On Gratitude - By Debby Dahl Edwardson

Photo by Chloe Leis on Unsplash

A raucous group of five loons swam by my northern Minnesota island this morning, calling back and forth and raising their wings together as though dancing, then diving deep for their breakfasts before moving on, in unison, to the next bay. Their voices, still echoing behind them, exuded a kind of joy, sparking within me a powerful sense of gratitude—the kind of gratitude that transcends the particular. It wasn’t about the loons and didn’t come with any words. It simply was and I recognized it because it’s something I feel with increasing frequency these days.

I lit up when Jane, in an email to Marion and me, said, “I’ve been thinking these last couple of days about gratitude. I’d like to hear more about what that means to you both, particularly as relates to life/being alive.”

Boy, can I speak to that, I thought to myself. It’s something of an unspoken theme of mine lately. I felt it watching those loons, have felt it in noticing the way these pine needles glitter as though wet with sunshine, the way, when I’m back home in Alaska, the tundra turns russet with fall and the air responds with the kind of crispness that galvanizes the senses. And music of course. I have even felt it as a kind of peace in the midst of tragedy.

As soon as Jane set us to thinking of this, I thought immediately of a blog post Marion did several years ago when she was robbed at gunpoint.

Huh?

I told Marion I wanted to look at that post again. I remembered being struck at the time by one shining line, one totally honest and equally unexpected insight she had while staring into the barrel of that gun.

“Give me your purse,” the voice behind the gun said.

Even as I handed over my purse—my mind saying “NO!” and “OF COURSE!” in

the same instant—I found myself noticing that the man speaking to me beyond the

astonishing gun was young, slender, and somehow . . . beautiful.

I’ve never stared into the working end of a loaded gun before, but that one line, noticing the beauty of the man holding the gun, struck me as achingly authentic. And I recognized it.

I recognized it because for me gratitude is like that. It comes at unexpected times, welling up inside me, lifting me above the situation for just a second or two, taking me beyond myself and into a place where I am simply being. And seeing. Celebrating life. It prompts me, sometimes, to say thank you.

I used to think this impulse was something found in all its purity only in children and artists, who are more open to the raw wonder of life. I also thought, and in fact still think, that it’s something we are all born with, something that life contrives to beat out of us bit by brutal bit.

Now, though, I am noticing how it returns in full force as one matures.

Marion in one of her other blogs quoted Tolstoy “If you want to be happy, be.”   

The simple gratitude of being. The rare gift of watching a group of loons, drifting through the waters of life, just as I am, and being right there with them for a second. Just a second.

I sent the Tolstoy quote to my Buddhist nephew Cortland Dahl asking if he saw this as related to Buddhism. He did.

“…there are meditative traditions in Buddhism that are very much about being versus doing,” he told me, and, “actually I’ve been writing a lot about this recently…”  

Here is a link to Cort’s article

I sent it to Cort because the way I see it, it’s a spiritual impulse, one which is acknowledged in many belief systems. Maybe it’s in all of them.

I’ve been reading a lot in the past few years about Christian contemplation, a kind of meditation practiced in the fourteenth century and made popular by books written by mystics like the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a spiritual classic, penned in medieval English and translated into modern English by Carmen Acevedo Butcher.

The most famous contemporary practitioner of this kind of meditation was Thoman Merton, an American Trappist monk, mystic, writer, poet, and social activist.

I looked over The Cloud of Unknowing last night and came across this:

Start practicing contemplation and watch how this spiritual exercise makes a difference in your life. When contemplation is genuine it’s nothing but a sudden impulse, coming out of nowhere and flying up to God like a spark from a burning coal. It’s awesome to count how many times your soul stirs like that in an hour but of these you may only have one instance when you suddenly realize you have completely forgotten every attachment you have on earth.  

I know this impulse and when I feel it, it always sparks in me a sense a gratitude. Maybe because it feels like a homecoming. Or a reprieve, perhaps, from the intrinsic loneliness of the human condition.

This is the kind of conversation that makes me lean towards Mary Oliver.  If anyone knows how to truly voice it, it’s Mary. Marion used this poem of Mary Oliver’s on another one of her other blogs:

Every day, I see or hear something

that more or less kills me with delight,

that leaves me like a needle

in the haystack of light.

It was what I was born for –

to look, to listen,

to lose myself inside this soft world –

to instruct myself over and over in joy and acclamation.

Mary Oliver

Nails it.