Joy

Passages

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

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• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Walter kept his distance, but clasped his hands together before his chest when we emerged, and shook them, in a gesture of triumph. He was pink-faced and smiling with relief.Our second number - a song called ‘Scarlet Fever’, for which we dressed in guardsmen’s uniforms (red jackets and caps, white belts, black trousers, very smart) - went down a treat; it was during the next routine that all turned sour. There was a man in the stalls: I had noticed him earlier, for he was large, and clearly very drunk; he slept noisily in his seat, with his knees spread wide, his mouth open and his chin glistening slightly in the glow from the stage. For all I know, he might have slept through all the rumpus with the clog-dancer; now, however, by some horrible mischance, he had woken up. It was a very small theatre and I could see him quite distinctly. He had stumbled over his neighbours’ legs to get to the end of his row, swearing all the way, and drawing answering curses from everyone he stepped on. He had reached the aisle at last - but there he had grown confused. Instead of heading for the bar, the privy, or wherever it was that he had made up his gin-or whisky- soaked mind to make for, he had wandered down to the side of the stage. Now he stood, peering up at us, with his hands over his eyes.‘What the devil - ?’ he said; he said it during a lull between verses, and it sounded very loud. A few people turned away from us to look at him, and to titter or tut-tut.I exchanged a glance with Kitty, but kept my voice and steps in time with hers, my eyes still bright, my smile still broad. After a second the man began to curse even louder. The crowd - who were still, I suppose, rather ready for a bit of sport - began to shout at him, to quieten him down.‘Throw the old josser out!’ called someone; and, ‘Don’t you pay no mind to him, Nan, dear!’ This was from a woman in the stalls. I caught her eye, and tipped my hat - it was a boater; we were wearing the Oxford bags and boaters, now - and saw her blush.All the shouting, however, only seemed to enrage and confuse the man still further. A boy stepped up to him, but was knocked away; I saw the fellows in the orchestra begin to gaze a little wildly over the tops of their instruments. At the back of the hall two door-men had been summoned and were squinting into the gloom.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I had got a safe second and wouldn’t have to face the examiners after all. Then the chairman nodded at me with the same courteous little smile that he had given to the others. “And Miss Armstrong, would you stay here now, please?” I stood up slowly, adjusting my gown, while the others filed out of the room. “Come over here.” The chairman gestured toward the chair and I began the interminable journey across the carpet. It took a while before I recognized the sudden explosion of sound that stopped me in my tracks. It was clapping. I looked up to find that the examiners had risen to their feet and were applauding. The men had doffed their mortarboards. All were smiling broadly. And I remembered the old tradition. “Miss Armstrong,” the chairman said when the decorous clapping had petered out, “we wish to congratulate you on your papers, which were all quite excellent.” I felt a huge smile break my face in two and a wave of pure delight. I had done it. I had somehow managed to achieve what they called a “congratulatory first.” If I could do that, with all the distractions that I had had, I could do anything. I would survive. For a moment the path ahead seemed clear and secure. 3. I Renounce the Blessèd Face Looking around my new room, I smiled with relief and delight. Yes, I would be able to work here. This would be the place where I would write my doctoral thesis. The walls had been painted a long time ago in a pale green, which had now faded into a pallid, dreamy wash. There were two pretty leaded windows, surrounded by a leafy creeper, which gave the low-ceilinged room a cottagelike air. A washbasin, a divan against the wall, two wicker armchairs, and a desk—there was everything I needed. “Is it all right?” Jenifer Hart, my new landlady, sounded nervous. She was the tutor in modern history at St. Anne’s, and I had often seen her in college, striding round in flamboyant clothes, which never quite matched and which seemed to make a defiant statement against age and convention. She must have been in her midfifties, but her straight, shoulder-length hair, which she wore pushed behind her ears, was still golden red, though like so many things in her house, it was beginning to fade. Her tanned face was lined—she wore little makeup—and she gave off a rather fierce, uncompromising aura. Yet now she looked anxious and even vulnerable. I had approached her about the room with some trepidation. Word had gone round that she was offering free lodging in return for rather unusual baby-sitting. This was attractive, since my state grant, though adequate, was not princely.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I felt physically lighter, as though I could float, as though I could now do anything at all. This euphoria was short lived. Pride came before a fall. I was due to go to Cambridge the following morning, to spend a week with Sally in a little apartment in Clare College. We did this every year, and it was always fun. Still enchanted with myself, while packing my suitcase I sprang—weightlessly, I thought—up a short flight of steps, misjudged it, came crashing down to earth, and broke my big toe in two places. I got little sympathy, of course. There is an indignity about a broken toe that people find hilarious. Two weeks later, I even detected my mother’s lips twitching as I hobbled across the room. My life changed after the publication of A History of God. The book was a success, especially in the United States and the Netherlands, and I began to travel widely. But my work continued to revolve around the same issues, particularly around the centrality of compassion. When I wrote an essay about Genesis in In the Beginning, I found that the struggle to achieve harmonious relations with our fellows brings human beings into God’s presence; that when Abraham entertained three strangers, making room for them in his home and giving them all the refreshment he could on their journey, this act of practical compassion led directly to a divine encounter. In my history