I usually censor and restrain myself greatly when it comes to social media…it may not seem that way because I do love to share. My story, my opinion, my ideas and beliefs. I always think that no one wants to hear or they roll their eyes and laugh at the silliness that is this “connection.” But truthfully, I am an over sharer because I love the idea that a piece of me will be taken and ingested, a mind or heart will feel the outreach of ideas and want to make them a piece of themselves. It creates a timeless being. I know that ideas (I’m an air sign, what can I say) linger and affect people. They stick around and maybe they’re disturbing or harsh or in some eyes “wrong” (although I don’t believe in right or wrong as there is too much subjectivity in this universe to support that idea–to me), they are timeless and will be passed along, they will be argued or silently meditated on. And I know they impress the world with my print. I’ve spent most of my days insecure and scared to bare my all to the world, even to the people closest to me or even (gasp!) to myself. Every day, with practice, slowly but surely I gain confidence in my voice. In the nature of what I stand for in this life (and yes it will change every single day and second because I want to experience it all) and I find more and more that it is worthy. Of honor, of love. I am a unique being, we each are and we each and every one of us are worthy to be seen and experienced. Usually it is only because of our own selves that we cut that influx of love short. No more, I say!! Stand up straight, with bright eager and lustful eyes for this vibrant and beautiful life! Shout your presence from every tiny piece of ground you occupy and never shy away when someone comes up against you, they just want to be heard too. They just want to be relevant and known too. So honor them and take what they have to say seriously. It is all of them. And this is all of me. Here I am world! Take me or leave me but it will not hinder my boisterous roar. I will leave my impression on this universe and it will echo on through eternity whether I am here to recognize it or not. And that’s damn fuckin beautiful!!!

  Jesse and I took a short walk the other day before he left for his business trip. I hate when he travels and now that my support system is on the other side of America, it can get really lonely. But I can’t believe we live here! This place is perfect for when he travels, everything I could ever need is within walking distance or even just a short drive away! This picture is the day before he left at the park right next to our apartment complex. Do you see that view?! I know he has a little box on his head but if you look just beyond that, that is our view!!!! Everywhere! It’s stunning and every day when I get up and out I look over to the mountains and realize just how lucky I am to be able to witness with my own two eyes the timelessness of this stunning Earth! It really puts life into perspective. Everyone should be able to have this view, everyone should be able to be reminded of how big this universe is everyday like this, everyone should be able to recognize how small and yet how important we each are every single day. The sad part is that the reverence would be lost on so many people. It is lost on so many people. I want to live in a way that I remind others of that reverence every single day.

Most people’s idea of life is too small. It includes themselves and that’s it, and when it ends for them there must not be anything else afterwards. But it is so…small. It is scary to think that we mean nothing. Of course in that same breath I think we mean everything…but in the vast expanse of everything that ever has been and everything that ever will be, we mean nothing. We are not even an instant in all of time. I always like to think–of course time is relative–insects live their whole lives sometimes in a day or a week, their wings flap at a rate we can’t even witness with our big ol eyes…hummingbirds hearts beat so fast and they see the world we see in slow motion. A fly moves quicker than we could ever reach out to slap them…because time moves faster for them. A blue whales heart beats like this huge pump pressing slowly down on the blood to push it through the entirety of this huge animal. He experiences time on another level than a fly or a human. His time moves slow and his moves are weighted by water. His life is longer than any hummingbird living up to 90 years! What about the earth? This organism that lives and breathes. Inhaling the carbon dioxide and exhaling the oxygen. Then what about stars?! That explode into being and die with the same intensity? Like a heartbeat pulsing in and out of existence, scattering their guts throughout the universe to be reabsorbed by other stars and galaxies? Just as the human body dies and is buried to feed the grass and trees that feed off our nutrients. We come from this earth and we are fed straight back into the earth, indefinitely part of this wonderful earth and this wonderful universe. The earth is just a cell in a bigger picture. One day our sun will explode and take our solar system with it as the death of a human takes the life within our gut (millions of living organisms that have no awareness of the fact that they are just a part of our whole) and our cells with it…ugh!!!!! It’s so stunningly beautiful it makes my heart swell! We would do well to open our minds and hearts. We are nothing and yet we are everything. A part of this lovely cycle of death and rebirth. That’s heaven to me❤️

So we have been living in California for twenty days. Twenty beloved, beautiful, magical days! Getting here wasn’t easy. For years we believed in this impossible feat even when it didn’t look possible. Even when people on the outside looking in kept giggling because we had made the plan to go and then had to push it back…and then made the plan to go and had to push it back…again and again it kept falling through. Jesse and I fought and fought about when the right time to uproot from everything we knew and loved would be.  I’m the dreamer, I just wanted to go, I didn’t care what the details looked like or whether or not we had a place to go once we got there and Jesse (thank God!) is the pragmatic one who wanted a feasible plan. We argued about when the right time to make the trek across the country would be, after the holidays, before the next winter…do we travel during the spring or summer? Do we take the southern route or the northern route?

