Encyclopedia of Gratitude

SUBMITTED TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GRATITUDE BY PAT RICHARDS

Farmers Markets that provide wonderful, local, organic food to nourish our bodies and souls. My husband and I were just remarking tonight that we would not know golden beets existed without our local farmers market!

Farmers Market Facts: They connect urban people with locally grown, farm fresh produce, and give farmers the opportunity to have a personal relationship with customers. They’re also great places for local communities to gather. Local musicians often play songs ranging from comical to sublime. As of 2010, there were 6,132 farmers markets operating across the U.S.

When you look at the old photos now, those moments of childhood conflict melt away, and you remember the love and affection. But there were those moments, weren’t there?

YOU wouldn’t UNDERSTAND!
FINE! See if I care!
You’ll REGRET it, BELIEVE me!
Get OUT of MY ROOM!
I HATE YOU!

Yes, those were the golden years. You wouldn’t trade them for the world, though, because now you’re best friends.

Serena and Venus Williams remind us how intense our rivalry with our siblings can be. In their incredible matches, the one who loses weeps in happiness for the other’s victory, as only a true sister would.

When we let our sisters in our rooms and our hearts, we find they’re capable of symbiosis with us. Look no further than the Bronte Sisters, whose shared creative vision echoes through the ages. 

Maybe best of all, when the going gets tough, your sister shows up, day in and day out. When you’re down in the dumps, she lifts your spirits, and when you’re full of yourself, she gently brings you back to earth with a hug.

Thanks, sister.

SUBMITTED TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GRATITUDE BY YVONNE CANNON

The well runs dry. Your Muse is out to lunch. You think you’ll never write another word. Until, one shining hour, the Muse is back. Bringing life, as you knew it would. I write, I am. Thank you, Muse.

With our brothers, we share an elemental and complex bond.

We are fused together with an alloy of admiration and competition, bouts of temporary hate, enduring love, and time. 

Brothers may leave us with permanent scars. And, if we’re lucky, we’ll grow up to be the best of friends. 

Even when we don’t have a brother, we find our spiritual brothers in the world—enduring friends who are like family. 

In the end, we should strive to see every man as our brother—someone we may disagree with and sometimes loathe, but ultimately must love and stand by.

Perhaps there is no greater proof of the loyalty and love of friends and family than when they back your craziest endeavors—even when it means making fools out of themselves.

You’d do the same for them, that’s the beauty of it.

Here’s a great example from the movie Little Miss Sunshine:

Given how vitally important they are, it’s amazing how little gratitude (and money) we give to community colleges. 

True or false: If you’re smart and poor in America, your chances of completing high school or going to college are much lower than the chances for children of the affluent with lower IQs and/or lesser abilities. Answer: True.  

So where do the smart and poor go?

Community college. Here students can do two things in parallel: Slowly heal the emotional wounds of poverty and family dysfunction, and educate themselves. With the college as their lifeline, they have as much potential as anyone.

If that weren’t enough, community colleges also serve adults who want to enrich their lives by continuing to learn. 

So let’s be grateful for community colleges, and the incredible returns they provide to everyone in our society, whether we use them or not.

Community College Facts: Nearly 50% of all college students in America (over 12 million students) attend community college. Of these… Women: 58% Men: 42% Minorities: 45%. Close to 80% of U.S. firefighters, law enforcement officers, and emergency medical personnel are trained at community colleges.

The love of a grandparent is something special. It is both more removed than the love we get from our parents, and closer to the source of love that echoes down from our ancestors. Our grandparents hug us, and their love can feel as expansive as the sky.

National Grandparents Day is celebrated with the giving of forget-me-not flowers. We can celebrate the holiday whether or not our grandparents are still with us, because in some way they are always with us. 

Many of us grow up feeling out of place in our hometown.

As adults, we set out on the adventures of our lives, and one day we find it—the place we fit and feel like we belong. That place could be in the city, suburbs, country, mountains, or an island on the other side of the world.

If you’ve found your place, that’s something you can be grateful for.

Please feel free to leave a photo reply of your place.

You’ve seen pictures of the world’s famous landmarks, places like the Golden Gate Bridge, Great Wall of China, Eiffel Tower. You may even know their stories and historical significance. 

One day, you’re with that landmark, and you experience something you’ll never forget. Perhaps it’s as simple as meeting a friend in the middle of the bridge. Whatever the memory, from then on, that famous landmark becomes a personal landmark, too.

Beyond these famous landmarks, you have other personal landmarks that no one knows about. Maybe it’s the street corner where you met someone, the hilltop where you made a commitment to a dream, or the gym where you fell down on the treadmill and got shot across the floor.