of Jerusalem, I learned that the practice of compassion and social justice had been central to the cult of the holy city from the earliest times, and was especially evident in Judaism and Islam. I discovered that in all three of the religions of Abraham, fundamentalist movements distort the tradition they are trying to defend by emphasizing the belligerent elements in their tradition and overlooking the insistent and crucial demand for compassion. The theme of compassion kept surfacing in my work, because it is pivotal to all the great religious traditions—at their best. But it was my short biography of the Buddha that showed me why this was so. I knew that I could never be a yoga practitioner. The classical yoga, which brought the Buddha to enlightenment, is immeasurably more rigorous than most of the yoga practiced in the West today. I still quailed at the thought of any formal meditation, let alone this fearsome discipline designed to cancel profane consciousness by a ruthless onslaught on the egotism that pervades our lives.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I’d also forgotten, I guess, that there is no substitute for the joy of first putting your arms around a woman’s nudity—when time is unfrozen and when she answers your embrace by actually embracing you back and you can’t believe how well naked seamless bodies can coincide, how accommodating they can be, even before erections have been manually confirmed and clitorises tested or tasted. And it isn’t often that you begin making out with someone, for the very first time, in a state of total nudity, as Joyce and I did. As if it was all part of our kiss, as if our bodies were kissing, Joyce moved underneath me and opened her legs and as I let more of my weight press on her she brought me inside, past her lush black fur and into her hot Fermata. I whispered to her how good she felt. “Ready?” I said. “Yes.” I felt her breath on my neck. “Hold me really tight. Snap your fingers when I do.” I counted off, “One, two, three.” Then we kissed again and we snapped our fingers in unison. It was difficult to tell for a moment if anything had happened. We looked at each other inquiringly, our eyebrows raised. Our slightest movement made my cock squeak with pleasure. “Did it work?” Joyce asked. I listened. “Hear that? It’s totally quiet. That’s the way the Fermata always sounds. It worked.” She sighed with relief and started lifting her hips up against me. “Good news,” she murmured. “Good news. Can we do this for a while, though?” “We can take as long as we want now,” I said. Several Arno-and-Joyce-hours later, we walked back to the Meridien, wheeling the luggage cart with us. I showed her the negative black paths our bodies left behind in the constellations of hanging, glinting raindrops. “So—while you’re out on walks like this,” Joyce said, “you just take off a woman’s clothes, if she attracts you?” I said I sometimes did. Joyce tried it. She undid the black jeans of a motionless man in a leather jacket and pulled on his underpants and peered inside. She also unbuttoned a businessman’s raincoat and reached her hand into his jacket and felt his chest. “Hey, I could learn to like this,” she said. We took our seats at the restaurant and counted to three and snapped our fingers. The waiter appeared shortly after with our entrees. “The plates are very hot,” he said importantly, holding them with a cloth. We had been gone for no more than five minutes; nobody had missed us. Joyce and I talked for another hour, and we drank some more and then had some coffee, and then I walked her home and kissed her good-night at her door.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I felt a huge smile break my face in two and a wave of pure delight. I had done it. I had somehow managed to achieve what they called a “congratulatory first.” If I could do that, with all the distractions that I had had, I could do anything. I would survive. For a moment the path ahead seemed clear and secure. 3. I Renounce the Blessèd Face Looking around my new room, I smiled with relief and delight. Yes, I would be able to work here. This would be the place where I would write my doctoral thesis. The walls had been painted a long time ago in a pale green, which had now faded into a pallid, dreamy wash. There were two pretty leaded windows, surrounded by a leafy creeper, which gave the low-ceilinged room a cottagelike air. A washbasin, a divan against the wall, two wicker armchairs, and a desk—there was everything I needed.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  I carried her down the stopped escalator to a sofa in the lobby and found a rolling cart that the bellhops used for suitcases. I went into the back rooms and found several blankets and pillows and padded the cart with them. I put her down on the cart, on her side, with her legs bent. It took me less than an hour to push her to her apartment. I stayed mostly in the middle of the street. It had begun to rain, but we didn’t get very wet because we were only dampened by the drops that were suspended in our path, not by the ones above us, and even in a heavy rain, the number of drops per cubic foot is far fewer than it appears when the rain is in motion. I left the cart by the mailboxes and carried her upstairs and used her key. I laid her down in the sunporch, on her bed. I kept my eyes closed while I pulled off her clothes and my own. (I wanted to be able to tell her that I hadn’t looked at her.) I arranged the covers of the bed over her and then got in next to her. She was very warm. I lay there for a while with my eyes closed, letting my heart calm down. Her mattress pad felt terrific. I was tired and sleepy. I had a nap of maybe half an Arno-hour. When I woke up I thought to myself, I’m lying in bed with the woman whom, above all others, I want to be in bed with. I snapped my fingers. Joyce began to say something that began with “Although.” She stopped abruptly. “What happened here?” “See how easy it is?” I said. She turned her head on the pillow to look at me. “What did you do?” “I brought you to your apartment and got in bed with you.” Her arm moved under the covers. “I don’t have any clothes on.” “That’s true,” I said. “But I assure you, I kept my eyes closed while I was taking them off. I haven’t done anything seedily voyeuristic. They’re over there. I just wanted to be totally naked in bed with you.” We were both lying on our backs. Our arms touched a little. The room was dim. Joyce put her hands on her forehead and thought. “How did you get me here? Did you drive?”

