I'll tell them how I survive it. I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away. That's when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I've seen someone do. It's like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years.
But there are much worse games to play.
That what I need to survive is not Gale's fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.
So after, when he whispers, "You love me. Real or not real?"
I tell him, "Real."
Synchronicities bridge mind and matter. They are deep connections where your inner world and outer world meet, or when your dreams manifest in reality. It is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order.
Entrainment implies that sound can be used to tune brainwaves to specific frequencies to help reach a desired state of mind.
Called “Earthing” or “Grounding,” the idea is that placing your bare feet on the ground, or walking or sitting outdoors in nature, can improve your health and well-being. (Forest bathing in Japan)
For centuries, mystics believed that the divine proportion was the hidden language in nature, and a powerful ratio of healing. Sacred geometry is seen as spirals, torus shapes, or fractal shapes, which is omnipresent in nature, even in the veins of leaves and in the construction of flowers, trees, and mountains.
Roughly 90 percent of vascular land plants are in mutually beneficial relationships with fungi, colonizing the roots of plants in a symbiotic partnership called “mycorrhiza.” Plants and fungi also have each other‘s back, sending warning signals through an energetic exchange in a cross-species social network of collaboration.
Perhaps, if we are “in tune” with the Earth, we, as a species, like our kin the rhizomatic tree, can resonate with the collective. In other words, this is our brain on nature.
Trees don‘t just compete for survival, they also cooperate and share resources using underground fungi networks. Hardwired to connect, nature may have created the first electrical grid. In meadows, marshes, and river bottoms, electroactive bacteria are busy building an infrastructure to shuttle subtle frequencies to help control the chemistry of the Earth.
Our emotions are contagious through our networks, and that we are hardwired to connect through emotions and behavioural influences. People‘s happiness depends on the happiness of others to whom they are connected, and their research ultimately suggested that we should think of happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.
Emotions are biological, chemical, hormonal, behavioural, and energetic expressions of the state you are in. Emotions are somewhat impermanent; rarely do you experience a long-lasting emotion because of the capacity to move from one emotion to another. Emotions are the nexus between mind and matter, going back and forth between the two and influencing both.
They have been able to show that the heart is the most powerful source of electromagnetic energy in the human body, producing the largest rhythmic electromagnetic field of any of the body‘s organs. This heart field acts as a carrier wave for information that provides a global synchronizing signal for the entire body.
They found that the energy fields coming from the practitioner‘s hands were about a thousand times stronger than the strongest human biomagnetic fields of the heart and about a million times stronger than the fields produced by the brain.
Many TCM practitioners believe that an excellent doctor treats disease before it arises. How? By recognizing a disturbance in the energetic system that may not yet have affected the material body. While the Western view is to measure symptoms via blood tests, etc., the Eastern view is to catch the imbalance of the energy system before the deviation in energy flow becomes fixed, aka a “diagnosed disease.”
For the heart to pump, cells must generate electrical currents that allow the heart muscle to contract at the right time. Electricity is also required for the nervous system to send signals throughout the body and to the brain, triggering us to move, think, and feel. Traditional acupuncture is founded on the principle that energy flows within the human body and this energy flow can be directed or redirected to create balance and health.
Earth‘s natural frequency pulsating at 7.83 Hz on average— the “Schumann resonance.” Our body and brain resonate with 7.83 Hz.
Frequency is a measure of the rate at which vibrations occur, quantified as hertz (Hz). The shorter the wavelength, the higher its frequency. The longer the wavelength, the lower the frequency. Frequency and the vibrations it carries create an energetic change when they travel through a substance. So if you think about it, nothing is ever static. We, and everything around us and inside us, are in constant, “periodic,” motion.
Our body is an antenna system, intercommunicating via electrical currents of different kinds—from the long distances between our biological parts (from head to toe) to the most local distances inside each cell.
The “good vibes” and “bad vibes” people can feel are related to the chemical signals in a physical space that are picked up by our nervous system. This magnetic field, measured in the form of an electrocardiogram (EKG), can be detected up to three feet away from the body, in all directions. Our emotions are encoded in this heart field.
Plants and animals are perceived to emit and respond to energy we cannot. For example, birds are known to navigate, communicate, and flock together, and the premise is that they use Earth‘s electromagnetic field, aided by a complex sense of smell, to guide them.
Sound was creating the geometry. If you adjusted to the same frequency, the same shapes would reappear. Vibrations can and do have specific impacts on the shape of their surroundings, it becomes possible to extrapolate how vibration has a very real influence on our physical and emotional bodies.
Many ancient texts state that our universe began with the sound om. Om is the primordial sound, believed to be the essence of reality, the creative unifier of the universe. Sound, as you know, is frequency. It is vibrational.
Everything that surrounds us and is within us is made of energy—There is a constant geomagnetic field on the surface of our planet, generating from Earth‘s core out to space. It protects our atmosphere from solar wind and cosmic rays that would otherwise strip away our ozone layer.
Who's to say that once I run, I'll find that isn't enough? Who's to say I won't end up feeling exactly the way I do right now— not safe, but stifled? Maybe I'Il want to run again, and again, and eventually I'll end up back by those old tracks, because there's nowhere left to go.
