A Time for Thankfulness

A Time for Thankfulness

As we are immersed in the last quarter of 2022 and the Autumn season our attention is drawn to the gifts of the fruitful harvest, the brilliance of the fall colors letting go, reminders of homage for the dead and dying, and preparation for a time of giving and receiving in the spirit of generosity.

Today I sit here in remembrance of all I have been given this year and over time, with humility over the weak, sick friends and family in my life and their struggle; and all the beings whose poverty of wealth have placed them in compromised living situations. My heart beats for all humanity and cries out for healing, harmony, and healthiness. It is with compassionate feelings for all beings and non-beings that I share these writings from CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying by David Whyte :

“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 understand 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 color 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 color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face in the mountains, of a son's outline against the sky, 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 someone’s, 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 participants 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.”

May you all have a blessed Holiday bearing forth connection with family, friends, neighbors and co-workers and those we do not know. Sharing our abundance in whatever way we can is the essence of this special time of year.

In Lovingkindness,

Lhasha

Copyright ? 2022 The Mindfulness Path, All rights reserved.

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