Tag: gratefulness

Your Masterpiece

I got back to art class yesterday, after a few weeks off for Christmas break. It was great to be back. I painted the little guy above as sort of a “warm up”. I thought that I would share him with you. He makes me smile.

The best part of getting older is coming to the proven realization that the end product of anything truly doesn’t matter. The real joy always comes in the doing, in the process, in the flow. Yes, a successfully grown family, business, career, marriage, homestead, project, craft etc. can give you a sense of satisfaction and pride and maybe even some accolades, but those feelings are such a small blip of feelings versus the myriad of feelings and experiences that go into the process of forming and building and creating and experiencing all of the works of your life. There’s peace in this realization. Your life is your main product. And it doesn’t end, until you end. And none of us really know what “when you end” means, if we are honest with ourselves. We all have beliefs and hopes, but none of us truly know the mysteries of what happens to us after we die. So, in the meantime, we are living our ongoing creative product – our lives. And this product is a collaboration with the entire world around us. Our main creative product, our individual life, has the support of the whole entire world which only benefits when our creative product brings more individuality and beauty and imagination and our own uniqueness that is unrepeatable, to the whole of it.

I’m a middle-age, empty nester who is attending art class for the fun of it. I’m not graded. My output doesn’t matter. It’s even okay if I don’t particularly enjoy my art class on any given day. If I spill some paint, so what? If I never frame my art, who cares? The joy is in the doing. The joy is in the exploring. The joy is in the accepting. The joy is in the gratefulness for the experience – every bit of it.

Your life is your only creative product. Everything else that you do is part of that product. Be joyful in “doing” your life. Explore. Accept the messiness and the so-called flaws of it all. Mostly, be grateful for having the experience of being able to create your one and only masterpiece, and also be utterly grateful for all of the wonderful beings who are co-creating with you. If our world isn’t a creative masterpiece of miracles, than what is?

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

583. Do you prefer blue or black inked pens?

It Bears Repeating

Hi friends. I slept in. I am fatigued. This year has been full of big changes for our own family and for those whom we love, and I think that this is all catching up on me right now. So, in conservation of time and energy, I am going to reprint one of my more popular blog posts which tends to trend at this time of year (which is fitting!). Here it is:

Thank Yourself

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is the comfort food of holidays. Thanksgiving is warm slippers, a hot mug of coffee, non-glitzy, down-to-earth, deep sigh of relief, wholesome goodness. Thanksgiving is a cozy, fuzzy blanket, wonderful smells wafting in the air, the fading beautiful colors of a summer well spent. Thanksgiving is easy laughter, easy going energy, a building of anticipation of a fabulous feast and an exciting holiday season ahead. Thanksgiving marks the start of the end of a year. It is the awards show of the year, where the award receivers are looking back at all which the year has brought to them, and thanking everything and everyone who deserves to be thanked for helping to get the award receivers to this point of evolution and elevation in their own lives. Thanksgiving is the joy of a parade, the celebration of man’s best friend, and the communion and camaraderie of fans of the same teams. Thanksgiving is the reminder that there are few feelings better than the overwhelming reassurance of all of our blessings constantly provided to us. Gratefulness is probably the largest ingredient of love, and Thanksgiving makes this fact abundantly clear.

As I say (and I feel deeply) every year, thank you friends and readers for supporting and being a vital part of my blog. I love this blog and so by extension, I love you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Now go get going on your turkey . . . . . See you tomorrow!

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Thank You, Thank You!

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Happy Thanksgiving! I am incredibly grateful for this blog and I am so thankful for each of you, my faithful readers. A blog without readers is just a personal journal, and I already have a few of those. To feel a responsibility and a desire to write this blog every single morning, has been a Godsend for me. This has been particularly evident to me in the last few months, with my son’s epileptic seizures flaring up. They say that the person who saves you, is always you. If that’s the case, then the deepest part of me, who has the inclination to spill out my soul on this blog, is what saved me this fall. Thank you for being there to help me to sort out all of the pieces of my fragile heart during these last few months. Things are definitely looking up. We are making it to the other side of our family’s most frightening experience, and I feel you holding my hand through it all. Thank you for your interest, your kindness, your caring, your attention and your loyalty. I am immensely thankful for you, my readers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

One of the more popular posts which I have ever written on my blog is trending again. This is the right time for it. Happy Thanksgiving. Here is the post:

Thank Yourself

Capeless Heroes

Image

I don’t have the right words today. I have so many large emotions swirling all around my mind and my body. I tend to lash out angrily when I don’t have my balance. I don’t want to do that on my blog. It isn’t helpful.

