To see the full, miraculous essentiality of the colour blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks.
“I had the honor of meeting and working with David Whyte, creating the video for his essay, GRATITUDE. The essay was the perfect choice for me as I believe that gratitude is the key to life. Thank you, David for sharing your gift with all of us.” — Robin Layton.
GRATITUDE
is not a passive response to something we have been given; gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event; it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we under- stand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.
Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege, that we are miraculously part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the colour blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.
To see the full, miraculous essentiality of the colour blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully the beauty of a daughter’s face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participant and witness all at once.
Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness.We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort; this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.
Thank you! This is so resonant with much going on for me these days.
Looking up at the sky before sunset a couple nights ago, I wrote what follows. It is not haiku because count is all 7s but it was a beautiful moment I wanted to honor- a verbal snap when the camera would not do:
Turquoise blue sky at sunset
Lush reds, orange, golds and green glow
As evening shifts to night
Looking west at the mountains,
Light still shining on the bay,
I am happy to be home
KNJ
7/15/33
Often your spoken words calm my mind and guide me towards less doing and more being... and from time to time present me with a new face whose soul my own has known for a thousand years.
Blessings to all.