Maybe we could call it a grategy, though that lacks the melody of its sentiment. I had the rare opportunity yesterday to hear Gary Snyder, Pulitzer-prize winning poet, essayist, and sometime Buddhist with an environmental ethic seamlessly integrated into his daily practice. (He’s been living off the grid for decades, now, e.g.) He’s also got a great belly laugh and general merriment that leavens even his most sobering observations.
It was in San Francisco, at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature (nearly 10,000 in attendance!). Mr. Snyder was this year’s recipient of the Religion and the Arts award.
Mr. Snyder recounted how even as a youngster he was convinced of the basic person-hood of four-leggeds and other non-human beings. He also hunted and fished with no sense of hypocrisy. How? Gratitude. Mr. Snyder said that he realized gratitude is the means whereby subsistence-living indigenous peoples negotiate the opposition between respect for other living creatures and the necessity of killing for survival. We who do not live in such a way seldom reckon with that challenge of reconciliation… we are also seldom grateful in such authentic and visceral ways. For food, for the bodily comforts of warmth, fresh water, and security in sleep; for friends, family, the liberty to express our ideas and the opportunity to pursue ideals and dreams, our gratitude is often spare and fleeting.
In this season of Thanksgiving, while I’m stranded in the San Francisco airport, my homecoming delayed another day, I am comforted by gratitude — that I have a home at all and, even better yet, that it is populated by warm beings whom I love. Good food, family near and far, friends in many places, music in my ears, and stories to fill the time. I have much to be grateful for. For gratitude itself, a subtle slippery thing that can wrangle disparate, discomfiting things into space-making harmony.
Happy Thanksgiving. May gratitude be busily among you making peace.
