea when I showed up, and then quickly put me to work. She had me pick the fresh vegetables out of her side garden so she wouldn’t have to do all that bending over. “I just about ruined my back at that damn mill,” she said with a grin and a sigh. “Always leaning forward and reaching. Now I’d rather run than bend.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  After that there was no choice but to find work in a diner. The tips made all the difference, though she knew she could make more money at the honky-tonks or managing a slot as a cocktail waitress. There was always more money serving people beer and wine, more still in hard liquor, but she’d have had to go outside Greenville County to do that, and she couldn’t imagine moving away from her family. She needed her sisters’ help with her two girls. The White Horse Cafe was a good choice anyway, one of the few decent diners downtown. The work left her tired but not sick to death like the mill, and she liked the people she met there, the tips and the conversation. “You got a way with a smile,” the manager told her. “Oh, my smile gets me a long way,” she laughed, and no one would have known she didn’t mean it. Truckers or judges, they all liked Mama. Aunt Ruth was right, her face had settled into itself. Her color had come back after a while, and the lines at the corners of her eyes just made her look ready to smile. When the men at the counter weren’t slipping quarters in her pocket they were bringing her things, souvenirs or friendship cards, once or twice a ring. Mama smiled, joked, slapped ass, and firmly passed back anything that looked like a down payment on something she didn’t want to sell. Reese was two years old the next time Mama stopped in at the courthouse. The clerk looked pleased to see her again. She didn’t talk to him this time, just picked up the paperwork and took it over to the new business offices near the Sears, Roebuck Auto Outlet. Uncle Earle had given her a share of his settlement from another car accident, and she wanted to use a piece of it to hire his lawyer for a few hours. The man took her money and then smiled at her much like the clerk when she told him what she wanted. Her face went hard, and he swallowed quick to keep from laughing. No sense making an enemy of Earle Boatwright’s sister. “I’m sorry,” he told her, handing half her money back. “The way the law stands there’s nothing I could do for you. If I was to put it through, it would come back just like the one you got now. You just wait a few years. Sooner or later they’ll get rid of that damn ordinance. Mostly it’s not enforced anymore anyway.” “Then why,” she asked him, “do they insist on enforcing it on me?” “Now, honey,” he sighed, clearly embarrassed. He wiggled in his seat and passed her the rest of her money across the desk. “You don’t need me to tell you the answer to that. You’ve lived in this county all your life, and you know how things are.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I could not have said a word if Great-Great-Granddaddy had been standing there looking back at me with my own black eyes. Mama wore her hair cut short, curled, and bleached. Every other month she and Aunt Alma would get together and do each other’s hair, rinsing Aunt Alma’s in beer or lemon juice to lighten it just a little, trimming Mama’s back and bleaching it that dark blond she liked. Then they’d set pin curls for each other, and while those dried they would coax Reese into sitting still long enough that her baby-fine red locks could be tied up in rags. I would tear up the rags, rinse pins, strain the juice through a cloth happily enough, but I refused the perm Mama was always insisting she wanted to give me. “Stinks and hurts,” I complained. “Do it to Reese.” “Oh, Reese don’t need it. Look at this.” And Aunt Alma tugged a few of Reese’s springy long curls free from the rags. Like soft corkscrews, the curls bounced and swung as if they were magical. “This child has the best hair in the world, just like yours, Anney, when you were a baby. Yours had a little red to it too, seems to me.” “No.” Mama shook her head while she pulled more rags out of Reese’s curls. “You know my hair was just blond. You had the red touch, you and Ruth. Remember how you used to fight over whose was darker?” “Oh, but you had the prettiest hair!” Aunt Alma turned to me. “Your mama had the prettiest hair you ever saw. Soft? Why, it would make Reese’s feel like steel wire. It was the softest hair in Greenville County, and gold as sunlight on sheets. It didn’t go dark till she had you girls, a little bit with you and all dark with Reese. Hair will do that, you know, darken in pregnancy. An’t nothing that will stop it once it starts.” Mama laughed. “Remember when Carr first got pregnant and swore she’d shave her head if it looked like it was gonna go dark?” Aunt Alma nodded, her dark brown pin curls bobbing. “Rinsed it in piss, she did, every Sunday evening, Tommy Lee’s baby piss that she begged off Ruth. All ‘cause Granny swore baby-piss rinses would keep her blond.” “Didn’t she stink?” I bit at the rubber tip of a hairpin, peeling the coating off the metal so I could taste the sweet iron tang underneath. “Baby piss don’t stink,” Aunt Alma told me, “unless the baby’s sick, and Tommy Lee wasn’t never sick a day in his life. Carr didn’t smell no different than she ever did, but her hair went dark anyway.