Where The Earth Speaks

I need to go someplace where the land is not so mute. Where it will speak to me. Someplace where gentle swells and sighing dips will welcome me to roll into the rhythm of the ground. To speak its language. Someplace where sheer precipices and looming, roaring, walls will take me and hide me away in the folds and age of the very bone of the earth.
I cannot seem to hear the land, here. Or if I can it is a monotonous buzzing, a droning that carries with it no meaning, no message. Perhaps I simply do not understand the local dialect. And so life is covered with a heavy blanket of muffling silence. There is no echo, no reverb. There can be no amplification. When the land speaks, when it moves, life is more. Loneliness is emptier, joy is warmer, friendship is more full, a rush is so much faster, love burns so much brighter.

Failure puts things in perspective

I failed this week. I don't particularly wish to go into the details of my failure, but I failed. This brings up a few observations:
1). I am genuinely disappointed with myself. Surely that means something.
2). I am faced by the thought: if I get don't get into grad school, what will happen?
3). I am willing to consider that possibility, and not be scared out of my mind.
4). I still want to go to grad school. More than ever.
Thus I must improve, as always. Be better. Demand more, because I have, this past week, offered so little. If you read this, understand that I am not proud of my failure. I must better myself.

And so, with this in mind, we begin

I would like to think that I strive, in all things, for the truth. Perhaps a truth. Hopefully an honest truth. Thus, though few, if any, will ever read it, I find it appropriate to call this what it is.
This blog is the result of a tradition of irresponsibility, of laziness, of simple stupidity. Fully capable, I have often, in the past, found myself in an impossible situation, where what needs to be done cannot be completed with the appropriate level of quality in the time that I have left myself. I was supposed to "do" this directed study this summer. I started it--I usually start just about everything--and then failed to take it past the first slightly demanding assignment. A similar plot was followed in my directed study through Historical Methods, and it is to avoid the climax of that story, now completed, that I am brought to this web-page.
I am lucky to have around me an adviser who is both wise and patient, and a peer who is everything I should be--and by that I mean she is driven, responsible, and very good at what she does. She has already begun a blog for the purpose of aiding the completion of her senior thesis, and it is an impressive thing. Hopefully it can be a model.
Now, none of you few who may perhaps read this have come here for this type of post. Too bad. I am already finding this medium, this blank page, this blog, to be quite fun. So, in addition to my academic endeavors, I am going to fill this fount of potential with whatever tickles my fancy. It feels a place to stretch rhetorical wings.

If he falls, he fights from his knees

As per recommendation from my ever-wise adviser, I have created this blog for the purpose of accountability. It is here that I will post with, I now vow, regularity and frequency. The subject of these posts will be my reactions and thoughts as I progress through my Medieval History directed study. This in the hope of assisting me in my efforts to improve my discipline, to "fight from my knees."