Dear lovelies -
It's gratitude day and week and month and tomorrow we FEAST! And by way of thanksgiving I wanted to say a few words about what gratitude means to me.
I've learned throughout life that your focus shapes the way you see the world. There are innumerable things to which we can give our attention at any given time. And that attention, that thing we're focused on and what we believe about it will change our physiology, our psychology and our lives. So, why not give gratitude our full attention?
Like.
You know.
Always
An enchantress of the human spirit - French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943) - a woman with a mind of unparalleled intellectual elegance and a near modern saint whom Albert Camus described as "the only great spirit of our times"- wrote gorgeously of the idea of attention and how we use it. She viewed attention as a kind of contemplative practice through which we reap the deepest rewards of our humanity.
Simone is someone for whom I'm grateful.
My son and his demand that I pay attention to a mind radically different from my own is someone for whom I'm grateful.
The people that piss me off for being mean-spirited or small are also part of my gratitude basket because they show me the moments when compassion is a dry desert bed in me.
It's easy to be grateful for the nice things, the nice people. It's even more important to be grateful for the challenging ones.
I'll also get super personal and say I'm grateful to the friends who held me up when I was falling over a decade ago. They taught me everything about generosity of spirit and how simply sitting with someone in their grief or pain is perhaps the best gift you can give.
So.
To all of you.
I shout BIG, FAT LOVE in pink waves like a tide.
May they break over you and fill you with the most delicious kind of happy you can imagine.
With so much heart,
M.