• From Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry (2017)

  I asked her how often her monkey screeched that this was a new sensation or that it was stronger than ones she had experienced in the past. “Lots,” she said, smiling. Then I asked her how many times that week she thanked her monkey and said, “I am choosing to live with uncertainty.” This was, after all, the essence of the expansive mind-set and strategy we’d planned the week before. Maria’s eyes lit up from within. “Too many times to count,” she said. “I’m giving myself a hundred points this week!” Maria had a great week of practice. By continually reminding herself what her new expansive mind-set was, she had been feeding that mind-set. By reviewing how well she had welcomed her fight-or-flight sensations and negative emotions, she had been rewarding what she did right instead of punishing herself for falling back into safety strategies. Samantha’s Star Quality For my over-responsible client Samantha, it was a real challenge to resist checking up on her son, and she invented a whimsical way to reward herself when she was successful. Recalling how good she felt when she found a star sticker on a grade school paper, she decided to reward herself that way. Every time she was faced with an overwhelming urge to check on her son and she reminded herself that she was not responsible for his choices in life, she gave herself a star. Every time she used a Welcoming Breath to process her anxiety she gave herself another star. Every time she was able to resist checking on him she got another star, and so on. Although she sometimes broke down and checked up on him anyway, and would continue to do so for many weeks, as long as she was able to follow through with some element of her practice, she got some stars. By the end of each week she had a constellation of proof to herself that her practice was progressing. Co-coaching Patting yourself on the back, awarding yourself imaginary points, and

