Thanks Giving Graces from The Grateful Table

Thank You. It’s a simple phrase. Sometimes a prayer. Sometimes a love note. Always, a noticing of the goodness.

Go looking for the gratitude in your life. Call it out. Allow the emotion of Thanks Giving to wash over you. Experience it. Be grateful for your breath. And the food. And the music. Be grateful for what is, no matter.

Instead of comparing your experience to something else, something bigger or better, just be grateful for what is and you will feel a shift as gratitude begins working in your life.

In honor of gratitude and Thanksgiving and the blessings in life, please enjoy more blessings, prayers and graces from some of the world’s greatest thinkers excerpted from the book: The Grateful Table: Blessings, Prayers and Graces for the Daily Meal by Brenda Knight.

All We Need Is Love

I will not wait to love as best as I can. We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love.

—Dave Eggers

Food for the Soul

Flowers are sunshine, food, and medicine to the soul.

—Luther Burbank

West with the Night

And the night of darkness

And the dawn of light,

Meeting, joining one another,

Helpmates ever, they.

All is beautiful,

All is beautiful,

All is beautiful, indeed.

—From “The Navajo Song of the Earth”

Live Your Way to the Answers

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

The Soul’s True Worth

You have not lived a perfect day, even though you have earned your money, unless you have done something for someone who will never be able to repay you.

—Ruth Smeltzer

Fields of Barley

For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.

—Deuteronomy 8:7–10

Blossom Where You Are

Every flower about a house certifies to the refinement of somebody. Every vine climbing and blossoming tells of love and joy.

—Robert Ingersoll

Catch Them If You Can

During difficult transitions, our natural tendency is often to contract and grow rigid. In this state we seem to only be able to focus on the negatives. We think about the despair and torment of the death of a loved one, but not the wonderful moments spent together. We think of the heartbreak of a relationship ending, but not of the exhilaration and freedom of being unattached. We might even scold our loved ones, or our friends, or coworkers for something minor or insignificant when we wallow in such negativity. But it is in these moments specifically that gratitude can be used to alter this way of thinking. Finding positives and accentuating them is the easiest way to turn those proverbial frowns upside down and gray skies back to blue. Try catching someone doing something right for a change, not something wrong. Giving praise for a job well done lifts all parties involved and is the easiest way to say, “Thank You,” without actually having to say it.

—Brenda Knight

Philosophy 101

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

—Cicero

Giving Yourself Permission

I’ve permitted myself to learn and to fail with some regularity. And that is probably the one thing I was given, and that I’m still grateful for.

—John Malkovich

Excerpted from The Grateful Table: Blessings, Prayers and Graces for the Daily Meal by Brenda Knight, 978-1-936740-56-7, $ 15.95, published by Viva Editions, www.vivaeditions.com