Gratitude

The other day (actually several years ago when I wrote the story I’m now telling you) a good friend sent me a video about an autistic boy. You know the plot: A person overcomes a handicap to accomplish something amazing, their achievement is celebrated and emotionally shared by lots of people, and the viewer sheds a lot of happy tears.

One day I went outside and saw mushrooms everywhere. Not only was the yard absolutely full of mushrooms, but they were all so different from each other. It’s like elves and fairies were celebrating there in the night before.

Some were large and off-white. Some were small and orange. Some were dark, dark brown, thin and tall. Some were white with an orange ring at their edge. Some were tiny and delicate, the size of a dime. Colony upon colony of each kind.

There was a huge 8 inch mushroom. There were colonies of bright yellow sprouts, just stems forming, of young mushrooms.

What’s that sound
The sound of my dog
Missy as she is howling and growling away
playing with her toy
Having such joy with this stuffed animal
Is the sound ferocious?
is the sound she is making an expressing
Delight
Frustration
fun
there are so many sounds we hear in life
And the meaning we put behind the sound
And the expression of the sound
I can tell she is having a lot of fun
Running around
Enjoying this toy of hers
Just having a really good time
Getting up in the day

I really enjoy looking at tree bark - the whorls and swirls of bark as it moves up the trunk of the tree. It overlaps like house shingles. And it eddies around limbs and around the stumps of fallen limbs. You see the tree holes, and the flow of the bark around them.

The patterns are mesmerizing, like watching water that is stopped.

It really seems like something is written on the tree, by the tree, over and over again.

And when a vine climbs the tree, it is even more beautiful, especially in the autumn when the vine turns red.

I love working with beets – whole, leafy, bushy beets.

Everything about them leaves this deep, ruby tint. As you rinse the giant green leaves, the red stalks look like rhubarb and tint the water red. As they drip on the steel sink, the droplets look luminescent over the cool, silver blue.

If you hold a leaf up to the light, so the sun shines thru, the leaf is a gorgeous, vibrant yellow green, contrasted with the crimson stem system running thru the leaf.

The leaves taste great raw.

It pains me to have to recycle glass jars, but we simply do not have room to store every jar we get.

Of course, many items in the store are packaged in plastic or cardboard. The day may come when there will no longer be glass jars.

When I was a little girl, each glass jar was put to use.

I love sunflowers. I mean, here is a flower that grows bigger than me. It is gigantic. And the seeds are so visible, so wildly bountiful, and so orderly arranged.

I see them growing in the community garden, and I admire their towering, poetic, lilting stance.

There are two local farms that plant thousands of sunflowers – acres and acres - and let you walk among them. It is breath-taking. So many circles of purple-black with a rim of yellow against a backdrop of greens and a light blue sky – like nature is looking with 10,000 eyes upon the world.

If the stars are out there in the daylight, and we don’t see them, what else don’t we see?

Perhaps we need the contrast, the foil, the opposite to see what is hidden.

It really is a gift to appreciate what we have, and not take it for granted. There is a saying, that some dream of what we see as everyday normal, common place. I’m not saying this is bad, or that we are decadent.

Rather, it’s the difference between seeing objects and seeing essence. Being thankful for a spoon is just as important as being thankful for a smartphone.

I am driving to my next destination
As I am on this country road
Looking around
I am thinking wow isn’t it amazing
This car that just transports me
With these wheels that I can go
here and there
To and from
Often I wonder
Do we just forget the attitude of gratitude
Of being able to be so mobile
There are so many people who don’t have a car and need to walk everywhere
Although walking is a really good exercise
Just being able to move in an automobile
Is just really pretty much a gift