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I am a natural student and like nothing better than immersing myself in a pile of books. After the years of dreary domestic toil, I was in heaven. I also took a correspondence course in theology, scripture, and church history. In the autumn of 1966, I sat the entrance examinations for St. Anne’s College, Oxford, passed the first round, was summoned to interview, and, to my own and my superiors’ intense delight, succeeded in winning a place. In 1967, the scholasticate completed, I arrived at Cherwell Edge in South Parks Road, the Oxford convent of my order, to begin my university studies. And my life fell apart. Intellectually, everything was fine. I lived at the convent but attended lectures and tutorials with the other students, and did very well. I got a distinction in the preliminary examinations, which we sat in the spring of 1968, won a university prize, and was awarded a college scholarship. So far, so good. But as a religious, I felt torn in two. My elderly superior was bitterly opposed to the new ideas, and I fought her tooth and nail throughout the entire year. I am sure that I was quite insufferable, but I found it well nigh impossible to think logically and accurately in college, where I was encouraged to question everything, and then turn off the critical faculty I was developing when I returned to Cherwell Edge, and become a docile young nun. The stringent academic training I was receiving at the university was changing me at just as profound a level as the religious formation of the noviceship, and the two systems seemed to be irreconcilable. I was also increasingly distressed by the emotional frigidity of our lives. This was one of the areas of convent life that most desperately needed reform. Friendship was frowned upon, and the atmosphere in the convent was cold and sometimes unkind. Increasingly, it seemed to me to have moved an immeasurably long distance from the spirit of the gospels. Nevertheless, I struggled grimly on. To say that I did not want to leave would be an understatement. The very idea of returning to secular life filled me with dread. At first I could not even contemplate this option, which was surrounded with all the force of a taboo. But the strain took its toll, and in the summer of 1968 I broke down completely. It was now clear to us all that I could not continue. Everybody was wonderfully kind to me at the end, and in a sense, this made it even more distressing. It would have been so much easier to storm out in a blaze of righteous anger. But my superiors let me take as long as I needed to make my decision.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Danny would drive me back to the American Colony, screeching up to the entrance of the hotel with a flourish, clearly eager to get rid of me and begin his own evening. “Thank you very much,” I had said on the first occasion, as I got out of the car. “What for?” I looked at him questioningly. “Why are you thanking me? Don’t thank me! I have to drive you, whether I like it or not! It’s my job!” “Okay.” I got out and slammed the door in what I hoped was a reasonable imitation of Israeli insouciance and strode into the hotel without a backward glance, smiling inwardly. I was always being told not to say “please” or “thank you.” When I had lunch with Joel and his colleagues, I learned that I just had to grab what I needed, even if that meant stretching across other people. “You are not in England now!” Joel kept telling me, and even though I was far too English to leave “please” and “thank you” out of my vocabulary entirely, it was quite fun to lay aside the habit of deference for a time. I felt something within me relax and expand. But I saw little of my Israeli colleagues socially. Joel had dutifully invited me to dinner shortly after my arrival, and I had met his wife and baby son. But no further invitations came my way. But Ahmed and his Palestinian friends clearly did not find me so dull, and almost every night somebody in East Jerusalem would call and invite me to dinner. I was so ignorant about the political situation that I saw nothing strange about crossing the line and entering the Arab districts of the city. I noticed that suddenly the Western buildings disappeared and that I seemed to enter the Third World. There were no streetlights, no street signs, and the taxi invariably got lost in Beit Hanina or Sheikh Jarrah. If the driver was an Israeli, he would become nervous and agitated. “It’s dangerous, lady! These people will kill you! Let me drive you back to your hotel.” Today, of course, that would be very sensible advice. But in 1983, the situation was less tense, and feeling perfectly safe, I would refuse to turn back. With much head shaking and muttering, the driver would drop me outside a shop and drive off as though pursued by the hounds of hell, but always the Palestinian shop-keeper greeted me like a long-lost friend, even though he had never set eyes on me before; he would phone Ahmed or one of my other hosts, refuse to take any money for the call, and his wife would bring me a glass of hot sweet tea. Sometimes I would try to buy something from the store to make up for this, but to no avail.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  We smiled back, grateful but mystified. “No, we didn’t go to the Royal Arms, darling.” Herbert’s rather husky voice was patient. “We went to—can you remember?” “No!” Jacob flapped his hands about, as if to dismiss his father’s irrelevant questioning. He shuffled over and stood directly in front of me, looked at me carefully, and nodded, as though making a careful assessment. He then said, quietly and deliberately: “It’s the Royal Arms.” “Oh!” I suddenly understood. “It’s my name. Armstrong.” Jacob beamed again, entranced with his pun, and looked at me with his head bent enquiringly to one side. “It’s the Royal—” He waited. “Arms!” I capped, and we laughed together. We had established a connection and his parents visibly relaxed. “That’s a good joke, Jacob,” Jenifer said happily, and in order to capitalize on this unexpected harmony, added: “What about helping Karen and me to carry that little bookcase up to her room?” “Yes!” Jacob roared with enthusiasm, bounding into Jenifer’s study, grabbing books from shelves, and hurling them around the room with joyous abandon, ignoring his mother’s timid requests to proceed more quietly. I recovered the books as they fell and started to pile them up by the door. “Karen.” Jacob was now on his knees, peering intently into the crevice between the bookcase and the wall. “Karen,” he said again (like his father, he could not pronounce his Rs), “come and have a look at this.” To humor him, Jenifer and I went to look, only to have our superior smiles wiped from our faces. “How ludicrous,” Jenifer breathed. “It’s fantastic. Herbert, come and see.” A small rosebush had somehow forced its way up from the foundations, broken through the floorboards, and grown, thin and spindly, to a height of eighteen inches. “It’s a tree!” Jacob danced ecstatically. “Growing in the drawing room!” “Nature reasserts itself against the thin veneer of human civilization. If you can call this civilized,” Herbert mused. “Isn’t there a poem about that?” He looked at me interrogatively. “Something about ‘laughing Ceres’?” “Pope. The ‘Epistle to Burlington,’ ” I replied. “He’s making fun of that awful country house. ‘Deep harvests bury all his pride has planned.’ ” “ ‘And laughing Ceres reassume the land.’ ” Rose tree and all else forgotten, Herbert went back to the drawing room and started rummaging in a bookcase for a copy of Pope’s collected works. “You should keep that rose tree,” I said to Jenifer, as we maneuvered the bookcase out of the room with some difficulty. Herbert glanced up benignly from the sofa, spectacles askew, clutching the book in a somewhat awkward grasp. “Marvelous poem!” he beamed, watching our efforts absently. And so, yet again, a new life began. Within a few weeks, I had managed to impose a shape on my day. I had a gas ring in my room, but was allowed to use the Harts’ kitchen whenever I wished.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It showed me how far I had departed from those old ideals, and I could almost see my former self looking at this profane scene in astonishment. I had a similar experience when Ahmed and his Jewish Israeli wife picked me up at my hotel at five o’clock one morning and drove me down to Jericho. This was probably the road that Jesus had described in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Now, sitting between Ahmed and Miriam, watching the sunrise over the desert hills, with the Mendelssohn violin concerto blaring from the car radio, I felt happier than at any time in my life. Again, there was no polite conversation to break the mood. With my ears popping as we passed sea level and continued our descent to the Dead Sea, the deepest spot in the world, I gazed at the extraordinary beauty of the desert and felt moved as I had never been before by any landscape. I could not drag my eyes away from it and felt a great silence opening within me. There were no words and no thoughts; it was enough simply to be there. Perhaps other people had found this quietness in prayer, but there was no God here and nothing like the ecstasies experienced by the saints. Instead there was simply a suspension of self. Later we sat with a Bedouin family who lived in the ruins of the deserted Palestinian refugee camp outside Jericho. Abu Musa gave Miriam and me a breakfast of pita bread and sour melted butter, while Ahmed rode the horse that the Bedouins looked after for him into the mountains. Then we had to drive home quickly, snaking swiftly up that mythical road, so that I would be ready to start work with Joel at nine o’clock. We reentered Jerusalem, turned a corner, and there on our right was the Dome of the Rock, blazing in the sunlight. Not only was it perfectly at one with the hills and stones, it seemed to bring all the elements of the environment together, completing them and giving them fresh significance. “Strong!” Ahmed said briefly, and we all nodded. That was exactly the right word. It was not simply my personal circumstances that had changed, but my religious landscape was also being transformed. In my convent meditations, Jews had scarcely figured in the scenes that I had tried so hard to conjure up. They were marginal figures, lurking in the wings in a rather sinister way.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  When I had received the papers from the Vatican which dispensed me from my vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, I was halfway through my undergraduate degree. I could, therefore, simply move into my college and carry on with my studies as though nothing had happened. The very next day, I was working on my weekly essay like any other Oxford student. I was studying English literature, and though I had been at university for nearly eighteen months, to be able to plunge heart and soul into a book was still an unbelievable luxury. Some of my superiors had regarded poetry and novels with suspicion, and saw literature as a form of self-indulgence, but now I could read anything I wanted; and during those first confusing weeks of my return to secular life, study was a source of delight and a real consolation for all that I had lost. So that evening, when at 7:20 p.m. I heard the college bell summoning the students to dinner, I did not lay down my pen, close my books neatly, and walk obediently to the dining hall. My essay had to be finished in time for my tutorial the following morning, and I was working on a crucial paragraph. There seemed no point in breaking my train of thought. This bell was not the voice of God, but simply a convenience. It was not inviting me to a meeting with God. Indeed, God was no longer calling me to anything at all—if he ever had. This time last year, even the smallest, most mundane job had had sacred significance. Now all that was over. Instead of each duty being a momentous occasion, nothing seemed to matter very much at all. As I hurried across the college garden to the dining hall, I realized with a certain wry amusement that my little gesture of defiance had occurred on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. That morning, the nuns had knelt at the altar rail to receive their smudge of ash, as the priest muttered: “Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” This memento mori began a period of religious observance that was even more intense than usual. Right now, in the convent refectory, the nuns would be lining up to perform special public penances in reparation for their faults. The sense of effort and determination to achieve a greater level of perfection than ever before would be almost tangible, and this was the day on which I had deliberately opted to be late for dinner!

