You know how Oprah is always listing her favorite things?   Listing them so you will spend money on her advertisers.   Well, I'm going to start posting my favorite things.  But there is nothing for you to buy.  Unless you want to buy into the idea that we should practice gratitude for what we have rather than accumulating more and more and more like an ugly mouth.    Here is the first of what I hope to be a long list of things that add real value, happiness, or utility to my life.  A meditation on enough, plenty, and pleasure:  My Favorite Things.

The Big Ben clock in my bedroom.   It requires no electricity nor batteries.  So it takes my family one teeny tiny step farther off the electric grid.   Which pleases me completely.  The glow-in-the-dark hands float mysteriously in the night and never quite legibly.   So instead of waking up at 3:48 a.m. and thinking, "sheesh, I might as well just get up."  You can roll over, look at the clock, and think "sheesh, its still way dark in here and I'm going back to sleep."  I thought the tick tock might bother me.   It doesn't.  It makes me think of soothing puppies, heartbeats, love snuggled up in the dark.   The tick whispers "shhhhhhhhh" and the tock says "its late and all is well, sleep now my darling."  And finally, there is the visceral pleasure of winding time everyday just like my Grandparents did and theirs before them.   I love this timeless clock, the way it makes me feel connected to time gone by rather than dependent on unrenewable resources.