Tag Archives: Gratitude

Walking

Posted on by
Reply

“Solvitur ambulando – It is solved by walking
— often attributed to St. Augustine

Prayer Garden

Prayer Garden

Walking is something I am doing very differently for the present.  I am entering my fifth week of either non or partial weight bearing for one side, and have  as many weeks to go  plus months ahead for therapy. I am thankful repair was possible, for good medical direction, and help from my husband, our family and friends.. I am learning or choosing different ways to be and do. Since walking the  labyrinth in our church’s prayer garden is not an option for me , I can use this finger labyrinth given to me by a good friend.

IMG_1934Today I realized that since we have had so many days of cold, rainy weather, I most likely would not have been out there in the prayer garden with my umbrella anyway, and I smiled. As I trace my finger along the spirals into the center of this little pewter labyrinth I can pause to look out at my own garden and be grateful for all the different ways open to us to recognize God’s presence.  I put my thoughts if not my feet on this path inward, then outward,

” Not everything, of course, is solved by walking. But a good deal is. And if it isn’t solved, it is reorganized, refreshed, or revitalized so that new responses are possible. Walking changes perspective. It offers a path that moves us forward, literally and figuratively.”

Carolyn Scott Kortge, author of Healing Walks for Hard Times, and The Spirited Walker

Windows

Posted on by
Reply

IMG_1889

View from a windowr in our living room

Because our local temperatures have mirrored the widespread hanging on of Winter, I am even more grateful than usual for the warmth of my home and plenty of books to read. But I know that 29 degrees and wind and rain are minor compared to severe cold,snow and ice elsewhere, I am also grateful I don’t need to shovel snow and drive in those hazardous conditions. I know that Spring is around the corner – but I was still smiling in surprise when I saw this redbud tree in full bloom as my husband drove me to the surgery center 2 weeks ago.  When we returned this week so I could have sutures removed, I asked him to go the same way so I could look for the tree. There it was, on a corner where we could stop for a quick photograph.

I am thankful for windows, and for vision to see through them to beyond my immediate surroundings. But these would not be enough if I did not pay attention to them. At this very moment, I am in a room with windows but the blinds are closed. By paying attention, I hear not just one but many birds warbling and calling. It is still and there is no sound of rain beating down or wind tossing branches so I know the storm that ushered in this latest cold front has moved on. I am reminded again that being aware and giving attention to my surroundings  provide windows and views as well. And I am aware of stirrings within me. There  are also seasons of the soul.  I welcome Springtime..

IMG_1920 (2)View from the car window

Little Ones

Posted on by
Reply

IMG_1221 (2)

The Littlest Shepherd…

There is so much about Christmas days that involves children. In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens  wrote “it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself.”  

In the singing and ringing, the laughing, standing-on-tiptoe, eyes sparkling joy of children, we experience fresh joy ourselves. Each year when our boys were young, our family began and continued traditions that were then and still are important to all of us.  I love seeing many of those being carried into their own homes today. This is little Nora’s first Christmas. She delights in  the sights and smells and sounds, and trusts her parents, her grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins as we hold her and share this beauty. She does not expect it all, but she experiences it, learning and laughing. Trusting because she feels our love and care.

When I read the gospel message that we are to become like little children, I think of that quality of childlike trust.  I want to experience all of Christmas like Nora – laughing, learning, trusting.

 

Unexpected Discovery

Posted on by
2

003

 

One of my granddaughters likes to leave me little surprises in unexpected places that I find after she has left. Once it was a bright blue ribbon tied on the spiral binding of one of my cookbooks.  Another time she left a small rose from their dressup trunk The rose was perched on the crosspiece underneath a wicker rocker in the room where she sleeps when she is visiting. How long did it take you to be surprised to find a candy cane hooked over Joseph’s arm in our mantel Nativity?

When I find these unexpected signs Maddie leaves for me, I laugh and reach for my gift. In these days following Christmas, I also find joy in gifts that tell me again that God is with me – a brilliant sunset on Christmas Day,the scarlet flash of a cardinal on a bare tree limb, memories of all the ways He has come to me in the past.  I want to pay attention so I don’t miss the signs.  I want to reach for the gift.

