Gratitude List:
1. Motivation. Wherever it comes from. I read a silly thing the other day that suggested that if you have trouble getting the motivation to exercise or remembering to take your vitamins, imagine that the health boost is magically transferred to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Somehow, at least for now, it’s been helping.
2. Learning to rest. When I had the backlog stacks of grading hanging over me, I didn’t always manage to get to chipping away at it every evening, but everything I did was colored by that low-grade panic: I SHOULD be doing that. Now that I am caught up and keeping up, I still find that panic rising, and now I can remind myself that everything is okay. I am caught up, and I am going to keep up with it this time. I have a better plan.
3. Little synchronicities
4. Little daily rituals
5. Nourishment, of all sorts
May we walk in Beauty!
“We love because it’s the only true adventure.” —Nikki Giovanni
“Everything we do is music.” —John Cage
Abba Poemon said, “Teach your mouth to say what is in your heart.”
“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” ―Audre Lorde
“There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
―Audre Lorde
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” ―Audre Lorde
“We’re still dumb kids, just gray
and tame. If we had it to do again, we’d get it
right.”
―from Jack Ridl’s “The Reunion”
“For a lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day.” ―Evelyn Underhill
“… a ditch somewhere – or a creek, meadow, woodlot, or marsh…. These are places of initiation, where the borders between ourselves and other creatures break down, where the earth gets under our nails and a sense of place gets under our skin.… Everybody has a ditch, or ought to. For only the ditches and the field, the woods, the ravines – can teach us to care enough for all the land.” —Robert Michael Pyle, Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland
Mockingbird Chronicles 