Soul Food

As much of a foodie as I am, and I would really love to sit around and write how much I love food, this entry is about the soul and the things that I do to feed mine. My time for myself is spent immersed in warm bubbly happiness in the bathtub. Now that I have a computer I put on my favorite Ingrid Michaelson Pandora station and soak with my fashion magazines that teach me all about how to be prettier. Really I just like the pictures, I am like a child who loves picture books! I know it sounds completely cliche' but candles really add to the experience! I fit all different ways into the bathtub and so I squirm around until I am comfortable and then I melt in all the gooey goodness of spending quiet time with myself and my favorite music. Sometimes I find my mind has taken over and the pretty picture isn't holding my attention anymore. I will unleash my wandering thoughts and let them roam freely. This is when they tend to reveal truths that I didn't know I knew. This is when I can truly be quiet and teach myself. I mull over decisions, I piece together troubles and problems, and I think about everything in my life.
My hard working body thanks me every moment I am in the tub. My muscles drink in the warmth and heal with it. More often than not I am having a bath to ease my muscles and not my mind. I recommend hot baths to my massage clients every single day, and wouldn't that just make me such a hypocrite if I didn't take time to enjoy one?
Another thing I do to feed my soul is work on my relationship with God. I study the scriptures, I say heartfelt prayers and I take time to study and conceptualize the things I learn each Sunday at church. Feeding the soul should be the most enjoyable of experiences. Speaking of which, all my bubbles are slowly popping without me enjoying them! I'm off!!!

Risks and Benefits

Risk vs Benefit

This biggest decisions in life can have the biggest payoffs, and also the biggest risks. Why wouldn't something so grandiose also come with the potential of failure? The big question is how do you know when the benefit outweighs the risks? You could pull the pen out of your pocket protector, slide your glasses further up your nose and scribble down a pros and cons list in your daykeeper or you could do as I do! I spend weeks thinking of almost nothing else, I weigh the odds with my heart and feel them out. I try to imagine any outcome, what terrible thing could happen to me? How much happiness could I really have? In my contemplation I often unearth truths and revelations that I didn't know were in there. Every day in my life I am realizing that being an adult doesn't get much different than it is right now! I thought maybe that someday life would be boring, or that some light could go on above my head that pointed a giant “Grown Up” arrow to me. It feels pretty much the same day in and day out as the years before. Though I have often been told I act a bit more mature than I actually am, I think it may have something to do with my optimistic yet realistic expectations about what life is.

I learned early on that life will not be handed to me. I am engrained with the thought process that I can do anything I want with my life and it will happen if I put forth enough effort. So that is exactly what I did! Pioneered my way into a career, moved out of state, improved upon myself until I loved what I saw in the mirror and found behind these green eyes. Though I can barely take any credit. Every talent I have been given and every opportunity I have acted upon has been handed to me on a silver platter by the Lord. The process of me utilizing these things for my benefit is a two person act and I am currently trying to perfect that balance between me and the Big Guy Upstairs.

Anyway, the point of this entry is to hash out within my own mind the theory of risks and benefits, pros and cons and how do you know what the right decision is? Simple...whatever God wants for you will happen. That is a big pill to swallow! How long should we date before we get married? Should we even get married? What car would be best for me to buy in my life right now? What school will be the most beneficial in my carreer path? What should I do to be more financially stable? Would moving back to my hometown take me two steps backward? How much is too much to sacrifice for happiness? Am I being unrealistic and letting a golden opportunity pass me by? The trick is to put your faith and trust in the Almighty and be willing to be happy with whatever He decides for you. He has your best interest at heart and He can see the bigger picture of your life. You may want nothing more than to stay locked here in this beach town driving your convertible and basking in the SoCal sun, but He may see the greater happiness you will receive by doing something that seems impossibly unbearable at the moment. This is a hard lesson for this stubborn girl to learn, but I am learning it over and over all my life, and really I wouldn't have it any other way!

