I'm thankful:

• for the husband who is on the sofa being a couch potato, because he is home with me and not out at the bars.
• for the teenager who is complaining about doing dishes, 
because it means she is at home, not on the streets.

Excerpt from Seamus Heaney's play The Cure at Troy

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

~ Seamus Heaney ~

Unknown Author

Around the corner I have a friend,
In this great city that has no end,
Yet the days go by, and the weeks rush on,
And before I know it, a year is gone.
And I never see my old friend’s face,
For life is a swift and terrible race,
She knows I like her just as well,
As in the days when I rang her bell.
And she rang mine, but we were younger then,
And now we’re busy, tired women.

Susan notes: I came across this wonderful video on the ode magazine website exchange, which is a treasure trove of inspirational stories about...well...everything! The video itself was produced by Global Oneness Project; Ubuntu is an African concept of coexisting with other people, of compassion, of responsibility to others. If we lived according to these principles the world would be paradise :)

There once was a little girl who had a bad temper.  Her mother gave her a bag of nails, and told her that every time she lost her temper, she must hammer a nail into the back of the fence.

The first day the girl had driven 37 nails into the fence.

Over the next few weeks, as she learned to control her anger, the number of nails she hammered into the fence each day gradually dwindled.

She discovered it was easier to hold her temper than it was to drive the nails into the fence.

Finally, the day came when the girl didn't lose her temper at all, and she went to find her mother...