Bounties of Gratitude

A week from today will be Thanksgiving.  I am so ready for a holiday--and this is my second favorite holiday.  Christmas is my favorite, but Thanksgiving is close behind.  If Thanksgiving had a tradition of sparkly lights, it might take the lead.

Yesterday, we had our annual Thanksgiving potluck at work.  As with almost every potluck, I am amazed at how much food we had.  Our school bought the turkey:  we had a tray of sliced, smoked turkey, and we bought another roasted whole turkey, which our Director of Admissions sliced--she's a pro.

It was a wonderful spread.  The cool thing about a Thanksgiving potluck is that we have plenty to talk about:  what's our favorite food, what are our Thanksgiving traditions, what's our cooking approach.

I began the day by walking our social media coordinator around campus asking people to share what they're grateful for.  She's creating a gratitude video.  By the end of my work day, it felt like a bonus Thanksgiving.

I am grateful to be in a place where we get along well enough to eat together regularly.  We're a big group, but we still fit in a single room, so we can all eat the same meal.  We still have the problem of people who already know each other sitting together, but we know each other well enough that most people are welcome at most tables.

I'm also grateful that I'm continuing with my poem-a-day practice for the month of November.  I'm also doing my visual journaling on a daily basis.  It's a bonus that I didn't expect when I signed up for the class.

Part of my success with a poem-a-day process is that I'm writing more haiku than usual.  Writing haiku always feels a bit like cheating, perhaps because I'm only writing haiku in the sense that I'm following the syllabics for each line. I'm not following the Japanese conventions any further than that.

Still, I find them useful. It's good to think in such compressed form, even though I don't particularly like the haiku I write. I like the process.

I've written before (here and here) about gratitude haiku--a variation on the gratitude journal.  Here's one about yesterday's work:

Gratitude videos
A meal shared with colleagues
Various bounties