Carry your sword, my prophetess. Obstinate contumacy training. Find the objective that is more draining. More strenuous tasks will make you grow. Pain upon you I bestow. I’ll take it all and nothing less. I claim it back; I repossess. Tip the scale; Turn it over. Mark the unused; What’s leftover. The main part no longer exists; Despite the reduction, it persists. Continued movement; A quest for traction. An opposite and negative reaction. Hex induced metamorphosis; Reoccur once again for us. Physically and internally changing. The process of rearranging. The alteration was so fitting. Now they’re pausing; They’re intermitting. In reaffirming the causation; Keep kempt, and maintain your original explanation. Wear our serpent, prophetess; Prior to you was profitless. The soil was sown with no reaping. Tear our hearts out for your keeping. Beyond the boundaries of what is permitted. Reward me for the sins I’ve committed. My acts were bold; Caress my flesh. I give it all and nothing less. The facsimile will shudder. Express what it is I utter. Amidst psychos and others. Among psychos and others. Live with vigor; Efficiently transfigure. Disfigure; Change his figure. Make it so; Mark the torso. Undergo; Nock the torso. Let it grow; Open the torso. Let him know; Carve the torso.

    And when a filmmaker friend is brutally murdered in the manner of a death scene from one of his movies, she's convinced that a copycat killer is on the loose�and that she's the next target. The man who swoops in to save her is the mysterious new love interest Anatoly Darinsky. Of course, if this were fiction, Anatoly would be her prime suspect.… Passion, Betrayal and Killer Highlights When her brother-in-law turns up dead and her sister is accused of the crime, Sophie's priority is finding the real killer. With or without Anatoly's help. Her brother-in-law's secret life yields plenty of suspects, but the San Francisco police aren't taking any of them seriously. So Sophie does what comes naturally to her: she stirs up trouble (to lure the killer out, of course). Obsession, Deceit and Really Dark Chocolate Sophie's relationship with the irresistible and occasionally insufferable Anatoly is on the rocks when a friend recruits Sophie to decode her allegedly two-timing husband's strange behavior. Suddenly plunged into a crazy world of campaign mudslinging, dirt-digging and cover-ups, Sophie begins to uncover some pretty dirty secrets indeed. Way in over her head as usual, Sophie reluctantly�or not-so-reluctantly�enlists the help of her two-time sidekick and ex, Anatoly. Lust, Loathing and a Little Lip Gloss Sophie is head over heels in love�with a three-bedroom San Francisco Victorian. She's just got to have it, despite a few drawbacks. Her slimy ex is the realtor, and her first tour of the house reveals, well, a lifeless body clutching a cameo with a disturbing history of its own. There's no way Sophie is going to give up the ghost on her dreams of stained glass and original woodwork, though�especially since Sophie is 99 percent sure her problems are caused by someone six feet tall instead of six feet under….

    It is difficult for us now, even with all our engineering and architectural skills, to imagine the extraordinary ways these medieval houses of worship were constructed. Midway through the twelfth century, the building of cathedrals became a crusade to erect awe-inspiring churches across Europe. In their zeal, bishops, monks, masons, and workmen created the architectural style known as Gothic, arguably Christianity’s greatest contribution to the world’s art and architecture. The style evolved slowly and almost accidentally as medieval artisans combined ingenuity, inspiration, and brute strength to create a fitting monument to their God. Here are the dramatic stories of the building of Saint-Denis, Notre Dame, Chartres, Reims, and other Gothic cathedrals.

    Where she left the car, if she took her pills, the house alarm code - and whether the knife in the kitchen really had blood on it. Bestselling author B A Paris is back with a brand new psychological thriller full of twists and turns that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

     It also explores the circumstances surrounding the true-life event of my grandmother's gift of a concubine to my grandfather on his birthday to enhance the chance of an heir to the Family.

