Gratitude and Joy: History and Scottish Christmas Album

Gratitude and Joy: Day 7

I am grateful for:

History
I personally find history fascinating and entertaining, but what I'm grateful for is our access to it. I've been thinking about two different quotations lately: "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" (Winston Churchill, and literally every other person interested in history ever, probably) and "May you live in an interesting age" (probably not an ancient Chinese curse). We certainly seem to be living in an interesting age, and one that is marking the rapid and increasing loss of our remaining elders who have meaningful memories of the greatest upheaval in the western world in the 20th century. A human being in their late teens at the end of World War II is, if still living, near ninety now. Our access to the terror, the horror, and the lessons of WWII, the Holocaust, and their fallout is increasingly becoming limited to what history has left for us. Our ability to generate and record new primary materials about the events that still ripple through our world in the form of ideologies, borders, and still simmering disputes is passing away. In another decade, it will be fully gone. This is the nature of life, of time. Those who remember will always pass away. Thus it is forever incumbent upon us to value our access to the truth and to support continuing efforts to record history as truthfully as we can. Of course historical accounts are always biased, but I am grateful to live in a time and a place where it is usually easy enough to identify those biases and avoid material that contains outright lies. May we remember that this is by no means guaranteed and fight for this kind of freedom to continue to be the case. 


I feel joyful listening to:

A Scottish Christmas
My grandparents gave me this Christmas album some twenty years ago, and it has remained one of my absolute favorites since then. I have always felt a strong affinity for my Scottish ancestry, and I'm one of those people who feels that sharp combination of joy and pride that almost turns into weeping at the sound of the bagpipes. If you are one of those folks who finds them screechy, I don't want to hear about it, but I will warn you that you aren't going to like this, one of my favorite pieces on the album. 

Gratitude and Joy: Hot Running Water and O Come O Come Emmanuel

Gratitude and Joy, Day 6

I am grateful for: 

Hot, Running Water
Yesterday, having no where to be and being somewhat behind my time in the a.m., through one thing and another, I didn't shower until late in the afternoon. So by the time I got around to it, it felt like a real blessing to be able to wash away two days' worth of grime under a steady stream of hot water. Hot running water is one of those things I mostly take for granted--it's always there, and if it's not, it's because something is *wrong*--and it's easy to forget how lucky we are--within the world and within history--to have access to it with the twist of a knob. As someone with cranky sinuses and perpetually tight shoulder and neck muscles, I'm particularly grateful to be able to apply hot and steam to myself every morning, and not just because it helps me get clean. 

I feel joyful when I listen to:

"O Come O Come Emmanuel"
This plaintive Christmas hymns is one of my favorites. It never fails to give me the shivers. There's something elemental about these harmonies. This is a nice version. Close your eyes. Yes? Shivers. 

Gratitude and Joy: Reading and Advent Calendars

Gratitude and Joy: Day 5

I am grateful for:

Reading

I am happiest when I can read for at least one uninterrupted hour every day. Some days I get a lot more than that, and most weeks there's a day or two (or three) where I'm lucky to manage ten minutes. Reading is one of my chief joys, and I've realized (not really for the first time) lately that it's also one of the most important ways that I take care of myself. Reading allows me to pause, to rest, to reset, while it also exercises my mind and entertains me. Long stretches without sustained reading time (even when those stretches are otherwise happy or fulfilling times) are invariably times when I feel out of sorts, not quite right with the world or myself. 

In the last nine days, I have only managed a proper sustained read once. I'm right in the middle of the harried part of the preparation for Christmas, the two weeks or so when all the decorating, buying, wrapping, card writing, post office going and last-minute yarn-craft-gift finishing happens, and I simply haven't had the time (or sometimes the energy, when the end of the day comes and I only have enough brain cells left for television). The absence of sustained reading makes me realize how much a I love it, how much it does for me, and how grateful I am that I have the ability--through literacy and leisure--to engage in such a sustaining hobby. 

