SMILE

Not quite sure who wrote this song, but it's been sung by a lot of famous singers. And for good reason. It's a good song:

Smile though your heart is aching
Smile even though it's breaking
When there are clouds in the sky, you'll get by
If you smile through your fear and sorrow
Smile and maybe tomorrow
You'll see the sun come shining through for you

Light up your face with gladness
Hide every trace of sadness
Although a tear may be ever so near
That's the time you must keep on trying
Smile, what's the use of crying?
You'll find that life is still worthwhile
If you just smile

That's the time you must keep on trying
Smile, what's the use of crying?
You'll find that life is still worthwhile
If you just smile

Faery Tale

Tonight I miss the dream world of my childhood. With faeries and sprites, wood elves and water nymphs. Where you can actually taste moon light, dance on the surface of a pond, and be crowned with a circlet of iridescent dew drops. Where you curl up on on thick, soft moss beside a small bonfire, singing hauntingly sweet lullabies to the lilting fiddle and fairy pipes, and wink at the stars between the gently swaying silver tree tops overhead. I miss the wild and exotic flavor of magic. The feel of deeply breathing fresh, living air. Smelling a tale to be told on the breeze. I miss feeling free to believe anything could happen and it would be a dream come true. I want to capture that again. I want my own faery tale.

The tides of time

The year is drawing to a close. Time, like waves breaking on rocky shores, wears us in. Shaping us with the ebb and flow of tides. Carrying away little grains of our souls to wash up on foreign beaches. Where we are bound to discover fantastic worlds, and have many grand adventures. ;)

Bits of the poet in me...

So there are random times when I'm thinking about things, rolling thoughts over in my mind, being pensive or merely whimsical, and my thoughts come out poetry. It doesn't always make sense, these poem-thoughts, but I like that ring of them, the melody of them, and so I write them down somehow. Many of them are just bits. Poems never, or not yet, finished. I keep finding them on the backs of mail or receipts around my room, so I thought perhaps I should put them all in one place. Here.

--

There is a star to heaven,

that lights upon my heart.

Cutting through the blinding fog

it shines out in the dark.

A spotlight on the stage of life.

I stand beneath its glow.

I feel it's warmth upon my neck,

as I preform the show.

I do not know who's watching.

I cannot see the crowd.

But my lines mean nothing to me

if I don't speak them out loud.

Sometimes I see no other players.

I feel I act alone.

But the holy spot where I must stand,

the light has always shone.

--
--
Fear and pride stand side by side,
and point the way to hell.
While faith will rise with heaven's eyes,
hope and charity as well.
--

No easy path is worth hiking.

So tripping and bruising I fall.

No perfect man walked, e'er but Christ.

But he blazed out the trail for all.

Forever an uphill battle.

Forever a mountain to climb.

Onward we stumble and falter.

Rise up, determined of mind.

--

My heart is a well,
My finger the tap.
Upon this page I drip and bleed.

Words flush out.
I plumb my soul.
I wet my lips on things I read.

--

Tell me a story.
But tell me no lies.
Please make it simple,
But never disguise
The truth.

--

Lying still,
On a bed of clover.
Sighing,
For the day is over.
Silent,
Just to hear the Earth's heart beat.

--

Where are you going?
And where have you been?
And when are you coming,
Back here again?

--

Don't you see the stars tonight?
The ones that shine so bright.
Like the stars in you eyes,
Those bright lights in the skies,
They are shining tonight.

Don't you see the moon tonight?
The water, bending the light
So it lights up your face,
The most beautiful place
That it's shining tonight.

Oh, oh, oh,

And when you are far,
I'll still look to the stars,
I'll image I see
Your eyes looking a me.
Still shining wherever you are.

--

Here I stand upon a hill
And hold my hand out stretched.
And in my empty fingers grasp
At breezes I can't catch.

And at my feet the earth slopes by,
Down to a rolling plain.
That spans and spans as far as sight
'Til all is sky and grey.

Winds, in deep exhaling gusts,
Wrap 'round my legs and waist.
In scents of sweat and dust and rain,
To each a seasoned taste.

--

Prompt me...

10/26
Assigned by: Hilary Kuntz
Poem prompt: Spinach in the Rain

When people think of Autumn
They see gold and rust and brown,
Shades and hints of a richer hue
In scent and sight and sound.

But when the cooler air rolled in
Through my window by my bed
I woke to a morning of a cooler tone,
Bluer, like rain on spinach, instead.

10/25
Assigned by: Hilary Kuntz
Poem prompt: Love is like a refrigerator. Use the word nickel.

Some days we shut the door.
We keep our hearts fresh and cold.
Like the tomato for a nickel at the market.
Somehow we think it will ripen,
Sitting alone on it's shelf.
Or perhaps crammed in between
All those other comfort foods
And left over meal containers
From which once our emotions fed.

