thank you for the new day, with all its potentiality

thank you for the capacity for evolution and involvement

thank you for my relative health, with two legs for mobility, clear lungs, clear mind - and for the relative health of my extended family

thank you for my daughter, my partner, my family & friends (my web of concern, nurture & love)

thank you for my idiosyncratic passion, curiosity and ambition to improve myself

thank you for my inner monologue to live a moral life

thank you for the ability to work and support my family (despite the setbacks)

thank you for the cosmos aspect, the microscopic aspect, the animal aspect, the human aspect, the thought aspect, and the integration aspect of all my senses

thank you for drama and sentiment, human feeling, and compassion

thank you for literature and the great lineage of writers (the truth-tellers)

thank you for my ability to function despite the shocking abundance of evil in the world

thank you for giving me the spirit to question why evil is even necessary in the design of this experience

thank you for poetry, so that i may think; for sculpture, so that i may see; for painting, so that i may feel; & for reading, so that i can escape into complex semiotic worlds beyond myself

thank you for the delicacies of happiness: food, water, shelter, bread, wine, song, shared community and family ritual, parenting, love, reproduction, ambulatory motion, breathing, medicine

thank you for nature: weather, geology, biology, anatomy, trees, blood, insects, spiders,

wind, heat, sun, rain, rivers, autumn, cliffs, mountains,

clouds, clay, earth, loam, sand, cold, seawater, birds

thank you for planets, moons, stars, comets, nebulae, galaxies, the sun, dark matter, physics, my eyes, mathematics

thank you for the nurturing function - the caring feeling

thank you for laughter, silliness, tickling, playing, jumping, clowns, comedians, thespians

thank you for memory, and thought, and the relatively peaceful inner narratives bequeathed to me by my pure luck of being born at the right place, at the right time, under the right parents.

thank you for these inferences that lead to a grand conception of you, behind curtains of meaning, behind all the logics which point to you

thank you for all religions and faiths

thank you for your creativity in countless expressions: faces, languages, religions, arts

thank you for your complexity & elegance

thank you for home cooking

thank you for the knowledge of the efficacy of supplication to you, source of all things, the grand mystery, the grand holder of logics

may i live to honor your awesome beauty with beautiful and meaningful expressions, to show compassion towards my fellow man, & to espouse peace.