Gratitude As Motivation
“You don’t get wormy apples off a healthy tree,
nor good apples off a diseased tree.
The health of the apple tells the health of the tree.
You must begin with your own life-giving lives.
It’s who you are,
not what you say and do, that counts.
Your true being brims over into true words and deeds.”
Luke 6:43-45 The Message
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“My friends, this can’t go on.
A spring doesn’t gush fresh water one day and brackish the next, does it?
Apple trees don’t bear strawberries, do they?
Raspberry bushes don’t bear apples, do they?
You’re not going to dip into a polluted mud hole
and get a cup of clear, cool water, are you?”
James 3:11-12 The Message
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The Conversation
Elements From The Conversation
A taste of the list from Barbara Ann Kipfer's extraordinary 14,000 Things To Be Happy About.
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"To become fully human
means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive
into some concrete common good.
It means growing gentler toward human weakness.
It means practicing forgiveness
of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards.
It meas learning to forget myself on a regular basis
in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity.
It means living so that "I'm only human"
does not become an excuse for anything.
It means receiving the human condition
as blessing and not curse,
in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.”
Barbara Brown Taylor
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Music
In line with Barbara Brown Taylor's words above, it's interesting to see what Alanis Morissette is thankful for when she sings, Thank You.
In her own words:
"I felt that I lived in a culture that told me that I had to consistently and constantly look outside myself to feel this elusive bliss. And I achieved a lot of what society had told me to achieve and I still didn't feel peaceful. I started questioning everything, and I realized that actually everything was an illusion and it was scary for me because everything I had believed in was dissolving in front of me and there was a death of sorts, a really beautiful one ultimately, but at first a very scary one, and so I stopped. I stopped for the first time and I was overcome with a huge sense of compassion for myself first, and then naturally that translated into my feeling and compassion for everyone around me and a huge amount of gratitude that I had never felt before to this extent. And that's why I had to write this song, 'Thank U,' because I had to express how exciting this was and how scary it was and all of these opportunities for us to define who we are."
With great gratitude that we can be in conversation with you. And as always, with our love.
George & Matilda
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