~thankful thursday~ here

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

11/27/25

I am feeling grateful for Rich again (it’s fine if I repeat myself, I make the rules). But also, been thinking about the man who raised him, and missing him today.

11/27/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

I am grateful for good men. It is a gratefulness saturated with grief today. I am listening to the good man I am married to talking to his Aunt on the phone to let her know her brother, his father, passed away today. My father-in-law was the wonderful man responsible for raising the wonderful man I love. I am so sad, and wanted to let tonight be a moment of silence, but I decided to google gratitude and grief… and here is what Brené Brown says:

“Gratitude is vulnerability. I’ve had the honor of sitting across from people who have survived tremendous things. No matter what the trauma was, they said: “when those around me are grateful for what they have, I know they understand the magnitude of what I’ve lost”. So often we’re afraid to be grateful for what we have because we think it’s insensitive to those who have lost. However I think gratitude, in some ways, is healing for people.”

I always loved to be the one to make Bob a cup of coffee or pop open a beer for him, on the extremely rare occasions he’d indulge in either one. Tonight we toasted him using the glasses he gave us, and I imagine some popcorn will be popped in his honor in the next couple of days. (Yet another divine thing he is responsible for teaching my husband.) I’m posting one of my favorite photos of our dads from our wedding. I am so very grateful for the memories we get to carry forward with us, of this good man.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 28

11/28/25

Rich and I took a walk in our woods down to the bayou today. Moss, trickling water, bright orange fungus, a newt. I got to thinking about frogs again. Earlier this year, I worked with a film crew who needed access to arctic cod eggs, and who had tracked down our lab. Before I met them, I did not know we were literally the only lab in the world—World!—with arctic cod of age and healthy enough to spawn. The guy behind the camera told a story about another time he was standing inside a freezer, only he was filming a frog that was fully frozen as it began to thaw. I had not been aware of frozen frogs, but it’s an adaptation that wood frogs and a few other species have: to send sugar into their veins to protect their blood, and let their bodies succumb to freezing. For the winter. It sounds approximately like my worst nightmare, as adaptations go, and I can’t help but wonder if it hurts?

It’s another shining example of the vulnerability of frogs. Imagine shutting down your metabolism, all the processes in your body, losing your vision. Imagine your heart stops beating, and you’re just a frogsicle in the moss, waiting for spring.

I sometimes think I wouldn’t mind going fully dark for winter and waking up when spring comes. Sometimes my heart has had enough, and wouldn’t mind taking a long winter’s nap. But we humans have our adaptations, too. We have strategies for coping, bayou walks for grounding, friends to help us hold it all.

I liked hearing how the camera was zoomed in on the transparent eye of the frozen frog, fixated on one motionless red blood cell, which then began to move along the blood vessel as the frog thawed, and then more blood cells came along behind it. I am grateful for the astounding abundance of examples in the natural world of survivors.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

11/29/25

I am grateful for granddaughters and games!

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

11/30/25 (observed 12/1)

Last year’s gratitude mascot was our friend the glowing deep sea nudibranch, who inspired us to send beams of light out from our soft, transparent hearts from the deepest darkness.

This year, I’ve spent some of the month of November grounding, kneeling on earth, being closer to the moss. I’ve painted a moss-colored writing nook, contemplated mole tunnels. And this year’s mascot, also close to the soil, has been frogs. Cold and wet, absorbent and vulnerable, but with secret powers. Brumation. Slowing down her heart and allowing it to freeze, knowing even this cannot prevent her survival.

Most years there is a lot of light threaded through gratitude season. This one has felt darker than most. This year there has been light, too, but it required effort to seek it out.

I was pretty sure we were out of luck when it came to frogs making their own light. And, in a way, that’s true. But I did look into it, just in case of metaphors. It turns out, with frogs being mostly nocturnal, they do have reason to attempt to use light to their advantage. But unlike a deep-sea nudibranch creating light within her own cells, frogs have a different strategy.

In blue light, the kind of eerie light that is most abundant at dusk, some frogs biofluoresce. It’s a little different from bioluminescence, like sea slugs and fireflies. Instead of making chemical light themselves, they absorb all the dwindling, cool, blue light of the gathering dark, and send it back out from themselves in a slightly greener, more glowing form.

Nobody knew much about this until five years ago. Our eyes aren’t really equipped to see it. But then some scientists took their blue flashlights out among the cold, dark, dampness. When the effect is exaggerated enough, the human eye can see glowing patterns and colors in frog skin. They found 151 more species that carry this trait. Every frog they shined on, shined back.

Maybe it is still worthwhile gathering even the smallest shards of dim light in the dark times.

Some experts point out that this doesn’t prove the feature has a purpose. Many species aside from frogs biofluoresce for no reason we can reason out. But others note that frogs with big eyes and extra rod cells on their retinas are equipped to see each other’s subtle glow. We don’t know if they use the information, or how, but it’s an open possibility.

The parts of frogs that glow were most often their spots, their undersides, and their throats. Parts involved in communication. It might mean some complicated signaling is going on. A frog friend network that they can see, but that predators may not. It might mean simply: “Here I am. I’m here.”

And it takes exposure to specific lighting conditions for this message to go out. For it to be received.

As it happens, this set of conditions does provide a perfect metaphor for the light of this November. It has taken more effort this year, for me, to gather the small parcels of light that I can still find in the gathering darkness. And I am not saying that I am doing any type of glowing right now, but what I am trying to say is: I am here.

And all month long, as I’ve come to be able to count on, for TEN years, my friends, you have been here, too. Glowing back at me: here you are. And I’m grateful for you being here.