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I tore one half free and dumped it back in the bucket and then just as roughly started breaking out four equal sections of roots and top growth. As I worked I kept my face down, my eyes on the plant. “I was telling your aunt Ruth that Daddy Glen’s started a new job over at the Sunshine Dairy. He’s real pleased about going to work for his daddy, and it looks like this job is going to work out pretty good.” “That’s good.” I shook dried dirt free from one clump of roots and then set the mass down in the damp mix in the earthenware pot. “You want me to use that braided cord to hang these up, Aunt Ruth?” “Yeah, the brown cord Travis brought home from the dime store. It should hold up pretty good.” I nodded without looking at her. “You get that done, Bone, and we can talk about when you’re gonna come home. Reese’s been missing you pretty bad.” “I thought I was gonna stay till school started again.” I kept my voice neutral, my head still down. “Aunt Ruth can’t possibly get along without me. She needs me.” There was a long silence, and then Aunt Ruth cleared her throat. “Bone’s right, Anney. I don’t know how I’d drag my sorry butt out of bed without Bone to wake me up. She gets up in the morning singing along to the radio. Sounds just like Kitty Wells sometimes.” She might have been starting to laugh, but coughed instead. I looked up then, carefully, trying to keep my face in the shade. Mama was leaning forward into the sun, her fingers laced together on her knees, her eyes squinted against the light but intent on me. Aunt Ruth was leaning back in her rocker, her hand up, almost covering her mouth. Mama pulled her fingers free and dropped her hands down so that her palms cupped her knees. “Well, I can see how you might not be able to stand the loss of that. But maybe I’ll just bring Reese out on Saturday. Wouldn’t want her to forget what her big sister looks like.” I spooned loose dirt into the little pot, sprinkled water on the dusty leaves. The cutting drooped already, getting ready to lose half its growth. But the stem was moist and flexible under my fingers. Strong. It would come back strong. In August the revival tent went up about half a mile from Aunt Ruth’s house on the other side of White Horse Road. Some evenings while Travis and Ruth sat and talked quietly, I would walk up there on my own to sit outside and listen. The preacher was a shouter.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I saw her do that a lot, sit out there and stare into the distance. She always seemed completely comfortable with herself, elbows locked around her knees and one hand drawn up to smoke. Sometimes she’d hum softly, no music I’d ever heard. Aunt Raylene hated most everything that played on the radio, saved her greatest contempt for the kind of country ballads that bemoaned the faithless lover and always included a little spoken part during the chorus. “Terrible maudlin shit,” she’d declare. “You don’t like that, do you, Bone?” I’d promised her that no, I didn’t, ‘course I didn’t, not mentioning that I had liked it before. I would have hated for her to think I didn’t have good sense. For my own protection, I never talked to her about gospel music. I couldn’t bear it if Raylene laughed at the music I dreamed of singing. Aunt Alma’s girl Patsy Ruth came out to Aunt Raylene’s to get out of caring for Tadpole. The baby had finally been diagnosed with a heart condition, though she didn’t look sick, just very small and slightly blue. At four she still fit in Alma’s laundry basket and had to be watched all the time. “Tadpole falls asleep and it looks like she an’t breathing. Mama gets all crazy, thinks she’s died or something, and goes shaking her till she cries. Gets on my nerves,” Patsy Ruth complained. “I’d rather pull weeds for Aunt Raylene any day.” Patsy Ruth wanted to help me pull stuff out of the river but hated getting mud on herself. She stayed up on the exposed roots of the trees and rarely retrieved anything worth the trouble. Still, she was the one who saw the hooks—two of them, linked together with a rusted chain, big four-pronged things still dragging little shreds of rope. “Lookit the shine!” she yelled, almost sliding down in the mud. “Lookit there. It’s something, I bet you. Something.” I climbed out on one of the roots until I could reach down to the curved metal edge that was showing through the brown water. It was hard to untangle the hooks from the muddy trash. By the time I worked them free, I’d slid down and had one leg thigh-deep in the mud. “You get your ass down here and help me,” I yelled at Patsy Ruth, but she had no intention of risking the river. Instead she ran back to find Grey and Garvey. “My sweet Jesus, look at the size of them.” Grey pulled the hooks out of my hands even before I got them up the bank. “That sucker’s longer than my arm.” “What is it?” “It’s a hook, a set of hooks.” “Any fool can see that. What’s it for?”

