Sometimes the things that fill me with gratitude are great and weighty: The deep sharing of each others’ lives that friends do.  The way the Universe sometimes seems to be conspiring to make things work out.  The way things work out after they haven’t worked out.  Change and Permanence.

Sometimes they’re simpler: Rain.  Crows jabbering in the bosque.   The taste of the year’s first fresh tomato.  A small feather and a white stone.  Snuggly children.

I try not to separate them out from each other, not to suggest that getting a job is more important, more gratitude-filled, than a turtle sliding over the grass.  I want them to be jumbled up in there, the feelings and the noticings, the ideas and the bright colors.  That’s how it is in the world–they’re all jumbled up together.  You have to have both the steady warp and the colorful weft to weave the rug.

When I read a poem that grabs me or see a piece of art that really catches me, often it’s the way apparently unrelated things are juxtaposed together that really transports me.  Collaging together the sparkle of dew on a spiderweb with the  support of a family through difficult times offers new meaning to both, perhaps.

As a spiritual and mental health practice, it keeps me noticing the inward and the outward, paying attention to the ways that the inner and outer worlds intersect and inform each other, how some little thing that I might notice in the outer world is really an image for the inner realm.  On days when I get into a broody funk, when I am having inner conversations with my rage or despair or sadness, knowing that I have to find my gratitudes makes me focus on things outside myself and my inner tangles, draws me out of the darkest parts of the labyrinth.  It helps me to keep perspective.

And it also becomes like a prayer.  When I listen to that defiant cawing of the crows and note how deeply it satisfies me on some level, it doesn’t cover up and distract me entirely from the anger at the frackers.  But part of me sends that crow energy, like a prayer, to the people who are fighting the destruction of our natural resources for corporate gain.  When I feel the thrill of watching the impossible flight of a tiny hummingbird, it doesn’t cover up the sadness I feel for a friend in great pain.  But the hummingbird becomes part of my prayer for the lightening of burden and ease of my friend, for eventual joy to break through.

Today, I am grateful for what this practice has brought me, how it helps me to live in the moment, to keep perspective, to hold it lightly, to carry sadness and joy together in the same basket.  May your day be filled with sparkling raindrops and the coolness of rain-filled breezes.  May a bright color grab your soul by the sleeve and say, “Notice me!”  May you feel today the love of someone wrapped around you like an afghan made by a grandmother.

Having said all that, my list today, id filled with outward noticing.  Or is it?

Gratitude List:
1. Waking (after sleeping in) to the sound of rain and of birds singing their rain songs in the hollow
2. Bats!  They’re back at work
3, Giggling children playing hide and seek in their grandparents’ house
4. Helena’s magical mulberry pie
5. Teeny tiny toads.  Teeny, teeny tiny toads!

May we walk in Beauty!