Thank you for Nick Drake’s Road.

Thank you for sing-alongs on bike rides not caring who hears.

Thank you for the creamy-hued (but green) Crosstrek with CA plates on Tramway bringing happy memories.

Thank you for focus lately on elevating energy, practicing kindness (trying to listen better), and surrendering. Elevating each other’s positive energy seems like a healthy way to approach relationships. 

Thank you for the mood lift from a night gathering pics online for a vision board type thingy.

Thank you for joyful, loving, resilient, mutually respectful and adoring couples who overcome odds to show the world what’s possible. 

Thank you for cloud shadows speckling the city landscape viewed from the foothills.

Thank you for a surreal walk right before a thunderstorm, with the most vivid patchwork of massive dark and bright clouds you could imagine.

Thank you for dancer’s pose.

Thank you for once-in-a-while early mornings to get centered and nourished before the day starts.

Thank you for bedtimes conducive to early mornings. Thank you for freedom from caffeine aiding early bedtimes.

Thank you for what a recent vegan cupcake taught me about addiction.

Thank you for the mundane thrills of life. Granola and oat bars for snacking on adventures. New recipes for experimenting. Presentations to give. Books to read and classes to take. Friends with pups to visit. Walks to the store for chocolate bars and such. Birds flying all around. Their songs sweetening the air. Homes to build. Gardens to grow. Dreams to mull. Family and friends to practice loving and mess up and learn from and practice some more.

Thank you for the success and inspiration of BO’s latest endeavors.

Thank you for Everybody Loves the Sunshine.

Thank you for the bird rehab lady in ABQ and our chat today on animal rescues, vegan food, and the nestling goldfinch she’s nursing to health.

Thank you again for memento mori. One day my options will close down, maybe gradually or with a bang. Enjoying moments now with the aim of living well may up the chance that I’ll accept however and whenever those options narrow.

Thank you for the magic that surfaces when we believe in possibilities.

Thank you for Mother’s Day with Moms, TNT, JC, and September on their new deck. Thank you for harmony and laughter. Thank you for no dearth of poop jokes. Thank you for their new fruit trees and more plants to come, and for the opportunity to be a sous gardener.

Thank you for a dream of angels resembling birds if birds were jellyfish, diving from the night sky into a cold dark sea.

Thank you for dreams as a compass to guide our path.

Thank you for the new mindfulness center at Harvard and the donor who funded it. (Think of the contributions headed our way!)

Thank you for a high school boyfriend who used to be obsessed with the Beatles and for the name he called me that I didn’t much like back then.

Thank you for successful thrifting to prep for Paradise. It was more fun than expected rummaging through five-dollar shirts and six-dollar pants at St Vincent de Paul. Plus the only song that played there reminded me of my little girl.

(Here comes a long one…) Thank you for a tool, from Laura Lynne Jackson, to relieve stress-induced procrastination: reassurance that we don’t act solo. It’s related to surrender. When I think I have to solve a problem or do something hard, the outcome appears to rest on me alone. I’m usurping control; the pressure can be paralyzing.

To surrender, on the contrary, is to accept that nothing really rests on my shoulders. I’m not doing what I do on my own. I don’t have to (nor can I) figure it all out. Ideas are one example. We can work like crazy to strengthen our minds and increase knowledge. But ultimately, new ideas—creative connections and insights—float down to us.

So it helps to remember that I’m not solely responsible to solve problems or accomplish goals. I always have help. Or the universe, nature, or whatever, is the doing and I am merely the help, the channel toward a greater end. The resulting ease of mind ironically welcomes solutions. It leads to work accomplished in creative ways. 

Related to that, thank you again for Thich Nhat Hanh on inter-being. We’re made of our ancestors, our environments, our social circles, everything we consume… We are more than individuals. Thus we’re never alone. And we never act on our own. Our doing is inter-doing. What we accomplish with love is the universe’s love manifesting through us. 

Thank you for this snippet from Al Ghazali’s Path to Sufism (Translated by R.J. McCarthy, S.J.). Feel free to replace the God talk with whatever works for you (for me, it’s the universe or nature):

“I believe with a faith as certain as direct vision that there is no might for me and no power save in God, the Sublime, the Mighty; and that it was not I who moved, but He moved me; and that I did not act, but He acted through me.”

And for his prayer: “I ask Him, then, to reform me first, then to use me as an instrument of reform; to guide me, then to use me as an instrument of guidance; to show me the true as true, and to grant me the grace to follow it; and to show me the false as false, and to grant me the grace to eschew it!”

Thank you for another post. Despite worries, I feel freer. It’s a bonus if you gain from it.

Thank you for being there.

Thank you for your dreams. 

Thank you for your wellness and healing.

Thank you for transformation through love happening all around.