Daily gratitude

N Neta recently started a wonderful thread, the Capture Beauty Challenge offering the challenge to photograph and share something we find beautiful every day as a way to help cultivate such things in our worlds.  That got me to thinking a similar thread focused on daily gratitude might be a good idea.  It's something I've heard about many times and always think, "yeah, that sounds like something I should do", but then never really do it.  I see Greg Martin just started another thread also considering gratitude and shared a cool video on the topic.  It's so easy it seems to get all caught up in the reams of negativity and ugliness out there.  I find it can dominate my mind.  Yet, I also know I have control over my own thoughts.  Where do I want to focus my attention, and thus increasing my perception?  How do I want to cultivate the garden of my inner mind that shapes my views of our world?  Spending more deliberate effort training my attention to experience beauty and gratitude seems like a worthwhile practice.

So what I'm looking to do here is try to regularly (hopefully daily) share one or two things I'm grateful for that day.  I invite anyone else interested to join in as well and we can tend to inner gardens as a community.  These need not be big monumental things we are grateful for.  The simple, small aspects of life can be just as important, at least to us as individuals.  It may be interesting to have a quick read of small things others are grateful for, as they may be things in our own lives we are overlooking.  The goal is to be reminded of all the good things surrounding us we can take joy in instead of only dwelling in the negative.

I'll go ahead and start here.  While there are many things I am grateful for today a couple things stand out.  

First I am grateful to have finished doing my taxes for the year!!  It's a task I tend to stress over for too long before finally doing, so I'm glad to have them done.
I also struggle a lot with food addictions and I'm very grateful that today (so far) I've been able to overcome some strong craving demons demanding I go to the grocery store, buy junk, and gorge on it as a "reward" for doing those taxes mentioned above.  Instead I've found the strength to let my better self rule, eating food that nourishes me and costs less money (and has less wasteful packaging).

I invite you to join in and share a thing or two you are grateful for today if you so wish.

I'm very grateful that today (so far) I've been able to overcome some strong craving demons demanding I go to the grocery store, buy junk, and gorge on it as a "reward" for doing those taxes mentioned above.

So powerful when, after a long struggle with food addictions, you become stronger than the food that's screaming for your attention! A hearty congratulations for today's success!!

Today I'm grateful for sunny, warm weather. This is my husband's last day off work before we have to travel out of state next weekend for our daughter's wedding! He had a lot of car maintenance tasks he wanted to complete before we hit the road, and he was able to do it with warm sunshine. I'm grateful for a mechanically-inclined husband who can do such tasks, and is willing to teach our sons his skills. They worked alongside him, checking fluids, tire pressure, spare tire viability, etc.

What a nice thread you've started! I hope to post back here often for my daily dose of gratitude. Looking forward to others' insights as well.

Hi, Great job, good work on eating well.  A wise man once shared these thoughts. He said that he set an alarm on his phone for 1hr every hour. He then stopped what he was doing,  told God something he was grateful for in the last hour and kept it up all day, every day. Even until today. It changed his life.  Thanks David for starting this.

I'm grateful I didn't fall off the ladder when I lost my balance on it. I,m also grateful for the 2 eagles, they were walking on the ice half the day.

I need a reminder for this from time to time, so thanks for starting the thread.

I am terribly annoyed by some bad habits of DH and I tend to focus on them so much that all of the good things sometimes get forgotten.
So today I am thankful for him being loyal and supportive of all my gardening and environmental interests.
I had bought three different birdhouses (one for starlings, one for robins/wrens, one for treecreepers) which he helped to install, and made two more (there are DIY instructions from different organizations, e.g. Bird Saving Association). The one for starlings was inspected within hours and will be used for nesting in the next weeks.
I also hope to have dwellers in the one designed for tits.
Watching them makes me so happy! (especially now that I don't have to fear for them because we no longer have a cat - there's a spanish saying "no hay mal que por bien no venga" - there is something good in every bad thing)

Thanks to all of you for your supportive words and sharing wonderful things you are grateful for.  I've realized already that deciding to do this thread contemplating what I'll share next has me focusing on and seeing so much more in my life that is fabulous.

