Lessons in Gratitude Day 591

Posted on February 24, 2013 by mtchamblee
Day is done, gone the sun.

Here at the close of another day I reflect as always on the things I am grateful for, either for what has transpired in this day in particular or general thoughts I have about the gifts and blessings that surround me moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day. The very fact that my heart is beating and I draw breath in and out with ease is such a gift. I have watched my children at various points work to take easy breaths in and out as they struggled with asthma in their early lives and witnessed the gasping breaths my father took as he labored to breathe in the last hours of his life. I appreciate the breath that oxygenates my blood and carries strength throughout my whole body. It all works wondrously together in this amazing dance of particles, molecules, cells, organs, and systems in remarkable synchronization. And I know that I am indeed fearfully and wonderfully made.

From the lakes, from the hills, from the sky
All is well, safely rest
God is nigh.

As I prepare to take my rest for the night, I remind myself that all is well. Over the course of any given day, week things happen that shake up my sense of equanimity and balance. I can get ill-tempered and cranky or the blues creep in. But most days I can take a few breaths and get hold of myself and remind myself that indeed all is well. Throughout the course of my most challenging days, I have told myself that all is well (or all shall be well). It has become one of those assurances I give myself (and others around me who are experiencing moments of panic.) It is not a pollyannaish approach to life, it’s about having faith that even if all is not well in a given moment, all shall be well if I can stand strong in the midst of the storm. All is well, safely rest. God is nigh. And so it is.

This has been a good day, a much more productive one than yesterday; though productivity is not necessarily the only or primary measure of what makes a good day. It is a satisfying way to end one week and begin a new one. I am grateful to have completed a few household projects that I’d been wanting to get done, though I still have not managed to put away the last vestiges of Christmas decorations–yes, nearly two months after the holiday my creche is still sitting on the bookshelf where Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus are still hanging out in the manger. They are not directly in my line of vision every day and so I forget they are there. The three kings on the shelf below still have to find their way home too. Perhaps I’ll get them put away before Easter.

Gratitude takes on all kinds of forms, particularly in this blog. Sometimes I hit it out of the park and others it’s a foul tip into the catcher’s glove or I strike out entirely. The funny and unpredictable part of this all is that different people find different posts valuable, and sometimes those posts that I struggle with are just what someone needed to hear. I hope that those who read this post find value somewhere in tonight’s wacky, disjointed thoughts. I’m grateful for your coming along on the journey no matter where it takes us. Y’all come back now, hear?

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Lessons in Gratitude Day 590

Posted on February 23, 2013 by mtchamblee

Every once in a while I wish I could write something like, “Today I am grateful that I won several million dollars in the lottery. I am eliminating my debts, paying off my daughter’s college and graduate school loans, and helping my son with various of his financial challenges. I’m sending my therapist a check for a significant sum (which couldn’t repay the help she gave me without charge), and giving each of my siblings a whopping check so they can do whatever they want with it. Each of them in their own ways helped me during my times of struggle and while I can’t repay them I can at least add some ease to their lives. I would make several donations to a number of charities–including the Berkeley Food Pantry where I volunteered and developed friendships with my fellow volunteers. I am just getting started with all the good I plan to do with my new-found wealth.”

Yep, that would be sweet to write about. It is not completely lost on me that it is unlikely that I will win any lottery because I don’t play–heck, I don’t even know how to play. So if it is in the cards for me to have a vast fortune, it isn’t likely to come from lottery winnings. Alas. That is when I’m grateful for simple things. At this moment in time I am not likely to be grateful for big magnanimous things; right now I’m not living a big, magnanimous life. But I can continue to express my thanks for the smaller, more regular things that nonetheless grace my life.

I am grateful for relative good health, of being relatively strong and healthy in my body, mind, and spirit. Every day during my morning journal writing time I express the intention, “may I be healthy and strong in body, mind, and spirit.” Physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing is something I deeply appreciate, and though I would love to be more fit and healthy than I am, I am nonetheless grateful that I can move with ease, breathe fully and deeply, think clearly, and function relatively “normally.”

In the 15 months or so that I volunteered at the Berkeley Food Pantry I developed a deeper understanding  of what hunger looked like. Each week we distributed groceries to all kinds of people from around the area. I saw college professors and students, immigrants, homeless people, veterans, mentally and physically ill individuals–all came to receive bags of groceries to sustain them and their families. More than once even I brought some food home with me. I had days when I struggled to figure out what I was going to eat. I came to understand from my own experiences being unemployed and struggling financially that sometimes things happen and you simply need help. I am grateful for the experience of working at the Pantry, and I remain deeply grateful for the food that I have access to. Such a basic human need and yet too many people go through their days with little or no food.

