Since my June photo blog is finally up a month late I may as well send July's up there with it. This past month I learned that in order for relationsips to be anything worth missing you have to put some work in. Old news, I know, but often when you experience something first hand it becomes more realistic and something you may have heard your whole life finally makes sense because it actually applies to you. My dad reminded me tonight that it's really super important to go about living with an outward perspective instead of an inward. We cannot provide all the love, care, and nourishment that we need for ourselves. Silly lame little analogy: Let's say Ann and Blake are engaged, if Ann and Blake are both in the relationship seeking only to receive, their relationship won't be strong because they will both be sending empty boomerangs out that come right back to them without bringing anything home. If they go into the relationship sending arrows of love at eachother instead, they will both be giving love and by giving they will be recieving. Make any sense? I can see the little picture worked out in my head but don't know if I explained my thoughts well. Basically, you can't walk around town thinking only of what you want and what you desire and what you can get out of every situation because that will leave you empty. If you walk into your day with eyes open to find others needs and do your best to help and love them then you will be truly blessed because that is the example that Jesus set for us. It's a struggle, it really is, especially for me. But it is also a joy to live with an outward perspective and I am thankful for the people in my life who have been reminding me of that. I had the best weekend of my summer in July as well as the beginning of something very hard and want to be as thankful as I can for everything.
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Now that July is over I may as well put up my June photo blog because obviously I'm very on top of things. I don't have much to say about June seeing as it finished over a month ago. There is one thing though that stands out to me as something I discovered to be very important: the first step to being "happy" is deciding every morning that you are in a good mood. A trap that I fall into more often than not is waking up searching for happiness and waiting for something superbly pleasant to happen in order to make me happy. I learned that if you wake up and immediately dress yourself in the mentality that everything is a blessing it is so much easier to find joy and amusement in not so pleasant things such as soggy cereal, being woken up by a screaming four year old, and forgetting your shoes when you are already late for work. Waking up and deciding to put your happy pants on sure won't fix all of your problems but it is a step and you can't get anywhere without taking steps. As I look back and try to think of what kind of month June was I simply remember that I didn't say thank you enough. I didn't say thank you enough and mean it. So time to start meaning it, yeah? finger painting roadtripping sunsets sweet children adventures the friends good eats tried my hand at creating some logos //l.b.
My friend Amalia is really cool to be honest and she likes to show up at my house at the most unexpected times and either bring me food, particpate in my families activities or take me on an adventure. On one of the first day's of June she took me for an adventure which involved a sand box, me eating a lot of {grass, cheese and cookies} and a lot of laughter. // l.b.
A little something I learned this month: Stop waiting for friday, for summer, for someone to fall in love with you, for life. Happiness is achieved when you stop waiting for it and make the most of the moment you are in now. I get bored very easily sometimes and I let myself learn to dread things and learn to eagerly await things that actually don't matter in the long run. I find myself waiting for a moment that will excite my senses and make me feel happy. This month I was reminded more than usual how flimsy and temporary those little happy feels are. I was reminded how wonderful it is to dig through a pile of old books and spend an hour reading one of your first chapter books when you could be sleeping but it was really a nice book and brought back a lot of memories so it was pretty much worth it. I was reminded how delightful it is to find new music and take your little sister outside to finger paint pictures of each other. I was reminded that friends are really great and family is too and sometimes making other people happy and pointing them back to God is the best way to find lasting joy. I learned that people are still fun even after they have changed. I've learned that my big sisters are blessings. I learned that writing prayers for my friends down on paper helped me think more clearly. I learned that trying new things is fun and nourishing your inner child is so very very very fun. May was nice and I am thankful for every single day of it and how God blessed me again and again and again. got new shoes and they took me a lot of places new music happened I enjoy sandwiches travel happened the clouds are delightful sometimes a lot of bonfires happened // l.b. [well this looks terrible on mobile ok]
she's the kind of girl who'll fracture her mind till its light and she'll break her own heart and you know that she'll break your heart too / r.s. let go of her hand [well this looks terrible on mobile ok] I patted the cereal box on it's back and let a few more sawdust rings fall into the porcelain bowl that I was grasping in my right hand. My faded baby blue bandana fell off of my wrist just as I decided I had enough dry Cheerios for the night so I picked it up and single handedly tied it back around my wrist as I put the cardboard box that was two thirds of the way filled with stale-ing Cheerios back onto the crowded shelf and pushed it around till I felt confident that it would not fall. My bare feet slapped across the tiles as my oversized grey Greece sweatshirt warmed my arms up and I stepped into the window surrounded room. I sat down on the love seat, wrapped myself up in a quilt and let my damp hair fall down in a borderline uncomfortable cascade onto my neck. The house was quiet and dark and I could see stars through the skylights as my mind continued to rapidly yet respectfully converse with itself.
