Beyond Separate
As autumn leaves begin to descend and blend with the soil, another cycle of letting go begins. While I watch them spiral from the trees to enrich the earth, I open myself to absorbing their nutrients too. I open myself to the place in which leaves, soil, and my silence are related. For being part of an extended forest family, I’m grateful.
The blended silence of leaves and soul somehow reminds me: there was a time in my life when gratitude felt like pressure. Through all struggles and worries, I felt expected to still feel grateful. Alone. If, in my private painful moments, I couldn’t still appreciate the miracle of life, I felt it was a character flaw. It was something I should shamefully hide, lest anyone discover my ungrateful solitary shadows.
Meditation began to dissolve the illusion of separate self for me, however. And that begin to dissolve the illusion of separate gratitude. Becoming part of a mindfulness meditation group, then a mindful couples group as well, showed me instead that love, calm, gratitude, celebration, are all rooted in community. They dwell in that place beyond our separation, where individual borders dissolve.
It’s still too much pressure, on each of us, not only to feel grateful alone, but to move daily in service from that place of gratitude. In the same way that it’s easier to sit in meditative silence with others, it’s easier to move in gratitude while drawing on the grateful strength of others. That’s true, no matter what character flaws they too may have, alongside our own. Also true, no matter what pain any or all of us may currently be enduring.
That’s why this community of celebration has had such a powerful, grounding impact for me. Having a monthly deadline for contributing to this celebration is an effective holistic health practice for me. Its effect is vastly amplified because I practice it across the miles with thousands of others, of which you are one. I can’t separate my contribution and the community anymore than I can separate leaves, soil, and soul.
Also beyond separate from this community of celebration, is the community of gratitude with whom I’ve gathered every fall, for over a decade. In our live events called “The Nature of Gratitude,” we invite authors, musicians, poets, visual artists, community service activists— grateful spirits of all forms—for a gathering of gratitude beyond separate self and feeling. It’s gratitude as service work, to bring awareness to grassroots causes addressing universal human needs, beyond illusory separations of politics or religious beliefs.
At first, I found it hard to stand and lead our local community in gratitude, when yet another disaster had closely preceded our chosen date of gathering. Every year, it seems our grateful ensemble has had to follow some excruciating event, in bringing a day of gratitude to our community. Terrorist bombings, personal traumas, family deaths, community conflicts, legal and illegal injustice, economic devastation, the list goes on. I felt like an impostor, early on, as an ambassador of gratitude.
Yet with every single year, every single gathering, it’s become easier for all of us in our grateful ensemble. We’ve all come to experience collective gratitude as a force of transformation. When we’re beyond separate in that mindful, intentional, grateful way, we can lift each other beyond the depths of our troubles for a day. Often, the effects of that day carry forward for months. I no longer worry as to whether, together, we’ll be able to bring gratitude into being as one, and raise each other’s spirits higher, in a collective way that will inspire our individual actions later.
It feels especially vital now for all of us to share in grateful transformation, as challenges known and unknown hurtle towards us. So, linked below, is an offering of gratitude and celebration: our full concert of grateful music, photography, spoken word, laughter, art, and public service. For this one, we center around the theme of kintsugi: the ancient Japanese art, in pottery and philosophy, of healing what’s broken through highlighting the breakage with golden seams, rather than by seeking to conceal it.
We all have breakage, but together in that place beyond separation, we can also lift each other for another sharing of celebration and gratitude. We can walk out into the world to do our grateful service, in a world that needs our oneness more than ever. We are not impostors, in the fine art of being raggedly, lovingly human. Let us celebrate that, as one.