is for gratitude gumbo
It’s been forever since I posted a gratitude gumbo. My version of gumbo is a random assortment of people, places, and things I’m grateful for in this moment. All delicious ingredients to toss in the joy pot. I like to think of this as a community undertaking as well, so I invite you to add your own ingredients and let’s see what we can cook up.
- In the people category, I’m giving a shout out of great love and gratitude to my brother, whose birthday is later this week. I really do feel like I have the best brother in the world. He’s always been kind and sweetly protective in a big brother way and always supportive of me in the big and little ways. And I have to say it probably can’t have always been easy to have a HSP (highly-sensitive person) intuitive, channeling, Akashic Record reading artsy sister to champion. But he’s done an outstanding job, and I’m forever grateful.
- Laughter. The continuing guidance I keep getting is that it’s important to lighten up, laugh and have fun. It literally lightens and increases one’s vibration, and that is a real gift both personally and for the collective. Yesterday I spent an hour on the phone with my dear friend and sister collaborator working on a joint project and I literally laughed for the whole time. It doesn’t get better than that.
Earlier this week with a group of friends we tackled some amusing/helpful questions posed by Alexandra Franzen entitled 7 QUESTIONS TO ASK when you’re not sure who you’re becoming. It’s a wonderful exercise to do with friends and quite hilarious as we revealed some of the things we are freakish good at that no one else had a clue about. Believe me there was much laughter served up.
- Sedna is the Inuit sea goddess I’m dancing with who is overlighting the month for me. I think I’ll have more to say about her later this month, but her story is one about great transformation and reclaiming power, and I’m grateful for her presence. And once again I’ll mention my gratitude for the Dark Goddess Tarot by Elle Lorenzi-Prince. This is the image of Sedna from her deck.
- Trees. It took quite a while for our trees to fully don their spectacular autumn costumes this year, but this week has been especially breath-taking. And then of course as is the way, we’ve had great rain and wind which brought the majority of leaves to the ground where they now await raking. I had in my mind this year to collect leaves like we did as children and iron them between wax paper. Not sure why that sounds so delicious to me, but I may have waited a bit too long to gather the huge collection I was imagining. I may have to settle for a smaller number of samples. But in any case I’m grateful for the beautiful trees who are such an important presence in my life, throughout every season. And while I’m on the topic of how amazing I think trees are, I came across this photo of bent trees along Lake Michigan.
- Light. I’m participating in a project and one of the prompts this week was about paying attention to light and take some photographs. What fun! Autumn light is always magical. I’m loving this photo I took this morning of my living room door. Seconds earlier and you might have seen a handsome jumbo orange kitty, but even without him I love the light patterns and the wood. Much for my heart to be grateful for.
And what about you? What would you add to the gratitude gumbo pot? Do tell, you know I love to hear.