On Completing a "30 Days of Gratitude" Challenge

Gratitude! Day 30!

All righty, so, as of today, on Facebook, I completed a 30 Days of Gratitude challenge, this Thankful challenge, something I extended into my teaching in-person as well, and something that has been a bit of a struggle to complete each day. Once you get past the first 15 things, you are really digging for something that you enjoy, but maybe aren't as grateful for as like, your cats, shelter, or a hot shower.

If I had to make a list of the things I am TRULY grateful and thankful for, the list would look like this:

1. Being alive

2. My wife

3. My cats

4. My students

5. My work

6. My apartment

7. My food

8. My music (both the music that I listen to and the instruments I play)

9. My health (though I wish it were much better)

10. My friends

11. My education (and especially my teachers and professors)

12. My sharp logical and rhetorical brain, which thinks in terms of right ideas and right thinking, and is neither owned by ideology nor tradition, nor this side or that side, nor idle-talk, but always seeks for truth and authenticity 

13. My penis being in fine working order, form, function 

14. That I fuck like a sacred whore: possessed, shameless, in service, Holy.

15. Magickal and Esoteric and Mystical traditions 

16. The things I have that I often take for granted (my computer, books, toys, statues, a blender, my cookware, a bed, Xmas tree, toilet, hot shower, DVDs, a TV, etc.)

17. The awareness and wonder to participate in the awesomeness of nature and the natural, celestial world

18. The relative freedom to travel

19. That I am not a copy of either of my parents and resist being like them

20. That I am not a victim, more particular, I don't identify with the mentality of a victim (which was not an easy process to overcome)

21. The ability to Change

It is that last one that I think of has being essential to a truly grateful lived experience. I see so many people in the world who are trapped by their thoughts, trapped by their choices, trapped by their lack of clear thinking, their ideology, their seeming inability to grow and transform their lives into what they want it to be, people who jump off the roof of the first risk free life they can find and then never return, people controlled by the wills and whims of teachers, priests, gurus, people too afraid to change or grow, and I too get this way at times (hello, loss of Yoga practice, weight gain!), and then I remember once again that a miserable life is a safe life, a miserable life is a life feeling trapped or helpless, a miserable life is a life left wanting for a different life, and that I am free, at any time I choose, to change those circumstances, to gain more freedom, more control, hit the reset button, pull the controlled chaos lever, bare forth the ramifications of my actions with the resolve of a hero and not the fear of a victim, and can choose to CHANGE and to BECOME. 

Most important in my life has been the many different pursuits I have undertaken, the religions and spiritualities studied and abandoned, the thinkers, the traditions of Occult and Esoteric wisdom, the mystics and magicians, the lovers, the musical traditions, literary traditions, martial arts styles, yoga styles, the many places I have lived, the things I was passionate about one day and then not so much the next day, the tangents of culinary interest and focus, the musical instruments, the philosophers, the different costumes and clothes I have worn, people I was and then wasn't and then was again, the things I have believed in, then not, my ability to resist the crowd even when I'm trying to be a part of one, all this ability to change and to become, it's powerful, it is REAL POWER, and it's a magickal wand I can wield at any time or point, choose to invoke its spell to cause change in conformance with my Will, and recreate myself once more, like the path I have just invoked as of recent.

You are the prisons and the let downs and the confinements and the barriers and the false morals and the compromises that you set for yourself, but conversely, you are your own freedom fighter and liberator and hero/ine and victor and God/dess yourself: no one makes you submit or under-come but yourself, and if you can undermine yourself, you can certainly leap over yourself. YOU CAN CHANGE FOR THE BETTER!

I am grateful that I live a life where I will always be filled with the wonder of a God/dess, a life that changes and grows and becomes something more than what it was: a life, like a Phoenix, that collapses into ashes, rises, burst into flames, is greater than any God/dess could become, and then crashes and collapses once more. 

For the life of a Phoenix, I am truly thankful and grateful.

Now, watch me soar with wings of fire!