~thankful thursday~ paradox

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

11/21/25

I’m grateful that having outdoor kitties to tend to forces me to leave the house after dark. Tonight I looked up and realized the often cloudy sky was clear, and I had a great view of starry sky surrounded by treetops. It made me think of my trip to sea earlier this year, another thing I’m grateful for. I think it’s a funny paradox of gratitude month that it makes me both be more in the present moment (noticing the things in front of me, today) and also be more reflective about short-term and longer-term past things for which I am grateful. These are some of the stars I got to see this summer.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/25

I had my pick of the last decade of 22nds and they were almost unanimously about one topic, so I chose one that made me smile. Happy dorkaversary, Rich.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/23

Can you find my husband in this photo? I can, because even though I can’t read the name on his coveralls, his sideburns are unmistakable. I am grateful for him (again, I know, ew, but the 22nd is our day). He does fascinating things at work like suspend a very heavy engine on very short straps and move it from point A to point B inside a fishing boat with zero room to maneuver. Sometimes he welds and fabricates, sometimes he operates a crane, and other times he solves impossible problems like the one in this image. Which I’d like to thank his coworker for taking, because sometimes when he tells me about his day, the stuff is barely believable. For the first few years we were together and someone asked me his occupation I said he allegedly welds, because I hadn’t actually seen him do it. I mean, making things out of metal and fire? But then I did see him do it one time. And it was all true.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

11/23/25

I’m grateful for the weekend, a Saturday of lovely weather for the final farmer’s market of the season, for the women I work with every week and their badassery, for another date night to enjoy some lighthearted theater. I am grateful for a little time to sleep in this morning. I’m grateful for my community, and to hear their voices speak out at the Town Hall meeting this afternoon. I’m grateful that I’m still not taking this class for a grade, and I do not need to overthink it when it comes to gratitude.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

11/24/25

I am grateful for the Hamilton soundtrack to sing along to in my car, a new book in my Libby app that is making me laugh, and kitties.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

11/25/25 (posted 11/26)

It’s like this. I did not feel grateful last night. I was fighting sleep all evening, had powered through two somewhat frustrating workdays, and just wasn’t feeling spiffy. To be honest, I powered through my Monday night gratitude post as well. I’m calling myself on it because I have talked before about not wanting to weaponize gratitude, not wanting to engage in toxic positivity. What I said on day 24 was true (the things I mentioned had made me smile that day) but it had been a struggle to post it. By Tuesday night, day 25, I just felt miserable and to make the same kind of struggle post again felt dishonest.

This is not how most years go, at least not how I remember them. When I talked to Lauren today, she said, “this is the hardest gratitude year,” and I am grateful for Lauren, because she gets me when I don’t even get me.

I had been busy minimizing my feelings, trying to keep a lid on a simmering mood. Trying not to feel it, trying not to acknowledge it lurking under there.

Looking at my memories of day 25s of yore, there were multiple years when my gratitudes involved Quinn. This would make a mom happy, if she knew she was about to see her kid, but I have no confirmation that I will.

In 2020, on day 25, I apparently was grateful! In the pandemic! I wrote a cheerful post about a fish, a post which I would hesitate to make today, so often have I been warned, reminded, and cautioned not to speak about the work I do. Though I despise this policy, and I believe it is detrimental to everyone, I want to keep my job.

But, come on, I felt grateful in 2020, surely I can find it in myself to feel gratitude in 2025. (Yeah, see that? That’s the minimizing.)

Holidays are just not the best time of year for everyone. If that is you, I’m sorry, and I feel you. I guess what I am retroactively grateful for on day 25, is the permission to not always feel grateful.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

11/26/25

It is brother gratitude day which is so convenient because I am catching up from a temporary gratitude shortage and I will happily embrace the traditional day 26 topic. I am grateful for my two brothers, and their lovely families. I had so much fun with them in October. The most fun might have been when Rich discovered that on Google street view, looking at my parents’ house, the house we all grew up in, and scanning across the road into the field, you can find one of my brothers hard at work. But Google did not blur him out, because what was visible was not his face, because he was doubled over harvesting potatoes! We had such a laugh over this. Can you recognize which brother’s not-his-face it is?

~thankful thursday~ softer

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 14

11/14/25

I am grateful to work beside this beautiful bay, and to get to take a walk there on my lunch break.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 15

11/15/25

This morning as I was getting ready to depart for farmer’s market set-up in the dark, misty pre-dawn, I heard a frog croaking in our front yard. Frogs have been on my mind during this whole month of gratitude. When I think of frogs, my first thought is how endangered they are, how vulnerable to human impacts like drought, pollution, and disease. They are poached and collected and hunted and sold on the black market. Their habitats are bulldozed for development. All of which makes them seem the unlikeliest of folk heroes. No armor. Barely any defense mechanisms (though there are some with poison, and a small number with claws). Absorbing anything that comes at them, without much of a choice in the matter. Close to the earth, at the mercy of the elements.

As it gets cold and daylight gets shorter, some frogs enter a state called brumation. It’s like hibernation (which is done by some mammals) but they wake up every now and then to have a drink of water. They find a refuge called a hibernaculum, and they brumate, for one month or several. Everything slows down and they wait for warmer, brighter days.

Our coastal town learned a few days ago that ICE had plans to site a detention facility here. In trying to attend the city council meeting, I could not find a spot to park and went home to watch online. So many of us came out to oppose this evil. Folks made eloquent and heartfelt points about the inhumanity of the current ICE raids, and pledged to fight in any way possible. A young girl stood and spoke about her father who was taken in September, and begged and pleaded with the community to not let this facility happen. All of us absorbing her words, growing softer.

I am grateful for frog’s example, to be permeable and soft, to stare down threats matter-of-factly. To wait in the cold darkness, and when the time is right, to rise.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

11/16/25

I have a band of gratitude encouragers who talk to me about this month outside of November. So grateful for them! This summer one of them suggested that when I am feeling undecided on a given night, it would be okay to crowd source the gratitude. Cheers to making our grateful way halfway through this month! Please tell me something you are feeling grateful for.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

11/17/25

On this day in 2024 I said:

I’m grateful that some communication happens with no words.

Including the original picture of Kylo, and a more recent one. Grateful she is thriving, one year later.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

11/18/25

During my crowdsourced gratitude day, one lovely mentioned being grateful for the ability to feel. And I agree and will echo that today, because even though some of the feelings are rage, confused heartache, and unease, it is still a privilege to be able to experience them. To wake up to another morning and get ready for work beside a husband who notices sunrises. And some of the feelings are also love, care, and awe.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

11/19/25

I asked Rich on a date to get burgers and go buy a turkey, and he said yes. I’m feeling grateful for his love and yeses.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

11/20/25 (posted 11/21)

In one month, on December 20th, my parents will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. In October, we celebrated their anniversary with them, and I am grateful for that visit, as well as the rare and magical fact of a marriage of fifty years happening to my very own parents. It is certainly not to be taken for granted. Rich and I will invite you all to ours when I am 89 and he is 97. July 22, 2067. Mark your calendars.

