Over the last fifty years I've collected hundreds of quotes on the subject of gratitude. I'm now incorporating them into a book I'm working on, A Meditation on Beauty and Mystery: A Gratitude Art Journal, to be published some time in 2025. This work is also the basis of A Pause for Beauty.

Here are four of my favorites, offered with apologies to long-time readers who will have encountered them in my work before. But I believe that they bear repeating -- living with gratitude is a practice -- the constant tendency, including my own, is to backslide, to focus on what I don't have, to focus on problems, rather than on the many blessings of my life.

Sam’s Big Brother Brian, who still takes him every Tuesday for a few hours, is married to a very funny Southern woman named Diane, who’s bleached fabulously blonde, sober fifteen years, very Eve Ardenish. She says that we’re all so nuts amid so much beauty that it’s like we’re at the circus. In one ring is an amazing array of clowns and bears doing all this great stuff, and in the middle ring is a woman who does breathtaking tricks on horseback, and in the far ring are elephants or seals and maybe more clowns, and above us are trapeze artists, doing these death-defying precision feats, and we’re sitting in our seats looking around crabbily, going, “Where’s that damn peanut vendor? I want my goddamn peanuts!”–- even when we’re not particularly hungry.
     - Annie Lamott, Traveling Mercies

Furniture-maker Sam Maloof started each day’s work by giving quiet thanks.

“I used to tell Freda that if we could just make five hundred a month, why, that was all we ever neEded. It was spiritual security that matTered. I really believed in the importance of living right and being thankful and grateful. If your mind is right, I think that all things fall into place.”

Maloof derived his strength from resorting to something outside himself, from an appeal to an honorable code of conduct, an elevated sense of order, to a deep, abiding faith. He lives an ethical, right-minded life and cites integrity as the most important part of his work and of his creativity. Sam believes in the unseen influences that guide him. That is the source of his risk taking, of his courage to create. He gives a quiet thanks, he shows respect, he behaves in the most correct way he knows how, and then he sits down to make a piece of furniture. 
     -  Denise Shekerjian, Uncommon Genius.

What we celebrate in our thoughts and actions, what we express gratitude for, gains a special energy. The objects of our appreciation grow in significance and power in our lives. But we can’t express gratitude in the hope of getting something. The relationship is more mysterious than that. We invite rather than expect. The universe responds however it responds. It is our role to express gratitude and be worthy.

In 1996, in the early days of Heron Dance, I interviewed Balbir Mathur, founder, with his wife Treva, of Trees for Life, a Witchita Kansas-based nonprofit that has provided millions of fruit trees to farmers in rural villages in India and other developing countries. I asked him about the spiritual underpinnings of his work.

Balbir: Religious conversion is often a form of violence, but, of course, I am in a spiritual rowboat... I call my boat Surrender -- complete surrender to the will of the Greater Power. My two oars are instant forgiveness and gratitude -- complete gratitude for the gift of life.

I serve. I do the dance I must. I plant trees but I am not the doer of this work. I am the facilitator, the instrument. I am one part of the symphony. I know there is an overall scheme to this symphony that I cannot understand. In some way, we are each playing our own part. It is not for me to judge or criticize the life or work of another. All I know is that this is my dance. I would plant trees today even if I knew for a certainty that the world would end tomorrow. 

This boat I travel in is called Surrender. I have nothing to achieve. Whatever comes is there and I enjoy it. The two oars that take my boat -- one is instant forgiveness. I get angry, I get mad, but as soon as I remind myself to put my oars in action I forgive. The second oar is tremendous gratitude. I am thankful for the experience of this life, for the opportunity to dance.

Me: To what do you surrender?

Balbir: The act of surrendering is so important that who you surrender to becomes insignificant. It is the surrender itself that is important. At different times you surrender to different things. Whatever it is, we will enjoy the moment the way it is. Call it God, call it Spirit, call it the love energy, call it by whatever pigeon hole you want -- but you surrender to life as it is, without demanding anything. If life is the master, I am the dancer. However I can serve, I do serve.

Finally, this quote from Julia Cameron's classic, The Artist's Way:

Daddy Howard, an elegant rascal with a gambler's smile and a loser's luck, had made and lost several fortunes, the last of them permanently. He drank them away, gambled them away, tossed them away the way his wife threw crumbs to her birds. He squandered life's big chances the way she savored the small ones. "That man," my mother would say.

My grandmother lived with that man in tiled Spanish houses, in trailers, in a tiny cabin halfway up a mountain, in a railroad flat, and, finally, in a house made out of ticky-tacky where they all looked just the same. "I don't know how she stands it" my mother would say, furious with my grandmother for some new misadventure. She meant she didn't know why.

The truth is, we all knew why she stood it. She stood it by standing knee deep in the flow of life and paying close attention.My grandmother was gone before I learned the lesson her letters were teaching: survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention. Yes, her letters said, Dad's cough is getting worse, we have lost the house, there is no money and no work, but the tiger lilies are blooming, the lizard has found that spot of sun, the roses are holding despite the heat.

My grandmother knew what a painful life had taught her: success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
     - Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way.

An interesting factum I only recently became aware of -- Julia Cameron is the sister of James Cameron, director of such epic Hollywood films as Titantic. 

. . .

Journal questions:

• To what do you surrender?

• Balbir Mathur calls his rowboat Surrender, and his oars Forgiveness and Gratitude. What do you call your rowboat? What do you call your oars?

• Where's the damn peanut vendor?