Lilly'sday- (Grandest Adventure)

Hello again, my friends :D I hope you have had a wonderful past few weeks, and i am delighted to talk to your gorgeous faces once again :D This weeks topic is our grandest adventure. So take a seat, get cozy, and prepare yourself for a little story (dont worry its a picture book). I would say that i have gone on MANY adventures, ranging from making fairy houses in my back yard (always have always will) or little trips to the park to my biggest adventure yet, The one i am currently living (but more on that later). The adventure story I have decided to tell you on this muggy July night, actually happened exactly a year ago! 

Summers for me are usually extremely uneventful. I hang out with a friend or two, go to a summer camp [Where i am now a Volunteer (GO TR!)] for a few weeks, and basically try to find ways to entertain myself the other 72 days of summer. Last summer (and this one but sadly i wasnt able to go) I was invited to go with my friends the Snyders (Virginia, who comes up frequently on this blog including yesterdays post) on their annual trip to Idaho for three weeks. 

That Trip would not only be the longest time i had ever been away from my parents, but also be the farthest i had ever driven across the county. That trip was basically 21 days of exploring the mid-west (a part of the country i had never seen) and having new experiences. Without a doubt i would say those where the best three weeks of my life so far. Although there where rough times (everyone being so tired of being in the car we could hardly function, for example), every single day was an adventure, filled with new experiences and challenges. I made so many memories that i hope to never forget. ^.^ That adventure not only helped mold me into the person i am today, it also ignited the desire in my heart for adventure even more! (If it was even possible) 

I think I should add a few photos here because i honestly dont think words could do it proper justice. 

(Seeee Fairy house! I told you!)

I was wrong.... they didnt do it justice, those are just some my favorites out of hundreds. 

Adventure, to me at least, is just doing something (sometimes hard things)  and putting a spin on it that only you can! Even simple everyday tasks like going to the store, or going outside, they can be adventures if you make them! To some people, maybe what i mean... isn't the exact definition of adventure. But the feeling of adventure, to me, is being open minded and letting good things happen. 

In two days I leave for the biggest adventure of my life. I dont know what is going to happen or who i am going to meet. What i do know is where i am headed and how to get there. And after that i just have to keep an open mind and do my best to MAKE it an adventure! Its not like it isnt scary, the unknown is always scary, but that certainly shouldn't stop me from something that potentially could be the best thing that has ever happened to me. ^.^

Love you all see you in a week, where i will be writing from a new home, in a new state :D  

Also sorry for having so many speaks 0.0

-Lilly

  

Adventure Post of Adventure-ness (2 AM Edition!)

Disclaimer: My fabulous cousins are in from South Africa on their annual trek to the United States and as such this is going to be a relatively short post, as I'm rather busy and will continue to be during the next week or so.

Disclaimer Number 2: 

It is 2 AM. I am sleepy. This will be rambly.

Moving on.

My grandest adventure, hm?

To be honest, “adventure” seems a pretentious word to use, to me. It implies a journey, feelings of new discovery and resulting insights into the world around us. It has connotations of that sense of prickly danger on one's skin and pleasantly anxious tightening in the chest as you charge forward on a beautiful and perilous undertaking toward New Things and the Beautiful Unknown, standing atop a mountain or navigating the U.S. in an unreliable vehicle with (hopefully) slightly more reliable friends that never fail to make you laugh.

Frankly, from my personal experience, this is extremely hard to come by, especially at the young age people who use the word typically are. It's more of a word that tumblr addicts use to put a name on this teenage ideal they wish they had the energy to go out and pursue (but instead paste with pretty fonts over nature-y backgrounds with a sense of brooding, yearning angst). So I don't like to use the term in everyday conversation.

But, persnicketies aside, the closest I've come to experiencing this sort of sensation is when I was a kid and everything beyond my backyard kind of buzzed with that electric, magically fun sense of immediate peril. Especially at my friend Cat's house, when we would venture into her woods when her parents were away and climb up into this enormously tall tree stand, sitting and overlooking the Lands Surrounding with an air of throned Narnian queens. She, her cousin (and mutual friend) Virginia and I would pretend we could control elements in the wickedly kick-butt manner of Last Airbender characters and were sort of heroes in this make believe world we had between the Tree Stand and the Creak. The Creak was a muddy trickle of an ordeal that served as the line beyond which Magical Things were probable to occur. Arachnia is the name we came up with for this realm. (Apparently, add -nia to any moderately cool-sounding prefix and BAM. Alternate fantasy world, done.)

So yeah. Childhood. That was when everything felt like an adventure by its traditional definition, places and things being innately new and mysterious and interesting, and that was wonderful. I think it's important to not lose touch with that side of ourselves, even as we grow, and perhaps even one day quit yearning for this unattainable perfect summer journey full of whimsy and ridiculously witty dialogue with the helpless desire that we do. Because unless you are a John Green character, it probably isn't going to happen the way we envision it.

Don't color me pessimistic, though. It doesn't mean you won't have good times, because you will (you'll have some great ones too, if you're lucky). It doesn't mean you won't exchange witty dialogue from occasion to occasion, or laugh so hard you fall over at something devastatingly hysterical a friend says. But it does mean that we all should appreciate these things when they happen because they usually won't be lumped together in one great big fabulous and oft-romanticized summer stew.

If one learns to see an adventure in everything they experience then life suddenly becomes a lot more interesting. Let's all stop brooding and do something today.

Talk to you all next week, hopefully in a more coherent and eloquent manner.

Elizabeth