As we celebrate the last week of November, the last month of Autumn, and the end of another year; it’s appropriate for us to give thanks for the many days, weeks, months, seasons, and years of our lives together wherever we are. As a nation, the United States has a national holiday every year at this time to give thanks with gratitude,  appreciation and hopefully with some sense of humility and understanding. With significant thanksgiving, we shift to a higher frequency which enables us to attract better lives for all in spite of what has taken us down and out over the past year.

As I sit here at my desk two days before the ‘official‘ Thanksgiving Day of our national holiday, now followed by ‘Black Friday’, a national consumer day of materialistic buying frenzy: I wonder how much gratitude, humility and understanding there truly is. I wonder about the thankful hearts that open their eyes to the multitude of blessings and those that close their eyes to the multitude of inconvenient truths.  I wonder about the poor, sick, hungry, homeless, refugees, women, men, and children that give thanks for the hope of a miracle that will set them free. I wonder about peace and new beginnings.

Next week we enter December, the first month of Winter, the advent of a new season, the Jewish Hanukkah, the Christian Christmas and the Winter Solstice where darkness turns toward light and a new series of possibilities and potentialities emerge. In all of this and more, we have a legion of opportunities for thanksgiving and expressions of gratitude, open hearts, and change. It’s a shift from despairing what has been to  appreciating what can be. It’s opening our hearts in ways that turn loss into gain, sorrow into joy, despair into hope, fear into love, darkness into light, and death into new Life!

From a spiritual vantage point, the emphasis here is on the inner light in all persons, the essential goodness in all creation. From this perspective, we acknowledge the spiritual within the material and awaken to the reality that all creation carries within itself grace and goodness. There’s a recognition that gratitude, humility, and understanding are all normal outcomes and natural occurrences of our lives together. As we awaken to this, we become thanksgiving transmitters and receivers in spite of the difficulties.

As we end this season and begin the next, let us open the eyes of our hearts to the goodness that’s deep within us and the whole of creation. Let us express overwhelming gratitude, humility and understanding to reunite everything we can that is divided. Let us be reconciled to all the broken and alienated parts of ourselves as well as those of others. Let us discover the goodness that’s deep within ourselves, one another and the whole of creation. Let us continually say the ‘best prayer anyone can say’ a thousand times a day. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You!!!!

• Over the next days and weeks, make a commitment to say ‘Thank You’ quietly and or aloud whenever you awaken to it: When you’re getting dressed, driving your car, dealing with a problem, getting upset, having a positive thought, giving or receiving a criticism or an affirmation and on and on. Awareness is key. . . . Thank You!
• Notice, in your day to day routines and engagements, the Divine energies residing wherever you are in anything you focus on. See into the heart of the matter and know that what you call God is there, here, everywhere. . . . Thank You!
• Become aware of the passing seasons of your life every day this month. Discover what blessings are present within your days, your interactions, your reflections, your thoughts, relationships, words, actions and, Give Thanks. . . . Thank You!