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An invitation to gratitude
The following is the eighth part of a 12 part series based on the book 12 Tiny Things: Simple Ways to Live a More Intentional Life. We’re focusing on the 12 themes outlined in the book: Space, Work, Spirituality, Food, Style, Home, Sensuality, Nature, Creativity, Communication, Learning, and Community. Each offering includes a new reflection or early draft or deleted scene from the book along with a worksheet and [sometimes] an audio component to help you delve more fully into the theme in your own life. I used to make these for paid subscribers only, but now they are completely free.
This week our theme is HOME. A broad topic, and one that can go in all sorts of directions. Home is word that can mean comfort and peace, bringing about a sense of safety and belonging. But it’s also a word that can point to chaos and heartache, depending on the life situation you were born into, what generational trauma might be present in your family, and all sorts of other things that influence how we interact with the concept of “home”.
The following is a blog post I wrote in 2017 while I was visiting my childhood home. Parts of it were eventually adapted for the chapter in 12 Tiny Things, and I think a few sentences may even show up in Collisions of Earth and Sky when I talk about ‘going home’ at one point, so I thought I’d share the original.1 Sometimes it’s interesting to see how writing evolves with a project[s]; where various sentences and ideas end up.
I also got to thinking about the concept of finding a sense of home after an event earlier this week promoting Stories from the Trail with my fellow writers Krissy Kludt and
—some of our dialogue was about what it means to feel at home in a place, which always gets me thinking about the place that I first called home.
A trip to South Dakota. Coming home, here, to the prairie, a place where I go when I don’t know what else to do; where I go when I need to reset and reclaim my center. A place to be absorbed back into the land that taught me how to be alive, how to pay attention, how to see beauty in the ordinary, in the fleeting. Somehow it’s a place of enchantment and magic, even as the population and sprawl grows, as I get older, as the trees get bigger but also fall, as fences and houses go up where I used to roam free. Under all of that remains the hummus of my youth. I may never live here permanently again, yet part of me will always be found here on this prairie hillside.
I’m looking at the rough wood on the walls of the living room — the walls my father and mother put up themselves. These walls have been witness to the cultivation of a way of life. They have weathered years of kids and mud and soccer balls and vegetables flying. The spiral staircase that winds above my head connects pieces of a house built by hand and reminds me that connection is important, even when no one wants to talk. Even when I don’t want to talk, which is more often than I think it should be. In the words not spoken I can feel the deep roots that will always tie me to this place — the deep root systems of prairie grass that you can’t see above ground, the ones that form a vast web beneath the surface. The roots that hold the soil in place.
We walk out back, pulling Eva on a sled, into the corn field behind the property line and then down to the low point on the east side of the gardens. I remember the thrill of discovering a new stream during the spring melt, the satisfaction of creating a child-size dwelling in the shelter belt, and the surprise of finding my strength by running in the pasture beyond the neighbor’s corn field. I feel my roots take in nourishment and replenish. I feel myself remembering what’s real, my imagination for all that is possible moving to the front of my awareness. I sense possibility emerging again. It’s fleeting. But it’s there.
All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up by other people. -Ursula K. Le Guin
Perhaps it’s the open space, the wide view; the emptiness of the prairie that taught me to imagine. No one can tell the prairie what to do, or how to be. Even though we try, we can never fill it up completely with our stuff, our economy, our progress. The open space, the wide blue sky, the endless sea of grass — these things leave room for possibility, for things to happen. For the imagined to take on a new life, as if it were riding on the back of a prairie wind.
The invitation in the HOME chapter of 12 Tiny Things is to gratitude, which I don’t touch on directly in that piece, but as we write in the book, ‘to practice gratitude is to embody a sense of home.’ To practice gratitude to to invite possibility. Going to my first ever home always reminds me to be grateful for what is already good, a concept that I’ve written about at length (as you may have noticed if you’ve been around here for awhile). But it’s a concept worth repeating.
Grief and lament have their place in the world, especially now. They are necessary. Yet so is giving thanks, when thanks can be given.
Elie Wiesel wrote, “When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.”
It can be tempting, in the face of loss, to look for silver linings or to say, “just focus on what you still have.” But as Megan Devine says, “Gratitude is not the tylenol of life.” Practicing gratitude doesn’t change what’s wrong. Gratitude doesn’t mean burying unwanted feelings or looking for the silver lining in the midst of a bad situation—gratitude means acknowledging what is still good even alongside the mess. You can experience grief, or anger, or overwhelm even while you are grateful for the good things that remain.2
A seed is a tiny thing that can always be planted, even when weather conditions seem tenuous, the soil is rocky, and the length of the growing season unknown. It’s been said that to plant a seed is to believe in tomorrow. I believe in tomorrow. So I’m going to keep planting seeds, even if they are just seeds of hope. And I’m going to keep being astonished by what happens as a result.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote, “To have the seed means to have the key to life.” To practice gratitude3 means to hold the key to being able to be home, no matter where you are.
The audio above is a poem called “The Wildest Kind of Love (Even in a year like this)” found in Slouching Toward Radiance.
So, all this to say, may you find a sense of home, an embodied gratitude for life, wherever you are, no matter what happens next.
Here’s a downloadable worksheet to deepen your sense of embodied gratitude:
I’m not going to edit it, which is very challenging to do since I wrote this seven years ago. Even as I write this footnote, I’m thinking, “but maybe I should just rewrite the whole thing” but that defeats the concept of sharing the original.
Parts of this section are in a chapter called Activating Hope through Grief and Gratitude in Collisions of Earth and Sky.
Please note “practicing gratitude” doesn’t mean you have to be good at it, or keep a detailed gratitude journal, or become a silver lining person. There’s room for all sorts of other emotions right alongside gratitude, and sometimes gratitude shows up in unexpected ways if you’re open to thinking creatively about a situation. Lately I just make a point to look for the glimmers, and try again tomorrow.