… for what you have, doesn’t mean resigning to strive to have even more to enjoy, give, or share.

It doesn’t mean that you aren’t possibly stained because of what you genuinely believe others have taken from you or kept you from.

And being grateful doesn’t mean you will never have an envious thought, a vengeful thought, or cynical tendencies. We are after all, human. Sometimes the best we can do is subdue these and be the best us we have the fortitude, joy (or somewhere in the middle), of being.

To think you are HaPpY about something or feel lucky or blessed with an event, person, position, animal or anything in your life is awesome.

But maybe that’s not the same as having a truly grateful-filled experience. I think that you feel it, but maybe not think it. Maybe you have an after-the-fact realization of how you just felt. You can contemplate or complicate the experience and put words to it later

• – But, language doesn’t exist for a spell in that event of being grateful. It is an in-the-moment, makes-time-stop experience wherein you think of nothing else. Maybe you’re not thinking at all anyway, but are quiet in the mind, aware & have an appreciable view.

I’m not sure about all that really, it’s a hypothesis, but I had a moment like that with Murph this morning.

He was resting on my leg. It was gorgeous outside. It was peaceful. I gazed at the view and the conscious being sitting with me, all wrapped in these perfect scales. He has thoughts and realizations with no language to attach to them!

I didn’t think about the improvements I needed to do to the yard around me. I admired instead the actually quite beautiful mess nature has made when I halted my projects. The weeds in the bed don’t know they’re weeds, but they know when I am ripping them up (albeit guiltfully). The “weeds” are pretty too.

I felt truly grateful – everything as we saw it. I lifted Murph to show you one of the simple views, I wanted him in the photo.:

Things could certainly be better. They could be worse. When we’re dying and the arrows on the clock of our most valuable asset is about to stop marching on, we will not wish we fed the mental dog that eats our peace. I feed that dog too much. Hell, I even give it treats!

So, I want to not forget about this morning’s moment. Sharing it helps encapsulate it, if only for a time.

I hope you have, had, and will receive moments of gratefulness. They & you who deserve them, should have them more often than can be recalled.

Best wishes from Lil’ Murph & Dawn

Thank you for being our far away friends.

“Give me Lizardry or give me Death!” – Dawn Renée