This is really the most wonderful thing for my soul after a nice night of friends and food. Thinking about it tonight should probably have been filled with some super stressful, worrisome and uncomfortable hours due to the fact that my final paper for my Composition II class was due at midnight and that it was not near finished. Somehow it happened to be one of the best nights I've had in a while. My oldest sister and some of her friends from college visited for dinner which included multiple plunges into the ice cold waters of our pool, an hour or so in the hot tub and a few hours eating cupcakes and drinking coffee while we discussed personalities and laughed. I went to the computer around 11:00 to finish four or so pages of my paper within less than an hour and got it sent in on time and finished to a satisfactory state. I then got up to discover a sleeping house with all the lights off and decided to munch on some dry Cheerios until my brain stopped wandering and decided to sleep. This isn't the firsr time I've sat in the sunroom with a quilt and a bowl of dry Cheerios while the rest of my family slept. The night we arrived home from our spring break in Mexico I did the exact same thing and meant to write about it but never got around to it. Writing this has reminded me how tired I am and I think I better go to sleep. Tonight reminded me to treasure moments and not let them slip through your fingertips. It also reminded me that growing up happens and sometimes it really hurts. It hurts because growing up means remaining a child yet letting go of your childhood. I think us humans so often want to become an adult while we live in our childhood which is the opposite of what we were designed to do. It seems as if it would hurt less if we could do all the adult things but do them as we live in our childhood. Sadly but thankfully that is not what growing up means. Growing up means you get to stay a child and stay yourself and you don't have to conform to any molds but it also means you have to let go of your childhood which can really really hurt. But growing up is part of life so I'm going to start teaching myself to embrace it and find a reason to be passionate about it. // l.b. "There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast." -Charles Dickens
While in Mexico my camera was always by my side. This resulted in one crack of a ten dollar lens filter and a whole lot of pictures that will forever be dear to my heart. One thing that I always find myself noticing are shadows and lighting, whenever I saw a representation of this that caught my eye on spring break I took a photo of it. Here is a bit of a collection of some of these photos, they all make me so inspired because I am amazed at the way the brightest light can end in a strict line at any given moment and give way to utter darkness. Small feet scamper up and down the runway unaware of the effect they have.
I remember someone once saying that sometimes you just have to talk to a year old to understand life again. I remember my inward response to that statement "Two year old's can't even speak, how are they going to tell me anything about life?" I can tell you for sure that talking to a child won't tell you anything about life because they don't understand anymore about life than you do...in fact they understand alot less. But I think that may be why a two year old can tell you so much about life. They don't fully understand any of the things that the world wants you to understand so they focus on other things, important things. Things like not caring about fingers caked in frosting because who cares about messy hands when you can instead worry about laughing. Things like building and rebuilding a meager tower of four blocks because it never gets boring. Things like enjoying a task and doing it not to get it done but instead to have fun. Children don't have all the answers but they don't spend their days searching for them and that may be a lesson to us. This is my four year old baby sister, Hope Abigail. “Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” ― C.S. Lewis This is my lovely cousin Tegan. She is such an example to me in the way she lives life, the way she loves the lord, and the kindness she exuberates in every step. I got to spend spring break with her along with my other cousins on this side of the family and the main reason I miss Mexico so much is because of the time I got to spend with my cousins there. Numerous times over the week I noticed the way she really cares for people and wont let them feel left out or unloved. She is a huge role model for me and I am so blessed to call her family. On a completely related note Teg is also one of the most gorgeous ladies I know and rocks a solid style. Big thanks to her for letting me take some photos of her lovely spirit and she also willingly grabbed the camera a few times to take some shots of me which was a treat and meant alot.
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