Day 28 of a daily gratitude practice: On hunger

We are hungry.

We are blessed with abundance, yet we hunger.

Gratitude for fishing in winter on the West Coast. (Hadi Dadashian photo)

We hunger for peace of mind, and peace in our time.

We are blessed with plenty, yet we want to be empty.

We are so grateful for the people who saved our lives, who risked everything to rescue us, that we are always hungry to do more to help them.

We are especially grateful, every moment, for the people in our circle of love, who kept us — keep us still — from the abyss.  They have withstood such pain, just to protect us with that love.  Our gratitude knows no end for their patience and understanding and remarkable kindness.

We are blessed with good health, yet we are surrounded by so much injury and illness, we want to do more to soothe wounds, whether psychological, physical or spiritual — or, in the case of many wounded warriors, sadly, all three.

Our gratitude is boundless and we are setting out to discover the bounds of our energy.

When you read this today, and think of a daily gratitude practice, know this.

It will transform your life.

You will, as Carl Jung advised, learn to break down your life (ego) rather than building it up.

At the end of this 28-day exercise, we hope you are learning the transformative power of gratitude too.

We are filled with gratitude, and hope you can find your way to that fullness too.

Please spread gratitude today, however empty or full you are feeling.

The world around you hungers for it.

With gratitude, always, to the American men and women in uniform (scrubs too!) who saved our lives on March 4, 2002.  If you share our gratitude, please thank someone in the military today.  And/or donate to the Wounded Warrior Project, or any non-profit that helps military families.

Day 25, gratitude practice: Staying the course among the ungrateful

Gratitude is a state of mind, a state of peace.

Grateful for California redwoods, during the rainy season. (Hadi Dadashian photo)

Peace of mind.

So, we’re not surprised when encountering people so negative about their world that they can’t see any reason to be grateful — or express it.

We’re always grateful, finding something to appreciate even in the worst of times.  Gratitude in the best of times is easy; staying the course among the ungrateful is more difficult.

Yet gratitude is in us, around us, and lifts us.  There is nothing so bad we can’t find good in it (most of the time), or, perhaps, in spite of it.

Ah, love and joy.

May your life be full of both today.

Day 22 of a gratitude practice: Babies and more babies

We are waiting for a special baby, yet we are surrounded by babies.

planet gratitude©

Work on a military base, live in a military community, and you’ll meet more babies — from Africa to Asia to America — than you ever have before.

We greet new parents (they’re conspicuous by boundless joy) on our daily walks, at the office, and in the neighborhood.

Most parents are happy to let you coo — we don’t try to touch.  We ask if the little one is their first, and s/he almost always is.  Again, with the conspicuous joy.

We always thank new parents, and they get it.  This stranger is the future of our community, our country, our planet.

We’re sending a silent message that we appreciate loving parents taking care to keep their babies healthy and safe.  We always thank the parents for sharing their joy with us, strangers delighted by families.

There are so many babies in our military community that people joke there must be something in the water.  It seems to us that the parents grow younger …

We’re waiting for a special baby in our family, the first great-grandchild in the three continents where our relatives live.

We’re grateful for this sweet anticipation.

TOMORROW:  Public service and being overcome by gratitude

Gratitude practice needs some quiet: Day 10

Yes, we shout out our gratitudes to the wind, to the world.

And yes, we trade gratitudes back and forth, as a couple, in loving moments, and more practical, how-was-your-day? pauses at day’s end.

Peace and quiet, at days’ end.  (Hadi Dadashian photo)

But every gratitude practice requires quiet.

Call it meditation, prayer, or mindfulness, it’s just listening to your heart with intention.

I AM grateful for every breath.  WE are grateful for every breath.

Our yoga instructor tells us to consider our in-breaths and out-breaths like the surf.

Imagine the ocean, she says … we always do, in every season, in any weather (including the snow-turned-rain of these last few days).  We’re committed kayakers, beach walkers … tonight, we are just imagining the Pacific. 

We are imagining the ocean on turquoise yoga mats, grateful for the freedom to slow and just breathe.

We are grateful for every breath, and every gentle twist and turn and posture designed to let the stress of the day out, while breathing in peacefulness.

