Habitual Gratitude

Today I am grateful for safe travels, pleasant family time, and nice weather for a couple of good runs and walks.  My husband Darcy and I stopped at Scooter’s Coffee Saturday morning while in Sioux Falls visiting his family. This location is near my mother-in-law’s. We’ve driven by it for years, saying we should try it sometime. We finally did. The coffee and breakfast sandwiches we had were enjoyable and prompted a second stop on our way out of town yesterday.  I appreciated the cups our coffee came in. Festive and “hearty.” Every season is “ A Season to Share.” I especially noted that Scooter’s was established in 1998 . . . the same year Darcy and I established our marriage. A little research tells me that Scooter’s started in Bellevue, NE, and now has nearly 400 locations, including nine in Sioux Falls. The name stems from their fast drive-thru reputation--helping customers “scoot in and scoot out” with their coffee.  So there's at least two really good things that sta...

WORD FOR THE DAY For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart  each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile. Writer, activist, Nobel Peace Prize recipient and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said these words.  When I read them this morning, here are some random thoughts: *"Every hour" reminds me to slow down and live in the now, the hour, to stay present, notice. *"Grace" is a beautiful word and it fills me with a sense of Great Spirit, Universe, Friend. It reminds me I am not alone, ever.  *"Every hour is grace" can also be said "every moment is gift." *"I feel gratitude in my heart" when I live gratefully, embrace it, practice it, and the beauty is that it spreads from my heart outward. *Loved ones, acquaintances, strangers--smiles shared warm both people doing the sharing.  *Suffering and grief are not contests and they are very personal and individual. Regardless of our circumstances, we have each known ...

Today I am grateful for rest, good books to read, gravity to keep us stable. I am also grateful for a new address book.  Our address book was getting old and cluttered, outdated and confusing. We got a new one as a gift at Christmas and I spent some time last weekend transferring addresses from the old to the new.  In the process, my thoughts and emotions included: *The sadness and grief as I came across the names of family members who have died in recent years. Some, like two of my aunts, no longer need a spot in the address book at all. Others, like my sister and one of my brothers-in-law no longer need their spouses listed with them.  *Have you ever considered the addresses of deceased loved ones? Wondered where they reside?  I know that part of each of them resides in me, in my heart.  *More sadness, and also some peace, as I put Mom's nursing home address "officially" in the book, thinking that the next new book will likely not need a spot for her either....

Living gratefully today, I say Happy Birthday to our son Sam.  Happy 20th! I so appreciate you and what being your mom means to me. It's 4:52 a.m. as I write this, almost exactly the time you officially entered the world twenty years ago on a Thursday morning at Regina Medical Center. Being pregnant, giving birth, and being your mom every day since is one of my biggest joys and learning experiences. It is also bittersweet every year as you grow more into a young man. Time goes so fast. You are doing so well.  This is the first time we won't be together on your birthday. You left yesterday to return to your second semester of college after the holiday break. And you have also left your teens behind you.  This  was the post I wrote two years ago, just weeks before your senior year of high school took a decidedly strange and unwelcome turn when the COVID-19 pandemic threw us all for a loop.  There has been plenty that has come and gone in these two years. College ...

“Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.  I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.” “Smile, breathe and go slowly.” (Thich Nhat Hanh) In recent days, three men have died. They had their last 24 hours. They each touched my life, and the lives of so many others. The singer and actor Meat Loaf died on Thursday at age 74. He was a unique performer when he hit the music scene in the late 70's, and I appreciated several of his songs. The album "Bat Out of Hell" was released in 1977 and became one of the best selling albums of all time.   In 1978, two big hits from the album hit the charts-- "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" and "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." These two and the title track are all such good sing-alongs. But it was "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" that was honored with numerous drunken renditions at parties in my youthful drinking days. We sang all th...

"Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope." From the "I Have A Dream" speech in Washington, DC on August 28, 1963 It seemed fitting to close this week out with another quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.  It is from arguably his most famous speech, but not always the words that are focused on. That's one of the reasons I like it so much. Another reason is that it is just what we need today, in these times. Do you ever stop and think "two years ago today . . . ?" Two years ago today our son Sam was in his senior year of high school. SnowWeek was coming up. We were doing some early planning for his graduation party. His eighteenth birthday was just around the corner.   We were starting to hear more about the coronavirus, but it still seemed distant and not something that we were giving much worry. We had no idea what was coming, and if we had we probably wouldn't have believed it.  A year ago, we were relishing the amazing poem "The Hill W...

