Thanksgiving

I am looking out my window at the odd gray sky: it was warm yesterday, and today the temperature is dropping as an ice storm approaches, all while the new grass we planted is finally growing on my lawn. 

It is an awkward transition, as they so often are. 

My Thanksgiving Cactus is again blooming as Thanksgiving carries us into the Nativity season. I look forward to these delicate blooms each year: to the wonder of shocking color amidst all the gray, as if to say the cloudy skies, frosty mornings and early evenings can not stop the earth from bursting forth with thanksgiving.

I haven't taken care of my houseplants as well this year, since moving into our new home. I'm still finding the right window, and remembering to mend my disrupted routine. And yet they persist, they bloom. Thank God!

Wishing you all a beautiful season of joy and thanksgiving!

I'm thinking how so much so often
comes of showing up, comes of being
willing to arrive, regardless,
as our several mute anxieties subside, and now
I startle, blinking—so much so

that I am for the short term almost wide awake—
and see a bit more clearly how
this willingness or that
can make of the confusion yet
another likely scene, make of the troubled,

packed interior a zone of calm, which calm
avails momentarily a glimpse
to mark among so many frank,
unlikely revelations that I continue
to observe that I am blinking still.

 - From Scott Cairns' Thanksgiving Poem