Monday Evening Gratitudes

Thoughts about self-doubt, finding diamonds in the moonlight, and enjoying the time to make mistakes. Play the audio to hear my handwritten notes read aloud.

Note: A reader recently told me that it felt like trespassing into private space to read my handwritten diary. I appreciated that insight and I hope the VoiceOver helps.

Photo by Mirco Wenzel on Unsplash

Dear Readers,

Sharing ‘gratitudes’ seemed like a worthy idea when I started this newsletter, but after a bold start, I started feeling insecure. My intention as part of the Wanderlife project is to review my Sunday night list of gratitudes on Monday morning, but this week my seagull of self-doubt squawked at me: Your thoughts are really not that interesting…

Here’s the thing: I tend to write, almost invariably, how grateful I am for the cozy, comfortable bed I’m laying in and for whatever delicious meals I’ve enjoyed with my family the previous week. There are seasonal variations, but it is actually a little repetitive. As rituals are.

I live between two lakes and there are often seagulls flying overhead. I’ve come to associate the birds with the common visitation of self-doubt that regularly flies through my head. For me, self-doubt is a familiar feeling that can flap its wings and stir up the air til I feel ungrounded.

Squawk! Squawk!

I recently read a beautiful piece about the Buddhist approach to greeting one’s regular visitors (doubt, anxiety, bitterness, envy) with kindness, but not giving them too much of your time or energy. It’s an approach I try to take with my seagull. “Sit for a while if you must,”

Don Boivin

wrote, “but you’re only getting tea, not dinner.”

I share this because I know, the seagulls of self-doubt are not just flying over my house or through my headspace. Who among us has not wondered if their fun idea might actually be ridiculous, or if their carefully crafted words would find the people who would appreciate them, or if a creative endeavor was possibly a waste of time? Or whatever your thing is. We all have our things.

Squawk! Squawk!

On this particular Monday, my seagull had landed. There are plenty of other things to be busy with as the week kicks into gear so I let that bird rest. Gave it a perch, even, for a bit. I didn’t write.

But then I had an hour to fill while my daughter was at swim practice, so I sat in the library and reread the first post I wrote about gratitude to remind myself of why I wanted to do this in the first place.

I wrote that to be grateful is a gift. Sharing something from my weekly list of gratitudes is partly to pass that gift on generously. I know that when I hear other people express their gratitude for something I may not have noticed, or appreciated in that moment, it might shift my perspective a little bit. Because not any of us are grateful all the time. We fail to notice good stuff happening often, like when we are stuck in a thought, or a feeling, or a situation, or just having a bad time of it. Life is hard to bear at times. Or just busy. And complicated.

But one thing I know is that the small ritual I have of writing a list of gratitudes on Sunday nights makes me feel good. Every time. Seriously. For ten years now. There isn’t much that so consistently and dependably lights up my brain and liberates my spirit as counting my blessings, putting words to my delights, and noting the small and large things for which I am grateful.

And so here, thanks to this newsletter and the chance to share directly with you, I am offering a little something more. To light up our brains, to liberate our spirits, just as this Monday slips to Tuesday.

Like the way the moon lights up the snow on those crisp, cold nights in the midwest, turning my world into a landscape piled with precious jewels. During the deep winter spell that hit home in late January, I had several reasons/excuses/invitations to leave my warm house after dark. Each time I wore a heavy wool cape that was my mother’s and was bought in Iceland many decades ago, as well as a rabbit-fur hat, complete with ear flaps and an under-the-chin tie, that came from Russia. When I ventured out - to see an art show, for a dinner party, to celebrate some friends’ birthdays - I was delighted by how warm it was within all those perfectly suited layers that had been imported from other lands with deep winters, and how special it was to be walking on diamonds.

Like the liberation that comes from a wide stretch of hours and a clean, uncluttered space to make things with my hands. Being there with myself as I manifest ideas into solid reality is so much fun! I am grateful to a dear friend who loves making wildly beautiful ‘costumes,’ who keeps texting me inspiring videos and photos of fabric and sequins, who invited me to join her this month in New Orleans, who gave me the reason/excuse/invitation to spend a weekend creating frivolous, sparkly, somewhat ridiculous bodily adornments to wear at my first Mardi Gras.

I could go on. The delights, the gratitudes, each one leads to the next, and once again I find myself simply grateful for the practice of paying attention enough to notice it all.

PS: After I wrote this newsletter, I found myself listening to the poet Ross Gay read his ‘Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” (with a soundtrack by Bon Iver!) It is so good I wanted to make sure to share that here with you, along with just one stanza that fits, I think, so beautifully:

I know I can be long-winded sometimes.

I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude

over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,

the suds in your ear and armpit, the little sparkling gems

slipping into your eye.

-Ross Gay, “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude”
Read it in full at the Poetry Foundation website or, better yet, listen Ross Gay read it himself while you eat your lunch, cook some dinner, take a bath….Enjoy!

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