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  Our address book was getting old and cluttered, outdated and confusing.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...