It All Just Is

The clouds parted, a spot of blue sky appeared, I looked up and said yet again, "thank you" to that unnamed force surrounding me. As the words hung in my mind i began to chew on them while walking through the cemetery. "What was "thank you"? What did it mean? Could i express it differently from just saying the words?" While saying the words has a certain power in and of itself, wasn't there something more to gratitude? Then it dawned on me gratitude isn't a noun it's actually a verb. Gratitude is action.

How could i express gratitude? The first thing i thought was "love your life." But again what exactly does that mean? I keep coming back to this word "acceptance." Accept what is present. Can you accept everything that passes through your life and give it a place in its temporary home? For truly the human experience itself is temporary. Happiness, sadness, jealousy, envy, joy, delight, anxiety, fear, openness, pain, glory. Each of these emotions moves through us...if we allow them. Surely they will get stuck if we offer resistance, tell them to go away or cover them up with "doings". In that place of acceptance, life flows. It is not like everything is blissful all the time. It is better than that. You get to experience everything, ALL. What a smorgasbord!

Last night I had an interesting conversation with a chanteuse from Lebanon. She kept telling me how difficult life was as an artist committed to singing. She carefully made her case that being a musician was much easier but to sing was nearly impossible. She lamented that she couldn't support herself though her live-in boyfriend, the lawyer, was okay with it. She then told me she would be willing to do other work but it had to be meaningful. As i listened to her stories of, well, let's get right down to it, victimhood, I gently tried to point out the flaws in her thinking. Of course she agreed with everything i said, answering "yeah" and then followed it with an excuse "but." Almost immediately another woman came up to her and asked her if she could take singing lessons from her. They exchanged information. Beaming as i watched Life answer Life, I said "see." And wouldn't you know it she responded with "yeah, but..." She was completely committed to her story of suffering and there wasn't a thing i was going to do to change that. I continued to listen for a few more minutes. I offered no resistance to her reruns of suffering, then dinner was served and we were seated apart. At the end of the evening she came up to me and said she didn't know why she had told me such intimate details about her life but she really just felt much better. I smiled to myself and thought this is acceptance in action.

It's sweetly ironic: Acceptance of what is, Transforms what is.

Expressing gratitude is making Life your partner, not your enemy. Accepting what is, transforms what is. There is no stagnation. When life is transforming, it is moving, creating. There is a natural flow and rhythm of which you are a part and when you dive into that flow, you understand that you aren't separate from others, from emotions, from experiences. It all just is.