So Live It

Don't you cry for the lost

Smile for the living

Get what you need and give what your given

You know life's for the living so live it

Or your better off dead

The Future of Forestry

-The Future of Forestry-

How will the legend of the age of trees

Feel, when the last tree falls in England?

When the concrete spreads and the town conquers

The country’s heart; when contraceptive

Tarmac’s laid where farm has faded,

Tramline flows where slept a hamlet,

And shop-fronts, blazing without a stop from

Dover to Wrath, have glazed us over?

Simplest tales will then bewilder

The questioning children, “What was a chestnut?

Say what it means to climb a Beanstalk,

Tell me, grandfather, what an elm is.

What was Autumn? They never taught us.”

Then, told by teachers how once from mould

Came growing creatures of lower nature

Able to live and die, though neither

Beast nor man, and around them wreathing

Excellent clothing, breathing sunlight –

Half understanding, their ill-acquainted

Fancy will tint their wonder-paintings

Trees as men walking, wood-romances

Of goblins stalking in silky green,

Of milk-sheen froth upon the lace of hawthorn’s

Collar, pallor in the face of birchgirl.

So shall a homeless time, though dimly

Catch from afar (for soul is watchfull)

A sight of tree-delighted Eden.

~C.S. Lewis~

Three Words

I don't know. 

These three words, while never quite satisfactory, are pretty handy in a pinch. But it seems that I've come to a place in my life where they won't exactly work. Specifically, what I want to do with it, my life that is. I love the idea of being an artist, but for lack of talent this evades me. Therefore I've settled on the next best thing: a writer.

Now if you are reading this you know my grammar is mediocre at best, but placing obvious setbacks aside, the idea still pervades. Unfortunately however, and while I try to stifle it, practicality has come calling. The job market sucks for journalists and I want to have a family (and all that crap). These annoying facts have pushed me farther than I ever thought I would go; I switched my major to nursing (the most practical AND deplorable career imaginable). Now I know that helping people is an amazing opportunity, but is it worth the loss? I look at the nurses in my life and I slowly see them being desensitized. It seems to me that the value of life, or at least the emotions that are attached to life, are slowly sucked away. Is the promise of a job worth losing emotion? Or maybe it's the concept of hardship that I'm afraid of losing. Life sucks, and while that is a reality, it is also an idea. As long as I keep that idea at least partially foreign, I can diagnose it, I can pick apart individual themes such as loneliness and jealousy and pain, and these themes are what fuel my desire to write. You can't inspire anyone without unearthing the hardships that individuals must push through. But if I make suffering my living, I'll bombard myself with it. If all that I will see is pain and loneliness, I'll overload my system and at the end of the day I'll avoid it. I'll push my fuel to the side and there's a chance I may never write. Is it worth the loss?

I don't know.

Life

Wouldn't it be fine to stand behind

The words we say in the best of times

Oh, and you and I know all too well

About the hell and paradise here on earth

I pray God will help me live by the words He shows me, so that the paradise I experience here will be the same joy I experience in Heaven.

Simplicity

~I just want peace of mind and coffee with my cream~

From the song In the Middle by Act of Congress

I Will Wait

This is the first single released off of Babel, Mumford & Sons upcoming album. Amazing!

Enjoy my friends! :)

Book List Homies!!

I most recently finished the Lord of the Rings trilogy and have started on That Hideous Strength, the last book in C.S. Lewis' Space trilogy. Seeing as I'm almost finished, my upcoming book list is (in no particular order) as follows.

Complete Sherlock Holmes (I'm about halfway through the stories)

A God Named Desire

The Odyssey

Enders Game

The Screwtape Letters

Fahrenheit 451

Player Piano

Watership Down

Holes

The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy

The Series of Unfortunate Events

The Picture of Dorian Grey
The Bishop's Man

If you have a particular order for me to read them in, or any ideas of other books I should read, shoot me a comment! Have a great day folks! :)

Let's be honest folks, you really can't get much better than a Chai Latte!

Click on expand and enjoy!

These awesome illustrations are drawn by Mattias Adolfsson, a freelance illustrator living in Sigtuna, Sweden. Check out all 101 pages, it's worth it!

