I am cooking, trying to get the food ready quickly. I notice my body feels tense, and then the cat comes in, meowing. She wants food – and not just any old food but the kind that comes out of a little sachet and has lumps of meat and gravy, and is fish. (No other flavour will do.) She has … Read More
Can You Feel Gratitude in the Midst of Chaos? #1000Speak
It seems almost selfish to feel gratitude at a time when the world is reeling from bombings and gun attacks, when forest fires are raging in Indonesia, sending as much carbon dioxide into the air in a week as Germany’s annual emissions and when a dam has burst in Brazil, causing a massive outpouring of sludge that has made its … Read More
The Man Who Learned to Listen
Two years ago today, my father died. I’ve heard that it takes two years to get over the death of someone you love, but I’ve also heard you never do. What exactly does getting over it mean, anyway? Certainly not that you cease to love the person, or to miss them. Certainly not that you stop thinking about them. It’s … Read More
Life Is – And that’s enough
Do you ever have the feeling that you are alone in the world? Everyone else is off having some party to which you weren’t invited? They are all more successful than you, have more friends, more fun, more everything? Or, do you sometimes sit alone and imagine millions of other people sitting alone too? Do you wish you could somehow … Read More
Gratitude, Attitude and a cat
Confession: sometimes I find writing about gratitude really hard. To be even more specific, sometimes I find writing posts for the Ten Things of Thankful blog hop really hard. With the Thankful hop, the difficulty is often logistical – because it’s the weekend and I’m busy doing weekendy things with my family or with friends. Other times though, the things … Read More
Thankful for moments
I’m sitting in departures, ready to fly home after a busy weekend. As if anyone in 1000 Voices Speak or Ten Things of Thankful don’t know that already – Lizzi and I met in real life. We did. The two originators of 1000 Voices Speak For Compassion met for the first time on Saturday. We had an absolutely wonderful time. … Read More
Conversations With My Father
Recently I wrote about a birth that came too early, that shook me up, left me scattered – and that somehow brought me understanding of things I’d never grasped before. This post is about a death that did the same. It’s a year today since my father died. He’d been in hospital just over two weeks and that day he … Read More
Thankful for machines and love
I am thankful for: Ventilators C-pap machines Oxygen prongs Oxygen masks Oxygen monitors Doctors and nurses who specialise in neo-natal care TPN (total parenteral nutrition) Breast pumps Freezers that stored the milk till she could tolerate it Blood transfusions (7 in total) Doctors Edgar Rey and Hector Martinez of Bogata, Columbia. I have never been to Columbia, and never met … Read More
Thankful for Connections
Gratitude comes in layers. I’ve written about that before, about how there’s the thankfulness for things, and then the deep thankfulness that is (in my opinion) actually our natural state. For me, the form of gratitude that feels most glorious is the kind that comes from opening to life just as it is, that comes from letting go of old … Read More
How to Recognise Gratitude in Daily Life
I’ve been thinking a bit more about the question Lizzi at Considerings posed over the weekend.My short answer, on my last post, was no. When I’m happy, gratitude comes more easily, and gratitude makes me feel happy. I’m not sure why I’d forgotten that a post I’d written a few weeks ago, Thankfulness is a Breeze, and Sometimes a Hurricane, was … Read More
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