Today I'm especially grateful for the absolutely amazing, generally symbiotic, community of microbes, bacteria, virus, fungi, and human cells that all come together to create the human body my soul gets to inhabit.  It's ability to self regulate and heal is really astonishing, but so often I take it completely for granted.  Yesterday while working with some firewood I got a splinter in my finger.  I thought I got it out then, but my body knew better.  Overnight it kept working at that area creating an appropriate amount of inflammation and pain to force my conscious attention to take a second look and probe deeper.  Yup, sure enough there was still a little bit more wood lodged in there.  A related bit of gratitude today is for the unheralded wonders that are tweezers and a straight pin.  Such simple tools.  In our modern world of high tech gizmos it's easy to overlook the astounding wonder and utility these low tech tools are.  Without them today I would still have a painful splinter deep in my finger.  

On Friday we were a bit fed up because our attempts to deal with a leak were not bearing fruit and we had other things going on all day interrupting our puny efforts. The next day I had to go out in the morning (so exciting during covid ! Going OUT, SEEing people !), so then we had lunch, then coffee, then mooched around trying to put it off and finally dealt with it ! It was just a bunged up pipe, so easy, but we felt so pleased and contented and pleased with ourselves afterwards. But mostly, we were totally aware of the absolute luxury of running water and felt very grateful and privileged to have something we take for granted most of the time.

I was given a great gift a few years ago. It's this : buy (or make if you're that way inclined) a pretty note book, e.g. cloth-bound. Every night, just before going to sleep, write the date then write down ten things you are grateful for. They have to be different every night of course. The first night, you can write a hundred, then just ten a niight. I swear it helps you get to sleep, amongst its other benefits.

I'm grateful that I can homeschool my two sons. They are learning how to learn, and their curiosity hasn't been stifled. I've been incredibly blessed that I get to watch them learn. I get to see them more than anyone else in this world, and I genuinely like being around them! They are fun.

I could come up with grander things to share my gratitude for today but as I've thought about this daily project I think it may be even more important, for me at least, to begin paying more attention to the smaller things.  So today I share my gratitude for the glass I drink out of.  I can remember getting it as a set of 12 for just $6 shortly after I graduated from high school.  I was preparing to move out of my childhood home and start off on my own at college.  I still have most of those glasses I've only broken 4 in the decades since.  I appreciate the simple utility of it, the slight ripple in the form to add some decorative beauty yet still be easy to clean.  The rim is a good thickness, not too thin or too thick, and it is smooth making it a pleasure to drink from.  To think that for just 50 cents a piece these glasses have been providing me with decades of flawless utility I should be appreciating them more than I do.  I take such things for granted.  I should be honoring such things with gratitude.  Thank you, my humble but trustworthy drinking glass.  May I take care when handling you so we can be together for decades more to come.

I've been slowly working on building two raised beds out of packing skids - bed one is finished and mostly filled with punky wood, dirt and duck shit inoculated bedding.
I've very grateful that today Hubby helped do the heavy moving and cutting of the final two skids for bed two. Using the skill saw is a bit of a struggle with my newly healed shoulder, and having the bulk of the sawing done with me just holding bits as an assistant, changed the whole process from one that's a bit scary, to one that was a pleasure. I was able to finish one skid completely, and the last one I should be able to finish tomorrow in between other critical chores.

Yes, I need to work harder at focusing on the positive! I need to celebrate what I *do* get done, rather than what is still on the list!

I am grateful for a wonderful woman who's basically become my adopted grandma. She shares my love of nature and gardening which is nice. But I'm most grateful for her incredible kindness, generosity, compassion and wisdom. It's amazing to see someone who has really committed herself to always learning, growing and working to be the best person she can. She offers me the kind of support and encouragement that I have always wanted but never received from my blood family. She makes me feel really seen and understood.

I am also grateful for times when I share something difficult with someone and they avoid the temptation to try to fix it or give advice. For me, that makes it way easier for me to move through the feelings instead of getting stuck in my head.

Thanks Jay and Heather for sharing things you are grateful for.  All wonderful things, esp. people who help out and those who model exemplary behavior that will hopefully inspire us to be better too.

