Hello! Welcome to The Gratitude Lens Project. I am so excited you’re here and I really hope you will join in in this super fun, soulful project. Let’s get intentional about gratitude together! Postings related to the project will be searchable on the front page of Lilac and Lupine in the Around Here section, category – The Gratitude Lens Project.

I created this project because I have learned over the past year or so that gratitude is a practice and striving to embed that practice into my life, has made it better. Like anything, if we don’t tend it and love it, it’s easy for gratitude to wither and die. It’s not always easy to practice gratitude. Some days are bad days. Some days it feels like there isn’t much to be thankful for, but for me, when I am engaged in the practice, I can focus on the small stuff; I can be thankful for my perfectly delicious cup of coffee or the fact that Bret did the dishes, or for a moment of snuggles with Rosie.  Gratitude can help me change my focus and of course the hard stuff is still hard, but it’s more tolerable and I feel more capable of managing it. The other wonderful thing about a gratitude practice? It makes the good stuff so much better! I feel more awake about what is good, more able to pay attention to those things and so on awesome days, like skiing with the family in the sunshine, I feel deep happiness and contentment. This is something that has not always been an easy place to get to for me and as I said, some days I don’t feel like this at all, but I am excited to be making steps toward a more gratitude centered life. And I want you to be too!

That brings me to my invitation! Please join me in a photo journey into gratitude.

What: The Gratitude Lens Project
When: Whenever, but I suggest doing it for a month solid if you can.
Who: YOU and me and hopefully lots of other people!
How: Each day, for 30 days, we will take pictures of things that we are grateful for. We will take as many pictures in a day as we’d like, but we will be sure to take at least one! Then, we will share these pictures on Twitter and/or Instagram using the hashtag #thegratitudelensproject. Share as many or as few as you like, but please consider sharing so you can join our community of folks sharing our gratitude! I’m planning to take all the photos with my phone, because it’s always with me. But you can use whatever you’d like. Photos can be color, b&w, edited, not edited, whatever makes you happy! The idea is to take a moment (or several) throughout our days to focus in on something we’re grateful for; to slow down. We all spend so much time rushing from this to that and in the hub bub it can be easy to miss the good stuff, big or small, that makes our life so full. So, I invite you to slow down and see life through a lens of gratitude with me.

Here is a shot I love of Bret washing the dishes on a Saturday afternoon in our house. We don’t have a dishwasher, so we are constantly washing it seems sometimes…I was grateful to drink a cup of tea and watch instead of wash!