My mom threw a party for her parents’ 25th anniversary, but Nana died before she and Poppy could reach 50 years. Same with my dad’s parents, because Grandpa also died in his 60s. I have been to one 50th anniversary party, when I was a youth, and it was for my great Aunt Margie and Uncle George, who partly helped raise my mom, and if there ever was a marriage you wanted to look to as an example, I’m pretty sure they were it. But my parents are very definitely in that category, too. My friends who know them will be nodding their heads as they read this. Rich’s parents also reached the magical 50-year mark before they both passed away. We felt grateful to be able to acknowledge both of these wonderful marriages with them all in attendance at our wedding in 2017.

I guess it is just the way life unfolds, how age happens whether we like it or not, how “sickness and health” becomes ever so much more of a focus when a marriage approaches a long duration. My parents have truly cared for each other through every illness; some scary, some tedious, some very painful, some nearly as long as their marriage in duration. It is what we vow to do in marriage, but it is commonly a thing that induces people to break vows.

Not to mention, it takes a strong marriage to survive a cross-country road trip. Pictured here, proof that they made it to their grandson’s high school graduation this past June. (They also made it home again, marriage intact.)

I’m grateful for my parents today.

~thankful thursday~ moss

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

11/7/25

Today I am grateful for kitties and wood stove fires. A throw back, but it’s just as true as year one.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

11/8/25

I am grateful for some dry weather today, to set up a late-season veggie rainbow, and to take my camera for a walk in the woods. I always like to add a photo to my gratitude posts, but have been in a photography lull. So today I fixed that. When I am thinking about gratitude, consciously, daily, it makes me look more closely at things. It makes me be conscious of the thing, to name it “this is my coffee that I’m drinking,” or “this is the kitty that one year ago was a poopy tiny sniffly runt and now look at this queen.” I can get into autopilot mode sometimes, gulping the coffee without noticing, dumping kibble in bowls while my mind is elsewhere. It’s a subtle but important difference to take a beat to acknowledge the thing. And in acknowledging it, the next step, gratitude, is another kind of autopilot for me. As I snapped photos of spiders and mushrooms, I kept wanting to get closer and closer to the ground, until finally I was on my knees, able to smell the fungus and focus on individual fronds of moss.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

11/9/25

It’s husband gratitude day everyday, but especially today. I am thankful for Rich’s muscles with which he helped me move a bed into the newly painted bedroom today. I am thankful for his Sunday kind of loving. I am thankful for how he supports my creative life (gratitude oversharing included). I am a broken record about this last one, but I am thankful to be married to someone who is always, without fail, nice to me.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

11/10/25 (posted 11/11)

Every year I’m reminded that I am not taking this gratitude class for a grade, and year ten is no different. As for yesterday, I was graceful for gratitude grace periods and a little bit of sunshine.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/25

Today I am thankful for veterans. I am reposting last year’s gratitude post about Cousin Rita, because she and other forgotten and underestimated veterans have been on my mind. As the current administration truncates the horizons of women in the military, Rita reminds me that those soldiers who are being erased are just as worthy of respect and deserving of honor on this day. Women are veterans. LGBTQ+ people are veterans. To me, you can’t be erased.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/24

There’s a veteran in my family lineage who I only learned about last year. She was my mom’s cousin Rita, a family member I never knew about nor met, and who died at some point while I was growing up. Like many working class families, both my mom’s and dad’s side of my family are filled with men who served. I heard about all of the men, but I never heard about Rita.

It seemed like it dawned on Mom last year that I might be interested in a woman in our family who defied gender expectations. Family is wonderful and weird, and sometimes you learn something that makes you make more sense to yourself.

She told me Rita ferried airplanes in World War II!!! She was in the Navy, and was something called a SPAR, Mom said. She told me Rita never married. She talked to her from time to time over the years Rita lived in Manhattan, where she worked as an administrative assistant after the war.

I’ve fact checked, and it turns out the things Mom told me do not entirely align, but I am bringing up Rita today because it’s Veteran’s Day and a woman veteran in my family is a story I very much want to know more about.

I’ve learned that SPARs were women who served in the Coast Guard, who did not ferry planes; women in the Navy were WAVEs, and ditto, no flying. The idea with women in the war was of course not to replace men, but to fill in for the men stateside so the men could serve overseas. I mean, we all know Rosie the riveter was not in it to bruise anyone’s ego. So these women were civil servants, and most were not considered full military. However, in the Army Air Forces a few women actually got to fly. WASPs or Women Airforce Service Pilots, they were called. And I am not sure whether Rita was a WASP because her name is not in the internet list I found, but if she ferried planes, then she must have been a WASP. There are three Ritas, no Donnellys, and all the Ritas had married names also listed. I do not know if our unmarried Rita was a WASP who is not listed (I’m guessing the list is not exhaustive), whether she flew under a pseudonym (was she one of the Madges or Barbaras or Lillians?), whether she was a SPAR or a WAVE and somehow still flew, or whether none of this happened.

But here are some things that did happen in the WASPs: Of 1830 trainees, 1102 flew United States military aircraft.

That is how few women they allowed to train of the over 25,000 applicants.

In May 1944 TIME magazine reported that a certain Congressman wanted to end the WASPs rather than see them elevated to actual military. “Unnecessary and undesirable” was the title of the article. This man argued that the women were taking jobs that could and should be done by men, that it cost too much to train the women, downplayed their qualifications, and invalidated the important and significant work they had done. Congress killed the bill that would have given these women their due designation as service members.

After all, 38 of them died in the line of duty. Their families had to pay for their bodies to be flown home. Their coffins were not draped in flags. Their families received no gold stars. After all, the women were just civilians, and the survivors left the WASPs and quietly faded back into the fabric of American life. And some of them got married and did things expected of women.

In the 1970s the Airforce announced it would “for the first time,” allow women to fly its aircraft, and if I had been a WASP, that really would have chapped my ass, too. Until then they had not felt anyone owed them anything, but now they made some noise. But wouldn’t you know, they still received a ton of resistance to receiving the veteran status they requested, though there was no denying they deserved it. That thing where people who have a right believe that someone else being given a right that they enjoy will somehow detract from their ability to flex their right.

But rights are not pie, so President Carter signed the bill in 1977 that granted the WASPs retroactive “active duty” status for their service, and in 1979 they received honorable discharge papers.

