What if:
…at the end of every day, you took a minute or two to consider your experience of that day?
…you searched for one or two outstanding events, feelings, expressions, sights, gifts, conversations, et cetera (the list of what it could be is endless) from today?
…you could find some gratitude for that thing (or those few things)?
… you then jotted down a couple of words that specifically describe your experience?
… you kept that scribble of a note for a whole year, collecting 364 other days of such notes from that same year?
And what if – at the very end of that year – you made a conscious choice to sit down and read every one of those 365 scribbled notes?
* * *
Several weeks after my mom passed away at the end of last year, I was talking to a fellow author at a book event.
I really didn’t feel like attending that event and would’ve rather stayed at home in my pajamas nursing my grief and avoiding conversation. But I had made a commitment, so I showed up.
But the blessing of going to that event was the one brief conversation with my author friend; it was about a gratitude practice. She described something very much like what I outlined at the beginning of this post.
Instantly, I knew I had to commit to a practice of this sort; it’s a natural fit with the occasional gratitude lists and frequent acknowledgments of gratitude that have been part of my everyday life for the past decade-plus.
And somehow, even in the fog of grief, it felt like a soothing way to move through the coming year.
* * *
It hailed early on New Year’s Eve. A big sudden deafening pound of half-inch hail balls for several minutes. It stopped as suddenly as it started. Then it resumed for another five minutes. The balls rolled and bounced on the deck, collecting in crevices and the coloring the ground white for a while.
I began my ritual for ending one year and beginning the next. Each Dec 31st, I review the year past and consider the year to come. I tend to make nature art to mark the ritual. In addition to that, this year I had 365 entries in a document of collated gratefulness remarks; I committed to reading each one before entering the nearby forest for a New Year’s Eve walk. It took me so much longer than I’d anticipated to read all of the entries; for some days in 2019 there were multiple gratitude entries –
a year during which we planned and convened a celebration of life; traveled as a family to lay our mom’s ashes in the special place she’d chosen; cleaned out and sold her home;
a year during which I somehow completed my chapters for a co-authored book, swapped manuscript editing with my co-author, published the book, began a book tour;
a year during which I traveled to three countries and nearly a dozen states;
a year during which I gave numerous presentations of various sorts and offered dozens of courses, workshops, trainings, events;
a year during which I spent months and months with family in unprecedented and deep engagement around really difficult matters;
a year during which life and work and love and hiking and writing and making art did not pause one bit;
and,
a year during which all of the everyday tasks of working, loving, and living were more pronounced by the profundity of loss –
I stood with my back up against a huge redcedar tree that stands just on the edge of the forest and I read the last third of the gratitude notes I’d made.
I entered the forest. Overwhelmed by gratitude. In the midst of all of that, and more, I had found great reason every single day to write at least one specific, genuinely-felt gratitude. I began counting my paces up to 365. Wondering where in the forest (on my usual hiking path) I would find myself at pace # 365. I lost count a few times as I became distracted by birdsong, the strong musk of winter soil, the way the light caught the limbs of an alder, the sound of the breeze through the Douglas fir needles. But at about 350 paces I ended up at what I call “The Cathedral,” a clearing in the trees in which I have occasionally created mandalas constructed of objects found on the forest floor. I paused at the entrance to the clearing. Raised my palms together, thumbs at my heart, and whispered “thank you.”
* * *
It is difficult to describe the ways in which finding gratitude in each and every day – no matter what is happening – changes a person. But it does. Irrevocably. Powerfully. Naturally.
All blog images created & photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted. Please circulate images with photo credit: "©2020 Jennifer J. Wilhoit/TEALarbor stories. All Rights Reserved."
