I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving (because celebrating a day glorifying genocide feels wrong) but I absolutely DO celebrate the season of gratitude! 🧡 With days growing ever-shorter and cultural pressures on the rise, it’s the most important time of year to practice gratitude and softness. 🧡 The whirlwind of the holiday season is at once both so in line and so distant from what nature’s cycles model for us. For thousands of years we have gathered in the light to keep the darkness at bay. Family, community, and connection are more important than ever, and yet we place so many unrealistic and unhealthy expectations on ourselves in the pursuit of these simple needs! Sometimes I want to scream it from the rooftops: “it’s okay to slow down!” 🧡 Unhappy, stressed, rushed people spend more money, so the capitalist machine keeps pushing and inventing new pressures and inadequacies that are seemingly only solve-able by buying that new product. The good news is there is an antidote to those pressures, and that is gratitude. Choosing to focus on the bountiful wonders in your life is not only a fabulous act of self-care, it’s also an act of resistance. It’s both a choice and a practice. And you can start anytime! Consider this a little nudge to spend 5 minutes today reflecting on what you are grateful for. You can write it down if you want. Allow yourself to pause and sink into the physical sensation of gratitude. Where do you feel it in your body? Does it have a color? A shape? 🧡 As I lay here writing this, I am feeling particularly grateful for the soft breathing (and blanket stealing...) of my sweetheart next to me. I surprised them with a tea party in the park for our first official date, with color-changing lemonade served in these honeybee teacups I made myself. (This is one set I will never let go of!) My fiancé is my muse, my collaborator, and my home. Reflecting on our relationship fills my chest with golden warmth 🥰 (and, miraculously, takes the edge off of the physical pain that is keeping me awake.) I love how it all started and I love how it’s going. I am so grateful for this love in my life. 🧡 What about you? What are you feeling grateful for? ✨