I have experienced hunger before, but I have not experienced homelessness. I am grateful to live in a comfortable little house on a small lot in a decent neighborhood. I am blessed to be employed and able to afford a home and all the requisite utilities to maintain it. It has been quite comforting during a time of upheaval and changes in my life to be able to settle into a space surrounded by my paintings and knick-knacks and photographs. My furniture, while nothing fine and perhaps a little worn is nonetheless quite functional and comfortable. I am quite content here in this home for me and my little dog.

Finally, I am grateful for my little dog. She is my roommate and while she’s not much for conversation, her presence is comforting. I experienced a pang of fear a few days back as I allowed myself to consider how I would feel if something happened to Honor. I realize how important it is for me to have another living presence in my house with me. Absent a human companion, she’s the next best thing: a loving, upbeat and entertaining, welcome presence in my house and in my heart. I am so grateful to have her with me.

Perhaps I won’t be in a position any time soon to write about really big, splashy things happening in my life. I don’t think I’m in that kind of phase right now. These days I am in a somewhat quieter, more regular phase of life. Nevertheless, I am content to find myself so and grateful to be where I am in this moment. As for the rest, we’ll just have to see what unfolds.

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Lessons in Gratitude Day 589

Posted on February 22, 2013 by mtchamblee

I am sitting looking at a brick wall. It’s the one I ran smack into, landing with a thud on my backside and now I am sitting looking up at it. I went around a corner too fast, not knowing the brick wall was on the other side. Suddenly there it was and WHAMMO,  I crashed into and bounced right off of it. Of course all of this is figuratively speaking; I didn’t run into a literal wall, but I felt like I hit one nonetheless. Sometimes life can feel very surreal and that’s how it’s been over the last few days. That’s alright, of course. After all, Mama said there’ll be days like this.

On February 11, 2012 I took a week off from writing this blog. I started back up again on February 19. Somehow without quite meaning to I have managed to continue writing this blog every day since then–nearly a full year (I’ve worked the math and somehow it keeps coming up that day 593 is the 365th day of writing since I took my hiatus.) In that time I have experienced days of nearly complete writer’s block and others of divine inspiration and everything in between. This has been quite an extraordinary journey thus far, exploring various facets of gratitude.

This has been a long week and I am tired. I am so very grateful that it is the weekend and I can exhale and perhaps get a little rest. I am not going to set my alarm tomorrow. Sometimes when I do that, I actually sleep til like 10. I know people who can sleep until noon. I’m not one of those, but perhaps I will try it tomorrow. I would like to try to quiet my mind tomorrow. We’ll see how that goes.

There’s a lot of energy percolating in my spirit, just out of my conscious mind. I’ve been noodling on some things, some plans and ideas that I set my mind to then stopped paying attention to it. Sometimes I do that–tell my mind to work on something in the background while I am running around engaged in other parts of my life. The idea is that my brain, being the supercomputer that it is can actually be working on a zillion things at once, but I am only aware of a few of them. I am hoping that if I can slow myself down and quiet my mind, then I can check in with my subconscious and see if there are new ideas, inspirations or answers that want to bubble up to my conscious mind. I’ll let you know how that works out.

Tonight, I am going to rest.

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Lessons in Gratitude Day 588

Posted on February 21, 2013 by mtchamblee

“As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation — either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

I am grateful this evening for the transformative power of suffering. I would not presume to place myself in the same category as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. the severity and weight of the ills I’ve experienced are not to be compared with all that he went through; but we each experience our own measure of suffering and the choice point as to how we will react to it. I have learned  that in this life trials are going to happen. We will encounter difficulties, painful experiences, tragic losses, catastrophic circumstances. Each time we choose whether to be hardened by them or broken open. The breaking is where we, as Dr. King says, “transform the suffering” into a force for good.

As I read back through the many months I have written this blog (I began in June 2011), there are dozens entries that reflect my attempts to make sense of and come to grips with the suffering I was experiencing. These entries focused on my gratitude for persevering, standing strong in the midst of the storm, and learning to be grateful in spite of the suffering. This is not to say that I was happily philosophical about everything that I was going through: there were many days when I howled in rage and grief, cursing God and bemoaning my lot in life. But after each stormy outburst, the sun came back out and life continued and I grew stronger and better able to withstand what was hurled at me or what I hurled at myself. Some suffering is self-inflicted after all.

