Gratitude 92

I am grateful for each and every waking and sleeping moment.  I love the drama that unfolds every night in the many bizarre and awesome dreams I am treated to, some of which turn out to be premonitory, clairvoyant and otherwise prescient.  I am also grateful for God's gift of the ordinary in every waking moment that I spend on this earth.  I just mentioned to a friend in an email that each moment is full of God, and if we think just a little bit we can see and enjoy the wonderful truth of this. 

I mentioned to one of my clients today that really the beauty that surrounds us is so immense as to be something monstrous.  We live in a universe of wonder.  Even if you happen to be seated at a wooden table, you need only engage in a little bit of connective meditation and you will find yourself wondrously transported  to the forest where that table was once a tree and to see the thrush that built its nest in the branches and the squirrel that scampered up its trunk.

Or you could look out a window and think of the technological marvel that is glass.  A product of the earth, in this case, white quartz, rock reduced to sand then melted down and transformed into great transparent sheets that protect us from the weather while allowing us to see outside.  The glass also protects our senses in a way from getting too overwhelmed by direct contact with the world outside. 

We do need contact with the world outside.  Without that connection we are never truly affirmed of being really human.  But there comes the time to retreat, not completely, but to stay reminded of what's really out there.  The glass protects us from direct contact but we stay connected by sight and in the meantime we can rest and restore our overwhelmed senses.

The beauty that surrounds, and fills, us is indeed something monstrous.  In the Old Testament it is written that no one can see God and live.  The intense power and beauty would reduce us to cinders.  But we can gently touch on the divine reality through our interactions with nature, through treating one another with love, gentleness and courtesy, and by slowly but surely opening our eyes to the beauty and glory that holds it all together.

Think of breathing as a spiritual exercise.  I am not thinking of the Buddha babble of mindfulness.  This is a rather different approach.  Imagine the air pouring down into your lungs and the oxygen being absorbed into your blood which carries those life giving atoms to nourish and energize ever cell of your body.  Now imagine the miracle of air.  Statistically, the chances that this earth would be swaddled by a living blanket of life-giving gases, with this perfect proportion of elements, and just the right proportion of oxygen, are so narrow as to render absolutely impossible that this could have happened by accident.

Even if you don't believe in God, nor in a first cause, nor in a sustaining divine principal, at least give thanks to the highest good you can conceive for the wonder, the miracle, the intolerable, unbearable, exquisite and monstrous beauty that is our earthly existence.