I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. About our need for it, our hesitance towards it, how freeing it can be, and how scary it is to love all at the same time.

About how we say to love our neighbors, love our enemies, love ourselves. Why, oh why, does loving seem to be so challenging when at our core it is what we are designed to experience?

As protesters hold signs with phrases about its power and aisles at Target fill up with pink, chocolate, and candy hearts, our world inundates us with the perplexing notion of what it means to love and be loved.

As I got lost in my own thoughts this week, I kept drifting back to these questions. I spent a few hours searching for quotes or profound statements, phrases, poems that have catchy truths about that little four letter word.

Like the poem read aloud at the end of “10 Things I Hate About You” or the bible verses read at weddings as we commit to love one another for our entire lives.

As I scrolled and scrolled, I stopped on this quote.

“Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you´ll find your treasure.”

– The Alchemist, Paulo Cohelo –

And so, in the next ten days leading up to the United States’ most commercialized day of expressed love, I’m asking you to do something.

Help me to understand just how beneficial love is. Why we need it, why we choose it, why we believe in it. Help me to understand how you find your heart treasure.

I invite you to participate in the “Where Your Heart is Challenge” by completing one of the following tasks and sending me your thoughts. The world needs more love right now, and I’m asking you to help spread it.

Here are your choices:

1. Write a love letter to your favorite person of choice. Stick it in the mail or deliver it in person.
2. Write a love poem. It can be about a person, a season of life, the good and beautiful things that enrich you right now.
3. Make a list of your treasures.  What treasures are dwelling within a space of love that enrich and enhance your life.

At the foundation of this little challenge, I believe time spent on this exercise will make you feel better about your own situation. If you choose to keep this to yourself, honor the time you spend reflecting on love.

I hope, ever so much, that you will want to be brave and share what you have come up with and I can repost it here. Send me a picture of the list, type up a reflection, let me know how you have been inspired to pay it forward and bask in the force that connects all of us.

Email me the details at (52beautifulthings at gmail dot com) of your experience and I will be honored to share your story.

Ten days of spreading the love. I hope you will join me.

xoxo