Words, Music, & Outdoor Adventures

I’ve dealt with my ghosts and I’ve faced all my demons
Finally content with a past I regret
I’ve found you find strength in your moments of weakness
For once I’m at peace with myself
I’ve been burdened with blame, trapped in the past for too long
I’m movin’ on

I’ve lived in this place and I know all the faces
Each one is different but they’re always the same
They mean me no harm but it’s time that I face it
They’ll never allow me to change
But I never dreamed home would end up where I don’t belong
I’m movin’ on

I’m movin’ on
At last I can see life has been patiently waiting for me
And I know there’s no guarantees, but I’m not alone
There comes a time in everyone’s life
When all you can see are the years passing by
And I have made up my mind that those days are gone

I sold what I could and packed what I couldn’t
Stopped to fill up on my way out of town
I’ve loved like I should but lived like I shouldn’t
I had to lose everything to find out
Maybe forgiveness will find me somewhere down this road
I’m movin’ on

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

The million complex forms of human experience has tormented me since my twentieth year and has driven me to unreasonable excesses in a hopeless attempt to read all the books, to know all the people, to see all the countries in the world n in short, to eat the world and have it too. I think I realize as well as anyone the fatal dangers that are consequent to such a ravenous desire, the damage it may wreak upon oneis life and on oneis work.

And I now not only understand, I really believe and know that so far as the artist is concerned, the unlimited spread and extent of human experience is not so important for him as the depth and intensity with which he experiences things.

“Be as you are.”

Music is a powerful thing n it conjures and creates memories, sets the scene, alters your mood, makes you think. Music provides the soundtrack to your life.

From The Autobiography of an American Novelist

“Like Whitman, Wolfe was a romantic who moved from a preoccupation with himself to an interest in his family, his friends, his town, his America, and finally the larger, external world. Wolfe explored time, faith, loneliness, and death; isolation, alienation, change, experience; the city versus the country; the North versus the South; Oe these concerns run through all of Wolfeis fiction. “

Sports Psychology
Did You Make The Grade?
Source: Craig Kain, Ph.D.

Victory isnit defined by wins or losses. It is defined by effort. If you can truthfully say, iI did the best I could, I gave everything I had,i then youire a winner.
As you look at the t-shirts and colored swim caps you collected from this yearis races, as you evaluate the season, try asking yourself these questions: Did I enjoy training? Did I enjoy competing? Did I give my all this season? Did being a triathlete this season improve me as a person? The experience of personal excellence is not whether you were better than everyone else but whether you became your best….

Sharpe had an epiphany.

While there is certainly no excellence without talent, itis over-the-top enthusiasm that makes the real difference. True excellence fueled by passion doesnit have to be outwardly encouraged, even in children. It doesnit require imotivationi n at least as we commonly practice it. True excellence is about finding that one thing that you do well and want to do many hours a day, even when the field is muddy or your fingers bleed.

the winter here’s cold, and bitter
it’s chilled us to the bone
we haven’t seen the sun for weeks
to long too far from home
I feel just like I’m sinking
and I claw for solid ground
I’m pulled down by the undertow
I never thought I could feel so low
oh darkness I feel like letting go

October Snowstorm Slams into Killington
October 23, 2005 - 12:46 PM

By AlpineZone News

KILLINGTON, Vermont o The earliest winter storm in more than 20 years dumped more than a foot of new snow at Killington Resort overnight and the forecast is calling for more.

March Hare: My goodness! Those are the things that upset me!
March Hare: See all the trouble you started?
Alice: But I didn’t think…
March Hare: Ah, that’s just it. If you don’t think, you shouldn’t talk.

Daisy: What kind of a garden do you come from?
Alice: Oh, I don’t come from any garden.
Daisy: Do you suppose she’s a wildflower?

“I was a communist for some years from which I learned a great deal, chiefly about the nature of political power, how groups of people operate, I think, according to specific but little-understood laws and the force of self-delusion. I am still leftwing in politics, though pessimistic about the human condition and more interested in philosophy and religion than I expected to be. Yeats said that a writer must work a way inwards, into self-knowledge. I am always surprised at what I find in myself and this to me is the most rewarding part of being a writer.”

I have been studying the difference
between solitude and loneliness,
telling the story of my life
to the clean white towels taken warm from the dryer.
I carry them through the house
as though they were my children
asleep in my arms.

“We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.”

iScrutinizing - touching what you are looking at with your eyes Oe you run all over the valley and look in on things that couldnit see you looking, for what it was out there that you didnit know and needed to know - scrutinizing people, the world, for the best story, for the truth.i

iWe go through the world looking for our kin.i

iSometimes not getting what you want is a stroke of luck.”

iI cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be ihappyi. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter; to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.i

iThe reason we connect so viscerally to our past is that we carry it with us always, just as the present moment will be found in our futures. We are inexorably shaped by our histories. The past is not a dead thing, fixed and remote. It is always accessible, albeit concealed under layers of current experience. It takes only a signal, like a ringing bell that resonates though time, and an open heart, to remember. The truth is that youth and wisdom can live together, even as we diminish one with the other. We still have access to the guileless purity of our childhood, a freshness that takes us by surprise if only we let it. Every time we are startled by beauty, a new way of thinking, or those treasures in nature, we are young. Every time we honor our pasts, we wake up to that innocence again. And to the wisdom in that.i

Place: 85 Kristen Lodge 34 CO Time: 2:15:50 Pace: 10:22 Bib # 1644