Oh how sweet to hear the beautiful music drifting down to my level.  Guitar with instrumental background accompaniment.  Found out something new about Charlene last night.  I was sitting down here in the lower level when beautiful stands of guitar music came out of nowhere.  It sounded so close and so real, not like recorded music.  I had to get up and be snoopy and go upstairs.  There sat Charlene strumming beautiful sounds on a guitar.  WOW!  I didn’t know she played the guitar.  She informed me that she is taking lessons.  Visions of the door of retirement keep opening before me.  Charlene is also learning Spanish and goes to Pilates workout each week.  Not yet even mentioning the greatest part of her retirement yet…personal travel tour guide around the greater Columbia Gorge area.  I don’t think there is a back road around that she doesn’t know where it goes, and that includes the gravel roads.  She and Larry and extended themselves way beyond what I would have ever dreamed or expected of anyone to do for me.  I told her that I have learned a great deal from her.  I have think I have a better understanding now of how to help my guests have the best time possible if they come to see me.  My mind just wasn’t opened to that before.  I didn’t know how awesome it would be to have someone who knew the area to be your guide and driver and informant.  Can’t wait now to have guests so I can go out and enjoy them showing them the sights.

The doors of opportunity of a different lifestyle beckon me.  I have two more weddings to complete, one senior portrait to finish and a baby session to workup and I will lay my professional camera down.  I will be finished with that stage of my life.  I do plan to continue with “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” bereavement photos of newborns but do not plan on any studio sessions at all.  It has been wonderful doing what I have done.  When I discovered photography as a profession it was if my passion had opportunity to surface.  I have loved what I have done and never tired of it.  I am not tired of photography but there is so much I feel I need to accomplish before I lay my mantel down and in order to do so I must first learn to enjoy being separated from the professional, pressured aspect of it being work.  Photography and writing will now come together to enable me to accomplish that which I believe I am called to do.  It is time for me to finish up some of the writing I have started and to begin new projects.  But first, I will put in time to enjoy the leisure of unstructured time, at least for part of the day.  I work well under disciplined time and know that will be part of my day but not in its entirety.   I  truly wonder what lasting effects and benefits this journey will have for me.  Sometimes I am just overwhelmed with the gratitude, to myself and to others, for allowing this journey to take place.  It was not done on a whim but with thought and some planning.  And further planning has taken places along the way.  I have plans now until June 24th and then I am free on the wind.  Where will I go?  Who will I see?  Who will I meet that is new?  How many miles yet to go?  Only God knows.

I know I am sounding more and more as if I am at my journey’s end but I am not at the end yet.  What is ahead is still a mystery to me, one I anticipate with joy, but at the same time still living in the moment I am in, experiencing everything with total concentration and exhilaration of the moment. I am continually looking forward, thankful for the past.  The past mingles with the presence in changing my attitude, incorporating the new wisdom I’ve learned, the events I lived through, the joys and sorrows I’ve experienced.  I am who I am today because of all my yesterdays.  How can I wish to change anything that made me who I am today.  I love being who I am, a child of the Living God.  Are all my past experience good?  No, not by a long shot, but sometimes it actually that which happens that is not good that God uses to His glory and creates beauty from our sorrow.  He has done that for me, even on this trip.  He can do that for you if you have regrets and places of unforgiveness in your heart.  Just open yourself up to living in the present presence of our God and He can mend your broken heart, he can take that which is not good and turn it into something beautiful.  You may be able to touch a life you would not otherwise connect with, just because you did experience things that were not good.

There is a card that I have made from some beautiful artwork  that my friend David Schrank drew and designed.  The words are so meaningful and come from scripture.  I want to write them here.  Please read each line carefully and ask yourself is this the way you think of love and do you follow this pattern with those you love.  The words are so powerful.

“Love never gives up

Cares more for others than self

does not want what it does not have

does not strut

does not swell the head

does not force itself on others

is not always me first

does not fly off the handle

does not keep score of sins

does not revel when others hurt

takes pleasure in the flowering of the truth

puts up with anything

trusts God always

always looks for the best to the end

never looks back

Love never dies”

I read these words and ask myself, am I living up to this standard of love?  Ask yourself that question.  It is powerful and mind awakening.  Thank you David Schrank for your design on the cards I have made.  I have enjoyed giving each one away.  I pray that the words will touch the lives of all who have received one.

