Month: December 2021

My two kids taught me this. Gratitude is more than simply saying “Thank you,” or giving thanks in the many ways the culture encourages us. Gratitude is a genuinely felt experience that comes only after a deep awareness, after truly paying attention. Gratitude is not in the words or kind gestures but in the experience that proceeds.

I noticed this as my young adult kids were opening gifts on Christmas. Their whole manner reflected a growing ability to experience gratitude and how to express it. All this has developed independently of the customary expressions of saying “Thanks”.

This Christmas, each one took the time to examine each item, mostly kitchen tools for the apartment they are about to occupy. They took turns explaining how they might use the gift. They showed a maturing understanding of how to manifest gratitude. They were attentive to each others gifts as well as their own. They showed an ease and freedom to react in genuine and insightful ways.

I think they each actually experienced a level of gratitude and were able to express that gratitude.

I don’t think this was an accident. It came from years of practice and paying attention. As young kids, they often would open gifts one at a time, taking turns. They might then proceed to play with a new toy for an hour or more.

They learned to be attentive, to pay attention to each item before rushing to open the next gift. We sometimes would urge them to move on with gift opening as the hours of the day passed by. Because they took the time to pay attention, their experience was richer and the feeling of gratitude, of true appreciation was able to develop.

Paying attention is not easy and has to be practiced. I think it is not natural and has to be learned. Attention has to develop before gratitude can be experienced. Gratitude is a natural development that arises out of attention.

Solstice is a fine invitation to allow myself to slide into darkness. Yet I resist, and think mostly about light and its return, as do many others. I am aware that most animals, seventy percent of them, are nocturnal and are more active during the time of darkness. I am an animal that typically shields himself from the grasp of night time. I even tend to want to escape darkness.

I shutter myself from the night that surrounds a large part of my day, and I attempt to avoid the peril other humans introduce into darkness. My home glitters with many tiny lights during this winter time of darkness, helping me to avoid my feeling of discomfort. I imagine they bring me joy. The trees in my garden are dressed in light that I can see as I look out the windows.

Today, I light candles as a reminder that light will truly return to fill a larger part of my days.

Darkness is an uncomfortable stranger to me and most of my species. Friends tell me of the sadness that creeps into their life during this darker time of the year. They blame it on the lack of light. There is much resistance to what feels foreign to those of us who seem to thrive better in light. There is a feeling of security and safety that light seems to bring.

I don’t understand it all, why darkness is so much less comfortable than daylight. I wonder about it. For me, it is a mystery that goes beyond simple explanations of biological human evolution.

Wanting to become friends with darkness is for me somewhat similar to my inclination to plunge into emptiness . Darkness holds some of that mysterious quality of emptiness. Like emptiness, darkness involves the shedding of what I think I know, the dissolving of familiar notions of reality, the release of curiosity into a realm of unfamiliar dimension.

Today, on Solstice, I want to become just a little more comfortable with darkness. Even while I will walk in light for part of the day and light candles to bring illumination into the darkened evening, I will allow the darkness to creep a little more deeply into my felt presence.

I will let go of the focus light brings into my life today and get a little more cozy with the unseen, the undefined. I will attempt to settle more into the darkness and all its undiscovered mystery.

I walked in the garden this morning though I never left the soft warm covers of my bed. Outside, I am surrounded by the unmistakable signs of winter. The ground is frozen, there is snow wherever I look, the air has a sharp edge of icy cold. Winter lights glisten from where I hung them on trees in my garden.

But the garden remains alive and and verdant in my whole body. It is a wonderful lingering experience.

I see the gentle movement of the green leaves and touch the gentle petals of blooms. The scent of the earth rises to welcome me as I move along the uneven contours of the brick path. From time to time, I hear the faint murmur of the wind in the leaves of hostas. I am aware of the soft sound of birds.

Branches of bushes reach out to touch my skin and brush against me as I pass. I feel the luxurious carpet of long green grass and smell its fragrance as I cross the yard. I observe what has changed and what remains the same. The old and the new blend in my walk.

It is, of course, a walk in my imagination. It is a vivid memory of what has been. It is also a preview, a premonition of what is yet to come. The garden is simply with me. The clutches of time have been relaxed for these moments. It is a place of untime. What was and what will be have become one in a moment of luscious presence. Knowing garden presence has taken me out of time.

I roll over in my soft bed, still in the embrace of blankets, no longer feeling the touch of leaves. The garden slowly fades away. But the ardor of its presence remains and lingers in my body. I carry it with me as I step into my timely routine.

I have grown up with movies where tea pots had eyes, brooms freely moved about on their own and animals spoke to one another. The whole world seemed animated in the imagination of the movie story-tellers, and so it has become for me. There is animation in all things, whether they be trees, people, rocks, stars or spoons.

The threshold of being alive sometimes has seemed to be related with movement. But I know now that movement only tells the easily visible part of reality. Not only do I now see that plants move, something I once saw as a distinction I once reserved for animals. Now I know there is movement in rocks and water and stars. I see animation in all things in my material world and I realize that I have simply been limited in my ability to perceive it.

It is perhaps a broad notion of animation to attribute aliveness to all things. But it is how I see my world. There is movement within all things, even if my senses are unable to grasp it easily.

Perhaps it is enough to see the movement simply as energy, although I also see animation as having many other characteristics as well. I recognize it as having many faces. It is the deep power that surges in all material reality, contained and constrained by structures I scarcely understand. It appears as love which courses through all things and unites us all. It gives us unity and oneness with all that exists. It pours out as expressions of compassion, wisdom and loving kindness.

It is life that oozes through all the crevices of everything I see and touch. For some, it is the face of a deity that is alive and so animates all things.

I prefer to focus on the nature of this animation as a manifestation of love. I like this way of absorbing and embracing the nature of aliveness in all things. This notion allows me to feel the force of compassion that compels me into a loving unity with everyone and everything I experience.

I like a world that is naturally animated by a principle of love, uniting us all. It is the alive source of fountains of loving kindness. All I have to do is jump in.