Dear Reader:

It is written that a brilliant day - full of aliveness and awareness and all sorts of enlightenment - must be followed by a day in which your house smells like cat pee, your mountains of laundry and incredibly messy living room present a Sisyphean challenge, and you speak so harshly to your son when he accidentally drops a box full of shells all over the kitchen floor that you both are shocked.  (The only comfort I have here is that my children are learning to ask for and receive forgiveness by my example on a regular basis - I was immediately repentant).   

Mary Oliver writes "every day I see or I hear something that kills me with delight."  I love that line, and I believe it to be true.  I especially love how the use of the word "kills" which implies that experiencing joy/beauty/love must contain a little hurt.   Anyway, Mary, I get it.  But, I would write that every day I see or I hear something that steals away my delight, too.   It's really keeping these two opposing forces in some sort of balance that presents the challenge for me.    And, trying to send out more of the former than the latter in my own words and deeds.  

The victory that I claim for today is that whether or not the day was fantastically satisfying (yesterday) or predictably banal (today), I had the same attitude toward eating and food.

Here are my stats:

Pounds lost so far:  9.6

Calories consumed:  1676

Calories burned:  183 (treadmill - 30 minutes - I did not want to do this, but I did.)

Here are my food pics:

Breakfast:

Lunch:

Dinner:

I also found this quote from a blog post about Thanksgiving to be beautifully written (I love the "quiet sonnet buried under a floor") and timely today:

"Gratitude is not publicly rejoicing in the best of the best. It's the timid celebration of the worst of the worst. It's finding the joy in the seemingly joyless. It's the quiet sonnet buried under a floor board. It's beautiful because you feel it in a dark corner of something lost and something sad. It's lovely because it blooms against stark cold.

My holy day is the sharing of a meal -- the making of the best of things. Warmth and full bellies and a quiet acknowledgment of the worst making us even better. Our biggest accomplishment: we were all still sitting at the same table -- loving each other in spite of our shortcomings."

Thanks for reading!