I am made joyful by:

Advent Calendars 

We always had an advent calendar when I was growing up. The one I remember best was a 3-D jobber of a cathedral. You had to walk around the whole thing to find the right door for the day. I delighted in it every morning. That particular calendar kind of died at some point and we had others in my teenaged years. My high school German teacher always incorporated a German advent calendar into lessons in December. (Those had chocoloate behind the doors, a thing which until that time was unheard of in my world, though it seems to be very common here now.) I've had one every year of my adult life too, supplemented in the last few seasons by a nifty animated one on the computer that involves music and activities. They are a simple treat, a small thing to look forward to , and the prospect of opening the door each day still sparks that little joy in me that it did as a kid. Now, too, it helps me slow down and notice the passing of each day rather than letting them all congeal into one great seasonal clump.

Gratitude and Joy: Thursday and Ceehke

Gratitude and Joy: Day 4

I am grateful for:

Thursday:
Thursday is my golden retriever. She is a year and a half old, and she is made of equal parts adorable, twirl, and buttface miscreant. I can just about remember not having a dog as a kid, but only just. I was six when we got our first one. But when I moved out, I wasn't in a position to have a dog--apartment living and long, looong hours away from home in graduate school. I got a cat as soon as I thought I could manage one financially, and I adore her. But I missed having a dog. So once we got a house and got settled into it and got a proper fence in the back yard, the search for a doggo began. Thursday is work, I'll tell ya. She has all the energy. Have you been feeling run down lately? Mmmhmm, it's because my dog took all the energy for herself. And she wants all the attention, always. And, oh hey, did you know that a dog has to be taken outside to do its business where a cat just saunters off to its box and leaves you alone? But I wouldn't trade her for the world. My mom calls pets our "furry blessings." That couldn't be more true, and every evening when I get the dog settled for bed, I try to remind myself how grateful I am to have the Blonde Wonder in my life. 

I feel joyful watching:

This scene from episode fourteen of season two of All Creatures Great and Small
The set up! The unhurriedness of it all! The constant mooing and birdsong in the background! How serious they all are!

Gratitude and Joy: My Neighborhood Church and Trees

Gratitude and Joy: Day 3

I am grateful for:

My Neighborhood Church:
We didn't go to church growing up. My parents grew up Methodist and were not "lapsed" so much as intentionally "nah" by the time I came around. Both sets of grandparents went to church and nearly all of my childhood friends did, so I went sometimes if I was staying over the weekend with someone who did. Recently I've become interested in exploring my spirituality and religion, less because of any kind of newfound belief and more out of a desire to see what's what and find out what I believe and what a spiritual community and ritual might have to offer me. I'll go from there. 

I did some research before picking a church to attend, and boy, did I luck out. The Presbyterian church I've been going to--still very sporadically--is literally in my neighborhood (which feels important somehow, and beyond the pleasantness for a newbie to a Sunday morning get-up routine of a less than ten minute round-trip), the service is traditional without feeling out of touch, the sermons are excellent and on point, the music (my single favorite part) is lovely, and--most important--everyone is genuine, friendly, welcoming, and *not pushy.* I don't know yet whether I will become a regular attendee of this (or any) church or if my attendance will change anything about what I believe or my relationship with faith, but I'm so grateful to have found a place to explore it that I enjoy going to and where I feel welcome.

I feel joyful around:

Trees:
You've probably seen one of those articles of foreign words for things we can't say in English and come across the Japanese word shinrin-yoku, which means "forest bath," and refers to a contemplative walk through nature. They're always accompanied by pictures of beautiful trees, these articles, and every time I come across one of them, something inside me goes "Yep." I've always been a lover of trees, and lately I've been trying to go for a short walk through our neighborhood as near to every morning as I can manage. We're right on the edge between the end of the city and the beginning of the country here, and we have a lot of trees and almost, almost, a forest just up the road. For a joyful start to the day, nothing beats a quiet walk under sunlight dappling through the trees.