“Ah, you’re in bardo,” one of my Buddhist teachers told me during a period of struggle, “you’re in the in-between state waiting for what’s wants to come forth next.” I didn’t want to deal with bardo any more than with dukkha (the Buddhist term for suffering or dissatisfaction.) But whether I was in limbo or suffering, whatever condition I found myself in, I had to learn to sit with it in those moments when I wanted to squirm and run away. There was nowhere for me to run from what was happening; all I could do is sit with it and wait for (hope for) it to pass and for me to survive it.

I am grateful for the grace of God that allowed me to withstand the stuggles that I experienced most intensely during 2011 and 2012. I definitely had moments when I truly wasn’t sure I was going to “make it,” but then I knew that not making it wasn’t an option; I had people depending on my ability to pull myself together and be there for them.  I am grateful that, up to this point I have chosen transformation. Both bitterness and transformation have a legacy to them, I prefer the legacy of perseverance and strength of will that keeps me going when I would have given up. I have Dr. King and many role models who have gone before me and shown the way for how to learn and grow in grace from the challenges as well as the triumphs. I am grateful.

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Lessons in Gratitude Day 587

Posted on February 20, 2013 by mtchamblee

Tonight is a tough writing night. The blinking cursor of death is mocking my attempts to write something coherent. I find myself switching back and forth between tabs in the browser, bouncing from Facebook to solitaire to checking my bank balance. Anything but sitting here writing about gratitude. The trouble is I have standards and tend toward perfectionism. For a long time that perfectionism kept me from writing anything because I either edited it to death or I could never finish because I had to keep tweaking it as I went along. The perfectionist tendencies have eased but not gone away completely so on nights like this I struggle to bring thoughts together in a form I can share. We shall see where this goes tonight.

I have been thinking a bit about self care: how for so many of us we put other people and things ahead of ourselves and our wellbeing. Too often we are the last person on our to-do-list. This was true for me, particularly when I was a single mom raising my two kids while working full time. Add to that the stressful nature of the work I do and you have a recipe for burnout and other maladies and afflictions. So, self care becomes increasingly important. I intend to start practicing  in the days ahead as best I can. Part of that self care involves going to bed at a decent hour and getting my rest. I’ve already fallen asleep at the keyboard several times since I started writing today’s blog. It’s a good night to offer a few items of simple gratitude then head off to slumberland.

I am grateful to be working. The work that I do on issues of diversity, racial equity, access to higher education, and a variety or related themes is difficult work. There’s a significant measure of resistance on the part of many people to confront their biases and privileges and the historical and structural inequality that is built into many of our systems and structures in this country. Working against such opposition often leads to exhaustion and burnout if one isn’t careful. What does self care look like for someone who does work like this? How does one replenish their energy on a regular basis so they can continue to do the work with strength and resilience. Good question, and once I have it figured out, I’ll be sure to report back.

I am grateful as always for the basics–food, heat, electricity, hot water. These are things that on really cold days like today I give thanks for while also remembering in my thoughts and prayers those people who have no safe, warm place to rest.

I am grateful for traveling mercies as usual. My commute can be long and annoying, but I manage to make it safely to work and back without too much drama. It is like a dance I do with hundreds of other vehicles I share the highway with. I thank whatever gods my be for watching over me every time I get behind the wheel of my vehicle, particularly on the long drive to work.

And of course I am grateful for my family and friends spread out far and wide in a beautiful net of loving support. Tonight I received an unexpected text message from my stepbrother telling me how much he’d found himself missing my dad. It was a sweet, poignant note from a brother who though not related by blood still shares the connection and love of family. That’s a very good thing.

I will gratefully close now and take my rest. It’s been a long week and tomorrow will be a long day. I’ll be back here tomorrow though, sharing with you the lessons I’m learning as I continue to navigate life with a grateful heart.

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Lessons in Gratitude Day 586

Posted on February 19, 2013 by mtchamblee

Tonight I am grateful for anything that makes me laugh. With the advent of the internet and YouTube, not to mention the mainstays of television and movies, I find any number of things at which I can laugh at any given moment. My son seems to find and post some of the silliest things I’ve seen on the internet. Today’s fare: goats and sheep whose bah’ing sounds like people screaming. My daughter introduced me to the “cinnamon challenge,” in which people take a dare to eat a tablespoon of cinnamon (which is essentially impossible). These poor fools choose to take the cinnamon challenge with the video camera rolling to record the many varied and often ridiculous reactions to what is likely extreme discomfort. (I have not been tempted to try the cinnamon challenge at all, let alone videotape myself doing it and then posting it on YouTube. It does make one wonder, doesn’t it?) Still, unfortunately, I find myself shaking my head and laughing at many of them.

