Grateful in this Season of Gratitude

 And so a new day begins.  I know this not because I am awake – that happens, in tandem with episodic sleep all through the day as well as the night in this season of my life – but because as I stepped outside to release the chickens the guard light on the face of the barn switched off.  Surely that constitutes some kind of official proclamation.  

 

New days, especially these days, prick at me the invitation to greater intentionality.  What will I do with these daylight hours?  Toward what meaningful purpose will my calories be burned and my oxygen inhaled?  There are plenty of incentives in the gathering chill in both the weather and the culture to simply go back to sleep, or to settle resignedly into Rhett Butler’s famously apathetic retort to Scarlett O’Hara.  The problem is that increasingly I do – give a damn, that is.  More than a damn, in fact, about what happens to the soil and the air and the water and the trees; about the diminished and trivializing values beneath our food supply and energy supply and moral paralysis and entrenchment in ignorance and disdain for the common good.  As a civilization we seem determined to regress into primitivism – collectively casting ourselves in the leading role of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Having been born as something of a wise and old soul, we seem to be aging in reverse, becoming more and more puerile with every passing day.  And election.

 

So, there is a troubling much about which to give a damn.  

 

But somehow, stepping off the porch step in the crispness of the morning, beckoned by the muffled rooster crow inside the coop anxious to be free, the light I experience is more than the alternation of sun and moon.  Maybe it is my age, newly cradled as I am in Medicare.  Maybe I’m finally growing wiser.  Or maybe it is simply the month of November and its evocation of Thanksgiving.  Who can say?  All I know is that I am increasingly mindful of gratitude for so many surrounding, animating and nourishing gifts - place and possibility and people I love, sustenance in countless forms, and grace-filled hope; increasingly staggered by the cornucopia spilling out around me.  And how I am more and more conscious of the need for Thanksgiving to be something of a lifestyle rather than a day.  

 

And so this new day begins, and inhaling a deep and frost-bracing breath, I step into the brightness of its hours, grateful for the calories I get to burn, and the good and useful work on which I pray they will be expended.