The sky is always hopeful to me. Today, a day of gratitude and friendship and honesty was cleansing. A day away from shopping, from news, from frustration, from money. On a day like this, we got our humanity back.

Family is a much more complicated issue than all the holiday traffic and shopping stories might suggest. For many people, it is time of fear and anxiety. In the movies, family conflicts are always happily and ultimately resolved, it is almost a cliche.

In real life, not so fast. My family is either estranged or dead,  I am only in touch with my sister, and this is a painful thing for me to bear. I never could resolve my family issues the way they do in the movies.

So far, Maria can’t either. So we are family to one another, and I am grateful for that. I have made some progress on the friendship thing – there are several I can count on – but I accept the other truth about me: I’m really not built to have a lot of human friends.

Perhaps this is why I love dogs so much. I hope everyone reading this had a happy day and perhaps even a restful weekend. I plan to do some serious reading and meditating tomorrow. And some act of good, of course.