So I guess it isn’t that surprising that I’d never heard of her, never heard of her service, and still haven’t connected all the dots about my first cousin once removed, Rita. But if she was still alive I’d sure like to ask her about it, and tell her I’m grateful for her service.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

11/12/25

Today I am grateful for the life of Jane Goodall. I am watching her funeral, which was held today at the National Cathedral, in installments. I saw her speak almost twenty years ago and I’m so glad I can say that I was in a room with her, because she is like no other person who has lived. I was born on her birthday and she defines my hair goals for myself, but obviously it goes deeper than those things. As a “difficult woman” who is a biologist who names her subjects and who also writes… you can find her in my book shelf, my search tabs, and my passwords. She has always inspired me and I’m so grateful for her example.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

11/13/25 (posted 11/14)

I was so grateful to be back at work yesterday that I fell asleep in my chair before I could post about it. I am grateful to have such good colleagues that we all congregated in the hall first, catching up before we logged into our dusty computers. When each person arrived, we raised our arms up like soccer parents and made a sparkle finger tunnel to welcome them back.

~thankful thursday~ tunnels

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

11/1/25

Welcome to year ten, Team Gratitude. I know you know what we had for dinner tonight, because no matter how much I think about the approach of November for the entire month of October, and no matter how furloughed I am, I still waited until November 1st to actually write a post. Cheers to nachos.

You might have seen some posts from me this week, and all of them have been about food security, or food insecurity, or trying to get food to people who need it. As I say every year on one or more November Saturdays, I am forever grateful for my sweet farm gig where I set up veggies for the farm on Saturdays in exchange for an armload of them to put in my own fridge. This picture is not from today, because today we left the veggies in their totes in the torrential rain, tucked the lids under them so they wouldn’t blow away in the gale, and didn’t bother with a color scheme. Farmers will go to some lengths to feed the people, and I’m grateful for farmers.

I read an essay this week about the food issue by author Stephanie Land, and she shared what it was like to be on food stamps with young children as a single mother. I was a single mother with a small son, and I saw myself a little bit in her words. How she and I both took so many pictures of our children eating, especially when we could give them something healthy, which felt lucky and not always assured. I have piles of images of Quinn harvesting fresh veggies from our community garden plot, picking free blackberries down the street from our house, and harvesting free apples in the wildlife preserve in the valley. I had resources, like a car and a job, and we did not go hungry. My resources were limited, so I was stressed about keeping us from going hungry. That’s just the line where we existed, somewhere hovering in the okay zone just above then not okay zone. That looming scarcity. I was never on food stamps, and I’m not proud of that, it was that I made just a little more money than the threshold, and therefore we did not qualify. This does not make me a better person than someone who does qualify for food stamps. We really have to get away from thinking that way.

I also really appreciate what Stephanie had to say about the premise of public assistance. That the premise is to prevent us from being on it, that the premise is literally to prevent… us. To “prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies” yes prevent people like Quinn and me. I want a world in which the premise is: feed people who need food. Full stop.

I felt such joy feeding my little one, AND I felt terror at falling into a position of not being able to, AND I felt neurotic about not wasting a morsel. Multiple things can be true. I apologize for how hard I worked to project an image of having it together. I did not. I did manage to feed us. It was not easy. I’ve never hustled so hard in my life. And if you know me, you know I always hustle. That period of my life stands out as the absolute most harrowing time.

So I’m thankful for the people making food-access options more accessible. I’m thankful for all the bundles of “here please take these urgent-care veggies” I was handed as a younger mom because someone could tell by my hollow cheeks and bony shoulders I could use a little boost, and I’m thankful to hear people speaking up about how it is to be one of the stigmatized folks near or at the point of hunger. I’m thankful for those fighting for everyone to have their basic needs covered here in the wealthiest nation on earth.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

11/2/25

Today I’m grateful for deep layers of memories of gratitude to choose from. I’m resharing this one from 2019 because it made me smile today.

 

11/2/19

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

In August Rich and I visited the corner of my parents’ farm where the migrating monarchs were a kaleidoscope of wings wheeling among a rainbow of tall flowers. I took a million photos, journaled descriptive language, and vowed to myself that “as summer floats south on the wings of the magical creatures we witnessed, I will reserve a part of my heart as a sanctuary for the butterflies of summer.”

Dwelling on gratitude as the days grow very dark and cold is, to me, a bit like keeping the habitat open for the butterflies, holding space for what needs to take root to foster their ability to thrive. It doesn’t mean I can ever keep the clouds from passing over that habitat, or stop the clock on the passage of the seasons. What I can do is watch the clouds passing over, trusting they are not here to stay. Contemplating darkness doesn’t mean it will become a permanent condition. And indeed, I seemed to have launched this round of gratitude posts by delving into the shadows. While it was summer, I watched the butterflies alight on each flower, pausing to drink in sweetness, lifting upward on the next air current. While it’s winter, it takes all my courage to descend into the dark, but I trust that I will emerge next spring transformed by whatever develops in the darkness.

The caterpillar entering the chrysalis is of course not an activity/metaphor of fall and winter. Still, there is something about how they go inward and turn into caterpillar soup (caterpillar nachos don’t sound any more appetizing) that resonates in autumn. The chrysalis is a slow cooker of broth seasoned with imaginal cells, those bits of the crawling being that code for the dream of flying it has always known as its destiny. A little trust in the process, a little rearrangement of the molten materials, and out comes a winged creature.

It may take more years of this practice before I can truly feel thankful for darkness, or the meltdown it initiates in me. Simmering in my slow cooker today, I’m grateful for memories of summer, excellent walks with my husband, and butterflies.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

11/3/25

Sorry, I cannot write a long gratitude post tonight, because apparently Rich and I are now completely hooked on watching the Voice. In between episodes we are also obsessed with Florence and the Machine’s new album Everybody Scream. I am grateful for music!

