free flow thoughts 5:18 AM

so, as jason described in yesterdays post, thursday we left redding, california and our lovely new friends there to head up to portland, OR. it was sad to leave, but the drive up was incredible! northern california and southern oregon are full of beautiful mountains, forests, and rivers. it never ceases to amaze me how beautiful nature is and how different each place looks from the one before. i even got to choose the music so we were listening to a lot of chill music that i havent been able to listen to while driving (because it usually puts everyone to sleep because we have in the past had a tendency to not leave till like 5pm) so we listened to some alexi murdoch, brooke waggoner, fleet foxes, fiction family, sigur ros, and coldplay. i love music and i feel like driving music should fit the location and my mood, you know like a soundtrack..... and i just felt like those artists were so right at that moment. anyways.... heres N. Cali....

...... and here we're driving into S. Oregon.... ..... and here we enter into Portland, OR.... where it rains 9 months of the year and is known for its coffee shops, breweries, and hippies..... we are staying with our good friend meggie. her sister owns her own coffee shop in town, her mom is the pastry chef, and meggie is working as a barista there over the summer... i think its so cool that it is a sort of family run business. and its a really lovely little coffee shop.... very comfortable and open and has lots of natural lighting through the big front windows, its really family friendly - they even have a play room for kids! and the food was excellent! i had a dirty chai latte and a piece of pumpkin loaf and it was sooo good. i really really like coffee shops :) we hung out there for a good while, talking with meggie and friends and just enjoying spending time together we went geocaching next and just wondered around and also got to talk with some different people and hear their thoughts on love. i'm getting so excited about our show and being able to share all of these really wonderful thoughts on love that people have relayed to us! people are so inspiring and encouraging.... i feel like often we individually are too hard on ourselves and feel as though we have nothing to offer or maybe because we aren't experts on something we have no advice to add. Frequently when we've asked people what they think love is they shy up and say "ohh i don't know, i'm not the right person to ask," but they usually go ahead and right something down or tell us something while we're recording and i am always encouraged by what they have to say. I can't wait to share them! each new one expands my thoughts on love. at the end of this adventure i'll share mine... its gets longer every day.

I've been thinking a lot about the future and my purpose and my dreams the last couple days, and thinking about how love is the key to everything and how love should be the leading force behind all of my dreams....

i was reading a friends blog the other day and they had a quote up that said,

" don't ask what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive, then go and do that. because what the world needs is for people to come alive." - J. Eldridge

it really got me thinking about self confidence and identity. things that most people struggle with through adolescence and even as adults.... second guessing whats in our hearts. i saw this poster up on the side of a building today....

and i was just thinking about how when you're in love you're sort of living a dream.... you hearts alive and you're not worried about what other people think of it. and to live your dream (your destiny, your purpose, your passion) you have to live in love... in love with where you are, who you're with, what you're doing.... love drives out all fear of failure.

i'm not sure if any of that made sense.... i'm sitting here just typing off the top of my head and its 2:30 in the morning and we are getting up early and going to the market tomorrow..... sorry if that was all over the place! O_O anyways..... we headed into downtown portland just as the sun was hanging itself low in the sky making the shadows stretch far across the ground.... its my favorite time of day because the lighting is just amazing, everything is warm and the long shadows create a beautiful contrast. looking at the world at this time everything just seems more friendly and easy going. we found a park and played on the swings and the slide for a little bit :) and we walked and ended up at Powells Bookstore.... which is an amazing place. its so huge. i didn't make it any further than the paper sculpture and cooking sections :) meggie found a cool devotional book and a couple others, and em and jason spent some time in the childrens books section :) then we wandered the steets in search of some fooood and we ended up at pita pit.... it was really good. i love how fresh everything is. i do not know why we don't have these in sarasota...

Our portland project is comprised of these disposable camera that we are leaving at meggie's sisters coffee shop, Posies Cafe..... they will be sitting on the counter along with our business cards with the instructions:

-take a camera

-take a picture of yourself

-take a picture of something/somewhere/someone that you love

-return to Posies Cafe we figured if this sort of thing would work anywhere... portland would be the place :)

its been really really lovely to spend time with meggie and explore portland.... and do you know, it didn't even rain today.... i guess we brought a little bit of the california sunshine with us :)

tomorrow: Tacoma, Washington

until then, good night and good sleep :)

ginger

Painting the town Red(ding)! 6:42 AM

Well...I guess it's high time that I posted something on here, since it's been a little while.

I guess picking up where Emily left off, we finally made it to Redding!