For better or worse, these places serve as emotional touchstones throughout our lives, and we can return to these personal landmarks again and again, either physically or in our minds. 

Personal landmarks, be they famous or not, are something we can be grateful for.

You hear there’s going to be a meteor shower at a certain time. So you call some friends and head out to an open spot where you can see the night sky. It becomes a kind of picnic with blankets thrown out on the ground. You lie there. You look up.

This is when you realize that half the beauty of seeing a meteor shower isn’t just the sight of meteors, but the chance to give your full attention to the beauty of the night sky. 

Then it happens. OOOH! DID YOU SEE THAT!? OVER THERE… 

The meteors begin to rain through the night sky, burning out and fading away in the blink of an eye.

Someone laughs. Tells a story. Passes around a drink. 

Soon it’s time to go home. Your headlights carve a line through the darkness. You must remember to do this again next year. 

Meteor Facts: They range in size from a grain of sand to a baseball. There are about 9 major meteor showers that occur annually. The painting above is of the 1833 Leonid meteor shower in which 10-15 meteors were seen every second.

You know a good climbing tree when you see it. The expansive, outstretched branches welcome anyone who wants to climb. The bark is worn away from generations of children clambering over the branches. If you were one of those children, you spent a long time just sitting up there, looking down on the world instead of up, feeling about as safe as you can feel while doing something thrilling. Maybe it reminded you of climbing on your parents, when their arms seemed as big as tree branches.

As you sit high up, time slows down. The wind moves your hair and the branches sway. You enter the Long Now of the tree. You climb down and walk away, though the feeling stays with you.

Thank you, climbing trees.

Large crowds of people gather regularly for essentially two things, sporting events and concerts. At sporting events, half the people are rooting for one outcome, and the other half for its opposite. 

At concerts, though, everyone has come together to share an experience—one that until now each has had alone, listening to music through headphones or in a car.

Then… the concert. The people fill the hall, the music begins, and everyone moves together like one giant dancing living thing. 

Connecting them is a circle of gratitude—the audience’s gratitude for the artist, and the artist’s for the audience.  

During World War II, Hitler created Fortress Europe, turning the continent’s coastline into the equivalent of a fortified castle wall. 

Thanks to the men who stormed that fortress on June 6th, 1944, Hitler failed. The German defensive line was broken, and Allied forces won back the continent.

In the words of Winston Churchill: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.” 

D-Day Facts: An estimated 10,000 men were killed, wounded, missing, or captured that day on the Allied side, and 10,000 Germans met the same ends. 

There was a time when poets were celebrities—Edna St. Vincent Millay filled stadiums with her fans. Can you name a famous living poet today?

Exactly. 

Today’s poet works with no hope of ever making a living at his or her craft. Yet poets keep writing. For this we should be grateful for poets. And for poetry. 

What He Thought

BY HEATHER MCHUGH

for Fabbio Doplicher

We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the mayor, mulled
a couple matters over (what’s
a cheap date, they asked us; what’s
flat drink). Among Italian literati

we could recognize our counterparts:
the academic, the apologist,
the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib—and there was one

administrator (the conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated
sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.
Of all, he was the most politic and least poetic,
so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome
(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)
to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.
I couldn’t read Italian, either, so I put the book
back into the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans

were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there
we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,
till, sensible it was our last
big chance to be poetic, makeour mark, one of us asked                                             

                     ”What’s poetry?”

Is it the fruits and vegetables and
marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or
the statue there?” Because I was

the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn’t have to think—”The truth
is both, it’s both,” I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed
taught me something about difficulty,
for our underestimated host spoke out,
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statute represents Giordano Bruno,
brought to be burned in the public square
because of his offense against
authority, which is to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government, but rather is
poured in waves through all things. All things
move. “If God is not the soul itself, He is
the soul of the soul of the world.” Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him
forth to die, they feared he might
incite the crowd (the man was famous
for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask, in which

he could not speak. That’s
how they burned him. That is how
he died: without a word, in frontof everyone.

                     And poetry—                                       

(we’d all
put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on
softly)—                 

                     poetry is what

he thought, but did not say.

Hotel bathrooms are what your bathroom aspires to be: 

• Sparkling clean surfaces
• Fluffy folded towels of all sizes
• Carefully wrapped soaps
• New shampoo and conditioner
• Spotless mirrors and glass
• Nice art on the wall, fresh flowers…

You feel like you’re the first person to ever use this pristine bathroom, and you’re grateful for the expendable income (or expense account) that allows you to have this experience.

The best part is, after you use all those soaps and towels and so on, you simply leave. If you didn’t, that bathroom would turn into your own, and no one wants that. 

It’s hot in there.

