Naming and Feeling and LIVING

This morning I feel grateful.

Grateful for the arts organization staffer who took time to be ever so thoughtful in her response to my email inquiry.

Grateful for friends who are vulnerable with me and allow me to be the same.

Grateful for lawmakers who truly care about people and our earth.

Grateful for a husband who gets it done and still takes the time to reach out for my hand.

Grateful for a kid who is independent and flexible and wows me often, while being a typical kid, too.

Grateful for sisters and sisters-in-law who bear witness.

Grateful for parents who are showing they can stretch themselves in retirement and continue to grow.

Grateful for a kid who stretches me daily and is teaching me how to be more fully present.

Grateful for a new spiritual home that is already more than I ever imagined one could be.

Grateful for women I encounter regularly who are courageous, strong, funny and wicked smart.

Grateful for the freedom to sit here at my computer and write and share with the world in real time (regardless of whether the writing is good!).

Grateful for a neighborhood that is unexpectedly, beautifully diverse and kind.

Grateful to be alive. Right here. Right now.

Grateful to have learned (and to still be learning) about mindfulness and how it makes life so much more meaningful.

And grateful for the painful, the difficult, the exhausting, and the confounding moments, which allow me to also know pleasure and ease and vitality and clarity.

Name a thing to expand your awareness of it. So you don't miss it altogether. So you get to fully experience it. You are alive!