I must admit that videos of cute babies laughing at things like tearing paper or dogs that make sounds like humans or baby elephants chasing the surf on an ocean beach have given me a great deal of pleasure over the months. I am as likely, however, to find myself chuckling at what’s happening in the book I’m listening to, or the antics of the family of squirrels that live in the tree outside my kitchen window, or the funny habits and expressions that my dog Honor has when we’re playing or she’s chewing on her bone.

Not too long ago my life was way too serious–I had suffered through dramas and traumas that sometimes made it hard to want to get up in the morning. Laughter didn’t come as easily, but I was sure grateful when it did. As life has eased up a little, I find I laugh a bit more than before and take everything a little bit less seriously. Life coach and author Martha Beck says,“The more stressful,dangerous,baffling or unpleasant your situation, the more important it is to laugh at it.”  I’m not sure I ever directly used a humorous approach to whatever was troubling me, but the idea has merit.

When we laugh, our body generates a variety of responses–it causes the release all kinds of “feel good” chemicals in the brain that flood the body. The interesting thing is that the body doesn’t really distinguish between a real genuine belly laugh and a fake, pretend laugh. So I make it a practice to smile at myself in the mirror and periodically to laugh. Of course I prefer to be tickled into laughter by something genuine, but absent that, I laugh out loud as often as the idea crosses my mind. And when I fake laugh, it can be so ridiculous that it turns into genuine mirth. Like gratitude, laughter begets laughter. The more I can laugh  at the many funny things that I hear and see and experience, the more there is to laugh about.

I’m grateful for the ability to find humor in a variety of circumstances. As with gratitude, when I look intentionally for things to smile and laugh about, I generally find them. When I am feeling a little blue, I have any number of resources at my disposal to help me get back on track. The key is to avail myself of them. And isn’t that true with so many things?

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Lessons in Gratitude Day 585

Posted on February 18, 2013 by mtchamblee
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody,but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds,and shall find,me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
by William Ernest Henley, 1875

On more than one occasion over the last few years I have “thanked whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.” I am grateful for the gift of perseverance that has graced my life over the years. When I think about some of the difficulties I’ve faced, I can recall times when I wanted to sit down and simply give up. Frustrated, despairing, angry, depressed, I couldn’t always see how I was going to make it through, but somehow I managed it. I owe that to the grace of God and the knowledge that I simply couldn’t give up.  I also owe it to the examples I see in the people around me who in spite of their challenges still get up each morning and go to work and live their lives to the best of their abilities.

As I look upon my life, I continue to seek and find the many blessings–obvious and not so obvious–that surround me every day. By some measures my life isn’t carefree or easy, but by many, many others I live a very blessed life. As usual, it is a matter of perspective.

Every morning, I write in my journal at least four simple phrases of well-wishing associated with the Buddhist practice of metta, lovingkindness. I begin by offering them for myself and in turn offer them for my loved ones, acquaintances and “enemies,” and ultimately for all sentient beings. It’s like a daily prayer that I offer on behalf of us all, and as I offer the metta phrases I often picture and hold the images of certain people in my mind and heart, wishing happiness and an end to suffering for them.

May I/they/we be peaceful and happy.
May I be safe and protected from harm.
May I be healthy and strong in my body, mind, and spirit
May I live with joy, ease, and wellbeing.

They are simple enough phrases, and as I walk through each day, reciting them, sending good wishes out into the world, I know that I change the environment around me, that where I choose to put my focus affects my energy and that of people around me for the better. Sometimes this phenomenon is more obvious than at others, but I believe it to be true and am seeing the impacts of this in my own life.

So I am grateful that I have persevered through challenging circumstances and have come through them with my faith not only intact but stronger. That faith doesn’t look like it used to back in my regular church-attending days, but in many ways it’s stronger than it ever was back then. I am on an interesting path at the moment, moving inexorably forward toward a new “what’s next” that I have a feeling is going to surprise even me. In the meantime, I am content to let things unfold as they will. Every day offers new opportunities to learn, grow, and be grateful.

