Shared Shelter

I first understood grateful living as a place of shelter when I was my mother’s full-time caregiver, at the end of her life. I realized I was building shelter for her, in gratitude for the lifetime of shelter she built for me.

It wasn’t a physical shelter, in the same sense as this log house she built, which shelters me even now. It was an emotional shelter, built from caring translated into action. Sheltering her meant gently, persistently attending to whatever her needs were that day. Sometimes caregiving was grueling. Sometimes it was easy. Even on the most difficult, heartbreaking days, it was a precious honor to be there until her final moments, guiding her across. It was one of the most cherished phases of my life.

Caregiving can be relentless, though. You have to do whatever caring work is needed, right now, regardless of how you feel. Yet that relentlessness offered me an essential insight: Grateful feelings come from taking grateful actions, not vice versa. We don’t have to feel grateful, in order to move gratefully and gracefully through the world. We just have to keep working.

That insight distilled my view of grateful living down to its essence: Being grateful is like being a carpenter. The skills are only realized when you use them to build shelter for others.

In any occupation—no matter how beloved—there will always be days in which getting up and going to work feels like a strain. Gratitude and celebration are no different. They’re forms of relentless caregiving too.

Many days lately have been those difficult ones for me. It’s been hard to celebrate in light of the news. Hard to keep doing grateful work, even though it’s most essential to do so when times are hardest.

After a difficult day, the most sheltering thing I can do is to step back and breathe deeply. Often, I do so while walking at sunset on the dam nearby, where sunset enfolds me on all sides. There, my perspective returns. There, I can reliably find others out remembering how beautiful this damaged world still is. This community of celebration parallels those sunset gatherings. This too is a vigil of caregiving.

Part of my refreshed perspective is that none of us have to do our caregiving work alone. Not only do we have each other; we have the earth itself to support us. Just as a carpenter doesn’t have to grow the trees that produce lumber, we don’t have to build shelter for each other from scratch. The materials for a grateful life are as organically alive in their shape and shade as any trees. We’re only guiding their growth.

I find that relieves inner pressure. It relieves us of the weight of maintaining perspective alone. Our gratitude, our celebration, and the shelters we grow from them are uniquely individual, yet as much in living community as trees in a forest. They too grow wildly, insistently. They too are nature. Human nature is as natural as anything.

To further refresh my perspective, I step even farther back. I wonder again, as I watch the sunset: When did the seed from which gratitude first sprouted become a seed? Not only when, but how? How did seeds even come to exist? Somehow the miracle of life sprouted from the seed of the entire universe. Now, life grows on levels so vast and minuscule that it dwarfs our ability to comprehend its wholeness.

From this miraculous mystery comes endless life energy from which we can draw, to gratefully grow and build shelter for each other. That energy infuses everything. It’s nearly infinite. And we only need a tiny bit in any given moment, to take our next sheltering steps.

This whole universe is a shelter, encompassing all in its beauty. The appearing evening stars offer that remembrance, as another sunset fades. They reassure me that our universal future is within and beyond us, seeded already, waiting to grow anew as the new day does.

Someday we’ll walk off into the metaphorical sunset ourselves, but the grateful path we leave will be there to be walked and celebrated by the next who come alive. That is assured, in ways beyond our imagination. The actions of nature, so much greater than any one of us could ever take, offer the energy we need to care again today.

As a result, I’m flooded with grateful emotions again, as night deepens. I know I’ll be able to get up at dawn again and get to work building and growing shelter, no matter what I feel. And I know you’ll be there with me, to share that shelter.