The Enchantment of Thankfulness

It's that time of year again - when we gather with family and friends and sit down together to a festive meal, the traditional table laden with turkey and seasonal vegetables. For many, that's all there is to it. However we sense that there is something more to a holiday named Thanksgiving.

This holiday is a time for reflecting upon our harvests, whether they be emotional, spiritual, or physical. We count our blessings and consider how they have affected our lives. These reflections and considerations are all part of the enchantment of living simply - for it is in living simply that we allow ourselves to take the time for such ponderings.

Using the seasons as an analogy, we sow our seeds early in the year. Those seeds may be the physical seeds we need to plant gardens and crops. They also take the forms of studying, starting a new project, renewing a commitment, and many other beginnings and ideas.

This year, during the harvest season, we Americans awoke to a late-season blight that struck at our very core. A handful of people have told me that they have nothing for which to give thanks this Thanksgiving. But that blight did not destroy our entire harvest, for the American spirit still lives and the individual spirit thrives in most of us.

In spite of this sense of heaviness or pessimism that seems to pervade this year's harvest, I have found that when we verbalize gratitude for each and every blessing, our gratitude grows. To express thankfulness verbally, we must focus upon our blessings. Once we engage this focus, our blessings seem to magically multiply and we find ourselves feeling true gratitude for the simple things in our daily lives.

An example from my life may help to illustrate this. During this year, I have lost the sense of peace and safety in my country, and I have lost a beloved companion. I could reflect upon these facts, and these alone. But simple living is not a philosophy of what we lack; it is rather a philosophy of abundance and harvests.

I have gathered pleasant harvests, as well - an ordination, a new hobby that my husband and I can enjoy together, new friends, and having some of my writings published in an online magazine. I am thankful for these harvests and for what has gone into manifesting them - study, meditation, the ability to set time aside, my husband's encouragement and support. Now the blessings seem to multiply magically, for I find that I am also thankful for birds - just birds, in general - those who come to our feeders, as well as those we have sighted and identified in the wild. I am thankful for the binoculars that we use for bird-watching, and I am thankful we had the means to buy them, for they certainly are not a necessity. They are a luxury, one that helps us to more fully enjoy the natural world around us.

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