Since holidays are unavoidable calendrical occurrences
the vast majority of which (I risk speaking for others) are either corrupted or wholly constructed through greedy corporate commercial interests many people now disdain, I call this day from now forward simply gratitude day.
(hence the edited title)
It's nice: cold and quiet, deserted in the way Christmas is but lacking the feelings of stressed-out irritability, despair, defeat and depression that often seem to fill the atmosphere on that holiday, for me, no matter how much I try to disengage myself from it. I've always liked Thanksgiving, from when I was young and it was just a nice family gathering, into my adult years where I don't have any tradition but wing it year-by-year. This year I went to a large "feed" at my local community center, and it was really really good.
Anyway- gratitude!
This
is gratitude day, but yes it is at the center of what carries me through day by day. Even in the shittiest of shitties, there's something to be grateful for. I've got a big long list of personal little things I could run off this year but I'm not going to bother to right now, rather one of the things if not the thing right up there at the very top says it all for here.
Community.
The greatest lesson that I've learned over the last year which is been one of the greatest lessons of my life, came simply through being accepted, respected, and shown love through this online and my local community.
Being able to interact and be accepted by people from a culture outside of the only ones which I knew prior to engaging with this psychedelic practice, which were either street drug culture, in- or outpatient institutional treatment or methadone clinics has allowed me to grow into something much closer to the person that I want to be.
It's taught me that serving others is where fulfillment lies, for me at least. I spent a good part of my life serving myself, and while it would make me feel good for ephemeral moments, the fleeting pleasure always had to be chased. Having someone simply say they appreciate me being around because they really do, because somehow in someway I can help them squeeze a little more happiness makes me feel good and I can take that to bed with me and wake up in the morning with it.
Until recently, and still to a smaller degree, I would confront the entire world and all of its inhabitants with my suffering-only displayed as anger. Exposing my agony as some self righteous rage, throwing it in everyone's face in an ugly display and pushing them all, and all of
it away, as far away as I could from my heroin cloud, repelling the world and consequently pushing myself up against the wall until I was backed into a corner and had no choice but to give in.
It's taken a long time to disengage and find my spot outside of that, to find people I never knew I needed- or more accurately denied knowing I needed. And I'm very happy to have found humans who have helped me to hold a mirror to myself and see things more clearly as they really are. And there in the reflection, I could see very deep within the wound that broke my heart bound up in all of the agony and rage is the simplest of simplest things, the need to be loved. Something that without the benefit of having other people to hold me, the realization of which would've destroyed me, probably completely were I still isolated.
Anyway, yeah, blah blah blah, gratitude, blah blah blah I really, really love you guys.
blah blah blah
Sine experientia nihil sufficienter sciri potest -Roger Bacon
*γνῶθι σεαυτόν*