Monday, April 29, 2013

The Butterfly Effect of Love by Allison Adams


Science has shown the butterfly effect to engage 
with the first movement of any form of matter- including people.

            ~from Andy Andrews book The Butterfly Effect
            a gift for the families who attended the wedding





A few years ago, a boy was too busy to make it out for a blind date with a girl.

After talking to her long distance by chat, text, phone, he decided he had to see her.  Convincing his parents who were on their way to the town where she lived to drop him off at her house for the weekend, he arrived at her doorstep, a sleeping bag and pillow in hand. 

I don’t recall the exact way it was told at the Rehearsal Dinner but I think it went down like this.  As he stood there, a surprise to this girl and her college room mates, he waved to his parents over his shoulder with a huge grin, “This is Lauren. I am going to meet her parents this weekend, then another weekend you are going to get to know her and some day we are going to be married!”

They dated a couple of years and the celebration of their lives together was this weekend in Rosemary Beach, Florida.

My husband and two daughters (7 and 17) followed the flutter of love set forth in their college days and headed to Rosemary beach for their wedding.  Getting to know his family, in the brief moments we had around them, was something magical. To meet Will you can only grin from ear to ear. I don’t recall seeing him not smiling, and hugging people, and sticking his arm out to say “I’m Will!” to anyone and everyone he saw.

Toasts from their friends were all upbeat, magical, kind, genuinely all about the magic of their love.  The preacher who married them had been waiting for this day since he was a child. His humor and pure joy for the occasion sent waves of chuckles throughout the weekend.

A toast was made by an elderly couple, briefly strangers, who met Will on an airplane on his way back from Argentina where he works as a hunting guide.

“I’m getting married,” he told them.

The gentleman whom I would guess is in his seventies gleamed as he and his wife stood to toast Will.  “This boy whom I met for only hours but felt like I knew him my whole life told me about Lauren on the ride home. It sounded like such a magical union. “

Will’s answer was, “You should come. I’ll send you a ticket!”

And that is how the little northern couple too were sucked up into the love current started back in college by a boy with a big heart and a girl who won it with her brains, beauty and love of hunting.

And everywhere we were, stories of Will and Lauren drifted across the wind. Her college friends from Rhodes, her roommates from Auburn, and some from Graduate School at Vanderbilt all meshed together in a tail wind of excitement spurred by the birth of a little girl whose daddy taught her how to hunt and fish and her mama who loved to shop with her and ski and do all the things boys like for girls to do with them while looking “fabulous”.

While her parents are no longer married, the love in her heart and the love they have for her brought them to a moment where they could stand together, for her, with her.  The toast Carson made was not about him…but how “your mother and I feel about the blessing that you are”.



Love is the ultimate goal in life. It is the most important of all of the messages that God left for us here on earth.

The couple didn’t say “we are in love”. 




They ARE love. Their eyes showed it, their hugs showed it. There was no need for words.

In a time when the world seems tiny and meaningless for so many as it crumbles around us and hate rises up, we are reminded on a beach in a small town of Rosemary that there are great new beginnings being formed. There are messages floating along the sands and waves shouting out to perhaps a couple who was there who re-kindled a stale relationship, or a stranger who watched from beyond the dunes who dreamed of one day having such a blessed marriage.






Yes, there were butterfly effects going on all around us in Rosemary.

My seven year old watched it all.  Perhaps the effect she sees will be with her forever as she aspires for true love.  She was so excited to help hand out the rosemary that would shower the bride and groom  as they rolled off in their antique thunderbird convertible. Rosemary symbolizes love, remembrance, friendship and truth ~ something they will take into a new life, a new world, where laced into an even more powerful strand, I have no doubt that they will send tornadoes of hope across the world.



I can feel them now in Belize~ landing on a soft beach, speaking of love, toasting to their future, perhaps sparking a small wave, a breeze of what is to come across the planet where we are, just as we are soaking in and simply remembering the first wave.

Cheers and congratulations to you for touching my life and reminding me how precious my sweet husband is and how blessed I am with my children.

The greatest of these….is love.  Thanks for sharing yours!

