It has been almost two months since I finished work on Meditations on Gratitude, Beauty and Mystery. Now, on Thanksgiving, with a little distance between me and that work, it seems a good time to think over its message and try to condense it down to its essence.
Living with gratitude should be easy, it should be natural, but it is not. Living with gratitude opens up a whole world of beauty and mystery, but there is a price of entry charged at the gate. To enter we need to set aside the concerns of day-to-day life, our fears, our grievances, our preoccupation with what is not fair, our desire for “more” whatever our definition of more, with what about life is less than perfect.
In our interview, Balbir Mathur summed it up well – as well as anyone I’ve ever encountered or read -- “I call my boat Surrender, my oars Forgiveness and Gratitude. Instant forgiveness. I get angry, but then I remind myself, and I put my oars back in the water.”
Surrender isn’t easy. Forgiveness is not always easy. Rachel Carson describes dwelling among the beauties and mysteries of life as life’s supreme reward. Harlan Hubbard, devoting his life to living simply in nature, reflects on how easy it is to lose touch with that love through some trivial distraction of day-to-day life. We are all distracted by the trivial, the superfluous, the petty. We are all distracted by the things that, in the end, don’t matter.
The Lord works in mysterious ways – Whomever or whatever the Lord is. To Einstein and Thomas Berry and Ray Bradbury the Lord is a vast sea of energy, a sea in which, of which, we are a drop. Our separateness is an illusion, a delusion. “To see birds,” as John Burroughs says, “we must have birds in our heart.” To see life, we must have life in our heart. Helen Keller, sightless, unable to hear, finds her way to an Enchanted Wood where foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, where life and death are one.
“The universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts,” said Ray Bradbury. We exist as a brief spark between two eternities. Living in that realization, incorporating it into how we think, how we live, is a challenge worthy of the gift of life.
A New Heron Dance Book:
Meditations on Gratitude, Beauty and Mystery: Gratitude as a philosophy of life and as a spiritual practice.
Visit here for more information and to order.
A mockup of the first two pages of the new book, Meditations on Gratitude, Beauty and Mystery. It is available now as a PDF, and in the next few days as a hardcover.
A mockup of the first two pages of the new book, Meditations on Gratitude, Beauty and Mystery. It is available now as a PDF, and in the next few days as a hardcover.
A mockup of two pages of the new book, Meditations on Gratitude, Beauty and Mystery.
Front cover, The Pausing For Beauty Poetry Diary. PDF and Softcover (Lay Flat, wire-o binding) versions available. Visit here.
Two interior pages, The Pausing For Beauty Poetry Diary. PDF and Softcover (Lay Flat, wire-o binding) versions available. Visit here.
Below, two sample pages from my recent art journal, and the related diary/planner
Nurturing The Song Within
There are a few copies of the first edition (hardcover, dust jacket, premium art paper) still available. After they are sold out, we don’t plan to republish, at least in that format.