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What is it that inspires your gratitude this year?
This is the hardest easy thing for me to do when I am blue, and the easiest thing for me to do when I am happy. Want to gauge my mood? Ask me to list things I am thankful for and watch my brow -- if it squinches up and I look confused and stupid – the blues have me by my toes and are squeezing up to my heart. If you can’t shut me up, it’s a great day – for me anyway. Today the squinch index is very low, so I apparently am not blocking my own vision from what nourishes and sustains my soul. Today I am a smart cookie. Get out the glass of gratitude milk and dip me in, sister! Dive in right along side!
1. Most obvious gratitude focus for me: At age 57 I have just become a first-time-home-owner in what is called The Pioneer Valley in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. Who would have thought? Last week I sat at the kitchen table, sipped a cup of coffee, saw black squirrels gamboling in the ½ acre back yard and promptly burst into tears of joy.
2. I have friends in my life that I have known and shared love with for over 50 years, over 40 years, over 30 years and over 20 years. And I still am making friends of meaning and substance in my life. I am wealthy with community. Granted it is dispersed all over this country and into Europe and Asia, but that just gives me a sense of home almost anywhere in the world. I cannot imagine my life without these astonishing people. They have also given me reason and welcome to be there for them, to share the rough and joyous times of all of our lives. It is an inestimable joy to look back at the treasures in a long-term friendship.
3. The crepusculum. There is a moment, almost at the end of sunset, when the sun is setting and the moon is rising at the same oppositional moment. If it is an autumn day with yellow trees, the yellow will fairly burn painlessly into your eyes. If it is midsummer, the vibrancy of the green trees will pierce your heart with such splendor that you beg for it to do it again and again. Everything shimmers in this light. Everything feels like hope and promise. I get blown away in the midst of a good crepusculum. I evaporate into colors, and reassemble sometime after sunset a changed woman, full of thanks and glistening with strange hues smeared onto my lips and fingers.
4. The opportunity to give. The opportunity to be the beneficiary of giving.
5. My faith. It has been said that faith is a gift, and sometimes that is how it feels for me. I am deeply thankful to have been raised in a faith-oriented family, even though I have pretty much dismantled and rebuilt what I was told was faith as a child. The faith that I live surrounded by the love of an inclusive and accepting God whose grace extends to all freely and without burden has sustained me and helps me see the world in a way that leaves me with hope rather than despair.
6. Big, goofy, furry, loyal, fat-footed, wide eyed dogs. I just love ‘em. They help me understand God’s unconditional love. And they make reassuring bed-lumps when sleeping sans partner. Besides, no matter how much anyone ever loves you, no one will ever be happier to see you come home than your dog.
7. There are certain scents I am thankful for because they remind me of times of bliss or joy or supreme contentment – morning coffee is one. Morning coffee and bacon is another. The scent of a pine forest after a rain. The smell from my childhood of piles of burning raked-up autumn leaves. Yardley’s April Violet cologne (which was my Mom’s favorite). The scent of wood shavings in a sawmill. Mushrooms growing under leaves. Pier One peach ginger candles. My grandfather used to smell like a cross between Ivory soap, Aqua Velva shave lotion, and Camel cigarettes – thinking of that smell brings him back immediately to memory. Fresh cut cucumbers smell wonderfully happy to me.
8. My cancer surgeon and radiologist. Sloan-Kettering. Columbia Presbyterian. And for the recovery for 25 years now that