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Now. Listen. You’ll hear the thunder very quietly at first, building up and up and up. Then you’ll hear it go away, as it always does . . .” “Karen says the thunder always goes gradually away,” Jacob informed the gas fire sotto voce, as we listened to the first chords of the storm sequence in the Pastoral Symphony. At first, I acted as the commentator. “Here are the raindrops. Now—the first rumble of the thunder.” “Rumble!” Jacob echoed, but after a few moments he indicated imperiously that he wanted me to be quiet, and for once I did not insist on a “please.” He began to sway thoughtfully to the music, keeping perfect time. “Whoosh! There goes the lightning! Brroom! That’s the thunder!” and as the storm died out, he sank back with a histrionic sigh of relief. As the final notes of the symphony died away, Jacob demanded that we play the other side. “All right. This time you’ll hear a cuckoo and some people dancing.” By the end of the evening, I was as enthusiastic as Jacob. We had also got through the whole of the Elgar cello concerto, which was another hit. He immediately called the cello the “deep violin,” and when I introduced him later to the Dvorak concerto, he dubbed it the “new deep violin record.” His comments showed astonishing sensitivity. “Listen, Karen, the violins are asking a question,” or, “Oh dear, this is so sad. Somebody’s crying!” But mostly he just listened quietly. A little after nine, as we got up to go to his bedroom, he stood at the door and bowed solemnly. “Thank you, Karen,” he said formally, obviously imitating one of his parents’ dinner guests. “I enjoyed this evening very much indeed.” He almost clicked his bare heels together. “In fact, it was our best evening yet, don’t you agree?” I nodded. “So can we listen to your records next time I come to your room? Please?” “Of course. Next time we’ll hear something different.” “Something different and the thunderstorm again. Please.” He grinned and became a child again. “And now—o f to the lavatory!” he yelled, and then, forestalling me, “And don’t forget to pull the chain!” Is that all you are having for dinner? It’s quite ludicrous! You must eat more than that.” Jenifer was standing at the top of the stairs, poised as if for flight and clearly uneasy. It was against her principles to proffer unwanted advice to the young. We looked at my supper tray: a boiled egg, two slices of crispbread, and a tub of plain yogurt. It seemed more than enough to me. I had now narrowed down my expenditure dramatically, so that I spent only about two pounds a week on food. I bought one small carton of eggs, which had to last six days. I was also learning to make my own yogurt in a thermos flask, which was a great deal cheaper but an uncertain process.

