“realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.”– eckhart tolle

10:00 on saturday morning found me just barely rolling out of bed.
meaning i wasn’t really coherent or functioning until almost 11.
but a little past 11, i get a text from my good friend, tyler, asking if i wanted to go to the festival of colors.
{side note: tyler is a violin master. seriously. i could say that he works magical wonders with the violin of his, but honestly? words cannot adequately describe his amazingness.}
we had talked about going as roomies, but hadn’t made any decisions.
i wasn’t sure if i really wanted to go, but then i decided it would be way fun.
so brooke, the asian, and i joined kim cox and tyler on our adventure to the festival of colors.
{side note: kim is also a fantastic individual. she and i are great friends. sometimes i see her 4 or 5 times a day. it’s awesome.}
on the way there, we busted out all our disney songs.
tyler and kim were impressed with our skills.
with good reason.
because we don’t mess around.
especially with our disney.

{this is us before. notice how clean we are.}
we made it to the bus that would take us to the hindu temple. (we may or may not have possibly gotten a tad lost on the way)
and eventually got to the temple, and started walking to go buy our chalk.
people that had been there for the previous chalk throwing had leftover chalk, and would randomly throw it at us, because we were all clean.
don’t worry, jcho got a huge chunk in her eye and had to cry it out.
we had a good 2 hours to wait because we got there right after the 1:00 throwing, so we had to wait until the next one.
we bought our chalk, took some pictures, ran into some people from our ward, took some more pictures, went onto the temple, took some more pictures, then went down where the main crowd of people were.
then we just stood there in our little circle and danced a bit to the music that was playing.
i kinda wished one of us had tried crowd-surfing...but only minimally.
{side note: the girl that was singing kept telling us to “come into unity—COMMUNITY!” and kept asking us if we felt the love! at one point, the comment was made that even though the music sounded like it could be talking about drugs, the love could definitely be felt...}
during all the dancing and stuff, interesting things happened, which i will not describe in detail. all i will say is that kim and i got to know each other pretty well. that and...there are some weird people at the color festival.
OH!!
i almost forgot.
there was a kid there with dreadlocks.
when he turned around, brooke and i touched them.
booyah grandma.
i touched dreadlocks.
word.
anyway so then the time came.
the time we had been waiting for.
...or so i thought.
this guy gets up to talk for a few moments about the festival and the traditions and such.
then randomly, he told us that we were gonna burn a witch.
(he obviously didn’t feel the love...)
something about tradition and a story...i dunno. i wasn’t really paying attention (extra brownie points if you can name that movie reference...)
they had made a witch dummy thing and burned it.
then finally, we had a countdown.
10...
9...
8...
7...
6...
5...
4...
3...
2...
hare krishna!!
and then we all threw our chalk up in the air.
i couldn’t see or really breathe for a minute or so.
there was so much chalk dust stuff everywhere.
and it was crazy!
we got so colorful!!

{remember how we were all wearing white shirts? yeah that was fun...}

our shirts are now pink...that’s partially because brooke washed her red hat with all our stuff, but still...

my scalp is still pink.
as are my fingernails and the lines in my hands.
but it was amazing.
definitely worth it :)