| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: chaplets of grains of sand strung together with slender silken
cords. To these sandy stalactites, which form a bushy beard, are
added a few heavy lumps hung separately and lower down, at the end
of a thread. The whole is a piece of ballast-work, an apparatus
for ensuring equilibrium and tension.
The present edifice, hastily constructed in the space of a night,
is the frail rough sketch of what the home will afterwards become.
Successive layers will be added to it; and the partition-wall will
grow into a thick blanket capable of partly retaining, by its own
weight, the requisite curve and capacity. The Spider now abandons
the stalactites of sand, which were used to keep the original
The Life of the Spider |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A treatise on Good Works by Dr. Martin Luther: all who in adversity run hither and thither, and look for counsel
and help everywhere except from God, from Whom they are most
urgently commanded to seek it; whom the Prophet Isaiah reproves
thus, Isaiah ix: "The mad people turneth not to Him that smiteth
them"; that is, God smote them and sent them sufferings and all
kinds of adversity, that they should run to Him and trust Him.
But they run away from Him to men, now to Egypt, now to Assyria,
perchance also to the devil; and of such idolatry much is written
in the same Prophet and in the Books of the Kings. This is also
the way of all holy hypocrites when they are in trouble: they do
not run to God, but flee from Him, and only think of how they may
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: "No, I was thinking of yours. My own, I know."
"But perhaps my secrets are yours, and yours mine," cried the young
man, softly seizing Mademoiselle de Fontaine's hand and drawing it
through his arm.
After walking a few steps they found themselves under a clump of trees
which the hues of the sinking sun wrapped in a haze of red and brown.
This touch of natural magic lent a certain solemnity to the moment.
The young man's free and eager action, and, above all, the throbbing
of his surging heart, whose hurried beating spoke to Emilie's arm,
stirred her to an emotion that was all the more disturbing because it
was produced by the simplest and most innocent circumstances. The
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