To the Evening Star by William Blake

Thou fair hair'd angel of the evening,
Now, while the sun rests on the mountains light,
Thy bright torch of love; Thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
Smile on our loves; and when thou drawest the
Blue curtains, scatter thy silver dew
On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes
In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes
And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full, soon,
Dost thou withdraw; Then, the wolf rages wide,
And the lion glares thro' the dun forest.
The fleece of our flocks are covered with
Thy sacred dew; Protect them with thine influence.Golden Apollo, that thro' heaven wide
Scatter'st the rays of light, and truth's beams,
In lucent words my darkling verses dight,
And wash my earthy mind in thy clear streams,
That wisdom may descend in fairy dreams,
All while the jocund hours in thy train
Scatter their fancies at thy poet's feet;
And when thou yields to night thy wide domain,
Let rays of truth enlight his sleeping brain.
For brutish Pan in vain might thee assay
With tinkling sounds to dash thy nervous verse,
Sound without sense; yet in his rude affray,
(For ignorance is Folly's leasing nurse
And love of Folly needs none other's curse)
Midas the praise hath gain'd of lengthen'd ears,
For which himself might deem him ne'er the worse
To sit in council with his modern peers,
And judge of tinkling rimes and elegances terse.

And thou, Mercurius, that with wing?d brow
Dost mount aloft into the yielding sky,
And thro' Heav'n's halls thy airy flight dost throw,
Entering with holy feet to where on high
Jove weighs the counsel of futurity;
Then, laden with eternal fate, dost go
Down, like a falling star, from autumn sky,
And o'er the surface of the silent deep dost fly:

If thou arrivest at the sandy shore
Where nought but envious hissing adders dwell,
Thy golden rod, thrown on t 1000 he dusty floor,
Can charm to harmony with potent spell.
Such is sweet Eloquence, that does dispel
Envy and Hate that thirst for human gore;
And cause in sweet society to dwell
Vile savage minds that lurk in lonely cell

O Mercury, assist my lab'ring sense
That round the circle of the world would fly,
As the wing'd eagle scorns the tow'ry fence
Of Alpine hills round his high a?ry,
And searches thro' the corners of the sky,
Sports in the clouds to hear the thunder's sound,
And see the wing?d lightnings as they fly;
Then, bosom'd in an amber cloud, around
Plumes his wide wings, and seeks Sol's palace high.

And thou, O warrior maid invincible,
Arm'd with the terrors of Almighty Jove,
Pallas, Minerva, maiden terrible,
Lov'st thou to walk the peaceful solemn grove,
In solemn gloom of branches interwove?
Or bear'st thy AEgis o'er the burning field,
Where, like the sea, the waves of battle move?
Or have thy soft piteous eyes beheld
The weary wanderer thro' the desert rove?
Or does th' afflicted man thy heav'nly bosom move?

Snyder v. Phelps: Inside the Supreme Court's Free Speech Showdown

Snyder v. Phelps: Inside the Supreme Court's Free Speech Showdown

These people make me sick. I want to find them and... I don't even know. I want to scream and use violence on them. Spew on them all the anger that I feel in regards to their disgusting actions. I also want to sit them down and calmly explain that they are being hateful, hurtful and unkind.
To give a bit of context here, I am not particularly fond of the war in which we're currently engaged. I hope to never have a funeral and I don't attend them willingly. I think grief should be much more private and less organized than most funerals allow. Although I do my part to support the men and women that choose to spend their lives defending our country, I do not as a whole support our military system.
But I also do not think my own beliefs should be imposed on anyone else. I make sure to send packages of goodies overseas and I do attend the funerals of my loved ones. My beliefs are private and there is a time and place to discuss such sensitive subjects. At the funeral of a man who died doing something he felt was right, just and necessary is not the time to share your controversial and detestable opinions.
Hate-mongering is not free speech. Attacking a bereaved family that has nothing to do with your rather psychotic cause is not free speech! It is harassment and it should not be protected under the first amendment, instead it should be prosecuted as harassment. These people should be forced to pay the $5 million in damages as awarded by the first court in which this suit was heard. These people should have charges brought up on them for disturbing the peace, harassment and any other charge that lawyers and police can imagine.
Or better yet, we should shoot a few of the leaders and hold up signs at their funerals congratulating ourselves and declaring their deaths to be God's will.

wanderlust

I want to go everywhere. I want to do everything.
I want to climb more, hike through sands and up mountains. I follow this blog and live vicariously through Aimee. A fellow Abbey subscriber and Southern Utah lover, her writing speaks to me. Calls me into the wild. She is living a life less ordinary in a most extraordinary way. Sometimes, today, reading of her adventures, seeing the photos of all these places I may never know, makes me melancholy.

