grateful today

I’m spending a lot of time at home these days, and I’m grateful for my dog’s company.  Even though she was terribly naughty at daycare yesterday.

-Katy

Because I meet the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia, and because I have this astonishingly sharp pain in my side that Western medicine insists does not exist (bless their hearts) – I’ve gotten interested again lately in Eckhart Tolle’s teachings about the pain body .  Here are some quotes from The Power of Now.

“The pain body may seem to you like a dangerous monster that you cannot bear to look at, but I assure you that it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot prevail against the power of your presence… Just as you cannot fight the darkness, you cannot fight the pain-body…Watching it is enough.”

And check this out!

“When you start to disidentify and become the watcher, the pain-body will continue to operate for a while and will try to trick you into identifying with it again…  At this stage, it may also create physical aches and pains in different parts of the body, but they won’t last.”

Huh!  Wily little pain body!

I really love these warm days, cold nights and chilly mornings.  Today I’m grateful for a quiet day at home, I’m satisfied with how much money I have, and I’m enjoying a regular exercise practice.  Especially when I get to watch Jeeves & Wooster from the elliptical.

-Katy

Estyn reminded me last week how quickly spring happens.  It seemed like the apple tree in my front yard was black one day, then pink the next, then white, and now green.  Practically overnight.

-Katy

It’s raining. It rained yesterday. The garden needs it so badly that it makes me happy to look out and see the water falling. The peas look like they’ve grown two inches since it started.

- Estyn

… and sometimes I feel grateful for that. Mostly I feel grateful for it when I’m having a bad day and I remember that it’ll change soon, perhaps within the next half hour. Maybe some singing will help. Or dancing around the room. Or a call from a friend. Or the sun breaking through the clouds. Or a couple of cats running by, playing a mysterious game of their own devising. Or nothing. Nothing to cause it; it just changes. Everything changes. And once in a while I am thankful.

- Estyn

* I’m grateful for being up early this morning, and watching the dawning sun come up over the horizon.

* I’m enjoying that it’s only 10.30 and I’ve already done so much feeling. (My experience of impermanence has taught me that soon there will be the I need a nap feeling.)

* I’m enjoying seeing and naming the flowers blooming everywhere. Forsythia and daffodils still going strong. Red and yellow tulips all over town — planted for last year’s Hudson Quadricentennial. Crabapples. Great hedges of flowering quince.

* I’m also enjoying the colors of the beads I’m working with. Every shade of pink and green tourmaline.

* M mowed the yard yesterday and I’m enjoying the neatness while it lasts.

- Estyn

I’m grateful I feel better this afternoon than I did this morning.  And for all the reminders from dear friends to hold each moment of well-being gently, with open fingers.

Also for this lovely song from Mary Gauthier, Mercy Now.  Have you heard it?

-Katy

I’m grateful that there are so many more flowers in my life now that I live in the country. Not just the occasional city cut flowers, or my potted blooming iris, but a huge variety of flowering plants.

Today out front there is white Rock Cress,

and pink Bergenia, both planted last July and coming back strong.

In the pots on the front stoop there are pansies bought on the first day that the farm stand reopened (a winter-long-anticipated event).

There are also pale and bright yellow daffodils, purple rhododendrons, a few tiny blue violets, and the still bright sea of golden forsythia in the back corner of the yard. All of them offering joy for the taking.
- Estyn

I adopted Happy during last year’s Awakening Joy class.  Because joyfulness does not come easily to me, it took a few months of study to realize how happy dogs make me and how ready I was to live with one again.  Just a few things I’m grateful to Happy about:

*She’s always happy to see me.

*Her ears look exactly like drop down menu arrows.

*She loves odor.

*Where I am stoic and slow, she is exuberant and fast.

*She’s a little afraid of silverware (I think it’s the sound).

*She’s amazingly willing to follow me almost all the time.

*She loves vegetables, and last week snuck behind me to steal a collard green rib out of the garbage.

*She collects her own food outdoors – crab apples, grass, walnuts, and (sadly) carcasses.

*She loves dogs as much as people (which seems healthier to me than some people obsessed dogs somehow).

*She loves Indian raga music.

*She’s super smart and speaks more English than other dogs I’ve had.  So far she knows Come, Down, Stay, Sit, Speak, Get it, Bring it, Leave it, Jump, Chase, Go, Look, and Who Is That?  And Stairmaster, which means “Why don’t you go run up and down the stairs until you’re tired out?”

-Katy