Thankful Tuesday: Rambling

Its Tuesday and I am joining in with Thankfuls over at Mama Monk’s … where we could all wish her son Brooksie a happy birthday!

Today I am thankful for the weird windings of my days bracketed by insights and celebrations. I am thankful for:

• Red Tent Thursday (local Red Tent monthly gathering of women, sharing food, stories, dance and song) followed by silent retreat Friday (Christian Meditation 2-day retreat) culminating in high Anglican Evensong (which, in addition to the sung Evensong, included the monstrance and incense). 

• My therapist Kim who is helping me to discover the untruths that I so totally believe and that so totally interfere with my ability to both discover the future and hire a contractor to fix the leaking shower.

• The days I go away and find out that Jessie actually takes some of my teachings to heart. As when Dan was unsuccessfully trying to describe a tricky problem of etiquette (how to invite yourself over to dinner without actually asking to be invited for dinner; don’t ask) and Jessie said, “I wish Mom were here to teach me how to behave properly!”

• Farm Boy fresh food and grocery store for making almost homemade chicken soup, so I don’t have to and because Jessie insists on chicken bits in her soup when she has a cold. Which she does.

• Vitamin E cream to minimize the rawness of the rubbed-red skin around Jessie’s nose and mouth.

• My husband, for shoveling this morning, even though I have no work and nothing better to do than shovel! (Oh, and drive Jessie to rehearsal, because I’m not letting her take the bus in this last gasp of winter with a cold).  

Jessie Flips: About the Creative Process

Jessie and the Propeller dancers are thick in the creative and rehearsal process. Instead of the usual Friday Jessie Flips here, I will be linking you over to her Propeller Blog. Pardon the lateness. Monday will be catch up time! Full of raw material, truth telling, and red tents... oh my!

Thankful Tuesday: Bonhoeffer and Thanks for the Little Things

If this is Tuesday, then I must be thankful. Or so Mama Monk and Bonhoeffer remind me. Mama Monk because she hosts Thankful Tuesdays and keeps me occupied with remembering the small delights. Bonhoeffer, because he is accompanying me (or I him) through Lent and I have been instructed to write in my journal, daily, a list of those things for which I am grateful. To start, I am grateful to Bonhoeffer, who reminded me in the midst of my anguished interior wailing about my own defects and lack of joyful faith, to give thanks for the little things. He writes (in Life Together, p. 37)

“. . . We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the small (and yet really not so small!) gifts we receive daily. How can God entrust great things to those who will not gratefully receive the little things from God’s hand?”  

And I do often forget. Because life keeps intervening and pushes me scatter helter skelter into rescuing fainting daughters as they whimper from the bathroom or unblocking random cell phone calls that blink “blocked” with every ring (that will be tomorrow’s post).

But since thankful is now my evening Lenten practise, I have a list to remind me of what I am thankful for, even if the day scoots out from under my keyboarded fingers.

So. I am thankful for: 

1. Bonhoeffer & Mama Monk for helping me give thanks for the small.
2. Good buses that get my daughter to work on time, even when she gets up late and stomps/slams her way out the door.
3.  Tim Horton’s healthy lunch choices (chicken salad sandwich, 380 calories … and thankful for the internet that lets me look that up!) that let my daughter defy our best advice rebel by choosing to buy her lunch out as often as possible.
4.  The new old pine coffee table and Persian carpet (from my family home) finally laid out in our living room that allow Jessie and the cat to work and nap in comfort.
5. My Monday meditationgroup that returns me to my family and myself with a new measure of hope and hopefulness, even in this desert time.
6.  Delayed contracts that give me time to think, blog, wrestle with transition daemons (meaning mostly myself and my need to control).
7.   Jessie’s increasing independence that allows Dan and me to BOTH pursue our passions, even at the same time!

And you? What are you thankful for? Come and share over at Mama Monk.