I  journal and do morning stream of consciousness exercises, and
I’m again participating in Linda Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday. 
I write to a timer, 15-20 minutes, no editing except spelling, and of course I add my art!
You can do it too!
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “open book, point, write.” Pick up the closest book to you when you sit down to write your post. Close your eyes, open the book, and place your finger on the page. Whatever word or phrase your finger lands on, write about it. Enjoy!

A note after, wow this is long… I wrote longer than the timer!

Oddly enough, the only book next to my desk is my calendar
and I wrote a bit about grace yesterday and
had the word grace in a dozen places and grace is what it landed on.
Not “the”, which I thought would be very funny!

I took the time to look it up — just curious —
and the oddest thing is that the dictionary is SO Christian!!!
Their definition (of the type of grace of which I am thinking) is this:
“the free and unmerited favor of God” but then they wax on about Christian notions.
It assumes so much without owning that it does…
The Christian Dictionary is owning it.

God gives you a lovely path to walk if you are good?

That God controls destiny (which is not even what I was taught as a Catholic
when I argued with the nuns which btw got me kicked out of catechism at 5
because I wanted to know if God was so dang powerful why not just
STOP the devil from doing all this bad stuff like starving children?)
“Mrs. Beck, She is disrupting class again.”
I was right… You can’t have it both ways, so “free will” is present
and then the chips begin to fall where they may which is one reasons
why I switch teams and now bat for the Buddhists because, frankly,
without even considering god or no god, is more consistent and logical.

Okay this was not where I was heading before the detour of the dictionary,
which really should be non-denominational and tell us all religions ideas on “grace”
or leave off the overtly religious attitudes.

When I think of grace I think a bit of being in the flow.
Coming to the suchness of the situations and wrapping your attitude around it
and working with it when it is not what you thought you wanted.
So often what you didn’t want is actually some part of your path.
I never know what to say about the terrible stuff but I will tell you that when my former husband died I thought it was one of the worst things to happen to me but it brought Mitchell into my life, and honestly, I had a pretty bad marriage before, very disconnected and distant and I put up with all of it because I had not fully imagined THIS…
not consciously, anyway, to be lovers and best friends.

The Great Recession wiped us out and I am not sure where the trajectory will land us
(the story is not over)
but I will say that seeing the tsunami that was about to hit us and
moving into the wave to take whatever control over what happened
instead of fighting and denying it allowed us to survive with our business intact.
Friends did not recover, and no one wants to acknowledge the horrid things that good hardworking Americans have walked through in the last few decades.
They lost their business or job and went to live with their kids and never found a job.
We are not wealthy and we struggled (who didn’t)
and frankly are working much harder than we should at our age
and have not “recovered” what we lost
BUT BUT BUT but we are here and we work with each other and we are doing our craft.  We get to have out cats at work, how great is that?
We are not working separately at horrid jobs
(I worked taking payments at night for a bit to tide us over while he held down
the business and we were miserable BUT a great project saved us.)
There is grace in our lives.

So grace is being at one with, moving into the wave so it doesn’t knock you over, and getting back up if you slip and fall on your butt.  Reading the tea leaves as best you can.

AND BEING GRATEFUL.
IF I DID NOT PRACTICE DAILY GRATEFULNESS
I AM SURE I WOULD NOT HAVE MADE IT.

Below, Tsunami image… Acrylic, from 1995.

For the rules, go to Linda’s blog;  feel free to join the fun!