Love Song Blues

Am I the only one that listens to random love songs, just to hear the beauty of another relationship? A friend turned me onto a great musician, Joe Purdy. I have been listening to his music off and on for a while. I am one of these people who will listen to everything they can find of an artist, and listen to it over and over (yes to other people's disgust) and then just stop listening to it. The result is that I have a soundtrack running through my life and when I pick up an artist again I am catapulted back to the time when I was listening to that music. So today, I picked up Joe again. He is great- not just because I love his acoustic style, and his original lyrics, but because he puts ALL of his CD's on his website to listen to- this always makes me happy. I started listening to his album, "Stompin Grounds" and was, yes, transported back.
Interesting thing about his love songs, they aren't really the love songs of my life. I mean, we all have pitfalls, bad break-ups, those we wish we had followed, those we wish we hadn't. These songs are all so unique, and they do not apply to me right now. Yet, hearing them I am nostalgic. The music is so vivid, I can visualize this man singing to this other random girl or girls, these words- and they are beautiful, sad, humorous and wonderful all at the same time. He wants to know her, and wants to love her. I guess it makes me reminiscent because how many of us actually have love songs that we can relate to? And yet, how great would it be if we were a part of at least one love song, so unique and so beautiful?

"The only thing I know is true, is when I close my eyes at night, the only thing I see is you, and I believe that we can see it through, and I'm praying that you see it too." Now who can't feel empathy for such a desire?

Thanks to Joe Purdy, Stompin Grounds, "This Morning Blue"

Resource Allocation

What direction are you going in, how do you plan to get there, are you there yet, do you need to change directions to get there, do you even want to be there, what? we were there all along?? These are the questions that come to us as we sojourn here- in whatever we pursue. The amount we want to give to individuals, to organizations, to ourselves, our families all changes with the transient nature of time. Even in the midst of pouring everything into one thing I will turn and think to myself, "is this where I am supposed to be, am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing?" At which point I think, "well of course it is, otherwise I would be somewhere else doing something else."

What is really amazing to me is when I look around at how others choose to distribute their resource of time. If you think about it, time is more precious than any resource we have, and least known. We all know that we want X dollars for a new ____, but none of us know if we will wake up tomorrow to spend it or not. We cannot buy more time, and we cannot sell it. It is the great equalizer, it does not discriminate, does not care if you have a really good reason or not. When time is up, the game is over.

For this reason, those people that use it in a way that I deem excellent, have great worth in my eyes. Today I am reminded of a beautiful woman that spent her life being only ordinary and yet exceptional. Her job was one in a million, teaching. Her love was typical, children. Her passion was beautiful and her style impeccable. These things did not make her excellent. Her excellence came from her resource allocation. She did not know that she only had 47 years to make her mark, and yet she was driven with a desire to change the injustice that she saw and to love her daughters. In a determined state, she chipped away, student by student, barrier by barrier at the lives of illiteracy and poverty that she taught. There was time to celebrate, always, and there was time to relax. But her focus remained her focus- regardless.

Sometimes, when you are very close, you do not even realize how truly amazing the person you are near is. Not long after her time was finished here on earth, I came across a young girl at a drive-in-restaurant. The girl recognized me because of my voice, it was the same voice that had encouraged her, driven her and motivated her to reach for goals that were bigger than the place she lived in. She asked if I was her dear teacher's daughter and I told her that I was. She declared with tears in her eyes that she never would have been able to be anything, or do anything if it was not for the encouragement of her fourth grade teacher, my mother.
Resource allocation well spent.