Gratitude.

Sometimes being blessed is a full time job.
You may laugh at that, or, well scoff, as you bend over your dim laptop screen, biting into your morning pastry, the crumbs scattering onto your keys as you curse clumsily under your breath and chew faster, putting down your jam danish and swiping at your keyboard with your free hand, the crumbs scattering both, onto the floor and deeper wedging themselves behind your letters G and H. Finally you sigh, take the last bite and return to my seemingly ridiculous accusation, that being blessed is a full time job.

But looky here; life is pretty wild right? With all the things it throws at us, jobs, school, parents, friends, partners, heartbreak, siblings, dogs, grocery shopping, washing our underwear - you get the picture. And then on top of that we've got the things we go out and find: people to date, over priced terimisu, traveling, skinny dipping, a quarter on the side walk on a hot summer day.
All these things come at us, they fill us, and we are consumed, and it is so incredibly easy to keep being filled by these things and their details. It's called life. It's so incredibly easy to be unsettled by the new crumbs chilling in your keyboard, rather than simply being grateful you had a delicious and overly sweet danish for breakfast while you leaned over your incredibly useful and probably expensive laptop, and read the words that I have written here. It's so easy to march on into the week, or the month or, hell even the years without stopping to think, "Damn, I've got it pretty darn awesome." Not just when the ceiling fan gets fixed after that heat wave, or the baby (finally) goes to sleep. No. I'm talking about all the time.
We have things to celebrate all the time. (Isn't that incredible?) All the time we have something to be grateful for, even if it's just that we have air in our lungs.
How cool is that?
But I find, in my life, I don't realize I am so, damn, blessed unless I stop to appreciate it. That's the key. It's acknowledging it and accepting it into my life.
It's in seeing the blessings, that I realize I am blessed. It's in accepting the grace that life extends to me that I am grateful for grace.
I talk a lot about being blessed, feeling grateful and the ways it manifests itself in my life. And I've gotten a lot of people who, (half jokingly, half unsettled) ask me how I got to be so blessed. And this is what I say: It's not that I'm especially lucky, or pretty, or special. We all are. It's just that I try and keep gratitude at the center of my life. And when life leaves fresh berries on my porch, I give some to the neighbor girl. Because I want to share the gift. Of course, it doesn't always work this way.

Recently I've been traveling and while I was doing so, I simultaneously launched a fundraising campaign to help me get to summer acting school in New York City. I made a little video of me at work at the goat dairy and I wrote a bunch about this dream of mine and what it means to me and posted it to the crowd sourcing, fundraising website, indiegogo. I launched it while I had limited Internet access, and limited time to spend on it. Which was silly.
I was blown away by the amount of reposts I received on Facebook and the incredibly thoughtful, kind and passionate endorsements people had to say about me. I was Absolutely astounded.
But the thing was, because I didn't have the time to really feel my immense gratitude, to be excited and blown away that I raised over 700 dollars in the first 4 days, I wasn't.
I was cut off from being connected to the things that make me happiest. To the connections that fill me with delight. And the gratitude that makes it real for me. I wasn't receiving the blessing.
I wasn't inviting Grace (the verb, not the person) inside to sit down and have a cup of tea with me. No, instead I was answering the door with the phone between my shoulder and my pinched ear. I was asking Grace to just leave the bounty of blessings for me just there on the porch while I switched the laundry over to the dryer. Not really very satisfying, for anyone, if you ask me.

And in the middle of all the muddle, I forget what I'm doing and what I'm doing it for, but most of all, I  miss the joy, the wonder, the gratitude, and the astonishment of love in action. Because I find that without that. Life, yeah, it feels pretty damn meaningless.

So here's to taking a minute (that's 60 whole seconds folks) and taking a deep breath in and just soaking up what we have around us, letting that feeling of gratitude radiate inside us and letting that be the feeling that fills us up, not the nagging sensation of not wanting to forget to pay the electric bill.

Life is pretty sweet. But it's our job to remember that. And it's a constant one. Always on the list, no matter how many times we run a pencil line through it.

I have to remind myself that the beauty of life is found in the grace of a good friend who I've hurt, reaching out with a hug; it's a sky full of stars, blearily winking back at me through my sleep deprived eyes.
It's washing my dog in the irrigation ditch and watching her leap into the ice melt after a water logged stick.
Hell, it's even when my mom and I can't agree on a good way to communicate, because, you know what? I've got a great mom, even if we can't agree. The fact that we are trying to, means that we care and care is just a softer way to say love. And love is, in my humble opinion, kinda the whole point.

So here's to life.
Here's to facing my fear that I won't make all the money I need to be able to go to New York City for school.
Here's to doing everything I can to not have to make that a reality.
Here's to sticky situations and good friends.
Here's to family
Here's to breakfast danish crumbs.
Here's to taking the time to let the gratitude in, for the money, stars, family and things we already do have.
Here's to the knowledge of wealth, that I know, that goes so far beyond monetary means.
Here's to the handmade quilt I am sleeping under tonight and for the new day tomorrow when the slate is clean and I can let my gratitude and thank yous run wild to the incredible people who belive in me so much.
And here's to the incredible power of life that fuels this insanely huge, sweet, messy, beautiful and astounding world of ours.

And to you. Thanks for reading these words of mine, the thoughts I'm thinking are now the ones your thinking. And neither one of us said a word.
Pretty sweet, right?

In gratitude.
Bare foot, bare heart, Elizabeth

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