Kind Promise: I will appreciate blessings.
To appreciate my blessings means to feel gratitude. (When I arranged my kind promises for the year, I chose this one so that it could coincide with the season of Thanksgiving.) Yesterday, I asked myself, “what color is gratitude? What shape is gratitude?” I sat down with my paints.
I had an oval shape in mind. Ovals are filled with possibility. I was drawn both to the orange/red and the green/blue families. While I was waiting to decide, I painted and oval in yellow. I thought that I could cover it with another color most easily. I looked down at the lemon on my paper. “Ha!” I thought. “Now I have to make lemonade.” I started, tentatively, with some light green over part of the oval and some blue answering it. Yin and yang? I continued playing.
Years ago, I shared a house with a composer. He would lead me with delight to the piano. “Listen to what happened,” he would exclaim before he played his latest piece. He took no credit; the tunes seem to flow from his fingers.
When I painted gratitude, look at what happened!
This painting tells me that gratitude is:
- lit from within
- both at a distance and close
- green and growing
- sometimes surprising
- welcoming and mysterious