Tag Archives: love

Adventures, Experiences, Philosophy

A Valentine (Again)

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Four years ago today, I posted a short entry to express affection for a man who’d been making himself a little home within my heart.

At the time we’d been dating for about six months. I teased him regularly that the shelf life on most of my relationships was less than eight months, and as he approached that mark and then surpassed it, he often joked that he was running out of time on my attention span and he’d lose me soon.

Early in our relationship, he shared his lack of fondness for Valentine’s Day. He’d avoided it every year, even when seeing someone, he told me. Women knew he wasn’t going to make plans with them that day, and that was that.

So when our first Valentine’s Day approached, in 2013, I assumed his personal tradition would hold true. I was living in Las Vegas, he was in Los Angeles. I wasn’t disappointed about it — I knew what to expect because he told me what he was like.

The day before Valentine’s Day was a Wednesday, and he sent me this adorable picture of the two of us, and told me he wished he could spend the day with me. I asked if he was serious.

He said yes, but he was leaving to shoot 2013’s International Students for Liberty Conference on Friday, so he’d be flying out at 8am the morning of the 15th.

He said if I could get to him for Valentine’s Day, he’d buy my return ticket home. So, at 5:30pm on the 13th, he purchased a ticket for me from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, same time as his flight to DC.

Last minute flights were a bit out of my price range, so I befriended a random German tourist who had decided to rent a Ford Mustang and drive from Las Vegas to Los Angeles on Thursday morning.

I’m not kidding. I met the German dude on Craigslist. He was 25ish, having his “American road trip” experience and was happy to drive me to LA for free just for the company for the 4.5 hour drive.

Thursday morning I hopped into the car of my new German friend, with just a backpack and my heart on my sleeve.

I arrived at his house mid-afternoon, bid good-bye to my chauffeur, and we spent the day and evening together – we made dinner and watched the movie Ted. We stayed up all night talking (and not talking), and in the morning we headed to LAX for our respective flights.

It was a perfect Valentine’s Day that neither of us expected.

I drew this for him on 2/14/2013.

Right before Valentine’s Day two years ago, we decided, very amicably and mutually, to break up. We wrote loving testimonials to each other and meant every word. The response from friends and followers was enormous and loving, and we were so grateful that our communities that we were both so involved in did not have to “choose sides”. We stayed close afterwards, and over time the lines we’d drawn eventually blurred between us.

Now he’s my Valentine again this year. Whether this lasts another 6 months or 6 years or a lifetime… I love our story and these adventures we have.

I’ll admit, I see us both as people who see the world and what we get from it as something within our control and ability. Like: I’m this way, and so this is how I react, this is how I want this interaction to go, this is what I do, and this is what I expect to happen.

I think when it comes to love, we’ve both let go of a number of our assumptions, because engaging in this story together as it unfolds is new, challenging, exciting, and unlike anything either of us has really done before.

Maybe it’s just a kiss, frozen in time, echoing back over four and a half years of very influential memories that keep us coming back to one another. But it’s special and it’s real.

I can’t say if it’ll last. I’ve never been out this deep before.

But I love that he’s my Valentine.

Adventures, Character, Current Events, Experiences, Writing

The State of the Avens

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Judd & I at the Tesla event. I was so excited I could barely handle it.
Judd & I at the Tesla event. I was so excited I could barely handle it.

I turned 27 this past Friday. The night before, I had the good fortune to attend the unveiling of the new Tesla Model D. Friday night, a small group of incredible people I am so grateful to call friends gathered for dinner to celebrate my birthday. On Saturday, I went to the premiere of a new documentary called The Culture High (which I recommend highly). On Sunday, I spent the better part of a day playing with my adorable little niece-of-the-heart. It was an amazing weekend. I am tremendously lucky for all the incredible events and people in my life.

I haven’t done a formal update about my life in quite a while. I guess now is as good a time as any. I’m calling it The State of the Avens, because we all know I’m a little too obsessed with politics and nerdy references. Continue reading The State of the Avens →

Adventures, Character, Experiences, Past

The Lucky Ones

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I am tremendously lucky in my life. I’ve had some amazing loves. I’ve been passionately kissed under fireworks and under stars, I’ve been the center of somebody’s world before, and I’ve felt the smile of my lover like the sun in the sky. If I was never loved again in my life, I think the amount of love I’ve felt and given is probably more than many get to experience in their lives.