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  told me had died long ago, frequently used to be seen in his time, swinging his heavy iron filled with red-hot coals through the air, these and other images, said Austerlitz, ranged themselves side by side, so that deeply buried and locked away within me as they had been, they now came luminously back to my mind as I looked out of the window. It was the same when Vera, without a word, opened the door to the room where the little couch on which I always slept when my parents were away still stood in its place, at the foot of the four-poster bed with its barley-sugar uprights and pillows piled high which, together with the rest of the furniture, she had inherited from her great-aunt. The crescent moon shone into the dark room, and there was a white blouse hanging from the catch of the half-open window just as it had always hung there in the past, I now remembered, said Austerlitz. I saw Vera as she had been then, sitting beside me on the divan telling me stories from the Riesengebirge and the Bohemian Forest, I saw her uncommonly beautiful eyes misting over in the twilight, so to speak, when after reaching the end of the story she took off her glasses and bent down to me. Later, I now remembered, while she sat in the next room over her books I liked to lie awake for a while, safe as I knew myself to be in the care of my solicitous guardian and the pale glow of the circle of light where she sat reading. With only the slightest effort of will I could conjure it all up; the hunchbacked tailor, who would now be in his own bedchamber, the moon traveling round the building, the patterns of the carpet and wallpaper, even the course traced by the hairline cracks in the tiles of the tall stove. But when I got tired of this game and wanted to go to sleep I had only to wait to hear Vera lift the next leaf of her book in the other room, and I can still feel, said Austerlitz, or perhaps it is only now that I feel again, the sense of my consciousness dissolving among the poppies and leafy tendrils etched into the opaque glass of the door before I caught the slight rustle of the page turning. On our walks, Vera continued when we were sitting in the living room again and she had given me a cup of peppermint tea with her two now unsteady hands, on our walks we hardly ever went further than the Seminar Garden, the Khotek Gardens, and the other green spaces in the Lesser Quarter. Only occasionally, in summer, did we make rather longer expeditions with my little pushchair, which as I might perhaps remember had a small colored whirligig fastened to it, going as far as Sofia Island, the swimming school on the banks of the Vlitava, or the observation platform on Petrin Hill, from which we may have spent an hour or more looking at the city spread out below us with its many towers, all of which I had known by heart, as well as the names of the seven bridges spanning the glittering river. Since I have been unable to go out of doors, so that I now see almost nothing new, said Vera, the pictures we enjoyed so much at the time come back to me with increasing

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Chances are, you’ve heard this prayer enough times to have some or all of it memorized. It even shows up in movies, often chanted by an overly solemn priest and a bored congregation, or recited by some poor soul facing an impending apocalypse. Hollywood loves its stereotypes. However, the Lord’s Prayer is anything but a boring chant or a prayer of resignation. It’s actually a simple but revolutionary way to pray. KEEP OUT OF THE GUTTER Think of the Lord’s Prayer as bumper bowling. If you’ve ever been bowling with little kids (or if you are terrible at bowling and don’t care who knows it), you know what bumper bowling is. Normal bowling involves rolling a ball down a long lane to knock over a triangle-shaped group of pins. We all know that. The problem is that on both sides of the lane, there is a gutter. If your aim is off, your ball ends up in the gutter and does a long, slow roll of shame into oblivion. Hence, bumper bowling. Bumpers are placed in the gutters on both sides of the lane. Now, if your child (or you) can get the ball rolling in the right direction, it will eventually knock down some pins. It’s not cheating—it’s just bowling with a little help. The Lord’s Prayer is like having bumpers for prayer. It’s praying with a little help. It gives you an outline to follow, some topics to cover, and even some language to use if you’re unsure what to say. If you’re intimidated by prayer and/or feel like your prayer times often end up in some cosmic gutter, following this model can help. Let’s look briefly at each phrase in this prayer. Again, prayer is not meant to be a ritual, so don’t turn the Lord’s Prayer into one. Notice Jesus begins by saying, “This is how you should pray,” not “This is what you should pray.” It’s not an incantation. You don’t unlock a heavenly level by getting the words right or nailing the intonation. We humans have an amazing ability to take truths and turn them into formulas. Something about structure makes us feel safe, I guess. But if we exchange heart for structure, we’re missing the point.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Our perspective shifts in prayer: from our weaknesses to His greatness, from our failures to His holiness, from our need to His supply, and from our goals to His purposes. No matter what words you choose to pray, beginning with these two truths—God is our Father, and life isn’t all about me—is a powerful way to start seeing reality as God does. If you can, take a moment right now to make this personal. Meditate on what the truths in this first line mean for you and spend a few moments praying about them. That might look like telling God thank-you, asking Him to help you understand these truths, or something else entirely. It’s up to you. There is no script. Practicing the Lord’s Prayer Our Father in heaven What emotions come to mind when I pray to God as, “My Father”?How does He view me?What rights and benefits do I have as God’s child?Hallowed be your name How big and great and powerful is God to me?Have I made life too much about me?Where is my focus—on God or only on myself? Does He want to shift anything in my perspective?