To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks

~ Live & Learn

blue-sky-palm-trees-clouds

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 across the table, of a son’s outline against the mountains, 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 even stranger inner lives beneath calm 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 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 strange 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 and fully beholds all other presences. Being unappreciative, feeling distant, might mean we are simply not paying attention.

~ David Whyte, from “Gratitude” in Consolation: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

 

Notes: Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo: Ethnoscape via Blue in My World

17 thoughts on “To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks”

  2. He managed to make me feel so big and glorious, yet so small and insignificant. But by the end equilibrium was achieved.

    Especially loved “to inhabit many worlds at once in this world.”

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  5. Love this DK. I sat at the dinner table this afternoon, trying to freeze everyone’s face in my mind, the smiles, the laughter, the moments that I will harvest from my memory in the months and years to come. So. Very. Precious……

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    1. Yes Lori, it is precious. Your comment reminds me of a post on consciousness that I read earlier today:

      Parks: So we might say that consciousness is the word we use to refer to the fact that rather than just physiological activity, mute like any other physical event—the sky in the morning, a cloud crossing the sun—we have experience, we have a feeling of that event?

      Manzotti: Exactly. Instead of a world where we merely interact with external occurrences—the way a flower opens in the sun, or water freezes in the cold—we also have experience of the occurrence, the sun, the icy weather, and so on. This addition of experience (or in future we may want to suggest that experience and occurrence are one!) would be puzzling enough in itself. But it is even more puzzling that experience is usually described as experience of something else, of something that is not me. I experience a red apple. You experience a piece of music. Ruth experiences a landscape. How is this possible since, if we leave aside quantum mechanics (for the moment), our traditional view of nature tells us that an object is what it is and nothing more? William James put this very clearly when he asked, How can the room I am sitting in be simultaneously out there and, as it were, inside my head, my experience? We still have no answer to that question.

      http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/21/challenge-of-defining-consciousness/

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  6. I want to get to a point in my life where this is my everyday, not just a single holiday or unique circumstance. To be overwhelmed by gratitude-in some cases bittersweet perhaps, in others without anything but awe

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    1. Me too Mimi. I am finding that there has been an uptick in more if these moments every day. I pause to reflect and say: there’s one. And they seem to come more frequently. So of like Woolf’s:

      “I belong to quick, futile moments of intense feeling. Yes, I belong to moments…”

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  7. He had me at the very first line. All is miracle. And yes, to live in this space more fully every day – as several have already said – is my personal mission. I loved this, DK. Thanks so much.

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