Today I am again grateful for my body and it's ability to improve and grow stronger.  I've been trying to get out most days of the week to walk at least a couple miles for a bit of exercise.  It's not that strenuous for me though, at least for the distances I've been going.  I know I could use some serious aerobic exercise to push my limits.  So yesterday I decided to try jogging a short section of trail that I walk along.  I picked that spot rather than the road I'm mostly walking along because I know how bad it would likely look to anyone watching.  I'm sure it was a sad site, my middle aged self pathetically jogging with no grace and very heavy feet.  I managed to do the short distance I had set as my goal.  As expected my heart was absolutely pounding inside my chest and I was heaving for breath as I barely held out to my goal.  I know though that if I keep at it my body should respond and grow stronger.  Today I repeated the experience.  While my heart was still pounding and breath still heaving mightily it wasn't quite as bad and I managed to go just a few feet farther.  I am so grateful for that ability to self improve.  Hopefully tomorrow I can get out again and jog a little farther yet.

Last night a storm rolled through my area.  It was nothing terribly bad, just a late winter/early spring rainstorm.  However, lying in bed hearing the wind howling and rain pounding down I found myself with a deep sense of gratitude for my little home that was providing me with a secure warm dry shelter.  I am blessed to have this place and if I keep up sharing these daily gratitudes you will no doubt read about my home again.  It supports me in so many ways.  Being a shelter from the storms is just one of them.

Despite it being a bit of a mixed blessing, I am really grateful that the frogs are again mating in my small pond. It's so much fun coming across them in odd spots during the warm parts of the year, and hearing their spring calls assures me that the cycle continues. (the mixed part is that they can be a bit noisy at times...     )

I do look forward to hearing the raucous sounds of springtime frogs.  It's not warm enough yet at my place for my little pond.  They can get very loud though, you are right!

Tonight I had a long conversation with an old friend.  We've been drifting apart for years but recently I've found myself in need of his help.  I'm actually really bad about asking people for help and have a hard time doing it,  though I know and have often read that needing and relying on others is a way that stronger bonds of friendship are built.  Though tonight we were just talking, bitching and moaning about the trials and advantages of being so far into middle age we can't deny it anymore, I could see that my need for him has in fact pulled us closer together.  He is my friend and there for me when I need him as I've tried to be for him over the years.  I am grateful to have him in my life and that a reciprocity of assistance and needs is helping to save what was a dwindling friendship.

Oh, and as an amusing side note he mentioned the joy of recently hearing spring peepers in a small pond near where he works.  So Jay, that's a good sign for me that I may soon join you in gratitude for active frogs in my area.  :)  

Today I will express gratitude for pea seeds. Happy to germinate in my cool house, I made 16 paper pots, filled them with dirt, put 3 pea seeds in each pot about a week ago and *every* *single* *one* *germinated*.  It may not seem like something big or wonderful, but it's so easy to overlook the small wonders that make up our world.

I am grateful I feel somewhat rested this morning...despite the vivid dreams I have been having lately.

I am grateful I have gotten an early start to the morning to prepare for another day of work in the barn, working on electrical for the commercial kitchen we are building for my father.

I am grateful to be building this homestead from scratch with my parents, even though often it feels like we don't have a plan and are completely winging it.

I am grateful that I was able to get up early, check my emails and follow up on a few threads here on permies.

I am grateful for the permies community and all that I continue to learn here from all of you.

I am grateful for this thread this morning giving me the opportunity to express my gratitude.

I am grateful for so much in this life, and I feel blessed to be able to share it with you.

Today I'll be going to visit a friend who I am quite grateful has a welder and will let me use it to fix a couple welds I broke on my kindling cracker last fall.  (rough handling with a 4 pound sledge hammer!)  I should perhaps get my own welder sometime because they are such powerfully handy tools, but I don't know that I would use it that much and tool sharing just seems like a more Permie way to go.  Still how awesome is it that we live in a time when equipment to organize fire and bind steel is so readily available!

Rob, that sounds like an awesome project you have going, esp. the fact that you get to be doing with your parents!  It's a blessing to be grateful for indeed!

Jay, a 100% germination rate is fabulous and your post reminds me I have a bunch of various seeds I wanted to plant all over my property about now when the ground has thawed some but before it truly warms up.  The tiny genetic wonders that are seeds are certainly something to be grateful for.  I hope I can get a germination rate that's even half of what you had!