There’s one battery-powered fan blowing air over your head.

You can barely see out of a hole in the mouth.

The costume is 100% exuberance, so you’ve got to match that with exuberant body language. Dancing. Waving.

You make people happy. 

More than that, you make the world seem like a magical place where imagination thrives and finds expression all around us. Y’know, for kids. 

And for that, we are grateful.

Human beings are social creatures. It takes something extraordinary to make us leave everyone and everything we know. That’s what immigrants must do.

Without any social safety net, or the privileges enjoyed by local aristocracies, immigrants must work harder than everyone else just to have a chance. Often, the hardworking spirit of immigrants brings great bounty to their new homelands.

If we’re all descended from immigrants, perhaps we should be grateful for them. At this very moment, someone somewhere is moving on—with sadness and hope—from everyone and everything they know.

Immigrant Facts: America is made up of nearly 100% immigrants. The exceptions are African Americans, who were brought by force and, of course, First Nations.

During the Great Depression, millions of people were put to work in a Federal program called the WPA (Works Progress Administration). They built schools, bridges, roads, dams, trails, parks, you name it. The agency also hired photographers to document what was happening to real people in the fields and streets of America.

Perhaps the greatest photographer to participate in that effort was Dorothea Lange. Her photographs of the human cost of the Depression are some the era’s most iconic and honest.

About this photo, Lange recalled, “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

Thank you, Dorothea.

Dorothea Lange Facts: A bout of polio at age seven left her with a permanent limp. “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.” She was inducted into the California Hall of Fame at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.  

WPA Facts: Every community in the United States has at least one park, school, or bridge built by the WPA.     

You move through it, but in the end it moves through you. Here, in the middle of Los Angeles, you find yourself understanding your relationship to art and nature. Thank you, thank you, Robert Irwin.  

Central Garden Facts: It’s a 134,000-square-foot work of art that’s visited by millions of people. Like the rest of the Getty Center, it’s free. 

Our personal fortunes ebb and flow. Sometimes apace with the fortunes of the nation, sometimes not.

In any case, when you find yourself scraping two nickels together just to keep warm, you really appreciate all the nice stuff you bought when you had money—stuff you couldn’t afford now.

Of course, some of this stuff you’re going to look at and say, “Why the hell did I waste money on THIS!?” We’ll all prone to blowing our wad on frivolous things. However, some of that stuff is real treasure, all the more so during the hard times when it’s out of reach.

It could be nice shoes or dishes. A good camera. Moisture-wicking fabrics.

Whatever it is, be grateful for it—even and especially once your fortunes improve again.

Your toes are freezing. Your hands are numb. Will you ever be warm again?

At last, the door. You open it and the warmth washes over your face. 

Oh, yeah.

Lock out the cold. Stomp the snow off your feet. Take off your jacket.

Bonus! Someone is there making you hot tea/coffee/chocolate. Before you know it, you’re kicking back with your feet up and remembering what it’s like to feel warm.

Ahhhh…

Time for a little Sinatra. Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow…

It’s a different kind of hunger. You’ve exhausted every fiber of your body. Food feels like a reward.

You’re grateful just to eat—and to feel the satisfaction of fully exerting yourself. 

After the meal, if all the stars align, you pass out on the couch. Maybe later someone wakes you and you move to the bed. 

Sometimes the more exhausted you get, the more grateful you become for everything that keeps you upright. Or horizontal. Or whatever your body needs at that moment. 

Sure, you can call all your friends at 2am, but how many will answer?

If they answer, how many will get out of bed and help you, no questions asked?

Okay, now think about calling these people—but not at 2am—to say how grateful you are for their friendship.

After your parents die (and sometimes before) you begin to appreciate all the things they’ve given you.

It starts with your hands. Look at them. Do they look like your mother’s hands and your father’s hands, made one? As long as you’re walking this Earth, you can be grateful for this amazing thing your parents gave you—your flesh and bone.

Maybe they also gave you some clothing, and when you wear it, you feel closer to them. Or when you cook in their old pots and pans, you remember them cooking for you.

Even when our parents leave us little more than bad examples, we can be grateful for that, too.

One day you find yourself talking to a child, and as you impart your wisdom, you remember hearing it from your parents. “Don’t eat yellow snow where the Huskies go.”  

The older you get, the more you feel appreciation and gratitude for your parents, and the things they left you. Here’s a great scene from the film Tender Mercies, to help you reflect on that.

This is when you know you’re relaxing…

You’re in the sun with a hat tilted down over your face, staring at the filtered sunlight. You close your eyes and listen to the sounds of nature and people around you. The sun is warm.

You squint a little to make sure the sunlight is still there. Yep. 

Sigh.