Living Life With Passion...

Life is honestly what you make it. It can be an empty canvas awaiting a masterpiece or just waiting endlessly for someone to come along and get inspired enough to fill it up with magical colors.

Waiting...

We wait and wait for something to happen and we get so lost in the waiting that we sometimes forget we are what we are waiting for... inspiration comes from being intricately, involved and inspired by living life interactively with nature, music and weather.

Why do we chase storms? For the danger? Nah... For the thrills? Nah... For the fame?No...seriously... not.

We chase storms because we are chasing life and we are interactively, involved with the wildness of the moment, wanting to learn more, see more.. up close and personal, to understand more.. to think..to watch...to wonder...

And, knowledge is power and the more knowledge the more power we have collectively over storms and the better we understand them.

And, in the process we better understand life.

To see a fallen ficus tree that provided shade and a canopy of delight filled with hiding places for generations of children reminds us that we are only human, time moves on and nothing is permanent except change and the wind and weather. Just as the children hiding high up in the highest branches on a hot summer day are now grown and have moved on... so eventually does even the biggest tree. One big tree that lasts 100 years and then finally...one strong storm hits it just so and wham, bam... it falls across a yard, a street, takes out part of the sidewalk and a few water pipes and takes weeks to get cut down into small enough pieces to be carted away.

And, then..........

There is big hole in the ground that looks empty and sad and missing something and you can either sit around waiting and watching and wondering how such a big tree that was such a big part of your life could be gone in one storm...or you can go out to Home Depot and pick out a new tree and plant it into the spot where the old tree was and move on.

This is life. These are lessons learned from watching storms...

Some people leave the hole there and others plant a big, bright royal poinciana tree that soon showers the yard with scarlet petals in the spring.

Your choice...

Live life with passion and become intricately involved or sit passively by and pout and be depressed that nothing ever happens. Make it happen!!

Being an artist is being constantly inspired by the big and the small of it all.

A website, a wren or a wrinkle in time.. a rainbow or a snow storm or a sudden summer shower.

The Hurricane season was a bit of a let down for us chasers, however even though there were no storms to chase in the Southeast there were storms in Southeast Asia and we watched and learned from them a bit more than before. Every season brings some new piece of the puzzle, some new forecasting tool, some new favorite link or friend that enriches our understanding of how hurricanes are born, live, thrive and die.

I went to the beach after a storm passed by off shore this year and saw starfish on the beach, glistening in the light of the early morning sun... a sight I had never seen before. I bathed in waves that crashed about and yet did not wash over the beach with a storm surge but passed safely offshore before crashing into beaches far away in Newfoundland!

Passion can be found quietly by staring at the colors of a fallen leaf on the ground on wet stone walkways on a cold, damp fall morning. Ficus trees turn colors too when they are uprooted and die after a hurricane has plucked them out of the soggy, saturated ground and yet they don't grow back... they are dead. The oak tree will be green again in the summer ... until some hurricane comes close enough to this area and uproots it like the trees lost after Hugo marched deep into the Carolinas and took out much of the tree canopy of Charlotte.

Hurricanes... passionate reminders of the beauty of living in the moment. And, the constant reminder that each year is different and change is inevitable.

The very quiet year of 1925 in the Tropical Atlantic was followed immediately by the very active year of 1926 when 4 storms affected Florida in some way and trashed the tobacco crop in Cuba as well.





So...today is a new day... what are you going to do with it?

How are you going to live it?

Interactively, passionately or are you just going to stare out the window and wonder?

Find your passion and paint it...write it...live it!

Besos Bobbi

Life a life less ordinary...live life with passion!!!