Yes, today may not be the day for answers but to finally let your heart
break open to the vastness of the question. ~ Matt Licata
As language’s invitation to embrace uncertainty and deepen curisoity, questions serve as a powerful pathway to gratefulness.
With this generative capacity in mind, we offer a Daily Question in our Daily Practice Space to inspire grateful reflection. Each day we are moved by and learn from the responses that appear. The reflections are joyful, poignant, subtle, poetic, loving, generous, sophisticated, playful, vulnerable, and, of course, infused with gratefulness.
When we hold a question, we begin to welcome uncertainty and expand our sense of possibility. Exploring the magic and mystery of questions as a daily practice, we continually open ourselves to learning, and to leaning into the great fullness of life. Over time, we can strengthen our capacity to trust uncertainty, recognize and be with paradox, shift our perspective, and engage more gratefully with the world and the gifts of our lives..
Every day, our Daily Question offers you a space to explore the expansiveness that comes with this practice. Consider the questions in solitary thought, then stretch the practice. How does it feel to spend some time journaling your response, rather than reflecting solely in your mind? Try talking about the question with others in your life.
Further, try sharing your answers with our community in the Daily Question practice space. We encourage public responses in this forum as well as on our Facebook and Instagram pages, where the Daily Question is also posted. In these shared spaces of reflection, you might discover new perspective-enhancing ways of thinking and being. Come. Be curious. Be open. Be enchanted. Be heartened.
In the space below, we welcome any perspective-enhancing and gratitude-uplifting questions that you might like to see featured on our site.
Note: Our Daily Question currently does not exist as an email subscription. We encourage you to bookmark the Practice Space link for convenient access on a daily basis.
Awaken to Awe
What would it mean for you to create more moments of awe in your daily life? In this self-guided series, learn how the practice of grateful living can help you expand and deepen your experience of awe.
A MOMENT of SUSPENDED SURPRISE
(The day before Awakening to Awe.)
Sitting after dinner
Looking to the working kitchen
Seeing
My daughter at the left counter working with her hands
My wife at the right side rinsing something in the sink
My granddaughter going on six
standing facing the island in the center doing some craft
Her infant sister of six months sitting in the high-chair smiling,
Motionless I’m grateful
In a dynamic stillness Awe surprises me permeating the whole space in timeless joy.
I love to garden so I hate weeds, I pull them out and do my best to prevent them from spreading and ruining my flowers. In the garden of life, the weeds have taught me that there will always be weeds. They grow back fast and in my garden of life those weeds represent my insecurities and flaws. They are a part of life and sometimes they come and go. The flowers represent all my hard work and the ways in which I overcome my insecurities and flaws. It is important to always work on those flaws and insecurities for me there are times different flaws arise depending on the circumstances. Knowing how to adapt and play to my strength is what keeps the weeds at bay in my garden of life.
The miracle of rain is a something to celebrate! I know I love sun so much, but we need the rain for life too! Water is a precious miracle.
The magic of technology; the way i can respond to life challenges;
In my garden of life the weeds have taught me strength, they have taught me that it’s important to care for my garden on a regular basis and that both flowers and weeds are beautiful and important in thier own special ways ♥️🌻🌸💕
In the quiteness of meditation i focused on the aspect of home. My thoughts told me I carry my home within me. This unfolding of thought made me reflect on how powerful that realization was. To me that was my quiet and amazing miracle.
Weeds grow where they will, and my perception of them is the only thing I can control. In my garden, even if the seeds I plant don’t flourish into flowers, I can try to be grateful that the earth offers up life in any form.
As a gardener, I know that weeding is a continual practice. No matter how often I pull weeds, there are always more that arrive the next day. I’ve come to think of weeding as a sort of conversation. The weeds are just the plants I haven’t chosen to grown in my gardens, but they are plants that have arrived nevertheless and demand my attention, whether I want to give it or not. Some of them are quite beautiful and so I let them stay for a while, knowing that I may eventually need to pull them before they try to take over the rest of the garden space. That’s the problem with most weeds. They can choke out the other plants if you don’t pay attention to them. Similarly, I think there are unexpected, uninvited happenings/experiences/elements that come into our lives that demand our attention and creep over all the rest of our being until and unless we address them properly. It is a continual conversation of balancing what is chosen with what is uninvited; examining the gifts of the uninvited and discerning what and when to discard to make room for the other parts of our lives.
Thank you Beth WR for this beautiful metaphor, I’m gonna meditate on it today after work!
I love this….weeds: “plants that have arrived none the less”
All human lives are too various and alive with contradiction to be neatly classed into the categories in which we try to contain the chaos of life, and yet we spend so much of our own unclassifiable lives classing the lives of others. One measure of kindness might be the unwillingness to crush complexity into category, the refusal to lash others with our labels.
Marcus Aurelius