Brave Heart, Brave Soul. She who is brave is free.

“Cause you never think that the last time is the last time. You think there will be more. You think you have forever. But you don’t.” ~ Unknown They say, “go where you feel most alive.” I say find your happy place, wherever that may be and go there often. And when you find it be content, untroubled, light-hearted and cheerful. Be all there in every moment...fully and completely. Don’t overthink or over plan. Just be part of the moment and make it yours. Why? Well truthfully we never know when a moment will be our last...when we’ll see a person or a place for the very last and final time. We live and we die. Nothing beyond is guaranteed. Everything in between is a gift. No one really knows when our time will be up, but we do know it will be... someday. And this is why it’s extremely important we find time for the people and places we love. Being in our happy place and better yet sharing it with our family and friends has the ability to truly fill us with joy and happiness. So ...

"I can't. You can't rewrite the past." ~ Jay Asher How many times do things go wrong in life? Our plans get caught up in mayhem or simply fall off course and  into a stinkin', rotten, nasty, unpleasant, gigantic pot hole in the middle of the road. Sadly a lot of the time we can't avoid the road hazards. They just come with the territory. Goodness gracious I know I've found myself more than once taking the detour. Life just has this way of altering , faltering and revising any and all of our perfectly laid out plans. For whatever reason, life seems to have a mind of it's own right? The same can be said of our past. Our lives are all different, each one of us has a distinct, separate story to tell and like those unaccounted for detours, we tend to stay stuck in the same chapter, and often on the same page over and over again. We get caught in a warped time loop, becoming prisoners of our own poor, sad, story-telling. The reality is while you ...

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." ~ J.R.R. Tolkien When I look back on my life, on the clock ticking away one minute at a time I'm left breathless. We all know the sun goes down, the moon comes up and the stars come out. It's the cycle of our lives but realizing how all those days and nights add up is pretty astonishing. Counting up my life span so far, as of February 26, 2017 my clock comes to 523 months, 2278 weeks, 15,947 days, 382,728 hours, 22,963,680 minutes, 1,377,820,800 seconds give or take a digit or two. That's startling actually if you think about it. Now think about this, something Henry David Thoreau once said, "The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." So I guess my question is this, what are we willing to exchange for the life we live, with the time we have? As a little girl I held on to my daddy's hand and to his every word. As he still does, my dad hung the moon, ...

"Today's MOMENTS are tomorrow's MEMORIES." ~ Anonymous Do you ever wish you could go back and re-live a moment? Maybe you've pulled out a few old pictures from your childhood or your child's childhood and thought to yourself, "I just want 5 minutes minutes." Christmas time especially evokes those feelings for me. I'd love to go back when the boys were little, and scope them up in to my arms again, kiss their little cheeks and delight in their Christmas morning joy. Honestly how many times do we reflect on Christmas' past longing for those 5 extra minutes? How many times do we "smell a certain, familiar scent and suddenly remember a small part of our childhood?" Often is my bet. Christmas time in our home has always been a warm, homespun, family affair. As a little girl Christmas was magical. Our tree was always glimmering with gold garland, red balls, our German ornaments and our family star high a top. Gifts were beautifully ...

“A simple life is a beautiful life.” ~Anonymous Life in itself is pretty complicated. Why, well I'm not sure there’s one particular reason honestly. We hurry to work, hurry home and repeat. Life can get overwhelming and become under appreciated. Life, if we’re not careful can get completely out of control. Before we know it we’re working to live instead of actually living. If lived simply, life offers us continual moments of inspiration daily. We just have to be willing to stop worrying about the Jones’ next door and begin living as the Smith family we are. “Sometimes all we need is just a new perspective.” That’s part of the reason I love spending weekends at the country house. Being out in the woods, away from the noise with no real technology, being able to grill and eat  outside, just chilling with our family and friends, well it centers us. Want a simple, uncomplicated life well then you have to, “ask yourself what is really important and then have the wisdom and ...

