Tiny thanks in hard times

a gratitude challenge for readers

I’ll be off next week for the holiday. See you again here on the 29th. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and listen to Ashley Judd’s “wise unknown,” Ted Klontz. It really is a quiet revelation.

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It’s the season of thanksgiving (the only version of this holiday that makes any sense to me) and I’ve been thinking about being grateful in the context of such a broken world. Grandmothers have been taken hostage and thousands of children killed in the Middle East. In my city of Oakland aggravated assault is up 20% and robberies 40%. The planet keeps warming while young people across the world organize and scream for accountability. It’s hard, in the midst of all that, and so much more, to express gratitude.

But I find that if I can “turn to wonder”—as my mentor Parker Palmer says—that there is a wider range of the human condition available to me, and that is endlessly healing. It doesn’t mean denying the gravity of the horror we are facing all over the world, but baring them alongside the miracles and mysteries and beauty and tenderness. So this week, I challenge myself, and you dear reader, to write five tiny gratitudes to buoy you for facing the hard shit. Here are mine:

1. I found my copy of Mary Oliver’s House of Light and it realized it was given to me by my high school newspaper adviser, Vincent Puzick (hey Puz!), who somehow knew that I would need poetry to survive this world. Twenty-five years later and I carry the book with me and I carry his example with me. Teaching is a sacred, eternal force, the power of which is so much bigger than almost anything else I’ve ever witnessed or experienced.

   

2. There is a kid in my kid’s class that I have known since he was 5 years old. I slip a seaweed packet into my daughter’s lunch every single day so she can give it to him and every single time I see him, he gives me a huge hug and says, “Hi Miss Courtney,” with the brightest smile you’ve ever seen on his beautiful face. The love between us isn’t made of that much outside of this little gift economy of seaweed and hugs, but it feels like more than enough in its own quiet way.

3. My dear friend biked over with her son to give us a big bag of guavas from her garden. We gave them some persimmons from out tree to take home. They stayed awhile and we all chatted. Stella challenged us to a hula hooping contest. Miles pulled a bottle of homemade sparkling water out of his bag and swore it was flavored in a very special way. My friend and I—the grown-ups—couldn’t taste anything but sparkling water, but Stella could taste the magic. She was 100% sure of it. She’s like that—always ready to affirm any good soul’s imaginative leap no matter what narrow, silly reality is telling her. May she never change.

   

4. A few of my friends have gotten divorces recently and it has been such a revelation to watch them create their own lives in their own healing ways lately. One friend got a sun porch and a black cat and stocks her fridge with every Italian delight she craves. Another reupholstered a chair on her own, found a bedroom with not one, but two balconies, and sleeps every night with her giant, geriatric dog and her elfin, inquisitive daughter. Partnership is beautiful and so is loving yourself enough to nourish your own dream for your life and never stop.

5. I’m on a text thread with a group of women who all went to a 40th birthday party together. That was many years ago now. We thought the thread would be temporary, or at the very least, a light way to stay connected and reminisce about reading books about menopause in the pool and walking on the beach. Instead it has become a portal into a sacred space where women who are often thriving, and sometimes plunged into the kind of hell it is hard to imagine, show up for one another in surprising and profound ways—little snippets of acapella songs, poetry excerpts, prompts and responses, confessions, prayers. These women, we have a lot in common, but probably not nearly as much as you would think; what we have in common are human hearts and grand capacity to hold pain and hope side-by-side. I never, in a million years, would have predicted what it has taught me.

   

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Okay, so what are yours dear readers? Turns out, sometimes the tiniest of observations deliver the most cosmic of feelings, I learned.