What am I grateful for in 2018?
I’m staring across the room, looking at a candle I lit about a half hour ago as I settled in to see who I might connect with: what like hearted people, people with whom I might build a positive relationship in order to make this world a better place through writing and the creative process.
Now I am quiet, attempting a go at naming only three things I am grateful for in 2018.
Only three. I am setting the timer to write for five minutes or else I might get stuck trying to make this perfect, which it will be no matter what, anyway.
- I am grateful for tenacity. In early Summer things looked ridiculously bleak. After the year started with such promise, but July, I was despondent. It wasn’t until the last six weeks or so that I felt consistently better about myself and about the year.
- I am grateful I started reaching out again to different people thanks in great part because of local groups and people using social media. I found KWESI and my new Cameroonian family and I took that extraordinary day trip to the Tejon Ranch artist in residence day that was so spectacular my mood was bright for weeks afterwards. That was a really big thing I almost missed but I hung in there and did it. So grateful.
- I am beyond words grateful to everyone who is participating in Bridge to the New Year. I have cried repeatedly to Paula who started it with me because I have wanted to do something like this for years, literally, and in doing it I feel like I am shedding a lot of excess ugly thoughts and no longer constructive attachments. I am looking forward to more people showing up in the last two weeks of December and am excited to be adding a week of brain dumping into the mix, too. Every day in every way, better and better and better.
I purposefully didn’t add “big things” (except for The Bridge) because I know gratitude best in the small moments, the day to day, the extraordinary ordinary. A lit candle, the voice of my son asking me for something or another, a clean desk. Grateful. For you reading? Thank you, more than you know.
What are you grateful for?
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