The Make-Over: Ceaseless and Sorrowless

The other major change I made to the blog was, obviously, the web address.  After I changed the name, I thought that I really out to have a new web address too.  Why not, right?  I wanted something to match the type of things I hope to write about as well as the name.  I wanted something to remind me of why I started blogging in the first place.  But, alas, I couldn't come up with anything I liked, much less anything that hadn't been taken.  So I have up.

As is the way with these types of things, though, the right idea eventually found me.  I've found that brainstorming is only really productive if you have some clouds in your brain to begin with, maybe a little wind.  I don't know how it is for anyone else, but I can seldom will myself to be creative on the spot and come up with good results.

But where was I?  Ah, yes - the address.  The bolt of inspiration that caught up to me after I had given up on it.

When I was in college, the LDS Institute held weekly devotionals wherein a guest speaker spent an hour or so with a chapel full of students, offering motivation and inspiration (or trying to do so, at least.  One of the first devotional addresses I can remember involved the speaker saying something like "You know you're in college when you spend $200 for a book you don't want, don't read it, and sell it back for $7.  Neener-neener.").  It was in one of these devotionals that I was first introduced to Arthur Edgar O'Shaughnessy's "Ode."

I was working on getting into nursing school at that point, but I was also very interesting in poetry.  I set out to find the full poem, fell in love with it, and committed it to memory.  You probably know the one I'm talking about - "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams..."  (It is not a Willy Wonka original.  Don't be deceived).

The seventh stanza reads:

"But we, with our dreaming and singing,

Ceaseless and sorrowless, we!

The glory about us clinging

Of the glorious futures we see,

Our souls with high music ringing:

O men!  It must ever be

That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing

A little apart from ye."

It seemed like the perfect companion for a title like "Tales from Far Away."  My life has diverged from all of my friends' and family's.  We are not far, and yet apart.  Not separated, and yet irreversibly divided.  And wherever we are, time moves on, ceaseless.  We have sorrows, but they are not what define us. 

I married a man who loves to sing.  He is always singing something and he sings sunshine into our home.  If anyone asks, we are out here in the middle of our lovely Somewhere, living our dreams.