Now perhaps I should mention what we did yesterday, Sunday June 7, 2015.  I tried to watch online the service at City Church and could not get it to come in on the computer.  So I wrote instead.  Then spent the morning visiting with Charlene and Larry, ate a late lunch and headed out for a new adventure. I was primarily sightseeing.  We drove to Oregon from Washington where Charlene lives.  Washington is just across the Columbia River but it takes a long ways to get to the bridge to get across.  All beautiful scenery.  We went from mountain bluffs, through little quaint towns (remember no fast food places) peppered with many cute little restaurants.  We saw farms and cattle and fields of elk roaming wild, vineyards, orchards, and our final destination was Mount Hood in Mt. Hood Oregon.  I mistakenly stated that the Mt. Adams, the mountain we went to a few days ago was in Oregon.  Mt Adams is not is Oregon, it is in Washington.  All of the large mountains in this area are volcanic mountains.  I believe the last volcanic eruption of Mt. Hood was in 1868.  It was so powerful that during the eruption it pushed so much land mass that it relocated a lake a half mile higher on a mountain than it had originally been.  You could still see the large crater on the side of the mountain.  There weren’t many trees on the mountain even after all these years.  There was not much snow either.  That was a sad sight.  The mountain looked like grey ash and stone.  There was a large dry riverbed below the mountain and it actually had a trickle of water just a few feet wide in some places.  The massive river bed bed was dry.  I think it was called the White River (I may be incorrect but I think that is what I remember being told).  It was sad to see.

The taller isolated volcanic mountains still have some snow to melt but very little.  The Columbia river is very low and the smaller ones are dried up, meaning they are no longer feeding the Columbia river.  The Columbia river is no longer able to reach the Mexico border due to the volume of water being used in the U.S.  I wonder how long it will be before it dries up farther and farther to the north.  Remember to be thankful for the rains when they come to your area.  The west coast is becoming a dry and weary land.

Today we plan a trip to Mount St. Helen.  Many of you may remember the explosion in 1980 when Mt. St. Helen blue her top.  Several were killed and the ash was carried thousands of miles from its origination.  It will be interesting to see what recovery has since taken place.  It has be 35 years ago, longer than a lifetime to some.  I remember seeing the mountain a couple years after the eruption and it was sobering and sad to see.  Nature’s force, beyond man’s control, is a powerful force to reckon with.  And just to think that God is even more powerful.

I guess I will write about my experience to Mt. St. Helen tomorrow.  Let’s go back to yesterday.  After visiting Mt Hood we stopped at a cherry orchard and bought cherries.  They were picked right at the farm where I bought them but that doesn’t mean they are less costly.  I didn’t really care how much they cost after I tasted one.  It was the true epitome of what a firm, fresh picked, ripe cherry should taste like.  See the picture below of the cherries on the tree.  Also included a photo of the little fruit stand at the farm.  Another picture is of me on a gigantic swing.  Larry pushed me and took a video of me.  I felt like the little girl in me was still alive, especially with the experience of the swing being so over sized.  As simple as a swing hanging between two large trees gave me such a thrill of enjoyment.  To be a little girl again.  Pumping to go higher, arms splayed wide to reach the chains, under the cool of two old oaks, with Mt. Hood framed in the background, was an exhilarating, fun moment in time.  I went higher and higher and didn’t want to stop.  But each moment does end and the next begins.  What I do is take the joy with me as I leave, tucked away in my heart to enjoy the moment again when I view the memory or the photo.  Go out and doing something fun today.  Something you did as a child.  Remember the feeling of awe and excitement of the simple pleasures in life.  No matter how old, or how infirm, there must be something you can do, even if it is sitting on a bench in solitude just reminiscing.  Go and enjoy a special moment this day.  Don’t let any day pass you that  you do not take time to notice you are alive and young at heart.

The garden is waiting for me.  Charlene and Larry have already left.  It is getting how out so will pick strawberries before the noon day sun approaches.

I’ll proof read this tomorrow.  Have a great day.  This is my day to do the zip line!  (TINGLE GOES MY HEART)