    Including drawings, cartoons, manuscripts, personal letters and illustrations as well as prose and poetry by Bukowski, this pictorial and textual biography of the great polemicist also features revelations gleaned from FBI documentation.

    It includes texts written about her, by figures such as socialist leader Eugene V. Debs and Mark Twain. "Her liberal views and wide sympathies ought to shame those who have physical eyes, yet do not open them to the sorrows that encompass the mass of men."—New York Call (1911) -------------- "We were born into an unjust system. We are not prepared to grow old in it."—Bernadette Devlin Rebel Lives books feature writings both by and about individuals who have played significant roles in humanity’s ongoing fight for a better world. The series shows the not-so-well-recognized political views of some well-known figures and introduces some not-so-famous rebels. Strongly representative of race, class and gender, these books are smaller format, inexpensive, accessible and provocative.

    Years of listening to other people's stories of going through tough times, hoping to overcome difficult odds, or trying to find a way to make a difference in the world brought Edward Grinnan to the undersanding that personal change is vital to achieving success. In each chaper of this book, he weaves the tales of other people with his own story to reveal how each of us can learn about the keys to powerful personal change. He shows these principles at work in his own personal struggle with alcoholism, and how he has learned through his own missteps to accept change and become the person he was meant to be.

    In Part One, we join him on an engaging, often hilarious, and compelling personal journey.... through decades of tasting from a banquet of spiritual approaches. Through his direct experience, fierce exploration, and scintillating discernment, Brown exposes the fragmented, ungrounded and dissociative notions of spirituality that have imprisoned our consciousness and obstructed our awakening since time immemorial. In his cuttingly straight style, he reveals that much of what we have been calling "spirituality" is actually a patriarchal, emotionally bereft construct that perpetuates our self-avoidance. He then proves to us--point by brilliant point--that true spirituality is a whole-being awakening, one that wonderfully embraces our entire human experience. In many spiritual practices, emotional healing processes (blockage clearing, issue resolution, the working through of the shadow) have been bypassed and trivialized, as though the 'real' spiritual realm exists independent of our feelings. Brown makes no distinction between these realms, revealing that emotional maturity and spiritual maturity are synonymous, and that any spirituality that desacralizes our selfhood is not enlightenment at all. It is a bypass of that which is fundamentally human: our feelings, our stories, our bodies, our relationships with each other and the earth that houses us. In his words, "Detachment is a tool- not a life. If you can't find your transformation in the village, you haven't found a thing." In Part Two, Brown engages in a riveting dialogue with an ungrounded seeker named "Michael." Their dialogues unfurl in warmth, humor, playfulness, personal story, threaded with challenging confrontation and cutting truth. Hands-on exercises are dispersed throughout--providing readers with a direct experience of a new, inclusive model. Here the author lays down the tracks for a more balanced, heartfelt and relational spirituality- one that leaves us "enrealed," integrated, and purposeful. Not awakened, but awakening. Not escaping our humanness, but finding our meaning and spirituality deep within it. Out of the ashes of old ways of being, a bright new paradigm comes into view. An inclusive, self-honoring, and healing spiritual perspective that will be a welcomed relief for any seeker.In the author's words, "It's one thing to briefly detach from story in the hopes of gaining a different perspective--it's quite another to deny our storied roots altogether. What will we stand in, then? At a time when our personal stories have been shamed and shunned in the spiritual community, it is all the more imperative to revive them and makes luminous their sacred, transformative properties. The past is not an illusion, as many would suggest. It is the ground of our being, the karmic field for our soul's transformation- the mystery that threads right through our history. Story is where we come from. Story is what roots us in the present. Story is how we arrive at the next place intact. A spirituality without story is like a body without breath. Dead to the world." What we need now are models that lead us back into our hearts, into relatedness, into a deep and reverential regard for the self's journey through time. In this magnificent book, Brown endeavors to hearticulate one such path, reminding us that heaven on earth begins and ends deep within the recesses of our enlivened humanness. At long last, we can lay down our weary heads, burdened by the impossibility of transcending our human experience. Back to our roots, back into our bodies, back into all that makes us marvelously human. Home at last.