• From Bold Move

  The road back is going to be long and arduous! How can I possibly have anything that is joyful in this domain? So I asked myself, What would my best friend say in this case? (Shifting in practice!), and arrived at: “Just because you are out of shape now , it doesn’t mean that you have never, ever experienced joy when you focused on your health.” Saying that to myself eased my discomfort and allowed me to finally complete this exercise. Here is an excerpt: It is an early morning in April, Diego rushes into my bedroom after waking up, demanding that we go do the Peloton (not to worry: he doesn’t have a Peloton—he has a little stationary bike next to mine). I look at him puzzled. Exercise at 7 a.m., just like that? But he tells me that he and David had been exercising daily while I was in Los Angeles for a business trip, and he wanted me to exercise too. “But wait, I want coffee,” I protest, but it is clear that I am losing this battle. So Peloton it is! We walk to the basement where the Peloton is, and he is elated. He goes on to lift weights (he has some toy weights we had given him for Christmas). Looking in the mirror, Diego smiles at himself, saying how he was going to get stronger. His smile brings me joy, I feel alive, like I could just hug him forever in that moment. But he quickly persists, demanding that I exercise with him. So I slowly jump on the Peloton (at first dreading it), but Diego’s genuine love for exercise in that moment carries me forward. I put on my favorite Latin ride, the music is loud and alive, and the ride quickly gets to “La Bamba” . . . Diego is now dancing, I am smiling and riding, but actually focused on how the music and my son make me feel . . . alive, present, connected. Diego loves the music, and the songs in this ride often make him dance. Twenty minutes go by, almost in a blink of an eye. I am sweaty, happy, and feeling amazing. As I reflected about health, and that morning in particular, I realized that what I really care about in the domain of health is connection with myself and my family, a sense of well-being, and also responsibility as a parent. I realized that by exercising often and demonstrating care for my health, I am also modeling a healthy life for Diego, about whom I obviously care a great deal. It cemented in me that I want to have a life where health is a priority.

