Gratitude

I felt a burst of gratitude as I arrived home from my afternoon walk today. Here I am, jobless (save for the small but significant bit of income from my client, Suzie Baker), very alone in a new city, not knowing what will come next for me, and I am grateful!! What a gift I've been given, to have been able to move past the anxiety I was experiencing a few short weeks ago. (Is it God?) It's just that something's shifted in me and I feel in many ways similarly to how I felt as a child. I mean, something about how it feels to be in the world has returned to me. For example, noticing how long my shadow was this afternoon, or how beautiful and cute the little birds are up in the the brush on the hill. Loving the squeaky green clouds of parrots that fly around here, watching them from the porch the way one watches an air show like the Blue Angels. Except the parrots are just symbols of themselves, unlike the acrobatic jets which are symbols of military force. I suppose that all of this solitude has brought me back to my deeper self. A self that I became increasingly distant from as each year in middle school, high school, college, business school, I got busier and busier. That occupation of my mental and social self pulled me into a consciousness that did not include nature and sensation, only ideas for money or commerce. Of course, I still love my career and don't intend to move away from Marketing as my occupation. But it will cease to be a preoccupation. I hope.