Every morning when I wake up, I am grateful for another day - I mean, really grateful.  Without that one day, there would be no opportunity to feel thankfulness for anything.

I am so very grateful today!!!
My daughter married her Mr. Right yesterday. He is a wonderful young man, and both our families get along great. It was a wonderful day. A wonderful ceremony. A wonderful reception. Did I say how wonderful it was, LOL!?

Congrats Stacie to your daughter and son in law.  Olga, you are certainly right the gift of time, living for another day is always something to be grateful for.

Today I've been especially grateful for my rocket mass heater (RMH).  I haven't really pumped much heat into my house the previous two days as I was riding out the residual heat with the relatively warmer weather, and I was mostly away from home yesterday.  That meant it was distinctly on the cool side in the house this morning.  My RMH is such a wonderful thing!  It puts out heat quickly through the radiating barrel and then also stores it in the mass to be released slowly over time.  I am grateful that the RMH uses a fuel source I am in control of, ie. sticks and firewood, rather than the propane I would need to rely on otherwise, hoping all the supply chains that get that for me don't break down.  It's a wonderful thing!

In a related note (with some shameless plugs and affiliate links) I'm grateful to all the sources of information that helped me learn to build my RMH.  Paul's 4 DVD set Better Wood Heat: DIY Rocket Mass Heaters (affiliate link) is what opened my eyes to the notion that I could do it in my mobile home with a pebble style.  Ernie and Erica Wisner's book, The Rocket Mass Heater Builder's Guide (affiliate link) was invaluable to me in conjunction with the DVD's.  Lest I forget, I'm also very grateful to Permies community in the Rocket Mass Heaters Forum who were so willing to share advice and knowledge when I got into the actual build and found myself unsure on a point or two.

Rocket mass heaters have changed my life for the better and I'm truly grateful for everyone who helped develop the concept and bring it into the world!

Today I find myself grateful for my local laundry mat.  I appreciate the fact that I can load my dirty laundry into a bag, strap it on the back of my bike, bring it in and use several washers at the same time to get it done all at once.  I'm also grateful that I don't need to hassle with owning, maintaining, and taking up space in my home with a washer and drier.  ( I usually use a clothes line to dry if it's nice enough outside.)  I'm also grateful that after almost a year now the laundry mat has brought back the community jigsaw puzzle for people to work on if they so choose while doing laundry!  :)

Today, I'm grateful for this thread. I do tend to be busy with just daily life, taxes, and I think we end up running from one problem to another, never stopping to think how beautiful life is, as we are on a steady diet of frustrations and anxieties. So I think of gratitude as a way to detoxify the mind, a worthwhile exercise. In the summer, the joys are many and gratitude is easy: a beautiful flower, and abundant crop, a tree finally giving fruit. Those are easy things to be grateful about. In the drab days of winter, it is not so easy.
Making this simple effort daily helps me focus on the little things in life that are beautiful, interesting, valuable, and I can shed [at least for a while] the negative feelings: [anger/rage, anxiety, frustrations that just eat at the kindness out of my soul].
It feels like taking a really satisfying bath, when you've shed all that dirt and you feel clean. I'm looking for opportunities to give sincere compliments, just like when I was teaching. For a short minute, I could see the effect on a child in my care, like a glow, a shy smile. My effort is rewarded.
Gratitude detoxifies my soul.

I've enjoyed watching the bats fly at night. Their new activity each Spring gives me joy. We'll hear the tree frogs soon enough, but for now, I find myself rooting for the little brown bats to eat as many mosquitoes as their tummies can hold!

I'm grateful for new bareroot trees I planted a few weeks ago already leafing out and spreading cheerful blossoms.

I'm grateful for sweet peas pushing their sprouts through the soil. Fresh green peas straight out of the pod are one of my Springtime pleasures. When my boys were preschool age, I taught them to count while shelling sweet peas. It's a treasured memory.

This might be weird, but I'm also grateful for a clothesline. We gave up the dryer several years ago (I did the math and figured with electricity costs at 50 cents per load, my dryer was costing me well over $300 per year just to own. Let alone maintenance costs.) But the clothesline makes me more in tune with the daily weather, it gets me outside, it makes my whites whiter, and my clothes are cleaner and fresher-smelling. And rainy days mean I get a day off doing laundry!

