346 / Gratitude #2

The "My Name Is Gratitude" image is from a website called "Gratitude Planet."

There are lots of web references to gratitude: quotations, for instance, and advisory lists. The "Gratitude Planet" website is only one of them.

I have been spending the year thinking about the "two world hypothesis," which is the idea that we actually live, simultaneously, in a world that we create (a human world) and in the world of Nature (the world that God created). If that hypothesis is accepted (as a hypothesis is supposed to be, as a proposed explanation for an observable phenomenon), I think we can find helpful lessons as we navigate our lives.

Also helpful, I find, is an "attitude of gratitude."

For the beauty of the earth
For the glory of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies.

Lord of all, to Thee we raise,
This our hymn of grateful praise.

This attitude, an abiding gratefulness for the world of Nature, rings true to me.

And in the human world, the world that we create, I am grateful, always, for the gift of freedom, our inherent power to do something new, and by doing so to create a new, and we hope better, world.