"We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself,  a society that can live with its conscience."          (Martin Luther King, Jr. in  Montgomery, Alabama, March 25, 1965) My mom was pregnant with me when MLK, Jr. said these words. It was also my brother Morry's 10th birthday and my sister Ruth had just turned one the day before. There were five other children between Ruth and Morry, and three older ones. Two more would come after me.   I think about the world we all came into in the fifties and sixties (the youngest being born in 1970), and the tumultuous but transformative times our nation was in. Progress was made and laws were passed. But many got complacent and others got greedy and power-hungry and we lost some of the humanity for which MLK, Jr. and so many others had worked so hard and peacefully. My next thought with this quote was what if I said it this way "I must come to see that the end I seek is a woman...

Today I am grateful for life's little mysteries. And the big ones too. I am also grateful for my sister Ann as she celebrates her birthday today. Happy Birthday!  One of the little mysteries?  A couple days ago, the older pair of glasses I wear when I run and workout had lost one of the tiny screws holding it together. I was still wearing them, but needed a better fix. As I put them away in their case after my run yesterday morning, what did I discover amidst the cleaning cloth I keep in there?   The tiny screw.  Somehow it was there, hadn't fallen out the few times I had used the case, and it caught my eye. I put it back in place, problem solved--for now. The mystery of how that little screw fortuitously came off at the time and in the place it did is the kind of mystery that makes me smile. And speaking of smiles, how about these two? Thank you to the neighborhood family who created these smiles. What a fun idea and one I have not seen before. I don't personal...

"Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a better person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in." (Martin Luther King, Jr. at the March for Integrated Schools, April 18, 1959.) I am embarrassed to admit that more than once late last week I said how much I was looking forward to a 3-day weekend without even acknowledging why I was getting one. The courageous work of Martin Luther King, Jr. set so many good and necessary things in motion, and also put him in danger.  Born on January 15, 1929, he died at the hands of an assassin on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, TN. He was 39 and in his short life had changed my country and our world. He had already won the Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the youngest recipient to that date, at age 35, in 1964. He was also a great orator and had such a way of putting powerful and poetic words together.  In today's polarized world, there isn't much that s...

glorious : marked by great beauty or splendor; delightful, wonderful, magnificent  having a striking beauty or splendor that evokes feelings of delighted admiration Thank you Merriam-Webster and Oxford dictionaries for these definitions. Glorious is a word I probably use more than others. It is just one of those words that carries the right tone and emphasis, particularly when referring to the wonders of the natural world.  It was the word on my mind and heart yesterday as I took notice of the stark contrast of an evergreen tree overlapping the barren branches of the neighboring non-evergreen. Did I mention the striking blue backdrop of sky that helped create the crisp image in front of me? This glorious scene touched my human heart, resonating with the parts of myself that have always been with me--a writer's heart, a runner's body, a seeker's journey inward, a grateful soul. And it resonated with those barren parts too. The ones laid to rest peacefully after having their ...

Consecutive: following one after the other without an interruption; continuous Consecutive came to mind this morning as I completed a meditation on Insight Timer for the 100th consecutive day. The app was tracking it for me, but I noticed as the days started to build. The last time I had a consecutive stretch going, I made it to 70. I intentionally broke the streak that time as a little test for myself.  Was it more about keeping the streak alive or keeping the practice alive?  That last time, I didn't trust myself just yet. I am notorious (in my own mind) for being persistent and consistent about certain things. That is not always a good thing.  This time, without a doubt, and with trust in my heart, it is more about the practice. Daily meditation has become just that--daily. Even if I don't use an app on my phone, I know better how to tune into my breathing, take a timely pause, repeat a helpful phrase, let a thought go, identify a current emotion. I am better able to g...

Living gratefully today, I give thanks for the Body Boss workout apparatus and resistance bands that help me do my targeted exercises. I also send thanks out to all the people and resources that created these items and delivered them to me. It seems like a good morning for an A-Z gratitude list, or as far as I can into it with the time I have. A is for the apps Healthy Mind and Insight Timer on my phone. They help make my meditation practice accessible and enjoyable. B is for the book I am currently reading, a young adult novel titled The Seventh Most Important Thing  by Shelley Pearsall. It is a compelling story of grief and redemption. My kind of book. C is for capturing the various ways the light from lamps throw that light throughout rooms and levels of our home. In those moments, I also capture the other blessings in these walls.  D is for my husband Darcy and the walk we shared last evening in the warmer temperatures. It got above freezing for the first time in awhile. E...

