Grace! Gratitude!
And flowers, don't forget the flowers
I’ve written before about fantasy, but I realize now that expresses one side of a much more precise word: Hope.
At a dharma talk last week, the subject was hope. How hope can toe the line between inspiration and desperation. We did a meditation (before I learned the talk was about hope) and the instructor guided us to invite in a word that we needed to give ourselves.
My word was hope. Until I (as all the great meditators do) started way overthinking it. And realized that no, ‘hope’ seems too fickle a word. ‘Hope’ projects out too far into the future, it strikes me as too grasping. I want hope for the present. Some sort of lightness that can help me find ease in the difficulties of my current life.
I have great trust in the future, faith in a deep sense that all will be alright. I might not know what that alright future looks like, but it’ll be alright. The present? Sometimes that seems hopeless.
Perhaps ‘grace’ is what I meant to conjure in that meditation. Let me move through difficulty with the kindness and lightness that comes when you realize nothing is as serious as it seems. That everything is temporary.
It’s helped this week. And with some good advice from my dad (hat tip to wise dads on Father’s Day), I’ve tried to be more grateful. Here are a few of the things from the week that have helped me gain in grace.
Inhaling wild hydrangea like deep round honey
Cool air off muddy high waters
Flashcards
Taught sunkissed skin
Carrying around a hand fan in your purse
Late breakfasts
People who know how to tie knots
Knots
Soft belly skin
Children growing up
Rebellion in the form of flower picking
Meditation in the shape of flower arranging
The sweet and sudden dream of stopping everything to become a florist
Homemade pasta
Children that never grow up
Teaching someone how to cook your favorite dish
The fuzzy sensation of tiredness
Smelling someone cooking in the next room
The uniform green of high summer
Bumping into people you weren’t expecting to see, and realizing how small your town is
Saltwater
Drinking coffee out of funny vessels: A Pyrex measuring cup, for example
Sleeping dogs
Finding a scarf that was your mothers in a thrift store on your street; not remembering when you gave it away and beginning to get upset but then realizing that not everything is meant to stay with you, and to wish for it back would tie you by your pretty blue neck to the past and you don’t like wearing scarves, anyway
Little siblings
Giant pots
Planning parties for the summer solstice
That’s just a snippet, but I’m grateful for all of them. And I am immensely grateful to you all; thank you for tuning in weekly and supporting me as a writer and evolving human being.
