Over the last fifty years I've collected hundreds of quotes on the subject of gratitude. I'm now incorporating them into a book I'm working on, A Meditation on Beauty and Mystery: A Gratitude Art Journal, to be published some time in 2025. This work is also the basis of A Pause for Beauty.
Four today’s post I’ve assembled four of my favorites, offered with apologies to long-time readers who will have encountered them in my work before. They bear repeating -- living with gratitude is a practice -- the constant tendency, including my own, is to backslide, to focus on what I don't have, to focus on problems, rather than on the many blessings of my life.
Sam’s Big Brother Brian, who still takes him every Tuesday for a few hours, is married to a very funny Southern woman named Diane, who’s bleached fabulously blonde, sober fifteen years, very Eve Ardenish. She says that we’re all so nuts amid so much beauty that it’s like we’re at the circus. In one ring is an amazing array of clowns and bears doing all this great stuff, and in the middle ring is a woman who does breathtaking tricks on horseback, and in the far ring are elephants or seals and maybe more clowns, and above us are trapeze artists, doing these death-defying precision feats, and we’re sitting in our seats looking around crabbily, going, “Where’s that damn peanut vendor? I want my goddamn peanuts!”–- even when we’re not particularly hungry.
- Annie Lamott, Traveling Mercies
You can read the other three — Sam Maloof on giving a quiet thanks before beginning creative work, Balbir Mathur on the rowboat he calls Surrender and the oars Forgiveness and Gratitude, and Julia Cameron, An Artist’s Way, on “The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight.”
Read those here.
If you appreciate this work and can afford to support it, please do. It may shortly become a paid Substack, in which case payment would be required to access these art journals. I’d like to avoid that — keep it free to those who genuinely can’t afford to support it.
You can make a one-time or recurring contribution here. And thank you.
You can access a longer, more complete version of this post on the Heron Dance website, including larger images, here.
Rod.. I have been a ‘follower’ since the very early days. I never ever tire of the readings you offer to us . Your art creations have special place in my heart & soul.
I am truly grateful to have you on my Journey. Blessed Be..