DO WE EVER PAUSE TO BE GRATEFUL?

Here's a poem I found in my friend Carolyn Howard Johnson's newsletter today.

What are you grateful for? Please make a list and share it in Comments.

For myself: I am grateful for the love of friends and family, for health, for the creatures who share my life and my bed, for wind (strangely), and soft breezes on my skin. I am grateful for old things, from dogs to old crystal and ancient African greys, and old furniture and structures with character and old people with life lining their faces. For things and people forgotten, but not by me like old Miss Butts; for memories, for water in all its forms. For hot air balloons and hiking boots. For the sound of milk squirting into a pail. For pizza. Blueberry tea. My mother's (and grandmother's) recipe for spaghetti sauce. The feel of a book in my hand and horse sweat. For an extra day of life - what possibilities there are. For the gift of noticing beauty all around me. For moles making tunnels and the shock of deliciousness of a wild strawberry; for the feel of lanolin when I'm at the wheel spinning a fleece; for bad times, because if you didn't have bad times, how would appreciate the good? For hot, black Cuban coffee, the scent of wet sage in the grasslands. And isn't it nice to exchange a smile with a stranger? Sometimes it becomes an open door. The glint of koi in a pond. And waterlilies.


So, how about you?


Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:

Práise hím.

---

First published in 1918, the above poem can be found in:

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Catherine Phillips, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Harmon, William, ed. The Classic Hundred Poems (Second Edition). New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.