Which Comes First: Gratitude or Gift?

In chapter 5 of God in the Yard, I admit that lists didn't change me. I feel alone in saying this, seeing the popularity of the gratitude list. But I'm being honest. And of course it doesn't mean someone else couldn't find change this way.

Today I'm particularly struck by the Lewis Hyde quotes in this chapter:

...with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again...

and

Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude.

So gratitude seems to be almost an ache, one that moves us to give what we've been given, after the gift has wrought some kind of work in us.

I do not think the receiving or the giving is simple. So much depends on our openness. Our openness depends on healing, or maybe courage. The giving and receiving seem not to be one-time experiences either. For instance, it occurs to me that the subject of beauty has been recurring in my life over time.

A few years ago I discovered someone whose life work with the poor is based on theories of beauty— manifested in pottery, jazz, and growing orchids. How unusual. It gained my attention. About a year later I was asked to speak on beauty at Jubilee Professional. This request perplexed me. What did I know of beauty, to be pinpointed as someone who had anything to say about it?

Since that time, the subject has been coming 'round again. When did it become a gift? Have I come up to its level? Is the process of receiving even near over? Yet I've begun to feel the intense need to consciously give beauty away.

Which is to say that gratitude seems to me to be a complex experience rooted in gifts. And gifts are not something we can necessarily engineer in our favor. They are given through time, in pieces, and in unexpected places.

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Andrea has blogged on Chapter 2.

Early Thanksgiving

Trudging through fallen leaves, we rounded the corner and there they were. Cherries. Or something that looked like cherries.

The tree was hung with them. So full.

And all we could do was stand still, in the cool air, on a grey day, and stare.


The Thanksgiving Tree, in soft pastels, by L.L. Barkat

For

I met her on-line. Why should I be surprised? It's a gathering place where I've found such amazing people.

We did the social media dance (following, friending, linking) and one day I discovered she lives on my ocean side. Not just that, but she lives on my mountain, crosses my river. She has seen my cliffs perhaps as many times as I have, maybe more.

It only seemed fitting to have her to tea. So she came. Joan P. Ball graced my dining room. We ate scones. I drank green tea; she drank Harrod's Afternoon Blend. I ate chocolate. I don't remember if she did. Time raced. She slipped on her funky leather high-heeled sandals and was gone...

But not before giving me a piece of art made by her husband Martin. Black on wood, with a path that speaks of "Journey."

"I thought," she said. "The path. Your art pilgrimage. It seemed..."

It was.

Before she closed the door, we also spoke of gratitude. I told her how I'd "failed" at practicing it and instead had received it as a gift during my year of outdoor solitude. She said she thought "failing" at gratitude practice might be not an ending but a beginning, something to turn over in one's palm perhaps... to examine and handle afresh. Yes, perhaps.

I pondered this and decided I will not go back to gratitude lists— cold lines that took me nowhere. I will write "for" poems (as in, thankful for). I don't know how often. But here is the first...

"Today"

For life yet again,
and girls with long dark
hair

For you, sleeping there,
pulling me close in
dreams

For poetry that calls
to life beyond what
seems

to be. For me loved
by You. I should embrace
the blue.

Journey Art, by Martin. A gift from Joan P. Ball.

Writing Towards Debt

Sometimes I wonder if my writing-life means anything significant, if it's okay that I want to do this, indeed that I DO it on a regular basis. It can feel selfish, this tucking away, this departure from daily tasks and other people to put words down, to set them like goblets, silver, china on a table that— at least temporarily— only I see, feel the wood and smell the fragrance of it.

Then (thank God... or thank you, God) I read something like this from John Leax's Grace is Where I Live...

...I find myself wondering how to pay that debt of gratitude I felt and feel for my life. I think I must begin where I am— sitting in my garden study— setting down these words.... I offer in thanksgiving and praise these nouns: painted lady, red admiral, tiger swallowtail, mourning cloak, cabbage white, monarch.