on being.

I want to be my life, not do my life.

Doing leads to check marks. Being leads to Heaven. 

xo. pa

21.

Yesterday was my birthday. I'm twenty one now. 
And here's my ice cream cone of sagacity:

1. It's actually okay to be you. In fact, you need to be. And please do. Be you beautifully and completely and wholly, without justification.

2. The truth always surfaces. Because it must.

3. Date the hell out of a lot of great men and don't regret it.

4. Be a woman with edge. Wear dresses. Be gracious. Curse occasionally. (see three)

5. You need someone in your life to be your biggest advocate. And you need to let them be.

6. God is there. Always. And He loves you. Always.

7. Wordlessly demand respect and you will receive it.

8. Take care of your body and the respect and appreciation will come. 

9. Rain is never an inconvenience. It's refreshing. Let it be. 

10. Please don't limit yourself to friends who are just. like. you. Let people broaden your views.

11. Be humble. Understate. Be bold. Flaunt.

12. Let the unknown be delicious. 

13. Let the past be. It's gone and over with. So there isn't much you can do but let it go. 

14. Don't always take your girlfriends advice. Your heart might be right. 

15. Figure out what you think and believe before others tell you what to think and believe. 

16. Be opinionated. Be boundless. Have passion.

17. Let your love be so big that it spills right out of your heart. And then let people swim in it.

18. Surround yourself with the people who love your weird. 

19. Open yourself to learning--purposefully stretch your mind.

20. Realize that the world doesn't end. So when you find yourself on the bathroom floor with mascara running down your cheeks know that you will make it. You will. You always will. 

21. So have a little faith.

xo.pa

the woman I want to be

I peaked in first grade when I won a Martin Luther King essay writing contest for grades K-12 and it's been downhill for me ever since.

There have been little peaks on my decent, of course, with other minor achievements. But I can't find myself discovering anything more monumental than I did on that cold January evening as I concluded my essay.

I was a little girl then, and I wrote about the dream of a man who had altered and unraveled the views of America which eventually created the equality we know today. Everything about him--his gumption, his beliefs, his words--is real and empowering. And that's just the thing. He wasn't afraid to let himself be heard--to outwardly be himself--which for him, was a rather scary approach.

It was then, as I sat there scribbling away, that I realized I have a dream, too.

I have a dream of the woman I want to become, the woman I feel God has intended for me to be. I haven't always known where life would take me (obvi) or what to do with my life (duh) and circumstances were not always ideal (life). But deep down I've always known that woman. And I discovered who that woman was that evening.


I want to be the kind of woman that is happy because she lives life wholly. Not fully, but wholly.
Which part of that wholeness is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure--everything that makes us who we are. Happiness and fulfillment and triumph are nice little things that will also happen, but do they really teach us much? I'll have a board on my wall with the word "wholeness" painted on it, and every day I'll ask myself, "Is this contributing to my wholeness?" and if I'm having a bad day, it is.

I want to be a woman who embraces life. Who is happy but doesn't fear the sadness. To have balance. Balance between investing in all the right things and paying attention and putting forth all my efforts and then being able to let go and not care.

I want to be the kind of woman that takes care of herself. To not be afraid of her dreams. Dreams of every sort. To have wrinkles around my eyes and lips from all the laughter and smiling. And to laugh loud, loving with all the kindness in the world.

I want to eat healthily and move my body because it's good for me. To be a woman who takes off her make-up every night and actually flosses her teeth the number of times recommended by the dentist. And wears heels...or no heels is fine, too.

I want to live life out loud and to be unapologetically authentically myself. I can't imagine anything more beautiful than a girl unabashedly being the woman God intended for her to be. And becoming that woman. I want to open my mind to every form of beauty.

I want to have a career--a part of that career being motherhood--and be successful at it. For my babies to come to me before they go to someone else because we have that kind of relationship. That trust. That love.

I want to be the kind of woman that gives other women the want to be better. To be thankful for everything. Truly thankful. Even the really small things. Small things like pearl earrings.

I want pictures everywhere. And frames everywhere. And words. But instead of seeing borderline-bad-interior-decorating, it will remind that I have a good and full life.

