I’m grateful for so much today. For a functioning, pain-free body; for all the beautiful green and/or flowering plants in my sunroom and making time to water and tend them; for an exhilarating zoom with Foundations Course graduates across the country, for exercising and laughing with my frousin (yes autocorrect: frousin: it’s my friend-cousin), for a delicious lunch with a bunch of leftovers in a tortilla wrap, for RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 16; for my best girls back east planning a birthday zoom with me… for community, companionship, friendship, love; and for the mindfulness that makes it possible for me to appreciate it all, despite the climate, political, and other human-induced chaos plaguing our precious, fragile planet; and for cultivating the capacity to hold the ten thousand sorrows and the ten thousand joys with both hands and an open heart. This is it.

This is the only life we know we’ll ever get. We might get another one, but can we know that? No. The only thing we know for certain is that we have this present moment in this singular life. I’m grateful for the pure awareness that allows me to appreciate almost every moment of it just the way it is. I’m grateful for equanimity, contentment, perspective, and the gazillion stars in the night sky–oh, in the day sky also–whether or not they’re obscured by clouds. I’m grateful for knowing my place in this universe. All I can do with this knowledge is love.

I’m grateful for loving this little creature that came into my life, no matter what she does, just loving her for who she is. I’m grateful for the growing capacity I experience with practice for loving myself just as I am, no matter who I am. I’m grateful for having a roof over my head, a bed to sleep late in, a kitchen filled with tools and food and the resources at hand to nourish this animal body who loves what it loves. I’m grateful for people like Mary Oliver who say things more eloquently than I have yet. I’m grateful for this carrot-orange-ginger soup that I made tonight to nourish me for three or four more meals, with organic carrots, ginger grown in the sunroom, and regular old oranges, as well as a handful of spices from around the world via Penzeys and Amazon. What a world we live in, with so much available to us!

I’m grateful for all of this, with the caveat that I understand there is impact and injustice involved in me getting what I need to make a simple carrot soup. We live in un-simple times. I do the best I can with what I have in each moment, to be the best human I can be under the conditions leading up to this moment. If we would all do the same, what a wonderful world it would be.