THANKSGIVING

I have a good husband who takes me dancing, and says things to me like, I don’t love you for what you do. He says, We notice when you clean, we don’t notice when you don’t. He kisses me deep, buys the groceries and irons his own shirts.

I have healthy, alive children who don’t stay in their beds, who draw on mirrors and have fights and laugh, and wrap their arms around me every day. They make me coffee, remind me to buy dish soap and say things to me like, You are more special than Minecraft.

I have a room all my own, just for writing. It has a window to the sky and a door that locks. It has a closet filled with good memories and with things I like to hide. It is a serious luxury, and I am all the appropriate amounts of grateful.

I am blessed – bountifully blessed.

I think of friends who squeeze all their family into two rooms, and who don’t have a yard. I think of friends who can’t choose what they want because they are one, not two – so they choose juggle and provide and not sleep. I think of friends whose husbands push them into walls, and of friends who have kissed their babies and tasted gone.

I am blessed – bountifully blessed.

Why is gratitude so hard to remember? It is so easy to stop and list blessings – to think of things like soap and water, light and heat, pen and paper, kindness and acceptance, space, time – and to know that these things are wealth beyond measure. A fly lands on my child’s face and nobody ever thinks, Take a picture. This is blessing. This is abundance. There is never ingratitude for this. But blessings carry weight of their own and, when your hands are full, sometimes you long to just take some things for granted.

I don’t think it is any kind of accident that the Hebrew word for Spirit is the same word that is used for wind and for the exhaling of breath. The invisible, moving force that surrounds us, that fills us, that sustains our lives, that breathes into us and blows out of us without thought, while we are asleep, without ever once asking for grateful – this is the way of God. God is everywhere – in all things, around all things. In God we live and move and have our being. God does not have ego, that we are required to see or know or say, Thank you.

I remind myself that a grateful heart is not for God’s benefit, but for mine. I give thanks to God so that I do not ever lose sight of what matters – what I have, not what I have not. I give thanks to God so that I can drink from the wellspring of peace and contentment – because nothing in the world poisons like ungrateful. I give thanks to God because it reminds me that precious things have been entrusted to me, that they are not mine, and that I must remember to share them and to treat them with care. I give thanks to Spirit so that I can remember to hold joy and pain loosely, with open hands, knowing that for life to sustain there must be breath – that the force of all things that live requires both ebb and flow.