Being Thankful

In my previous post, I noted a news article that revealed the huge increase in the number of Americans who are going hungry and those who often do not have quite enough food to put on the table. Many other people are without jobs and have little expectation of being hired before holiday decorations are lit in downtowns across America (especially since some of those lights came on right after Halloween). Many of us have circumstances that cause us sleepless nights and that bubbly, anxious feeling in one's chest that seems to seep from one's pores and to fill the air one breathes. It's a hard time of the year for many people. Oh, yes, some seem immune from life's vicissitudes, but most have had that feeling at one or another time in their lives. And it's here, in the middle of that breath-catching moment, that it seems to me to be the most important time to be thankful. That's when it counts the most--not when one is sitting on top of the world, satiated, but when one is confronted with situations that seem to suck the air right out of the room. For I believe that thankfulness can help inflate one's lungs for that next, more hopeful breath.

I've been in such situations several times during my fifty-two-next-week years of living. Sometimes those situations were of my own blundering; at other times they were caused by the simple unfairness of life--the luck of the draw--or the callousness of others.  While I was never in great danger of starving, I do recall tough times in the first years of our marriage while my husband and I were struggling students.  During one particular rough spot, we sold my gold high-school ring to buy groceries. What we could have been thankful for then, however, is that if we hadn't had the money from that sale, we could have turned to family and friends, hands out, and had those hands filled--or an invitation to belly up to a full table.

And if family or friends aren't available--for whatever reason, death, disease, abandonment, distance--there is always the sunrise or the sunset or the smile on a stranger's face for which we can be thankful. That moment of thankfulness can be enough to produce the first oxygen-laden breath after disaster, a breath that just might allow us to think more clearly in order to navigate the maze of despair.

It's not easy.

But it's easier if you have a friend to show you the way. Here is a poem by Wendell Berry that seems to do just that, sent to me by my friend Christine (Chris): Listen to and read Berry's poem "XI," here.


My friend likes best these lines:
"They came eager
to their feed, and he who felt
their hunger was by their feeding
eased."

I love those, too, as well as these, which speak especially to me:
"Was this his stubbornness or bravado?
No. Only an ordinary act
of profoundest intimacy in a day
that might have been better."