American Thanksgiving. Most countries do not have a
secular tradition of giving thanks for the bounteous gifts of the earth and
community. As the day and weekend progressed, I began to question my own sense
of gratitude. So much is taken for granted in my life. I never have a concern
for clean water. The air in my city is almost always pristine. My food choices
are phenomenal, safe and nearly always available ─ for a price. Frankly, most
often my friends and I have the wherewithal to buy nourishing food. I live in a
safe neighborhood, have dear friends and family, have never been displaced by
war. And yet, I am not grateful every day for all of that. I don’t even notice
much of the time. It seems simply normal, perhaps a birthright. One Facebook
friend/colleague speculated that life is less worth living when we cease to
have a sense of wonder about it all. That seems like a very good step to move
toward gratitude. I so often turn to Rilke for an opening into the nether
world. I remembered his advice the young poet to live the questions.
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in
your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked
rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the
answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to
live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps
then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.
Rilke, Letters To A
Young Poet
(Note: the
photo is of a sculpture in the gardens of the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts. The
sun was shining through the leaves of an old Coastal Oak and reflected in the
polished center of the stone work by Dick O’Hanlon)
