WOW!! This past month could only be described as being caught in a whirlwind! I cannot believe it has only been a month since my last blog post...so many things have happened. Our northwest tour began June 20 in Heber City, Utah at one of my favorite resorts and here in about a week we get to finish our tour at the same place- Mountain Valley RV Resort. For all of our traveling buddies out there in the RV world I highly recommend visiting....be sure to do it while we are there ;) Anyway, after we left Utah we hot-footed it over to Sacramento, CA to spend time with our friends. Joshua was determined to finish a project he had started while we visited by train just a few short weeks before.
Each step of our journey becomes clearer as we learn more and more about each other, who we are, and finding our joy. You may be wondering, "What does she mean finding joy?". So, let me explain this just a bit....take a trip back in time with me. Think about a time in your life, maybe around the time you were 3, 4, 5 or 6 years old. What made you giggle? What was it that you were sooooo into that you couldn't think about taking a nap or you couldn't wait to get up in the morning to do? For me, I LOVED being outside, music, dancing and singing....I could not get enough!!! I had a toy piano that I would sit at and play for hours, in fact I learned how to play the theme song to my mom's favorite soap opera "The Young and The Restless" by ear. I had a broken old cassette player, you know the one you didn't have a cover to keep the batteries in so you had to tape them in. I would play all my favorite cassettes; The Statler Brothers, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers- over and over again. Then I would record myself singing on the little corded microphone on the one blank cassette that I had...this was my prized possession <3 Joshua loves to tell a story that my mom shared with him about me during our shows, how when I was about 4 or 5 while we were traveling with my dad on the oil rigs in Wyoming and Utah. I told everyone that I had written the song "Delta Dawn".....I loved that song so much that I had in fact believed that I had written it. I sang it all the time and one of my favorite songs to dance to was "Music Box Dancer". In fact, I had created my very own dance routine to that song and people would ask me to do it whenever they saw me lol. One of my favorite memories was when my grandma (we call her Honey) took me, my sister, and my cousin to see my great-grand-mother (Honey's mother) in a nursing home. Honey asked us to sing Christmas songs to a group of the residents that were sitting there in the dining room. I loved singing for them, their eyes lit up and I was the center of their attention while we sang...it was wonderful!!!
After awhile life piles up all kinds of stuff that can cause us to forget what true JOY feels like....You know the old saying "Life Happens". We begin to forget what makes our hearts happy and we start going through the motions. Going to school, getting jobs, raising kids....chasing a paycheck, for the mortgage, for a house that we don't really get to spend much time in, just to go back to work the next day. I share this with Joshua and others as we travel, people are afraid of a zombie apocalypse...we are already there. Don't believe me....take a walk through a department store, grocery store or watch people headed to work on their morning commute....get up, go through the motions without even a thought (shower, hair/makeup, breakfast, out the door by 6:45 to be to work by 8), no smiles, no excitement and no passion. Just zombies going through the motions. I did this for years!!! I was so "busy" making a living that I was forgetting how to LIVE.
Since we jumped off the edge 3 years ago on January 1, we continue to learn how to LIVE in our JOY! This past month has been so FULL of LIFE!!! I LOVE performing, singing, learning new music, writing new music, sharing my light and joy with others!! We got to spend time with awesome friends and family, make new friends, walk the beach, play games, climb mountains, see waterfalls, experience new places, have coffee, watch the sun rise and set, giggle and be silly! There were so many experiences in such a short time, I am sure I have forgotten a few lol. Now, instead of slogging through the motions, we start each day excited to see what we create! Sometimes it's a new adventure or a new opportunity and sometimes it's just rest, with a few great people or without, just depends on what we need. This is what I call LIVING and Oh What a RUSH it is!!!