Life is a funny thing. Nothing is guaranteed and nothing is completely safe. We can try and predict all we want but we cannot fully anticipate life’s twists and turns. Life is beautiful this way. Everything can fall apart only to be revealed as stained glass once broken and restored. Memories they too can be tricky. Just like our emotions they can become fuzzy, blurred, vague, unclear and distorted. I’ve heard it said before a picture says a thousand words. Memories are in many ways like a photograph. When we invision a moment in our thoughts sometimes those memories aren’t as beautiful or as horrible as we imagine. It’s when we actually look at a memory captured on film we can see the truth revealed. Our faces and our eyes they don’t lie. Happiness, love and joy or even hurt, sadness and anger speak for us. In those photographs our unsaid words are captured.  I know for my family, we’ve had many more happy memories than sad. The problem is sometimes those sad, hurtful mem...

To say I'm a blessed woman is an understatement. I'm always struck by the grace which abounds in my life. I realize so many of us feel we are lacking, instead of embracing the grace our lives provide each of us. Sometimes our fantasies take hold of our reasoning, the way we think and feel about those unattained desires we want for our own. Sadly many times we fail to appreciate all we have in the process. The truth is if we could just step back and take a good look at all we have, the love we carry inside us, the blessings our lives give us daily we'd find real happiness. Maybe our lights would even shine a little brighter? Seriously how many times do we actually take inventory of our own heart, our soul and spirit? How many times do we truly accept we have everything we need without longing for more than we have? Why is it we can't accept the gifts we've been given without the need to take more? As I share advice here on my blog, you should know the adv...

What comes to your mind when you think of an anniversary, possibly a birthday, graduation, cancer recovery, maybe a personal triumph, simply an accomplishment of any kind or the loss of a loved one? Life, in itself, is made up of small, beautiful, painstaking and mostly complicated moments. These moments are set in time, more than dreams and always wide open to interpretation. Our moments of celebration in life can be remembered as particularly breathtaking, brilliant, beautiful and pure or positively slanted in our perceptions, altered and crashed in the wreckage of our best laid plans.  Life Lesson # 8: Life can be amazing, full of little moments worth celebrating! That is, if we can keep from being caught up in our opinions, full of good intentions, so busy making plans for everyone else and ourselves, maps included, we forget to live in the little moments life offers us along the way. While we’re busy out planning, life is continuing, moving with meaningful points ...

I was born 39 years and 5 days ago. I was not born to celebrities, nor was I born of royalty but I was born into a very loving, stable and amazing home. My parents did not have a lot, they did not own the best of the best, with grand TV's on beautiful stands nor did they serve up food with names I could not pronounce but they gave me everything they had and then some. My dad worked hard serving his country, my mom stayed home with me, sacrificing many luxuries in life to do so. Our home was a place of refuge, warmth and joy. Mom made the best of what we had and never complained. She created a beautiful home for me to grow up in, many times made up of third hand items and never thought to complain. When folks walked into our home, they automatically felt at home and the truth is our home was always open. What we had, we shared with everyone. No meal was shared between just the 3 of us, no; every meal was made and shared with extended family. When the bills piled up and...

Today I celebrate my 37th birthday. I had to stop today and ask myself where did the time go? When did life pass by so quickly? When did my precious boys grow up so fast? When did I get old? Well it all happened while I was living life, taking care to grab each moment by the horns. Time passed while I giggled and ran through my childhood. Life sped forward as I sipped tea with my Daddy and as I had my hair brushed by my Mom. Life just kept creeping up on me as I said I do to my husband and gave birth to each of my children. Breast cancer came and took what she could from me and though she took a good many years she never took moments from me. These moments of my life are precious, held deep inside my heart, held gently and cherished each and every day. I know life is a battle ground and I know some days are losing battles but every day is worth is the effort. Every day is new, a time to embrace the beauty and the pain, every hour a new chance to give thanks for the unending hope we...