I am phenomenally fortunate. Continue reading The Lucky Ones →

Adventures, Experiences

The Bear & The Bird

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I’m kinda-sorta-maybe-a-lot-in-love right about now. I would claim I don’t know how I got here, but I do, and this is where I’ll tell you, if you stay to read. This entry was harder to write than most simply because it’s a currently evolving story, not a finished chapter from my past. I hope I do this present experience justice.

It was just another Wednesday in June of 2012 when I spotted a clever post on Facebook credited to an online friend. The original poster was some cocky-looking guy named “Judd Weiss” who’d tagged my acquaintance. After some banter back and forth in the comments I explored Judd’s profile, pictures, and website (Hustlebear.com) and found we had mutual interests and mutual friends, so I sent him a friend request.

Over the next year I’ve certainly gotten to know him (I’d dare say more than most) – I met him in person a few weeks later at Freedom Fest in July. I brought a couple of people up to a little get-together in his hotel room, and next thing I knew I had seven people following me to a great little restaurant in Las Vegas. He sat beside me, and somehow as I drank glass after glass of Sangria, I missed the fact that I was sitting next to the next great love of my life. Continue reading The Bear & The Bird →

Adventures, Experiences, Past, Writing

The Move That Made Me

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I sat at a computer all night trying to find the emotional zone that makes me tell a story. I got distracted by the typical aspects of the internet, and suddenly dawn arrived and I had no words yet, despite having spent three days telling myself it was time to write it. Finally, I grabbed a pack of clove cigarettes and a lighter and headed to my porch to watch the sun rise. I don’t even smoke, I just love the smell of burning clove, the way the tendrils of smoke rise off the ash at the end of the cigarette. I listened to birds sing and the neighborhood wake up. I started talking to someone who wasn’t there, I started telling them the story I was trying to tell in written word, and suddenly it poured out. I do this a lot. I tell it like I’m a character in a movie, like every dramatic scene that’s quiet in which a character tells another the truth. Dramatic pauses, a drag from a cigarette and thoughtful sighs. It makes it so much more artful, and suddenly those spoken words travel down to my fingers and allow me to walk back inside and type them out. It’s always this damn cigarette that brings it out.

Three years ago, on Memorial Day weekend of 2010, I left New England for my new life in Los Angeles. I was twenty-two and ready for an adventure. Many friends confessed confusion as to why I would leave, and why I’d choose Los Angeles, a city I only knew three people in, a city so much different than where I was from. Once I moved, and still to this day, I get asked by people in LA why I chose to move there.

I often laugh and say, “it all started with a boy”. Continue reading The Move That Made Me →

Adventures, Experiences, Past, Travel, Writing

Love (Found & Lost) Along the Road

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So, the context provided in the entry before this one should explain that I’d followed love to a strange set of life-decisions. After having planned for over a year to move from Boston to Los Angeles, I finally did, and a year later I left to drive haphazardly across the country. Because of a Boy. Seriously, read that damn entry first.

So I left Los Angeles on June 3rd. It was very hard to do. My stuff was in storage, my birds were in their travel cage, there was less money in my bank account than I’d hoped, and I was very, very, nervous. I had just moved to LA a year before. I’d been so excited to start my life there. I kept looking at my favorite restaurants, favorite haunts, thinking to myself that I’d be back in two months, that I’d just settle right back in, hopefully bringing the Boy back with me.

The only way I was able to leave was by reminding myself I’d be back soon. Reminding myself that I had an adventure to go on, and that I’d be home again before I knew it. That the time would fly by.

So I drove to Las Vegas. I checked into my hotel room at The Artisan, a hotel I’d stayed at many times before and have stayed at many times since. I spent the next two weeks working – booking tables, selling bottles, hosting parties, Go-Go dancing, bar-tending private parties, gambling even, all cash and quick. The plan was to make as much money as I could fast, and to head East.