Beneath the Silver Moon

      Over the course of my vacation to California, I have found myself experiencing a lot of different emotions. Not only have I had to come to grips with a few uncomfortable things, my emotions have helped me realize so much about myself. Emotion is so unpredictable, and although I feel the need to control my outward identity, my inward identity has been rocked out of control. If I lived my life as a river, up until this point I would have been damed up into a lake. Now that the dam has burst, I'm learning to direct my river of emotions to a place where I am able to control it again.

      Now this realization has lead me to another point: How much should I control my emotions? Emotion can be a hassle, and I for one have had to deal with some annoying feelings as a result. But on the other hand, emotion is what makes life interesting. Inspiration in many forms is influenced by our feelings. A band I've been listening to lately plays a song called "Tin Man", and it talks about missing the feeling of feeling, likening a lack of heart to the tin woodsman in the Wizard of Oz. The song points out how awful it would be to lose emotional reactions such happiness and joy. In this line of thought, could I ever control my emotions to a point where they weren't responsive anymore? That would be a disaster, life would lose its flavor. So my question is now: What balance of emotion will keep my life interesting, yet still manageable?

So Boss!

"'You? Who are you? How could you know anything of the matter?'

'My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't...'"

~Sherlock Homes~

in

"The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle"


I really need to start saying stuff like this

METRO MOTION!

She looks so good in red!

Hecks Yes!

New moozic folks! Enjoy! ----------------------------------------------------------------->

Neverland

     
I wish dreams were reality, and reality was a dream. Reality and the dream world create an interesting paradox. In reality, I experience things physically through the five senses; I live in a physical, external world. Right now I'm sitting in a physical chair and physically typing on a computer. Yet the largest struggles in reality aren't physical or external, they're internal. Although the outlying effects of my internal struggle may be physical (such as addiction), my battles are fought inside my mind, where I stand small against a large, evil willpower. In dreams however, my battles aren't manifested in what I fight inside my mind; in my dreams, I fight my battles physically. I'm no longer battling myself, instead, I fight the bogeyman. I no longer stand small against a large, evil willpower, my struggle is now whether or not I'll be able to swing from the mast of this pirate ship, to the cliff of that island. My battles are still a challenge, but if I put on a face of courage and pick up that gun, I'll be able to conquer the unseen danger hidden below me in the foggy swamp. My dangers aren't internal, I'm living an adventure with me the hero. In the safety of my bed I can be Robin Hood, Crocodile Dundee, and a pirate all in the same night. Valiant effort and brute strength combine to swing my sword at the enemy, and then, with my foes vanquished, I wake back up to my dreams. 

Prone to Wander

"Freedom from myself will be

the sweetest rest I've ever known."

~Chris Rice~

Tom Bombadil

"That night they heard no noises. But either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind; a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise."

(J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring)

I want to write like this.

The Gospel According to Calvin and Hobbes

Sometimes I see life in this way. I have a preconceived notion about one thing or other, and I'm comfortable with my frame of mind; but then, when I'm finally pulling together the loose ends, some wise-guy philosopher has to come along and rattle my cage. Actually this sort of experience happened to me last summer. It all started over a frying-pan full of omelette. My and one of my best buddies were chilling in the kitchen and making breakfast when the subject of life origins came up. My bro isn't exactly a Christian so this is an area we don't exactly agree on. Now I was pretty psyched about this conversation because the semester before I had taken Defending Your Faith class from Mr. Lemon and I felt like I at least could throw down a few good points. Well was I ever mistaken! Unfortunately for me (and the rest of my class), most of the points in Defending Your Faith were from the angle that Atheists don't know what their talking about. Well just for the record, some actually do. (Hey FV people, you should talk to Mr. Lemon about this. Ask him for some arguments from both sides. I'm not saying the class is bad or anything, I just think some more relevant points could have been brought up.) Now this shook my faith a bit and honestly, I guess it probably should have. It seemed to me that by believing in what I did, I was essentially saying "It's complicating my life", I don't wanna think about it. Because I don't have an explanation for what I believe, let's just call it "faith" and chuck it into the supernatural realm. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to belittle faith, but I do think this mistake can and is made a lot... simply because I know I do it. In Isaiah 1:18 it says "Come now, let us reason together saith the Lord". God gave us a brain for a reason, and although I may not have all the answers now, neither does science, and I'm not about to give up looking for the answers simply because I don't want to make myself a little uncomfortable.

