gratitude

Being in awe and thankful for the experience of aliveness is not tied to any particular day or season. It is, or can be, in every breath. Often, though, we're nudged to remember practices of gratitude in November.

It has been a complex stretch of years, so I want to lean into this energy, to explore with curiosity as the month unfolds. I don't just mean skipping rocks over the surface, or being thankful for only ease (which, certainly, deserves a bow of appreciation too), but for the richness, the texture, the endless layers of life.

I'm thinking of how ee cummings summons the thrill of being here in this world when he writes, "i thank You God for most this amazing / day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees / and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything / which is natural which is infinite which is yes."

I'm thinking of how Mary Oliver often speaks similarly of truly paying attention and being present, but also how she gives a nod of retrospective gratitude to the more tangled lessons when she writes, "Someone I loved once gave me / a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand / that this, too, was a gift."

I'm thinking of how David Whyte weaves it all together when he writes, "Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things must come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape."

As I step through the threshold to November, I opens my hands, cupped, offering a blessing, receiving a blessing, all woven with threads of gratitude, an energetic tapestry of wild, wild aliveness.