NOTE: I am a fan of 30-day challenges, and November is traditionally a time of two: National Novel Writing Month, and 30 Days of Thanks. As I am not a fiction writer, this year I have chosen to publish a daily blog for the entire month, expressing my gratitude. This may not be entirely food-focused, but expect recipes aplenty. Feel free to join me in the comments below. What are you thankful for today?
This is not how I envisioned this month going, blogging-wise.
The last time I did this challenge, it was a straight-up daily blog. There wasn’t the gratitude element to it, which I often complete every November in a journal instead, as a list.
There is no significance to this method – the separation of blog and list – except that it is often less challenging to simply make a list of the myriad ways I am blessed on a daily basis (#ToUseTheVernacular). A November challenge should be challenging, and I am Champion of the Listmakers.
It’s not that I didn’t write today – I did. But it was not this.
And I worked teaching yoga to small creatures who were very trying on this day but still managed to be beautiful.
And I made a pie and then spread that pie all over Baltimore on small white styrofoam plates, covered in foil.
So here I sit now at 9 p.m. in my kitchen, having just returned home from a poetry reading. I have snacked on some pie and some coconut cake and some of the delicious pumpkin pie ice cream that Khristian’s daughter made and am now tasked with following through on the challenge I have set myself.
Today that will come in the form of a list. #ItHappens
Today I am most grateful for:
Editors that get back to you immediately.
Lenar (spelling?) who is just about the nicest person on the planet
FaceTime because it allowed me to have a long, newsy chat with my Gorgeous Girl across the ocean
NOTE: I am a fan of 30-day challenges, and November is traditionally a time of two: National Novel Writing Month, and 30 Days of Thanks. As I am not a fiction writer, this year I have chosen to publish a daily blog for the entire month, expressing my gratitude. This may not be entirely food-focused, but expect recipes aplenty. Feel free to join me in the comments below. What are you thankful for today?
The three of you that are following along on my 30 Days of Thanks may have noticed that I missed yesterday.
The struggle is real.
Not the struggle to write. I have a lot to say but can be very lazy and don’t physically write it down sometimes, but in general, #KnockWood, I can usually gather a few thoughts together and write when the rubber meets the road.
Not even really the struggle to be grateful. There are so many things that I am thankful for that I could start a list and add something to it every ten minutes until the end of November and still probably not be finished. Every day I am amazed and grateful for the people, animals, and other general things that happen. Even on the shittiest days.
My struggle these days is to remain hopeful.
Every morning I wake up, let the dogs out, make some coffee, let the dogs in, let the cat out, feed the dogs, drink my coffee, and check email, Facebook, etc.
The second I open up my electronics, my day goes south.
There is nothing hopeful about what is occurring right now. Everything my liberal friends are trying to do and say about what has transpired over the past week is completely overshadowed by the continued asshattery of cabinet appointments and other general bullshit coming from the president-elect.
This is not meant to be a political post, but I am not really sorry if you are offended. I am offended by the result of the race, but I won’t get into that here.
The writing is on the wall: the climate, minorities, women, LGBT community, and the rural poor and working classes (although they don’t know it yet) are all screwed, for years and years to come.
And it’s super easy to talk about coming together when you have control of all three branches of government.
So hope is not a thing with feathers, perching in my soul, and that feeling makes me wonder why even bother?
And yet. I have committed. I have said I would.
I tell my kid that when you have nothing else, you have your word. You can do what you say you will do. You can keep your promises.
This matters. This one little thing.
So for yesterday, I was thankful to receive a letter from my kid in France, along with a slew of pictures. She has a dog here in Baltimore (Winston, who misses her desperately), and she is currently cheating on him with this dog, Joy.
Note the tongue.
It was nice to get real mail (even though it was TOO SHORT), and I am going to write her an actual letter and send it along this afternoon.
Side note: If you came to her going away party and took an envelope, write that kid a letter. #PleaseAndThankYou
Today, I am thankful for coffee, a back that isn’t hurting at the moment, positive notes about the food I am making and delivering for people, and the fact that even though this morning is still young there might be other things to be grateful for later on.
If you know someone feeling a little hopeless today, take a moment and do something nice for them. Even if you don’t know someone who is feeling hopeless or overwhelmed, do something nice anyway. Pay for the coffee of the person behind you. Say something nice to a stranger. Hold the door and let someone go first. It’s not hard and requires very little psychic energy, but can you imagine what might happen if even half of the people in your life took on this challenge and just did one easy, nice thing?
