The Tao of Thanksgiving

It's Tiw's day . . . our first hard freeze this morning ahead of a sunny day here in TulseyTown . . .

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living; we live ourselves into new ways of thinking. – Richard Rohr.

Today is the birthdate of playwright Eugène Ionesco. One of the founders of the Theater of the Absurd was born in 1909 Slatina, Romania.

Casablanca premiered this day in 1942 and became one of Hollywood's most-revered films.

As we approach Thanksgiving this week...

The cartoonist Charles Schulz was born in 1922, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Schulz was the creator of “Peanuts” and its principle character, the beloved Charlie Brown, who is celebrating Thanksgiving for as long as the holiday may last.

We have the capacity to practice receiving love, the scariest thing of all, and to experience the curiosity of a child. And, as it turns out, the family is the most incredible and efficient laboratory in which we can learn to work out the major blocks to these, which of course we got from the family in the first place....One might as well start this process at the dinner table, that way you can do this work, for which you were born, in comfortable pants...don’t bank on never...Here's the secret... we are all preapproved. The only way we can be at any moment, in this moment, is the best we can be at the moment. Mistakes, poor decisions, ghastly first drafts … And so here we are in amazement and hope, finding ourselves alive. Hope springs from that which is right in front of us.

– Anne Lamott, Almost Everything, Riverhead Books, NY, 2018. ppgs 174-175.

When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.

– Willie Nelson, The Tao of Willie: A Guide to the Happiness in Your Heart. Penguin Random House (2006)