Summer: Gloriously Messy!

Well it's August and that means it is time for my annual trip to the most magical place on earth. Some might contest that that's Disney World. What foolishness. It's home.  It's my back yard with the sound of the waterfall and crickets, the smell of the basil growing, picking fresh raspberries off the bush, sitting on the roof, watching the fireworks from Kennedy Days, having a camp fire, walking around barefoot, green grass, deciduous trees, family dinners, late nights with friends, and lightning bugs. It is good to be back!


I love fruit (you may recall my affinity for mangoes), and I just had the perfect pluot. As I took my first bite, juice came rushing forth - not just dancing delightfully over my taste buds, but also in alarmingly large quantities onto my shirt. Covered in bright purple juice, I decided I had nothing to lose and simply to keep eating, enjoying the delicious fruit. My friend recently remarked to me that I have an interesting response when things don't go as I expect when I'm trying something new, that I'm generally more curious than upset, and that was kind of the case here. I thought the juice flow would abate, that the first bite tearing the skin was the cause for the vast juice quantities. Nope. Even more came with the next bite and more and more. I was a mess, and loving every second of it. Reveling in carefree abandonment, pluot in hand, walking (barefoot, of course) in my yard, I started thinking about how many of the things I love or enjoy - particularly about summer - are accompanied by being messy or dirty.

Pluots to start, obviously, but then on to other great summer fruits: peaches, watermelon, berries... seriously, the best peaches can barely even be considered a solid. Next up we've got hiking and camping. If you've been hiking or camping without getting dirty, I'm not sure you've been hiking or camping. As much as you try to avoid it, sometimes you are just going to sink into mud up to your knees - I have friends who will attest to this due to recent experience. Or be covered or smudged by the ash from a fire you've just cooked over or lit. Run through the woods without regard to whether or not you'll stain your clothes. Dive for a volleyball on a sand court. Jump out of the boat to get out and swim. Dance in a rainstorm. Slip and slides, mud fights, climbing trees, hopping fences, whatever! Set aside comfort and fear, dive into the adventure. Just to be out and to put aside the concern of having food on your face or dirt on your clothes and to simply be and be grateful.



Live in the present, enjoy it, love it. Yesterday I was alive, but today I am alive. Recognizing the blessings of now helps me know God's love for me. If I look at now and see the beauty in it, and not only to the past or future, I actively experience His love for me. He is loving me in the present, he is making a gift to me of this moment. If I live now, I can see all of this as gift. We are in a state of being perpetually and actively loved, and if I can simply enjoy the mess of the moment, I can know that. Even in the hard things, the large messes of life that are far more trying than a juice stain on the shirt, with the right focus, I can know that I am loved, looked-after, and provided for. What more could I ask? The mess allows me to abandon myself to love.


Matt 6:25-34, I think you should read it.


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"I have come that they might have life, and have it abundantly." -John 10:10b

"Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for the day is its own troubles."  -Matt 6:34

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered." -G.K. Chesteron

not about Paris.

Upon commencing this blog, I decided that I would write only when the mood stuck me. Evidently, you say, the mood does not strike you often, it’s been nigh half a year and all there is is a post about a fleeting moment in time, a brief interlude between summer and winter. Perhaps that interlude is not so brief for you if you don’t live in Colorado, but in any case, if that is your assumption, you would be incorrect.

The mood to write actually strikes me quite often.  Sometimes I go so far as to think “perhaps I should post about that on my empty blog,” but clearly thus far I have not undertaken to do so. I’ve been pondering the reason for this, and I have come to a conclusion: I have of yet no purpose for blogging. I am not a comedic genius nor even mediocre when it comes to intentional comedy, I do not have profound essays on the nature of man or theses on the supernatural, I do not even have recipes or photos to share. I simply have my thoughts which to me seem unfitting of digital publication for I frequently contemplate the absurd, the mundane, the preposterous, the commonplace. Are such things, I ask myself, worthy of being shared? For me these subjects oft precede deeper thought, an unlikely gateway to reflection, but sometimes I really do just want to write about mangoes. They’re delicious, juicy, colorful, odoriferous, and unfortunately sticky. But stickiness is the price you pay for such a treat to the senses. I digress.

So there in the end I still seek my purpose for this blog. It has no direction, just as my thoughts are generally disjointed, but it is simply that: my thoughts. I share these not because I believe they will offer insight or consolation or revelation, but because fifty percent of my two followers live very far away and I do not get to share my thoughts with my far away friends as often as I’d like. Generally, my far away friends, when we speak we have but time to catch up and not to simply converse. With this blog I write to you as if you were next to me as these thoughts come upon me and share with you simply the small joys of life and odd observations.

This post is not at all what I intended and seems more like it should go on an “about” page, but hopefully I will write again soon, having defined my purpose for doing so. My thoughts took me away with them again, but that is what this is to be. Also, I plan to redesign this page in order that it look less a grey dreary day, despite the fact that I love grey days, but right now slumber beckons.

This post looked empty without pictures, so I added a couple I took in Paris that I like.

I recommend finding a perfectly ripe mango and maybe washing it down with vanilla ice cream.