Well, it's what everyone is calling Black Friday. The melee begins over getting the best deal on a gift for someone that, do you really want to anyway? I chose to stay home. I put in over 7 years of my life working retail and just don't go near a mall if at all possible until way into the new year. Instead I chose to sleep late, have a wonderfully relaxed breakfast with my room mate, did laundry, watched a few shows on the net I wanted to catch up with, and took the dog out to a state park this afternoon for a nice long walk in the sunshine.
As we were walking I started thinking about Thanksgiving, i.e. gratitude, and what that really means in my life. For me I realized it's simply a point of view. I could rattle off a list of trials and complications that I've been through and how each thing is something that happened to me. Would you feel properly sorry for me or begin to tell me your sad story? I could spend hours writing down things, "I'm grateful for this, I'm grateful for that" but it seems different somehow to what gratitude feels like.
Although that feeling place is often hard to put into words I'm going to give it a shot. It's when you can feel your big toe and it's vibrating, just a little, with the gratitude for you own life, like Gratitude lives there, and you suddenly become aware of feeling it everywhere in your body and how it feels completely different in each place, yet there's some thread that you recognize "That's Gratitude".
And then it's what your entire body is made of, Love in it's pure unadulterated state, un-manipulated, unaltered, uncomplicated.
It's when the world at large keeps telling you you don't know what you're doing and inside you there's a knowing that no matter what, you're fine...not you're going to be fine but you already are, right now in this moment, everything is good, the pieces are snapping together and you're beginning to see You.
It's when you can see the larger picture that's making up You and want every piece that's in the puzzle because every piece is You.
And it's the simplicity of a breath and the beauty of a dream and then a way of life.
Feeling Gratitude, how it lives in me, is something that stretches me from one day to the next, one moment to the next, because it is ever in motion, expanding and creating something new to explore, teaching me how to relate, how to stand in relationship with the world around me and in me.
Thanksgiving, not giving thanks, giving away, giving up something of yourself, but rather leaving an offering, recognizing the relationship, the connection, that lives and breathes and feeds in every way possible.
Happy Thanksgiving.
