Francis Weller on Gratitude … and Grief. Excerpts from In the Absence of the Ordinary: essays in a time of uncertainty. (see https://www.francisweller.net/)

‘Healing trauma requires a restoration of the matrix of life. When we are able to return to the original ground of our belonging, we come home and remember who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred.

‘The soul is fully aware of the reciprocal relationship it has with the wild world, with the worlds of spirit and the ancestors. Soul recognizes the innate requirements for maintaining these connections. It was the role of mature individuals to honor our place in the family of things by carrying out the rituals of gratitude and renewal that sustain our relations with the breathing, animate world. Initiation embeds in us a fundamental requirement of being human:

‘We are meant to feed Life in an ongoing way!

‘As we mature, we are asked to come into a more reciprocal relationship with the earth. We are called to develop the manners which help sustain the body of this exquisite world.

‘You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” – Buddha

‘At the heart of every spiritual tradition, we find the teaching of compassion. Through the gate of compassion, we are invited to enter the wider conversation with all life. Compassion binds us with all things through the shared encounter with suffering. Compassion: From the Latin, com patti, “to suffer with.” It is through our shared experience with loss, sorrow and pain that we deepen our connection with one another and enter the commons of the soul.

‘The grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.” The others here referred to the animals, plants, rivers, trees; the entire surrounding field that was the ongoing reflection we encountered for hundreds of thousands of years. Paul Shepard, human biologist, quoted in In the Absence of the Ordinary.

‘Gratitude is a spiritual responsibility. A grateful heart acknowledges and participates in the ongoing exchange with life. Gratitude is an act of faith, of trust in the ways of life. It is a confirmation that we are inextricably bound to each other thing in the cosmos. In this sense it is a reflection of belonging…. Gratitude is the other hand of grief. It is the mature person who welcomes both. To deny either reality is to slip into chronic depression or to live in a superficial reality. Together they form a prayer that makes tangible the exquisite richness of life in this moment. Life is hard and filled with suffering. Life is also a most precious gift, a reason for continual celebration and appreciation. To everything, as the old prophet said, there is a season. This is the time of Thanksgiving.’