That would be a real disruption to the status quo.
NOTE: I am a fan of 30-day challenges, and November is traditionally a time of two: National Novel Writing Month, and 30 Days of Thanks. As I am not a fiction writer, this year I have chosen to publish a daily blog for the entire month, expressing my gratitude. This may not be entirely food-focused, but expect recipes aplenty. Feel free to join me in the comments below. What are you thankful for today?
Between cooking for deliveries this evening, a yoga workshop this afternoon, delivering what I cooked, and a last-minute (delicious) invitation to venison pot-pie, there has not been much time for reflection.
So that’s what I am thankful for today – this hastily assembled blog post is brought to you by good food, good friends, and good yoga, all of which are what makes my world go ’round.
NOTE: I am a fan of 30-day challenges, and November is traditionally a time of two: National Novel Writing Month, and 30 Days of Thanks. As I am not a fiction writer, this year I have chosen to publish a daily blog for the entire month, expressing my gratitude. This may not be entirely food-focused, but expect recipes aplenty. Feel free to join me in the comments below. What are you thankful for today?
I have been craving cake for two weeks.
If I was not gluten-free, this would be easy enough.
Gluten-filled cake is like pizza or sex: even when it’s not the best, it’s still pretty good. A cake craving can be easily handled with a quick Suzy-Q from the 7-11 or something from the bakery at Giant. They even hand that shit out for free sometimes, so I could have technically just gotten a couple of samples and have been done with it.
Gluten-free cake, on the other hand, can be a total waste of money and the time it takes to go buy it. Some are gritty, some taste heavily of the bean flours with which they are made, and some forgo things like sugar and butter and try to be healthy.
I am too lazy to go try to acquire a cake that tastes terrible, and I just didn’t feel like baking a cake that feeds 14 for just little old me.
Today, I am grateful that I made a cake.
This cake.
Imma eat the shit out of this cake.
It’s a little bulgy in the middle (like I will be after eating it ALL GONE) because the frosting is a marshmallow creation that isn’t always up to, well, holding up a cake.
No matter. It does the job as long as it needs to, which isn’t very long because I may be sending this out to those lucky folks who ordered food this week. #Surprise
I used the white cake recipe from the piecaken experiment last year, subbing coconut milk for regular milk, and I covered the whole damn thing with coconut.
NOTE: I am a fan of 30-day challenges, and November is traditionally a time of two: National Novel Writing Month, and 30 Days of Thanks. As I am not a fiction writer, this year I have chosen to publish a daily blog for the entire month, expressing my gratitude. This may not be entirely food-focused, but expect recipes aplenty. Feel free to join me in the comments below. What are you thankful for today?
This is not the November I expected it to be.
Yesterday I had a conversation with Sicily in France about the current election situation. We talked about the writing on the wall and how hard it was for the French to understand why she didn’t really want to get out of bed on November 9th. Today I also read, against my better judgment, a slew of racist and abusive texts as well as testimonials about people of color and Muslims being attacked and told to leave (or in the case of one Muslim woman’s encounter, hang herself with her own hijab).
It seems grim days are ahead.
But as ever, there are things to be thankful for.
Today, I am thankful for poetry.
I keep hearing Wendell Berry in my head today:
“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
I am so thankful today for the music in words.
I am grateful for the beauty that poets see, as well as the despair they so eloquently express.
Feelings like pictures on the page, leaping in swirls whether written or typed.
In poems we can come into the peace of wild things even in the midst of the deepest anguish and anxiety and fear. We need not be in the middle of the woods to rest in the grace of the world but can instead rest in the grace of the words of men and women who have written before us.
This day I think of the simple promise of the sun rising just as it has for as long as we know, and I leave you with Mary Oliver’s “Morning Poem.”
Morning Poem Every morning the world is created. Under the orange
sticks of the sun the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches — and the ponds appear like black cloth on which are painted islands
of summer lilies. If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination alighting everywhere. And if your spirit carries within it
the thorn that is heavier than lead — if it’s all you can do to keep on trudging —
there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted —
each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly, every morning,
whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray.
And finally, it seems appropriate here to quote the genius Leonard Cohen whose death was announced just last night in another heinous crime against humanity:
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is the ash.”