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

11/4/25

Today I am grateful for a chat with my bestie and a date with my sweetie. I am grateful for the gratitude groove to get going… around day four, I think I’ve said this in other years, is when I start to notice myself thinking more gratitudinally ™ early in the day and I’ve shaken off eleven months of dust from this important habit. I thought grateful thoughts about the fresh tomato slices on my bagel and my first sip of coffee this morning. I also thought them when Rich put on our nightly episode of The Voice and we chatted during commercial about how we appreciate the wholesomeness of this particular show. I’m not a big tv gal, and other competitive shows make me sad at how the contestants are treated, and how people in positions of power (coaches/judges) speak to them, and to each other with disdain, contempt, or insult. Which is why I am now hooked on this silly show, because each person on this show is treated with dignity and is given great advice and pep talks, no matter how far they make it in the competition. And it makes me grateful that even in silly places, there are examples of how humans can speak to each other and about each other with graciousness and care.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

11/5/25

I’m grateful for the oh-so-satisfying feeling of peeling masking tape off the walls I’ve been painting this week of furlough. I’m also thankful to observe National Nacho Day one day early, because tomorrow is date night day. And finally, I’m thankful for pictures I took back in summertime, because I have been staring at walls and tape these last few blustery, rainy days.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

11/6/25

Today I started listening to my next audio book while I painted. Brian Doyle’s One Long River of Song. After his essay “Leap” (go ahead and read it if you dare, it is on the internet, but bring a whole box of tissues), the tears were already primed. I have been painting Quinn’s bedroom, after organizing and cleaning and storing childhood belongings, dismantling the twin loft Ikea bed with the dinosaur stickers on it to make room for a queen size bed. As another essay began in which Doyle was contemplating a dead mole he was about to bury in his yard, I was applying a second coat of a mossy, pistachio-y, avocado-y green onto the tiniest of accent walls around a window for a writing/study nook for the college creative writing student. The essay described the mole’s life cycle, the young, their departures from the burrow nest. I thought about this empty nook for my son who is grown and not spending time here in this mossy, vaguely food-hued nest I’m refurnishing for him, in case he does need it. Then:

“This tribe of mole is thought to be largely solitary, I read, and I want to laugh and weep, as we are all largely solitary, and spend whole lifetimes digging tunnels toward each other, do we not? And sometimes we connect, thrilled and confused, sure and unsure at once, for a time, before the family cavern empties, or one among us does not come home at all, and faintly far away we hear the sound of the shovel.”

I am thankful for the tunneling activity of November gratitude.

a little more 2024

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Taking a photographic walk down memory lane for the year and there are three of you who might want to join me.

Quinn turned 17!

I hatched some eggs!

I went to Galveston, saw dolphins, drove boats.

Jazz band went to state!

Rich and I went to New York! There were fireflies.

A family portrait was taken at Oregon Country Fair by a kind stranger.

I went tidepooling! (I plan to do much more of that in 2025.)

I went to Kodiak twice… love it there. Fin whales were my favorite wildlife sighting, but there were many contenders for that role. Practiced my new boat skills. Backed the boat trailer down Anton Larsen Bay ramp successfully!

 

I did not take gratitude for a grade. But I am grateful for this year!

 

 

 

~thankful thursday~ light cone

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/24

I was full of gratitude moments yesterday, but was not on social media to share, so please accept my belated day 22 gratitude. I accompanied fifty-three high school students (band and friends) and two teachers to Portland for a very full day (from an 8:30 departure Friday all the way until the kids said “we’re at school on a Saturday” when we got off the bus at 1:30 am.) I have written about band kids before and my love for them. Yesterday, being with them as they visited the music department of PSU, I loved the tiny insights into their psyches revealed by the questions they asked and observations they made aloud. As we took a self-guided tour of campus, I loved how they looked up and took pictures of tall buildings. I loved watching them arrive on the rec field and expode into activity: run, skip, hacky-sack, jump for the goal posts, race, climb, kick a water bottle, manifest a soccer ball out of the bushes, flop on the ground and be with each other. As we ate pizza at an arcade, I loved filling the water pitcher eleven times and hydrating them as they refueled, cheered each other on at silly games, discovered infinite ways to play with a rubber chicken, sang a friend happy birthday, and in the case of Quinn and his friend, performed a good chunk of the Hamilton score a cappella and in harmony. I loved helping a student who wasn’t feeling well feel better, and I loved sitting in the very last row of the Arlene Schnitzer’s upper balcony and seeing them absorb Mariachi Sol de Mexico perform a phenomenal show. I loved the way some of our students glowed to have their first language predominate the show, the way they knew the call and response parts of the songs, when to clap to the beat, the way they got up and spun each other at the back of the hall like it was their own quinceañera. I loved the way some of our students cheered and laughed, remarked how they understood none of the words, absorbed that moment of empathy for the students who feel that way most of the time instead of only on a field trip. I loved how all of our students instantly lit their phones up when the band called for the crowd to do so. I loved watching them sway back and forth, combining their individual tiny lights and reaching for the sky.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

11/23/24

After one friend (and gratitude reader) I saw today remarked that it might be a good nacho night, my bestie sent me this photo. Even though it’s hot dogs and mac-n-cheese tonight, I’m grateful for easy dinner and friends who celebrate mediocrity in the kitchen.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

11/24/24

I am grateful for a weekend with Quinn during which he designed a fleet of fantasy ships he can use as D and D shipboard adventures. He knew I might have a small clue about ships, having lived on and sailed them for a couple of years long ago, so he asked me a zillion questions. Types of ships, names of masts, how many decks, how many crow’s nests (he was disappointed in the answer), what is a stun’sl, below decks configurations, how many crew, what was that word again? (The word was bulkhead.) I taught him beam and draft, fore main and mizzen, topgallant and royal, that the lazarette would be an ideal location for a character to stow away, and we even discussed skysails. We talked about the shapes of hulls, the lines to control sails, and how the rig is meant to flex. He decided “difficult terrain” would be an appropriate penalty for pretty much any character without high dexterity, anywhere on board a ship, and I agreed.  It brought back a lot of memories, but mostly just made me grateful for every minute I get to spend with him.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

11/25/24

I am grateful for a dinner of bbq brisket and ribs made by the same guy who catered our wedding. I am grateful for my fabulous mother-in-law who picked up the food for us and kept us company while we feasted.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

11/26/24

I am grateful for my birthday boy brother B, and my unbirthday boy brother T. I always do this on B’s birthday and I’m not going to start bucking tradition in the ninth year. Instead I’ll find the photos that make me smile the widest from our visit this past June: T at my nephew’s baseball game keeping the sun off his delicate skin with a dainty pink umbrella; B and Dad standing in the potato field they’d just planted. My reasons are still the same: they are great brothers, great dads, great uncles, great men, great at doing specific things like punk power chords or defragmenting your hard drive. I am grateful for their sporadic text messages, whether they feature roman numerals or not. I heard there was quite a bumper crop of potatoes this year.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ days 27 and 28

11/27 and 11/28/24

Two quick gratitudes for two very good, full days. I choose kitties and pie.

