Can Gratitude Grow on Granite? Gratitude Lists as a Lifehack
Photo by author.
“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”
From Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Last paragraph in ‘The Consolation of Water Lilies:’
The first time I experienced the ‘magic’ of gratitude was after Michael, my best friend and husband of twenty-five years, died of a heart attack. I called a wise friend and for twenty minutes did all the talking. I’d spent a lot of time crying and raging on my bed and in my journal, but still felt swaddled in maddening numbness.
She listened. Finally, I asked, “Can you think of anything that might help me feel better?”
She said, “I don’t know if it fits for you right now, but one of the things that helps me through tough times is making a gratitude list.”
Gratitude lists weren’t a new concept for me. I got petulant. “How many things do I have to list?”
She laughed. “I’m not telling you to make a list. I’m just saying it helps me sometimes. If you do make one, I like the number five.”
And so, less than two months after we lost Michael, I pulled out my journal and made this list:
1. Oxygen to breathe--although I wish Mike was still sharing it with me.
2. And 3. Joe our precious boy and Celin our precious girl--wish Mike was still sharing them with me.
4. That Mike and I had twenty-five years together--although I expected another 25!
5. Friends (I listed ten by name) --missing my very best friend, Mike! and all the kind people carrying Joe, Celin, and me in their thoughts
6. My family and Mike’s family (so many to list!) who continue to check in and share our loss.
7. Mantis, the dog, and Matrix, the cat
8. Our home
9. Chapel Lake
10. The long light in summer
11. The hope of hearing the bittern in the swamp (it’s call sounds like a bilge pump and makes me laugh)
And I wish you were here, Michael, sharing all of this with me. Sweet dreams! I’ll leak a few tears and then count some more blessings before I look for you in my dreams.
When I started the list I thought, FIVE things? How am I going to find that many things to be grateful for right now? At that moment, my life felt cold and hard as granite. We have a lot of bare-naked rock here in northeastern Minnesota. The last glacier left here just ten thousand years ago. It plowed soil and softer rock south to Iowa. Dirt takes a long time to form from gravel ground to sand, airborne dust, and rotting vegetation. Shorelines, ridgetops, and wherever you want to sink a shovel are flowing lava solidified into unyielding rock—we call it ledge rock. Some of it is greenstone, some granite, but it’s a shield of rock—part of the Precambrian Shield.
But where thin soils have gathered over the rock, there are trees. Zillions of them. From towering white and red pines to scruffy little red oaks, they crowd the place. And underneath them, there are flowers, shrubs, and ground cover. Enough variety to challenge the most determined naturalist. Add all the water cupped in the rock and the mix of water and soil in bogs and swamps and there is an explosion of life. Birds, animals, and bugs love the place. Some even endure the nine-months long, bitterly cold winters. Life won’t be stopped. The thinnest soil supports it. Lichen and mosses even embrace the rock itself.
And in those places where life is thinnest and hardest, gratitude can gain a toehold. Life won’t be stopped there either, even though we are sometimes astounded that it hasn’t. David Steindl Rast says that joy is happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens. He argues that it’s not happiness that makes you grateful. It’s being grateful that makes you happy. Check out his TED talk and an On Being interview he did. He says we can’t be grateful for everything (violence, war, loss of friends) and yet we can be grateful in every moment.
The next night, after making the eleven-item gratitude list, I wrote:
Just a sliver of gratitude becomes a slender crescent moon rolling back the edges of a fat, black cloud bank with deft fingers and palms of light. I hear the reassuring murmur of Momma God playing peek-a-boo with her toddler.
When I made my list, I didn’t know that physiological changes happen in our bodies when we channel our thoughts toward gratitude. Some people make gratitude lists a formal practice. For me, it’s more an organic part of journaling. I do plenty of whining in my journals, but when that gets boring, I turn my thoughts to blessings.
