Ever Evolving

I saw this last night and loved how it spoke to me.

Not only was it a beautiful, artful couch, the message just reached out and grabbed me. I want that to be true of me. I want to spread happiness and light wherever I go. I want to bring positive energy. Relaxed, contented energy.

It was just one day after meeting and falling in love with a really cool older lady. Allie's friend Mikayla brought her grandmother to our house during their Tuesday science experiment time, where they do different projects from The Vintage Remedies Book for Tweens and Beauty Secrets of the Bible. From the moment this lady walked into my house until the moment she left, she was just so full of life and positivity and inspiration. She had tons of interests and passions and skills. She was so interested in life. You know? She offered to bring me some new plants to grow from extras she has around the house. She talked about quilting and jewelry making and painting in her garage. Although she was attractive, her physical beauty wasn't all that overwhelming. She didn't look perfect or put together and Mikayla told me later that you can't find a square inch of clean space on her kitchen counters at home. Her imperfections didn't stop her from being joyful and beautiful and exuding enthusiasm for life. I just loved being around her.

I have found these things to be true and have begun to embrace them as part of the woman I am becoming:

"I don't believe makeup and the right hairstyle alone can make a woman beautiful. The most radiant woman in the room is the one full of life and experience." -Sharon Stone

From Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach: You choose to take joy in your real life as it unfolds day by day, hour by hour, a heartbeat at a time. Emily Dickinson confessed that "To live is so startling, it leaves little time for anything else." To be startled and intrigued by daily life.

This sounds like a beautiful woman- "All the year round she kept racks full of plants in pots standing on green painted wooden steps. There were rare geraniums, dwarf rosebushes, spiraeas with misty white and pink plumes. . . "-Colette

"What is passion? It is surely the becoming of a person." -John Boorman

"I consciously reject our society’s narrow definition of beauty. I believe that beauty lies in the part of us that insists we get sane for the sake of our children; the part that dares to create and dance and reach out to each other; the part that risks being hurt, then gets hurt, then loves again anyway-- the part that refuses to believe beauty has anything at all to do with the number on a scale or the size of our jeans." -Judy Clement Wall

The beauty of my body is not measured by the size of the clothes it can fit into, but by the stories that it tells. I have a belly and hips that say, "We grew a child in here," and breasts that say, "We nourished life." My hands, with bitten nails and a writer's callus, say, "We create amazing things."

~Sarah, from I Am Beautiful: A Celebration of Women in Their Own Words

It's tough work, this visioning and flowing into the future person we want to be. Well, actually the visioning part isn't tough, that part is fun. It's the flowing into that person that is tough work. It's tough when you encounter negativity in yourself more often than you'd like. When the reality of another poopy cloth diaper and two children arguing over whose doll it is and a reminder that you're late on yet another task, crowd in and make you want to cave into what's been comfortable in the past: wallow in pity, say something negative, drown it in a bowl of ice cream. It's in those moments that you say to yourself, "No, I'm choosing a different response today. I'm choosing to dwell on the positive, not the negative. I'm choosing to breathe slowly and think through my options instead of simply reacting. Because I always have options. I do not have to react. I am in control here and I've already decided I'm going to think positively about this situation. I'm going to bring order into chaos. I'm going to restore beauty where there is ugliness. One choice at a time." It's making a conscious decision to elevate your thoughts by bringing them into submission. It's deciding who and what you're going to be instead of giving in to what you think you have to be because of your circumstances of the day. And I think it's what makes one person more attractive, more desirable than another. It's what I'm going for anyway. :)