Gratitude 99

I am especially grateful, Gentle Reader, for the absolute and ineffable beauty of absolute everything.  No, I haven't been smoking anything, and no you can't have any.  It's been a thoroughly positive day, despite the angry and aggressive crazy man on the bus this morning.  He was frightening, an older, burly guy wearing dark glasses, pacing back and forth, yelling at vehicles out the window for following and watching him, then making threatening comments to the poor driver as he approached him and got in his face.  He eventually settled down.  There were only a few passengers on board and of course we all looked like we'd just been assaulted, because we had been.  I wondered, despite my fear reaction, about saying something to him, then thought that discretion might be the better part of valour, not wondering if he might be carrying a knife, or worse, packing heat, or that he would simply get all the more aggressive and maybe physically violent.  Since I was on my way to work, I thought it better to keep my mouth shut and pray and hope for the best.  I have learned in the past that when I am foolish enough to confront bad behaviour on a work day that the resulting stress ends up getting carried to my clients and this is something that they, already vulnerable, do not need from me.  I was glad to get off the bus.

Of course, I would be challenged to find anything good or of beauty in this kind of individual.  But I do not know this person.  I do not know how or when or why he became mentally ill.  I do not know what he's like when he's not decompensating.  I do not know what he was like as a child, as a baby.  He was a baby once.  We all were.

Still, I was very glad to get off the bus and there was plenty of time left over to walk for half an hour to see my first client of the day.  I cannot write here about my clients because of confidentiality and privacy concerns, but we did enjoy a better than average visit.  We took a walk past the neighbourhood Anglican church, where there was a fire on the weekend, likely arson.  The church building is unaffected but the hall has been badly damaged.  This is a huge loss to the community because many poor and marginalized people have come to depend on this place for meals and a sense of community.  This is what I mean when I say there is beauty in the world.  As for the poor loser who set the fire, who knows what kind of hate and fear, what kind of cold relentless shadow, has been oppressing and destroying his life.  He also was once a baby and I would like to pray for this person through this blogpost that he find a place of repentance and a sense of forgiveness and peace in his life and that something truly good and beautiful might finally happen for him.

I walked afterward to one of my favourite cafes where I sheltered with a big cookie, an iced Americano and more than an hour of working on a drawing.  Here is my bird de jour:



It's called a seven coloured tanager.  They live in Brazil.

Then I walked through the pleasant leafy neighbourhood again to see another client.  Following a particularly positive session with my client, I went walking for around five miles through the most beautiful (and pricey) residential neighbourhoods in my city, bought two tins of fair trade cocoa powder at the Ten Thousand Villages shop on Granville Island and bussed home where I made a pot of cocoa, the last half of which I have been enjoying iced.

It's been rather an ordinary day.  There has been some ugliness along the way, but great beauty as well.  I sometimes like to think that we have to take care to really look into and deconstruct the ugly to find the thing of beauty that lies within.  It can be a lot of work but in the end I think it's worth it, eh?