To Garden Girl and Scott The Trainer, Thank You.

2007 was The Year of Fifty. It has been a good year, filled with celebrations and accomplishments and a sense of beginning, of commencement. 2008 will be The Year of Can and Will. The inspiration for 2008's theme came this past Monday from Scott The Trainer, who shared his belief that believing you can do something will make it so. Like doing pushups (he had me do 36 of them today). Like believing you can lose weight without significantly changing your eating regimen (this is a stretch for me - he's 34 and not a 50-year-old woman with a hormone-encouraged mid-section, but I loved his enthusiasm).

This blog, inspired by my dear friend Garden Girl, will be an integral part of the coming New Year. When it came time to type in the name of this blog, “the art of mahalo” is the phrase that immediately came to mind. It will be a companion site for MahaloArts.com, the site through which I will share and distribute my work. For both sites, the foundation, the essence, the spirit, will be gratitude (“mahalo” in Hawaiian). I like the notion of approaching gratitude as an art, as an act or process of creation. I aspire for every action I take to be done so in gratitude.