Happy Thanksgiving

a nice message on Thanksgiving and every day in between!

To Walk the Path of Thankfulness

It was during one very painful period of my life that I made the firm choice to walk the path of gratitude. At a time when my suffering had reached the depths, when I felt misunderstood and betrayed by some of those I had trusted to stand by me, I made the seemingly irrational choice to be thankful. In my pain, I had chosen to focus on the awareness of what was good in my life in the present.

Gratitude is an agreement we make with the Unknown. I chose to express my gratitude to the Source of Life. You could say it was an act of faith, but I don’t think I deserve any credit for it.

The only other choice was not to be thankful, to resent the actual conditions of my life and everything that had created those conditions. It was then that I saw that I could be grateful for the pain and what it was telling me. In essence, I was learning to trust something beyond my immediate circumstances, something that restored my sense of peace, strength and openness to life.

Since the time that I chose to walk the path of thankfulness, I have tried to make gratitude my fundamental attitude, living in the present, grateful to the Unseen Mystery. Is that Mystery real? Or is the resentment, dissatisfaction, or self-conscious suffering I would otherwise experience more real?

I have come to trust that if we are patient with difficulty, the Unseen supports us. To express thankfulness is to attract goodness. Gratitude merely smiles at dissatisfaction and disappointment. In any moment we can choose to focus on the disappointments or losses we have experienced, on any number of details in our lives that might seem less than what we might want them to be. Or we can choose, instead, to be thankful for things great and small in the present. Above all, we can be grateful for our relationship with a Mystery that we may not fully comprehend but seems to be more and more present and real.

To be thankful for both abundance and hard times is wisdom, for thankfulness is the panacea that turns pain into happiness. Let’s celebrate Thanksgiving.

– Shaikh Kabir Helminski
Kabir Helminski is Shaikh of the Mevlevi Order, Co-director of The Threshold Society (Sufism.org).

There is one thing... Love

I finished reading Peony in Love by Lisa See today. The last sentence of the author's note at the end of the book got to me...

All women on earth-and men too, for that matter-hope for the kind of love that transforms us, raises us up out of the everyday, and gives us the courage to survive our little deaths: the heartache of unfulfilled dreams, of career
and personal disappointments, of broken love affairs.

I've been reading a lot lately. I started off reading about love and loss or rather losing someone you love and feeling lost. There were ghosts and dreams, strange disappearances and travel to distant places. I would say things took a turn with Murakami's, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, where love is like the brightest sunlight illuminating you wholly as if you were everyday sitting in the bottom of a dark dry well... the sunlight only lasts for a few seconds each day and then maybe it burns so brightly that it takes everything inside of you and replaces it with itself, love. You can't be sure of anything but that. Now I have Yukio Mishima's novel, Spring Snow to read and I am trying to decide between starting it or finishing Anna Karenina, thus continuing on with my education on love. I want to know everything there is to know.

Oh yes, and the photo is Marie-Antoinette's Temple de L'Amour.

Scenes

I watched the seagulls flying in a whirl
sticking close in formation then scattering.
I watched them and I could only think how
I was probably the only person in the world
watching this scene right now...

Polaroid

...We are so close to the water. She takes off her shoes, places them neatly beside her. The dress she is wearing bunches at her thighs as she draws her knees close to her chest. She is quiet and so we sit in silence watching the current rush through the narrows then slowing where the path widens. I close my eyes, and I almost feel alone if it wasn’t for my arm brushing against her arm. I hear her body slide along the gritty rock surface. Squinting my eyes open I see her inching into the water where it settles just above her knees. She gathers folds of fabric, holding the dress to her waist. A small piece of dress escapes her grip and dips into the water. Tiny flowers soak through and turn translucent. When she moves, the wet fabric clings to her thigh leaving tiny flowers imprinted on her skin. She stands still, letting the current influence a slight sway. She stands with her back to me for what seems like a long time. A few strands of hair lift in the breeze. She stands in the water up to her knees like she is standing in a field of gold she has unexpectedly discovered. Shape-shifting light reflects on her skin from the water’s surface, pools of melting precious metal.

Imagined sweet

Until recently I used to eat honeysuckle, or rather I would try to drink the dew. I would pick a honeysuckle blossom from it's vine, bite the small green tip of the flower where it once met the stem. Then I would gently suck the flower searching for that honeysuckle scent. There was never lot to taste, maybe the slightest prick of sweet would alert the tip of my tongue that it had met with something perfectly delicate and new. The sensation was never as real as I wanted it to be. Instead it was small and fleeting. In the end, I decided honeysuckles were better to smell than taste... And actually they are almost always better to imagine than anything. There's a sort of empty feeling though, in the imagining of something so ellusively sweet. I bite the inside of my bottom lip and wait for the feeling to pass. I've given up crushing flower petals against my teeth, but the imagined sweet won't leave me alone.


*photo by jacilluch on flickr

Harvest moon

Some evening skies are yellow
And over my head they’re blue
What happened to the green between
It happened to me too
-vashti bunyan, against the sky

Everything you do disarms me in an alarming way. The last few days of summer are finally stamped out with one puff of breath in the morning air of autumn, which has arrived one week early. Driving home from work yesterday, feeling my body unravel all the tension I've collected through spring and summer just trying to resist the inevitable fall, I realized it's useless... There isn't anything I can do to protect myself from the pure gold sunrise melting over a silvery blue sky. I'm sensitive to the cold, that is to say I am always cold, and the cold has begun, or is beginning. Still there is something radiating, no doubt a warming of my blood from some heady bout of love that always strikes me without warning in these early autumn moments. If this season came to me in human form, I know what it would look like. I would recognize that red leaf anywhere, those green eyes turning amber. My reflection captured forever, right next to the mosquito and the fly. Here we are. The planets have aligned a little early or maybe a little late. I'm not one to judge the passing of time. I just know what I feel. I know you'll split me open with all your perfect sunsets, bruising the flesh of a sky that unconditionally holds you. I know I'll give too much of myself as I always do. I know you'll give me pleasure just by being in your presence. I'll take what you give and I'll grow bold. My cheeks will have the rosy glow of youth. I will be kind to everyone I know. I will seek quiet moments of reflection. I will give thanks every time I breathe. I will be inspired. People will notice and wonder. I will tell them it is all because of you. I will tell them I am in love. Soon plumes of smoke will rise from chimneys. Another batch of leaves will fall to cover last years remnants. Tedious hands stand at the ready to create the tatted lace leaves a new autumn demands. I will warm up to the chill and chatter of black-winged birds just before I am ushered into the unbearable silent cold. Alone again and buried in snow. I'll wake up in December and wonder if you were ever there, if you were ever real, if you meant what you whispered that one night in September when your face rose above me like a harvest moon.

Traveling without moving