Gather Up Your Dreams/One Thing More

Recently, I've felt that my life is in standby mode. Each repetitive day comes, goes, and comes again. College and work is set down like a template in my life, a shell of something that could be much better. It's like I'm building a house, a nice house. The framework has been put up, nothing else, I just don't seem to be getting around to finishing it. The interior needs to be completed and I've still got to put in all the things that make a home, a home. What's built simply keeps me out of the rain, it isn't embellished; there is no flair, no depth. It's like trying to dive into a refreshing mountain pool, and yet somehow not getting fully submerged.

"Hope is comfort, if not relief" 
-Matthew Perryman Jones-

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Togetherness

I love Christmastime. I wish that I could fully express the feelings associated with the holidays, but I simply cannot. The joy of togetherness, decorating the tree, reliving traditions, it really cannot be equaled. And honestly, I actually had fun shopping this year (although the traffic tonight made me a bit cynical). Now never having believed in Santa, I can imagine that when most children learn the truth about him, a bit of the Christmas magic is lost for them; the truth hits home and a little bit of their faith is imperceptibly squashed. The childhood wonder is stripped away revealing the "true" meaning of Christmas: Commercialism. (I'm not saying this is what everyone who believed in Santa thinks.) I guess growing up in a family that doesn't uphold the Santa tradition helps me love Christmas even more. Although we do go a bit overboard on the presents sometimes (and I'm not complaining), that's not what my family loves about Christmas, we simply love being together.

Togetherness takes love to another level, it points out that love isn't simply expressed, it is put into action. In our case, we put up the tree (it's fake :( when I have a family, we'll have a real one), decorate it, take earring pictures (we still have to do that this year),  drink festive drinks, and listen to Christmas carols. The fact that we have such a great time together indicates how much we really love each other. I think this love is simply a typification of Christ's love for us. Jesus coming to earth as a baby shows His love of togetherness. In Matthew 1:23 it reads: "'Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,' Which is translated, 'God with us'" The name that God gave His Son shows how much He loves being with us. He risked the fate of the universe to come down to earth, spend some time with humanity, and ultimately sacrifice Himself for Me. 

Why do I enjoy Christmastime so much? Because I can be together with those I love, and the One who loved me first. 

Merry Christmas.

Green Tea

This is a quotation from the book A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 by Phillip Keller. I got this book from my dad and have been reading it sporadically over the past months. Last night, right before I went to sleep, I picked it up and opened it randomly to the following passage. It couldn't have come at a better time for me.

"Paul in writing to the Christians at Corinth warned them of this danger. "So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall!" (1 Corinthians 10:12)

Admittedly this may appear as one of the paradoxes and enigmas of our spiritual lives. When we examine it carefully, however, we will not find it too difficult to understand.

As with sheep, so with Christians, some basic principles and parallels apply which will help us to grasp the way in which a man or woman can be cast.

There is, first of all, the idea of looking for a soft spot. The sheep that choose the comfortable, soft, rounded hollows in the ground in which to lie down very often become  cast. In such a situation it is so easy to roll over on their backs.

 In the Christian life there is great danger in always looking for the easy place, the cozy hardship, no need for endurance, no demand upon self-discipline.

The time when we think "we have it made," so to speak, is actually when we are in mortal danger. There is such a thing as the discipline of poverty and privation which can be self-imposed to do us worlds of good. Jesus suggested this to the rich young man who mistakenly assumed he was in a safe position when in truth he was on the verge of being cast down. 

Sometimes if, through self-indulgence, I am unwilling to forfeit or forego the soft life, the easy way, the cozy corner, then the Good Shepherd may well move me to a pasture where things aren't quite so comfortable -- not only for my own good but also His benefit as well." (A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 page 76 & 77)

Never, never, never, NEVER let your guard down.

p.s. 

I have no idea what it means for a sheep to be "cast", but I am assuming it is a bad thing!

A Visit

Should I be posting right now? Probably not! Why? because I have a Comp 101 final in like 4 hours and although I think it'll be pretty straight forward, I'm still nervous. Maybe because this is my very first final exam in college, or maybe because it includes writing an essay and I have to write perfectly within the time frame. This said, I should be studying right? Well I would, but my good friend procrastination stopped by for a visit and I simply cannot run him off without spending a little time with him. So here I am, posting and listening to the Noisetrade fall sampler!
Question of the Week: When procrastination stops by to hang out with you, how do you run him off?