Growing in wonder and gratefulness with a practice, a poem, and 2 questions.
the standing walls keep standing with their whole attention . . .
How rarely I have stopped to thank the steady effort of the world to stay the world,
to thank the furnish of green
and the abandon of yellow . . .
Jane Hirshfield
It is such a small and vibrant thing to be grateful for a color and connect it to a memory.
I find myself grateful for specific colors that connect me to my life. I have long felt grateful for the curried yellow my Mama painted our front door in Inwood Forest, the chocolate brown (Hull Pottery’s Brown Drip) of Dad’s 1970’s thick coffee mug filled with Sanka to calm his ulcers, the Cornflower blue in the crayon box (the one with the sharpener), crisp black and white as a combo, the shifting indigo blue of a fresh blueberry same as Crosby’s eyes, English green, rosemary green, sea glass green, all the greens really. When my friend Darcy recently mentioned a snappy green from her trip to Scotland, I felt grateful before I even saw it.
I pictured what I call English green like the color I painted my front doors last year to remind me to walk with the Good Shepherd of Psalm 23 (or that he walks with me), and which I found in laundry drying on a clothesline in Sienna and a worn doorway in Florence with a center knob.
You don’t have to travel far to find colors that give you life and spark a memory. You only have to travel into your life to find color to be grateful for.
My Thanksgiving table may be set with a mismatched collection of brown and white English dishes as a thankful homage to the Brown Drip dishes of my childhood or maybe it was picking pecans with my Dad.
Dad’s coffee mug from my childhood
My Thanksgiving table from last year.
So here’s a question for you to journal or ask those around your Thanksgiving table,
What color are you grateful for and what memory does it connect you to?
(For kids, depending on age, you could just ask what color there grateful for and where they see it.)
This year, I will probably share I am grateful for lapis lazuli - a blue with stars of gold that both reminds me of a ring my Dad gave me for my birthday one year and this ceiling fresco by the Renaissance painter Giotto. It was my thanks for the day we visited and I think it is showing up in my dreams. I even saw a version of it recently in a TV show.
Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy
About four years ago, I began a practice of naming three tiny things I was grateful for and writing them in my journal, then posting them into my Instagram stories with #tinythanks. It was a way of noticing, connecting to my life and our Good God, and anticipating where wonder and gratefulness might be living if only I had eyes to see. It could have simply remained hidden in my journal and done some good work in my heart. But somehow, while I knew I needed to practice gratefulness in my real life, I also knew I needed to do it out loud. These thanks weren’t only for me but were invited into the world to grow and thrive and be joined with others’ in a kind of praise to the One who is shaping us by our actual lives.
I am inviting you to join me in whatever way Jesus is calling you. Write 3 tiny thanks daily into your journal, as a way to begin your prayers, around your dinner table, or aloud to a friend in your life. If you want to join me on Instagram, you can do so privately or use the hashtag #tinythanks and we can do it in community.
There is no right or wrong way to practice gratitude. Just begin where you are with what you notice, and then give it time to grow and deepen.
If you want some tips, here are a few things I have learned over the last several years:
• notice your ordinary, everyday life (more than in broad sweeps)
• be specific (name people (use initials if that feels more respectful), places, weather, senses)
• include what you’re learning, feeling, praying for, smelling, tasting, hearing, seeing, happy or sad about
Keep practicing because as I did, I grew more attentive with heightened anticipation for what God might have for me, for us. I noticed deeper layers in my thanks - places, unspoken prayers in myself and others, and more precisely where God was speaking to me. Over time, I began noticing specific circumstances where I sensed God’s Trinitarian presence or a quality of God that was feeding or challenging me and let that find it’s way into my thanks.
Even still, ordinary thanks never leave my list as Ordinary Time reminds me every year. I continue to find everyday things as Buechner names them in his book by the same name the remarkable ordinary.
In keeping with this practice of gratitude for tiny, simple things, here is a poem called The Patience of Ordinary Things by Pat Schneider. May it help you be mindful in a world that needs to feel God’s loving presence.
The Patience of Ordinary Things - Pat Schneider
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
You might want to read it at your Thanksgiving table and ask a slightly different question,
What ordinary thing are you grateful for just for being itself?
Or use Pat Schneider’s poem as a writing prompt for your own. Here is my version using Schneider’s poem as template.