Christmas Eve: Relationship

Posted on by
Reply

The final figure has been hung in my Advent shadow box. In our Nativity scenes, the manger holds a baby. It is Christmas Eve, the time of laboring, receiving.  As waiting and expectancy end, the intense work so aptly named labor begins, the urgency of a baby’s entrance into our world gives way to embrace. With the birth of our granddaughter this year so fresh in my mind, I think of holding her minutes after birth.  So small and precious in my arms, so helpless, yet holdiing such power over my heart. In the hush of those moments, relationship locked and sealed forever. Relationship that began the moment I heard of her coming, that grew so sweetly when I saw ultrasound images, became one that will endure past physical life.

It is in that way Christ came to us. In that picture of receiving Him that we see God’s intention for relationship. We don’t just know he is coming . We welcome Him into our hearts.

 

IMG_1479This Nativity belongs to our youngest son. He first set it up when he was very small. As a boy, he built the little shed from scraps of wood shingles.  Now it sits in his own home, where his daughter holds the figures as she discovers her very first Christmas.

 

 

Saying Grace

Posted on by
Reply

IMG_1063                      Our entire Satsuma harvest – but the tree is very small.
                                 
 As we move toward the end of November, our garden is a reminder of things that can be counted on: Gulf Coast Muhly fronds mound up like pink froth.   Satsumas are ready for harvest, Meyer lemons are hanging ready on the tree, the last of our okra and tender herbs fade as the first frost comes. Marigolds, chrysanthemums and calendula bloom gold and copper. Thanksgiving is less than a week away.  We will gather friends and family and favorite foods at full tables.

IMG_1941

Marigolds

I am remembering childhood meals around my Terrell grandparent’s table in Smith County, Texas. There were hearty breakfasts with farm fresh eggs, sausage, biscuits and gravy,  dinners (at lunchtime) that often included  peas and tomatoes from their garden and an iron skillet of cornbread cut into wedges.There were suppers, often the same food reheated or a bowl of soup, and Sunday dinners after church. There were holiday meals at Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas where the table and kitchen were both filled with chicken and dressing or a ham, plus those garden fresh vegetables which had been put up into canning jars. To follow, there would be an assortment of sweets – cookies, sweet potato, pecan, and mince pies, and often a pound cake. The food and occasion might vary, but there was always the same beginning: This, too, was something I could count on.  Papa Terrell would say grace. Today we may say a blessing or give thanks, but he always said grace.  The words were always the same, and rattled off so quickly I could never understand them.  But his posture spoke to my heart with no need for words.  Over 70 years later, now I see him clearly in my mind:  gray head bent forward and bowed in humility.

“We offer grace at table as a form of waiting with confidence…reciting such a prayer is sometimes referred to as a way of preparing to receive all that has been granted to us. We offer grace in amazement that even the good things we have rejected are being offered again. And then we eat, and the food meets an earthly need of our souls, and we are made whole.” – Cynthia Rigby, W.C. Brown Professor of Theology, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary*

For me, the calendar days designated to Thanksgiving are a wonderful approach to  beginning of Advent exactly because of this waiting with confidence…preparing to receive all that has been granted to us. Our family will gather once again around the old oak table, the very same one that Grandma loaded with food and where Papa said grace.

IMG_1933

Pink Gulf Coast Muhly, a coastal grass

*as quoted by Wayne Slater in DallasNews, a Texas Faith Blog

Story Telling

Posted on by
Reply

IMG_1028

gray and grateful, I am

glad to be grandmother

holding this child who continues my story

she sleeps in my arms

as if melted and poured out,

I am melted and poured out too

 

Nothing in my life prepared me for how being a grandmother would change me.  I should have suspected, remembering the molding and mentoring of my own grandmother and seeing the love and tenderness my mother gave with abandon to my sons when she became a grandmother.  Our first granddaughter came to us when she was three, when our oldest son brought her and her mother to meet us for the first time. I enjoyed fussing over her, and when my son married the two of them, was tickled when she began calling me my Grandmother name, Granmary, instead of Mary Ann. I jumped into being a grandmother without a second thought,love, tea parties and all.  And when her sister Skye was born.12 years ago, I was ready and waiting to be crazy about this baby,  cherished from the moment of the announcement of her conception. I kept a journal during the time we waited for her birth, a practice which I continued 9 years ago with Madelyn, 6 years ago with Jordann, and this year with Nora! This is something I now realize helped me tell family story to them and to welcome them into that story. As they grow and interact with me, I have many exciting opportunities to add to our together stories!

