With gratitude: Paeans to Everyday Thanksgiving

What I am grateful for today, this week, this month, this year:

• My rich creative life and having the freedom to apply it wherever and whenever I desire.
• Two smart, beautiful, funny, talented children.
• Swimming pools, safe places to walk, and yoga.
• A wonderfully diverse and inspiring client base.
• Literary readings and events and hanging out with writers who are in it for life.
• Figuring out tech development stuff both on my own and with some stranger's help. These are the minor miracles of daily life, when things work.
• A husband who doesn't mind too much the Honey-Do list.
• My community support system, which, when I recently made a tough choice, has backed me 100 percent.
• Friends in foul weather as well as fair. At age 44 you begin to see very clearly the difference between the two.
• People who break stereotypes. Period.
• A full pantry, a kid who bakes, a husband who roasts a fine turkey, and lots of pretty Thanksgiving towels.
• Paid work!
• Having my parents back in our lives.
• Lucid dreaming.
• Great programming on TV and the Tivo advantage.
• A president who puts his head down everyday to get to work on The Big Picture despite all the people who criticize him for not being a miracle worker.
• The practice of patience (within myself and from others).
• An amazing dream life.
• Trips into Seattle.
• My daily Seattle Times by way of Kindle 1.0.
• Women friends who are a huge source of inspiration.
• The pleasure of seeing new generations of women doing the things they want.
• Living in the woods.
• My doctor, who showed me evidence that all this self-care I'm doing is paying off in excellent lab results!
• My iPhone!
• Fresh cut flowers.
• A year of familial reconnections.
• Helpline House and being able to help my friends through them.
• Small town life, despite its fishbowl qualities.
• Elizabeth Austen's poem about women in the wilderness.
• Reading for the fun of it.
• Podcasts.
• Coupons.
• Farmer's markets.
• Having a great community to buy local from!
• Friendly, helpful neighbors.

Let there be pumpkin pie! Happy Thanksgiving!

Creative Commons image: "GSUSA All Abouts Thank you.JPG" © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0, Attribution ShareAlike 2.5, Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 and Attribution ShareAlike 1.0 License.

Wordless Wednesday

Fruitfulness

Public Domain image: "Fecondite: Placard publicitaire pour le roman Fecondité." ca 1900.

Wordless Wednesday

Happy Crucifera

Original image: "Happy Crucifera" copyright 2009, Tamara Kaye Sellman. All rights reserved.

Dreams: Changemaking and its outcomes

I had two different dreams last night, so bear with me.

• In dream one, I was helping a local business to do some interior decorating. By mashing up some backgrounds and "wallpaper" using some sort of holograph technology, I was able to render a unique interior design for them.
  
  However, the way in which I arrived at the outcome was so unusual that they were intimidated by it (especially the technology). Instead, I applied the same idea to the products they had for sale, and this was met with admiration and some acceptance.
  
  A council of community members met in the attic of the business to discuss the potential for the kind of design technology I had used. It became clear to me that my ideas were ahead of their time so I didn't take it none too personally; also, some of the folks in the community who encountered what I had done were quite supportive at that meeting.
  
  Potentially archetypal details from this dream include: fleur de lys and brocades, books, attic, doorways, two different councils, upstairs and downstairs, wood, glass.
  
  

• In dream two, I had the day off. I felt like a kid! I went to the movies, or went somewhere to watch a movie at someone's house.
  
  In the course of watching that movie, I ended up figuring out ways to give it a second ending. Then I went out into the neighborhood to enact the second ending. It was as if the original movie was literally taking place in our neighborhood, and my being there made a second ending possible.
  
  When I came home from my movie date, I was a bit on the run, as the outcome of the movie did not exactly favor a couple of the actors/neighbors who were in it.
  
  However, several of the kids who were part of the movie revision seemed to be very excited by and proud of the new version as well as the fact that I had even put a new version together, and they began to make their own versions in an underground fashion so their parents wouldn't find out.
  
  My mother asked me about the movie; she had heard certain negative things about it, but because of my live revisioning of the movie, I was able to spin my answer in a new way, based on my own alterations of the movie, and that seemed to satisfy her.
  
  But it was one of those Ferris Bueller moments, ultimately; in that movie, the parents don't know what really went on behind the scenes that led to that moment. In the same way, none of the kids in my neighborhood were going to rat on me or anybody else because we were all part of the same secret.
  
  It's funny, because what I had done with the movie wasn't underhanded or illegal or against the wishes of the adults in our neighborhood; it wasn't a challenge to authority. It was an effort at retelling a story in a way that made sense to the young people. It seemed that only they could admire the work I'd done. That was good enough for me. We just kept it all to ourselves because we sensed the older people, for good or for bad, were incapable of warming up to the new ideas we'd put into action.
  
  Potentially archetypal details from this dream include: dipping my feet in water, birds, forest, mud, boats, trails, flying.

[Note: I know these are somewhat abstract summaries of what actually happened in both highly detailed dreams, but I can't reveal some details without identifying real people and places in my own community, and what can I say, I live in a small town!]

Creative Commons image: "Fleur de Lys Studios" copyright 2008 by Daniel Case. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.


Public domain image: "Watt2" by Booter, 2006.

Wordless Wednesday

Flag over Port Gamble

Please remember the veterans of all wars today

Original image: "Flag over Port Gamble," ©2009 Tamara Kaye Sellman. All Rights Reserved.