"It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes or bags!... Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before! "Maybe Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas... perhaps... means a little bit more!"
~Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas
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So once in every year we throng
Upon a day apart,
To praise the Lord with feast and song
In thankfulness of heart.
~Arthur Guiterman, The First Thanksgiving
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Forever on Thanksgiving Day
The heart will find the pathway home.
~Wilbur D. Nesbit
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I'm getting on. Time to cultivate my own garden.
--Claude Monet
My new "cultivating" place is all I need to have the necessary time and space to cultivate my own inner garden.
A place to sit, think, read, nap, journal, and ponder. A few potted flowers and herbs...
...to live in harmony with the seasons, to continue embracing simplicity, to live abundantly while yet practicing elective frugality, and savoring frequent moments of grace.
If "gardens are a form of autobiography", as Sydney Eddison, of Horticulture magazine (August/September 1993) has stated, then I'm writing a new and adventurous chapter in my own personal autobiography.
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"Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble there's no place like home!"
--John Howard Payne (1791 - 1852)
If we are to thrive, we must bloom where we're planted, at this present moment.
Most of us have a place to live be it an apartment, condo, cabin, dorm, stand alone house, mobile home, or even a tree house! Having a place to live, however humble or small, showy or large, we should give thanks.
I've been blessed my whole life to call a variety of abodes, my home. In this I consider myself most fortunate - to have and enjoy a home - when there are legions who don't have even this needful comfort.
Gratitude. It all begins there. From gratitude flows abundance. One cannot have one without the other.
Prosperity without gratitude is empty, devoid of meaning or pleasure.
If you are so blessed as to have a home, cherish it, lavish it with order and cleanliness, bring in bouquets of flowers, herbs, blooming "weeds" from the meadow, the forest, the lot next door.
With this post I close one chapter and begin another. The Cottage has sold and I have a new home in a new State. My blog will still focus on living simply, abundantly, graciously, and frugally be it cooking, preserving, decorating, restoring, re-purposing, and recycling.
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How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes! ~Maya Angelou
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"Everyone chases after happiness, not noticing that happiness is right at their heels."
Bertolt Brecht
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No language can express the power, and beauty, and heroism, and majesty of a mother’s love. It shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over wastes of worldly fortunes sends the radiance of its quenchless fidelity like a star.
~Edwin Hubbell Chapin
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The lightness of Joy unbounded
On April 5th, of 2012 I wrote in my Happiness Journal, "I believe that there are five essential components for joy", and then I made the following list.
1. Gratitude - journal it, feel it, express it. Thank God, humbly and often.
2. Simplification - complexity is opposed to the creation of joy. It is a distraction (and a subtraction).
3. Mindfulness - joy occurs infused only within the present moment. We must be in now moments mentally and emotionally to experience joy...not agonizing over the past or worrying, plotting, planning, and racing mentally into the future.
4. The Recognition of "Enough" - hold within ourselves a real recognition that we are enough and have enough. The pursuit of "more" (stuff, money, you name it) smothers the emergence of joy.
5. Cease Self-comparisons with Others. Comparison breeds discontent. You are unique, one of a kind (no comparisons needed here)!
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