Happy Valentine’s Day!
May we all be lucky enough to know the kind of love that Annie has for the balls in her life.
Although I do agree with the critics that Valentine’s Day is a made-up holiday, I am always an advocate for anything that adds more love to this world. Examples include my feelings for Heath, dogs, and polar bears, and, yes, that order is correct.
On Friday Heath and I celebrated five years of marriage. I know some people were quite skeptical about marrying someone after only three weeks of knowing each other, but not a day goes by that I don’t marvel about our love and how everything is working out.
Our wedding day, Friday, February 12, 2016, at the courthouse in Nashville, TN.
To celebrate our anniversary, I asked one of my favorite Internet dogs, Casper, to film a Happy Anniversary video to Heath via Cameo. Heath is the one who first introduced me to Casper and his sister, Daisy, and their TeamCasp47 account is the only reason I have a TikTok account. They are the only account I follow, and I think it goes without saying that I am here for talking dogs being silly and mischievous.
You can watch our anniversary video here:
If you watched the video and didn’t understand the reference about the Elvis glasses, I asked if Casper could wear them in the video since the first words Heath ever said to me was to sing I’ll have a blue Christmas with you, but Casper wasn’t having it the day the video was filmed. Heath and I also like to indulge our sweet tooths with chipwiches from Dee’s One Smart Cookie in Glastonbury, and the day we got married we fell asleep watching Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in what was one of the best naps of both of our lives. It is also my dream that someday we are a family with six dogs!
Since I’ve mentioned both Heath and Dogs, it seems only fitting to also write something about polar bears and how much I love them. Well, I’m going to do one better and share with you an invitation to a program I’m giving in conjunction with our town’s annual winter festival, Winter WIN. This year the festival is virtual, and I offered to present Adventures with Polar Bears on behalf of the Norfolk Library.
Here’s the description from the Library’s website:
Join us on Sunday, February 21, at 4:00 p.m., to find out what it’s like to live among polar bears, one of the world’s cutest, yet most dangerous animals. In the fall of 2018, polar bear enthusiast Kelly Kandra Hughes spent seven weeks living at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, in Churchill, Manitoba, as a polar bear season volunteer. Known as the polar bear capital of the world, Churchill is the destination for over a thousand polar bears every migration season. This presentation provides an overview of Kelly’s time in Churchill and the surprising truths she learned about eco-tourism and life in sub-arctic Canada. Please register here to be emailed the Zoom link.
Finally, since this whole post is about love I’m sharing with you an initiative I’m working on as the Director of Community & Creativity at the congregational church in Norfolk. This year for Lent, we are adding more love to the world by offering daily loving kindness meditation.
If you’re not familiar with loving kindness meditation, it’s when you think of a specific person (whom you may or may not know, and whom you may or may not like) and send positive thoughts and love their way. Every day during Lent and Holy Week, we created a guided meditation with a specific person in mind, for example, a friend you haven’t seen in while or someone who has hurt you in the past.
Here are the opening pages from the devotional:
If you’d like to access the full daily devotional, you can do so here. It’s a large file because of all the photographs, so you’ll need to download it before you can view it. Feel free to share it with whoever you think may enjoy adding more love into the world over the next few weeks.