4/3/17
i'm thankful for a nice sunday. i'm thankful that in the morning i worked on a challenging but rewarding personal project and did some intensive yoga and meditated. i'm thankful to have had a bowl of sauteed chickpeas and a fuji apple for lunch. i'm thankful that in the afternoon, it was warm and sunny outside and i went for my first longer run of the year. i'm thankful to have chosen a quieter path than the trail i normally use, which i knew would be filled with other people out for one of the first tastes of spring. i'm thankful for the way running and walking distances around the town over the time we've lived there has resulted in a kind of mental map i can use to tell where i am and an augmented sense of direction. i'm thankful to know this place in my body.
i'm thankful to feel quite sore today all through my body, especially in my right foot, the sides of my but, the sides of my upper arm, and my thighs. i'm thankful to feel quite sore today, even though it's not nice to feel sore, because being sore means that i pushed my body in a way that it hadn't been pushed recently. i'm thankful, still, to hope that i feel less sore later. i'm thankful that though i get sore sometimes, my body generally responds well to the kind of exercise that i choose to do, which isn't true of everyone and which is a blessing. i'm thankful that i have time to exercise every day if i choose to and i'm thankful every day to make that choice.
i'm thankful last night to have made us portobello "burgers" with avocado and raw onion and mustard and american cheese and baked sweet potato "fries" (which i cut into pretty decent shoestrings but didn't get hot enough to get a good crispiness on most of them). i'm thankful that though these food items were in quotation marks, the kind that indicate failed representations of a better original, they were still tasty and satisfying. i'm thankful for sriracha mixed with ketchup. i'm thankful for the orange that we had as a palate cleanser—i'm thankful for the thick rind of navel oranges, which makes them easy and satisfying to peel, and i'm thankful for the way when you rip open the feels orange oil sprays into the air around your hands.
i'm thankful for the chocolate tres leches cake that d made for our dessert. i'm thankful for how impossibly moist and sweet and rich the cake is. i'm thankful that i tried to cut us more reasonable portions than i would normally cut from a cake. i'm thankful that when looking up the blog that recipe, the top autocomplete result was this recipe, which i couldn't help but look at. i'm thankful that on the way home from my run, i stopped at the grocery store and got whipped cream to go on top of the cake. i'm thankful to understand that you might think a cake with three milks would not need to have whipped cream on top, but i'm thankful to tell you that you're wrong.
i'm thankful that d built herself some shelves for her clothes, which helped us to organize and de-clutter our bedroom, which with the new space that created feels like a new space. i'm thankful to have vacuumed the house, which always makes it feel nicer to be in. i'm thankful that it didn't take me very long to pack up the recyclables and i'm thankful that i did it yesterday so that i don't have to do it today. i'm thankful that though it's going to rain today, i don't have to leave the house except to take the trash and recyclables down to the street. i'm thankful that i will take the time to find the batteries i need for my keyboard and trackpad so that i can stand up while working today, which will hopefully make me feel less lethargic at the end of the day.
i'm thankful to feel like today's notes are kind of boring, but i'm thankful that the ritual of writing the notes is more important to me than whether they are interesting to read. i'm thankful to know that even if these notes are boring, i will eventually (probably not too far from now) come to a day where i write notes that i think are more interesting and i just need to be patient. i'm thankful to know that these notes are like exercise, in that they grant me both long-term tangible benefits (the creation of a body of work, the sculpting of a body) but also immediate tangible benefits (sanity at the base level and if i'm lucky a sense of peace that will hang on with me through some of the rest of the day).
i'm thankful for this episode of in our time on hokusai. i'm thankful that hokusai drew and painted and printed thousands of images over the course of his life, that his goal was to represent everything. i'm thankful to have learned the story of how hokusai was invited to the court of the shogun to "compete with another artist who practiced more traditional brush stroke painting. Hokusai's painting, created in front of the Shogun, consisted of painting a blue curve on paper, then chasing across it a chicken whose feet had been dipped in red paint. He described the painting to the Shogun as a landscape showing the Tatsuta River with red maple leaves floating in it, winning the competition." i'm thankful for abstraction and i'm thankful for action.
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