Thanksgiving

I’m thankful for so many things this year; I think this is really the first time in my life I’ve really known what Thanksgiving is for. I find that I’m really glad there’s a day set aside for me to stop and think about the things in my life that I’m grateful for.

And there is so much to be grateful for. I have always enjoyed excellent health. My career, while it’s had ups and downs, continues to provide me with a good income and with the satisfaction that comes from knowing that I’m good at what I do. Despite some pretty awful life experiences, I have emerged a strong, healthy, happy person. I am grateful for all of those things, and more. But this year, I am grateful for one thing above all others:

Love.

I have always had love in my life: the constant, if sometimes troubled, love of my family and close friends. These are the people I know I can count on when things get really tough, the ones who really know who I am and love me no matter what. These are the people in my life who I know will always be around, who will always forgive me after a fight, who I will always forgive. I’m so grateful that I have brothers who are now fascinating, funny, intelligent adults who I can talk to and laugh with and who will always be my friends. I’m thankful for my close friends, old and new, who support me and challenge me and make me laugh and make my life so much more colorful.

I’m so thankful for my daughter, Jessie. She has become such an amazing person, and I’m so proud of her. Even if she wasn’t my daughter, she’d be someone I’d be grateful to know. I’m really happy that we can make music together, and I’m even grateful for the fact that we’re so close that we end up fighting about half the time, because we are so close, and we always forgive each other, and everything always turns out ok. I’m thankful that my mom and stepfather, Doug, were there to help me raise Jessie. Their love and influence has helped to make her who she is, and I’m so grateful that she had them to talk to and learn from, and still does.

I’m grateful for my mom, who has been my friend, mentor, collaborator, and business partner, and the person I have turned to when I couldn’t turn to anyone else. Her thirst for knowledge has meant that I have learned so many things from her, from how to tell a story to how to be more authentically myself. Her bravery helps me to be brave; her open-mindedness helps me to keep myself open to new experiences, her sense of adventure helps me to look forward, without fear, to the adventures ahead of me.

This year, for the first time in my 42 years of living on this planet and waiting, hoping, losing hope, fearing…this year, I have the true, unconditional love of a partner, the love of my life, Blunt. I really can’t describe how grateful I am that he came into my life and offered this to me, and that I was ready to receive it and offer the same in return. He has given me, and continues to give me, more love than I ever thought was possible. He has shown me in so many ways that his love is something I can rely on no matter what challenges we face, and that I can trust it to remain strong even in the face of life’s challenges and difficulties. This love has taught me, and continues to teach me, that I really am worthy of it, that I can trust, that I can be honest with both of us. Words can’t really describe how it feels to know that so many things that were scary and threatening before just aren’t now, because I know he really does love me and I don’t have to wonder, doubt, or question that love. I am so grateful that we have each other, that I can give him all those things in return and bring the kind of joy to his life that he brings to mine, that we are going to accomplish so much together and feel such joy in those accomplishments, and that we challenge each other the best people we can be, and in so being, make the world a happier place. I thank the Universe every single day for this love, and it is my wish that everyone in the world feel the joy it has brought me.

In gratitude,

Marti

Our House

My love and I have decided that our first house should be in town and should be something cozy, with a yard big enough for our animals (just the dog, the rats, and the snail right now, but we want to get a tortoise, too). At some point in the future, we’ll be ready for our bigger house with more land (and room for more guest and more animals). So this post is about the home that I want to attract for us.

We want our house to be a welcoming space where our friends and family will feel comfortable. We want it to be pretty inside and out; something with character and quirks, interesting spaces, and lots of light in all the right places. We’d prefer an older building to a newer one, but the essence is character. Brick would be welcome. It should have beautiful wood floors and wood detailing; moulding, shelving, that sort of thing, and we definitely want a a fireplace. We’d like to have 2 bedrooms minimum, but more are fine if the price is right.

The yard should have grass and plants, and at least one nice tree. It can be any kind of tree, as long as it is healthy and beautiful, with personality. Any plants should be low-maintenance, wild spaces are something we both like a lot. We just need room for people and animals to enjoy the outdoors whenever they want or need to. Other features like a deck or patio, a fountain…those are welcome, too. And we need a fence to keep our animals safe and to give us a sense of our own space.

We would like our house to be in or within walking distance of a community core: a pub, a coffee shop, some restaurants, places to hang out with other people.

We want our house to be ready for us to move into by February or March at the latest. We are extremely grateful to the Universe for providing the perfect house in the perfect location at the perfect price and at the perfect time for us.

My Archetype

 

I aspire to be the woman on the Nine of Pentacles tarot card in my Albano-Waite deck. She represents my desire to be competent, self-sufficient, prosperous, graceful, poised, accomplished, and grateful for everything life gives me. This card comes up for me often in tarot readings, and I have come to think of it as a sign that I am moving in the right direction.

From 15 Minutes a Day to Tarot, by Mary M. Cowan:

Abundance in all things is the message of the Nine of Pentacles. Order — but not in stifling excess — accomplishment, and success. Wise management is sure to have contributed to this state of affairs.

A lady stands in her richly abundant garden holding her falcon, symbolic of the air element. A humble snail, the falcon’s opposite as it were, and symbolizing earth, crawls near her feet. She is as relaxed in the presence of one creature as another, accepting of nature’s gifts in whatever form they take. Hers is not a rigid, ordered garden, but a riot of luxurious growth.

In a reading, the presence of this card may indicate that your goals are, or soon will be, accomplished. This card is a description of what true inner and outer success feels like when you get there, and you’re on your way.

There’s another interesting description at learntarot.com.

I imagine myself as I want to be, walking my land, in view of my beautiful home, hanging out with my animals, breathing fresh air, sunshine warming my skin, wild, growing things all around me. This image fills me with gratitude because I am working toward these things and have no doubt they will be mine—are already mine.

About 9 months ago, I decided that one of the things that was blocking my prosperity was that I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted. I have a difficult time visualizing, so I started a project that would allow me to visualize, on my computer, the things I wanted to attract into my life. I called it “Attraction” and used Front Page to create it. It’s basically a website, but it lives on my computer rather than on the web.

I made a home page containing a statement that I intended to attract “these things” into my life, then created several categories of things, each with their own page. The categories are, in no particular order:

• Love
• House
• Land
• Friends
• Money
• 100 things I want to be or do or have

I think that’s it. Then I turned to my favorite tool, Google, in search of images that represented to me each of those things. In addition to these images, which provided the visualizations I was having difficulty creating in my mind, I wrote about each thing, sometimes in brief, other times in detail.

A few weeks later I fell in love. I have loved before, but I have never been “in love,” in a completely reciprocal partnership where two people want the same things out of life and work every step of the way to give and receive, to communicate, to be real partners to one another, to take care of each other, to love unconditionally…in other words, I have found my soulmate.

Recently I went back and looked at my Attraction project. All of the things I said I wanted are either present in my life or are in the process of happening. The love I wanted has manifested in a way that I could never have imagined. The house and land I wanted are something we both want, and we have begun looking for our home; the images I chose are startlingly similar to some of the places we’ve chosen as possible homes. Items from the “100 things” (incomplete) list (which I’d completely forgotten) have either happened or have come up in conversation as things that we want or plan to do.

I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge these developments and share them here, and to express my gratitude for all the things life is giving me. I will come back soon and add a list of specific things I’m grateful for, as gratitude is something I’m concentrating on a lot right now.

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity…. It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.

–Melodie Beattie