Redding wasn't originally on the docket of places to stop, but we sure are glad we made a point of stopping there. Way back when we were in Nashville (a whole 2 weeks ago!), you might recall us telling a story about how we met these cool guys while at dinner and ended up hanging out with them later that night. Well one of them, Blake, had a bunch of friends out in Redding that he said we should hook up with when we passed through. I love new friends, so it sounded like a great plan.

To sum it up, Redding was awesome. We visited Bethel, a church/Bible school, spent the afternoon longboarding/geocaching at a park, and then met up with Blake's friend (our new friend) Lori for dinner at Chipotle. Post Chippy, we met up with a ton of other new friends and burned the midnight oil chatting it up. It seems we have a new place on our list of "places we need to revisit".

(Sun Dial Bridge at our new favorite longboarding spot)

I love how when we choose to step out of our comfort zones, make decisions grounded in love, things work out so perfectly. By choosing to reach out to these 4 trendy guys at the Silly Goose in Nashville, that led us to new connections (and more importantly friends) in Redding. By Stan choosing to trade bunks with the Irish guy at the hostel in Flagstaff, that led us to hooking up with our 2 German friends and having a place to camp the following night at the Grand Canyon. I don't mean to imply that we choose to walk in love in anticipation of receiving some sort of karmatic reward, nor can one expect that every single time you hold a door for someone or pay for their gas. But in such a love starved world, when you choose to act in love, it becomes contagious. Love is a doorway to many wonderful and amazing things. But more of my thoughts on love later.

We left our dear new Redding friends this morning and drove 7 hours to Portland, Oregon where we are staying with the wonderfully hospitable Meggie Burke. My 2 favorite things of this trip: meeting new friends, and getting to see all our old ones. I like people. :)

Who knows what tomorrow holds, but I know that it will involve coffee shops, acts of love, and rainy Portland, which is good enough for me!

P.S. In Redding, we kept seeing these weird lizard/snake things.

Thanks to 2 seconds of google research I found out they're called Southern Alligator Lizards. Ginger saw one (and snapped the photo above) and I saw one (almost ran it over with my longboard). Their tails can sometimes be up to twice the length of their bodies, which appeared to be the case with the one I saw. Pretty crazy. Here's a couple google images for your viewing pleasure:

Cheers! Jason :)

the beauty of living in the moment 1:58 AM

so we took off today

with all intention of making it to Redding.

However

our once again unexpected friend, Traffic, caused us to move slower than... me :P

We made it across the bridge after what seemed like forever, where moooore traffic awaited us, Gingy was ready for a second bathroom break and I was feeling rather hungry.

(this picture does not display the traffic we ran into today, clearlyy)

Conveniently the next exit was to Stan and Mikey's new place :D

so we pulled off and discovered they had just sat down for dinner at the "Can't Fail Cafe" and decided to join them. In the end we just decided to push everything back a day and stay here so we can get an early start tomorrow.

right now the boys are watching the movie Sunset Boulevard, Ginger's sippin tea and I'm going to be eating ramen.

tomorrow we'll cover more ground. Today was very nice even if we didn't make it to Redding. We ate lunch with Stevie and Lindsey, got some free food, and lots of lovin hugs :) met Mike R over dinner, helped the boys get much needed supplies from Target,

and enjoyed their company for a bit longer (as you can see from Jason's face.. :P)

We've been in the San Fran-ish area for five nights now. It feels like forever. It's been really nice to see friends and share stories and things we've learned. I feel a bit repetitive cause the basic thing we've learned is very simple. Love is not a feeling, it's a decision. It's a simply message that takes a lot of very conscious effort to exercise in one's life.

I think a lot of things are decisions. More things than a lot of people realize. You have to decided to be happy, or to eat healthy, or to get sleep, or to learn how to do something. I admit that I feel like I've been lazy in the past. The commitment required in doing something, or learning something seemed a bit too boring/routine to me, so I avoided it. But at the same time I realize I admire the people that can say they're going to learn French, then turn around and learn French. Their self discipline is so attractive. So that is a new goal for this summer as well. I will grow to be more self-disciplined. It goes hand-in-hand with walking in love :)

We haven't done a lot of random acts of love recently. We did pay a toll for a few people, which was funn! but not much else. This stop is different. It's been more about individuals we know, rather than individuals we just haven't had to pleasure of meeting yet. Both are fun to love on and spend time with <3

To end my post I leave you with an LA sunset from a fire escape off the Dream Center.

happy dreams

<33emilyy

san francisco 6:50 PM

this part of the trip has been full of things.... its been lovely to see ringling friends and sad to say goodbye.... here is san fran in photos:

(emily says she sees the word 'love' in this lettuce... :P)

goodbye san francisco :)

on the road to redding this evening!

vegas pictures! 6:00 AM

night out on the town.....