We are grateful for peace, for the peace of this moment, and peace in our lives.  (Other times, we are stung with sorrow about war, about the wounds of war, about the families who suffer from war …)

We are thankful for this space in our lives, for the freedom to quiet, to be quiet, to listen to our hearts beat in this silence.

I am your heart, I say to my partner.  You are mine, he says.

I plant my hand on his chest, and ask him to take good care of my heart.

We guard these hearts fiercely, in good health and gratitude, and always, deep love.

 

Gratitude practice, Day 7: Sharing and more sharing

What is gratitude if it’s solo?

Thankful for fan palms in winter, South Puget Sound, WA. (Hadi Dadashian photo)

What is thankfulness, the full appreciation of life, if not shared?

Our gratitude practice started with private, we-will-survive-this moments.

It grew to embrace all those we love … our thankfulness for those who stood by us/behind us/with us, through the worst.

And then, it blossomed to embrace everyone we met.

Gratitude is meant to be shared.

We share it every day, with each other.  We share gratitude with those we love.

And we share our thankfulness with everyone … the mailman, Starbucks baristas, co-workers, the hardware store clerk, our pastor and church congregation, artists, fellow photographers, community volunteers, musicians … people who enrich our lives, and those whose daily toil allows us the freedom to do the things we enjoy.

It’s nothing, truly, to thank someone.

Yet we’ve noticed that gratitude is almost — should we say it aloud? — dead.

In our increasingly crude and rude culture, saying ‘thanks’ is heard less and less.

So we say ‘thank you’ more than ever.

Gratitude is the foundation of our second-chance at life, so we try not to miss an opportunity to give thanks, say thanks, offer thanks.

It is such a simple way to appreciate life, and others.

Love, play, thanks: Heart of a gratitude practice, Day 6

Persian girls and women who love poetry — love poets — open the works of Hafiz and point.

This is a game of affection for another, or others.  (The poem-finding game is often played at girls-only parties.  Sometimes, a Persian woman will ask a man she likes to open a book of Hafiz poems and then she’ll point and read, hoping the lines are romantic.)

Pacific Ocean, Oregon beach — one of our favorite places to play. (Hadi Dadashian photo)

The poem your finger seeks is the ones whose words will, invariably, fit the recipient.

And the moment.

Consider this:  We’re happy-happy-happy this very second for many reasons, so open our well-worn book of Hafiz.

These are the lines we found:

“God wants to see

More love and playfulness in your eyes

For that is your greatest witness to Him.”

It doesn’t matter what religion was claimed by Hafiz, known to his mother as Sham-ud-din Muhammad.

He was a Sufi master, who lived 1320-1389, about the same time as Chaucer in England, to give some perspective to his poetry and gentle wit.

When Hafiz writes about God, he writes playfully and with such love, that one can imagine all the faiths of the world uniting to sing gratitudes.

We’re grateful for Hafiz in our home, and in our daily gratitude practice.

We’re grateful for his example of monastic-stye life yet words of incredible, simple beauty and power.

Play and love and give thanks.

Simple.

With gratitude to Daniel Ladinsky, for his wonderful translation of The Gift, a collection of Hafiz poems we read and read and read.

Gratitude grows to a roar: Day 4

Our gratitudes began silently, then became a ritual of love, a couple’s own private hallelujah.

At the end of each day, we ask each other, “What made you grateful today?”  Sometimes, the answer is a whisper.

This is an especially brilliant way to end a bad day — tap your inner gratitude, and all the stress of the day melts.

There are days we shout our gratitudes.

On a sunny day, Mt. Rainier looks like melting ice cream. (Hadi Dadashian photo)

Yesterday, Mt. Rainier teased us with only a partial showing, revealing her middle third.

“Thank you-thank you-thank you!”

Our gratitude can be contagious.  We were shouting in the car on the 30-minute commute home, because Rainier was just simply glorious.

Life in the Pacific Northwest is just that, all blues and greens and the startling white of mountains all ’round.

“Like melting ice cream,” the resident photographer said, being caught without a camera again.

We couldn’t have captured that late afternoon light from our vantage point — rush hour traffic — anyway.

