Tomorrow is thanksgiving. Who and what are you thankful for?

Celebrate the small blessings, especially when the big blessings seem scarce.

First, a shoutout 🔊 to my first paid subscriber! 🥳

Nate, you’re what the kids call my “A 1 since day 1” and I’m beyond grateful for your support.

While Growing ‘n Musing is a labor of love, paid subscriptions are welcome and encouraged.

In today’s episode

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” - William Arthur Ward

If you’re running low on gratitude right now, I’ve got enough for both of us.

—click👇🏿 below to listen—

Today’s Affirmation ✨

I am grateful to have things and people to be grateful for. 🧘🏿‍♀️

Make way for the light to shine on something new.

Blessings

by Jay Parini, poet and novelist

Blessings for these things:
the dandelion greens I picked in summer
and would douse with vinegar and oil
at grandma’s little house in Pennsylvania,
near the river. Or the small potatoes
she would spade to boil and butter,
which I ate like fruit with greasy fingers.

Blessings for my friend, thirteen
that summer when we prayed by diving from a cliff
on Sunday mornings in the church
of mud and pebbles, foam and moss.
I will not forget the fizz and tingle,
sunning in wet skin on flat, cool rocks,
so drenched in summer.

And for you, my love, blessings
for the times we lay so naked in a bed
without the sense of turbulence or tides.
I could just believe the softness of our skin,
those sheets like clouds,
how when the sunlight turned to roses,
neither of us dared to move or breathe.

Blessings on these things and more:
the rivers and the houses full of light,
the bitter weeds that taste like sun,
dirt-sweetened spuds,
the hard bright pebbles, spongy mosses,
lifting of our bodies into whiffs of cloud,
all sleep-warm pillows in the break of dawn.

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In case you missed it, read last week's post: Today, I decide, I am brave.