snippets of gratitude

Diene bolts up in his sleep, hearing rain pouring down and yet seeing sun stream in the window.

“What is that?” he asks, panicked that our plumbing is on the fritz.

But its just one of my many alarms on the new iPhone. I’ve gotten a little overly excited about the Nature Sounds and Alarmed Apps.  For the next ten minutes, I groggily poke at the screen, wondering exactly how I am supposed to snooze when there’s less than a minute between intervals.

I start recounting the dream I had last night — the Occupy movement surrounded our apartment and  while Continue reading →

My new backyard is a birder’s paradise.  Every day I sit on my porch, close my eyes, and listen to birdsongs of countless species.  Recently, on a super hot afternoon, we found a baby robin in the grass, not moving a whole lot.  Assuming he needed help, we picked him up and put him in a shoebox with water.  Turns out, he wasnt sick or injured: likely just napping, as he eventually flew up and out of the box.  I can’t imagine anything scarier than being woken from a heat-induced nap in a cardboard box!

Another highlight:  a red-tailed hawk had a chipmunk in its talons and was swooping in the sky, clearly on a celebratory joy ride for minutes before taking the kill home to the nest.

I love being surrounded by so many birds. I am so grateful to bring a retirement hobby to life, well before retirement!

Homemade bird emergency room.

Eventually, he flew from the box and moved to continue his nap.

Splash of yellow on our houseplant.

Moving day has arrived.  It will be stretched over a 3-week period.  That seems like something to be grateful for.  Little projects here and there, trips to the Hardware Store, mixing cleaning solutions.  A busy day that has me so damn exhausted, but I am so grateful.

So many new thoughts, so many new questions.  How much should I worry about dusting the top of the kitchen light fixture?  Is climbing up on the counters to get to the cabinet’s top, back corner with my sponge worth it?  What should I do with this ugly Direct TV satellite?

So many new questions.  Each one I am grateful for.

This is the final of five posts about travel that celebrate the launch of my online class, Manifest Money for Spiritual Travel.

I was already uneasy on the train, because only a few months before a train crash has killed 13 people and the locals were still talking about it. Yet, I was determined to see as much of Sri Lanka as my short visit would allow and I was willing to push through fatigue and fear to get to Adam’s Peak, to see the purported footprint of Buddha.  A friendly young Buddhist monk sat next to me the first half of the trip, making friendly chit chat and recommending a meditation center outside of Kandy.

“It’s peaceful there.  You can relax,” he said.  Why would I stay in one place when there was so much to see?, I asked myself.

The guy who slid into the seat after the monk seemed unassuming enough; his curiosity towards me was no more creepy that any of the men I attracted traveling alone. Still, my guard was up because after six months in India and Sri Lanka, I knew what could happen.  A motorcyclist cruising by reaches out and grabs my breasts; the guy in the bus seat behind me grabs my side through the gap between seat and window; anonymous men in a crowded train thrusting their growing erections into my back; a guy on the beach posing as a jewelry vendor sneaks up to fondle me before running away laughing.  I was tired of all this, but I wasn’t letting it stop me.  I couldn’t.  That felt like giving in.

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