Meeting Life with Gratitude
An embodied realisation of the web of life
I’ve never been good at writing lists of things I’m thankful for. I know for some it is a daily practice, but because of the way I was raised I tend to buck against it — to me, it feels forced and extractive, like writing a pros and cons list for someone you are considering dating.
Writing a gratitude list pulls me away from the embodied experience, present to the moment, and is more like a hindsight activity. For sure, I believe it can build up an awareness of living in gratitude, but I also believe practising mindful awareness in each moment is more effective. It brings it into the body, as a visceral deepfelt gratitude for all of life, and the gift of being here to experience it, in all its guises.
I remember when I was young, about seven or eight years old, picking wild raspberries for our dessert. I was with my mother, together bent over the prickly bushes, baskets in hand, and in my general sensitivity (that prevails today) I felt awful.
The raspberries had pretty, magenta bonnets, plump with juice. Plucking them from their stems, from the mother bush, I knew I was taking their lives. “Sorry! I’m so sorry!” I wept while I picked them.
My mother, her long blonde hair swept up in a bun, looked at me shrewdly. She was a pioneer, eking out meals from the land we had just moved to from the city. With a slight edge to her voice (most likely a bit over my weepiness), she said “Life doesn’t understand “sorry”. The plants don’t understand it. They understand “thank you”. Thank them when you pick them. Thank them for nourishing your body and continuing life”. My mother was often like this. She is unconventional, in the best possible way, to say the least.
At that moment, at age seven or eight, my whole perspective shifted. In my bones, I knew this to be true. Death, for the continuation of life, is not something to be sorry about. It is something to be grateful for, and in that gratitude is an honouring of the life lived.
And as I grew older, I practised my thank yous. At first, they were verbal, thanking the rain for watering the plants, thanking my boots for covering my legs and feet as I trod through nettles, and thanking the bees for the honey that dripped from my buttery toast. In time, these thank yous became a silent prayer in my mind, and now, in my middle years, my being is a mantra of gratitude.
This is not to say that I always sit in that sacred space of holy reciprocity! There is some intense bullshit in the world, and I can be a mantra of hexes and murderous vitriol as well, though it takes quite a bit to get me to that place these days, and I always come back, because that is how I was raised and it is a part of me.
When we embody gratitude, we see more clearly when things are not in alignment with our values and moral compass. Gratitude is an echo that runs through the relationship of all things. I have my honey because bees worked so hard to make it. Do I get my honey from someone who makes sure their bees have much honey left, or that their honeycomb is mostly intact? Do they make sure the bees have plenty of flowers nearby so they don’t have to fly so far? The sun and rain and soil helped these flowers to grow… and so on, down the line of reciprocity and community. As a child, I was hypervigilant and thought about each of these things individually, and I became anxious and over-conscious about every footstep I took. But now, leaning back into the softness of experience, I simply have a general expansion of gratefulness, aware that many lives were lost and many births have begun for my honey. Aware that birth and death are inseparable.
Gratitude now reverberates through my life, in the choices I make with the things I consume or use. I do the best I can that my level of privilege can afford in acknowledging this web of life. And in this understanding, I know that many people, awake to the power of gratitude, can’t always follow through with their support and purchases due to a lack of privilege. It makes it much easier to not judge people too quickly. I know, because I find myself there often as well.
And now I show my son. He’s not as energetically sensitive as I was, or perhaps it’s not as obvious because he is more attuned and confident in himself, given that as a parent I give him the love and space to feel what he feels without reprehension.
We thank our food before we eat, and I watch him quietly as he traipses out to the garden and thanks the lettuce before he twists them gently from the earth. Not always, but he does it enough for me to know he is aware of the circle of life. Aware that, on some level, in some plane of existence, the lettuce feels his gratitude and the balance of reciprocity is maintained.
Thank you for reading. I appreciate the connection with this community and would love to hear your thoughts! A clap or comment would greatly encourage me as I start my journey on Medium.
Melanie
