September's Gratitude

The daily practice of starting my day with what I am grateful for is powerful.  It gives me a chance to think about the big and the small things that are true joys and the things that I sometimes never realized I should be thankful for or acknowledge.  And it has lead me into thinking about ways of being grateful that I had never thought of before.  
Word cloud of this month's gratitude.

It seems that each month as I progress with this project, I find another way of expressing or thinking about being grateful.  This month, after reading Kate Harding's Asking For It, I was so moved by the book that I felt compelled to find her online and thank her for her willingness and ability to write such a book.  That of course triggered another thought of how rarely I do this and yet how many authors have enriched my life with their words.  With that in mind, I think I will likely make an effort to reach out and thank authors as I complete their works and to let them know that their words have impacted my life.  

I remember the first two authors that I did this with, decades ago:  Sara Douglass and Terry Goodkind.  I don't know what inspired me to write to Terry Goodkind, nor do I remember how I ended up writing to him (not sure I had his address), but with Douglass, I contacted her online to gush about how much I loved her novel, BattleAxe.  Their correspondence has long since been lost but that connection and their expression of warmth upon receiving such excited words from a teenager was a pretty meaningful experience to a blossoming avid reader.  I think about the thousands of books read between then and now and realize how much I have missed an opportunity to do something that is long overdue: thank people in my life whom I may have never met but have left an indelible mark on my life.  So, for the rest of the year as I finished books by authors who are still alive, I intend to send them thank you notes.  

What else have I been contemplating about gratitude this year, take a look at my previous posts:  

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By Any Other Nerd Blog by Lance Eaton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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