For the children's portion of November's in-person Family Program, we enjoyed exploring the themes of gratitude and interconnectedness.
We first shared our names and things we've been noticing in nature, including the colder temperatures, shorter days and longer nights, ice floating on top of grass, emptier gardens, fewer leaves on trees, and the recent snowfall.
We then read the book the tree in me by Corinna Luyken, which explores how eating a single apple with mindfulness and gratitude can help us experience our connection with all things. We practiced being trees ourselves and then made a gratitude tree with decorated hanging leaves illustrating things we feel grateful for.
We also made gratitude journals and used an apple peeler-corer-slicer to prepare our snack of apples and cinnamon, using apples from the trees Taihaku Roshi planted perhaps forty or fifty years ago!
We concluded by gathering with the adults outdoors and offered bows and bells to the earth, sky and everything in between.