Alphabetical gratitude lists are one of my sleep aids, too. At two a.m. my mind becomes a loud, sports bar-sized flat screen, reliving old resentments, imagining new ones. Horizontal drama. My amygdala has taken over the mind remote and is playing angry documentaries. Sleep, meditation, and peace are jumping the next flight for Australia. I grab for the remote with any letter of the alphabet: “Thank you, God for. . . G: well You of course, gratitude, granite, gardens, gates (hm, really? openings in fences? OK), greenstone. Beck, you only need three things per letter. H: hell (not!), um heaven?, healing, heights, helium, heroes, hugs, handkerchiefs (they remind me of Dad), hair (even if it is gray). . .home” Sometimes a word will send my mind off on another spin, and wind up blaring more wide-screen anger. But when I circle back to the alphabet, my breathing deepens, the Australia flight is cancelled, and peace and sleep step softly into the room. The gratitude alphabet is meditation for me. It clicks off the Power button.
I shaped the journal for my first year as a widow into a manuscript, Sweet Dreams, Michael: A Verdant Grief. Gratitude cropped up over and over in my scribblings. Of course, it’s not all gratitude. This was a hard year. There are frequent references to how hard it is to breath when your nose is full of snot from crying. Other things helped me. At the time, I didn’t know they were called resilience practices. Spending time in nature, friends, finding something I could do for others. Often, giving myself time and space to wail seemed to make room for gratitude and joy so that both are in the same entry.
Here are a few more excerpts:
There is a path I can feel with my feet even though I am walking in complete darkness. My eyes, once adjusted to being led by my heart instead of the other way around, can see others’ pain. I know that I am not alone--and that daylight, when it comes, is to be celebrated because it is precious.
*****
Somehow, grief informs my joy. I really hate and resist FEELING my rage and despair, giving into crying, screaming, talking or writing--doing the work of grief (and DAMN, it is WORK!)—and then, bloop, like being born, I come out the other end stronger and with a greater capacity for JOY. I can’t explain it.
Now sometimes when my own expectation is to feel anger, depression, or sorrow, I find myself in a weird space of gratitude. For example, when David, my boyfriend of four years died just a few months after my dad died, a friend called to check up on me.
Last night I said to Peggy, I think a lot of people may be feeling sorry for me right now, but except for brief moments I’m not feeling sorry for myself—I’m feeling this strange gratitude. I could be thinking, ‘Why ME God? Why ME? Do you hate me? Why did you take ANOTHER good man from me?’ Instead, my thoughts are ‘Why me God? Love is such a miracle—that You shared two, three if you count my dad, such good men with me—why?’ I had the honor of witnessing, participating, sharing in their lives. Grateful is not a big enough word.
I don’t want this to sound trite or dramatic either one. I have regrets—regrets that I didn’t just full-on leap into David’s arms. AND I know that I did step up on the stairs and wave him over to me so that I could give him an eyeball-to-eyeball hug every time I left for work or he left the house. He knew I loved him. To wallow in ‘should- couldas’ doesn’t serve either of us right now. It serves only as a source of drama for me.
Our puny human brains can only absorb a tiny amount of truth about God but I know with my soul that there is an ocean of joy and love out there. Out there and in here, if only I can open myself to it and let the flood come in. David, Dad, and Michael are not so far out of reach for me.
Lichen, the most tenacious of granite growers, is a collaboration of algae and fungus. They each bring something to the mix the other couldn’t do without. And in their tenacity, they actually soften the rock, allowing toeholds for other life.
Gratitude grown on granite is a collaboration of life and loss. Neither one is the same without the other. In our tenacity, we offer softer ground to other people. I haven’t lost anyone to COVID 19, but these last few months, almost every list I’ve made (either in writing or in my head) begins with “Thank you, God, for air to breathe. Please ease someone’s pain.” Airborne spread of the disease is witness to our shared oxygen. We humans, all of us, are dependent on this common ventilator, Earth.
This blog at lovewithroots.com is my alphabetical gratitude list for all things rooted in love, including plants, people, and all that sustains them. G is for Gratitude Grown on Granite.
My current favorites among so many great references for gratitude are Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights (essays) and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (poetry).