We made so many prepatory motions in order to facilitate this dream. Like downsizing our apartment and purging so many items in order to travel as light as possible. In my last post I shared about the biggest challenge in this move which was our finances, prepping and disciplining and changing behaviors that would keep us in a place where we wouldn’t be able to take this plunge. This wasn’t the only challenge though. As expected things kept popping up that would derail our plans. We are pretty darn stubborn though and by golly this was going to happen!

When we signed our lease with the apartment complex that we decided on we were unaware that a few days later they would call and tell us that the lady in our unit had decided to stay another month. What?!? Can you even do that?! Apparently so. We had already ended our current lease in Elkton and so we decided that we would make the trip anyway and ask the complex to put us up in a temporary unit. They did…this complex is by far the most amazing complex we have ever dealt with and are so blessed…the accommodations are more than anything I could ever expect and the people who run it have been more than amazing. Every concern and issue we’ve had they have jumped at the chance to resolve it. I am so grateful! A stark difference from the last few places we have resided.

The view right outside of our place. 

The moving company on the other hand was not so amazing. We opted to save as much money as we could but learned the hard way that you really do “get what you pay for” in this regard. At the beginning of this post I mentioned that we have been here for twenty days…well, we finally received our stuff from the moving company yesterday. YESTERDAY!!! Now granted, we are living in paradise, out of suitcases, but we have so much to be thankful for, like a washer and dryer in our unit that we don’t need quarters for, sunshine, a dishwasher (even though we didn’t have dishes there for a while…) but mostly just being here is a dream come true so a few (twenty) bad nights sleep couldn’t break us. We have already been through so much to get here…this little hiccup wasn’t going to get me down!! Until we realized that the movers wouldn’t actually move our stuff!! Unless we were willing to pay an extra $75. Seriously?! Welp, then haul our crap from the street side all the way up to our third floor apartment would be our workout for the day. And now we’ve got a bed!! We’ve got a bed and I’ve got my coffee press and all my art and jewelry making stuff and even clothes! It is amazing!

Finally got to make a cup of coffee in my pajamas!

There have been so many things to come up against us in this whole endeavor, I couldn’t possibly name them all and some were more devastating than others (like, leaving my beloved community and best friends and momma and sister), but I don’t want to spend too many posts on all of those things. Mostly I just want to highlight the simple fact that this move was not easy in any way but when you want something, I mean really want something, with every cell in your being, there is nothing else but to do other than go after that with all your might! Not only that but as an idealist and an optimist through and through I believe with all my heart that YOU can have literally ANYTHING your heart desires. ANY ANY ANYTHING!!!

No, it is not simple to chase your dreams. That’s why the only people who can truly live them are the people brave enough to reach out and grab them. You have to be willing to be uncomfortable and face the idea that it may be unrealistic or learn how to discipline your behavior. You may have to face turbulent times or learn to let go of a place or people you adore. You may have to sleep on the floor, literally or figuratively for quite some time. Where I find the power to face these difficult things is in the tiny little moments of beauty and light along the way that hold together my world. My little routines and habits that keep my sanity and allow me to express my gratefulness for everything beautiful in my world. Waking up early with the sun and giving thanks for the things i DO have, like my health and my lover and my beautiful family. Saying thank you to the Universe for every single thing that I am grateful for every single day, which I personally believe activates the Law of Attraction in your life, allowing the best things to find you. And lastly, but most important of them all, setting an intention. Your intention is what moves your world. Intention dwells in the space between the stuff. It is the mystery, the nothingness, and we can activate that space. Most of the “stuff” that we interact with, the material matter of our world is actually empty space. The whole Universe from outer space down to the room your sitting in and even further down, all the way to the atom is mostly just empty space. What dwells there? Our intention! So activate that space with your hopes and dreams. Fill it with love and intention and start taking steps with those dreams in heart and mind and let me tell you, you will have no other choice but to meet your dreams. Live with purpose and activate your world. I read a silly meme once and I think it goes like this: Whether you believe you will or you believe you won’t…you are right! So, don’t just let life take you on its ride, decide to gently guide it to the place that you want to be. I believe in you!! I believe that you will go where you want to go. I believe that you will make it to where you want to be.

You got this! Peace from the West Coast!!

We are finally on the road to California (okay, so we are here now since this was mostly drafted 20 days ago!)

It feels like a dream actually…we set this intention to move our lives to our favorite place to visit since long before I had ever even been here! The dream was born out of an escapist mindset I admit, my young “run away” mentality that was seated in fear and disguised as adventure but has since changed and evolved into the love seeking, life building “create the life you want” journey that we are on now. I’m actually so surprised at how well the trip is going. We’ve come up against challenge after challenge but press on we must. 

