Today I found another gratitude list postcard in my mailbox!  I am so happy you are actually writing to me and I can’t wait to do some major double-batch cookie baking.   For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about – to celebrate Snippets of Gratitude’s first birthday, I will send you some homemade cookies! All you have to do is send me a postcard with a list of the things you are grateful for.   See the link on the right for more details.

One of my greatest blessings (and also biggest curses) is the ability to dream big.   When the idea of the Snippets of Gratitude Birthday Bash came to me, my train of thought went something like this:

Ooohhh, fun – I get to share my vegan cookies and get postcards.  People will do it.  Will they do it?  Of course they’ll do it – who doesn’t love cookies?  In fact, so many people love cookies that I’ll probablly be baking enough to open my own bakery.  Hmmm…the Gratitude Cafe.  I like that!  I could totally do that.  I’ll just put the hundreds of lists I get into a book, publish it, get Oprah to love it, sell millions of copies, make the world happy and earn enough to open the bakery.  I’ll be so rich by then, I can make it a nonprofit bakery.  I’ll hire Bonniejean to do the non-vegan baking and soon the whole world will forget about Mrs. Fields and instead eat our cookies.   I can’t wait to sit on Oprah’s couch and tell her it all began with a simple birthday celebration.  “I never dreamed I’d have to bake 100 batches of cookies!” I’ll lie and she’ll laugh and the audience will laugh and then we’ll cut to commercial break.

The blessing in this is that sometimes, my dreams actualy come true.  Becoming a vegetarian.  Living in Africa.  Working full-time as a writer.  Starting my own business.  All of these were simply ideas that spiraled out of control.

The curse is that its very easy to talk myself out of a dream that has become bloated to a point I no longer recognize it.  Why even bother starting if the bakery doors will never open?

But this week, each time I go to the mailbox I am reminded of the reason to bother taking the first step towards a goal.  The chimeric Gratitude Cafe is only a magnified version of what dwells in heart of the simple postcard/cookie exchange  – sharing something I love and celebrating gratitude. I am thankful that these days, I can do both simply by sticking my hand deep into my mailbox,  pulling out a postcard, and reading something you wrote.  It makes me just as happy as sitting on Oprah’s couch could.  (well, maybe.)

Send me your postcards!  I’ll send you my cookies.