Happy Thanksgiving

Okay- well, today I can do my Thanksgiving Post, I suppose. I am going to Winnipeg tomorrow and since that is an early flight out of town Kelly and I decided to make our Thanksgiving meal yesterday. We threw caution to the wind and instead of a traditional Thanksgiving meal or even a tofurkey we decided to make calzones. Yummy. We made the whole thing from scratch-Kelly made the dough, I made the sauce and the filling (porcini and portabella mushrooms, garlic and spinach) and we added some fresh mozzarella cheese. (Okay, we did not make the cheese ourselves but we did get it from a local dairy.) Bake for 15 minutes and voila- a meal to be grateful for.

So today we slept in and now I am finishing up a cup of coffee that Kelly roasted and then brewed. (Something else to be grateful for- freshly roasted Ethiopian Harrar coffee and made to perfection by someone else.) We are going to walk the dogs and then he is going to go on a bike ride and I am going to practice asana and finish packing. We have a kale soup we are going to have later with some fresh baked bread. Yum. All in all, a relaxing day doing things we like to do.

Well, gratitude. You know, I actually do cultivate this virtue a lot in my life. Many years ago whenever I would get depressed or in a funk, my counselors would say, "Make a gratitude list." The gratitude list is a simple thing to do. Really, you just list out the things you are grateful for and then lo and behold, you can see whatever small-minded, self-centered things you were focusing on get subsumed in the larger force of gratitude. It is a useful tool. (I am not saying that every negative feeling or funk can be summed up as small-minded or self-centered. Certainly sometime we just need to grieve, be mad, etc. and deal with it head on like that. But anyway.)

So even though the last few months have had some personal challenges for me and a certain measure of difficulty, I do feel very grateful for my life. I have work I love, friends across the globe, a yoga practice to strengthen me in body, mind and heart, my sister lives close, my parents are coming to visit for three months this winter, I am married to someone I love and who loves me and so on and on the list goes.

So I think Thanksgiving is a great time to remember the Bigger Picture. Certainly every one of us has a list of things we might like to be different or that might need tweaking in our inner and outer lives to be "happier" and by all means we should be addressing those things. But taking the time to remember our blessings is about seeing those small imperfections within a larger context and that can make all the difference.

Enjoy your day.