So I and four other girls are in Flagstaff at the moment. It has been a long eventful day, following upon a particularly long and rather sleepless night. I will share a bit of the day with you thru the medium of photo mostly because I am too tired to write out accurate descriptions of everything that has happended. (I am also too tired to make this come out in chronological order...) The top one is of the girls singing at the top of their lungs to something playing on my computer. The next one down is of the brush we had a "run in" with somewhere between Barstow and Kingsman (my car lost an eye in the encounter...) Then there is the nearly mile long train... and then a testimony to the girl's addiction (seriously - this place was closed and we followed the signs for the next "fresh jerky" shop for well over 100 miles, not that it took us out of way but we were watching the signs...) So tommorw's plan of opperation find a mechanic who can tell me what is wrong with my car (other than being filled with juniper twigs and cactus paws) and fix it for a price I can afford, and then the Grand Canyon (the original reason for this escapade...) More on what happens latter.

If I were the rain that binds together the earth and the sky, who in all
eternity will never mingle, will I be able to bind the hearts of people
together?

It's over and done. This small sheaf of papers waiting to be stapled and laid
outside the prefect's door, the summation of weeks of thought and writing,
seems to be too little to show for all of the work that went into it. But it is
done now and I have a week before I have to start thinking seriously of finals
study.
*sigh*
Time moves far too quickly...

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
-Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist, Nobel laureate (1899-1961)

This is such a true observation of the "hermetically sealed bottle" we live in. Why is that???

life's noblest lie:
Amor omnia vincit
...it hurts.

I will not attempt to argue with the good senor on his point that I would not have remarked thus if I had known love. I have and it is reflection on this love that lead me to this statement. But that does not express the reflection in its entirety (neither will this though...)

In the end it all depends on the direction one is looking from... from the perspective of mortality and change and imperfection it is true. Men change and thus necessarily so does their love. It waxes and wanes, finds new direction and looses intensity. It is everything man is, it reflects him in all his faults, it is imperfect - it dies. It is the doom chosen for all human things at the moment Adam took the fruit from his wife's hand.
However, in the end, that is not solely what love truly is. From the perspective of the immortal and unchanging and perfect, it is perhaps our closest conception of what God is in Himself. It is all that St Paul described- patient, kind, bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things, never failing, never ending. This is what man was intended for at the first creation and lost in his fall. In the re-creation of the Cross, it is offered to him again but this time with a requirement attached. Man must enter into the sufferings of the Cross, sharing in its the pain and sacrifice in a spirit of submission and willingness and humility. Man's love becomes his cross, drawing him in two contradictory directions, toward heaven and across the earth. And even then the fullness and perfection of love desired cannot be achieved in this life, it is only seen from a distance as Moses saw the Promised Land from the peak of the mountain but could not enter into it.
Man, acutely aware of his passing-ness and imperfection, craves the unchanging and the perfect. And every fiber of his being tells him that this desire ought to be satisfied in goodness, truth, beauty, and most especially in love. It could perhaps be described as his recognition of what was lost in the fall. Man, being the mixture of the mortal and mutable with the immortal and perfectable that he is, is neither able attain the love he desires in this life nor condemned to the merely mortal affections proper to the flesh. He is given both, mortality with the promise of perfection. Change and death are inexcapable and are yet able to be overcome.
Hence I feel justified in saying that man's love fails - it does. But that is not the end of the story because to be true love it must be God's and that we are assured never fails.

Quote of the morning:

"Oh man, the sun is so sunny...and glorious."

hehehehe - what a night of papering can do to one's power's of articulation.

It's so wonderful to be loved... Upon confessing to Sir Jeo that my familiar had
blown in on the winds and had set to work to make me depressed, I was informed
that if he happened upon that unfortunate creature it would be preemporally
shot and then kicked about upon the ground. "Things that make you depressed
ought to be shot!"
"Life goes on," he said "You've got friends, and school, and beautiful
weather...so no frowns. Smile, come on, corners of the mouth up...that's it."
How can one refuse? So I will try to give my familiar a bit of a kick to
dislodge him from his wonted location- entwined about my ankles- and move
along.

Shortly forthcoming, further thoughts or perhaps a modification of my rashness
of the other day.

I've been promising to share my plans for the future for about a week now and the thought occurs to me that I should perhaps give you something to make up for the blatant misery of the previous post. (In addition it gives me a break from my philosophy paper...) I was reminded of them (my daydreams, I mean my plans) again when the lovely student worker from our campus career center tracked me down to subject me their current junior survey. So in simple, humble terms I will lay forth for your perusal my thoughts for my future...

