Thanksgiving in the East ...

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life

is thank you, it will be enough.

Meister Eckhart

I'm off to Toronto in the early hours of Thursday morning to speak at the ATSS conference and then I will be driving down to Kingston to spend Thanksgiving with dear friends there.

I've been thinking about Thanksgiving and "gratitude" over the past week and was surprised to find an echo of my thoughts in an article in the Winter 2009 newsletter of the Callanish Society.

(Callanish is a wonderful nonprofit organization, worthy of your support, that provides retreats for people living with cancer and their families. A number of years ago my best friend, Linda Vick, attended one of their retreats before dying of lung cancer. It changed her life and touched many of us through her. I still have the journal she kept during her week's retreat - a treasured gift - and I read it from time to time when I need a reminder of what matters most in life.)

Janie Brown, Executive Director of Callinish, wrote these words in the Winter newsletter -

Many of us need to work at feeling grateful when life turns around on us.

A good friend of mine, Roger Hyodo, writes about thankfulness. He speaks about

two kinds of gratitude. The first is one that we cultivate based on our preferences,

beliefs, and values. We like something, we feel grateful. We don't like something,

we feel ungrateful. Our state of internal thankfulness is dependent on the ups and

downs of our lives. There are some people who tell us that we should see

everything as a gift, and that every experience that arrives is meant to be.

This is all very well, but what we cannot do is will ourselves to be grateful. It doesn't

work. All we do then is bypass our sadness, anger and regret, and send those feelings underground. At Callanish we offer a space for people with cancer to have their feelings, to honour the dark emotions by giving voice to them. In time, and it takes time,

I hear people speak not of cancer as a gift, but of life as a precious commodity.

Even in the midst of fiercely rejecting cancer, people can become clear that

there are things worthy of thanks.

The second form of gratitude Rodger speaks of is one that we may sense as a

"field" of thankfulness. I have experienced this many times in our circles at Callanish,

as well as in many other moments of my life. When we deliberately create certain conditions in our living, we become aware of this underling ever-present

quality of thankfulness.

Some of the conditions at Callanish are beauty, silence, real conversation, music,

art and spontaniety. We find ourselves risking expression to speak what is

true for us. In this kind of space, the heart seems to unabashedly open in response to

another's honesty, and we feel thankful. It feels like this thankfulness moves

effortlessly among us.

Perhaps, then, in these times of great uncertainty in our lives, it is up to all of us

to create these conditions for ourselves and each other ... whereby we can touch into

a genuine feeling of gratitude for the lives we are living.

When I hear someone express thanks amidst a life of great struggle, it humbles me to

look at my own life through a different lens. With that view, how could I not say,

"Thank you".

So, for Linda and Derrick and Barry and Mom and Dad and Christopher who, through times of great struggle, taught me about thankfulness, beauty, silence, real conversation, music, art, spontaneity, and mostly, love - I, too, say, "Thank you".

Gratitude...

Today is one of those brilliant autumn days that make you feel glad to be alive!  Bright sunshine.  Blue skies. Crisp air. Leaves changing. Early mist over the lake... 

The beauty of this day has filled me with gratitude and motivated me to return to a practice I have allowed to lapse since my husband died four years ago - that of keeping a gratitude journal.  

Gratitude is a powerful transformative force.  Author, Sarah Ban Breathnach, in her introduction to The Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude, says that, "Gratitude holds us together even as we're falling apart.  Ironically, gratitude's most powerful mysteries are often revealed when we are struggling in the midst of personal turmoil. When we stumble in the darkness, rage in anger, hurl faith across the room, abandon all hope. While we cry ourselves to sleep, gratitude waits patiently to console and reassure us; there is a landscape larger than the one we can see." 

My husband gave me a copy of Sarah's Journal of Gratitude for Christmas the year after he was diagnosed with viral cardiomyopathy and he also bought one for himself.  Inscribed on the first page of my book were the words, "It would be wonderful to follow the ideas on these pages. Let's try."  And so began six years of gratitude journalling.

For the first several years, we each made daily entries of five things for which we were grateful - the laughter of a dear friend, licorice allsorts, sweetpeas, 19 jars of red plum jam, Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, clean sheets, the movie "Simon Birch", chest pain ending, the ability to walk on the Seawall, financial help after leaving work.  As the years passed, and illness and caregiving ate up time and energy, the entries became fewer and shorter but the intention remained and on the days when we couldn't write, we often shared our gratitude at night in the quiet darkness before going to sleep.

I was glad of the opportunity to focus on the good things of the day, not in a Pollyanna-ish way, but as a means of balancing some of the pain and sadness of our day-to-day existence.  The gratitude journals helped us to live well with Chronic Sorrow and, I believe, to stave off Compassion Fatigue as well.

Now, more than ever, I am glad of those books of gratitude for they provide an intimate and detailed picture of our lives throughout those years and they trigger so many wonderful memories that would have been forgotten otherwise.  ( I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to journal about the crises and hard things in life in order to work them through. When it comes to the good times, I'm far more likely to enjoy them without writing them down.).

So, whether your life is going well or things are in a mess, I encourage you to start a gratitude journal today.  You might want to find a lovely book with a beautiful cover and smooth pages or you might want to use an old scribbler (do they call them that any more?) or you might want to get a copy of Sarah's journal.  Choose whatever suits you best.  Then begin writing down the five things that make you grateful each day.  

(Know that some days your list will expand to ten or fifteen items and other days, as Sarah says, "... the only thing that you might be thankful for is that the day is over."  That's okay. The gift is in the intention, not the number of items on the list.)