I'm enjoying this thread too. Thanks again for starting it.

Today I'm going to be grateful for the ability to "find another way". This can be a little change or a bigger change, but simply the ability to acknowledge that some plan or approach isn't working, and accepting and embracing the creativity to change things. Sometimes, this is not a process that can be rushed, so giving myself the gift of time to figure out the better path is also acknowledged in this message.

Want to post another "gratitude:"

Our first harvest of 2021! This is my son (who's lost 4 teeth in the last month, so he doesn't want to smile), holding our first carrots. I've struggled with carrots, but I was, like Jay Angler posted above, determined to "find another way" and "figure out the better path." I'm so glad I didn't give up!

Nice carrots Stacie!  I've always struggled to grow them too.

Today I am grateful to have had Pumpkin, one of my best friend's cats, in my life for the past 15 years.  She was the sweetest kitty, pawing a the end of pool cues, playing the sock relocation game as she felt the need to arrange them around his house, or turning the cuteness factor up 200% standing by the fridge with big, innocent eyes mewing her request for tomato juice.  She just loved her tomato juice.  For about a month now she had been struggling.  Today that struggle is over.  Pumpkin has passed on and is at peace.  I have gratitude she isn't suffering anymore, and that I got to know her for so many years.  She would hide when most other people came to the house, but not with me.  Sometimes she would even sit in my lap during movie time.  Thank you Pumpkin, my friend.  Be well as you journey onward.

Today I found myself thinking about and grateful for another thing so ordinary in life these days it's easy to take for granted.  That is cloth.  That I live in a place and time where clothing and other cloth items like towels or bed sheets are so readily available is a serious boon to my life.  When I think about all the effort I would have to expend if I wanted to make such items myself from raw materials it boggles my mind.  From growing/harvesting the fibers, to preparing them, spinning them into thread/yarn, then all the weaving to make bolts of cloth, followed by cutting/sewing into the finished products.  Wow!  That would be a lot of work.  Even when I am purchasing my clothes new they seem cheap when I compare it to what's involved.  The fact that my culture is swimming in such material wealth so much so that I can easily go any of a number of second hand stores and get these things in like new condition for next to nothing is astonishing.  

While I think it would be fascinating to actually make an article of clothing someday starting from the harvesting of a plant for it's fibers and taking it all the way to a finished product, I am very grateful I do not need to.

As a secondary bit of gratitude today I'm pleased to have been able to overcome some sinister food cravings for a second day in a row.  The desire for some unhealthy Chinese food that I would drive a ridiculous distance to get hasn't gone away yet, but I've been able to tamp it down for at least another day.

Today I got Hubby to help me scavenge almost 4 ft long chunks from a dead tree to put in the bottom of my new raised bed to act as a sponge to hold water. As we were working, I looked down and in just the last week, all sorts of wild spring bulbs have all of a sudden started doing their thing. I could see the lovely speckled leaf of the Fawn Lily (Erythronium oregonum) and several already had a flower stalk, although none had open blooms yet.
So I would say that today I'm just grateful that the signs of spring are arriving around me!

David, your post about cloth reminded me that I've also been thinking about how much we take paper and cardboard for granted! There's so much of it, sometimes I think many people actually consider it a nuisance, but just think how precious it was 300 years ago!

My head is on my pillow and owls are singing to each other in the forest just outside my window...so much gratitude!

That sounds wonderful Greg!  I do so love when owls visit my place at night, unfortunately they rarely do.

Jay, you are certainly right about paper and cardboard too.  Definitely something we take for granted which was once so precious.  I can recall in college when I was getting my art degree a prof once commenting about one of the old masters, Da Vinci or someone like him, and how they were such masters of composition with whatever it was they were drawing on.  Then he used as an example how paper was so precious torn scraps would be saved and the drawings done on them would be beautifully composed taking into account whatever irregular shape and torn edges it happened to have.  Paper is certainly something I am grateful for but also take for granted.