 

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

Observed 12/1/24

I’ve been both busy and full of sinus pressure for a couple of days, so I’m getting to penultimate gratitude a few days behind schedule. Luckily, I’m still not taking this class for a grade. Indulge my semi-lucid gratitude musing for today.

Sometimes Quinn talks to me about physics.

“Picture a flash of light above your head moving out in all directions. The second that flash begins, it is impossible for you to ever get outside of that light, because to do so you’d have to travel faster than light.”

“Mmm.”

“That’s your light cone. It gets bigger as time progresses, and a greater area of the world is illuminated in that light. You also have a past light cone that defines all the area where anything can travel at up to the speed of light to reach where you are right now and give you information about the past, so anything you can have ever experienced is also defined by where you are right now.”

“Whoaaa.”

I told Quinn I thought this was a great metaphor. He thought that was silly but I’m sticking with my metaphor assertion. Because I have so often found light to be a part of the conversation about gratitude, I think they are intertwined. I can picture the act of choosing to pay attention to gratitude as a type of light, and maybe this gratitude light, too, moves outward, maybe it defines a cone of experience around me, maybe it informs and enfolds within itself everything about my past, everything about my future. Maybe all of it comes back to this moment I am in right now.

And even if I am a glow slug in the midnight zone of the high-pressure, chilled-to-the-bone, fully dark ocean, I can make my own light, a flash that moves outward, a pulse that grows and expands and defines an area around me.

I learned a few more things about the glowing nudibranchs. The research carried out on this species was based on none other than the research vessel Western Flyer. Iykyk. But on the nudibranchs themselves: They are a marvel of evolution: they represent the third independent evolution of bioluminescence in nudibranchs, and they swim and evade predators, unlike their nearest known relatives who typically crawl on the sea floor. They are so evolved that they have created their own family, like a lot of us are known to do when we don’t fit easily into the classification schemes of others. They are growing on me, these dark-dwelling light-makers with their soft, transparent hearts.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

Observed 12/2/24

I am grateful for paid sick leave and a day of Tea, Tay, and Turkey Broth (shoutout to bestie for the playlist and we are grateful for music in case we haven’t said so this year).

I am grateful for several days in a row of sunshine! I am grateful for all the forms of light that have shined on this November. A non-exhaustive list might include:

Friday night lights

clarity

light cone

sunrise

stage lights

cousin Rita

head lamp

sunlight on water

sunlight on kitten fur

glow slugs

cell phone lights in the hands of teenagers, swaying

you, and you, and you.

I am sincerely grateful for all of you and your comments and hearts and grocery store acknowledgements. Thank you for beaming your lights my way, too. If you are among those for whom the light has seemed dimmer than usual this November, I am sending you as many beams of bioluminescence as I am able.

When Rich was driving me home from the funeral I mentioned earlier this month, one of the darkest days of this November, we noticed someone’s not-put-away-yet Halloween decoration, a skeleton perched as though it was driving an antique tractor alongside the highway. It was too dark to get a good photo, but the image has stuck with me anyway. No matter how lovely and wonderful a life we might be privileged to enjoy (and I am so lucky, comfortable, and privileged), it does feel as though the whole machine we are rolling forward on is an antique and that there is a reckless skeleton behind the wheel. No ocean of gratitude, no arena of swaying teenagers with their phones lit up, can change that. Loss and death and grief, we do not get to escape them.

I have thought about it a lot, and without veering into the toxic positivity lane, I have decided to keep myself hitched to the gratitude wagon. I will strive for mediocrity and honesty in this practice, always.

Thanks everyone, for climbing in the wagon with me again after all these years.

~thankful thursday~ glow slug

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~30 days of gratitude~ days 14 and 15

11/14 and 11/15/24

I was grateful yesterday for another date night, and tonight I’m grateful for nachos again. But in addition to those repeats, I’m grateful that I’m not taking this class for a grade (which apparently was a gratitude I posted five years ago yesterday). I’m also grateful for some awesomely inspiring writing I’ve been reading, like this essay from Andrea Gibson (whose writing I also shared last year). They just so happened to mention gratitude, wouldn’t you know. “I hope we each feel a deep responsibility to be grateful for our lives through this time, to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun.”

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

11/16/24

I am grateful for another sunrise (“to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun,” eh?) setting up the farmstand in the predawn murk working shoulder to shoulder with good people. I am grateful for the abundance I take home (pictured here on the truck’s front bumper), and for the sturdy, hearty vegetables of fall, including, har har, a very “hearty” rutabaga that could so easily have passed for that meaty human muscle. I am also grateful for my sweet kitty Rey, also known as Reymond, who is named for a Jedi and whose favorite toy is her mouse ball. Rey also likes to hunt down the green ear plugs that tumble out of Rich’s pockets after work. She was like Kylo last year, a crusty-eyed outdoor kitten who opted in on condo life, but now she is a full housecat who likes to make suggestions in her tiny-meow voice about when the wet food ought to be served to herself and Bart. Sometimes her tiny meows are just requests for “urgent care pets” and I pick her up and tuck her on my left side like a baby while I do kitchen things. She loves cream cheese. One of her least cat-like traits is that when Rich vacuums, she comes running and likes to play vacuum games and even allows him to vacuum her fur. She likes to tuck herself into the small space beside Rich’s hip in his recliner. She sits with me during writing time every morning at 4, which she has been licking my face to wake me up for at 3, because daylight savings is a gift that keeps giving for a while when you have pets. I am grateful for the big nap that Rey and I took on the couch this afternoon, and a yummy schnitzel dinner from the wonderful new food truck in town (locals: follow Raised by Wolves on the social media for their menu, they are fabulous and they incorporate veggies from my favorite farm). And now Rey is curled up by my feet, but figuratively she is curled up inside my internal organ that resembles a rutabaga.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

11/17/24

I’m grateful that some communication happens with no words.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

11/18/24

I’m so dang grateful for sunshine today. There was lots of rain, too, and that meant rainbows. I am grateful for the steady steps a project can take with time and patience.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

