While acknowledging the turmoil in global financial markets — and in many individuals’ personal investments — it would be a mistake to lose sight of the blessings in our lives. Good health, the support of family and friends, the freedom to simply ponder events as they unfold around us.
Despite the challenges we’re all facing, I am grateful for many things. Frequently, they are simple things. In Hickory Valley, Tennessee, cotton farmers have experienced the best crop of their lifetimes. A miracle, really, considering the draught which nearly devastated us last season.
Last week, I walked my property with a friend who taught me how to nurture my pecan trees and inspired me to buy a new nutcracker. And the first turnips are coming in….
“Through work, human beings earn for themselves and their families, make a difficult world habitable, and with imagination, create some meaning from what they do and how they do it. The human approach to work can be naïve, fatalistic, power-mad, money-grubbing, unenthusiastic, cynical, detached, and obsessive. It can also be selflessly mature, revelatory and life giving; mature in its long-reaching effects, and life giving in the way it gives back to an individual or society as much as it has taken. Almost always it is both, a sky full of light and dark, with all the varied weather of an individual life blowing through it.”
David Whyte – from Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as A Pilgrimage of Identity
An attitude of gratitude while we particapte in the Cosmic Dance with our Creator will keep us properly grounded.
Beautiful writing, Catherine. Especially that the turnips are growing. Risa
Catherine,
i just wanted to say as a semi-longtime reader how much i admire and enjoy your posts.
I used your popsicle index to explain to my friend who was visiting me here in La Cumbre Argentina as to one of the numerous reasons i live here.
Just to let you know a number of us ex pats have gotten together and are very involved in permaculture and are building the first passively solar, straw bale house in the community.
Every day I glory in the simple rustic life we have here while still enjoying high speed internet! I envy the pecan trees though.
love your work and your insights, thank you Heather
That really is a beautiful reminder… thanks