Gratitude....I believe that we all think that we feel grateful about a variety of things in our lives. That feeling of gratefulness is usually fleeting, short lived and conditional. The moment passes, the words and feelings fade. And very often this gratitude comes after a challenge of some sort. When it passes, we feel grateful. But then again...after a short time, it fades.
I think this is true of most all of us. Life and busy times come back into play, and we move back into the tasks at hand.
I think that I am a person who feels grateful quite often. In my life and in my career, I see many wonderful and also very sad things happen on a daily basis. I have worked in nursing and social services for many years. I also, with my husband own a farm, a hobby farm. It is large enough to be a production farm, but we love our careers and want to continue in those occupations.
But our land and our big old barns began calling to us and we wanted to make use of these wonderful blessings in our life. So, we made began making plans to make our place into a home for animals that would not otherwise have a warm, well-nourished and safe place to life. Where they could enjoy running in grassy fields by day and then lay down in soft hay at night to safely rest and relax.
We began acquiring our sweet animals in a variety of ways. Word of mouth mostly. Pretty much everyday someone would tell us about an unwanted animal that someone did not or could not care for properly. We met people who would tell us about animals living in less than tolerable conditions. So, we would take in animals that we felt that we felt we could offer a better life and that we ourselves honestly felt that we could handle.
Our animals family grew every week. We love each and every one of them. We seemed to rescue mostly goats, sheep and llamas. But we also ended up acquiring miniature donkeys and horses. Then, we added to our group...ourselves. We started going to bird sales and we bought peacocks, pheasants, chickens and ducks. The peacocks turned out to be the best alarm system for our farm.
We would work every night after work and especially on weekends building pens and feeding systems for our growing group. We felt so satisfied and fulfilled....and grateful that we had the land, the buildings and means to help out these otherwise helpless animals. We read and learned a lot about their care. Shearing, inoculations, proper feed, trimming hooves, toenails...on and on. For some of the more difficult tasks we did hire people to do those, like hoof trimming and shearing the sheep. I would sheer the llamas. I loved spending that close time with them...they are amazing animals. I know they sensed my gentleness and they would stand still for me to clip them with scissors; I didn't want to use an loud, annoying electric sheering device on these gentle animals. It did take much more time but I loved the experience. I had to start wearing gloves because my fingers/hands were covered in calluses and they would bleed and hurt because of the opening and closing of the scissors so many hundreds of times.
It was during those peaceful clipping sessions with my llamas that I really started thinking about how very grateful I was. For everything. I started feeling both lucky and grateful all of the time.
I began choosing special times to really think about all of the ways that I was blessed.
During my morning ride to work each day, my evening personal conversations & prayers and the time I spent thinking about my animals and mostly being with my animals. I would pull off of the road on my way to work to specifically think about how blessed myself and my family were. I always took the scenic backroads route to work so that I could do just that. In the evening when I would turn off the lights and say goodnight to all of the animals in the barn, I would go into our comfortable home and either sit by our woodstove in the winter or out on our deck in warmer temperatures and take the time to think about all of our blessings.
I started journaling to expand on my feelings of gratefulness and then I began blogging also.
I knew that this was the best thing for me personally - good for me physically, mentally and emotionally. It made me feel complete...full circle...and that felt really good.
I would encourage everyone to take some time each day to think about your many blessings and be grateful for all that you do have...not give any real time or thought to the things that you feel you are missing. If you wake up each day that is the first blessing of the day. And, then many more will become evident to you as you go through your day...as long as you consciously think about gratitude.
Don't wait for the feeling to come to you because of some outside situation...
keep it present in your mind and in your heart all of the time.
