These last years I’ve been focusing a lot on feeling gratitude. Sometimes it’s easier, sometimes harder, but it can usually always be found. It’s like a muscle that needs exercising and then when it’s up and running it only takes a little to maintain it.
According to the Huberman Lab podcast feeling gratitude is one of the easiest, cheapest ways of taking care of your immune system, but some ways of feeling gratitude are more beneficial than others. The thing is to find a story to make you feel gratitude, and here is where I differ a bit with Huberman. He sort of thinks of only humans as persons.
When you extend personhood to animals, trees and all of nature, all of a sudden you are surrounded by persons and stories!
You can feel gratitude for the tree that you meet on your walk, for it growing so beautifully or make up a story about how it’s an old tree that has seen a lot, or a young tree that is trying to grow through a thicket, or a clump of trees, as if they are all siblings caring for each other. Mama trees watching out over their young and so on. You can feel gratitude for the squirrel you meet along the path, or the sun shining through frostbitten branches.
And you can feel gratitude at home.
The chair you sit on can be thanked, for the wood or steel or plastic that has made it, for the persons that have made it. For the person shipping it to you, for the one buying it for you.
You fork is made up of materials that have come from the ground, and has a story of its own. Everything has a story. Everything can be thanked.
Today I want to thank my blog and the people who have touched me through the blog.
I feel grateful for all who have commented during the years. For all who have given me preloved fabrics and items to use in my home, with no strings attached.
I am so grateful for the person who gifted me a fur coat that I thought I would use I a photo shoot (eye problems have prevented me from doing it yet, but you never know!). For the one who sent me a lovely green fabric that became cushion covers in the bedroom. For the one who gave me some small cups back when we dreamed of having hens or fowls, in our before bunny-times. For the one who gifted me old sheets that have been much used in our house. For the one who sent me essential oils in the hopes it would help me with my health. For all the people who have given me preloved jewelry to craft new jewelry out of. For all who bought my book back in the day. For all who keep checking in even though I don’t write that much any longer.
For everyone who reads my words or look at my pictures, and perhaps get some inspiration in their own lives.
You all mean a lot to me, and I hope we can send lots of more gratitude out into the world.