Gratitude Journal

The morning sun rises over my mountain (they call it Mount Sentinel for now, but I’m working on renaming it Justin’s Mountain, ha!). I sip my second cup of coffee. Regina Spektor comes through the speakers. I am all dressed to run to the gym, but suddenly I feel quite content right where I am. So, to kill some time and soak up some sun…. A bit of what I am grateful for today:

1. Little things – like Maggie (Magnus, my friend Jen’s youngest boy). I really do look forward to being a father someday. Until then I am very grateful for Jen for letting me hang out with her kids, learning some of the things one might not do with little ones (like taking them on a pretty steep hike up the mountain). This little grumpy monkey had to be bribed with ice cream to get up the mountain and then a dollar to let me carry him down the last steep part 🙂 Oh well, he survived, pretty happy in the end, and I had fun.
2. Ice cream in June, or any month really. Ice cream is scientifically proven to bring a sense of well being. Add sunshine, a cool town, a friend (or several), and worries just slip away.
3. Wildflowers – all things wild, actually. They are reminders of our true nature and teachers of simplicity. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” (Matthew 6:28) Why then do we toil so? I suppose the Buddhist answer is that it is ignorance, or that it just doesn’t matter – we toil, it causes suffering, we can stop and find freedom – here’s how. Now get to it.
4. Sunsets – so beautiful here, so slow. Those last moments, the sun seems to grow in all directions, wrapping the world in its warmth like that last hug from a good friend after a hard day. Then, gracefully, it slips beyond the western mountains. And as it sets here, it rises somewhere far away, perhaps India. Our day closes, theirs begins. All is connected.
5. Big things – Mountains, barriers to humanity’s hubris, giving us lessons in our smallness in body and mind.
   

   When we truly enter the mountains,
   birds, bugs, beasts and blossoms
   radiate supernatural excellence
   and take great delight in our presence.

   – Dōgen, Mountains and Rivers Sutra,
   as interpreted by John Daido Loori, Roshi
   

Time to run. Take joy into your day.