Oh, hello, November.
I started this month with the usual weird sleep and hunger (Daylight Savings Time, can we talk about this?) and a nice long (way too sunny) walk. And, I saw a coyote, long-legged, lean, and golden as the hill on which he stood. He was unafraid, and beautiful and I was… grateful. And realized that this year, above all other years, I need to take part in the deliberate activity of observing a month of gratitude.
Looking back over my blog posts, I realize I didn’t do it last year. Last November I was still reeling from last summer — and the highly publicized police-inflicted deaths of Eric Garner, John Crawford, and Michael Brown… and then the death of Tamir Rice. I hadn’t realized how long it took me to begin to be able to articulate the effect of the violence and, frankly, paranoid, unsafe feelings I felt, and how long it took my thoughts to become coherent. Add to that struggling to read and comprehend editorial notes – well, November 2014 was a Lost Month. But this year I joined Twitter… and for my first act of Thankfulness, I’m going to give it a rest during November. These auto-post to my feed, but I’m leaving Tech Boy to man the gates, and am going to pull a full Introvert and stop paying it any attention. October on Twitter was a hot mess.
I always learn a great deal from social media – some of it truly excellent, as I learn about new blogs and the exciting things some people’s cats can do – and some of it really disheartening – and illuminating in ways that I never wanted to understand. ☙ I’m grateful today for the chance to stop learning and to sit with and think about what I know.
That photo brings me much joy!
And Tech Boy is glad to have been notified you were abandoning the twits for November … and is perhaps slightly envious, ’cause it’s not like I know what the heck to do with it either.