It is the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, and I’m just now finding the time to sit down and write. We took a several mile hike through the 100 acre woods behind our house, that connects to another hundred acres of nature preserve. My children, 6,7 have learned to identify mile markers that lead us from our land to Cedar Creek. The names, to me sound like the Dora the Explorer clues. “Giant Swamp”, “Troll bridge”, “Twin Towers”, “Monkey Island”, and the final destination, “Rushing River”… aka, Cedar Creek.
It’s the kind of day that makes it really easy to be grateful. Beautiful, calm, peaceful… and I felt that gratitude very strongly on our walk. For my amazing family, for (if not so much the house we live in) the land live on, which I love. For watching my husband teach my children about deer trails, and pointing out antler posts. These are the moments I never want to forget. And yet, an important part of gratitude, to me, is learning to be grateful for the less-than-blissful things that enter our lives. The crisis. The big loss. The little lose. The failure, and the trauma. These are the things we are often tempted to meet with resistance. “Why me?” “This can’t be.” are the natural initial responses. Most people try to deny, minimize, and withdrawal from these “bad” things that are also a part of life.
What I have noticed, is that actually embracing the bad, and finding gratitude for the hidden gift, lesson, or strength that is being honed by this negative experience is important- even if you can’t yet determine what possible gift or strength is being honed. The longer you shove away the bad feelings and question, ‘why me’ the longer it takes to learn the lesson the “bad” thing can teach you. In my experience, shoving these emotions away can also lead to depression, but that’s probably another article.
It is counter-intuitive to step into and really experience with gratitude the negative things that enter our lives, and the things we bring into our lives unintentionally. And yet doing so, with an open heart, and trust in the process that is your life, yields healing and wisdom much more quickly than denial or self-pity ever could.
There are things in life that are impossible to be happy about. I’m not happy that after our blissful walk we came home to find the male of the Woodpecker pair that fed from our feeders everyday, dead; his mate at his side watching over him. I hate seeing animals die, I hate that part of life. I hate to witness suffering, I hate loss, and I really was quite smitten with that bird. Yet, it was an oddly intimate experience to watch my daughter pick him up to investigate his body in death. She placed him gingerly against a tree while my son picked the last of the years Mums to lay over his body. Then my daughter and I buried him while she told me what was to happen next with his soul. Death is an amazing opportunity to learn what children intuitively know of life and death; a better way to allow them to develop than to tell them what I think I know about it. Mostly I just listen and learn from their innate wisdom.
So of all the things that happen today, the death of that beautiful bird is my least ‘favorite’. And still, there are gifts of intimacy with nature, intimacy in a shared moment with my children, and a learning moment for them about what life is, and isn’t, to them. All things, though sometimes it can take a lifetime to find the gift, are worth having gratitude for; despite the package they come wrapped in.
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