When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.       – John Muir

I’m grateful for lots of big things in life, like the good fortune to be born in this time and place, into my particular family.

But it’s the smaller miracles that inspire my most intense thankfulness. Each one is connected to a long string of other marvels, cartwheeling across time and space.

I’m thankful for the person who delivered ingredients for the first batch of Christmas cookies this morning, for the cows that made the butter and the chickens that made the eggs and the farmers who grew the wheat for the flour… and how ‘bout that Toll House proprietor who chopped the first chocolate chips?

I’m thankful for the scientists who created the new recycling technology I saw last week, and for the waste collectors and machine operators and operations managers who brought it into being, and for the salespeople and procurement experts and designers and policy crafters who are making the economics viable, and for the elegant chemistry that orders our world,

Friends, sometimes it’s hard to feel thankful. Sometimes there’s just one little scrap of gratitude left at the bottom of a big pile of resentment and misfortune.

But one scrap is plenty.

Follow the thread,

and one scrap is everything.