I have started this blog a few times. I have a lot I want to say but discover that because I am feeling under the weather I haven’t been able to stay awake long enough to write a fully coherent post. It will have to keep until I get back home tomorrow and get a little wind under my sails. So I once again spun the RNG wheel and landed on a post that I enjoyed re-reading. Sometimes when looking back through blog posts from early days of this blog I am inspired by the resilience and strength of will that carried me through some challenging days. That strength still bears me up–both the original power that kept me putting one foot in front of the other even when I wanted to quit, and the strength I draw from realizing just how covered by grace and filled with gratitude I was during those days. Grace and gratitude sustain me now, as do so many other wonderful attributes I discovered I had back in the really tough days. I have some interesting new challenges ahead of me in the weeks and months to come. I pray that I can continue to approach them standing strong, resilient and filled with peace, serenity, and calm. Please enjoy this post from spring of 2012.
The blank screen beckons “Fill me with sweet,wondrous words.” Gratitude now speaks.The first haiku I’ve attempted since high school. How about it? I owe this to my sister, with whom I was chatting on Facebook a bit earlier. She’s traveling and was sitting in a hotel room in Chicago a little too wound up to wind down. So she was on Facebook having just posted about watching the eagles nest (one of our favorite past times.) I had just gotten off of a Skype call with our brother a little while earlier, so clearly this is family night for me. I was lamenting that I needed to write this blog and wasn’t feeling quite up to it.
“I’m cranky and I don’t feel very grateful,” I whined.
“Be grateful that you can accept your current mood and go with it, knowing that tomorrow is another day,” she replied in her ever helpful, practical way.
“Been there, done that. I might go on strike tonight, and me without ice cream.” “Be grateful that there’s no ice cream, lol. You don’t have to always be all deep you know. Be silly.” “I’ll do my best,” I wrote, doubtful that it would be very good. “Write a grateful haiku. Nice and short.”Almost before I could write that I didn’t know the “formula” for a haiku and hadn’t written one since high school, she typed in the chat window, “5-7-5″ which of course meant little to me. I thought it was word count, not the number of syllables. (Thank goodness for Google…) Thus, in a matter of a few brief moments, I had constructed the masterpiece above, my haiku titled, “Gratitude Speaks.”
I’ve decided that the haiku and the conversation leading up to it is probably a lot more interesting than what I was going to write. The truth is, today’s been a bit of a struggle and sometimes on days like this,it’s all I can do to muster a modicum of enthusiasm to write about gratitude. As always I am grateful today for many things; and as I’ve written before, gratitude doesn’t falter or fail or take days off, only the writer does. Sometimes the warm, gentle glow of gratitude gets lost in the white-hot, glaring stadium lights of life’s trials and tribulations. The peaceful, gentle lapping of gratitude’s waves against the shore of my consciousness gets drowned out by the clashing, clanging cacophony of the noise of doom and cataclysm of past due bills and empty larders…..well, you get the point.
In spite of everything, I am grateful for so many things, too numerous to count really. More than anything, tonight I am grateful for loving family, for siblings who love and care enough to call me on Skype just to see how I’m doing or who stay up late offering helpful suggestions to help a cranky writer find her words again. And for my kids for whom I still drag myself out of the bed each day, even though they are not children any more. I am grateful for them–who they are and who they are becoming. Look out world. They make my world go around–my family and friends.
Tomorrow starts a new month, and is the anniversary of my moving away from my home of six years. It was pretty much the last significant blow in the series of losses in 2011 I now cavalierly refer to as my “series of unfortunate events.” In some ways I’m still very much finding my footing and am still recovering from being put out. But, I am grateful to still be standing–knees wobbling, hands shaking, head spinning–and soldiering on.
The long day is done. Now comes the stillness of night. Gratitude still speaks. © M. T. Chamblee,2012