“YOUR KINGDOM COME, YOUR WILL BE DONE” The second line of the Lord’s Prayer says, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” This doesn’t mean that God is not sovereign here on earth. Instead, it is a recognition of the current reality of sin, shame, disease, death, hatred, and a host of other things not found in heaven. And in the midst of that chaos, we are asking God to be just as sovereign, just as powerful, just as triumphant, as if none of those things had any power. Because they don’t. Well, they do and they don’t at the same time. On one hand, the pain and evil of this world have real consequences. We can’t deny that, and prayer should embrace reality, not ignore it. But on the other hand, nothing we face in this life is bigger than God. The “real reality” is that God is more powerful than our circumstances. That’s the point of this line: recognizing the sovereignty of God. Before God, nothing stands. There is no failure, no weakness, no enemy, no problem that lies outside His power and authority. So when we come to God in prayer, it is with a recognition that He has all we need. Notice that up until now, the prayer has not even mentioned our needs, wants, or desires. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The prayer begins by recognizing who God is and surrendering our will to His. Now, your prayers don’t always have to start with this lofty, mature perspective. A lot of mine don’t. They go more like this: “Dear Jesus . . . help!” And I’m in good company with that prayer.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  She went to her mailbox, checked that the mail had been delivered, but left it in there. She nodded to a bicyclist going by—he was wearing a kind of skin-tight black cycling shorts that she normally didn’t like, but now she didn’t mind seeing his thigh definition. She stood at the end of her driveway for several minutes with her arms crossed, breathing deep breaths of spring air and feeling peaceful and content, or playing at looking like the woman out in the garden breathing deeply and feeling content, while actually part of her was thinking over what dildic wickedness was waiting for her in her back yard. On her way back, she bent and felt a leaf of one of the peonies in the tractor tire in her front yard, very casually, giving the road the chance to appreciate her shape under her dress, and murmured to herself, “Hmm, I think it may be time to do some watering.” She went in and got the water temperature just right in her shower, and then drew the hose into the bathroom window and hooked it to the shower spigot. Outside, she turned the stopcock on (the plumber had fixed it so that she could turn the flow of water on and off at the end of the hose) and toured her side yard, sending a frolicsome misty spray from her mobile water-source over the grass and over the mock-orange leaves. She hummed “Private Dancer.” She heard a truck drive past on the road. When she rounded the back of the house, she surprised a deer who had wandered by, drawn by the tasty-looking tulip blossoms. It appeared to be licking the pink head of the Armande Klockhammer with its equally pink tongue. “Now, now, enough of that!” Marian called, and the deer sprang away. She glanced around to verify that she was indeed in private, and put her foot up on her lawn chair and hiked up her jumper, holding it in a one-handed bunch just below her breasts, and directed the crown of water-jets on her clit-site. The water was just right. “Oh, nice,” she said, watching the flow disappear into the grass. The idea that she could carry her daily shower around with her, outside, pleased her quite a lot. She dropped her dress and began watering again, working up the nodding tulip beds. Her maraschino tingled. She pretended to notice for the first time something alien and fleshy sticking up, pinkly out of place in the general verdancy beyond the near bed of tulips. “What’s this now?” She pointed the shower-water at it (making sure to rinse away any deer saliva). “What’s this sex organ doing sticking straight up in my garden? Does it need something to fuck?” She pulled up her dress. “Is this what Armande wants?”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  You could not have spent three minutes in that house without noticing it; but after three days there I began to sense a kind of system to her mania which, if I had had routines of my own, like an ordinary girl, might have proved rather maddening. When, on my first Wednesday there, I went down to breakfast in a yellow waistcoat, Mrs Milne flinched: ‘Gracie don’t quite like to see yellow in the house,’ she said, ‘on a Wednesday.’ Three days later, however, we had a custard for tea: food on a Saturday, it seemed, must be yellow, or nothing ...Mrs Milne had grown so used to the fads, she had almost ceased to notice them; and in time, as I have said, I grew used to them, too - calling, ‘What colour today, Grace?’ as I dressed in the mornings. ‘May I wear my blue serge suit, or must it be the Oxfords?’ ‘Shall we have gooseberries for supper, or a Battenburg cake?’ I didn’t mind, it came to seem a kind of game; and Gracie’s way was quite as valid a philosophy, I thought, as many others. And her basic passion, for the vivid and the bright, I understood very well. For there were so many lovely colours in the city; and in a sense she tutored me to look at them anew. As I strolled about I would keep a watch for pictures and dresses that I knew that she would like, then bring them home for her. She had a number of huge albums, into which she pasted cuttings and scraps: I would find her magazines and little books, to worry at with her scissors; I would buy her flowers from the flower-girls’ stalls: violets, carnations, lavender statice and blue forget-me-nots. When I presented them to her - producing them with a flourish, from under my coat, like a conjuror - she would flush with pleasure, and perhaps dip me a playful little curtsey. Mrs Milne would look on, pleased as anything, but shaking her head and pretending to chide.‘Tut!’ she would say to me. ‘You will turn that girl’s head right round, one of these days, I swear it!’ And I would think for a second how queer it was that she - who had been so careful to keep her daughter from the covetous glances of fresh young men - should encourage Grace and me to play at sweethearts, so blithely, and with such seeming unconcern.But it was impossible to think very hard about anything in that household, where life was so even and idle and sweet.And because, since losing Kitty, thinking was the occupation I cared for least, this suited me best of all. So the months slid by.

