pause

As I sat on a bench on campus today between meetings, it felt quite strange not having homework or a computer on my lap. In sitting doing nothing, I almost didn't know what to do with myself. I'll be honest, I couldn't handle it for long, so I quickly snatched a notebook and pen from my bag to begin writing some thoughts down.

Do you ever stop to consider how foreign the concept of free time feels in this day and age? We dash from one thing to the next, moving so quickly that we forget to breathe. To sit and do nothing - it's just odd. There's a voice telling you to always do more, keep moving, never stop. If you have free time - well, you just aren't doing enough.

Why is that? Why don't we allow ourselves to simply do nothing? We seem to insist that by sitting on a bench we are wasting time that could be invested in so many other pursuits. But are we really wasting time? Don't we need that chance to hit pause more than many of the tasks we jam in its place?

sketchbook

pencil + paper + good tunes = highly therapeutic.

this place

There is a place -

A place where things once dull
Are inexplicably illuminated from within

A place where each breath
Upon filling the lungs, yields awakening.

At first, this place seems distant,
Held hostage in some far off land -

But through surrender we soon discover
This place lies just round the bend.

Yes, there is a place -

A place where true joy
is not supplementary but instead necessity

A place where defeat from burdens
becomes but a thing of the past.

Pause long enough and finally claim
this place as home at last.

risk

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
- Teddy Roosevelt

be still

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
-Henry David Thoreau

more photoshop fun

If you can't already tell, I'm quite a fan of grunge-style design. I wish these displayed better in here though. Please follow the directions from the previous entry for optimal viewing. This will fix the size and get rid of the strange blur action.

reviving photoshop

The neglect of Photoshop and favoring of Illustrator has been quite out of hand since my digital tools course, and I thought it was time to give Photoshop a chance to shine. As such, here's a collage involving a poem I posted previously:

The path to optimal viewing:
1) Click on the image to enlarge.
2) Once it's big, right click on the image itself and select "view image."
This should make it a more ideal viewing size.