No Accounting For One Second of It
“A thin comma moon rises orange, a skinny slice of melon, so delicious I could drown in its sweetness. Or eat the whole thing, down to the rind. Always, this hunger for more.” So Barbara Crooker wrote in How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River. That’s the work, simply put. Alongside thankfulness, focusing on what I already have, there is always, always this hunger for more.
Herman Hesse, whose birthday (1877) is tomorrow, said this somewhere. “The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect in every moment, every sin already carries grace in it.” Every moment of gratitude also already carries hunger for more in it. A knife edge exists between acknowledging what we already have and our endless acquisitiveness.
There’s power in celebrating and acknowledging and whispering or writing or shouting thanks for what we already have. Dipping into want or need or regret are non starters, unless it serves the larger purpose of noticing the embarrassment of riches in this moment.
One deep hope I have is that by working to see the gifts in everything, to peer underneath, to suss them out, one is on a mastery path, as with a martial art, and it can help one’s life in a practical way. Being able to see what you couldn’t see before by virtue of looking and practicing every day.
Gifts are there, though many are hidden until you have eyes to see. Perhaps it’s like looking at one of those silhouettes that can be two different images depending on how you view it. Is it a white chalice or two people looking at each other? Depends on focus. I’m keen on the idea that a life of practicing gratitude reveals more and more of what we can’t see, the key to every door. Putting in hearing aids, as I do every day now, I hear sounds I had forgotten about.
It’s like being grateful today for air conditioning, maybe in the same way Abbey was grateful for his gas fridge in Desert Solitaire. I mean with respect to the long chain of workers and inventors and merchants who caused it to be, without any agency on my part. I don’t particularly like having to use it, but two nights ago it was a blessing to have as a soporific. Trying to get to sleep would have been a tough go. That goes for fans, too, and for the automobile in which I can ride so conveniently to work this AM. I’m focusing only on the convenience of course, not the environmental downside. Grateful for A/C, I wish I didn’t have to use it. Grateful for a car, I wish I didn’t have to drive it.
Life begins as a gift, completely outside our agency and that is the tone setter for our entire life. All is gift, handed to us to do with as we will or can. Gifts pile on gifts, as we continue to live, doing nothing to earn them. We’re given stuff and we use it well, or not, for a long messy continuum of reasons, as the parable of the prodigal son and the parable of the talents both point out in the New Testament.
Messy and full of wonder, all at the same time. “My God, what a world,” Annie Dillard wrote in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “There is no accounting for one second of it.”
