Romance and Adventure…Daily

written by Cilla & Morgan Day Cecil

When Bret and I realized that there was a good chance we would never be able to conceive a child of our own, many different life plans swam around in our heads. We had always planned on being parents and living the life of a perfect little family. While beyond devastated, we began to get excited about one of our alternate plans. We decided that if we weren’t going to have children, we were going to live these lives of adventure and charity. We would travel the world, helping children, and seeing things we had only dreamed of. The funny thing was, that in our minds it was one or the other. It was like we would live this life of parenthood, or this life of adventure. Since our dream of a sweet little family is on its way to coming true, I started to wonder if it really had to be one or the other. Could we live a life of adventure AND a life of parenthood? I would never ever want to give up the dream of being a mommy and am so thankful to God for granting us this gift. If I had to choose one over the other, well, that choice is obvious. But what if we could have BOTH…

I’ve been a fan of Morgan Day Cecil since I ran across her blog of romance and adventure here in the Bluegrass. Reading her words always make me feel like I’m settled into a good Elizabeth Gilbert book. I feel inspired by each word. We all knew immediately that we wanted her to be a guest blogger. We were beyond amazed after reading what she had written and knew she had to be our very first guest blogger. Her words spoke to me and really hit home. Without further ado…our first guest blogger….Morgan Day Cecil…may she inspire you the way she’s inspired each of us.

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When I was 15 I went on Safari in Kenya, kissed a giraffe, and rode a camel around the pyramids of Giza.

When I was 21, I took out a map of Italy, scanned it’s coastline for the eastern-most city and put a pin in it. I decided I would go there, on my own, to watch the sun rise out of the ocean, and learn Italian.

When I was 26 I said yes to the invitation to go on holiday with a wealthy latin lover in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. We would swim in the Red Sea and dine like royalty.

These memories of mine make my life look like a storybook tale of Romance & Adventure…and I treasure them for it.

While the first few decades of my life were marked by dozens and dozens of passport stamps, the next decade of my life, decidedly, was not.

I got pregnant. I wasn’t married. Dreams of a glamorous, jet-set life crashed. I was a single mom who named her son after a handsome city in Italy with a prayer that our life together could somehow still be magical and beautiful, even if we stayed put stateside.

My heart still longed for romance & adventure though. And as I fell more in love with motherhood, met the love of my life and got married, and became grounded in my faith, I felt the delicious suspician grow that romance and adventure indeed could be ours, even in Kentucky.

And I wanted it to be ours because romance and adventure are transformative: we live differently when we are in the middle of a grand romance and/or an epic adventure. We live as if our life had the significance it was always meant to have– for ourselves and for others. Simply put, we come alive!

So I began the Bluegrass Romance project and began to investigate the true meaning of a life of romance and adventure. I knew that if romance and adventure, strictly speaking, meant pocketfulls of gold and living out life in a foreign land, we were out of luck. But if we could discover or invent new possibilities of romance and adventure than life could be very interesting and lovely no matter where we lived.

The first thing I learned (or rather, confirmed) was that romance had everything to do with love. Love and beauty. But interestingly, it didn’t necessarily require a significant other. In fact, the presence of a significant other made no difference if love & beauty weren’t felt internally first.

And this brought me to the understanding that love, beauty and romance were intricately tied to self-worth.  Talking with friends, looking back over our lives, we noticed that we all treated ourselves as if some days we were worthy of romance and adventure and some days not. When we were skinny or fit, or had a particularly great hair cut, we felt worthy of romance. But, on days or seasons we felt fat and ugly or grumpy and mean, we cut ourselves off from even the possibility of romance. The flowers our husbands brought us withered without us even recognizing ourselves worthy of the gift.

It wasn’t until my faith encountered my desire for romance that things began to shift. “The root of all holiness is Romance,” I read in the book Captivating, by Staci & John Eldridge.

Something in me came alive when I read that sentence. I immediately resonated with it’s truth. But it was also elusive, like, what does it really mean for holiness and romance to be connected?

As we lived out our year in Kentucky, far from the sophistication, charm and ready-made Romance of Europe, I began to experience romance in everyday little things. Like, in planting cosmos in our backyard and watching my then 3 year old son water them with me ever morning in his Disney Cars slippers.  Or, jumping in the car at midnight to drive out into the dark country to lay on the hood of our car and scan the night’s sky for shooting stars.

What became romance to me were things already dunked in holiness. I could see romance and holiness in my experiences meeting at the sacred crossing of the ordinary and extraordinary. This is where life becomes poetic, glazed with something beautiful, transcendent, significant. This is what I still seek daily, even though the Bluegrass Romance project is over.

On days when my self-worth is intact and I know my identity has everything to do with God’s love for me and not my personal failures, hang-ups or life’s disappointments,  even ordinary moments happen like cloud’s bursting open: I awaken to a certain presence and the whole dang thing of life becomes romantic again.  All I can do is sing hallelujah.

So there is a little of what I’ve come to know about romance in the pursuit of living a life of romance & adventure. There is still so much to share (we didn’t even touch on the adventure part yet!).  For now, I’ll leave you all with this: Our cups can runneth over with romance everday when we become present to where possibilities of beauty and love in our life already exist.  Go within. Meet your faith. Stand from the place of already being adored so you may adore the extraordinary in the ordinary things around you.

Morgan Day Cecil now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and son. She is on sabbatical from her personal blog, but contributes monthly to Transformed Magazine.  She is the co-founder and a principal photographer at Lola & Eve Boudoir. She still dreams of Italy and looks forward to the day when, with her husband and her son, she will ride camels in Egypt, go on Safari in Kenya, swim in the Red Sea and watch the sun rise from every ocean on the planet. Until then she is greatly enjoying fantastic coffee houses and brew-pubs in the Great Northwest.  Stay in touch with her on Facebook and Twitter.