254) Day 22 -- Reason #22 to revolt against Predatory Capitalism: True Happiness
With very, very little in terms of material possessions, but rich in purpose, rich in play, and rich in love, you can be happy, every day, forever. And so can your loved ones, your neighbours, and people on the other side of the world. Happiness is not a zero-sum game, in which if one person gets more the others get less. But Predatory Capitalism, is.
217) Francisco, and the motivation to keep reaching out to the world (NOTE: Please forgive me if I have misspelled your name!!) :)
And Francisco? You changed my life just a few days ago, simply by saying hi. It was such a gesture of kindness. I have to tell you, you reinvigorated me to keep reaching out to the world.
95) Gratitude Day 9 - A Dead Raccoon
That raccoon-shaped piece of God taught me an important lesson about the wisdom of the “Perennial Philosophy” that is the beating spiritual heart inside the world’s religions. Without that raccoon, I think I would have been lost for far longer in a kind of modern perversion of spirituality, a positivity-infused delusion known as spiritual bypassing whereby so many people talk about wisdom as though it was practically synonymous with happiness, and happiness with “success” and living a life of passion and adventure, a North American-ized, mega-church, business and self-esteem-friendly Disneyworld version of Wisdom that is easy to translate into motivational sayings for people to hang on the walls of their yoga studios.
90) Gratitude Day 8: Loneliness
Loneliness is like a psychic heartbeat. It shows you that you are a creature of Love. You yearn for love. Not just to BE loved, like you want to consume other people and vampirically suck the love out of them. But TO love.
Loneliness tells you, moment by moment, that you are a fountain, a river, an ocean of love, and it is the sheer, relentless pain of loneliness that confirms that, irrefutably. For if you weren’t a creature of Love, then you wouldn’t be lonely. You would just “be”.
It is the very agony of loneliness that reflects your inner light. It is a Friend who visits, right in the depths of your suffering.
81) The Feeling of Falling
My hand knows a soft perfection that my mind can only understand
As a dream,
Knows curves that fit my palm
Like the sky fits the albatross’ wing.
My fingers know what it feels like
To grip
A galaxy that seems it could only be fashioned
To be their glove.
26) Gratitude Day 6: Dad
I am grateful for my dad.
There are a lifetime of reasons why, but let me share just a few. He taught me a fair amount of what I know about living in this world. These lessons weren’t always easy to learn. But so many of the important ones aren’t.
22) Gratitude Day 3: Bugs
I’m grateful for bugs. They’re the choir singing the Song…..of my home.
21) Gratitude Day 2: Humour
And, humour is weird. Like, our bodies convulse, our eyes water, animalistic, guttural noises come out of us, we flail our limbs around, sometimes slapping other parts of ourselves because we just don’t know how else to express the zany energy exploding out of us. We snort, squeal, sometimes fart, and then just laugh harder. ….humans are bizarre creatures, when you really think about what we’re doing in our moments of “meaningful” expression.
20) Gratitude: Day 1 — Slider
There’s something rather….intimate….about another ‘being’ who shares your bedroom for 40 years. They go through a lot with you.
8) Gobble Gobble
When you face loss, which we all do, and the loss is one that you feel with the full gooeyness of your heart, and you sit and weep, tears dripping freely off your face….and that feeling inside? That aching, burning, desperate, gasping desire to do ANYTHING to go back in time and change how this has turned out? That feeling is one of the worst feelings in the world.
And gratitude is the gift that it brings. All you have to do is unwrap the soul-crushing, heart-splaying agony that it is wrapped in. And then, my friend, gratitude can be yours.