A Call to Gratitude

Every day when I go out with my camera I hear

A Call to Gratitude

I look around and see the beautiful sky, blue water of the lakes, and green of the trees, I feel the soft breeze on my skin and the warmth of the sun. How can I help but be grateful?

We are showered every day with the gifts of the Earth, gifts we have neither earned nor paid for: air to breathe, nurturing rain, black soil, berries and honeybees, the tree that became this page, a bag of rice, and the exuberance of a field of goldenrod and asters at full bloom.

   — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Returning the Gift

Gratitude is Powerful Medicine

When I give thanks I recognize not only the gifts I receive but the giver of life. My existence and your existence relies on the gifts of other beings. To notice and name the gifts creates a sense of satisfaction, a feeling of “enoughness.”

Think about taking a bite out a sweet fresh-picked apple. What created it? Air, soil, sunshine, rain, honey bees, a farmer who tended the tree, pickers who picked the apple, truckers who brought the apple to the store, and more. 

Paying attention to the gifts of the earth is an act of reciprocity, in which attention generates gratitude, wonder, and joy.

For some time I have been working on giving thanks to the earth when I make photographs. But I am still surprised at how I usually forget to pause and give thanks before pressing the camera shutter button. It seems that I’ve grown up steeped in entitlement and forgetfulness.

As I listen to discussion of approaches to solving climate change, I hear lots of proposals for technology changes, tax incentives, and the like. But until we recognize that we are not separate from the earth but rather a part of a web of relationships, I fear we will search in vain for solutions. To change our worldview is the first task and the most difficult.

Open and  attentive, we see and feel equally the beauty and the wounds, the old  growth and the clear-cut, the mountain and the mine. Paying attention to  suffering sharpens our ability to respond. To be responsible.

This,  too, is a gift, for when we fall in love with the living world, we  cannot be bystanders to its destruction. Attention becomes intention,  which coalesces itself to action.

    — Robin Wall Kimmerer

So I continue to work on hearing the call to gratitude and to change how I relate to the earth. May I find ways to returns the gift.

The earth calls us to recognize the personhood of all beings.

   — Robin Wall Kimmerer

May you walk in beauty.

Note: photos in today’s post from my morning walk beside Medicine Lake.