Falling In Love

Love has been on my mind a lot lately as I begin this new adventure with BlueStar. For me love grows like a well nurtured Forget-me-not, but not always. Sometimes the mere suggestion of being loved sends me spiraling into furious passionate reciprocal feeling when they may not actually be real (hence Marco)...I have also been reading this month's Ensign and it couldn't have come at a more pivotal moment in my life. BlueStar and I have decided to stay together and soak up every moment of perfection we have together here in California for the next five months. When August comes around there might be some severe heartbreak, but I am feeling so calm and peaceful about it that I am not worried at all! We fit together, like pieces of a puzzle. We are very much alike: naturally happy, adventurous, creative, driven people who have come from somewhat similar backgrounds (very wealth-less childhoods, major conversions to our church, independent of our families, awful heartbreaks) and we have tons of simiar goals that we just simply discovered that we shared and didn't make together: adopting children, settling down in Southern California, never ever having divorce be an option, going on a mission together, making a huge difference in the world somehow...I fit with this man.

So the question now is what does falling in love mean? How does it happen? It suggests that it was accidental and against your will. Falling is a feeling of being out of control and not understanding what happened until the result: hitting the floor. This sentence doesn't exactly sound like the best thing to ever happen in one's life, let's see if we can find the real gem in this concept. There are extraordinarly wonderful moments to be out of control, such as the huge drop of a roller coaster, or sitting lazily in the sun in the passenger seat of a car, or feeling your ears pop as your airplane wins the gravity battle. There are also many terrifying ones (some of my wonderful ones may be your terrifying ones...that is what makes life so diverse and amazing) such as being pulled from the shoreline by the undeniable forces of the tide, or watching helplessly as the car behind you refuses to slow down at the red light, or trying as you might to convey your opinion to a best friend who is ruining their life...out of control, like anything, has it's light and dark. Not understanding what happened until the result is a funny one. I remember once leaving my Mom's house on a frozen night and losing my footing on the 3 front porch stairs what were slicked with a layer of ice. I fell square on my back and got a horizontal bruise from hip to hip. I found it very funny because I didn't even remember slipping, just sitting on the ground laughing. I have also had experiences like this where I find myself deep in a puddle of affection without having any recollection of ever getting there. What did I see in this person again? How did I get to this point? It happens, and sometimes it works out for the best. Not having been raised on instant anything (there will not be instant pudding in my home, cook and serve only!) I am not a believer of love at first sight. My love must be nourished and reassured constantly until it blossoms into an all encompassing tree with it's limbs and blossoms wrapping tightly around the other person. The last and most terrifying part is the hitting the floor. This part can destroy a person, can turn them into a hollow shell and leave them shattered laying in the bottom of a dry bathtub wondering how they are ever going to find the strength to climb out. I do not want to focus on this because I am sure that with that visual each of you paused for a moment and remembered being there, wherever there was for you, and felt enough pain to not want to read further.

I love that the phrase contains the word “in”! Falling IN love. I imagine myself thin and lovely in a flowing wispy dress standing on the edge of a slab of marble. Spread out below me is an expanse of rose colored water, only it's almost more like air than water. Water surely is one of the most powerful forces on the planet, but air is a necessity of a different sort. We can choose to drink water, to eat wet foods, to swim until we are soggy; but breathing is a different story. As Regina Spektor sang it best “everyone must breathe until their dying breath.” Air equals love in this analogy if you have not gathered that already. Ok back to me in my pretty dress. I imagine gracefully tumbling, willingly taking the plunge so-to-speak. I would break the surface and breathe in a new life, new love, a new person. His smell would be all around me and I could simply bask in the deliciousness of this new sensation. We would float blissfully, tumbling forever in this rose colored endlessness, completely saturated IN love.

Now we approach the last word of our darling phrase, this verbage so easily confused with lust, among other things. l.o.v.e.....

What more to say? It is the single most sought after thing in the whole world. It is the holy grail of emotions, the fallen star, the treasured prize at the end of the race. Those few successful ones run hand in hand into the sunset leaving the rest of us behind in a shadow of green envy, and self pity. Love comes in all shapes, motherly love is the shape of warm lips gently kissing her newborns brow, friendship smells like sugar and is the shape of us all laying together on the trampoline on warm summer nights, family love is the shape of shipping rope tied in endless knots never to be undone and sometimes there is romantic love that is the shape of sand caught up on a light ocean breeze, it blows away easily and picks up just as easily the next time. If you can be counted as one of the lucky ones who found Atlantis you can only do your best to make love stick around like the polished slab of marble my feet were warming in my pretty dress. You feed it with laughter, you water it with compassion and thoughtfulness, and you put it in the sunshine of compliments. Ok this is getting stupid...you know what I mean. Both of you adore each other enough to nurture it and treasure it more than yourselves. This is falling in love to me!