"you had a lot of potential. But you spent every day of your life expecting the world to repay you for a few really shitty years you were dealt as a child. That's where you went wrong. The world doesn't owe us a thing. We take what we‘re given and we make the most of it. But you took what you were given and you shit on it and then expected more."
Worries flow from her lips like the random words that flow from her fingertips. I reach out and try to catch them, clenching them in my fists, wanting nothing more than to catch them all.
I'm content with the direction in which my life is headed, and I know if I obsess over the past, that obsession will only serve to anchor me in a place I am more than ready to move on from.
Since the day I found out the truth, so many questions have gone through my head. I used to think I needed the answers, but I no longer need them. I know that I loved the best versions of Jenny and Chris. But they fell in love with the worst versions of each other—the versions capable of betrayal and lies.
I recall what I wrote on my birthday board: Find your passion.
Maybe I don't have just one passion. Maybe I have several, and I've just never made myself and my wants a priority. The idea that I have the rest of my life to figure myself out is exciting. There are so many things I want to try, whether they work out or not. I think finding my passion is my passion.
“You're the first and only person in this world I've ever loved without some reasoning or justification behind it. I just love you because I can't help it, and it feels good to love you. The idea of getting to raise Elijah with you makes me happy.” … “I'm confident that I'll never spend a single second of my life regretting you."
Attraction isn‘t something that only happens once, with one person. lt‘s part of what drives humans. Our attraction to each other, to art, to food, to entertainment. Attraction is fun. So when you decide to commit to someone, you aren‘t saying, ‘I promise I‘ll never be attracted to anyone else.‘ You‘re saying, ‘I promise to commit to you, despite my potential future attraction to other people.”
"But heartache builds character. Remember?"
"So does being in love," he says.
My mother went through it.
I went through it.
I‘ll be damned if I allow my daughter to go through it.
I kiss her on the forehead and make her a promise. "It stops here. With me and you. It ends with us."
He leans toward me and wraps an arm around me. "I would beg her to leave him," he says through his tears. His lips press desperately against my forehead and I can feel some of his tears as they fall onto my cheeks. He moves his mouth to my ear and cradles both of us against him. "I would tell her that she is worth so much more. And I would beg her not to go back, no matter how much he loves her. She's worth so much more."
His shoulders begin to shake, and for the first time since the day I met him, he has tears. Real tears that rush down his cheeks as he holds his daughter tightly against him. I'm crying, too, but I keep going. For her sake.
"What if…" My voice breaks. "What if she came to you and said, 'My husband tried to rape me, Daddy. He held me down while I begged him to stop. But he swears he'll never do it again. What should I do, Daddy?'"
“If Ryle truly loves you, he wouldn't allow you to take him back. He would make the decision to leave you himself so that he knows for a fact he can never hurt you again. That's the kind of love a woman deserves, Lily."
This is the sound of you breathing. This is the sound of the engine.
Inside this small space, the air recirculates. It always feels cold. Outside You are rushing through the air so fast. There is always this rushing.
Stay here. Stay calm. Stay still.
Open your eyes.
Do you see me?
You won't want to see me, but you will.
For a long time I thought I was broken, but what does that actually mean? If you're broken, you can be put back together. I had never been broken. I had just been wandering in the dark, not aware that I was lost.
It's funny. My life only came together after it blew up. It exploded into all these pieces, and after I realized I hadn't died from the impact, I put the pieces back together in a slightly different way.
Now I think real beauty might be in all the small and obvious places I had overlooked. Oh, a rock in Manhattan. Oh, an empty street in Manhattan. Oh, my sister and me watching a movie. Oh, the sky.
Our lives could be beautiful in the quietest ways, and already were.
I was learning that a good relationship included work. It was hard. But we talked about it. That was the simplest and strangest change: actually talking it out. … We had many long conversations about moving—is this house cursed?—and for now we've decided to stay. Here in this house with its red door. We will not run away from the past.
There was no reason to remind her who the father was. There was no reason to cause her more pain. There was no reason even to say, "I forgive you, Mom." The lipstick said that. My being there said that.
She gazed out the window. Maybe she looked lost. Maybe she looked more lost than before. But she also looked kind of peaceful.
"What are you thinking about, Mom?"
"We are here."
"Every event is a choice to give up or to persevere," William said, and I wondered if this was a line he repeated to himself a lot. "The terrible things separate the weak from the strong.”
Denial, I have learned, is not the act of lying to yourself. Denial is not an act, it's a state. It's the state of not knowing you are a liar.
I was fixated on a certain picture of my life, and that picture was reflected on the surface of everything I saw.
We do not choose to be blind, and when we are blind, we don't know that. We see as much as we can bear to see, and we assume that's all there is.
“Logan and I fell in love while we were also learning to love ourselves. So for us, it was more a discovery that we were where we belonged all along. We didn't have to change. We just had to open our eyes to see it."
When I was very nearly asleep and the world was warm and hazy, I felt him kiss my temple softly. Then he whispered, so faint it was barely more than a breath, "Whatever it takes, let me keep her."
I kissed Logan for all I was worth—which was so much, as he had tried so many times to tell me.
“If there‘s one thing I‘ve learned, it's that people have to come to things in their own time. You had to change your relationship with yourself before you ever would've been happy with someone else, even Logan. And really, when people love each other, things have a way of working out. You can trust me. I'm your big sister."
