Sometimes it just stuns you
like an arrow flung from some angel’s wing.
Sometimes it hastily scribbles
a list in the air: black coffee,
thick new books,
your pillow’s cool underside
the quirky family you married into.

It is content with so little really;
even the ink of your pen along
the watery lines of your dimestore notebook
could be a swiftly moving prayer.
~Andrea Potos

We are in that season when words like gratitude and thankfulness become the stars of the stage. This poem called ‘Essential Gratitude’ came across my reading plate this past week. The word ‘essential’ has been bandied about a lot over the last months and when it appears it brings about all kinds of questions within me. What does it even mean? Who can say what is and isn’t essential? Everyone’s life is so very different and to try to define what is essential for anyone of us seems an audacious act. In this conversation about essential we became confronted with all the people who plant, grow, harvest, sell, serve our food. All essential and most underpaid and under appreciated. Certainly, during these last months, we were reminded in ways we so easily forget that those who offer health care, elder care, child care, respite care, just plain everyday care, are certainly essential to our daily living. And then there are the teachers who welcome the young ones, witness to their lives, teach them skills they will need, inspire them with kindness and a sense of belonging, work hours longer than any of us would endure…essential all…and worthy of our thanks.

When I think back over the last months I am stunned at the many ways I have been bathed with a sense of gratitude. Certainly there is deep gratefulness for all those I have mentioned and also for the other numbers of people who have surrounded me and others I know with attention, phone calls, notes, ways of connecting that have lessened the isolation we have all felt from time to time. I have been grateful for the creativity of so many as they dreamed and brought to reality new ways of doing every thing from church to education to exercise. Aren’t we all astounded by what we have learned in the midst of this pandemic? And, of course, paramount is the gratitude for the scientists who came together to solve problems I cannot understand to create a vaccine that has helped us breathe a little easier. So many people to be grateful toward.

And yet, I think the poet is pushing us further. “Black coffee, thick books, the cool underside of the pillow, ink, cheap notebooks.” As I look out my window on this cold, November morning, I see the brown of the leaves from the trees that now make a winter blanket for my garden plants. Earlier in the summer these same leaves brought brilliant green to my yard and shade from the Sun’s rays. The wind is doing its work to bring the hangers-on to the ground to join their limb neighbors, a wind that is strong and cold and also reminds me of how the Spirit moves in our lives, unseen yet powerful nonetheless. A butterfly who lifeless body I found in June still adorns flowers on my kitchen table, its beauty a visual of what was and what will be again when summer returns. The Sun is slanting across the bowl of fruit that sits nearby and the colors of orange, yellow, red and green give my eyes a show. 

What is essential? What isn’t really? Important questions to consider. Essential gratitude? And how to cultivates its importance in our lives. Every day is filled with so much that I had nothing to do with bringing about but which serves my life and begs me to notice. Perhaps that is the true act of gratitude…the pausing, the noticing, the naming, as it becomes the ‘swiftily moving prayer’.