Origins: Morning Thanks: Looking for Beauty

Here's the story of the Morning Thanks: Looking for Beauty, a book that's just now out. In fact, it's not "just out," because the books are still on the way.

It's almost embarrassing to admit, but I've been at this blogging thing since 2006--that's 14 years. 

It started with a journal I kept, not a blog. I'd read an interview with Garrison Keillor in Christian Century, an interview in which Mr. Keillor had said that he thought the whole world would be a much better place if everyone determined to give thanks every day for something, just to stop whatever they were doing to give thanks. If we'd make it a practice, he said, all of us, we'd all be better off. (That quote still is up at the top of the page, where it's been for all these years.)

What Keillor said just struck me right, so I thought I'd try it myself--a whole year of giving thanks, a kind of spiritual discipline. And I did. I sat down in the basement, early in the morning, all year long, and tried to give thanks for something. 

What came out of it 365 days later was a huge collection of these:

I'd try my best to come up with something fresh every day. Sounds easy if you're a believer, but it's not actually. I'd write something out, take off for the gym, then, still sweaty, edit and finally put a picture on it. Once a day--early morning, my own brand of piety.

Whether or not Keillor is right is a good question I can't answer for the world. I do know that trying, every day, to be thankful for something specific, even when there's a whole world around you, is not an easy to thing to do hundreds of days in the row. Took some doing, as they say; but I never really wearied. 

What I've learned, only when I quit however, is that doing a gratitude journal put me in mind of thanksgiving far more fully than I would have been had I not committed it to being a discipline. And that was good thing.

I was already taking pictures--all three of the above are mine.

That little gratitude journal turned into something else, and that's where and when the blog began.
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Tomorrow: "Stuff in the Basement" develops