- gary payton . tree of thanks . cherish tree @ burningman @ health and harmony . mike baker fundraiser
From: "Gabriel Mott" <[email protected]>
To: "Jamey Austin" "Maggie Holmes"
Subject: FW: thanks for the thanks tree
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 05:16:51 -0800
i thought you guys might appreciate this... i'm working with a friend otto to make an altar for his fundraiser at 550 barnevald the wednesday before thanksgiving. the altar is a tree of thanks and he had been trying to get the tree that michael franti had used at one of the 911 shows in the park--
-----Original Message-----
From: Gabriel Mott [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 5:14 AM
To: Otto Schutt
Subject: thanks for the thanks tree
otto--
we may not need to use the tree from the spearhead show after all. get this. a tree just showed up. i had been thinking the last two days how cool it might be to have a real tree-- like one of those city trees along sidewalks that die and they have to be cut down. "where do those go?" i was wondering. wouldn't that be cool to have an actual tree for the altar? a rescued tree? tonight, outside on san pablo street, we heard this loud and long screech of tires. the screech lasted so long that my roommate and i had time to look at eachother, wincing, waiting for a sound of cars crashing. it came as a crack instead of a crash. we ran outside to find a city tree that had been planted in the median lieing on its side. it had been hit at its base. other than the fatal blow to the trunk, the rest of the tree is intact and beautiful.
how high are those ceilings?
the tree of thanks, the thanks tree, the altar of gratitude,
hmmmm.
believ' that shit,
G
To experience life with gratitude is to know peace.
Being thankful generates personal power allowing you to manifest your desires.
Gratitude is not good or bad. It is a way of an extraordinary person. An ordinary person sees everything as either a curse or a blessing. The extraordinary person is thankful for what comes.
Living with gratitude is a life of acceptance that is not bland, nor doomed. Rather, life becomes expansive and the things we want come to us because we are already grateful for having them.
Being ungrateful does not mean that desires go unfilfilled, it is just that they often pass without being truly experienced.
Gratitude allows us to hold something without becoming attached. It allows us to truly be with the things we have without the distance of grasping or the fear of loss.
Being thankful is a practice.
Gratitude is choosing to believe that your own desires and those of the universe are the same.
Cultivate gratitude.
The Tree of Thanks was designed for the BassCAMP benefit to send kids from Hunter's Point and Bayview to summer camp in the Sierras. It was composed of a painted city tree that landed on my doorstep after a speeding car hit it down. Behind the tree, was a canvas dripped with acrylic over the shadow of the tree. Participants selected leaves and wrote what they were thankful for to cover the tree.
After the event, we reinstalled the tree on the median where it had originally been growing. It lasted about two weeks before the city took it away.