A few days before my expected leaving date, I met Ghost. Ghost has a real name, but I don’t feel like using it, as few people know it and by keeping it close I feel it makes him still belong to me in some way, even though I’m giving away this story.  Continue reading Love (Found & Lost) Along the Road →

Adventures, Experiences, Past, Travel

The Context (Leading up to the Summer of 2011)

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Two years ago, I was in a very different space. So different, in fact, that I can barely recall it, so I flip through journals and pictures and try to reassemble the jumble of memories. I loved a Boy who lived 2,000 miles away from me, and I struggle to remember why. I try to remember kisses and adventures on chemicals in a forest land in upstate New York where we found one another among the clutter of New Age festival wildness.

Two years ago, I packed my life up and drove across the country for three months. That’s the story I’ve been wanting to tell, but before I do, I have to explain why I did, which is a story in and of itself. So there are few entries to read, and they’re autobiographical nonsense of a girl in her early 20s who seems to make a lot of life-altering decisions for boys. But these experiences, for all that they twist me around and make me run off on crazy paths in alternate directions, they’ve really shaped who I happen to be.

So, I guess we’ll back up to July of 2010, when I flew from my home in Los Angeles to New York for an annual hippie festival I’d been attending for years. It was already set to be a wild adventure – I flew out with clothing, a sleeping bag and a pillow, but no tent. I had no room for one in my baggage and decided I knew so many people at the festival that I would find someone to let me share their tent. It was a crazy idea, I’ll admit, but I love those kinds of situations. I have always made the best of not knowing what comes next, and Brushwood is a real home for me, filled with friends of my parents, friends of mine, former lovers, and lovers yet to be discovered. Continue reading The Context (Leading up to the Summer of 2011) →

Adventures, Experiences, Modeling, Photography, Writing

A Valentine

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Photograph by Judd Weiss.

So I love. I’ve had so many great loves, so many butterflies and wide-eyed moments of trying and failing and hurting and giving. I’m not afraid to feel, not afraid to enjoy and embrace, but profoundly appreciative of how rare I find those sparks and subtle wants to please and need.

Things are great sometimes, with cuddles and kisses and irresistible trysts. I’m rather non-possessive and attentive and affectionate and all of these things come naturally and preemptively for the right person, the right dynamic. I’m passionate and careful – with my heart and others’.

I try to be the best for someone, the best that I can be. People deserve the best from one another, and I love the song in my soul that serves to remind me I deserve someone who inspires the best of me.

Maybe love is for a short time, or a long time, or a lifetime. In this instance it is, so far, six months of laughter and dreams and adventures and late-night stir-frys, and reflecting on the distance we’ve come and the hurdles we’ve climbed and the things we might wish to do. Six months thus far, and if this were as far as it went it’d be perfect as it was, and if it continues, it’s perfect as long as it lasts. We learn from one another, we give and we hold and we provide safe space to grow and be, tender and gentle, dominant and submissive, and everything, anything, together. It’s not exclusive, it doesn’t have to be, it lacks the resentment I tend to find in binding myself to one, and yet there is no disrespect, just compassion and courtesy, trust and openness. I’m very grateful for it, tremendously so.

I don’t grasp at love, fleeting as it can be. I just bask in it.

I’ve got so much love to give, to share — I love you, Valentines. All of you. And him.

Poetry, Writing

Three.

The lover of another covered me in kisses, her specificity dismissed for the bliss that we could witness. At first glance I was coy, but the division was elusive, my submission to the substance and her heart was most profusive. I watched skin touching skin and those satisfying sounds of lovers giving in to their passions all unbound, and the test was passed most surely by each in their own way, as the girls we felt emotions that came strong and held some sway.

Curves of bodies, moans of pleasure and disappearance into dreams, I can’t say it wasn’t lovely and heartbreaking at the seams, as you learn the look your lover gives the other all undone, and you cling to what you have because it’s all you’ve ever won. Still experience is effort, and we gave it as we got, the openness was awesome, battles won but never fought, for there is nothing gained in grasping at the fluidity of love, just some souls all pressed together, hope as pure white as a dove.

November 7, 2012

Travel

Mid-West Wandering

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Dubuque, Iowa.  I cannot believe I’ve been here this long.  The house I’m staying in is set up on a bluff overlooking the city.  If I bothered to wake up early enough, I could sit on the front steps and watch the sun rise in the East over the Mississippi River.  From this vantage point I can see Illinois and Wisconsin.  At night, the same view is littered with blinking and stationary lights – alerting boats and aircraft alike to the position of the bridges. Continue reading Mid-West Wandering →