    They celebrate the wonders of nature and explore the nature of love and friendship.

    He has been compared to Shakespeare for his outpouring of creativity and to Saint Francis of Assisi for his spiritual wisdom. Yet his life has long remained the stuff of legend rather than intimate knowledge.In this breakthrough biography, Brad Gooch brilliantly brings to life the man and puts a face to the name Rumi, vividly coloring in his time and place—a world as rife with conflict as our own. The map of Rumi’s life stretched over 2,500 miles. Gooch traces this epic journey from Central Asia, where Rumi was born in 1207, traveling with his family, displaced by Mongol terror, to settle in Konya, Turkey. Pivotal was the disruptive appearance of Shams of Tabriz, who taught him to whirl and transformed him from a respectable Muslim preacher into a poet and mystic. Their vital connection as teacher and pupil, friend and beloved, is one of the world’s greatest spiritual love stories. When Shams disappeared, Rumi coped with the pain of separation by composing joyous poems of reunion, both human and divine.Ambitious, bold, and beautifully written, Rumi’s Secret reveals the unfolding of Rumi’s devotion to a "religion of love," remarkable in his own time and made even more relevant for the twenty-first century by this compelling account.

    His stories often read like thoughtful essays, his essays like poems, and his poems like brief narrations. Borges in conversation similarly transcends and transmutes our expectations of the ordinary colloquy. In the wide-ranging dialogues presented in this volume, the author's thoughts are evoked through the perceptive questioning of Willis Barnstone, John Coleman, Alastair Reid, Dick Cavett, and others. The resulting interplay between Borges and his interview2ers makes fascinating reading, revealing him as perhaps the premier conversationalist of our time. Borges chats intimately with his audience. "A crowd is an illusion... I am talking to you personally," he tells one group. Candor, wit, and humorous self-disparagement mark his responses, as do the Socratic qualities of profound yet amusing meditation and retort. "When I wake up," he informs us, "I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself." With the haunting resonance and structure of a fugue, the pervasive themes of Borges' works (or "exercises" as he chooses to call them) are woven throughout these evocative conversations. The nightmares, labyrinths, mazes, and mystic experiences that are part of Borges' creative mythology similarly loom large in his conversations. Revealed here are the interests that have continued to engage the writer-Old English and Old Norse sagas, his favorite authors (notably Whitman, Poe, and Emerson), the Kabbalah-as well as his feeling of what it is like to be blind, and now, in his eighties, his thoughts on death. A dozen of Borges' poems are reproduced, both in Spanish and in English translation, followed by remarks on how he came to write them and what they mean. Willis Barnstone's remarkable photographs complete the sensitive word portrait that emerges in Borges at Eighty: Conversations.

    This series features classic tales retold with color illustrations to introduce literature to struggling readers. Each 64-page eBook retains key phrases and quotations from the original classics. You'll be kept in suspense with these four Edgar Allan Poe short stories! The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

    This collection of 50 poems illuminates our experiences of love - tracing the links between seduction and surrender; the intensity of desire; and the anguish of death.

    Two years of unimaginable pain. Two years of isolation, mutilation and torture. Two years of fear and loneliness in a morph tank. And that's not something you just get over, even if you are psycho-sniper, Junco Coot.Tier is desperately trying to hold everything together as the avian prepare for the return of the High Order, but Lucan is still holding his secrets close and no is sure what will happen if Junco doesn't fulfill her role.Tier, Lucan. Annun, Isten, Ashur, and all the players come together to make their final move in a game that spans thousands of years... but the end they so desperately want hinges on the shoulders of one insane girl with a rifle.And while everyone knows what Junco is capable of now, no one can predict what she will do when she has to make that final choice.