11/19/24

I’m grateful for a successful trip to the vet for this guy today. His name is Peachy and he showed up while I was in Kodiak this summer, and approximately three days after I came home was converted from scaredy yard cat hiding in the wood pile to taken-care-of lap cat sleeping in the condo at night. He purred right through his vaccines today, and is such a big healthy boy at seven pounds. I probably have enough cats to ride out the rest of the gratitudes, and I won’t do that, but he is one of the ones I’d be in error not to mention. I am grateful for the way he flops onto the driveway to have his belly rubbed as soon as one of us appears, and the way he adores his big brother, R2. I am grateful for how kitties seem to be made of pure gratitude themselves, that they transmit through their beautiful kitty eyes.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

11/20/24

I am grateful for sunlight on water.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

11/21/24

I’m grateful for a second day in a row of sunlight on water between storms, for date night garlic bread with marinara dipping sauce, and for science. A new nudibranch from the very deep Pacific Ocean has been named, after many years of observations and research in order to establish that the mystery mollusk is, in fact, a nudibranch. This creature lives at thousands of feet, under the extreme pressure and incredible darkness of the midnight zone, where the soft-bodied animal creates its own light. This self-sufficient being contains male and female parts and collects prey by trapping them in a floaty-flowing hood. When threatened, their bioluminescence scatters across their body like a starry sky. So if anybody is looking for a mascot for these times, science has got you covered.

~thankful thursday~ flyer

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

11/8/24

I am grateful for the music program in our schools, and for watching Quinn come up through it. As a pandemic middle schooler, his music career was interrupted for quite some time, but he has had some excellent teachers and students to study with. A fall concert features the very beginning band playing a series of quarter notes, part of a scale, and a rendition of hot cross buns. I am grateful to be part of a crowd who applauds hot cross buns with wild enthusiasm. The teacher acknowledged that you can’t get to symphonic band without hot cross buns. Tonight the symphonic band featured a senior percussionist on bells, crash cymbals, and snare drum. I am grateful to be his mama.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

11/9/24

I am grateful for the pieces of community connectedness that have become my routine over the years. Bumping into a friend at the co-op, buying my coffee beans from folks I hold dear. I am grateful for the beauty of my early Saturday mornings, painting the most gorgeous vegetables you’ve ever seen onto a blank palette of pavement. The veggies are fading into the fall hues, but I’ll stubbornly arrange them in rainbows until all that’s left is green and beige. I saved you one of my favorites from earlier in the season, too. And this morning’s sunrise was worth being up for.

 

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

11/10/24

I am grateful for a nice phone chat with my mom today.

 

 

(would love to give photo credit if the internet provided such info)

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/24

There’s a veteran in my family lineage who I only learned about last year. She was my mom’s cousin Rita, a family member I never knew about nor met, and who died at some point while I was growing up. Like many working class families, both my mom’s and dad’s side of my family are filled with men who served. I heard about all of the men, but I never heard about Rita.

It seemed like it dawned on Mom last year that I might be interested in a woman in our family who defied gender expectations. Family is wonderful and weird, and sometimes you learn something that makes you make more sense to yourself.

She told me Rita ferried airplanes in World War II!!! She was in the Navy, and was something called a SPAR, Mom said. She told me Rita never married. She talked to her from time to time over the years Rita lived in Manhattan, where she worked as an administrative assistant after the war.

I’ve fact checked, and it turns out the things Mom told me do not entirely align, but I am bringing up Rita today because it’s Veteran’s Day and a woman veteran in my family is a story I very much want to know more about.

I’ve learned that SPARs were women who served in the Coast Guard, who did not ferry planes; women in the Navy were WAVEs, and ditto, no flying. The idea with women in the war was of course not to replace men, but to fill in for the men stateside so the men could serve overseas. I mean, we all know Rosie the riveter was not in it to bruise anyone’s ego. So these women were civil servants, and most were not considered full military. However, in the Army Air Forces a few women actually got to fly. WASPs or Women Airforce Service Pilots, they were called. And I am not sure whether Rita was a WASP because her name is not in the internet list I found, but if she ferried planes, then she must have been a WASP. There are three Ritas, no Donnellys, and all the Ritas had married names also listed. I do not know if our unmarried Rita was a WASP who is not listed (I’m guessing the list is not exhaustive), whether she flew under a pseudonym (was she one of the Madges or Barbaras or Lillians?), whether she was a SPAR or a WAVE and somehow still flew, or whether none of this happened.

But here are some things that did happen in the WASPs: Of 1830 trainees, 1102 flew United States military aircraft.

That is how few women they allowed to train of the over 25,000 applicants.

In May 1944 TIME magazine reported that a certain Congressman wanted to end the WASPs rather than see them elevated to actual military. “Unnecessary and undesirable” was the title of the article. This man argued that the women were taking jobs that could and should be done by men, that it cost too much to train the women, downplayed their qualifications, and invalidated the important and significant work they had done. Congress killed the bill that would have given these women their due designation as service members.

After all, 38 of them died in the line of duty. Their families had to pay for their bodies to be flown home. Their coffins were not draped in flags. Their families received no gold stars. After all, the women were just civilians, and the survivors left the WASPs and quietly faded back into the fabric of American life. And some of them got married and did things expected of women.

In the 1970s the Airforce announced it would “for the first time,” allow women to fly its aircraft, and if I had been a WASP, that really would have chapped my ass, too. Until then they had not felt anyone owed them anything, but now they made some noise. But wouldn’t you know, they still received a ton of resistance to receiving the veteran status they requested, though there was no denying they deserved it. That thing where people who have a right believe that someone else being given a right that they enjoy will somehow detract from their ability to flex their right.

But rights are not pie, so President Carter signed the bill in 1977 that granted the WASPs retroactive “active duty” status for their service, and in 1979 they received honorable discharge papers.

So I guess it isn’t that surprising that I’d never heard of her, never heard of her service, and still haven’t connected all the dots about my first cousin once removed, Rita. But if she was still alive I’d sure like to ask her about it, and tell her I’m grateful for her service.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

11/12/24

In a time when it feels like so much of what I care about is under threat, I am grateful for moments when the being in front of me requires so much care that they are all I can focus on. Caring for beings is my thing. This is Kylo Ren, of the wild back yard bayou. She has decided I’m okay, and that I may attempt to tame her. She spent her first night in her kitty condo last night. Tonight at dark, when it was time for me to wander by headlamp into the deep maw of the backyard and air lift her to safety, it turned out that she was already nestled in her condo bed, ready to be tucked in for the night. I’ve entered my cat lady era, y’all.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

11/13/24

I’m grateful for all this rain, and also for the break in the rain during my lunch break so I could take a walk.