Today I was thinking a bit more about how precious cloth was and it reminded me of my grandmother.  As a child my sister and I always got a new pair of mittens for Christmas each year that my grandmother would knit for us.  I'm pretty sure she did this for all her other grandchildren too which was a lot of kids!  As a child I wasn't as grateful for this gift and the effort that went into it as I should have been.  I just saw that all the other kids had gloves not mittens and wished I could have had gloves.  I took consolation in the fact that mittens were said to be warmer because they kept your fingers together to share heat.  In truth I had something far more precious than the store bought gloves all the other kids had.  I had something made with love and labor exclusively for me.  I am grateful for this now, and a bit ashamed for my attitude back then.  

My grandmother also saved all the fabric scraps she could, recognizing their value.  She would make quilt squares from them that would later get assembled into full quilts for her children and grandchildren.  I still have mine tucked away.  My grandmother made the squares and then working with my mother designed the overall layout.  Then my mother, complaining a bit as I recall, finished the work sewing them all together, adding the backing and such.  This is something I was grateful and appreciative of even as a child when I first got it.  I could, and did, look at that quilt and feel a strong connection to her because I could identify various bits of fabric that I recognized as having once been dresses or skirts she wore.  I wondered about the history of the other patches I didn't recognize.  Where did they come from?  What was their story?  I still have that quilt, tucked away in storage.  I stopped using it because it was getting frayed and torn in too many spots.  I was worried for it, wanting to save it in some way because it is precious to me.  I need to pull it out again to see just what condition it really is in.  Perhaps I can patch it up with some scraps from my own old clothes and put it back into service.

I am grateful for the good soaking rain we got last night. My neighbors in Alabama received an awful wallop of storms, but we just got a good rain for our garden. I'm also grateful for tornado sirens in our neighborhood. And for storm alerts that come through my cell phone and weather radio. But thankfully, we didn't need them last night. Those who were affected are in my prayers.

I totally agree with being grateful. I am grateful for my two kids and how they love to be outside with my husband and I a lot. I am grateful for the outdoors and nature, as well as the mentors in my life and the teachings I've had about successful gardening. I also am grateful for my husband supporting my love for gardening and even getting involved as a fun hobby for us both to do together.

Anita Martin wrote:
I am terribly annoyed by some bad habits of DH and I tend to focus on them so much that all of the good things sometimes get forgotten.
So today I am thankful for ...

We got into the habit of noticing and hating all each others perceived failings. Life got hard. Then we suddenly remembered we could actively recognise and be thankful for each other's qualities and helpful behaviour. What a difference it makes saying and hearing thank you's and compliments ! I have to remind myself regularly of this, thanks for reminding me !

On how precious fibers are, I remember my mother in law making rugs and potholders out of old clothes. I'm grateful to her for them.
I'm not sure how she did it, but they've lasted me some 40 years! Washing the rugs is a bit harder [outside, with a hose] but I do, once in a while. I wish I knew how to make them though. Tattered clothes that have not been "gently used" could find a second life.
There are a number of garments that are given to the local Goodwill that are not suitable for resale. This could be an avenue, instead of clogging the landfill... Chopping them up to make insulating bats is another use.
Menards sells for good money a blue insulation bat that I'm using to protect my bee hives in winter. They are made out of old blue jeans. I'm grateful they can turn them into a valuable article. I used them to insulate the chicken coop too.

I'm having a bit of a rough day here, but won't gripe about it.  This thread is about gratitude after all and cultivating gratitude is all the more important when challenges otherwise abound.  It can be harder to do though.

I am grateful today for the abundance of food in my life.  My food questions are almost always on the order of what do I want to eat or what should I eat, rather than will I have anything to eat?  The bulk of calories I ingested today were even of the healthy nutrient dense variety.  For that I am pleased and grateful.

Today I am most grateful for the self healing capacity of my body.  An injury from yesterday has gotten significantly better after a good nights rest allowing me to move around with far less of a limp.  Having health and full mobility of my body is so much taken for granted until suddenly taken away and I realize just how much I use certain muscles when they cry out in pain from said use.

I'm grateful that it's a beautiful sunny day outside too!

I took these guys to the butcher yesterday. It was very bittersweet for me--this is the first time I raised my own hogs. I am thankful that I got to take care of them for the past 7 months. They really tested my problem-solving skills but they made me laugh, too. And I'm thankful for the food they'll provide my family.

Today I am grateful that a friend of mine got a job. She was so excited to tell me about it! Her friendship is very dear to me.