Gratitude

I am grateful for this life. For the opportunity to have arisen from a vast eternal mystery with eyes to see, ears to hear, a body to feel, and a heart to bear witness to all the realms within and without (though there is no such thing as without at the absolute level, the place of totality where it is all the same thing).

I am grateful to bear witness to the expansions, contractions, activity, and stillness all within. I am grateful that attention, awareness, is a muscle that grows stronger with cultivation in order to stay in intimate contact with, intimate relationship with, the quiet field within—that still place from whence my roots draw their nourishment, their knowing, and steady themselves. I am grateful that I can grow that still place to fill more and more of the container of my being until it is the entirety of the weather pattern, whether for a second, a moment, an hour, a day, or a life. I am grateful to have the choice, the option, to utilize my awareness in this way.

I am grateful for the understanding that nothing is personal, and love is ours for the conjuring up any moment we choose. And that it is ok to choose it or not choose it. While the fundamental reality, that which binds us all, that from which we arise, is itself an eternal field of scintillating love, it is ok to resist and squirm, and play ignorant. To question and not know. You see IT is eternal and thus there is no hurry. There is nowhere to go, and nothing to get to. We’ve never missed the boat, and we drive the unfolding of things.

I am grateful for love because it feels better when I fill the atoms of my being with it like air in a balloon, instead of filling them with negativity and false assumption, distorted divisive projections onto other when I can only ever know their reality from my perspective (which is ever fickle and morphing), thus could never be their reality. I am grateful that it releases the contractions and corrects the distortions.

I am grateful for all the ways love expresses itself. In the quiet of dawn. In the twinkling night sky. In birdsong, in falling rain, in delicious flower scent, in the lapping of waves on the shore. In turtles and owls and trees. In ever-morphing drifting clouds. I am grateful to hug a tree. I am grateful to have a heart that feels so deeply I want to utter thank you, a thousand times thank you. I am grateful to be able to lay my body on the earth, curl right up on her and smell her scent like the wild animal that I am.

I am grateful to taste the salt of the ocean, to feel her silkiness on my skin, to be enlivened and bedazzled by the depths and hues of her greens, aquas, and blues, and witness dancing fractals of light on her velvety-soft sandy bottom into which I love to dig my toes juuuuuust a little deeper … down, down, down into the dark mysterious places where my they feel the cold. I am grateful for the presence and joy she sends to us in her whales and dolphins and century old turtles napping on the sand.

I am grateful for meditation and for the plants that nourish us on every level, that teach us well beyond anything we’re able to know with our eyes and thinking mind. Especially filled with gratitude and deep bows to the ones that show us who and what we are beyond what we understand at the physical level of reality. The ineffable experience of the bigger picture, the one that doesn’t need to be understood to be known (but is so easily known because it is already within). The one that affirms that we’re all already okay (even if that isn’t the subjective experience). Not in some future time when “everything will be fine.” Now. Already.

I am grateful for my beloved, my stepchildren, for family, and soul family. I am grateful for the amazing beings in my life, namely my sister tribe, in whose presence my own reflection is mirrored back to me such that I see myself and know myself more deeply. I am grateful for the understanding that seeing and knowing myself more clearly is synonymous with seeing and understanding the divine more clearly. What a gift. I am grateful for my depth of suffering within the realm of duality that mirrors the unity of all-that-is back to me.

I am grateful I showed up here (both in the relative and absolute sense). For however long. I love the way it feels, smells, sounds, tastes. I love the felt sense of the inhale and exhale as the air passes in through the nostrils causing the chest to rise, and so on and so forth, forever and always.

Love you all. Be nourished in whatever way feels good to you. And if you’re not feeling it, lean in to that a lil more … scaling the canyons and chasms is every bit as important and revealing than soaring the great heights….these experiences give us our sea legs such that our roots remain intact.

I am grateful for you. I am grateful for me. I am with you shoulder to shoulder