Our biggest challenge so far (and by “so far” I assumed that I would have this written before we actually got here and experienced a ton of OTHER challenges! Hahaha, doh!) has been our finances. Three years ago, after a trip to my home state of Colorado with my Momma, I was beginning to itch to see the world. I wanted  to meet new people and be exposed to new ideas. I wanted to see new ways of being that I believed would help in growing my mind and heart. For me, this is the meaning of life. Growth. Yes, you can grow anywhere but for me personally a pretty place connects me to the earth and ultimately, to my God. So, that’s where this intention started. I remember the day. I follow this beautiful yogini on Instagram, Rachael Brathen and she lives in Aruba. Yoga on an island every single day?! Holy hell, YES I want that!! And I just remember saying to myself, “why not me?!” Jesse, my husband is the practical one in the relationship and his simple answer was, “well, because we are in debt.” Hahah! It was true. We both grew up in poverty and had fallen into the credit card scheme as soon as we were able to sign a legal document as a way of alleviating the pressures of life. Out of that simple understanding, another intention was born…to get our finances straight, to live within our means and to stop spending unnecessary money on THINGS. 

Material items were my prison. For a very long time I had a server job where I would walk home with cash in hand every night. Naturally, the next day on the way to work I would find a reason to stop and spend what I had made the evening before, whether it was new make-up or a new dress for my shift, or even food out, it didn’t matter, I would find a way to blow the money. Ironically, I couldn’t afford the rent I owed or the payments to anything I needed to maintain my lifestyle…but who cares! My nails were done and I had every THING I wanted.

The illusion was that being able to buy what I wanted when I wanted was my freedom but the truth was quite a different discovery. Material items didn’t make me a better person, they didn’t make me cooler or more accepted by my friends, they didn’t give me love or fulfill my heart in any way. My new clothes or car didn’t hold or comfort my heart or grow my mind. Even though it felt like that at the time and I received quite a “high” from this behavior. I realized that I had quite an unhealthy attachment to stuff. So, Jesse made a spreadsheet of our outgoing money and our incoming money and we have been following it ever since. The simple lesson I have learned in that spreadsheet is that through discipline we find freedom. It was hard. Like really fucking hard. I’m a spender. I fight boredom by walking around in stores filled with pretty things. I like to surround myself with those pretty things and where once I was purchasing them every single day, I have learned how to curb my behavior and change my thinking. I started spending my time outside in nature, spending time with family and filling my time with things that fill up my heart instead. Spending unnecessary money was a habit that died so hard. I can’t tell you all the days and nights of rationalizing my emotions. Especially since right around this time I had also quit my job to pursue my true purpose which I hadn’t even discovered yet. I just knew it wasn’t sitting in the bottom of my closet crying because I didn’t have a new outfit for date night. That was not the person I wanted to be in this world, it was not the person I wanted to portray or the being I wanted to emanate. In fact, it was quite frankly, embarrassing!

In order to have this dream come true, or any of my dreams for that matter, this behavior had to die. And so it did. With the endless help of my loving and supportive husband who is always willing to be my sharp edge, we learned a new way. A way that would put us on a path to be able to manage our finances in a way that we didn’t feel like we were drowning all the time. We were willing to set an intention and live by it. We were willing to grind and grind, our beings and each other and our patterns and behaviors every single day, etching out this life from the formless stone that we were born as until we are a stunning sculpture of the life and relationship we have always wanted.

It was never easy. It will never be easy. Having the life of your dreams does not just happen, you have to be willing to go against the grain and believe when every one else giggles at your attempts. Finances was not the only challenge in this journey to our dream of living in California, and it won’t be the last one we face. You get the life you deserve. What you are willing to actively put into life, you will get back. People always make off handed comments about how lucky we are with the “why not me” tone in their voice, not only in this move but also when I quit my job to pursue my purpose and at a million other amazing things that we have been able to enjoy along the way and I always politely nod my head and speak of how grateful I am for everything this life has offered. But the truth is it was never easy, and the reality is that those people were’t there when we sat and cried together Jesse and I, or when we dreamed together and those people were’t willing to put the intention and good energy out there in spite of the challenges of any of these dreams. You get the life you deserve. It may sound harsh but it is true, what you are willing to put in you will get back. And THAT is the key, that I am willing. We are willing, to face whatever obstacles come at us in this beloved journey of life, receiving with open hands whatever the Universe has to offer us always and moving with intention and grace. Grateful of every every single thing. Just living in itself is a blessing to honor. So start there. Then watch as the rest starts to fall into place. You can have the life of your dreams!! You can have it!! It can be done. No matter what it is, what you want is right there in front of you, waiting for you to have the bravery to reach out and grab it.

If you open yourself up to love, you will be loved. If you don’t feel loved then you’re not open.