I am in a quiet, reflective mood this evening as I ponder the matter of gratitude. I have a lot of thoughts and emotions swirling around as they have been for the better part of the evening. It has been a long three days at work with two more long days to come. There are many varied issues arising there that require a great deal of time and energy, many of which don’t involve the work itself but the infrastructure surrounding it. At times I am reminded why I studied agriculture and animal sciences as an undergraduate and masters students: at one time I most definitely preferred animals to people. Now having worked for 30 years in a career in which the only animals I’ve worked with are human ones, I find myself longing for the relative simplicity of working with cattle or perhaps sheep…
Periodically I am so tired that putting coherent sentences together requires monumental effort. While I feel gratitude for the beautiful blessings in my life, on a given night–such as tonight–I lack the ability to write about it or express it in any articulate fashion. At times I’ve thought to myself, “This is it: tonight’s the night I don’t write my blog because my ability to reach in the hat and pull out a rabbit has finally failed me.” To not write my blog at this point while not completely unthinkable would nonetheless be disheartening and disappointing; and while I don’t have thousands or even hundreds of readers, I do have a few loyal daily readers whom I am loath to disappoint. In thinking about what I would do on those days when the well had temporarily run dry, I landed on an interesting solution: I would repost part or all of a previously written entry. So I found a random number generator, asking it to choose a number between 1 and 300. Based on that turn of the wheel, tonight I am sharing a portion of a blog I wrote a about 13 months ago (day 281.)
I am astonished to be at the end of another week and to be headed toward the end of April. Time continues to fly by, yet I find that I am grateful for the week just past. Tonight I am simply grateful to have come through another week with relative calm in my heart and a smile on my face. It is proof that progress is possible if one approaches one’s challenges with as open a heart as can be managed. I go back to Khalil Gibran’s quote,“Awake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.”While I can tell you that I definitely did not wake with a winged heart this morning (though I did wake around dawn), I did give thanks for another day of loving.
I am grateful to be looking back at my life through the stories and thoughts and ideas I speak about in this blog. I continue to approach the many issues and challenges that arise with as open and compassionate a heart as possible. I’ve generally had a “soft” heart throughout much of my life, and it feels as though the difficulties I’ve struggled through over the past few years have softened it even further, that suffering some of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that I have have over this time has not hardened me and turned me bitter, but softened me even more.
This is important in the work that I do. In working toward a more just, peaceful and loving world, I encounter people who oppose many of the things for which I stand and speak. Still, I must approach them with compassion–hardening my own heart against them will not produce the results that I want. A soft answer turns away wrath, the proverb says. And that is an approach that I take. It might not work for everyone, but it works for me. I am grateful for the grace that has allowed me to remain open and tenderhearted over the years. May it continue to be so. May I continue to walk in compassion, love, and peace even as I work for justice. May it indeed be so.
