Tracks In The Dust

A Father's Advice About Learning the Mission of Life

02 Oct 2014

Hopelessness and Despair

What amazes me today what appears to be that there are so many lost people in the world. People looking for a purpose. People feeling helpless and out of control of their lives. There have always been lost people with who feel hopeless and heavy with despair. It is nothing new, it is a human ailment since time began. .

But these days there are non-stop 24/7 reports of people around the world who are struggling with their lives, with their vision on what they want from life. They feel alone and seek to find acknowledgement from others that they are something.

Feeling alone can result in evil things happening. Evil provides hope by authority, allowing people to reach for bad things that will make them feel in-charge. It is a kind of hope that is easy to come by with when one is alone. It seems ironic that in a world so “full” of people hope on things we should not

But that is what is means to be hopeless I think. Thinking there is no way out. And then today it is so much easier to let things leak in from everywhere. 24/7 – lonely in front of a glowing monitor as it speaks. The appearance that the world around us is “so bad” and everything is wrong. The government cannot help you, there is no end in sight and the news is not good . Negative piles on to the despair one may already feel.

What is truly sad is that the positive messages get lost in the balance. There is the rub. Embracing the messages of hope and promise are hard to do, it means being confident in its existence. Feeling as though there is some way to make something out of life. Not seeing the short time on this Earth as worthless. Looking for answers from those who are willing to help lift you up.

The answer is there. It is in the spirit of the human being to focus on the simple. Too many people make the simple salvation too complicated. They find all the rules they can to provide you with hurdles- when salvation is only one faithful step away. Choose it.

Posted in Doing Things That Will Change Your Life and tagged Acceptance, Change, choices, Dispair, Doubt, Faith, Hope, Hopelessness, Postive Thinking, Religion and Spirituality, Who Are You

30 Sep 2014

Holding Down (Poems, Prayers and Promises)

Holding Down

Lately my spirit is held down

And my head is bouncing like sound against the walls that are surrounding me

It is that it’s my darkest days

and somehow I’ve acted plays that now lives to make me be

So now I lean to the side and drift

like I am waiting for things to sift through the fine chains that surround

Like a bird on the highway as the cars go by

doing everything from keeping to fly and go where I wont be found

Other poems – my pages:

Songs and Poems from Another TIme

Posted in Poems, Prayers and Promises and tagged Arts and Entertainment, choices, Faith, moments, Opinion, Poems, Postive Thinking

25 Sep 2014

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The Colors of Your Mood

Changing moods. Something that we all experience at many times in the course our lives, in the course of a minute, hour or day in fact.. Although we may dream that we can be happy every day, there are going to be a lot of times that we are not.

Our moods come in all colors in our lives don’t they?

Blue- we have those days. We have those times. We sing them, we are them. Blues

Black- those specific days we want to never live again – the black day

Red- Those angry days

Grey- those days of emotion, of loneliness or despair

Yellow- happiness? caution? urgency?

Our best answer to manage our lives is to understand our “true colors” and make the choices that help to color our attitudes.

What are the colors of your moods? The color of your world?

Cyndi Lauper – True Colors

Donovan- Colours – a songwriter of many colors indeed.

Posted in Life's Sound Track (Music) and tagged choices, Cyndi Lauper, Donovan, Emotion, Happiness, Hope, Joy, life is precious, Memories, moments, Music, Postive Thinking, Self-Awareness, Sprituality

23 Sep 2014

What is Your Muse?

Inspiration.

Being inspired to communicate sometimes can be hard. It can stop with the idea that there is absolutely nothing to say.

Funny but most everyone I met these days has something to say. There is always something that can spark the reason to want to express themselves. it could be on this blog-site, it could be at work, on the Internet somewhere, texting, calling, holding a sign, making noise in a crowd, wearing a t-shirt with something on it, or hundreds of other ways.

What provides the inspiration seems like a million times the ways available to communicate it.

For me music, or written word I guess does it. But perhaps sometimes I need a muse.

Profoundly the verb means: to become absorbed in thought; especially : to turn something over in the mind meditatively and often inconclusively

But I am talking about the noun. Founded from mythology of nine sister goddesses in Greek mythology presiding over song and poetry and the arts and sciences

I am looking for the “source of inspiration; especially : a guiding genius” What is your muse?

As usual I find it in my family and in the music of this world which is truly abundant. It is the language of expression that can reach across cultures, like may of the arts. It doesn’t take interpretation classes to understand it, it doesn’t have to have interpreters to help define it. It is what is in your heart. It is the muse of the arts and sciences that make up our everyday meaning.

Sarah Jarosz – A child prodigy at one point and now just a great artist. Perhaps my muse?

Posted in Doing Things That Will Change Your Life, Learning Lessons Along the Journey Of Life and tagged Advice, choices, Music, My Muse, Postive Thinking, Reality Check, Sarah Jarosz, Self-Awareness, Who Are You

25 Aug 2014

Schmaltzy Movies

Since I was probably old enough to change the TV channel on our family TV I have loved movies.

I guess I am going to turn in my “man card” to admit this: I love schmaltzy movies. Rom-com’s. Romantic comedies. I know that when I was a kid it was so easy to turn on the TV and work to find those Tracy/Hepburn classics, or Thin Man movies. Gable/Lombard, Astaire/Grable,,,the list of old movies goes on. My first fave movie of the era gone-by “It Happened One Night” was (is) one of those movies I can watch again and again.

But I am just as likely to scan the hundreds of channels today and find one that tweaks that old memory. And I am inclined to stop I guess. Whether it is old or contemporary. It is just in me.

“Love Actually ” (another one of my all time faves) just stops me cold and have to watch some/all of it. I know it is more like a holiday movie, but I am just stuck liking it. Or When Harry Met Sally, or Notting Hill, or Runaway Bride, You’ve Got Mail,or….you get the idea. That doesn’t even include the 60’s movies romping through hi-jinx and crazy situations, with stars as that can range from Sinatra to Tony Curtis or Rock Hudson.

So yeah, Julia Roberts movies, Hugh Grant, Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, and all that lot. Just the same to me there are stars of the 30’s and 40’s that were just great too… Once again you get the idea. I am a sucker. So many more. Old and new. Great sound tracks; inevitable endings where the “meet-cute” is over and the wrap up is forever bliss.

My wife chuckles when I stop and dwell on the Rom-com movies. Some end sad, some end with a head scratch, But any way, it is always great stuff. Heck- as part of my college degree (Communications/Media) we had CLASSES about movies. Bliss.

So put me up for the hours of wasted time I guess. Watching those movies. It is like hearing a great song or reading a great book, you want to listen to it or read it again. Movies are like that… just suspend everything else for a small bit of time and enjoy them.

Whew… I feel better. A confession of sorts (except for my immediate family who already knows this weird obsession and lives with it). Someday I will get over it…. perhaps.