there are sooo many wedding chapels in vegas.... even drive through ones

we didn't get to see any weddings happen, but we did get to talk to a girl who worked in one of the chapels and she told us how it all worked.... its very interesting.... she was really fun to talk to though, she was studying interior design so she spoke our art language :) we drove by all of the well known casinos.... they are so huge, its such an interesting sight to see... we ate at the hard rock cafe and there were all these quotes about love on the walls more exploring heres the inside of the bellagio ..... i just thought this was pretty :)

its the most toned down of the casinos.... we waited by the bellagio fountain for like 40 minutes and they never started.... we were kind of disappointed... but i guess there's always oceans 11 :)

vegas isn't really our kind of place.... but we love the people just not everything that goes on there. good people watching.... so many people!

thinkthinkthink 7:20 AM

The last few days have been good. They’ve been a bit different feeling than the others. After volunteering at the Dream Center we headed to Disneyland for the day.

Three of us earlier this year were able to get a free Disney ticket from the “Give A Day, Get A Day” program, so we split the cost of one ticket for the fourth person and decided to go.

We’d been planning for a while on buying a families Disney ticket but we weren’t quite sure how we would present the proposition. How many people could we pay for? What if they wanted a hopper? What if they already had a free ticket for volunteering? All these things had crossed our minds but didn’t really hit us until we were standing outside the Disneyland gates. After 10-15 minutes of staring at families waking by and debating who we should talk to we decided to ask one of the cashiers about paying anonymously. Just pay for the next four one-day passes and let them hand the family our business card. I mean it’s Disneyland right? I was suuuure someone had done something like this before.

Nope.

They couldn’t do that.

So we began wandering, doing our best to ease drop as people were buying their tickets. After more endless minutes of people watching and listening I wandered back over to see that part of the group had found the perfect Disney family for us :) Jason was speaking with the lady buying tickets for her group of four. As Jason ran through Love Each One’s purpose he quickly pushed the ladies credit card away from the cashier and concluded with “…so we’d like to buy your Disney tickets.” The lady stepped backwards and one of the boys in the group suddenly snapped to attention, “Hold up! Rewind! What??” The other boy asked, “Wait, what do we have to do?” When they realized we just wanted to do it for them they where thrilled! And even took a picture with us :)

So it was cool. Very cool. Just being able to pay for them. They were so surprised. Not only them, but the cashier. Why is doing something nice for someone foreign to us?

Friday we had a slow day of packing and beach walking before we took off to San Fran. However once we hit the interstate we began moving roughly one mile every ten minutes.

For some reason I just never think of traffic. I guess I’ve never lived in a city where traffic could hold you up for longer than ten minutes. So we pulled off and decided to preoccupy ourselves until six-ish when the traffic should be gone. The boys went to see the movie Babies and Ging and I went shopping. We hit the interstate again around seven and where able to get to get to the lovely Lindsey O’s house a bit late that night.

But these few days of events have made me think. We’ve been doing normal things. Things I would do if I was back home with my family or out with friends. And it’s made loving individuals feel harder. Or maybe not harder… just more uncomfortable. Going to the mall I realize I don’t make a lot of eye contact with other shoppers. I stay out of their way and they stay out of mine. If that balance is broken by an accidental shoulder bump usually an apology is exchanged. Usually. But beyond that, we don’t communicate.

But why is that? The days that we’ve gone out specifically thinking “okay, how can we show love to people”? I feel more confident in my expressions of love. I don’t want to go on this tour very purposely loving people then go back to my normal way of living after week seven. This trip shouldn’t be separate from my life. I don’t want to allow myself to fall into old ways of thinking. I wont let it happen. I want to go home and keep loving people that I see in Panera. Or at Target. Or just in my house. I want to be loving everywhere I go.

Speaking of thinking, tonight I was thinking a lot. Just about loving people that can be hard to love. About loving people who aren’t showing you love back. After mulling over these thoughts I felt exhausted. I felt worn out just thinking about loving these people that frustrate me. Loving these people that maybe don’t listen or respect me. And my inside felt like yelling and crying and shutting down. And though my head was telling me lies, my heart knew the decision I’ve made.

Jesus has loved me always. Despite all the terrible things I’ve done and all the times I didn’t listen. He doesn’t keep record of any wrongs. And he never tries to make me feel guilty. So I choose to love others the way He loves me. And without His help, I wouldn’t be able to love people that way I know I can. Loving people is hard. It can be very hard. And it doesn’t have anything to do with feelings. Nothing. It has everything to do with your decision. Your self-control. They way you decided to act or react. I know I’ve messed up. I’ve let my feelings control my tone or my body language before. But I am becoming much more aware of the decision I must make to love. I encourage you to do the same.

<3emilyy