Gratitude and Joy: Extras and Pentatonix's Hark the Harald Angels Sing

Gratitude and Joy: Day 2

I am grateful for: 

Extras:

Today was tree day in our house. We drove our SUV ten miles to the edge of town and bought a freshly cut Christmas tree and brought it back to our spacious house and decorated it with lights and ornaments while we listened to music on our fancy entertainment system. Yesterday I went to Target and bought a fair amount of nice things that are pretty and pleasant to have that we do not need, like a new pillow that says "Merry Christmas" on it and some new tree ornaments and a spiffy plastic box designed to keep your light strings from getting tangled up in storage. I derive a lot of emotional security and real, but surface-level, happiness from having pleasant things, but in the end, they are extras. Because they do make me feel genuinely good, I am grateful that we are in a position to provide them for ourselves. But today I'm using my gratitude to challenge myself to remember more often those who live without the extras and those who struggle without the necessities. We support a number of causes that are important to us, but it's been a while since I've put my body where our money is. I've been thinking about finding a soup kitchen to volunteer at regularly or training to help out at our local literacy initiative, which largely helps refugees who have relocated to our area learn the English they need to help them rebuild their lives in our country. In light of the extras I'm glad to have, it's time to commit to one of these inclinations to help those who don't.   

I feel joyful listening to:

"Hark the Harald Angels Sing," by Pentatonix

The first verse of Penatonix's "Hark the Harald Angels Sing" brings tears to my eyes. The harmony! The bass! I'm going to let this one speak for itself: go listen. If you have a good pair of headphones you can plug into your device, do. Trust me, it will be worth it. 

Gratitude and Joy: The Bookternet and The Moon

Gratitude and Joy: Day 1

I am grateful for:

The Bookterweb
As an eighties kid, I kind of grew up along with the internet. It started out for me as a thing you got on to do a specific thing, like check your email or read a fannish bulletin board. It remained a novelty for quite a while, a thing I sometimes did (not so much used) just for the sake of doing it. Hey! I'm internetting! How cool is this? It's morphed by now, of course, into an ever-present entity, a thing I kind of can't really get through my day without and which I find myself doing brain hacks to lessen my reliance on. My relationship with it has soured, in other words. But there's one piece of it that invariably improves my life, and that's the bookterweb.

I've always been a bookish person, and for long years my desire to be a part of the book world was satisfied by being a college student and later a graduate student in English. Book people everywhere! But those days are behind me now, and I miss having bookish people wherever I turn. But the bookish parts of the internet do an excellent job standing in for a large circle of book-friendly acquaintances. (Sometimes it's better than a large circle of book-friendly acquaintances. The bookterweb will always be more diverse and cater to more niches than any group of humans gathered in one place can hope to be.) It's only been in the last four years or so that I've really sunk elbow-deep in bookish places online, and I've realized lately just how much all of those places add to my intellectual and emotional life. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I saw that a day does not go by where I am not brought happiness by bookish websites, forums, podcasts, or Youtube videos that I would not find anywhere else. They say the internet makes it easier for people to find their tribe. I've found mine, even if I might like to interact face-to-face more than the internet allows for, and seriously, how cool is that?

I feel joyful around:

The Moon
The moon is just a sliver shy of full tonight, and as I was walking the dog, trying to hurry her along a bit to get us inside the nice, lit-up house and out of the dark road, I caught sight of the moon through the bare branches of a tree in our yard. And it stopped me cold. It often does. I glance up and it catches me, hanging there in all its certainty and improbability. I'm not the first person to feel small gazing up at it or the first person to get kind of warm in the chest and break out in a grin at the sight of it either, I'm sure. It takes me a minute sometimes to identify that feeling I get, because it's so big, and tinged with something just a bit fearsome, but it is joy. Hanging right there in the sky.