But then we grow hungry.
We open the door, and stare.
Wondering what will feed our hunger best.
What sugary, fatty, soupy muck
Will fill the pit in our middle?
Sometimes we pull out that tomato
To cut in half and share.

Sometimes love is like a refrigerator.

Beauty. This is how I behold it.

Go ahead. Date your lovely woman. Marry your handsome man. Fall in love with your physically attractive person. Go ahead. There is nothing wrong with that at all. You deserve to look at your companion and think of yourself as lucky. You're goal is happiness. Beauty is a powerful component of happiness. You should aim for the best. I encourage you to do so.

Just please, PLEASE don't forget this one thing.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I believe it has been said. Not "beauty is in what you're looking at". Beauty is in your OWN eye. So ask yourself, how deep do your eyes see? Are you far sighted? Near sighted? Do you have colored glasses on? Do you wear blinders? Do you look hard, or do you just glance? Do you see or do you just look?

When you decide if someone else is beautiful or not, you are not really accurately defining them. You do not have that power or that authority. When you define the beauty in someone else, you are most assuredly actually measuring yourself.

On your road to happiness, when you look inside and take note of all those things that you measure to determine if you are happy or not, and you locate the section for "beauty", what do you find? Is it a check-mark on a list from 1 to 10? Is it a snap shot of an image, worth a thousand words? Or a fruit on the tree of your happiness whose sweet nectar could never be capture by any amount of words? Is it a pulsing ball of light, that hums and throbs and burns with a tender brilliance like a star capture within your heart, surging through your veins, bursting to break through you?

When you define the beauty in others from the outside in, you are defining yourself from the outside in. If it matters to you more what state their physical rather than internal "attractiveness" is in (by your own opinion or by the opinion of those whom you let sway your opinion), then it will matter more to you what your own state of physical rather than internal attractiveness is in. What matters about the beauty in their heart, depends on the beauty of your heart.

And if you try and measure their heart by their face... you're about to learn a very hard lesson. Because it doesn't matter how attractive you THINK they are on the outside, if they are rotten on the inside. Just like you do for yourself, they are in control of who they are on the inside. No matter what you want to believe. If you can not see that far into a person, how on earth do you know if they are beautiful or not?

__

This goes for people who think that others are more beautiful than themselves as well. I know that sometimes I am harsh. On others. On myself. I hate it when people say things like: "I'm not beautiful and pretense doesn't change that." Because sometimes that feels true. When the world around us seems to hold up a picture of a certain look rather than a mirror when it wants us to look inside and examine ourselves. But those days, when that phrase feels true, are the days I am too lazy to open my eyes. The days I don't want to try hard to be responsible for my own inner beauty, or to look inside others and love them. Idealizing and idolizing "beautiful people" is not loving them. In many ways it really is highly demeaning. While they may truly be beautiful on the inside and physically "ideal" on the outside as well, no one deserves to be thought of as an object. No one deserves to be stripped of their identity and personality and inner worth. Some "beautiful" people feel like no one even knows who they really are but judge them impersonally and objectively.

The simple truth of the matter is: No. I am not outwardly the shell of a model or the lustful dream of a sadly shallow man. And I don't want to be. I want to be beautiful. I want to be happy. And I want to look around me and find that I am surrounded by beauty.

I want you to realize, to HONESTLY open your eyes, and find out how beautiful you are.

I want you to look around and find that you can date a beautiful person. Marry a beautiful person. Be in love with a beautiful person. Be SURROUNDED by beautiful people. Even if others don't see it. Even if you have to act on faith 'til you do see it. And NOT JUST IN THEORY! This isn't a joke. No one said it was easy. But those who have seen it have never been so happy.

I want you to OPEN YOUR EYES AND BEHOLD BEAUTY!

Beauty is important to happiness, no doubt in my mind. But if your measurement of beauty is shallow, then that will be the depth of you happiness as well. Good luck with that.

Some inspiration:

“For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart“ (1 Sam. 16:7)

"For the Beauty of the Earth." LDS Hymn 92

http://lds.org/churchmusic/detailmusicPlayer/index.html?searchlanguage=1&searchcollection=1&searchseqstart=92&searchsubseqstart=+&searchseqend=92&searchsubseqend=ZZZ

John Keats:"A Thing of Beauty (Endymion)"

http://www.bartleby.com/126/32.html

Maze Runner

Another good series that i've become hooked on. I read this first one about a year ago. I just finally got a hold of the second one. Reminded me of how i enjoyed the first. The last one comes out this fall. Similar to the Hunger Games in genre... but a little less gory and little more mysterious.