Some days I miss the life I didn't choose.

YouTube - We No Speak Americano ft. Cleary & Harding

YouTube - We No Speak Americano ft. Cleary & Harding: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

One day I will be as cool as Nikki and figure out how to embed videos directly into my blog. But until then, turn up the volume, click the link, kick your chair out of the way and DANCE! Oh, then come back and watch this totally rad video. That's right, I said totally rad.

Music

I don't really know why I keep a blog. As previously mentioned I am not actually comfortable with knowing that people read it. I was asked to blog professionally for the newspaper and found that I just couldn't do it. Too much pressure, too much exposure. But I write a lot and it needs to go somewhere. I have what I could term a diary, or a journal of sorts, but it isn't in a form that I can easily read back through it. And it's all full of secrets and truths and things I wouldn't share. This is public enough to keep me from wandering too deep but private enough that I am pretty much within my comfort zone of sharing. Anyone who knows me well knows I don't often get into girly feelers and whatnot. But when I do delve into that realm of myself it can get pretty messy. This is a nice balance for me.
I'm not sure what all that has to do with what I came here to post. An amazing song. Delta Spirit, Salt in the Wound
When I heard this it was as background music under a monologue and I briefly wondered if it was my man, Willy. A throaty voice with just enough twang to make me giddy over an hypnotically pleasing repetition of guitar strings being plucked with love and skill. Alas it is not The Legend of the South but instead a band I'd never even heard of before. Enjoy, Anonymous Readers and Jenni.

Therapy and Privacy and fear of the unknown

I don't think anyone really noticed but I set my blog to "private" a few months ago. The visitor log was driving me a wee bit bonkers. Visits would be logged from all over the world, or even worse, from my own area, but I never knew who it was. I, being the over-thinking natural control-freak that I am, would wonder who was visiting, reading my errant and mundane thoughts. What did they read? How did they find me? And on it went. Until one particular visitor drove me over the edge of reason and I basically shut down my page.
Well, visitor log you are no more! I deleted the infernal thing and am now free to write whatever I want in blissful ignorance of all visitors! As far as I care to know, no one is reading my ramblings and I think I may like it that way. My words have always flowed more freely if I imagine an audience (anyone know the definition of a narcissist?) *but* as a confirmed sufferer of severe and sometimes debilitating stage fright I can't actually know that anyone is reading. Ah, what a conundrum. If I think only myself will read my writings I tend lose focus and not finish. But if I actually know someone will read my work then I can't manage to string together coherent thoughts.
So I am trying something in between. We'll see, or, um, at least I will, how it goes from here.

Desert Rat

For many years I have had an abiding love for the desert. The smoothly stark landscape superimposed with jagged life and alien species can always make me pause for a moment of peace. There is something ancient, something primal in the desert. Instead of the cacophony of life one can touch in the mountains there is a delicate roaring of solitude. Every plant seems individual, special for its very existence and the lack of brotherhood in which it manages to thrive. And with this comes a sense of the extraordinary in every rock, tree, bush and animal. Colors never seem more vivid than when there are only 3 or so from which to choose and varying degrees of those.

Moab, Arches, Zion, Goblin, Bryce, these are places that visit me in my dreams but often seem unreachable through the fog of reality. Children are born, careers thrive and trips are delayed. I want my children to experience the magic of desert, the beauty of a sunrise flanked by hoodoos, to learn to follow cairns and stand behind a waterfall.

But until they are a little older, until I can show them some of the splendor of their world, I will try to experience it without them and write it down for them to read one day, if they wish.