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Lessons in Gratitude Day 584

Posted on February 17, 2013 by mtchamblee

This morning I found myself thinking about the expression, “failed relationships.” It’s an expression that people use often, generally speaking about marriages or other significant relationships. I was thinking about this as I reflected on my current relationship status as “single” or unattached, about my having two “failed” significant relationships. Like many people, especially overachievers such as members of my family and a number of others I know, failing at anything is generally unacceptable, and failing at something as important as a marriage is exponentially so.

As I began to really unpack the notion of having  failed, I realized what a terrible misconception this is. First I want to say how exceedingly grateful I am to have experienced two deeply loving and connected relationships over 30-plus years of my adult life. There are no doubt many folks around the world who perhaps have gone through much or all of their lives without one significant relationship and others who would say they’ve had many. It is not for me to define for anyone else what that means, I can only speak for myself. And as I ponder what the words “failed relationship” mean, I’ve decided that for me it wasn’t that these relationships failed, it is simply that they ended.

It is not lost on me that in each case I wasn’t the one doing the ending and so I experience this differently. I also recognized with a start that in one case I was the one doing the ending. Interesting, isn’t it that at first I acknowledged only the two relationships in which my partners “broke up” with me and completely blanked on the one significant relationship that I ended. Perspective is an amazing thing, isn’t it?

I want to reframe this notion of failure. I was married for about 12 years; my marriage ended officially in 1998, though it was probably over well before that. (I remained in obstinate denial for a long while.) So when my ex-husband told me he was leaving to take a job out of state, telling me he didn’t want me to come with him, I was stunned. The divorce was final a year later. While it was deeply painful and I was a long while recovering from the hurt of it, struggling as a single parent to support two children who were also struggling, I eventually got very clear that ours had not been a “failed relationship.” I need look no further than my son and daughter to know that a failure could not have produced such beautiful beings. One outcome of my having united for a time with my ex-husband is the incarnation on the planet of the two children produced from the union. Another is the growth I experienced in those 12 years. Nothing is wasted; virtually every experience we have–even those that are painful–are opportunities to learn and grow and become a deeper person. I am a better person because of that relationship than I would have been without it and, as I’ve written about before in this blog, I am exceedingly grateful for and value the relationship that I currently enjoy with my ex-husband, whom I consider to be among my closest friends.

I am still recovering from my most recent “failure,” the ending of a seven-year relationship that was fraught with challenges almost from the very beginning. While many of those issues swirled around us and weren’t–at least initially between my partner and me–they nonetheless weighed heavy and differentially on each of us. And while, once again, I should have known it was coming, I was nonetheless unprepared for the ending blow. This was sandwiched in between my father’s death in September of 2010 and losing my job in March of 2011. Yes, it was one of the “series of unfortunate events” that swept down on me in about a six month period. As I think on it now, two years removed from it, I still do not consider it a failure–a deep disappointment, yes. A failure, no. I loved and was loved and it ended. A lot of things “went wrong” that I wish had been different, but were not. I am grateful for all that I learned through those seven years; I grew tremendously during that time, and I am grateful to my ex-partner for that. And while my heart is still a little tender, I remain grateful for all the experiences we had and learning I received from those days.

In his poem, “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote:

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

And I think that’s possibly true, at least it has been in my experience. I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey, the old folks say, and that’s right. I’ve had my share of difficulties, though I believe I’ve been more fortunate than some. I am still mostly in one piece without excuse or regret and will continue to chose learning from “failures” rather than lamenting them. While I have the occasional pangs and ouches associated with my most recent loss, I’ve come along way. Holding each relationship with a grateful heart is speeding me toward healing and wholeness and confidence as I continue to walk this path. May it continue to be so!

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Lessons in Gratitude Day 583

Posted on February 17, 2013 by mtchamblee

I am getting a late start tonight–starting after midnight East Coast time. I spent the evening lazing around with my younger sister and her family. I smile as I think of them–it’s fun watching them in all their normality, listening to their back and forth, and once again remembering what it was like to sit at a dinner table with family. It was a good time.

The day started as it often does: I woke a little earlier than I’d wanted, my mind swirling with a few anxieties about work and bills and taxes that need to be done. I rose, turned on my coffee, brushed my teeth, then climbed back into bed to write in my morning journal. I’ve come to really appreciate my morning journal writing practice. It’s become a way for me to pour out onto the page any anxiety I’m feeling, thoughts, concerns, sadness. I do my best to keep my pen moving, otherwise my mind wanders too much like a restless puppy who can’t quite light and stay still. If I keep my pen moving my mind either stays on what I’m writing about or my writing becomes gibberish. Either way I keep my focus a little better.