After graduating I plan to wander the world, beginning in Europe and working my way east, staying as long as my money (what I have, what I can make while I'm there, and what I owe due to loans) holds out and perhaps a bit longer after that. The reason for this period of wandering is not entirely frivolous, but I'll come back to that. After the year or so of travel, I am hoping to continue in school, hopefully on the graduate level, but if I have to take some more undergraduate classes that will be fine. And the field? Not theology or philosophy (though I will always study in those areas- its gotten into my blood, its how I think now). I am going to go into conservation and research, so a degree in conservation biology, ecology, or natural sciences is the general aim right now. I need to do more research in the specific degrees, but that is the field. Where is such a degree useful? Government work to begin with, National Forest service, Department of land and natural resources; within the private sector there are conservation agencies and organizations.
Now back to the year or so of traveling. I have noticed that while being here in school will expand one's mind regarding the intellectual life, it can cause a rather narrow view of the world as a whole. Given the way technology and global economics have been developing in the last decade or so, there are few things that happen in one corner of the world that do not affect other parts of it in some way. I want to be able to see how this works first-hand. Further, if I want to enter a field that is concerned with the world as a whole, it will give me an advantage to have a feel for it and some first hand knowledge of it. In addition, I have seen that within the conservation movement, people tend to get dropped out of the big picture. In the more extreme views mankind is seen as a plague upon the earth. I see no danger of this happening to me, but I want to know the people in these areas that are so "crucial to the salvation of the earth."
What draws me to this? Various reasons. I love nature and the outdoors and abhor the idea of being trapped behind a desk as a career. I see the world not as being a possession of man, but as a stewardship entrusted to him for the greater glory of God. Destroying it will not give Him glory and I do believe that we will be held accountable for it in some way. Thinking less theologically but along the same lines, it makes no sense to destroy what has been inherited from our fathers; rather we should strive to be able to had down to innumerable future generations. I find the workings of economics and politics on all levels ( global, national, local) fascinating, and conservation seems to be an apt way of combining many of the areas I am rather passionate about.

So that, in brief, is the direction I'm headed in. Its the "what I want to do when I grow up," modified and refined, that I've had since I was about 12 or 13, having only gotten stronger as time went by. I honestly have no idea where or how a husband or family work into this, but right now I don't have to worry about that...
I do need to start looking into grad schools and degree requirements and grants and scholarships and - but all of that can wait until my paper is finished...

~life's noblest lie:

Amor omnia vincit.



it hurts...

Closing time, open all the doors
And let you out into the world
Closing time, turn all of the lights on
Over every boy and every girl
Closing time, one last call for alcohol
So finish your whiskey or beer
Closing time, you don't have to go home
But you can't stay here

I know who I want to take me home,
I know who I want to take me home,
I know who I want to take me home,
Take me home

Closing time, time for you to go out
To the places you will be from
Closing time, this room won't be open
Till your brothers or your sisters come
So gather up your jackets, move it to the exits
I hope you have found a friend
Closing time, every new beginning
Comes from some other beginning's end

I know who I want to take me home,
I know who I want to take me home,
I know who I want to take me home,
Take me home

Closing time, time for you to go out
To the places you will be from

I know who I want to take me home,
I know who I want to take me home,
I know who I want to take me home,
Take me home

Closing time, every new beginning
Comes from some other beginning

So yet another evening has gone by, full of potency and expectation of accomplishing plenty... with little to nothing to show for it. However I have a few more dollars in my pocket and a bit more perspective on the beautiful little bottle I live in most of the time, so perhaps it was not as fruitless as all that.
"Tiny Dancer" is playing on the internet station in the background... I need to aquire some Elton John... I do like his music...
I need to write to you all my discovery of actual plans for the future... it was an exciting discovery on my part I can tell you. But the baristas will be giving me dirty looks soon...

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to
write one story, and writes another, and his humblest
hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what
he vowed to make it.

-J.M. Barrie, novelist and playwright (1860-193o)

Take The Quiz Yourself!


ok I am going to go out on a limb and admit that I am totally into this series...perhaps addicted is a more accurate description....

How I spend my Friday afternoons...

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so
much. It means to me now - only that place where the
books are kept.

-John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)

~Notes from the exile wandering the balcony (ok, its a patio but that does n't
sound as nice) behind the rose hedged wall...

Ink splotches on fingertips
damp blacknes that smears on
everything I touch and then
it dries and will not come off for
love or money or hot water adn soap.
Yes, good quality ink
it will never fade or run or
come off my hands.

A dry heat has settled upon us, apparetly coinciding with the jump to daylight
savings time... I have no idea what the two have to do with each other, but
seeing as they came together I have no reason to think they don't have some
sort of causal relationship.
I've been reading Alice in Wonderland and am caught up in the myriads of
equivocations and puns that I didn't noticed the first time I read it through
years ago. I knew all this education would come in useful somehow...

..and now back into the heat of the day with productivity in mind...