• From Bold Move

  One of these joyful experiences was recording a course on managing anxiety with Dan Harris. I had met Dan when I was on his podcast in March 2020. The topic for that episode was anxiety, and if you were to look back at the date of the podcast, you’ll recognize it as the beginning of the pandemic in the US. Neither one of us knew that day that the world would effectively shut down mere days after our recording. Dan was lovely to work with, and about a year later he invited me to record a course with him for his app Ten Percent Happier . The process of developing the course with his team was great, but I especially enjoyed working with Dan. Anyone familiar with his interviews would know that he is an incredible interviewer, and the process of creating the course for him was thoroughly enjoyable. Above all, I noticed how happy I felt throughout this process. It felt as though I was hardly exerting myself, and yet the work was excellent (if I do say so myself). The experience of flow state can be a major indicator in helping you find your true values, because that is when you are acting in line with something that really matters to you, and that is why you may experience less stress during such periods. In fact, next time you come out of a flow state, ask yourself: Forget about stress. Was I even aware of myself during that time? When I looked behind the pain at my job versus the contentment I felt when working with Dan, I realized that I needed to do something like that again, and that something became the book you now hold in your hands. Writing this book has been the most transformational piece of my working life, as it allowed me to massively realign my daily actions with my values. While I am not sure how the world will receive it, I am proud to have put down in these pages my own bold journey from poverty to Harvard to striking out on my own to become an author. As you Align your life with your values, fear will almost certainly show up. But being bold is not the same as being fearless. Being bold is living a life that is driven by what matters to you the most, no matter what, and doing so becomes one of the most beautiful rewards imaginable. To bring it all together, I want to close this book with another piece of my grandmother’s wisdom, as I think she had the perfect recipe for living a bold life. In one of our many afternoon coffee chats, we were discussing change and how most people go to extreme lengths to avoid it.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  A tree and a girl were summoned the same way. In this language, Mrs. Kersaint said, trees are assigned to different countries, bodies to different ways of being buried. We got in trouble with the other teacher for never using plurals. When I said that Chinese words have no plural forms, she said, Then how do you know if it’s one thing or many? I said, One thing is always many. Ben got in trouble for not capitalizing the names of countries and people. When the teacher asked her why she’d chosen a boy name, she said, I liked Ben because it’s already short for something. This way, none of you can abbreviate me further. In class, she asked questions like, How long ago was the sea salted? I was the only one who answered: So long ago, Nuwa was the one who did it. Because otherwise the sea would go bad like milk. Salt is what preserves it. She misremembered idioms: I’ve got butterflies in my bladder. Or: A bird in the hand is worth more in the soup. We misspelled all the words in our essays on purpose, baiting our teachers so we’d get a time-out together. We wrote: Baba’s a good sky and mama’s a good kook We be leave in rein carnation We were born hear so you cant depart us. All our essays were returned red: IMPROVE YOUR GRAMMAR. IMPROVE YOUR SPELLING. IMPLORE YOUR GODS. WE’LL SHOW YOU A SENTENCE. I mimicked the way all of Ben’s sentences ended with -er, a purr that made me feel feline, foreign to myself. Her accent was an axe: mother abbreviated to moth, country to cunt. There was a game where the teacher pointed at pictures of objects on a projector screen and asked us for their names—apple, bus, cat, doctor—but Ben had her own vocabulary, made mostly of the sounds different bird flocks produced when they passed over the parking lot. The sound they make, Ben told me, depended on the density of the flock and whether or not they were native to the weather here. She could hear any sound once and continue the strand of it, threading the sound through her left ear and pulling it out of her mouth. At noon, she walked up to me and stole my reduced-lunch hot dog bun, ripping it into confetti-sized pieces and feeding it to the crows. They walked up to the bench and pecked at her ankles, opening their beaks as if to name her.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Thereupon he began to ride a Priapean race with masterly skill; from an amble he went on to a trot, then to a gallop, lifting himself on the tips of his toes, and coming down again quicker and ever quicker. At every movement he writhed and wriggled, so that I felt myself pulled, gripped, pumped, and sucked at the same time. "A rigid tension of the nerves took place. My heart was beating in such a way that I could hardly breathe. All the arteries seemed ready to burst. My skin was parched with a glowing heat; a subtle fire coursed through my veins instead of blood. "Still he went on quicker and quicker. I writhed in a delightful torture. I was melting away, but he never stopped till he had quite drained me of the last drop of life-giving fluid there was in me. My eyes were swimming in their sockets. I felt my heavy lids half close themselves; an unbearable voluptuousness of mingled pain and pleasure, shattered my body and blasted my very soul; then everything waned in me. He clasped me in his arms, and I swooned away whilst he was kissing my cold and languid lips. CHAPTER VII"ON the morrow the events of the night before seemed like a rapturous dream." "Still you must have felt rather seedy, after the many——" "Seedy? No, not at all. Nay, I felt the 'clear keen joyance' of the lark that loves, but 'ne'er knew love's sad satiety.' Hitherto, the pleasure that women had given me had always jarred upon my nerves. It was, in fact, 'a thing wherein we feel there is a hidden want.' Lust was now the overflowing of the heart and of the mind—the pleasurable harmony of all the senses. "The world that had hitherto seemed to me so bleak, so cold, so desolate, was now a perfect paradise; the air, although the barometer had fallen considerably, was crisp, light, and balmy; the sun—a round, furbished, copper disc, and more like a red Indian's backside than fair Apollo's effulgent face—was shining gloriously for me; the murky fog itself, that brought on dark night at three o'clock in the afternoon, was only a hazy mist that veiled all that was ungainly, and rendered Nature fantastic, and home so snug and cosy. Such is the power of imagination. "You laugh! Alas! Don Quixote was not the only man who took windmills for giants, or barmaids for princesses. If your sluggish-brained, thick-pated costermonger never falls into such a trance as to mistake apples for potatoes; if your grocer never turns hell into heaven, or heaven into hell—well, they are sane people who weigh everything in the well-poised scale of reason. Try and shut them up in nutshells, and you will see if they would deem themselves monarchs of the world. They, unlike Hamlet, always see things as they really are. I never did. But then, you know, my father died mad.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Dillard and Fay were in the truck cab with their black mantillas on like they were heading to six A.M. mass. Even Junior and Joe had been stuck into white shirts with clip-on bow ties. They squatted on the flatbed’s built-in toolbox. Their two blond heads were slicked flat with Butch Rose Wax. I could hear their laughing over the truck’s rumbling muffler. When Mother heard Lecia tease me about it in the kitchen, she decided to get out of bed. She threw the bedcovers off her legs, a gesture we’d all but deleted from our memory banks, and said it was a lot of horseshit caring if people saw you naked because we were all naked under our clothes anyway, but goddamn if she’d listen to me caterwaul about those boneheaded Dillards anymore. She was gonna seal over the windows so God Herself (she made a point of the female pronoun) couldn’t see in. Her method for this was wacky. First, she took a cheese grater and made crayon shavings in all different colors. She sprinkled these between sheets of wax paper and ironed the paper together till the crayon melted. With sable brushes and Elmer’s glue, Lecia and I set to work pasting these squares of paper and color over all extant windows, an effect Mother likened to stained glass. It was Mother’s first enthusiasm in a long time, and we pounced on it. Lecia started racing with herself right off. She timed the process to see how fast she could paste over a whole window, then tried to beat that time. Not long after we blanked out the windows, I came home from school and found the front door open and the screen ajar. That was weird, not only given our fierce need for privacy, but on account of all the roaches and june bugs, lizards and mosquitos down there. The semitropical climate could also send a spotty green-black mildew climbing your whitewashed walls if the full damp of the outdoors somehow got inside. You couldn’t stop it entirely, but nobody left the door wide to it. In my head, I go back to that open door. My penny loafers outside it are the color of oxblood and scuffed and run down on the inside from how pigeon-toed I am. I can almost feel the thump of my plaid book satchel on my right hip. It was hot that day, the air thick as gauze. I bounded up the front steps after school having just gotten 100 on my spelling test. That grade barely beat out my class rival for the best grade, Peggy Fontenot, who’d lost two points for misspelling “said.” I’d personally graded her paper, and my heart leapt up like a roe when I saw it spelled “sed.” I had the winning test in my hand with the gold star that said my grade was highest.

