What is it exactly that makes us fall in love, in passion, in infatuation...with a hobby, person, song, sight, smell? And I'm not talking about when we fall in love with our spouses or lovers or whatever you may have, although that fits into this as well...but I am talking about other people and things. When we meet a new friend or group of friends for instance. And you find that you talk like teenagers all night long and you just met. It's like falling in love. You get the excited feeling of wanting to talk to that person or those people every second of every day because you want to find out what else you can share with them. Or when you find out that you have the talent of playing the guitar by ear. You play every spare second you get until your fingers are raw and hurting but you keep playing. Eventually, those fingers are callused and you're writing your own songs. What happens when a certain song comes on the radio that you've never heard before and the words or the sound of the artist strikes a chord in you and your heart just wants to scream because it reminds you of a time in your life or someone who also made your heart want to scream or melt or burst? You go out and buy the CD and play the song over and over and over again until the emotion starts to fade. After a while, you stop playing it. But one day, months down the road, you'll turn on the radio and that song will come on, and you'll FEEL that song in the pit of your stomach just one more time. What IS that? And smell...what makes us remember the scent of someone that was so familiar to you over 10 years ago? A cologne of a man walking through a grocery store now could bring us to our knees. So we drink it in and try to hold it in our senses as long as we can and brreeeaaathhheee and just....remember. And there's sight. The other day I went out to an empty lot out in the country where they will be building a house eventually and it was dead silent. It was late afternoon and the sky was such a brilliant blue that there shouldn't even be a name for the color. The sky was so clear that you could see the moon. I stood in the middle of the clearing and turned in a full circle and looked at the tall trees towering around me. The sun was in the earliest stages of setting so the limbs of the trees took on a brilliant red color. And every part of my being wanted to stay there for the night...just so I could lay on a blanket in that clearing and look at the millions of stars that I knew would show up that night. My body SCREAMED to just snuggle up and take it all in.My point to this is that why do we stop? What makes the passion fade? I'm sure...no, I KNOW that there are hundreds of books written on the subject. But I'm here to say, that I don't want mine to stop anymore. I don't want to stop getting the lurch in my stomach when my phone rings or my computer says one of my friends is online. I want to pick the guitar back up and never stop singing. I want to hear that song every day and not say, "OK, I'm getting tired of it now" when it used to make my heart skip a beat. I want to be able to recognize that cologne 20 years from now and still remember. I want to spend the night under the stars snuggled up and who gives a damn what I was supposed to be doing. I want to live for right now. I don't want to get used to it or bored with it...I want to live it, love it, and be passionately IN it right this very moment! Since I didn't stay out in that beautiful place that day, I thought I'd share the pictures I took with you guys! And in case you didn't know this already, on most of the pictures on this blog, you can click on them and view them bigger on a separate page! Love to all! 
