Whole Wide World

This song really embodies the way I feel about life. 

These words are going to be my continuous inspiration and motivation for this coming year.

moving from melancholy

Something that I want to do for myself this season, is to find ways to keep myself optimistic and inspired.
For the past while I found that I've allowed melancholy to become my main motivator.
Gray rainy days have been my comfort. Tears have been more satisfying than smiles.
Whimsy and quirkiness are a huge part of who I am.
I enjoy being the quiet girl with the deep running strangeness... that is some what endearing... if not confusing to the general population.
Negative energy has been fueling me for quite a long time. My itunes playlist entitled 'melancholy', where all my most listed to music lives, is a testament to this.
I've come to the realization that I need to change my attitude.
I'm still the same girl, and this transformation may take time, but I think its time.
I need to focus on the joy of life. I need to find the sunshine, and enjoy the rain when it come - not go searching for the dark clouds.

This season I am going to use this blog as a place to keep a collection of thoughts and images that reflect the joyous whimsy that I wish to see in my life.
There may be moments of melancholy that appear, but I need to learn to acknowledge them, but then move on, with out lingering in the darkness.

Each day I want to find at least one thing, weather its a poem, an image on the internet, or from my own life... a memory, a moment of joy from my day, a piece of scripture that speaks to me, a song... ANYTHING! I want to post it here, so I can track my our journey to joy.

The Truth

Anchor

Austrian Quiet

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
Saint Augustine

Ave Verum

My choir went to Austria to sing in the Summa Cum Laude Youth Choral Festival. 

We came home with a first place placement in the Mixed Choir Category.

This is what we sound like, sometimes.

monastic beauty

Traveling to Europe is like stepping back in time. 

It's this world where two very different universes manage to co-exist.
We long for the stories of the past as much as we strive for the excitement of the future.

The old and the new are all jumbled together into a Picasso portrait that reflects the most beautiful part of the collective human soul. 

sweet lovers love the spring

It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green corn-field did pass,
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.
- Shakespeare, As You Like It

drizzle

welp. now I'm 18 folks.

Sunshine and daffodils, just happiness everywhere.
Actually, I'm still in a melancholy mood, which personally I'm quite enjoying. There is something oddly comforting about grey days and mournful melodies.
I feel creative and inspired, yet unmotivated and easily distracted... but what else it new.
I have plans for 18. Big plans.
I want to make a list of 20 things to do before I'm 20, because 20 is a rather terrifying thought for me, and in all reality, it's not that far away.
I could sit and fill volumes with all the shades of grey that I'm feeling. I want to light candles and sit in the silence of flickering light, imagining and hoping. A thought comes, and then flickers away before I can pin it down and admire the beauty of its dazzling wings, but that is probably for the best. This way I never get the chance to kill these vibrant imaginings and dreams by mounting them on my wall.
I feel the need to hold faded black and white photographs between my fingers. Photographs that contain memories that do not belong to me, but for one brief suspended moment of time I can claim them for my own and breathe my own words into the lives of people who have grown up and left their old selves behind.

heart and mind

Winter Bones

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Virginia Woolf 

frozen jewels

Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without. 

~Confucius, Analects

Imaginary Dates

THIS SONG!

Dancing Umbrellas

Sometimes I write original songs.

Winter Wind

Sometimes I write melodies to go with the lyrics in Shakespeare's plays.

Some times they sound like this.