Thank you for this reminder: “For our body to be healthy, our heart must pump a constant flow of blood. For our relationships to be healthy, we need a constant flow of mindful communication.” (Thich Nhat Hanh)

Thank you for efforts to practice communication and for forgiveness of non-efforts. 

Thank you for weekly phone meetings with GK to discuss the new house. Thank you for his patience.

Thank you for check-ins with RP. She also has a Woolsey lot and is planning a home with a small footprint. It’s comforting to go through the process with her. Thank you for how her lifelong learning teaches and inspires.

Thank you for regular texts from AH even though I don’t feel worthy. I admire that she stays real and loving all at once—she would only tell me what I want to hear if it’s true to her.

Thank you for a hand-written card in the mail from JL. Thank you for the example of how to be a supportive friend. Thank you for the care she gives uplifting those around her. Thank you for the inspiration of her and Z’s love story. Thank you for her integrity and independence. Thank you for her relationships with her little guys.

Thank you for trustworthy friends I feel safe near and happy to be influenced by. Hopefully they feel ok with me, too. (I could do better.)

Thank you for strong, tactful, dignified women in real life and the media who serve as my role models. 

Thank you for the next fermentation adventure: sauerkraut! 

Thank you for a free mirror to face a longtime phobia. Thank you for the happiness that comes with movement.

Thank you for self forgiveness and other forgiveness. 

Thank you for a web of features incompatible with shame (e.g., vulnerability, respectful communication, self esteem…). As I build the incompatible features, my shame naturally diminishes.

Thank you for the dexterity of hands. I wonder how human hands seem from a dog’s perspective. Maybe like huge wiggly alien appendages.

Thank you for Peaches watching me on the yoga mat.

Thank you for the cuteness in her movements.

Thank you for the watery self-talk of Marcus Aurelius: ”Dig inside yourself. Inside you, there’s a wellspring of goodness, which is capable of gushing all the time, as long as you keep digging.” (Meditations, 7.59)

Another of his aqueous metaphors is similar to Thich Nhat Hanh talking about salt in a river. Here is the emperor’s version: “Suppose someone standing by a clear, sweet spring were to curse it: it just keeps right on bringing drinkable water bubbling up to the surface.” He continues, “Even if he throws mud or dung in it, before long the spring disperses the dirt and washes it out, leaving no stain.” (8.51)

Following that metaphor is advice to himself on how to be a clear spring. “Preserve your self-reliance at every hour, and your kindness, simplicity, and morality.” (Thay’s similar advice is to cultivate equanimity or upeskha.)

Thank you for gentle persistence when my heart feels more like a sippy cup than a river or spring.

Thank you for impatience corrected with faith. We don’t always heal on our timelines. There may be lessons in the healing that we’re still figuring out. So we do well to stay with the process. 

Thank you for kindness to ourselves and others despite injuries. If one who loves me has done something to hurt me, the pain emanating from her to me may have been only a small fraction of what burned inside her. A loving thing I can do for her is to recover from my injuries.

Let’s go a step farther and say that anyone at all who has committed aggressions against us, even if they don’t know us, must be suffering. Their suffering is reason not to dissolve the boundaries that protect us but to relinquish our bitterness in favor of understanding.

Thank you for when words on a page become practices in real life. It’s a lot easier to say something kind than it is to mean it, to stand behind the talk. But sometimes loving and honest words—written, spoken, thought—are a good first step. May they guide diligent efforts to live in accord with our hearts.