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

  NINE Get in the car Prayer and power When we first moved to LA to start Zoe Church, we were a one-car family. And by that, I mean Julia and the kids had one car, and I had my Uber app. That was fine at first, but after a few months, I really started turning to God. My prayers usually came from the back seat of those Ubers, partly because some of them drove like they were in a hurry not to get to my destination but to meet Jesus face-to-face right then, and partly because I simply prefer to drive myself. It’s more efficient, more comfortable, and more economical. We couldn’t afford another vehicle, so I would tell God, “I need you to buy me a car.” Those were my exact words. I wasn’t demanding. I was informing. Obviously, I wasn’t telling God something He didn’t already know, but the Bible tells us to ask, seek, and knock. It reminds us that God knows our desires and responds to our petitions. The more I rode in Ubers, the greater my desire grew, and the more frequent those petitions became. This went on for months, but I didn’t give up. I knew we were supposed to have another vehicle, and somehow God was going to make a way. One day, out of the blue, a friend texted me. He was a pastor in Rancho Cucamonga. He told me his father had just called him and asked him to give me a message: He had been praying that morning, and the Holy Spirit told him to buy me a car! He said, “Choose any car you’d like, and we will buy it for you.”

• From Wild (2012)

  “I’d have caught you,” he said, and laughed in that golden boy way that I remembered so vividly, though it was altered now too. He was grittier than he’d been before, slightly more shaken, as if he’d aged a few years in the past months. “You want to hang out while I organize my things and we can leave together?” “Sure,” I said without hesitation. “I’ve got to hike those last days before I get into Cascade Locks alone—you know, just to finish like I started—but let’s hike together to Timberline Lodge.” “Holy shit, Cheryl.” He pulled me in for another hug. “I can’t believe we’re here together. Hey, you still have that black feather I gave you?” He reached to touch its ragged edge. “It was my good luck charm,” I said. “What’s with the wine?” he asked, pointing to the bottle in my hand. “I’m going to give it to the ranger,” I replied, lifting it high. “I don’t want to carry it all the way to Timberline.” “Are you insane?” Doug asked. “Give me that bottle.” We opened it that night at our camp near the Warm Springs River with the corkscrew on my Swiss army knife. The day had warmed into the low seventies, but the evening was cool, the crisp edge of summer turning to autumn everywhere around us. The leaves on the trees had thinned almost undetectably; the tall stalks of wildflowers bent down onto themselves, plumped with rot. Doug and I built a fire as our dinners cooked and then sat eating from our pots and passing the wine back and forth, drinking straight from the bottle since neither of us had a cup. The wine and the fire and being in Doug’s company again after all this time felt like a rite of passage, like a ceremonial marking of the end of my journey. After a while, we each turned abruptly toward the darkness, hearing the yip of coyotes more near than far. “That sound always makes my hair stand on end,” Doug said. He took a sip from the bottle and handed it to me. “This wine’s really good.” “It is,” I agreed, and took a swig. “I heard coyotes a lot this summer,” I said. “And you weren’t afraid, right? Isn’t that what you told yourself?” “It is what I told myself,” I said. “Except every once in while,” I added. “When I was.” “Me too.” He reached over and rested his hand on my shoulder and I put my hand on his and squeezed it. He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I’d always know even if I never saw him again.