A great good fortune of my life is simply this: I have such talented friends.

Talented, and interesting, and interested. (Once of those friends said this once in my presence: that the most interesting people are, in her experience, the most interested. I hope I never forget this.)

I mean the people themselves, and I also mean the work they do. Community work, creative work, art work. It teaches me—they do—what is possible to imagine, which is the necessary foundation for what is possible to create. Which is a world.

I’ve absolutely just lucked into these people. That luck is not a small part of why I can create anything myself: community work, art work. My gratitude is immense.

Something I forget, too often, is that reveling in (the good work of) others takes attention. To attend is the act, attention is a state of being. For me, it is always a slow, receptive state, and an act of focus. I can’t be attention when I am in a hurry, or thinking in staccato.

Those last two things are a persistent disease of our culture, and I’ve certainly got it. I have skills! I have energy! I can figure out problems! I can think in multiple directions at the same time! And these abilities let me be helpful to my community, every day! Also every day, I think about something Ursula LeGuin wrote: “How you play is what you win.”

I said my gratitude is immense. Also my joy. And both of those, also, require attention to feel. I want to share two heart-shifting works of art—by two of these talented, interesting, interested friends—that I have been able to use today’s holiday to attend, in gratitude and joy. One I encountered for the first time today; the other I’ve known for years. They are:

The Scale of a Man, a short comic by Lucy Bellwood. It’s got model ships, museums, prosthetics…yeah, just trust me. I have no idea how Lucy does so much with a cartoon panel here and a couple of sentences there. You can read the whole thing online at that link above, and be amazed for yourself.

This Party of the Soft Things, an illustrated book-length poem by Nhatt Nichols. It’s out of stock with the publisher, and I don’t have an alternative to hand, but there might be one. It’s probably shaped like an independent bookstore, or a library, or a friend. If you know me, you can borrow my copy. Soft Things has bull kelp, coyotes, birthday whiskey, a beginning of the world.

It seems obvious, right?, but it’s just occurring to me as I write this: both of these also have joy, and gratitude, and attention. I mean that they are these things, and that they celebrate them.

This is a shape of my luck today—what luck! And I just want to share.