I could have easily gotten into a funk today–it’s kind of what I do on the weekends. It’s a pattern that I recognize and so I interrupt it and will keep doing so as best I can until I can shift it into a more positive direction.  I talked to my sister early in the afternoon: it turns out she was in a bit of a funk too. We talked for over an hour and a half about a wide variety of topics, including what we do when we’re cranky and wondering  about the role genetics plays in our having the blues. By the end of our conversation we were both feeling better and I had decided to stay home. Then a little while later she invited me to come over for a slumber party. She knows I hate to drive home late in the evening and so invited me to spend the night. After thinking about it for a while, I threw some clothes and necessities into a bag, grabbed some things for the dog and the two of us headed out.

I am grateful for the invitation. I knew I needed to be pulled from my house and out of the blues that could have easily settled in on me. She too needed something to lift her out of the cloud that had hovered over her for much of the day. I hope she felt a little better for our having spent time together. I decided not to spend the night–I wanted to sleep in my own bed and I also wanted Honor to have access to her food and water and her own bed as well. I think perhaps we’ll try the slumber party idea again sometime soon when we can plan it a little better.

My ten-minute ride home this evening reminded me once again why I live close to my sisters in spite of the long commute to my job. If I lived near my job I wouldn’t spend as much time with my sisters and their families as I can easily do now. I simply love that. And I am grateful for where I am living right now. I made a conscious choice when I decided where I was going to live and am grateful that my decision continues to feel right to me. Tomorrow is a new day and I will have the opportunity to spend some time with one of my older sisters and her husband. It’s good to be around family. Now I have to figure out how I can spend time with my children, both of whom live on the other side of the country. For now, though, I will appreciate the time I get to spend with my sisters. It’s all good.

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Lessons in Gratitude Day 582

Posted on February 15, 2013 by mtchamblee

I am grateful for getting home in one piece tonight. On very rare occasions in the months since I started commuting back and forth between my job and my home, I’ve driven while drowsy. I’m amazed it hasn’t happened more often given how my schedule seems to arrange itself; but nine times out of ten I am completely awake and alert on my drive home. Tonight,  I got tired, fortunately it was at the very end of the drive. It took me a little time to be aware of my exhaustion, but when I realized how distracted I was I started employing various staying awake strategies. Nevertheless, I am grateful that over the course of the hour and 20 minute drive home, I was watched over by angels. And I am grateful.

I was relieved to get home and going quickly through my evening routine: as soon as I get in the door, I grab Honor’s leash, hook her up, put on my gardening boots and take her for our evening walkabout in the back yard so she can do her business. Once we’re back inside I pretty much immediately set about the task of feeding her and then feeding myself. Tonight I was true to my schedule, sitting down to eat my dinner around 7 p.m. like usual. I fell asleep with my tray on my lap, pulling myself awake when a telemarketer called around 8 p.m. I am grateful to be at the end of what felt like a pretty hectic week. I am coming into what looks to be a hectic time period. Still, in spite of my exhaustion, I am grateful nonetheless for the work I am able to do each day.

So as I sit, wrapped in my electric throw blanket listening to the sound of rain pelting against my windows I am relieved to have the next couple of days off. I have things that I need to take care of here at home and that too requires energy, but it’s a different kind of energy that I hope to be able to muster to get it taken care of. Tonight, however, I am drowsing and will shortly turn in. This week I’ve spent most evenings focusing on simple gratitude, recognizing the myriad small ways in which I am blessed, the things which I could so easily take for granted. Tonight I add traveling mercies to this week’s simple gratitude list.

One more simple gratitude for tonight. I am grateful for all the little things that happen during the course of a day that make me smile. This afternoon at lunch time I was on my computer checking out a posting on my Facebook page. I don’t usually check at work, but took a few moments today while I was eating my lunch to catch up on things. One of my FB friends had posted a video of a baby elephant playing in the ocean. It was a joy to watch this happy creature frolicking and splashing in the ocean like any child playing in the surf. It was one of the sweetest things I’d seen recently and it put a huge smile on my face. I’ll take those free bursts of joy anytime I can get them, and appreciate them all the more when I can refer back to them periodically when I am in need of a smile or laugh.

I am grateful for this day, for this week and all that has transpired in it. I will sleep in a bit tomorrow, grateful for the weekend when I can hopefully recharge my physical and emotional batteries. Tomorrow is a new day with new possibilities. I look forward to seeing what it might bring.

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