My lovely friend Taryn over at Wooly Moss Roots has started a new tradition — Gratitude Sunday. Sunday’s a quiet and contemplative day, and a good day to share what we’ve been grateful for over the past week.
Each night I write in my gratitude journal at least 3 things that I’m grateful for that day, though the list is often much longer. I love this quiet ritual, and I also love going back through past years’ journals to see what I was doing “this day six years ago.”
So feel free to participate! What are you grateful for? Leave a comment!
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Here’s what I’ve been grateful for this past week:
– An amazing almost-3″ of rain that we desperately needed.
– A string of misty, cool, cloudy, wet, green days this week! Love them!
– A mug of hot tea on a chilly, rainy night.
– Waking up to an incredible dawn chorus of birds this morning, before the city noise began.
– Space heater to press my feet against.
– Spending time in my garden on a priceless glorious evening.
– Taking a break from garden work to eat watermelon with my neighbor on her lovely back porch. She’s 81 (acts like 61!) and is like a grandmother to me. We have a special bond. 🙂
– A magical bike ride at dusk.
– The garden’s growing so well!
– Eating salads where every single thing is homegrown.
– Cool spring air. Our apartment is comfortable and not yet too hot. I’m savoring it!
– Doing some contract work for my former employer; it feels good to use my knowledge and “expertise” again, and we both benefit — they get good work done by someone who knows the ropes of the place, and I get to earn some side money.
– Finishing a big, brain-frying project for them that I worked on all week; it seemed like it would never end, and it involved aggravating sentences like: The company will integrate event escalation procedures to identify incidents that require declaration of an incident. And… All data encryption keys must be stored encrypted and in a secure location. Key-encrypting keys must be stored separate from data-encrypting keys within applicable applications. But it’s done! It ended, I’m happy with how it turned out, and I sent it off tonight. That feels good!
– Not working a daily 9-5 job — just doing contract work from home.
– Got 3 loads of laundry done this weekend.
– Having fresh lilacs and lily-of-the-valley in vases around the house, and smelling them as I pass by.
– Eating a lime-juice popsicle. It tasted so good!
– A quiet, subdued week. A good week.
Just found your lovely blog. I’m a (semi)urban gardener, too. I enjoyed your gratitude list, especially “Spending time in my garden on a priceless glorious evening”… truly a gift to be thankful for!
-a carefree bike ride out Kasben Rd. with a stop to climb down a streambank, nibble some water cress growing there, then lean back against the early spring grasses, listening to the ripples of the water and feeling the warm sun upon my face.
-a wild collected bouquet of fat, yellowing pussywillows, spiky, soft green tamarack, and bright, yellow marsh marigold…simple, but sweet.
-two extra helpers today as we prepared new planting spaces for grapes, raspberries, strawberries and a mulberry tree in a client’s edible garden…with blue skies, lots of sunshine, birds singing and the sound
of Lake Michigan’s waves hitting the beach just down the road.
-the cheerful song of a Baltimore Oriole in the oak tree above as we ate our lunch.
-the treasure of a small, empty bird’s nest blown from a branch…the amazing construction of it…, starting with a bit of string, a collection of various grasses and fine, dried roots, and finished off with a
fine lining of reddish hair from the winter coat of the pony corralled near by.
Nice to meet you Donna Rae! Yes, garden time is so healing to the soul, isn’t it!
What a wonderful gratitude list, Jane! I love it. Your surroundings are so different from my own…it sounds like you have ready access to so much nature! And I know you appreciate it as much as I would!
(I love your description of the nest! Nests boggle my mind…)