"Ain't love the sweetest thing"

Okay lovers there is great wisdom in this quote, "Would you keep a chive on your tooth just because you enjoyed last night's potato?" (Boston Common) It is absolutly true. One cannot direct their life from the past. However, there is beauty in living life in a moment rooted in the experiences of the past. Therefore, I might change the quote to a conversation that would go like this:

"Would you keep a chive on your tooth just because you enjoyed last night's potato?"

"Well yeah, but only if it meant I would enjoy my next potato that much more!"

Now now enough of the lameness cause if you read my last post you are probably well aware I am in the mode of looking back over the last year, even morning the changing tide of my life, and the changes I have come to embrace and adore as my everyday in The City. The very things that made me crumble in fear just a year ago are now the thing I seek in the coming months as I transition back into home life. Granted the changes that have occured over the last year have come at a premium, paid for by my body which on my 22nd birthday delivered the gift that keeps on giving, yep you guessed it, graying eyebrows, which was of course followed by several converstations about my premature aging. Yeah it sucks. I am looking at the other side of the aging hill (and don't worry I have invested, or Diva Michelle has invested, in anti-aging creams so that when I actually get around to finding THE ONE i wont quite be workin the silver fox look) but it was worth every gray goose. With each graying hair I will look back to my time in NYC and remember that a life absent of change, or in the words of Socrates, a life unexamined, is not worth living. Believe me, I hate that it took an experience like this, one in which I had to be waked up side the head, and smashed in the face by life, BUT HOW LUCKY I AM!!!!!

Friends now please indulge me, and lets get our CHIVE on and talk about something else I have learned more about this year which is the good old classic L.O.V.E. Over the last year away from home I have been filled with deep resiviors of gratitude for everything I have been blessed with, and more specifically the family which continues to defy and re-define my understanding of what if means to love. I think more than one of you would agree that U2 said it best in "aint love the sweetest thing," but I will attempt to expand those sentiments by sharing my light bulb moment about love, and specifically loving deeply. Of course, place someone in a difficult situation, void of the familiar, and they will quickly decide what it is they love most. But when you get beyond that desparate, fear based clarity there is room for even greater love, and our understanding of, and ability to love will infinately increase. Love is a combination of, but obviously not limited to, emotional connectivity, history, compatible energies, selflessness, forgiveness, safety, being in the moment, and most importantly and significantly, GRATITUDE, GRATITUDE, and GRATITUDE. It is in moments where Gratitude confounds us, that our current understanding of love can increase and even be replaced by a greater understanding of what it means to love and be loved. I have found that it is in moments like this, where one definition replaces another, literally confounding our previous comprehension, that I am reminded of why we are here on earth. Now here comes the light bulb moment. If God sent his only begotten Son to save the world from sin because he LOVES us, and Jesus Christ performed the miraculous acts of the atonement in both the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross because he LOVES us, perfectly, it would only seems appropriate that we do all that we do (prayer, scripture study, family, friends, community, etc.) so as we might eventually learn to love as Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ love us, and in so doing create worlds without number for which we will require fully expanded resiviors of love.

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE you all, and I am sorry that you get stuck readings my retarded posts, which are so melodramatic, but this is me, and these are the things I have come to know, and I know that there is a love out there that vibrates on a spiritual, godly level becuase I have experienced it in you all, and as I have realized how RARE that kind of love truly is, I have discovered untapped gratitude and therefore love for the incredible people God has placed in my life. Again, I love you all.

Candy Land