Season of Gratitude

Can you believe it's already almost Thanksgiving?? With 28 degree days, the fields parched and paper dry, the garden soil like talcum powder, blowing away on the breeze . . . It's hard to believe this is actually October.

It's both wonderful and worrying.

(I'm a worrier.)

One of the greatest gifts of worry and even clinical anxiety is that if we're brave enough to be curious about it, to simply sit with it, it will teach us how to move through it.

For me, the bridge over the foreboding marsh of worry and despair is gratitude.

Gratitude gave me the strength and will to keep moving when my Mum died, and it keeps me moving now, when reasons to worry seem to surround us.

We are so much more resilient than we imagine. And by 'we' I mean - life. All of it. We are powerful, more powerful than the sources of our worry - we just haven't learned to recognize our power for what it is.

As Vandana Shiva says - that is simply colonization of our minds. We can choose to decolonize our minds, to resist. Resistance looks like hope, gratitude and joy.

We don't have to be powerful in the same way our problems our. We can root ourselves in a different power, one that belongs to all of us. One that is nourishing and nourished by love.

So despite everything, I remind myself that worry is wasteful. Instead I'll put my thoughts towards the tomatoes still overflowing my greenhouse, the return of the cheerful chickadees, the quiet and invisible adaptation that is happening all around and within us, as it always has and as it always will.

Everything will be ok.

As always.

Best,
S