Gratitude

Gratitude is a gracious acknowledgment of all that keeps us, a bow. Gratitude is the confidence in life. In it, we feel how the same force that pushes grass through cracks in the pavement invigorates our own life….Gratitude receives in wonder the myriad offerings of rain and sunlight, the care that supports every single life.

I thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
And a blue true dream of sky; and
which is natural that is infinite which is yes

“Thanks” is a massive head-shift, from believing that God needs our joyful chatter and also a public demonstration and is greatly considering our views of the folks we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed.

Near-death experiences and encounters with one’s own mortality are frequently clarifying tools with which to cut away inessentials and cleave to the essence. Illnesses and accidents can produce the same reinvigorated gratitude and appetite.

Gratitude is a way of undercutting your ego….That awakening, that awareness, transforms your way of dealing with life, with folks, and with all things.

To live a life will be to open our eyes to the countless ways that we are supported by the planet around us.

Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are countless means to kneel and kiss the bottom.

One Christmas at the beginning of your twenties when your mom provides you a warm coat that she saved to buy, do not look at her after she tells you she believed the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and overly bouffant and perhaps even overly warm. Your mum will be dead by spring. That coat is going to be the final gift your mother gave you. You may regret the little thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.

It seems that bliss–a second-by-second joy gratitude of being alive, aware, at the gift — lies of beating, breaking boredom, in the other side. Pay careful attention to the most boring thing you can find (tax returns, golf that is televised) and, in waves, an apathy like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Continuous bliss in every atom.