Thanksgiving Edition
on the magic of gratitude, finding wonder after a rainstorm, and making your own zines
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” —G.K. Chesterton
Austin Kleon shared this quote this past week in his wonderful newsletter on creativity, which I have subscribed to for years.
I'm also wildly grateful to be alive. I celebrated my 58th birthday on Sunday and it's a miracle I'm here and as healthy as I am after all I've been through in the past more-than-a-year.
The Magic
I am repeating the 28-day program outlined in Rhonda Byrne’s book The Magic and really loving it. I had continued doing the practices after I finished my first 28 days of it, but I wasn’t doing it every day, and life was feeling tough, so I decided to repeat it. Good idea!
Doing the daily gratitude practice in my journal is often a high point of my day and radically shifts my mood and outlook. I highly recommend it. If you missed my original post about it, you can read it here.
Doing this practice, I’m astonished by the things I took too much for granted and by how abundant my life is. Reading novels about people who have hard lives also helps me see how fortunate I am. For instance, I’m reading a very good novel called A Council of Dolls about several generations of Native American women. In one generation, they have so little to read, they read the same newspaper or magazine over and over. I realize how blessed I am to have so many books and always getting new ones. Not to take this for granted.
Art cultivates empathy and new perspectives. It is one of its profound gifts.
Update from the Wonder Factory
I’ve been intensely at work setting up Small Wonders on Substack. It’s a lot to learn a new platform and get it all set up. So this is my big creative project right now.
The person who had already claimed the Small Wonders URL on Substack won’t give it up, despite the fact he hasn’t published anything on it. Bummer!
This really threw me for a loop and had me wondering if it was a sign that I was going in the wrong direction. Oh, the suffering the mind invents!
I’ve decided to go with BrilliantPlayground.substack.com as the URL since Brilliant Playground is already the home of my offerings to the world. And I will call the publication “Small Wonders: An Offering of Brilliant Playground.” Thank you to Alicia for help with that suggestion! That gives me more flexibility to change the format in the future if I feel called to do so.
Weekly Wonders
This week's wonder is a video I took after the relentless rain storms we had for days.
Here's a little poem I wrote about this magical moment:
In the bare branches
of an oak
etched against cold
grey sky
dozens of blackbirds
become chattering leaves
proclaiming the rain
has gone
Wonder Spark
You can get Austin Kleon’s free downloadable Gratitude Zine with prompts for you to fill in your own things to be grateful for: https://austinkleon.substack.com/p/a-gratitude-zine.
It’s fun!
And might even inspire you to make your own zine. It doesn’t have to be a gratitude zine. Your theme might be different. If you do make one, I encourage you to share it.