100th Post - The Ancients

Hey guys! Wanna know somethin' cool? This is my 100th post! And so what do you think I will do for it? Well, first of all I will announce it. Secondly, I will post a poem! Imagine that. ;)

The Ancients

Sands of time

Blow across the ruined lands

Once ruled by Kings

With their triumphant hands

Spirits there

Remain on broken ground

And the dying trees

Now rustle without sound

When the children played

The rapture stayed

And every heart was a serenade

But now darkness looms

And the crescent moon

Now plays the ancient mourning tune

Of the kingdom's merry days

But alas, they could not stay

Oh, they could not stay

Ruined by pride

The kingdom tore apart

With revenge inside

Every citizen's heart

No one feels

No one understood the rain

Not one cried

Nobody felt the pain

When the children played

The rapture stayed

And every heart was a serenade

But now darkness looms

And the crescent moon

Now plays the ancient mourning tune

Of the kingdom's merry days

But oh, they could not stay

No, they could not stay

Some days

I remember the people

Some times

I can still hear their pleas

When the children played

The rapture stayed

And every heart was a serenade

But now darkness looms

And the crescent moon

Now plays the ancient mourning tune

Of the kingdom's merry days

But oh, they could not stay

No, they could not stay

No, they would not stay

~Trevor Howell

Sea Life

After a long wait, my single has finally gone out on iTunes.

...And I am stoked! :D Not just because I will be getting paid if people buy it, but just for the fact to say I have a song on iTunes! So if you wanna check it out, I would be honored. And I would be even more honored if you were to purchase it for $.99! Because that would be awesome.

Anyways, here's the link!

Sea Life

Life Lessons

Well, I survived. And living I must say feels quite nice.

Survivor Man was this past Thursday through Saturday morning, and it was quite the experience. I still am no a camper, mind you! But the experiences I had were worth going for. Let me share two of the biggest ones right here.

Lesson #1
After meeting at 6:30 AM Thursday morning, we headed off to the mountains. Upon reaching the parking lot, the leaders split the YM into two teams, and gave each team a map. I should mention that this map was void of names. Nada. They were all blotted out. All that was on the map was nameless lakes and trails, with one lake circled: our destination. "Get us there!" they said. And so each team had to figure out which lake we were trying to get to, and then get there. First team there got a prize.
My team was quite indecisive. It took us about 20 minutes just to take a guess at which lake was circled, and then about every 5 minutes on the trail, Jordan (one of the priests in my group) would stop us all and take out the map to look at it again for 20 more minutes. But here is the lesson that we learned upon finally reaching the lake (which, by the way, I was right from the start. Island Lake!). Every time our group would stop so that Jordan could triple check the map again, our leaders would scratch their heads, get this pained/confused look on their face and say one syllable. "Huh!" That's it.
The whole way to the lake went this way, and upon finally reaching the right lake, the leaders took the time to give us this analogy: The devil makes us doubt ourselves. Every time we make a decision, he tries to get us to think it's the wrong one. Especially if it's the right one. Every time that we decided to keep hiking on to Island Lake, the leaders would always say something that planted just that little seed of doubt in our hearts. But through it all, I had made my decision that the right lake was Island Lake, and so that's where I urged our team to go the whole time. And upon reaching the lake, we not only realized that we were the first team there, but that this whole Survivor Man experience was going to be full of little lessons like that.


The other thing we learned from that experience was that our leaders are like the devil.


Lesson #2
This lesson took part during the second day. After waking up Friday morning, (if you could call it that. Not many of us got any sleep) we packed up camp and went off hiking to our next destination which was supposed to be six miles away. But that's another story.
After about .5 miles, we got lost. Figures, huh? Well, we went up over a mountain, and as we peaked the top of it, there were some really marshy areas where the trail we were on just disappeared. After spending about 40 minutes looking for the trail, we just decided to put our orientation skills to the test. So we got out the map we were using (which was much like the first map we had - no names), found the direction we needed to head in, and started down the canyon. Unbeknownst to us, one of our leaders had a GPS with the trail loaded onto it.
After hiking a ways with just using the compass skills we had, the leaders collaborated and made an executive decision to turn us around. We, with the compasses, had felt that it was a good idea to just go strait for a river that we needed to follow. But Brett, with the GPS, had seen that we were most definitely NOT going in the correct direction. So finally, the leaders instead of being followers, became leaders and decided to take us back to the trail. Here is what our path looked like (the black dotted line in the bottom right was roughly our path).

The lesson we learned from this experience was thus: sometimes, bush whacking can be pretty fun! You can feel really accomplished sometimes by using your own reckoning to find your own way to the destination, but they way our leaders put it, and I totally agreed with them, was that they would rather get there knowing that they were on the right path than just blindly walking. Brett, with the GPS, was watching our trail as we made our own way, and he said for the first half hour, we were going pretty parallel with the right trail. But soon, we veered off and became quite a far ways away from the trail. That's when they decided to stop us and give us a little lesson.
What I took from this experience was that this hike is a lot like our life. We can feel really confident with ourselves, justify every little thing we do, say that we're good people, but when it all comes down to it, we may not be on the correct path. Even if we have been going parallel with it for a long time, we haven't been on it, and thus we don't know when it could make sudden turns and we could get completely lost, like what happened to us. The GPS on this hike we compared to repentance, or the prophets trying to get us back on track. Because, as you can clearly see on the map, we were quite a ways before we finally turned around to go looking for the trail again.


Anyway, there were many more experiences I had, but it would make this post much longer, and so I settled with these. All in all, it was a neat experience!


. . . But I still dislike camping.

If I Ruled The World

If I Ruled The World

If I ruled the world

Many things would change

I'd outlaw all the creepy bugs

Because I think they're strange

No more pointless roads

That lead to nowhere at all

No more crazy kids

Who bounce on rubber balls

No more undigested dinner food

Would be inside my hall

Because, you see, I'd have it all

If I ruled the world

If I ruled the world

The aliens would see

And I'd make a truce with them-

The whole entire galaxy!

I'd have servants

Who would wash my toes

I'd have servants

Who would blow my nose

Servants who would paint a portrait

Of me posing with a fire hose
Because, you see, anything goes

If I ruled the world

If I ruled the world

I'd make a giant slide

And at the bottom there'd be a pool-

The ocean's rising tide!

And everyone would do

Whatever I decree

And I'd be the coolest king

That anyone could be!

Oh yes! That would be the life

I'm sure you'd all agree

But unfortunately,

At the moment...

The world rules me.

~Trevor Howell