Happy Thanksgiving everybody! As we come to a close of this month’s blog theme, I wanted to write up a collection of short poems/prose about gratitude, and the thing that makes gratitude possible – Giving. We may only celebrate Thanksgiving once a year, but cultivating feelings of gratitude and giving on a daily basis helps us shift into a life-time of peace, love, and joy.
The first is a short meditation you can read to yourself when you have a few minutes to spend in quiet awareness.
If this particular meditative poem doesn’t quite resonate with you, then I invite you to spend a few minutes every day this week (and continue as long as you can) to really contemplate that which you feel gratitude for. It can be gratitude for the big things that have happened in your life – a marriage, a promotion, or a new home. It can be the small things like the taste of a warm cup of coffee in the morning, the breath in your lungs, a hug you really needed. It can be a more challenging endeavor if you can feel gratitude for the things that don’t look like gifts on the outside – a failed romance, a lost job, or an illness. Cultivating gratitude for things such as these can help you truly accept that these are not curses – they are opportunities if you only open yourself to them and surrender to the moment. Yes even when it feels like you are drowning in a puddle of mud and you can’t see the silver lining – it is possible, you can move forward.
Now, we know that gratitude isn’t possible without the act of giving, and Thanksgiving is just as much about giving as it is gratitude. I believe in my heart that those of us that are in a position of being able to give, have moral obligation to. But it’s not just about moral obligation either, true giving that is done from the heart creates love and joy for both the giver and the receiver. To me, it is truly a beautiful exchange. Giving can be anything, there is no right thing to give, or right way to give. It can be in the act of giving money to charity, volunteering for community service. It can be more in the abstract like giving someone the benefit of the doubt, giving forgiveness, or giving someone that second chance they may be desperate for.
I want to close with some final thoughts from a favorite poet of min, Khalil Gibran, taken from his timeless classic “The Prophet”
On Giving…
“It is well to give when asked, but it is better to give unasked, through understanding; And to the open-handed the search for one who shall receive is joy greater than giving. And is there aught you would withhold?
All you have shall some day be given; Therefore give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors’.
You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.” The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture. They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish. Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights, is worthy of all else from you. And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream. And what desert greater shall there be, than that which lies in the courage and the confidence, nay the charity, of receiving? And who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you may see their worth naked and their pride unabashed?
See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and an instrument of giving. For in truth it is life that gives unto life while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness.”
