Our New Year's Gratitude Tree

 The trauma that happened this Fall prevented me from making a Thanksgiving Day gratitude tree, and I'm glad. The idea was postponed for a few months until there was room for reflection again.

On walking back from yoga in late December, I came across a huge tree limb that had been torn off during a winter storm and smashed into the street. I paused for a moment to consider, and then slung one of the smaller branches over my shoulder and carried it a few blocks home. Eric laughed when he saw me parading down the street with a tree branch taller than I am, but he helped me wrestle it inside and fill a pot of dirt to keep it upright.

I decided this would be a gratitude tree for the New Year instead. We had a brunch on New Year's day, and I asked each of our guests to write down one thing they were grateful for in 2012, and one thing they wished for in 2013. Then everyone tied those little hopes and thanks to the dry bare branches. Whenever anyone comes inside, I've asked them to do the same.

I love walking past those fluttering slips of white paper, covered with handwriting; spidery curls, tidy printing, or bold block letters. Some thoughts are short and others detailed. Some are lofty, ("No more hungry children in 2013!") some outlandish, ("I hope the Vikings win the Superbowl ..in my lifetime anyway.") some just simple pleasures, ("2013: The perfect Old Fashioned.")

I've enjoyed it as a reminder of what good things we've had already as we go on hoping for more. newer, better too. I don't know if this wobbly shard of a branch will last an entire year in our apartment, but I love the idea of saving him till 2014 and using him as kindling for a giant bonfire to ring in another New Year.

Tell me gentle readers, what are you grateful for in 2012? What are your wishes for 2013?

I am Thankful for Oxygen.

Breathe from joyshoppe

Yesterday at school, I was grading student work. The topic, naturally, was thankfulness.

"I am thankful for earth, shelter, food, water, oxygen, a family, love, freedom, education, and pretty much everything."

Of course, this answer made me laugh. Who is thankful for oxygen?

But later, I thought, he is so right! We should be thankful for oxygen! Without it, life would be pretty bleak. A vacuum. The opposite of life. No-thing-ness.

It's easy enough to set aside one day to pay lip service to all we have. Most of the essays I looked at yesterday held the variation we still regurgitate as adults on such occasions; Family, friends, good food, a nice home.

Sure, we are grateful for those things. They are wonderful and we appreciate them, or at the very least, remember that we are supposed to appreciate them.

But what about just breathing? What about the tremendous and awe inspiring gift of life?

Your life is worth something merely because you exist. There is nothing you can do (or not do!) to make it worth less.

You can screw up the turkey. You can have a shouting match with your father right at the dinner table in front of all your relatives. You can be a Kardashian. You could have failed the bar exam (or passed the bar exam!). You could eat Thanksgiving dinner alone in a booth at Denny's. You could have negative five hundred dollars in your checking account.

Your life could be a failure (or a success) by all the measures of our culture, and you could still have this precious gift of life to be grateful for. Spend a moment basking in the glow of that knowledge on this Thankgiving Day. How tremendous. How humbling.