~thankful thursday~ going on

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

11/1/24

Did November 1st sneak up on me? Yes. And no. I knew it was coming, but it arrived in the blink of an eye. So after a jam-packed Friday, it’ll be a shortie for day one.

Michael J. Fox says, “My optimism is fueled by my gratitude. And with gratitude, optimism is sustainable.”

I’m grateful for this borrowed wisdom because optimism seems crucial in this moment, and if gratitude can fuel it, it is just one more reason to kick off another year of 30 days of gratitude.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

11/2/24

I am grateful to have been under the Friday night lights for last night’s high school football game. I am no big fan of football, although I am a reluctant fantasy football player to fit in with the guys at work. (Okay, maybe I still don’t fit in; I called my team She-rah Princess of Sportsball.) I root for my husband’s team and my family’s team, because it matters to them, while harboring no illusions nor denial of the toxic aspects of the sport. At any rate, I’ve attended all the home football games at NHS the past three years while Quinn has been playing at the games in the pep band. You all definitely know by now that I’m a band mom.

PSA: the band kids are in danger if we don’t defeat the felon. The homophobic, transphobic, anti-Department of Education, anti-gun-safety, anti-choice, anti-environment, hatred-fueled candidate for president. Please vote for the band kids: for their safety, their ability to be themselves in the world, their autonomy in their own bodies.

Last night, in their final game after a mostly losing season, our team won in an epic manner, and it was senior night, during which the football team seniors and the cheer team seniors were honored, and I have a band senior (the band seniors stayed invisible in their corner of the bandstands, but whatever.) And the band sounded great, and the cheer team is always amazing, and the football team was winning, and the kid who usually plays the drum set had to leave at halftime.

For the second half of the game, Quinn got his chance, at long last, to put down the bass drum and sit at the drum set and play all the songs he has been practicing throughout high school. This was something he had ardently wished to do. I was so grateful to be there to witness it, to take inordinate amounts of video of the fight song, let’s go band, pokerface, funkytown, tequila, school’s out for summer, the hey song, and all the songs he got to play. He also got to play the snare drum, as he alternated with his snare drum player friend so they could both have a chance on drum set. You know that thing the drummers get to do, to start off the song, where they whack their sticks together above their heads, to give the rhythm for the song they are all about to start playing? Watching your kid do that particular thing, to lead the band, is a crazy awesome feeling.

There is so much going on in the wide world and my own much smaller world, that it is difficult to even know how I feel on a spectrum from despair to joy, from anger to hope, much less what to write. But I was jumping on the bleacher seats, fist pumping and screaming at the top of my lungs happy last night when that boy carried that ball down the field, and my boy whacked his sticks to make the band play the fight song. I am grateful for one uninhibited moment of joy.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

11/3/24

A friend I met in an online group when our boys were infants, so a friend I have now known for seventeen years, posted a confession sometime this past year about her gratitude practice. She said that sometimes she wonders if it can be another form of spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity. At the same time, she shared that she believes her gratitude has been life saving for her in the years since her oldest son died. This woman has done so much awe-inspiring work on raising awareness around grief, and I take her thoughts on gratitude very seriously. I commented on her post that I, too, wonder about the potential for harm coming from a practice that has such good intent. I’ve thought about this so much in the months since our exchange. Don’t worry, I’m not quitting, I just never want to show up to the gratitude without being authentic.

It’s like this: there is a lot that goes on in any given day. Yes, I can almost always find something I feel grateful about during a given day, but also? Some days, there are some very large elephants in the room that make it more difficult to access gratitude, and more importantly, I would not want to negate all other valid feelings by trying to tamp them down beneath a gratitude that is forced.

Take today for example. I am super grateful for yet another annual fill-your-pantry market, another bucket of honey, another freezer full of humanely raised meat. I am ever so grateful for my husband who drove me not once, but twice, to the valley, and sat with me through a very difficult event.

But not mentioning that the event he was driving me to was one where we witnessed and joined in the grief of a family whose twelve-year-old son has died, would feel wrong. To not acknowledge sadness doesn’t do my gratitude practice any favors. I am not just going to say I am grateful for the life of this boy while I am so torn up that it is over. I don’t want to use gratitude just to spin every negative thing that happens into positive vibes.

So I guess that’s another thing to be grateful for: increasing clarity about exactly what my gratitude practice means to me. I am earning this over the years. Today’s clarity: I’m not interested in weaponizing gratitude.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

11/4/24

After some weekends, it’s possible to be grateful for Monday. I am grateful for a productive day scrubbing a fish tank until it sparkled. I am grateful for a simple evening of tuna melts (thank you local fishing community for supplying cans of tuna that have spoiled us for life against grocery store cans), strawberry ice cream, and watching Farm Aid with Rich while we each provide a resting surface for a cat.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5 and 6

11/5 and 11/6/24

Speaking of elephants in the room, I couldn’t really post last night. But this morning someone on social media somewhere quoted lines from a piece by Ursula K. Le Guin:

“The death way or the life way? The high road of the warrior, or the river road?

I know what I want. I want to live with courage, with compassion, in patience, in peace.

The way of the warrior fully admits only the first of these, and wholly denies the last.

The way of the water admits them all.

The flow of a river is a model for me of courage that can keep me going—carry me through the bad places, the bad times. A courage that is compliant always seeking the best way, the easiest way, but if not finding any easy way still, always, going on.”

I spent most of my day walking around the lab, controlling the flow of water, or being baffled by my inability to control it. I was grateful for the distraction, something to focus on, something to keep my body moving. I had a short break and took a walk on the estuary trail, paused and listened to the sound of the water for a few minutes. And then I went on.

As for tonight, I am grateful for the official meal of November, served proudly on national nacho day.

Here is the full blog post the quote is borrowed from. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/119-the-election-lao-tzu-a-cup-of-water

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

11/7/24

I am grateful for date night, same dreamy husband, different year. He is good to talk to. Five stars, would marry again.