GRATEFUL

While I was in treatment for cancer, I didn’t know if I was going to live or die, and neither did my doctors. During that time, so weak from the chemotherapy and radiation, anticipating two surgical procedures, and never knowing if all that suffering in the present was going to yield the desired result of surviving, I walked for 90 minutes every day. I got outside and I moved my feet. I can tell you that, during that time, the blue of the sky and a bird’s dark underside contrasting with that blue when I looked up would make me cry, would make my knees buckle in wonder and gratitude. I’m crying now, vividly remembering this feeling. Life! It was so juicy and colorful! That experience, being singed by the Refiner’s Fire (a phrase I know from Handel’s Messiah, but that originally comes from the Bible, Malachi 3:2), everything burned away except gratitude and love, meant that I really saw, really heard everything.

After I recovered from treatment, I spent a year keeping an online Gratitude Journal. I was still seeing and hearing in a turbocharged kind of way (still am). I posted daily, noting something I was grateful for. Often, though not always, my post was a photo and a brief explanation or caption. If you get outside every day, and look, you’re going to find something wondrous. I loved this practice, and found it had a positive feedback loop effect on my life in a couple of ways—it encouraged noticing, seeing, observing, paying attention. When you do that, gifts and wonders abound. It also meant, if I had gone a couple of days without taking what I considered a beautiful nature photo, that I would make it a point to get out and hike under the full moon, or take a longer walk than usual in a different woods. I.e., it got me out looking in places and in moments that I otherwise might not have accessed or bothered with.

 Anyway, I am grateful every single day for being alive and for getting to see and hear and taste and touch and smell and do all this great stuff that we, the living, get to do. I’m grateful for pomegranates and the mist rising from the grass when the winter sun hits it in the early morning. I’m grateful for the scent of tuberose, sweet peas, and paperwhites. I’m grateful for cotton flannel sheets in winter, linen sheets in summer. I’m grateful for my friend and companion, Ivory, and for bacon. I’m grateful for pieces of music that stir something in me on a deep soul level, every time I hear them—the fiddle tune “Dry and Dusty”; Satie’s Gnossienne no. 1; Aretha Franklin singing “Mary, Don’t You Weep.” The list really is endless.

 In this section, Grateful, I hope to share images of things that inspire, for me, Thank You and Wow!

 Gratitude is the wine of the soul. Go on. Get drunk! —Rumi