Category: Daily Compass

A Good Guest

“’We’re on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we’re saying: We know how nice you’re being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, and we’ll try to be good guests.’

‘Like a note you’d send somebody after you stayed in their house?’

‘Exactly like that. ‘Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn’t your favorite one.’”
― Barbara Kingsolver

How do you try to be a good guest on this earth?

Red Velvet Cupcake

How do you approach a cupcake? Frosting first? Nibble the cake out from underneath to save the frosting for last? Do you carefully balance the cake to frosting ratio for each bite or do you open wide to take in a mouth full of glory all at once? There is only one wrong way to eat a cupcake, and that is to fail to give it your full attention and appreciation while the moment lasts.

What will you give your full appreciation to today?

Black Friday

The day after US Thanksgiving is celebrated as a day of shopping: “Black Friday,” when the merchants hope to end the year in the black. But what if we celebrated Black Friday as a day of honoring the growing darkness of the season? Black Friday could celebrate the mystery of the dark, the beauty of the night sky, the richness of the dark earth, the restfulness of the dark evening time.

What experiences or images of the dark call most deeply to you?

Thanksgiving Gathering

What better to adorn the Thanksgiving table than a cornucopia of squash, a crazy assortment of colors and shapes, of textures and tones? What better day to rejoice in assembling the crook-necked with the pear-shaped, the fluted with the warty? This kind of kinship isn’t always easy, but it is the way families or communities assemble, not by being the same, but by welcoming everyone to the table.

Who or what are you grateful to be welcoming in today?

The Turkey

Surely this is a terrible month for turkeys across the United States, as they await their imminent demise. If turkeys marked holidays, the fourth Thursday in November would be a day of mourning, not gratitude. Except, of course, that turkeys presumably have no notion of the future, or roasting pans, or much of anything beyond the present moment.

Turkeys have a reputation for stupidity, but perhaps they are really a model of enlightenment.

How do you let go of worries and find a way to live in the present moment?