A Number of Things
We can start walking west, which conveniently is left, down this little road conforming to the shore on the southern end of Sebago Lake, Maine’s second-largest, where we have been with out of state family for a few days before the Labor Day weekend. Thank you, I whisper, for morning mist off the water, cricket song, long weird shadows of squat fallen acorns because the sun is so low, the high white scar of a jet trail through the cloud rubble, cool night air for sleeping, getting lost in a book, pale white ribs suggesting light to the east, dark silhouettes of trees and buildings slowly revealed, the three beeps of the coffee maker, the tribal feeling engendered with that camp wave or nod you receive and give to strangers, chairs still around a fire pit, eager dogs being walked (like the Maltese named Winslow Maximus whom we met), sweet air after last night’s rain, family, health, nature, and food. We can stop for a few wild blueberries and blackberries still hanging on.
I remember the first time I ever came upon a wild blueberry patch in a field off the path and how wonderful and intoxicating it was. I was on the college freshman Outward Bound course and all of a sudden there were berries and as you walked through and ate them you’d notice more and then more over there like an endless buffet. That image came to mind just now, because way leads on to way, as Robert Frost wrote.
There’s never really any struggle to come up with something to be grateful for, like still being alive, for starters. Seems it can be done without exhaustion once you intend it and start. You notice this little thing and then you notice that little thing, like following links to URLs, clicking on nature’s links. Who knows where it will lead when you just follow.
Way can really lead on to pleasant way if you take the time, which I have plenty of on this penultimate Thursday of August. I had nothing particular in mind, really, like sitting somewhere, having a beer with a friend and seeing how the conversation develops. What I know is that when I put on my gratitude glasses and look for what’s great rather than what sucks, it works.
I generally just get up in the morning and start writing about whatever comes to mind and my intention is to hold it in my hand somehow like a crystal or piece of beach glass or a weird mushroom and just ask questions about it that relate to gratitude. That’s really all this is. That’s cool or I love that is not a giant step from I’m grateful for that. Often I mean I’m grateful when I say that’s cool, like a proxy word. It isn’t that hard an exercise because the world IS so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings. The hard work is committing to the practice and the inquiry and giving it voice.
Galileo once said “The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.”
Same with blueberries.