• From Bold Move

  Yet, our modern culture has divorced physical and emotional health from each other. Somehow, our culture has ignored that the brain is just another organ. And that, as such, it also needs “exercising.” Sure, you can’t do push-ups with your brain, but by working on the skills in this book, you are building cognitive flexibility . But just because we’re talking about the realm of ideas and concepts, that doesn’t mean you will just “get” this overnight. You must consider this in the same context that you would consider any other skill, whether it’s building up a powerful back squat or learning a language. But I get it: waiting sucks. And I, like perhaps some of you, have tried skipping the line. In 2000 when I got to graduate school, my great friend Berglind talked to me about yoga and how it was helpful to her. She encouraged me to join her for a beginners’ yoga class. I loved it; it was (and is, after twenty-two years) very grounding for me. But at the end of that first class, I went up to the teacher and said, “What do I have to do to get to the next level? Can I do it by the end of the semester?” In other words: “I want enlightenment, an iron core, and a gymnast’s mobility NOW!” The kind and gentle teacher looked at me and said, “This is a journey, not a destination.” I hated hearing this kind of trite mantra, as I still thought of life as goals to be mercilessly achieved. To hell with this journey nonsense! But I kept going to yoga and chipping away at it, and I am glad I did, because it was the only way I got through graduate school. And by the end of the semester, although I had not learned the secret to levitating, I had definitely made real progress, to the point where I actually felt comfortable trying things like handstands (something that terrified me at first). I share this with you to encourage you to embrace values work not only through the course of this book, but also as you travel through the journey of your life. I hope this can become something you return to anytime you reach a major crossroads or transition in your life. It may be trite nonsense best uttered in a yoga studio, but the journey really is the thing. Or, if you prefer, choose progress over outcomes. So, let’s progress—it’s game time.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Was it for his own necessities, because he said, Ye sent unto my necessity? Rejoiceth he for that? Verily not for that. But how know we this? Because himself says immediately, not because I desire a gift, but I desire fruit. I have learned of Thee, my God, to distinguish betwixt a gift, and fruit. A gift, is the thing itself which he gives, that imparts these necessaries unto us; as money, meat, drink, clothing, shelter, help: but the fruit, is the good and right will of the giver. For the Good Master said not only, He that receiveth a prophet, but added, in the name of a prophet: nor did He only say, He that receiveth a righteous man, but added, in the name of a righteous man. So verily shall the one receive the reward of a prophet, the other, the reward of a righteous man: nor saith He only, He that shall give to drink a cup of cold water to one of my little ones; but added, in the name of a disciple: and so concludeth, Verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward. The gift is, to receive a prophet, to receive a righteous man, to give a cup of cold water to a disciple: but the fruit, to do this in the name of a prophet, in the name of a righteous man, in the name of a disciple. With fruit was Elijah fed by the widow that knew she fed a man of God, and therefore fed him: but by the raven was he fed with a gift. Nor was the inner man of Elijah so fed, but the outer only; which might also for want of that food have perished. I will then speak what is true in Thy sight, O Lord, that when carnal men and infidels (for the gaining and initiating whom, the initiatory Sacraments and the mighty workings of miracles are necessary, which we suppose to be signified by the name of fishes and whales) undertake the bodily refreshment, or otherwise succour Thy servant with something useful for this present life; whereas they be ignorant, why this is to be done, and to what end; neither do they feed these, nor are these fed by them; because neither do the one do it out of an holy and right intent; nor do the other rejoice at their gifts, whose fruit they as yet behold not. For upon that is the mind fed, of which it is glad. And therefore do not the fishes and whales feed upon such meats, as the earth brings not forth until after it was separated and divided from the bitterness of the waves of the sea.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  My point is that we don’t have to whine and complain and pester God until He finally does what we want. He’s already on our side. He knows and cares about our needs before we even think to pray about them. The second problem is that complaining can be a way of escaping personal responsibility. As my kids have gotten older, I’ve found myself doing something that I’m sure my parents used to do. I hand their requests back to them. “You’re hungry? Wow, we literally ate dinner fourteen minutes ago. But I get it, you’re growing. Well, you know how to make a bowl of cereal. Go for it. Let me know if you need help reaching the milk.” “You can’t find your lunchbox? Weird. That has only happened ninety-four times this school year. Did you look in your backpack? Under your bed? In the closet? Go look again. If you still can’t find it, go ask Mom to help. Just kidding. I’ll help you. But also ask Mom. Just don’t tell her I sent you.” “You’re bored? I’m sorry, bud. But you know, this isn’t a Disney vacation, and I’m not your entertainment director. You’ve got a room full of toys. Get creative. When I was a kid, electricity hadn’t even been invented yet, and we still had fun.” I’m exaggerating for the sake of emphasis, of course. I’m a lot nicer and less sarcastic than that. (That might change when they are teenagers because snark and sarcasm are teenagers’ love languages, so check back with me in a few years.) But I do encourage and expect my kids, in an age-appropriate way, to do what I know they are capable of doing. Refusing to do for my kids what they can do for themselves is not bad parenting. It’s good parenting. As parents, we train our kids to take responsibility for themselves. They might groan now, but someday they’ll thank us for it. Well, maybe they’ll never verbally thank us, but two or three decades down the road, they’ll do the same thing for their kids. I love seeing my children grow up and become more independent. It’s normal. It’s healthy. It’s exciting. I want them to believe in themselves. I enjoy challenging them to do more, and I delight in watching them succeed. They enjoy it too, once they learn a new skill or gain new freedom. I don’t ask them to do more than they are capable of. But I might ask them to do more than they think they can do or more than they want to do.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  Here’s how Part Two went. The Fermata 14 T OWARD THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER, MARIAN’S SEXUAL INTEREST inexplicably abated. She put all her dildi and appliances in the drawer that had once held David’s sweaters. The last two toys she had ordered—a tiny vibe, teasingly canine in appearance but molded from an impeccably comme il faut piece of pickled okra, and a giant Armande Klockhammer Signature Model—she didn’t even bother to try out before putting them in storage. She felt a mild snobbish contempt for people who devoted so much of their free time to solo sex-play. Her perennial garden, for example, was far more satisfying than a bunch of pastless, futureless orgasms. She read bulb catalogs avidly. After much study she ordered several hundred tulip bulbs from Mack’s. When they arrived, via UPS, she gently deflected the eagerly scrotal leer of her friend John in the brown truck. It felt exciting and strange to be more than a sexual being, to have interests. As she looked over the boxes of bulbs, however, she realized that she would need help cutting the beds and planting them all, so she hired the neighbor kid, Kevin. Ever since she had been mowing her own lawn, she had lost touch with young Kevin. He seemed to have grown an inch or two. He had gone out for the high jump, and he had acquired a girlfriend named Sylvie, whom he said was “a really special person.” For a whole weekend and three cool late afternoons he and Marian worked together preparing the soil in the beds with bags of peat and then setting in the bulbs. The dirt was cool through Marian’s gloves. After shyly asking whether she would mind, Kevin brought over his radio. At first she was a little irritated by the sound, which disturbed her bucolic alpha-state—but over time several of the songs separated themselves from the others. In one, a woman sang something about Solitude standing in the doorway. She sang, “Her palm is split with a flower with a flame.” Marian kept time to this song, first with her troweling, and then with her chin. When she had heard it the second time, she asked Kevin (feeling a little shy herself), “Who does this song?” Kevin looked up. “Suzanne Vega.” “Ah,” said Marian. “I like it.” “Yeah, it’s pretty good,” said Kevin. He was impossible to read. He dropped another dark bulb in a hole and gently mounded soil around it. Marian glanced at him several times. He had a gray track-and-field T-shirt over a gray sweatshirt. When he pushed on the earth over one of her bulbs, she imagined the muscle in the side of his arm, as she had seen it when he had had his shirt off that day, long ago, at the beginning of summer, before she had learned to mow.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  But what about—other obvious causes? You were so enthusiastic. You were so—forgive the jargon—sex-positive.” I couldn’t help sounding slightly disappointed. “We established the link informally and that’s as far as we can take it for the time being,” she said. “I want to concentrate on keyboard-related injuries for right now.” “I knew it,” I said sadly. “I was too talkative in the magnet.” She said no, it wasn’t really that. “It turns out that there are problems with doing sexual research. For some reason, the people who hand out research grants don’t take what you’re doing seriously if it’s related to masturbation.” This sounded believable. I told her I understood; indeed, I used that three-word sentence that ends so many affairs of the heart: I understand completely . “Anyway,” I said, “it certainly was a pleasant evening for me. Time well spent. That magnet really focused my attention on the problem.” “Good,” she said. She wished me all the best with my pornography. The Fermata 17 T HUS BEGAN MY LATEST AND LONGEST FERMATA PHASE, THE loose, easy, finger-snapping phase, the phase I remained in until quite recently. I would now like to take a moment to say a little prayerlike thing about my life. I am so very fortunate to have been able to see all the naked women’s breasts I have seen. That’s what it really comes down to. I am just shocked by how lucky I am. No life could be finer than mine. No compulsively promiscuous actor or pop singer, no photographer for a men’s magazine, has a better life, for I can take off a woman’s clothes en passant , as a momentary diversion, without my tender strippage interfering in any way with her life or with mine. The average woman, the unexceptional woman, the interestingly ugly woman, I can stare at in a state of sudden nudity (hers and/or mine) on a sidewalk, or in the unflattering light of a record store, and nobody else can. There are whole phyla of breast-shape that the public at large doesn’t know about, because the women who possess these breast-shapes do not ever bare them except to their lovers and spouses and radiologists. And these ever-hidden plenums, perfect in their indispensable imperfection, that by their hang-angle and scooped realism of curve sing out, “We two are quite modest breasts! We two breasts choose not to appear naked in public!” I get to fill my mind with until I understand them. I love modesty, or Modesty; I love to see and kiss Modesty and suck Modesty’s nipples and whisper to Modesty how arrestingly modest she is. And I have been able to do that. I haven’t been punished for it, either. Dr. Jekyll, Faustus, Stravinsky’s soldat, the ballet dancer in The Red Shoes , Gollum, Wells’s invisible man and time traveler, Dr.

• From Bold Move

  Yes, but they moved us away from living a life based on our values because we were operating on automatic pilot, following a cultural value that might no longer be our value. Culture, another person’s compass, can be a factor that prevents us from living a life in line with our values. Let Values Be Your GuideThe opposite of living a life driven by emotions, goals, or other people is a values-driven life. A values-driven life is one in which your values function as the internal compass guiding you toward and helping you define your goals in life. To live a values-driven life is at times much more challenging than being led by our emotions, goals, or other people because it means we have to face our avoidance, identify it, and often recalibrate our lives toward what matters most to us. To do so, you will have to make decisions that in the moment might lead to more discomfort but will yield more long-term fulfillment. For example, choosing the gym in the morning will always collide with my time with Diego and, to be honest, it is less immediately rewarding than his kisses, but by choosing to Align my daily actions with my value of health, I am much more likely to have a longer and better life and overall more time with Diego long term. In fact, more than one hundred studies that looked at acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT; the therapy I briefly introduced in the last chapter ) have documented the positive impact of values-driven behaviors.10 People who have learned how to live a values-driven life have less anxiety, depression, substance use, and even physical pain. Although a values-driven life can be challenging in the moment, when viewed in the long term, it leads to a more fulfilling life. To live a bold life, it is crucial to align values with actions, and that is what we will do in the next chapter. Chapter ElevenCalibrating Your Inner CompassAs we approach the final chapter of Bold Move , I have a confession to make. For the first several years of my career, I never talked to my clients about their values, even though I often thought a lot about mine. I was trained in what the psychological field today calls the “second wave” of cognitive behavioral therapy,1 which meant I focused most on my clients’ thoughts and actions, often creating clear plans to teach their brains to stop reacting to false alarms (see parts II and III of this book).

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  See what comes to mind. Journal it if you wish. Then throughout your day, remind yourself of the word or phrase that came to you while reading.Silence is another way to commune with God. Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still and know that I am God.” Rather than filling your whole prayer time with words, set aside time to just be still. It’s surprisingly difficult. You might need to start with just one minute of silence, then work your way up as you get better at the discipline. Quiet your mind, don’t speak, and if your thoughts take over, bring them back to stillness. If you must focus on something, choose one attribute of God, and think about that. But don’t try to explore the attribute or analyze it. Be still and sit with it for a while. Learn to find and value the joy of just being in God’s presence, without an agenda or a time limit.COMMUNITY PRAYER Praying alone is a beautiful, intimate way to communicate with God, but praying in a group is valuable as well. It has a dynamic all its own. Faith and religion naturally create community, and that community is centered on a shared relationship with God. Praying together is a powerful way to express our faith and grow closer to one another. There is incredible power, encouragement, and life in praying with others. Pray with one or two others . Jesus said, “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them” (Matthew 18:20). You could meet with a friend, your spouse, a sibling—anyone willing to join you in prayer. It could be daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever you feel the need pray.Pray as part of a small group . This could be a formal group that meets regularly or an impromptu gathering of friends. It provides an opportunity to hear others’ needs, to pray for and with them, and to be prayed for yourself. Not only is the prayer useful, but the fellowship, support, and counsel we are able to share with one another are life-giving.In church, corporate prayer will likely be part of the service. There may be time for everyone to pray at once out loud, or for corporate silent prayer, or for repeating written prayers in unison. All of these have value if they are from your heart. Participate as much as you are comfortable, and ask God to meet you where you are. Don’t compare yourself to others, but instead simply enjoy being in a community with people who share your faith.Intercede for others. Intercession is a term that refers to praying for other people.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  In the great quietness of these winter evenings there is one clock: the sea. Its dim momentum in the mind is the fugue upon which this writing is made. Empty cadences of sea-water licking its own wounds, sulking along the mouths of the delta, boiling upon those deserted beaches — empty, forever empty under the gulls: white scribble on the grey, munched by clouds. If there are ever sails here they die before the land shadows them. Wreckage washed up on the pediments of islands, the last crust, eroded by the weather, stuck in the blue maw of water … gone! * * * * * Apart from the wrinkled old peasant who comes from the village on her mule each day to clean the house, the child and I are quite alone. It is happy and active amid unfamiliar surroundings. I have not named it yet. Of course it will be Justine — who else? As for me I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory. I spoke of the uselessness of art but added nothing truthful about its consolations. The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this — that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side. Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold — the meaning of the pattern. For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential — the imagination. Otherwise why should we hurt one another? No, the remission I am seeking, and will be granted perhaps, is not one I shall ever see in the bright friendly eyes of Melissa or the sombre brow-dark gaze of Justine. We have all of us taken different paths now; but in this, the first great fragmentation of my maturity, I feel the confines of my art and my living deepened immeasurably by the memory of them. In thought I achieve them anew; as if only here — this wooden table over the sea under an olive tree, only here can I enrich them as they deserve. So that the taste of this writing should have taken something from its living subjects — their breath, skin, voices — weaving them into the supple tissues of human memory. I want them to live again to the point where pain becomes art.… Perhaps this is a useless attempt, I cannot say. But I must try.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  But there were other times too: those sun-tormented afternoons — ‘honey-sweating,’ as Pombal called them — when we lay together bemused by the silence, watching the yellow curtains breathing tenderly against the light — the quiet respirations of the wind off Mareotis which matched our own. Then she might rise and consult the clock after giving it a shake and listening to it intently: sit naked at the dressing-table to light a cigarette — looking so young and pretty, with her slender arm raised to show the cheap bracelet I had given her. (‘Yes, I am looking at myself, but it helps me to think about you.’) And turning aside from this fragile mirror-worship she would swiftly cross to the ugly scullery which was my only bath-room, and standing at the dirty iron sink would wash herself with deft swift movements, gasping at the coldness of the water, while I lay inhaling the warmth and sweetness of the pillow upon which her dark head had been resting: watching the long bereft Greek face, with its sane pointed nose and candid eyes, the satiny skin that is given only to the thymus-dominated, the mole upon her slender stalk of the neck. These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean. * * * * * Thinking of that summer when Pombal decided to let his flat to Pursewarden, much to my annoyance. I disliked this literary figure for the contrast he offered to his own work — poetry and prose of real grace. I did not know him well but he was financially successful as a novelist which made me envious, and through years of becoming social practice had developed a sort of savoir faire which I felt should never become part of my own equipment. He was clever, tallish and blond and gave the impression of a young man lying becalmed in his mother. I cannot say that he was not kind or good, for he was both — but the inconvenience of living in the flat with someone I did not like was galling. However it would have involved greater inconvenience to move so I accepted the box-room at the end of the corridor at a reduced rent, and did my washing in the grimy little scullery.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Then I remembered a story in the Bible where Jesus went off to pray, which was a habit of His as well. I doubt He had coffee, but He was God, so He could stay awake without caffeine. He would be gone before His disciples woke up sometimes. Often nobody could find Him—neither the disciples nor the crowds —because He was wandering the hills or some nearby olive orchard, just praying. On this occasion, when Jesus finished praying, His disciples were waiting for Him. There was something about His prayer life that captivated them. There was a massive difference between Jesus’ private, authentic walk with God and the public, all-for-show prayers that often characterized the religious leaders of the day. I think they wanted the same peace, passion, and power they saw in their Lord, and they realized that His prayer life was the catalyst for all of that. It was the secret sauce, the missing ingredient—and they wanted to know more. When Jesus walked up to the group, one of them blurted out what they were all thinking: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). Frequently, when people asked Jesus a question or tried to get an easy rule to follow, He would reply with another question or with a parable. He wasn’t being difficult, but rather requiring them to engage with the topic and explore it more in depth—not settle for superficial answers. Jesus could have responded that way. He could have said, “Just do it. Learn as you go,” or, “Study the Scriptures and figure it out for yourself.” But He didn’t. He didn’t roll His eyes or dodge their question. I think their hunger to pray thrilled His heart. So Jesus taught them to pray. Think about that. Jesus, the perfect, divine teacher, put whatever plans He had on hold for that day just so He could teach His crew how to do what He did best: pray. He gave them a simple, specific prayer. We call it the Lord’s Prayer, but it was more than an empty formula to recite. It was a sample prayer. A template to follow. A starter pack for prayer newbies, if you will.