Today I am grateful for eyes that can see and ears that can hear, even if less clearly than they used to. I saw this the other morning as the sun came up. It's a sun dog. The second picture is the sun dog and the sunrise together.  We sometimes see sun dogs here, especially in times of extreme cold. I had to do a little research on the science behind it, like I do each time I see one or two.  Here is what Encyclopedia Brittanica tells me:  sun dog, also called mock sun or parhelion, atmospheric optical phenomenon appearing in the sky as luminous spots 22° on each side of the Sun and at the same elevation as the Sun. Usually, the edges closest to the Sun will appear reddish. Other colours are occasionally visible, but more often the outer portions of each spot appear whitish. Sun dogs occur when the Sun or Moon shines through a thin cirrus cloud composed of hexagonal ice crystals falling with their principal axes vertical, as opposed to the halo phenomenon that occurs when...

Today I am grateful for bananas and clementines, the easy peelers in my fruit choices. I also appreciate the view I have right now from our dining room table, looking out into our comfortable home, sharing morning conversation with my husband Darcy. Another view I always appreciate is the one I get whenever I step outside. It's never exactly the same from one time to the next, but Nature is a constant. It always provides fresh air and the day's weather. It always brings me a sense of humility, of my little part in this expansive universe.  I love the changing seasons. I embrace the ugly weather days as much as I embrace the pleasant ones. They all bring me reminders of ongoing transformation, of riding our own storms out, of the profound and simple gratefulness of having mobility and working limbs so I can enjoy whatever Nature is dishing up.  Nature has been a constant source of energy, peace, and hope across the decades of my life. From the days I took a morning run with a n...

Living gratefully today, I appreciate the secure layers of clothing I have available to add from head to toe that keep me safe outdoors in subzero temperatures. I am also grateful for the enticing smell of bacon cooking. My neighborhood squirrel friends were up to their usual fascinating frolicking yesterday morning. This one was way out on a limb: In case it is hard to see, let me paint the picture for you. The squirrel is hanging upside down on a pretty flimsy branch less than a foot from where the branch ends. It took some risks, got what it wanted, then headed back to safer territory. If squirrels had egos, this one was probably feeling pretty good about itself in those moments.  Taking some risks. Getting out there beyond one's comfort zone. This is the squirrel's lesson for me and you.  In these frigid temperatures, it could simply mean bundling up and getting out there for some fresh air. Fresh air always helps me. Always.  Maybe the squirrel is inviting us to do m...

WORD FOR THE DAY (1/5/22) It’s really easy to be kind to others when I remember that none of us came  i nto this world with a manual about how to get it all right. JILL BOLTE TAYLOR I read this over a few times just now. Letting it sink in. We have manuals for any appliance we buy, and for our cars, electronic devices, and so many other things. But not for what still remains the most complex and intricate object on the planet: a human being. Cutting myself some slack is still not a strong point for me, but practice makes progress possible. I would like to think I have been better about giving other people a break, and I probably have. But in all honesty, I missed many opportunities to do just that when I was so busy having heated discussions with myself. A pause. A grateful living practice. A smile. All of these simple actions help me tap into human existence and experience. They help me see myself and you with kinder, gentler eyes. We are living in a time of upheaval and uncertain...

Below is the content of my blog post from this date in 2015, titled "Neighborhood." As I reread it, two things struck me. One is that I still feel we have a safe neighborhood, but that so much has happened, especially during the last couple years of pandemic and political upheaval, that it feels less safe and secure. Our world feels more tenuous.  The second thing that struck me as I read about cancer's "bad neighborhoods" is that since I wrote this in 2015, my two sisters Leonice and Aileen were diagnosed with cancer and my sister Mary Jo died of metastatic breast cancer. Seeing Mary Jo in her final weeks of life showed me, in painful bluntness, just how awful the spread of cancer is.  What can I do with these insights today?  Be kind to all I encounter. Make healthy choices for my body and mind. Maintain hope. Not get bogged down my discouragement. Live gratefully in the hours ahead. Life is tenuous and also full of amazing grace. Onward!  Today I am grateful ...

“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson This was a fitting quote for Word for the Day on New Year’s Day. It’s a nice spin on “all we have is today.” We are prone to get hung up on the word “best” and perhaps set the bar too high with expectations of what we will do and be each day.  Let’s turn to the “write it on your heart” instead. In the last few days, here are some things that come to mind:  *I begin with Happy Birthday wishes to my stepdaughter Emily today. Have a special day! I met her on her third birthday and now she is 27. That went fast!  *Road trip time in the back seat with her son Leo. We like to play Yahtzee and when that got old, we made up a couple other games. Fun! *My husband Darcy, a.k.a. Papa, getting some much-awaited pool time with Leo and our other grandson Aaron. Smiles all around! *Meeting our son Sam's new girlfriend Halle and having the chance to get to know her. We appreciated the time toge...