Gratitude Sunday * September 23, 2012

~ I’m once again joining Taryn over at Wooly Moss Roots in her Gratitude Sunday tradition. ~

Gratitude Sunday is a time to slow down and remember those thankful moments that graced our week. One reason I love keeping a daily gratitude journal is because it helps keep things in perspective for me. Each Sunday, I open my journal and share some of those moments with you here. If you’d like to join in, just leave a comment!

Gratitude is powerful energy. I love hearing others’ gratitudes!

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– Gorgeous, settled weather. Being able to have the windows open all day long, and having it be warm enough to really live outside all day. I love this season!!!!

– This season of abundance where I’m eating largely out of the garden. I think homegrown food is sacred food… it feels sacred anyway… and I feel so good putting it in my body. I think it’s even neater when I can cook my garden food in the solar oven, because not only is it fun, but it seems like that strong solar life-force energy must imbue something good!

– That our tree has apples this year. About a third of each apple is unusable because of apple coddling moths — I really hate those things — and the squirrels are more than a little wasteful in their consumption of the apples, but that’s okay; there’s still more than enough for us. Even though we don’t give the apple tree any special attention or fertilizer or anything, it still has generously produced the biggest, most beautiful apples! The variety is Red (un)Delicious, so they’re not spectacular for eating fresh, but they do make nice applesauce.

– Tons of sun = tons of solar cooking = hardly any indoor cooking on the stove!

– A moon cycle for me, finally. I haven’t had one in close to a year, and it feels like such a triumph for my poor ol’ body which feels so broken sometimes. The medical people say that not cycling is not healthy for your body because it increases your risk of cancer and whatever else. It just seemed like yet another problem to deal with. A couple months ago while lying in the silvery light of the full moon, I said internally to whoever might care, “Fix me, Grandmother Moon.” Perhaps there’s a Grandmother Moon, perhaps there isn’t, but something replied right back to me, “But you’re not broken, dear.” And indeed, it turns out that I’m not broken. It feels weird to type to the world about this very personal matter, but it wants to be said. One of the things I’m realizing (and just beginning to put words to) during this experience of extended, major illness and difficult recovery is that one of the little-talked-about effects is a disconnect — maybe even a total detachment, yes — from your physical body… and if you’re a woman, most especially from that soft, delicate, inward feminine nature. When you’re sick, you don’t feel beautiful — you feel the very furthest thing from beautiful. You don’t regard your body as the sacred vessel it most certainly is — because it feels like a living hell to be trapped in a severely sick, pain-filled body, and you just want out. When you’re sick, that tender and complex and ethereal and soft and fragile aura of feminine confidence you’ve gingerly built within yourself over the years… well it gets blasted apart, unceremoniously. When you’ve got a major illness going on, your femininity is one of the first things out the window, as your very survival shoots to the top of the list. And so now, having my body perform on its own accord a most normal and feminine thing, not only feels triumphant and reassuring, but also symbolic as the beginning of the rebuilding of something that’s been lost.

– Having a quiet, pleasantly lazy weekend, not overdoing it, and yet still getting the things done that I wanted to. That feels perfect — the perfect blend of rest and activity. I love it when I manage to achieve that.

– Clean windows. So nice!!

– Finishing up some applesauce- and sauerkraut-making before heading to bed one night, and feeling so content. Soft lighting, quiet music, being in our own home, in our own beautiful kitchen, preserving the food that I just picked from the backyard.

– My loved ones around me. It’s the thing I love the very most.

– The small walks I’ve been taking at dusk almost every day. I love them.

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What are some of your gratitudes from this past week?

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