Bringing my grateful and cheerful best self to a holiday experience with dear friends.

Deep connection to earth, our fragile island home.

Mark,
The sweet poignancy of feeding your dying father is almost unbearable to read. I feel deep sadness that I could not be in such a receptive moment with my own mom and dad. There it is.

By paying closer attention to the glories of the everyday, the normal ordinary stuff of daily life. My teacher is the wonderful Maira Kalman.

Simply being interested in other people.

The dream (also a conviction) that we humans at our essence are forces of and for truth and beauty and goodness.

I only need a little. I cherish human company more than solitude. For a long time I lived alone and had way too much solitude. Solitude as a spiritual practice is the domain of the fortunate ones who are not isolated.

People, prayer, purpose.

Feeling grateful is a gesture which springs from courtesy or politeness. Being grateful is deep, it is a Grace freely given and responded to (or not) from an open heart.

To bathe in the depths of today’s quote. YES to being contented with myself . YES to embracing the mystery, YES to the joys of self discovery.

There’s always more to the story than I realize. Practice being open to new perspectives.

Being suffused with gratitude supplants cynicism. I cannot help but be concerned for and to act on behalf of the common good. My activism springs naturally from awareness of and gratitude for my own good fortune.

Head to heart- me too Doreen! Thanks for the cue.

Be aware that you don’t know a person’s whole story, that you can’t see the complete picture. Refrain therefore from judging.

The deeply entrenched tendency to correct and criticize. I know the fullness of being that flows when this tendency is over-ridden; my work, my prayer is to consciously choose the better path more often.

It is a wide circle. Today it will be enough to care through cheerful attentiveness at two social gatherings.

At this moment I struggle to find good words, authentic words to offer a dear friend on her birthday. A small struggle but a worthy one.

A quote by Lao Tzu

Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.

I just turned 70. I am in more in love with life than ever. And more grateful.

Yes, the vulnerability of our precious island home Earth in the time of climate change. Here in British Columbia, Canada we are contending with the horrors of hundreds – yes, hundreds – of forest fires. Our cities and towns our shrouded in smoke. It’s very disturbing and in some cases life threatening.