I try to maintain a gratitude list to remind myself amidst life’s daily challenges of the abundance of blessings I am prone to take for granted.
It’s been hard to find much to be grateful about this brutal winter but for its end. I have to say, though, that today I am truly grateful for the crisp bright May morning when the sun cuts through the spring chill to remind me that the liberation of summer is coming.
So, a perfect day for some mountain hiking. I include a picture of Millie leading me up Squaw Peak Trail. She goes in tomorrow for a follow-up on her bite wound with Dr. Barbara. It’s healing nicely and I thank you for all your prayers.
Back to my gratitude list. I once complained to a friend that I had trouble finding new things to be grateful for, that I was always repeating myself. “What’s wrong with that?” he laughed. “Can you really thank God too often? You think he’s bored with your gratefulness? Oh, this guy again with all the same old stuff. Really?”
Well, I have discovered something new to be grateful for. Driving up listening to NPR I caught a rerun of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion from a couple of years ago that was broadcast from New York on Shakespeare’s birthday. At the end of the show he had kids from the New York public schools read selections from the Bard’s immortal sonnets.
To hear those sweet young voices carry the sheer unmatched beauty of the words, a kind of blessed beauty that transcended nearly half a millennium… I had to pull over and just listen. And all at once I felt deeply grateful that among all the fine languages on Earth I was incredibly blessed to born into the one Shakespeare wrote in.
