What do you see? A dreary grey day or a scene filled with lush moss and lichen?

I realize I haven't shared much in the way of my thoughts for the new year, yet alone my word for the new year. I have been writing about them, just not here on my blog. For the past year, I've been writing a monthly column called, Cultivating Life, over at PQ Monthly. This past month, I wrote about gratitude, and the powerful force of training your brain to practice it.

If I’m to add a new practice to my day, this year it will be the act of practicing gratitude, and I’m doing that by picking up my camera. Not my iPhone camera, but my digital camera. The day of the Newtown shootings, I turned off all media, shut down my social media, and picked up my camera. I carried it with me and looked at the world in a different way that day. It helped me see beauty in little things — like a bright blue sky, the pattern of my leggings combined with the tile floor, and how the steam curls from a freshly poured cup of hot tea. It took my eyes, and my brain, to a different place when it would have been so easy to have been overcome with grief and shock, and I learned that contemplating life, composition, pattern, and the world around me is a form of meditation when using my camera.

You can read the whole thing here, and about what happened the year I decided to say "no." It was transformative, and enlightening.