After A Long Night

We had a Solstice ceremony here on Thursday morning.  I was asked to do a thanksgiving and later a few people asked if I’d be posting it somewhere so, as this seems the obvious place, here it is:

Let us be thankful for everything we tend to take for granted – for food, shelter, heating and any amount of good company we are lucky enough to enjoy.

Let us be thankful too for all those things that help us carry on even when the times can seem uncertain; for community, courage, the sense that things are often not so bad as we might fear even when the world is full of change.

Let us be grateful too for living in these times – that it has fallen to us to help navigate the way ahead, that we have chosen or have even been chosen to be here, that the task is ours and that there is always help at hand - invisible or more material - if we have the strength to ask for it.

Let us be grateful for all the true measures of wealth – our friendships, our strengths and capacity to be content.

Let us be grateful to simply be here today, blessed by simply being on this hill, cradled by such a beautiful horizon in the knowledge that our mutual horizon in the coming year is both what we make it and can be augmented by the many blessings it is ours to both give thanks for and to share.

Have a great Midwinter and Christmas.  Here's to a good year in 2012...