Entering into thankfulness

At Christmas, many surprises of a good kind await a person living in a state of alertness to all that life can deliver from the hands of the natural world and from the generosity of the people around us. However, despite all that makes the going hard, we can find peace, even joy. Here are two poems that explore the necessary deep-seated spirit.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

     From Collected Poems (North Point Press) 1985

Sabbaths 1998, VII

There is a place you can go
where you are quiet,
a place of water and the light

on the water. Trees are there,
leaves, and the light
on leaves moved by air.

Birds, singing, move
among leaves, in leaf shadow.
After many years you have come

to no thought of these,
but they are themselves
your thoughts. There seems to be

little to say, less and less.
Here they are. Here you are.
Here as though gone.

None of us stays, but in the hush
where each leaf in the speech
of leaves is a sufficient syllable

the passing light finds out
surpassing freedom of its way.

— Wendell Berry

                 From Given (Showemaker & Hoard) 2005

For more about Wendell Berry’s view of life, see

 http://www.amazon.com/Wendell-Berry-Religion-Heavens-Earthly/dp/0813125553#reader_0813125553

Christmas and gratitude

The English writer G.K. Chesterton had powerful sense of gratitude that become stronger the older he got.  Here is what he wrote about day-to-day thankfulness:

What has happened to me has been the very reverse of what appears to be the experience of most of my friends.  Instead of dwindling to a point, Santa Claus has grown larger and larger in my life until he fills almost the whole of it.  It happened in this way.  As a child I was faced with a phenomenon requiring explanation.  I hung up at the end of my bed an empty stocking, which in the morning became a full stocking.  I had done nothing to produce the things that filled it.  I had not worked for them, or made them or helped to make them.  I had not even been good—far from it.  And the explanation was that a certain being whom people called Santa Claus was benevolently disposed toward me…What we believed was that a certain benevolent agency did give us those toys for nothing.  And, as I say, I believe it still.  I have merely extended the idea.  Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking: now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.  Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers, now I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea.  Once I though it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking.  Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it, and then leaves a great deal outside: it is the large and preposterous present of myself, as to the origin of which I can offer no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of peculiarly fantastic goodwill.

http://www.gratefulness.org/readings/dsr_chesterton.htm
See also the movie at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXDMoiEkyuQ