Hope

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 History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The kingdom of Christ, in its principle and aim, is as comprehensive as humanity. It is truly catholic or universal, designed and adapted for all nations and ages, for all the powers of the soul, and all classes of society. It breathes into the mind, the heart, and the will a higher, supernatural life, and consecrates the family, the state, science, literature, art, and commerce to holy ends, till finally God becomes all in all. Even the body, and the whole visible creation, which groans for redemption from its bondage to vanity and for the glorious liberty of the children of God, shall share in this universal transformation; for we look for the resurrection of the body, and for the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. But we must not identify the kingdom of God with the visible church or churches, which are only its temporary organs and agencies, more or less inadequate, while the kingdom itself is more comprehensive, and will last for ever. Accordingly, church history has various departments, corresponding to the different branches of secular history and of natural life. The principal divisions are: I. The history of missions, or of the spread of Christianity among unconverted nations, whether barbarous or civilized. This work must continue, till "the fullness of the Gentiles shall come in," and "Israel shall be saved." The law of the missionary progress is expressed in the two parables of the grain of mustard-seed which grows into a tree, and of the leaven which gradually pervades the whole lump. The first parable illustrates the outward expansion, the second the all-penetrating and transforming power of Christianity. It is difficult to convert a nation; it is more difficult to train it to the high standard of the gospel; it is most difficult to revive and reform a dead or apostate church. The foreign mission work has achieved three great conquests: first, the conversion of the elect remnant of the Jews, and of civilized Greeks and Romans, in the first three centuries; then the conversion of the barbarians of Northern and Western Europe, in the middle ages; and last, the combined efforts of various churches and societies for the conversion of the savage races in America, Africa, and Australia, and the semi-civilized nations of Eastern Asia, in our own time. The whole non-Christian world is now open to missionary labor, except the Mohammedan, which will likewise become accessible at no distant day.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  UNTIL THE SHOES arrived, whether or not the shoes ever arrived, I’d need to find some way to earn cash money. Before my trip I’d had that interview with Dean Witter. Maybe I could go back there. I ran it by my father, in the TV nook. He stretched out in his vinyl recliner and suggested I first go have a chat with his old friend Don Frisbee, CEO of Pacific Power & Light. I knew Mr. Frisbee. In college I’d done a summer internship for him. I liked him, and I liked that he’d graduated from Harvard Business School. When it came to schools, I was a bit of a snob. Also, I marveled that he’d gone on, rather quickly, to become CEO of a New York Stock Exchange company. I recall that he welcomed me warmly that spring day in 1963, that he gave me one of those double-handed handshakes and led me into his office, into a chair across from his desk. He settled into his big high-backed leather throne and raised his eyebrows. “So… what’s on your mind?” “Honestly, Mr. Frisbee, I don’t know what to do… about… or with… a job… or career…” Weakly, I added: “My life.” I said I was thinking of going to Dean Witter. Or else maybe coming back to the electric company. Or else maybe working for some large corporation. The light from Mr. Frisbee’s office window glinted off his rimless glasses and into my eyes. Like the sun off the Ganges. “Phil,” he said, “those are all bad ideas.” “Sir?” “I don’t think you should do any of those things.” “Oh.” “Everyone, but everyone, changes jobs at least three times. So if you go to work for an investment firm now, you’ll eventually leave, and then at your next job you’ll have to start all over. If you go work for some big company, son, same deal. No, what you want to do, while you’re young, is get your CPA. That, along with your MBA, will put a solid floor under your earnings. Then, when you change jobs, which you will, trust me, at least you’ll maintain your salary level. You won’t go backward.” That sounded practical. I certainly didn’t want to go backward. I hadn’t majored in accounting, however. I needed nine more hours to even qualify to take the exam. So I quickly enrolled in three accounting classes at Portland State. “More school?” my father grumbled. Worse, the school in question wasn’t Stanford or Oregon. It was puny little Portland State. I wasn’t the only school snob in the family. AFTER GETTING MY nine hours I worked at an accounting firm, Lybrand, Ross Bros. & Montgomery. It was one of the Big Eight national firms, but its Portland branch office was small. One partner, three junior accountants. Suits me, I thought. Smallness meant the firm would be intimate, conducive to learning.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt. I’d like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bull’s-eye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bull’s-eye. It’s not one man’s opinion; it’s a law of nature. I’d like to remind them that America isn’t the entrepreneurial Shangri-La people think. Free enterprise always irritates the kinds of trolls who live to block, to thwart, to say no, sorry, no. And it’s always been this way. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They’ve always fought uphill, and the hill has never been steeper. America is becoming less entrepreneurial, not more. A Harvard Business School study recently ranked all the countries of the world in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit. America ranked behind Peru. And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop. Luck plays a big role. Yes, I’d like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome. Some people might not call it luck. They might call it Tao, or Logos, or Jñāna, or Dharma. Or Spirit. Or God. Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao. And since no one has ever adequately defined Tao, I now try to go regularly to mass. I would tell them: Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart. In what format do I want to say all this? A memoir? No, not a memoir. I can’t imagine how it could all fit into one unified narrative. Maybe a novel. Or a speech. Or a series of speeches. Maybe just a letter to my grandkids. I peer into the dark. So maybe there is something on my bucket list after all? Another Crazy Idea. Suddenly my mind is racing. People I need to call, things I need to read. I’ll have to get in touch with Woodell. I should see if we have any copies of those letters from Johnson. There were so many! Somewhere in my parents’ house, where my sister Joanne still lives, there must be a box with my slides from my trip around the world. So much to do. So much to learn. So much I don’t know about my own life. Now I really can’t sleep. I get up, grab a yellow legal pad from my desk.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  And then. I’d instructed my friends to leave me alone. I’d filled the freezer with hawk food and unplugged the phone. Now I was a hermit with a hawk in a darkened room with books on three walls, a faded Afghan rug, and a sofa of stained yellow velvet. A mirror hung over the boarded-up fireplace, and a Shell poster from the 1930s on the wall above me was reflected backwards and watery in the old glass. YOU CAN BE SURE OF SHELL, it said, along with a scumble of stormclouds and a part of the Dorset coast. There was an old television, a mint-green vinyl cloth on the floor with the hawk’s perch on it, and a pair of deep green curtains printed with flowers that shut out the world. The goal was to be motionless, the mind empty, the heart full of hope. But as the minutes stretched I had to move, just slightly: angle my foot to stop it sleeping; wrinkle my nose if it itched, and each time I did so I felt the hawk flinch in fear. But I also saw from the corner of my eye that she was pulling herself up incrementally from that sprung-to-fly crouch. Her stance was more upright. There was a little less fear in the room.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I turn the engraved card over, and on it there is written in ink: WELCOME TO LOS ANGELES! I walk into a bar by the corner, next to the loan shop. HARRY’S BAR.... It’s a long bar with accusing mirrors lining its back. A canvas hanging across the ceiling from wall to wall makes the bar resemble an elongated circus tent.... Although it is early afternoon, there are many people here. I realize immediately that this is a malehustling bar. Behind the counter a gay young waiter flutters back and forth, all airy bird-gestures. The scores sit eyeing the drifters who are stationed idly about the bar, by the jukebox, leaning against the booths. I sit at the counter and ask for a draft beer. The fluttering bartender winks. WELCOME! his eyes beam.... Now the man next to me says: “You shouldnt be spending your money.” He slurs the words, hes very drunk. He pushes my money back toward me, replaces it with a dollarbill of his own on the counter. “Wottayadrinkin?” he asks me. I change from draft to bourbon. Hes a slender not-yet middle-aged man—well dressed—although in his juiced-up state, his clothes are slightly disheveled. He is not effeminate, but from the way hes looking at me calculatingly, I know hes a score. I sit there next to him for long minutes, and he doesnt say anything. I begin to think hes lost interest. I go to the head, through the swinging door. The odor of urine and disinfectant chokes me. There are puddles of dirty water on the floor. Over the streaky urinal, crude obscene drawings, pleading messages jump at you. Someone has described himself glowingly, as to age, appearance, size. Beneath the self-glorifying description, another had added: “Yes, but are you of good family?” Another scrawled note—a series: “Candy is a queen.” “No she isnt.” “Yes I am....” And in bold, shouting black letters across the wall: IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED FAIRIES & THEY MADE MEN The drunk man walks into the head. “You broke?” he asks me abruptly. I wasnt; I said yes. “Wanna come with me?” he said. We leave the bar—the bartender calls after us: “Have a good time!”... Outside, we turn left, past the burlesque house with the fullblown tantalizing pictures of busty women. We enter the hotel next door. A ratty-looking man with a cigar barely glances at us, opens a splotchy old register book, we scribble phony names. “Three dollars,” the man behind the counter says. The man Im with opens his wallet. Bills pop out. He counts out three. The man behind the desk says: “That rooms open, you can lock it from the inside.” He doesnt give us a key.... We go up the long grumbling stairway. Along the hall a door is half-open, a youngish man sat alone on a bed, in shorts, rubbing the inside of his thighs.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  HIRING SALES REPS and graphic artists showed great optimism, and I didn’t consider myself an optimist by nature. Not that I was a pessimist. I generally tried to hover between the two, committing to neither. But as 1969 approached, I found myself staring into space and thinking the future might be bright. After a good night’s sleep, after a hearty breakfast, I could see plenty of reason for hope. Aside from our robust and rising sales numbers, Onitsuka would soon be bringing out several exciting new models, including the Obori, which featured a feather-light nylon upper. Also, the Marathon, another nylon, with lines sleek as a Karmann Ghia. These shoes will sell themselves, I told Woodell many times, hanging them on the corkboard. Also, Bowerman was back from Mexico City, where he’d been an assistant coach on the U.S. Olympic team, meaning he’d played a pivotal role in the U.S. winning more gold medals than any team, from any nation, ever. My partner was more than famous; he was legendary. I phoned Bowerman, eager to get his overall thoughts on the Games, and particularly on the moment for which they would forever be remembered, the protest of John Carlos and Tommie Smith. Standing on the podium during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” both men had bowed their heads and raised black-gloved fists, a shocking gesture, meant to call attention to racism, poverty, human rights abuses. They were still being condemned for it. But Bowerman, as I fully expected, supported them. Bowerman supported all runners. Carlos and Smith were shoeless during the protest; they’d conspicuously removed their Pumas and left them on the stands. I told Bowerman I couldn’t decide if this had been a good thing or a bad thing for Puma. Was all publicity really good publicity? Was publicity like advertising? A chimera? Bowerman chuckled and said he wasn’t sure. He told me about the scandalous behavior of Puma and Adidas throughout the Games. The world’s two biggest athletic shoe companies—run by two German brothers who despised each other—had chased each other like Keystone Kops around the Olympic Village, jockeying for all the athletes. Huge sums of cash, often stuffed in running shoes or manila envelopes, were passed around. One of Puma’s sales reps even got thrown in jail. (There were rumors that Adidas had framed him.) He was married to a female sprinter, and Bowerman joked that he’d only married her to secure her endorsement. Worse, it didn’t stop at mere payouts. Puma had smuggled truckloads of shoes into Mexico City, while Adidas cleverly managed to evade Mexico’s stiff import tariffs. I heard through the grapevine they did it by making a nominal number of shoes at a factory in Guadalajara. Bowerman and I didn’t feel morally offended; we felt left out. Blue Ribbon had no money for payouts, and therefore no presence at the Games.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  He’d fallen asleep at the wheel, he wrote, and woke to find himself and his 1956 Volkswagen Bug upside down and airborne. He struck the divider, then rolled, then flew out of the car, just before it somersaulted down the embankment. When Johnson’s body finally stopped tumbling, he was on his back, looking at the sky, his collarbone, foot, and skull all shattered. The skull, he said, was actually leaking. Worse, being newly divorced, he had no one to care for him during his convalescence. The poor guy was one dead dog from becoming a country-western song. Despite all these recent calamities, Johnson was of good cheer. He assured me in a series of chirpy follow-up letters that he was managing to meet all his obligations. He was dragging himself around his new apartment, filling orders, shipping shoes, corresponding promptly with all customers. A friend was bringing him his mail, he said, so not to worry, P.O. Box 492 was still fully operational. In closing, he added that because he was now facing alimony, child support, and untold medical bills, he needed to inquire about the long-term prospects of Blue Ribbon. How did I see the future? I didn’t lie… exactly. Maybe out of pity, maybe haunted by the image of Johnson, single, lonely, his body wrapped in plaster of Paris, gamely trying to keep himself and my company alive, I sounded an upbeat tone. Blue Ribbon, I said, would probably morph over the years into a generalized sporting goods company. We’d probably have offices on the West Coast. And one day, maybe, in Japan. “Farfetched,” I wrote. “But it seems worth shooting for.” This last line was wholly truthful. It was worth shooting for. If Blue Ribbon went bust, I’d have no money, and I’d be crushed. But I’d also have some valuable wisdom, which I could apply to the next business. Wisdom seemed an intangible asset, but an asset all the same, one that justified the risk. Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks—marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling—seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast. In closing I told Johnson that if he could sell 3,250 pairs of Tigers by the end of June 1966—completely impossible, by my calculations—I would authorize him to open that retail outlet he’d been harassing me about. I even put a PS at the bottom, which I knew he’d devour like a candy treat. I reminded him that he was selling so many shoes, so fast, he might want to speak to an accountant. There are income tax issues to consider, I said. He fired back a sarcastic thanks for the tax advice.

• From Educated (2018)

  I was only sixteen, but I didn’t tell the manager that and he hired me for forty hours a week. My first shift started at four o’clock the next morning. When I got home, Dad was driving the loader through the junkyard. I stepped onto the ladder and grabbed hold of the rail. Over the roar of the engine, I told him I’d found a job but that I would drive the crane in the afternoons, until he could hire someone. He dropped the boom and stared ahead. “You’ve already decided,” he said without glancing at me. “No point dragging it out.” I applied to BYU a week later. I had no idea how to write the application, so Tyler wrote it for me. He said I’d been educated according to a rigorous program designed by my mother, who’d made sure I met all the requirements to graduate. My feelings about the application changed from day to day, almost from minute to minute. Sometimes I was sure God wanted me to go to college, because He’d given me that twenty-eight. Other times I was sure I’d be rejected, and that God would punish me for applying, for trying to abandon my own family. But whatever the outcome, I knew I would leave. I would go somewhere, even if it wasn’t to school. Home had changed the moment I’d taken Shawn to that hospital instead of to Mother. I had rejected some part of it; now it was rejecting me. The admissions committee was efficient; I didn’t wait long. The letter arrived in a normal envelope. My heart sank when I saw it. Rejection letters are small, I thought. I opened it and read “Congratulations.” I’d been admitted for the semester beginning January 5. Mother hugged me. Dad tried to be cheerful. “It proves one thing at least,” he said. “Our home school is as good as any public education.” —THREE DAYS BEFORE I turned seventeen, Mother drove me to Utah to find an apartment. The search took all day, and we arrived home late to find Dad eating a frozen supper. He hadn’t cooked it well and it was mush. The mood around him was charged, combustible. It felt like he might detonate at any moment. Mother didn’t even kick off her shoes, just rushed to the kitchen and began shuffling pans to fix a real dinner. Dad moved to the living room and started cursing at the VCR. I could see from the hallway that the cables weren’t connected. When I pointed this out, he exploded. He cussed and waved his arms, shouting that in a man’s house the cables should always be hooked up, that a man should never have to come into a room and find the cables to his VCR unhooked. Why the hell had I unhooked them anyway? Mother rushed in from the kitchen. “I disconnected the cables,” she said. Dad rounded on her, sputtering. “Why do you always take her side!

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  As part of my formal severing, I had to go in and talk to the boss, a senior partner with the Dickensian name of Curly Leclerc. He was polite, even-handed, smooth, playing a one-act drama he’d played a hundred times—the exit interview. He asked what I was going to do instead of working for one of the finest accounting firms in the world. I said that I’d started my own business and was hoping it might take off, and in the meantime I was going to teach accounting. He stared. I’d gone off script. Way off. “Why the hell would you do something like that?” Lastly, the really difficult exit interview. I told my father. He, too, stared. Bad enough I was still jackassing around with shoes, he said, but now… this. Teaching wasn’t respectable. Teaching at Portland State was downright disrespectable. “What am I going to tell my friends?” he asked. THE UNIVERSITY ASSIGNED me four accounting classes, including Accounting 101. I spent a few hours prepping, reviewing basic concepts, and as fall arrived the balance of my life shifted just as I’d planned. I still didn’t have all the time I wanted or needed for Blue Ribbon, but I had more. I was following a path that felt like my path, and though I wasn’t sure where it would lead, I was ready to find out. So I was beaming with hope on that first day of the semester, in early September 1967. My students, however, were not. Slowly they filed into the classroom, each one radiating boredom and hostility. For the next hour they were to be confined in this stifling cage, force-fed some of the driest concepts ever devised, and I was to blame, which made me the target of their resentment. They eyed me, frowned. A few scowled. I empathized. But I wasn’t going to let them rattle me. Standing at the lectern in my black suit and skinny gray tie, I remained calm, for the most part. I was always somewhat restless, somewhat twitchy, and in those days I had several nervous tics—like wrapping rubber bands around my wrist and playing with them, snapping them against my skin. I might have snapped them extra fast, extra hard, as I saw the students slump into the room like prisoners on a chain gang. Suddenly, sweeping lightly into the classroom and taking a seat in the front row was a striking young woman. She had long golden hair that brushed her shoulders, and matching golden hoop earrings that also brushed her shoulders. I looked at her, and she looked at me. Bright blue eyes set off by dramatic black eyeliner. I thought of Cleopatra. I thought of Julie Christie. I thought: Jeez, Julie Christie’s kid sister has just enrolled in my accounting class.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  I spent a few hours prepping, reviewing basic concepts, and as fall arrived the balance of my life shifted just as I’d planned. I still didn’t have all the time I wanted or needed for Blue Ribbon, but I had more. I was following a path that felt like my path, and though I wasn’t sure where it would lead, I was ready to find out. So I was beaming with hope on that first day of the semester, in early September 1967. My students, however, were not. Slowly they filed into the classroom, each one radiating boredom and hostility. For the next hour they were to be confined in this stifling cage, force-fed some of the driest concepts ever devised, and I was to blame, which made me the target of their resentment. They eyed me, frowned. A few scowled. I empathized. But I wasn’t going to let them rattle me. Standing at the lectern in my black suit and skinny gray tie, I remained calm, for the most part. I was always somewhat restless, somewhat twitchy, and in those days I had several nervous tics—like wrapping rubber bands around my wrist and playing with them, snapping them against my skin. I might have snapped them extra fast, extra hard, as I saw the students slump into the room like prisoners on a chain gang. Suddenly, sweeping lightly into the classroom and taking a seat in the front row was a striking young woman. She had long golden hair that brushed her shoulders, and matching golden hoop earrings that also brushed her shoulders. I looked at her, and she looked at me. Bright blue eyes set off by dramatic black eyeliner. I thought of Cleopatra. I thought of Julie Christie. I thought: Jeez, Julie Christie’s kid sister has just enrolled in my accounting class. I wondered how old she was. She couldn’t yet be twenty, I guessed, snapping my rubber bands against my wrist, snapping, snapping, and staring, then pretending not to stare. She was hard to look away from. And hard to figure. So young, and yet so worldly. Those earrings—they were strictly hippie, and yet that eye makeup was très chic. Who was this girl? And how was I going to concentrate on teaching with her in the front row? I called roll. I can still remember the names. “Mr. Trujillo?” “Here.” “Mr. Peterson?” “Here.” “Mr. Jameson?” “Here.” “Miss Parks?” “Here,” said Julie Christie’s kid sister, softly. I looked up, gave a half smile. She gave a half smile. I penciled a shaky check next to her full name: Penelope Parks. Penelope, like the faithful wife of world-traveling Odysseus. Present and accounted for. I DECIDED TO employ the Socratic method. I was emulating the Oregon and Stanford professors whose classes I’d enjoyed most, I guess. And I was still under the spell of all things Greek, still enchanted by my day at the Acropolis.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And having said that much, impulsively, not caring to what extent I will reveal myself now, I went on: “I mean that to choose someone to be wanted by—loved by—may be one of the many, many shapes of... ‘love’—if it exists,” I added guardedly. He was looking at me very curiously as I spoke. “If each side could be measured in emotional degrees—the one loving and the other accepting that love,” I continued, feeling suddenly as if I had to speak rapidly in order to be able to finish, “each side might balance the other. If someone is able to take ‘love’—and take it with intensity—with the full intensity of his ability—and someone else who can give it gives it to the full intensity of his, then one is hardly different from the other. Maybe youll say Im just defending an inability to love back. But if there is such a thing as what you call ‘Love,’ its shape must be as unpredictable as the patterns—...” I stopped. And I remembered this: So long ago! Those few, rare, treasured days! The strange, unpredictable patterns I had watched in fascination as a child—patterns created by the water as it poured from the aluminum tub in which my mother washed our clothes: the grayish water spilling onto the dry dirt in directions impossible to determine.... And I watched those patterns, on those pure, pure afternoons; watching those odd, intriguing shapes.... And then suddenly I remembered: the white sheets which my mother would hang up to dry in the Texas sun. And, drying, they flapped cleanly in the wind under the vast miles of equally clean sky.

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

  I will comfort you as you wait. Isaiah 66:13 I will remind you this is all real. John 14:26 I am on my way. Revelation 3:11 My steadfast love endures forever. Psalm 138:8 In just a little while... I am coming and I will take you to the place where I am. Hebrews 10:37; John 14:3 You will inherit the earth. Psalm 25:13 You will be with Me. I will wipe every tear from your eyes, and death will be no more. Behold, I am making all things new. Revelation 21:3–5 My kingdom is coming. My will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Matthew 6:10 God has declared these truths about Himself and about me. All these things are true for you and for anyone who loves and follows Jesus. This is who we are because of whose we are. We make our choices based on these truths. And our God doesn’t change and always delivers on His promises. T 16 Dangerous Thinking oday as I realized how close I was to finishing this book, I rallied a dozen people who love me to pray. I may never have met you, yet I care deeply about your freedom. I hope you can read that motivation in my words. I care deeply, yet I recognize that the freedom I’m referring to comes only by a work of God, by His Spirit, by His divine intervention in your life. Separate from that prayer rally, my friend Jess, who has no idea what I’m up to today, just sent me a text. She doesn’t know that I’m working on a chapter just now about how contagious our minds are and about how, when we’re conformed to the mind of Christ, we can influence everyone around us for powerful, almost indescribable good. She doesn’t know the prayers being prayed, that you’d be set totally free. Attached to her text is a picture of her dad. He is a godly man, a great dad, a faithful husband. He also is a man with a substance abuse problem. He finished a season in rehab a few months ago, and boy, did he return to his church and community on a mission. After his program finished, he went back and began leading Bible studies at the rehab facility he’d just left. The picture Jess texted me was of six men, all of different ages, ethnicities, and interests. They were all smiles, seated around a dinner table. Jess wrote, “My dad woke up Saturday morning with the idea to invite his rehab buddies over for dinner, so he and my mom made the invite, and a few hours later they all showed up. My family is still fragile, but these are the things that help me see that God really does bring beauty from ashes.” Only God can take our most broken parts and turn them into thumbs-up moments of hope around grilled hamburgers and potato salad. Only God can

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  It can be helpful to allow your recognition of the inevitability of suffering to surface, while at the same time registering the abundant sources of safety for both you and others. Holding suffering and safety side by side helps you maintain your resilience in the face of suffering, so that you don’t become shattered or overcome by it. It is into this larger context of acceptance —acceptance of similarity, interconnection, and of suffering and safety—that you can offer the wishes for happiness and well-being that are central to LKM. Cultivating the wisdom to put your LKM practice into balanced perspective protects its sincerity and keeps it real. Absent the backdrop of this wisdom, you might notice yourself becoming too attached to the prospect that your wishes will come true. You may come to feel that the people who you contemplate will feel safe, happy, healthy, and at ease. Or you might slip into feeling that these wishes must come true: that your own pursuit of happiness somehow hinges on it. These sorts of yearnings are not helpful. They reflect attachments to a certain outcome or way of being, rather than openness to whatever arises or is. Know that clinging to any sort of fixed idea that your wishes need be fulfilled is not the state you seek. Such desires masquerade as the state you seek, but miss the mark altogether. Far more important than reading or talking about LKM, however, is the time and energy you devote to practicing it. When you’re ready to dive in, read the following passages a few times, and then put the book down and experience it yourself. Try This Meditation Practice: Loving-Kindness Find a quiet place where you are unlikely to be interrupted. If you’re in a chair, scoot back in your seat so that the lowest part of your spine is well supported and straighten your spine up toward the sky. Lean forward from the back of the chair just a bit. Relax your shoulders and pull them back slightly. This position allows you to expand your rib cage in all directions when you breath, creating more spaciousness around your heart. Place your feet flat on the floor, so that the heels and balls of your feet make equal connection with the ground. Rest your palms gently on your thighs. If sitting like this doesn’t appeal to you, find any other position that makes you feel both alert and relaxed and that allows your chest to expand. Once you are physically comfortable, let your eyes drift closed. Or, if you find that awkward, set your gaze lightly on a spot on the floor in front of you, or on a simple, peaceful object. Bring your awareness to the sensations of your own heart.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  For White was certainly interfering with time. He was turning it backwards. In that green mound of a grave he had achieved invisibility, and after he emerged he felt he ‘had turned St Lucie’s day’, the shortest, darkest day of the year from which the earth rolls back toward spring. He spoke of that time as a rebirth: wrote that life ‘seemed to be creating itself, seemed in the blank walls of chaos to be discovering an opening, or speck of light’. In his imagination, the grave was his dissolution. He had lost the war with Gos, and it had killed the man he was. But now, with his apocalyptic, child’s vision of redemption, he saw himself reborn into the world with wisdom. And reborn, too, as a man living backwards in time. I used to think Merlyn was a magnificent literary creation, but now I think of him as a much stranger invention – White’s imagined future self. Merlyn was ‘born at the wrong end of Time’. He must ‘live backwards from in front, while surrounded by a lot of people living forwards from behind’. This backwards life is what gives Merlyn his ability to predict the future – for him, it is always his past. In White’s 1941 conclusion to The Once and Future King, published much later as The Book of Merlyn, Arthur awaits his final battle. He is elderly now, tired and despairing, and when Merlyn appears he wonders if the wizard is a dream. Merlyn rebukes him. ‘When I was a third-rate schoolmaster in the twentieth century,’ he snaps, ‘every single boy I ever met wrote essays for me which ended: Then he woke up.’ Being Merlyn was White’s dream, and it makes The Sword in the Stone not just a work of fiction, but a prophecy. All White must do is stay put, wait four hundred years and the Wart will appear at his door. Merlyn’s cottage, and all the things inside it, are souvenirs of the distant future. ‘I have always been afraid of things,’ White had written. ‘Of being hurt and death.’ But now he was recreating himself as someone who would become – who was already – immortalised in legend.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Then as the days pass she’ll grow tamer, partly because I am keeping her indoors and constantly in my presence, just as fifteenth-century falconers had done. Soon she will step to my fist for food, and later she will jump to it. We’ll go for long walks to accustom her to cars and dogs and people. And then she’ll fly to me when I call her, first on a line, the creance, and then free. And then. And then. I’d instructed my friends to leave me alone. I’d filled the freezer with hawk food and unplugged the phone. Now I was a hermit with a hawk in a darkened room with books on three walls, a faded Afghan rug, and a sofa of stained yellow velvet. A mirror hung over the boarded-up fireplace, and a Shell poster from the 1930s on the wall above me was reflected backwards and watery in the old glass. YOU CAN BE SURE OF SHELL, it said, along with a scumble of stormclouds and a part of the Dorset coast. There was an old television, a mint-green vinyl cloth on the floor with the hawk’s perch on it, and a pair of deep green curtains printed with flowers that shut out the world. The goal was to be motionless, the mind empty, the heart full of hope. But as the minutes stretched I had to move, just slightly: angle my foot to stop it sleeping; wrinkle my nose if it itched, and each time I did so I felt the hawk flinch in fear. But I also saw from the corner of my eye that she was pulling herself up incrementally from that sprung-to-fly crouch. Her stance was more upright. There was a little less fear in the room. The old falconers called the manning of a hawk like this watching. It was a reassuringly familiar state of mind, meditative and careful and grave. For the first time in months my life had a purpose. I was waiting for the moment from which all else follows: the hawk lowering her head and beginning to feed. That was all I wanted. That was all there was. Waiting. Watching. Sitting with the hawk felt as if I were holding my breath for hours with no effort. No rise, no fall, just my heart beating and I could feel it, in my fingertips, that little clipping throb of blood that – because it was the only thing I could sense moving – didn’t feel part of myself at all. As if it was another person’s heart, or something else living inside me. Something with a flat, reptilian head, two heavy, down-dropped wings. Shadowed, thrush-streaked sides. There was a greenish cast to the light in the room, dark and cool and faintly submarine. Outside life went on, hot and distant.

• From Educated (2018)

  I had a headache—not an ache in my brain but an actual aching of my brain, as if the organ itself was tender. I went to work but came home early and lay in a dark corner of the basement, waiting it out. I was lying on the carpet, feeling the pounding in my brain, when Tyler found me and folded himself onto the sofa near my head. I was not pleased to see him. The only thing worse than being dragged through the house by my hair was Tyler’s having seen it. Given the choice between letting it play out, and having Tyler there to stop it, I’d have chosen to let it play out. Obviously I would have chosen that. I’d been close to passing out anyway, and then I could have forgotten about it. In a day or two it wouldn’t even have been real. It would become a bad dream, and in a month, a mere echo of a bad dream. But Tyler had seen it, had made it real. “Have you thought about leaving?” Tyler asked. “And go where?” “School,” he said. I brightened. “I’m going to enroll in high school in September,” I said. “Dad won’t like it, but I’m gonna go.” I thought Tyler would be pleased; instead, he grimaced. “You’ve said that before.” “I’m going to.” “Maybe,” Tyler said. “But as long as you live under Dad’s roof, it’s hard to go when he asks you not to, easy to delay just one more year, until there aren’t any years left. If you start as a sophomore, can you even graduate?” We both knew I couldn’t. “It’s time to go, Tara,” Tyler said. “The longer you stay, the less likely you will ever leave.” “You think I need to leave?” Tyler didn’t blink, didn’t hesitate. “I think this is the worst possible place for you.” He’d spoken softly, but it felt as though he’d shouted the words. “Where could I go?” “Go where I went,” Tyler said. “Go to college.” I snorted. “BYU takes homeschoolers,” he said. “Is that what we are?” I said. “Homeschoolers?” I tried to remember the last time I’d read a textbook. “The admissions board won’t know anything except what we tell them,” Tyler said. “If we say you were homeschooled, they’ll believe it.” “I won’t get in.” “You will,” he said. “Just pass the ACT. One lousy test.” Tyler stood to go. “There’s a world out there, Tara,” he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.” —THE NEXT DAY I drove to the hardware store in town and bought a slide-bolt lock for my bedroom door. I dropped it on my bed, then fetched a drill from the shop and started fitting screws. I thought Shawn was out—his truck wasn’t in the driveway—but when I turned around with the drill, he was standing in my doorframe. “What are you doing?” he said.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  And a dream in which his psychoanalyst is congratulating him on how good his dreams are. ‘Bennet is the name, initials E. A.,’ wrote White to Leonard Potts, his old tutor at Cambridge, who was something of a father figure. ‘He is a very great man – must be, because cured cases like mine are I believe most rare, if not unique.’ And then there’s an assurance that is surely his wishful invention of some future self: ‘I had a friend who was a sadistic homosexual, now happily married with children.’ For the last year, White’s craze for analysis had been in full spate: he was certain that Bennet would cure him of all of it: his homosexuality, his unhappiness, his sense of feeling unreal, his sadism, all of it; all his confusions and fears. It was all going well. He was almost sure he was in love with the barmaid. ‘I’m so happy I hop about like a wagtail in the streets,’ he told Potts, with a pride that holds within it, cupped like a small bird in the hand, his abject terror of failure. The boys treated him with a kind of holy awe. Pacing the long corridors in grey flannels, a turtleneck sweater and gown, Mr White looked a little like Byron. He was tall, with full lips and very pale blue eyes, a trim red moustache, and dark, unruly hair. He did all the right things: flew aeroplanes, shot, fished for salmon, hunted; and even better, all the wrong things: kept grass snakes in his room, rode his horse up the school steps on match days, and best of all, published racy novels under the pseudonym James Aston. When the headmaster found out he was furious: Mr White had to write him a letter promising never to write such filth again, said the boys, who passed copies of the novels around in agonies of delighted subterfuge. He was a startling, light-hearted, sarcastic figure But a forbidding teacher. He never beat boys, ever, but they were terrified of his disdain. He demanded emotional sincerity. If it wasn’t forthcoming, he’d cut his pupils down to size, puncturing their new-grown armour of pretension with a relish that bordered on cruelty. Even so there was something about Mr White that made him an ally of sorts; boys confided in him in a crisis, and they worshipped him for his insubordination and glamour.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The plangent sound of hawk-bells drifts through the open window each time the falcons bate from their blocks on the lawn. Cully is dead: she tangled herself in strawberry netting in the cottage barn and hung herself, but he has trained two merlins since, and now he has two peregrines: a bad-tempered falcon called Cressida, and a nervous young tiercel as yet unnamed. For the last half-hour he has been recording the delicate steps of their training in a vellum-bound journal. He pauses. A thought has struck him, borne in with the sound of bells. Perhaps he might write the book about hawks after all. He had tried once, and failed. Perhaps he would try again. It would not be the usual naturalist’s book about hawks. That would be bogus, he thinks. This would be real literature. He begins to sketch out why: The initiation ceremonies, the voodoo hut of the falconer, the noises in the magic dark, the necromantic knots. Knots were probably the earliest spells. The two hawks consider themselves spell-bound to their blocks by my arts . . . I am convinced that if nobody had ever invented knots, nobody would ever have imagined magicians. As a falconer he would be in the book, along with all the other parts he would play in the hawk’s education. First he will be Torquemada, the inquisitor. Then the ‘witch doctor of the ceremonies of puberty’ – and the terrifying presence that will test them, their ‘devil-god of the cave’. And then he will be Prospero, of course, the masterly magician who has led them through all the ceremonies and ordeals of their hawkish adolescence, for White thinks he knows what freedom is now, and what growing up means. He is party to the magic that is the binding of the hawk to the magician’s will, and knows that at the end of the book must come the deepest mystery of all. The hawk must escape. Of course it must; for the hawk would have to ‘unwind the charm, to escape, to cock his snook at the nigromant – only to find that there was a charm within the charm, that the wizard was a holy man after all, quite happy about the escape himself’. He finishes the paragraph and finds himself greatly moved. There he would stand, small and inverted, looking up from the scorned earth, his planetarium of a cloak blowing in the wind, his wand outwitted, his white beard streaming. And Falco? A triumph, a hatred and a gratitude. No logic or moral. Only the magic for its own sake, weaving and unwoven.

• From Educated (2018)

  my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she had been, she became that mother for the first time. I love you, I wrote, and closed my laptop. — MOTHER AND I SPOKE only once about that conversation, on the phone, a week later. “It’s being dealt with,” she said. “I told your father what you and your sister said. Shawn will get help.” I put the issue from my mind. My mother had taken up the cause. She was strong. She had built that business, with all those people working for her, and it dwarfed my father’s business, and all the other businesses in the whole town; she, that docile woman, had a power in her the rest of us couldn’t contemplate. And Dad. He had changed. He was softer, more prone to laugh. The future could be different from the past. Even the past could be different from the past, because my memories could change: I no longer remembered Mother listening in the kitchen while Shawn pinned me to the floor, pressing my windpipe. I no longer remembered her looking away. My life in Cambridge was transformed—or rather, I was transformed into someone who believed she belonged in Cambridge. The shame I’d long felt about my family leaked out of me almost overnight. For the first time in my life I talked openly about where I’d come from. I admitted to my friends that I’d never been to school. I described Buck’s Peak, with its many junkyards, barns, corrals. I even told them about the root cellar full of supplies in the wheat field, and the gasoline buried near the old barn. I told them I’d been poor, I told them I’d been ignorant, and in telling them this I felt not the slightest prick of shame. Only then did I understand where the shame had come from: it wasn’t that I hadn’t studied in a marble conservatory, or that my father wasn’t a diplomat. It wasn’t that Dad was half out of his mind, or that Mother followed him. It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the Shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all.

• From Educated (2018)

  — THE ENVELOPE ARRIVED THREE weeks later, just as Shawn was getting back on his feet. I tore it open, feeling numb, as if I were reading my sentence after the guilty verdict had already been handed down. I scanned down to the composite score. Twenty-eight. I checked it again. I checked my name. There was no mistake. Somehow—and a miracle was the only way I could account for it—I’d done it. My first thought was a resolution: I resolved to never again work for my father. I drove to the only grocery store in town, called Stokes, and applied for a job bagging groceries. I was only sixteen, but I didn’t tell the manager that and he hired me for forty hours a week. My first shift started at four o’clock the next morning. When I got home, Dad was driving the loader through the junkyard. I stepped onto the ladder and grabbed hold of the rail. Over the roar of the engine, I told him I’d found a job but that I would drive the crane in the afternoons, until he could hire someone. He dropped the boom and stared ahead. “You’ve already decided,” he said without glancing at me. “No point dragging it out.” I applied to BYU a week later. I had no idea how to write the application, so Tyler wrote it for me. He said I’d been educated according to a rigorous program designed by my mother, who’d made sure I met all the requirements to graduate. My feelings about the application changed from day to day, almost from minute to minute. Sometimes I was sure God wanted me to go to college, because He’d given me that twenty-eight. Other times I was sure I’d be rejected, and that God would punish me for applying, for trying to abandon my own family. But whatever the outcome, I knew I would leave. I would go somewhere, even if it wasn’t to school. Home had changed the moment I’d taken Shawn to that hospital instead of to Mother. I had rejected some part of it; now it was rejecting me. The admissions committee was efficient; I didn’t wait long. The letter arrived in a normal envelope. My heart sank when I saw it. Rejection letters are small, I thought. I opened it and read “Congratulations.” I’d been admitted for the semester beginning January 5.