Every grandchild that is born is another leap of heart and soul for me, each one unique.  I am changed forever in my love for them and my joy in them.  And I am increasingly aware of the importance of our story and the need to tell it.  It is another Mary Oliver moment: “Pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it.”

“My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.

Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally.

If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually. The God of biblical faith is a God who started history going in the first place. He is also a God who moment by moment, day by day continues to act in history always, which means both the history that gets written down in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle and at the same time my history and your history, which for the most don’t get written down anywhere except in the few lines that may be allotted to us some day on the obituary page.

The Exodus, the Covenant, the entry into the Promised Land—such mighty acts of God as these appear in Scripture, but no less mighty are the acts of God as they appear in our own lives.”    Frederick Buechner

 

A Different Way of Seeing

Posted on by
1

IMG_1877

Underneath a caladium leaf in morning light

IMG_1875

Standing in front of the same caladium leaf in the same light.

 

“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

IMG_1879

IMG_1878

The pot of caladiums on my front porch continues to multiply and thrive in our cool mornings and sunny afternoons. Every time I come in that door I pause to to appreciate the soft colors and hint of scarlet at the center and edge of the leaves. They are pretty. But this morning when I opened the front door to go outside, I looked from a different place and what I saw took my breath away. Veined and shaded, the leaf’s translucency drew me closer. Morning light streamed through emerald tissue and glowed like stained glass.  In this moment,, in just this angle of sunlight, there was beauty I would have missed if had hurried by.  I believe we have countless opportunities like this to see with the eyes of our heart. I am grateful for this one.

 

Autumn in An Unexpected Place

Posted on by
Reply

 

 

IMG_0733

I might have been sitting on an agreeable rock or  lying under a Chinese Tallow tree, one of our few Texas Gulf Coast trees that can be counted on to scatter scarlet and gold leaves in the Fall.

I might have traveled a few hundred miles north to woods that were a childhood delight for me when the leaves turned.

But I only traveled to the Medical Center. I only lay on a hard, narrow table under a computerized tomography scanner that rotated around my body, assessing my lungs – a painless procedure that is a tool for detecting and identifying problems in my body. I have done this many times before because I have nodules in my lungs that need to be monitored plus some respiratory difficulties. But when I looked up from my narrow perch, this time I saw this illuminated image. And it took my breath away – in a good way. It made me smile, and I thanked the technician for this gift.

I thank God for the natural beauty which someone photographed. It takes little imagination to shut out all the antiseptic environment in that room and be transported to “light pouring down into the woods and breaking into the shapes and tones of things.”

,

Directions (excerpt)

The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.

—Billy Collins, The Art of Drowning

Taking the Heat and saying Thank You

Posted on by
2

 

 

Summer’s heat and humidity are  the most common complaints on the South Texas Gulf Coast in the middle of July.In the Spring I hear “April showers bring May flowers”, but there don’t seem to be any comparable sayings pointing to blessings that a 106 heat index brings. However, the gifts are there, and I am reminded to count them.  Here are a few.

IMG_0583

Summer’s heat produces these vermilion flowers twisted into a tube with extended stamens protruding from the whorl. Some call the plant bleeding hearts; my grandmother called them Turks’ Caps and always had them in her East Texas yard. I adore these little twisted turbans.  Their scarlet flashes are rivaled only by the red birds that like the berries left after the flowers fade.

IMG_0080

Morning glories!  Without the heat from the morning sun, they would stay closed shut. But with morning light, their fragile cobalt petals unfurl so the star in their throats can shine.

IMG_0483

Honeysuckle vines reach for the heat and produce sweet nectar- bearing blooms that lure me with their fragrance.

IMG_0580Golden day lilies bare their cheerful faces to sunshine.

 

IMG_0577

Peppers of all shapes, sizes and colors thrive in summer’s furnace along with yellow squash, zucchini, and melons.  All these add nutritious goodness to our summer suppers.

IMG_0573

Figs!  Our abundant crop of figs is plenty to enjoy and more than enough to share.

IMG_0378

Peaches are at their best in summer’s heat.  My favorite variety ripens in August.
IMG_0390

Fennel, basil, rosemary, sage, parsley, and all my favorite herbs don’t even begin to thrive until it begins to get hot. Cutting them just before they go into a light summer soup or salad gives a rich, fragrant treat for the cook!

Still counting…

I am grateful.