Thankful!

Thankful... meaning literally "full of thanks". My favorite talk show host (actually the only one I listen to) is Dennis Prager, and he is very big on happiness. He has written a book on the subject (Happiness Is a Serious Problem) and gives lectures around the country. According to Dennis, thankfulness is essential to happiness. I have to agree with him. Have you ever seen an ungrateful person who was happy?

Once a year we have a day formally set aside to be thankful. Believe it or not, Thanksgiving is for more than just eating a lot (although that's a pretty neat side benefit). It's even for more than getting together with loved ones (or in the case of some families, getting together with people whom you try to tolerate once a year). It's a day on which to be full of thanks.

This Thanksgiving day found me celebrating with lots of people whom I love -- and eating and napping and taking some time to read and playing my guitar and chatting online with a dear friend. I am "full of thanks". A list of things for which I'm thankful would be too long to post, but would include:

• my family (of course)
• my books (lots and lots of books!)
• my guitar
• getting to be with my two grandsons and my great-nephew (all in one day!)
• my computer (because it opens up the world to me and connects me with friends)
• music (and, in particular, my subscription to Rhapsody music service)
• airplanes (even though I can't afford to fly anymore, I can still say I'm a pilot - I got to fly!)
• a meaningful job (even though it ain't the highest paying one)
• a love of writing and words!
• that my brother survived his near-deadly medical ordeal, and I got to visit with him last weekend!
• Books-A-Million
• coffee!

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving wherever you are, and one more thing for which I am thankful -- all of you who honor and humble me by reading my blog.

Blessings, peace, & love to each of you!

~ Jim

Comfort...Reflections from My Journal

Thanksgiving day is nearing, and with it, like Christmastime that gallops in on its heels, memories of holidays past... places we've spent those times before, and the people with whom we've spent them, places and people in many cases no longer here, and in all cases no longer the same. One of those significant places for me is my boyhood home in Hillsboro, Georgia, and one of the most significant people is my mama. Holidays tend, in many ways, to make me more uncomfortable than happy. It's not all bad, because there are certainly new memories to carve out this holiday. But the past, like omnipresent Dicken's ghosts, is always haunting the present -- and the future. Here is an entry from my journal from a few months ago that helps put this in perspective -- and indeed gives me comfort:

___________________________

Saturday, July 14, 2007 (3:07 a.m.)

Some things just don’t feel comfortable anymore. Like my boyhood home. I have very fond memories, but I also remember how uncomfortable the place had become when we’d go up to visit Mama. The beds were uncomfortable, and the arrangement of the house just didn’t appeal to the gentler senses.

It was Mama, and it was me. That’s what made the place special. Those walls and floors and the space within was sacred. But it was the presence of certain people through the years that hallowed them, not any innate virtue.

The spaces have been taken from me – the sacred floors and walls desecrated by the business exchange of a sale. Yet the spaces within me – one might call them memories, but they are something more…much more – are still pure and true. There is something real and eternal that transpired in the mundane act of growing up and making a life my own way that inhabits the spaces that I have brought with me. They’re no longer “up the road a piece, in another county” – they are with me all the time.

I take great comfort in that, but it has taken lots of time for that comfort to settle in. It's still far from complete, but its real presence is clear – like the Spirit of Christ in the Eucharist.