We were just grateful, after shouting, to sit in gratitude and watch “our” mountain slip away in the rear view mirror.

Whenever we use the word, we’re grateful to Leonard Cohen for his haunting song, “Hallelujah.”

Guide to a gratitude practice: Day 2

At the root of any gratitude practice is one word:  Love.

That is all there is, all there ever was, and, we trust, all there will ever be.

Does it matter how one defines love to make it the foundation of a daily gratitude practice?

We don’t believe so.

Family enjoying the Pacific Ocean, in La Jolla, CA. (Hadi Dadashian photo)

We have been blessed to live in love all our lives (combined 111 years), in two different cultures on two continents, separated by the Atlantic Ocean.

This began with familial love:  We were blessedly secure in our knowledge, from infancy, that we were cherished.

We know many children who don’t have that.  It breaks our hearts.

We knew, from a young age, that we lived in God’s love, and that we were love because of this.  We didn’t question whether “our” God was better than someone else’s God.  The way we were raised, there was/is/always will be just one God, however one defines Her/Him/the Creator.

We know far too many people who don’t believe that, including people who tried to kill us.

We are grateful for the conversation.  Living in love makes you deeply grateful for the community of like-minded people, yet it also allows you to be more open to others whose worldview is far different.  We have learned, in these combined 111 years, to love others far different than ourselves — indeed, they appear to be the exact opposite.

Living in love, in daily gratitude, opens your heart as well as your mind.

Begin your daily gratitudes with love — love for oneself, love for those close to you, love for others, and love for your Creator or all nature.

Begin and end your daily practice with these love gratitudes, and we’re certain you’ll notice your heart growing.

Day 3:  What are gratitudes?

How to start a gratitude practice: One small thing

There are two questions we’ve been asked since we began writing about gratitude several years ago:  “How do I start a gratitude practice? Where did you start?”

planet gratitude©

The answer is the same for both:  One small thing.

When Kathleen was recovering in a Canadian hospital after a terrorist attack, she was heavily medicated for pain, and shielded from any outside contact.

This created more hopelessness than needed.

Immobile in a hospital bed — always with more questions than answers — we found solace in each other’s company, and the day-long comfort of family and one close friend.

(Security was so tight, only one beloved friend was ever allowed near Kathleen’s room.)

But when Kathleen was alone in her “private” room, the drugs helped fuel a new sensation — panic.

(What if I never walk again? What if I don’t get out of this hospital? What if I never work again? … all those tiresome, non-stop ‘what ifs’ …)

To counter this, we fixed on one object in the room that she could hold on to when all her loved ones departed in the evening.

Light.

Kathleen rarely slept at night in any of the hospitals where she had surgery.  So fixing on a light outside her hospital room was soothing, just like a night light for a small child.  (Spend much time in a hospital bed, and you’ll appreciate this.)

When daylight arrived, she slept soundly.

As the weeks wore on, and Kathleen was still unable to move, she trained herself to focus — through the heavy fog of pain medication — on a small window away from her bed.  It wasn’t close enough to allow a glimpse of scenery, but it did offer something no hospital room can offer.

Natural light — sunshine, in fact, on some days in rainy Vancouver.

So we giggled a little about this this seemingly ridiculous notion of seizing on a patch of blue sky through glass.

Yet this daily practice of calming oneself — and each other — by gazing at a little square of light, grew into meditation and prayer and, finally, gratitude.

We will be grateful today for light.

We are ever-grateful to be together.

We are grateful this moment for light.

We are blessed by light.

We are light.

TOMORROW:  A daily gratitude practice guide.

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr.

planet gratitude©

We like the slogan “Day ON!” rather than day off for Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday.

We’ve planned a day of personal service to honor Dr. King, so here’s an inspiring song to start this blessed, long weekend:  O Magnum Mysterium, sung by the University of Johannesburg Choir.  Conductor Renette Bouwer brings a gentle touch to this sacred music.

Listen for more than a dozen Alleluias … and think about Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of peace, justice, and reconciliation.

And love.  Always love.

With gratitude to our favorite Swiss composer, Ivo Antognini.