I want to always pray beneath trees that reach upward and outward.
I want to be a God-fearing woman. Because I know He's real. That He's there and that He cares. And I know that He always will be. And that sets me free. Because in the end that's what we all really need, right?

Freedom.

Freedom.
God gives that.







xo.pa

these days I spend the majority of my time:

+ streaming iTunes radio

+ sending pictures of my outfits to my style-savvy sister to give me a "red light/green light"

+ figuring out how to keep my skin moisturized with no humidity

+ perusing the internet for things I'm too poor to ever own

+ changing in and out of sweats because I can't accept how stupid hot it is

+ looking at photos from London

xo.pa

fourth of july

The past few weeks have been about drinking in everything there is to this stage of life.

At the beginning of the year, I had this feeling that everything was about to shift--a deep intuition that this was the time my life would be drawn into a before-and-after in a cataclysmic way. And it was because I was giving my life away for eighteen months of service to God. But my mistake was thinking that the line was vertical. That this change would strike down at a singular point.

It's horizontal. Definitely horizontal. 

A process. Just like everything else these days. 

There is only building. and fighting. and straightening out. and rising.

The line is horizontal. And I'm a process.

I decided early on this year that I can't spend my time waiting for something to pass, or waiting for something to happen, or waiting on anything really at all. Life goes whether you're waiting or not. Whether you're being prodded along or striding at speed or sprinting full-force ahead. It goes.

And I'm doing my best to go with it and not wait for it.

I'm so afraid of taking the wrong path that I don't even own the one I'm on. And then I miss it. I miss my life. And I forsake these beautiful, raw moments because this can't be it, nope. Whatever it is...

So I moved to Arizona. Not because it was what I wanted but rather what I needed. Because I have to stop discrediting my life--this process--with my doubt and negligence. I have to rid myself of the terror and start prodding alongside faith. 

I don't know how anything ends. I don't know where this process is taking me. I don't know my way. So I'm weaving one, the best I know. And at the end I'll look back and say, oh. Oh, so that's how it was supposed to go. It was all supposed to go that way. 

And I drunk it all in. 

Beginning with a fourth of July weekend roadtrip: 

  












+Sunset Crater Volcano Flagstaff, AZ

+Montezuma's Castle Sedona, AZ  
+Taylo and me waving our flags for America 
+Bike tour of the Grand Canyon
+Us at the Grand Canyon (obvi)






xo.pa

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself. | Anna Quindlen






xo.pa

a metaphor

Mending is not easy.

You see, you can’t mend people like you do clothes. A good seamstress can make it appear like there was never anything wrong. But with people, there’s always a mark left over, no matter how good the stitching is. That’s just how life goes. There’s always something left over: a loose thread, a seam, a reminder that something that was once whole was broken, then put back together. Sometimes the breaks are small, so small that only you notice them. And some are huge gaping holes that redefine the entire exterior, sewing you back together in ways that you never imagined.

Mending hurts.

A tear, even a big tear, can be over in an instant. You can fix a torn sleeve or a pulled hem in no time at all. Maybe an hour, maybe less if you really know what you’re doing.

But you can’t do that when you’re mending people. You just can’t. It doesn't work that way. Because when you rip apart a soul, it takes a long time to fix. Maybe a year. Maybe a lifetime. Maybe never. The bite of the needle moving in and out, in and out as it binds two raw edges back together can burn long after the rip was made. But we can’t stop. We still we have to mend.

When a shirt is ripped and not repaired, it becomes useless. It lies in shreds, and if it’s lucky, it might get turned into rags for cleaning. When a heart is ripped, if it isn't mended, it too turns to tatters. It languishes and disintegrates until is stops being a heart. And it turns into the rags of a heart. And when the heart goes to pieces, so does the person.

So you must mend. You must take up the needle, thread it, and begin the painful process of stitching. Maybe for years. Maybe for a lifetime. But you must stitch. You must mend.

But mending is not easy.

And sometimes you might believe you're not a good enough seamstress.

But you are.

So you must mend. 

Because mending is not easy.

xo.pa