I am
grateful.
Maybe I
say it every day; sometimes I hear myself express gratitude a number of times
in a single day. Yesterday - after writing some portion of this blog post, I
heard myself recounting to somebody how I often write about gratitude…not
exactly an expression of gratefulness in and of itself, but a reflection or
echo of how it is alive in my life.
I don’t
mind being accused of repetition.
It doesn’t
bother me to be seen as overzealous.
My
feelings aren’t hurt when someone tells me they’ve had enough of this
“gratitude stuff.”
It does
seem as if I’m becoming a gratitudephile. A lover of gratefulness. One who
adores the notion and practice of feeling the fat round letters of “G” roll off
my tongue, no matter the month. No matter the circumstance. No matter the
audience.
I cannot not be grateful today. Even a few days
ago when I admitted feeling less than terrific, a bit grumpy, a bit sullen, a bit
too sick of all that we like to say - from time to time - we’re sick of. Even that day I could feel a twinge of
gratitude, like a splinter almost, grow into a wide shining savior of a thing
inside me: “Oh, yeah, this all okay. Oh yes, right. All this stuff I feel that
feels yucky is just fleeting. What’s deeper and more abiding is the rightness
of fluctuation.”
Does every
day show up like I want it to? Not really. Do I show up every day like I want
to? Not really. But at the clean core of the façade of feelings is something
more eternal, more tangible even: the breath that I inhale in this now of life.
How can I do anything other than chant, cry, pray, giggle, yell, whisper,
croak, or sigh my gratefulness for this one tiny life that I have the great privilege
of inhabiting?
So, every
year in the month of November I allow myself to go a bit deeper into the
conversation about gratitude. But I cannot do so without the other eleven
months, those other forty eight weeks or three hundred thirty odd days, moving
my lips, my body, into or nearer the most genuine act of gratitude I can muster
for the day.
Gratitude
is not a denial of the dark and bone-splitting chill of the vicissitudes of
life; it is an embrace of them. Change equals gratitude. Every day. Every year.
All blog images created & photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted. Please circulate images with photo credit: "©2015 JenniferJWilhoit/TEALarbor stories. AllRightsReserved."
