It is the week before Thanksgiving, and though the skies are overcast, there is no chance snow will dust our rooftop. Unlike last year, I am not itching to put up our Christmas tree or create paper snowflakes. In fact, I just assembled a new faux olive tree. Here in the Southwest, large inflatable sleighs and colored lights now bobble in front yards where palm trees loom. This year, holiday feels and coming home will have to evolve into something fresh and new.
Finding Home Away From Home & Gratitude
I’m aware that as I age, even small changes to my daily life and rhythms are more challenging.
So being far away from my sons (we have never before spent a holiday apart) and the comforts of our prairie home is stretching me.
How do we keep our hearts calm and grateful with mixed feelings and even dread?
I can’t claim to have wisdom to know.
But I think this is where an interior landscape with plenty of room for hope, faith, and mercy is especially helpful.
I love this idea of an interior plenitude of riches that arises from a realm which has nothing to do with my small minded ideas of how my life should look and feel.
After all, my feelings shift all of the time. Even with a lot of intentional work and self-compassion, I’m not nearly as mature as I imagined I would be at this age.
So just now, I am shifting my prayer of thanksgiving.
This year, my heart is tender with a new humility and a fresh hope.
I am praying beyond my feelings, beyond my understanding, beyond my sense of security.
I am praying with thankfulness but without a strong sense of knowing anything.
Maybe you have been able to do this for many years.
Some of us are especially slow learners and resistant to the Great Mystery.
Some of us struggle to live from a place of abundance because we fear all good things could disappear.
But I can’t say worrying or a scarcity mindset has ever prospered me one bit.
How about you? What secrets do you know about more abundant living?
What steadies you when you begin to wander from such abundance?
It isn’t even Thanksgiving, but already I am thinking about a new year with new opportunities and ways to grow.
Can I look with delighted expectancy instead of dread for the things that have never been?
I recall a favorite Native American idea about gratitude which offers thanks for unknown blessings already on their way.
Are they on the way?
Will I be poised to receive them?
The older I become, the more I see how fear hijacks even the best of us.
We want certainty and simplicity more than complexity.
The problem of course is that in 2025, we must all accept that the truth is a very complex truth requiring us to be humbly aware of our biases and blindspots.
How will we refine our seeing so that we won’t fall into traps?
I only know that I can bring these questions to a trustworthy source.
I can seek the grace to see all as sacred. Even the messiest layers of my life.
The sacred takes us on a journey beyond ourselves and ushers us into oneness.
What are the ways you intentionally go toward the sacred?
It is often nature that provides the best entry for me.
I’m thankful for this place I find myself (a valley) where hemmed in by mountains, I can feel the smallness and insignificance of my human body…
and also recognize the vastness within it.
Sometimes the mountains teach us what we need to know just by solidly being there, and sometimes they teach us by moving.
A year ago, I was leaving Arizona on a road trip back to Northern Illinois, just as the sun was rising.
I was weaning from a prescription for neuropathy that was not doing the trick, and because of sleep deprivation, high altitude, and my brain’s unique chemistry, it turned out to be a perfect psychedelic cocktail.
The great mountain before us was suddenly breathing.
It was speaking to me about the life within its womb.
It shared sacred words about healing and connection that I keep close to my heart to this day.
I was fully aware that my trippy road trip experience was chemically induced, but I also trusted that if I allowed it all to wash over me as blessing, I might grow in ways I needed to grow.
Just in case you are imagining this was a silly “perfect storm” sort of 15 minutes in the mountains…
You should know I cried the entire duration…for 4.5 hours the mountains spoke, heaven and nature seemed to sing in 7-part harmony! A rich blessing impossible to forget!
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Peace to you right where you are.
-michele
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