A note from Erin:
Hello, beautiful human,
I hope you’re finding ways to delight in the season wherever you are adn whatever else is happening. Delight is necessary.
Today I have an invitation for you.
I have a new class starting on Wed. July 13th – and whether you
join me or not, why not read the invitation to strengthen your gratitude muscles?
Let us revel in the practice of praise, which I believe is one of the most neglected and vitally needed practices on Earth. It gives us potent soul ballast during challenging times.
Consider the species not yet extinct – we are blessed to be alive along with finches and ravens, singing whales and spirit bears, fir trees and peach trees, stag beetles and lightning bugs, seastars and honeybees!
Consider the amazing beings we’re blessed to know. Family and friends whose presence seems ordinary until they’re gone and we realize how extraordinary our moments with them really are. Temporary and priceless.
Consider sunrises and sunsets and coffee and fresh water and hot showers and cold rivers and electricity and baby toes and cloudscapes and snowflakes and poetry and the sound of a cello and the taste of a perfect salsa and the eyes of a beloved and fresh gelato. How often do you say thank you?
Praise is one powerful way of giving back – of stepping into reciprocity and offering lavish thanks for all we’ve been given every day of our lives.
Praise feeds the holy in nature, feeds what we love, feeds life. Praise is soul activism. Praise practice trains us to be more permeable to the beauty we’re surrounded by. Praise practice is oh so necessary and oh so heartening. Let’s do it! How do you praise?
Do you sing praise songs?
Offer love talk to the trees?
Kiss the mountain trail with your feet?
Do you make little altars?
Do you speak tender words into the soil?
Do you pile flowers and fruit and give them back to the ground from which they came?
Do you dance as an offering?
Do you whisper words of love for the world?
Do you make art as a gratitude offering?
Do you stroke the herbs and flowers as you walk by?
Do you send prayers of thanks up to the sky on sacred smoke?
Do you spread seeds for the birds and the critters, little love treats?
Do you yell “YES!” and “THANK YOU!” at the top of your lungs to start the day?
On the day you die, will you wish you’d have offered more thanks?
Why not start now?
Do you never think about any of this and want to come to be inspired?
Please do!
Mary Oliver says there is only one question: How to love this world? What a generative question to live into every day of our lives.
Would you like to join me and a wonderful group of humans weekly over 5 weeks to explore deepening the practice of praise and radical gratitude?
Yay, I have room for you! Read all about it and register
here.
We start Wednesday July 13th and I’m so excited!!
Sending love and gratitude,
Erin