Shirts and jeans litter the asphalt, the empty fabric limbs askew as if they're attempting to escape. Blood smears Sarah's lips as she struggles against the chest of a dirty looking man with a beard. Terror. Terror is the only word my mind can seize on and it forgets what it means. I forget how to think - to move.

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.... In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.' For in this love 'to divide is not to take away.

There are dread secrets that none may know and have peace. More, secrets that render whosoever knoweth them an alien unto the tribe he belongs to, that cause him to walk alone on earth, for he who takes, pays.

Give a man a mask, and he'll tell you deeper and darker truths. But he'll also be more abusive, unaccountable, and demonic.

There are those of us who nature is awakening to the secrets of the universe; apart from religious dogma or occult dabbling. It is Natural Law. It is awakening the minds and quickening the senses of those whom it's calling its descendants. Nature is fighting for its rightful place, which can never be fully usurped. Those who are most open to this knowledge are artists (poets, musicians, writers) who also happen to be free thinkers or "outsiders" to the system. We hear a voice that is calling us to waken to the secrets of the universe. Perhaps in some distant future, humanity will read of us; the ones who paved the way for this Pali or New Romanticism called the awakening unto Nature's Law. It won't be technology or software that paves the way, but nature. It won't allow itself to be destroyed, maybe uninhabitable for a time for humans, but never destroyed. There are those of us, the chosen few who are following the narrow path. We will be the future thinkers and writers who generations will read about that truly changed the world, and made a way where there seemingly was none.

Gratitude was never meant to be an excuse for giving up on the obstacles God has put before you. Some of the most magical things he can bring us require faith and a lot of planning.