Here’s what I’m grateful for today: my faith in an all-powerful, all-wise God/Universe, my family and our health, my friends, being in my comfortable home, the beautiful sunshine, our dedicated health workers and first responders and scientists and business heads and all of the world’s leaders tasked with helping us to find the quickest and safest path out of this mess (I’m hating having to make the “bad guy” decisions like scrapping vacation plans and telling my middle son that he can’t see his girlfriend (of 3+ years), until she is home and quarantined for 14 days. I can’t imagine the stress and pain and uncertainty our leaders are feeling, as they make difficult, overwhelming decisions on a daily basis), music, nature, swinging around in my daughter’s hammock, being able to face-time our eldest son, our dogs, fish and guinea pigs, wild birds, grass, kindness (I read a story about a quarantined single mom and kids in Norway who reached out on social media, and asked strangers to make her kids’ birthdays special, while quarantined, by sending them birthday cards. They have been inundated with greeting cards from all over the world, some of them artistic master pieces!), soap (luckily I’ve always been a soap hoarder, because I love great smelling soap), on-line capabilities for work, school and shopping, delivery people, coffee, learning to appreciate home-cooked family meals again, candles, a less-packed calendar, people keeping their sense of humor during difficult times, watching the wind mildly shake the palms, water, the rough times which I have gone through, before in my life, that have helped me to keep perspective, to be more even-keeled and less anxious now . . . . .

What are you grateful for today? Please tell me in the Comments section. Love, peace, serenity. Good juju. I’m sending it all to you.

The Lesson of an Elderly YouTuber

I read a beautiful story this morning about an elderly YouTuber. He loves to post videos about his gardening. In December, he decided to create individual “thank you” videos to each and every one of his subscribers. He had almost 2,000 subscribers, so that act was daunting, in itself. Now he has 897,000 followers because the story of his gratitude has gone viral.

Why is it so hard for us to express our gratitude when there is such a hunger for it in this world? I think that is why we love our pets so much. Every day, my husband has gotten up and gone to work to support our family for almost 25 years and who in the family is the most excited and thrilled and thankful to see him when he comes home every evening? – Our dogs.

I have told you before, readers, and I want to say it again. Thank you so much for supporting my blog. I look at the numbers of it every day. I question myself and my motives when I do this. Is it an ego thing? There is an element of that to it, I am sure. As much as I would like to be, I’m not above having an ego. I am human. But there is a bigger part of me, who is so grateful for the connection. When I see people have taken their precious time in their days to spend some time reading my blog, that means something. It is a gift to me and it makes me feel heard, understood and appreciated. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, for that.

Every one of us has had a myriad of people who have helped get us to where we are today. Our families, our friends, our teachers, our preachers, our bosses, the authors of the books we have read, the actors of the shows we’ve watched, and even the jerks whose actions have taught us to stand up for ourselves, are all precious beings who have played a part in our own individual “becoming.” Why is gratitude for this in such scarcity, that 800,000 people would join a stranger’s YouTube channel, in hopes for an individual, sincere “thank you”? Honestly, we should be living our lives in the spirit of gratitude. We aren’t in this thing called Life alone and not one of us would be where we are today if it weren’t for the precious gifts of the other people sharing our experience. We aren’t living in a vacuum.

I had a college professor who loved to proclaim that once a certain level of material needs are met, people don’t work for money. As young, foolish college students, we would snicker at this proclamation. He would tell us that if we were to become successful in life, we would have to understand that people have a real need to be appreciated. Why does it sometimes take until middle age or maybe even older, to fully realize this? If we feel a hungering for appreciation, why would it be any different for any other being sharing the experience of Living Life?

I wonder what it would be like to sincerely express thankfulness to everyone who touches our lives today. To actually look them in the eye, without a phone connected to our ears, and to truly show how grateful we are for the part they are playing in our Life’s experience. I wonder if that feeling of gratitude might almost be overwhelming. Perhaps that may be the reason why we avoid the act of gratefulness as much as we do – to the point that it has become a real rarity. I don’t know, but I am mustering up the courage to give it a try. It will probably be wonderful.