Today is the day our culture sets aside for giving thanks, so it’s a good time to do just that. I mean, even a misguided culture has an occasional good idea, right?
So here goes for me:
I am grateful for the Buddha, for the teachings, and for the sangha of qualified teachers and fellow practitioners. Without them, my life would have gone on just the same as it always had. With them, I am experiencing basic goodness and sanity and learning how to be of benefit to others and how to be a little bit less harmful in my approach.
I am grateful for the Woman on the Verge, my path and my heart and my most profound teacher, guide, and co-conspirator. She’s got enough steel in her that I can sharpen myself against her and enough love in her that it makes me want to. It is my great good fortune to have encountered her and entered into her orbit.
My wider family. Our daughter, our grandchildren, my brother and sisters, my mother and father and step mother and step father and grandparents and uncles and cousins and aunts. What we are flows through each of our family members in wider and wider circles. You can’t pick out what part is just yours, because they are in you and you are in them. That circle widens and widens to include everyone that ever was or will be, and not just human beans but every living thing.
We are all one.
I am grateful for this new journey. Glad the house was sold to a couple who will love it and be nurtured by it just as we were. Glad to be debt free at last and with money in the bank. Grateful for my career which is now supporting us with my pension. Grateful that I got through that job without having to take a life and without losing mine. Grateful for what I learned about myself and about everyone else, especially about death in all of its many forms. Death, and courage. Basic goodness and basic confusion. Forgiveness and retribution. Compassion and selfishness. That job was a cauldron that cooked everything down to brass tacks, to mix metaphors.
Grateful that I got to say goodbye yesterday to my Grandmother who is slipping out of this world very slowly and to my Grandfather who is going with her, faster or slower, but bound to go where she goes. Grateful for the chance to be with them both in mindfulness and prayer and compassion and deep joy and to wish them well and give them my love.
Grateful that my brother didn’t take any of the bullets that were intended for him in the last SWAT call out. Glad they missed him.
Grateful for you. For your reading here, for your love and your kindness. For sharing your hearts with me and for going forward with joy and trepidation but always going.
Grateful for my health and my basic sanity, for the strength still in me and for my own courage and good heart which leads me always farther into the wilderness of what is. I enjoy my own company and for that I’m grateful, too.
Pilgrimage. My Dharma brothers and sisters. Nature in all of its transcendent glory and presence. The vastness of the sky, the wheeling between day and night. The mysteries of the worlds inner and outer. The many guides and spirits, the angels and demons, the beings of all the realms and the realms and the cord that winds through all things and binds them one to the other.
I can go on and on in this prayer without ceasing, for everywhere I turn my gaze it falls upon blessings too numerous and wild to count. In truth I am grateful for everything just as it is and for this moment in its fullness and strangeness which is the only moment.
For love, in the end, which is my altar and my god.
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Namaste, pilgrims!
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Yep. To sum it up- love.
Always.
You know it so well. Love shines from everything you do.
I’m reeling. Your words guide me in my path and uphold what I believe and your life is a beacon. I’m thankful for you and the woman. Both of you have brought me goodness. I wish you every joy.
You leave me speechless. Thank you so much. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
Yesterday, one of my coworkers sent me a message complimenting me after she overheard a phone call in which I expressed my gratitude to the receptionist at my doctor’s office for going above and beyond the call of duty to resolve an ongoing insurance issue. I was profoundly grateful, and said so. I told my coworker that I always express my gratitude for exceptional or unexpectedly good service when I receive it because I think people aren’t thanked enough, and they always welcome that expression of gratitude when it’s offered. My coworker responded that I was a good person, a better person than she was, and that the phone call she’d overheard made her want to be a better person.
Brother. I told her I am only a good person now because I was not such a good person in the past, and that I aspire daily to be grateful for each moment, and to express gratitude as often, as loudly and as vocally as I can.
I am thankful for you. I am thankful that you share your whole self here in this space.
I am thankful for your words and your art. I am thankful, most of all, for feeling this sibling connection with you. My older brother is gone, yet he is in my heart. And you are here.
Thank you for being who you are.
Big love to you and your family on this day, and every day.
lk
We’ve both learned a lot about how to be better people. I’m glad you’re my sister, sister.
Big love-
Scott
A beautiful prayer of thanks. It is pure love that you always bring here, Scott, and for that I am very thankful.
Truly, Namaste.
Thank you Livia! Namaste to you.
Such beautiful gratitude. I’m grateful to know you and yours in this small way that you’ve so generously shared.
As we are grateful to you for your honesty and courage and big, big heart!
Love to you and yours. We are one big family.