Allison Adams




Wednesday, April 24, 2013

SOCIAL MEDIA THE HAPPYMESS WAY

The past month I have been a part of the happYmess quest to get all of my media frenzy in order. I am a habitual blogger, website starter, facebook poster, frequent frenzy tweeter and Mitzi Jane Media has provided me with so much happYmess to explore that my head might just bust open!

MJM STRENGTH Social Media Conference for Small Business 
has been the facilitator for area experts in every genre of Social Media.

Follow her on Facebook to get highlights and find when the next conference will occur!

As for now, I am pecking away doing a bit of happYmess housekeeping. Here are a few of the baby steps I have achieved this week:

Began the happYmessLIFE BLOG (still in progress...thanks for checking in with me)

Began the happYmessLIFE facebook page

Made a notebook grid of all of my "identities" and sites that I have scattered across the world wide web with columns to connect the many emails to the entity with which they speak to one another. 

(YES I should simplify..but one of those email addresses I have had since I was in college...perhaps I am a virtual junkie!)

Updated my Linked In Account...sorry all of you who just use Linked In...I still don't get it..perhaps because most of you are on the "morning cycle". 

I have embraced my creative inner clock..thus Linked In is not working too well for me!

Pinterest...I have formed a happYmess pinterest account and plan to privitize my personal account in many areas....until the workshop I had no idea it was for followings...I thought I was using it to stash great ideas for me to use only!   Don't be buying up the horses I have pinned! It is my goal to own a flock of them!  a herd of them....

I have updated my bloGSSSSSS....and thought long and hard about where to go from here. We'll see about that.

I have updated my new website that I build myself.....which is FLASH so web crawlers do not find it...but it was easy...free  from WIX.com and I love the graphics.  SOOOOO..re-evaluating that.

www.allisonpadams.com

Please check it out and give me feedback!  It was a hair wrenching project where I had goals to finish it in my journal a year ago today!  I arrived at the conference and had my doors blown by the fact that WORDPRESS is THE way to go...by the way...it and blogger are in with GOOGLE. Thus the ease in searches.
WHO KNEW?  Wish I had a year ago! 

And TWITTER....wow...the value of the conference went through the roof when I learned about a little ap I can add to my phone and IPAD MINI to post and schedule tweets called  HOOTSuite! Thanks to Julie Brannon with TELP Media I have been humming the little lollypop song associated with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang all day....It is a life saver if you are a multiple personality media person like myself!

And THANK YOU to Rachel Callahan, blogger of graspingforobjectivity.com  and active blogger leader of alabamabloggers.com ,who made me feel like a creative spirit again instead of a whistle in a square business hole. The session before was the technical stuff I love to know but hate to do~ google analytics, search engine optimization.  She freed me to blog on what I love in random order, all with handy bars at the top so the reader can pick what they want instead of wading. She is still telling me that Wordpress is the best way to achieve that. I'll be sifting that through my brain after I get back from vacation next week. But so far....Wordpress keeps wrestling me to the ground!

Don't get me wrong Jerry Brown (with InfoMedia), your information was invaluable....it just had my creative self in a tail-spin for a day or two. 

There happens to be ONE MORE SESSION!  

On Monday night, April 29 at 5:30 we will wrap up the month with Maximizing Your Online Productivity with Emily Lowery and the Top Ten Take Aways for Small Businesses with seminar maestro Mitzi Eaker.

IF YOU ARE CURIOUS, IT IS NOT TOO LATE....

Contact Mitzi at the link for MJM STRENGTH Conference to see how you can be a fly on the wall to catch the information buzzing out on 280!  She has a one time admission price under $40 bucks.

You won't be disappointed! If for any other reason than to GET ON THE LIST TO SIGN UP FOR THE NEXT ONE~

Hoping to MAKE MORE SENSE TO MY FOLLOWERS (because you know I usually, truthfully just write for myself!)

 about music, writing, art, fashion fun, fluff! design ideas and all that my life leads me to! I love to share....I love to write....I was born to BLOG!

Thanks Mitzi for turning my sprinkler into a smooth flowing water hose...at least that is the GOAL :)

Blessings!

Allison Adams




This photo from MJM Social Media Conference by Mitzi Jane Media

this post is cross posted on www.happYmessLIFE.blogspot.com