“More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity” -Francois Gautier

Clarity is another act of grace. It is not at our beck and call, but rather an internal re-organizing and fresh perspective that comes through us when we are open and listening. Clarity is attracted to humility. It can fill us with an authentic and deep connection to our own truth when we give up the idea that we know. Clarity eases the anxious heart with it’s simplicity and focus. It has nothing to do with the situations out there, clarity is a gift that unfolds from the inside and marks our path distinctly and without doubt.

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“He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had failed.” -William James

I have been thinking all wrong and not even aware of it all these weeks in the fast changing pace of my winning company becoming more than just me. I have been trying to let go, an oxymoron as the trying is just another way of holding on. Still the shifts have been bittersweet and feeling more like loss than victory. Today I was given the grace of new eyes and the wisdom to realize that a shift forward is not a process of letting go of the past, it is an act of opening, a willingness to embrace what is to come. This is how change can confuse us. Without realizing it, we hold onto the past so tightly that our arms are too full, our heart is too heavy to embrace the promise of the present.

The act of embracing life as it changes is the root of freedom and the perspective we are blessed with as children. We learn to fear change as we age, but when life is simple and we live in the moment, change is an adventure. As this new perspective washed over me and actually ran through me under the skilled hands of a local energy therapist, the images of the Red Balloon, the brief award-winning children’s film by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse filled my mind and spirit.

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“The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth.”  ~Chinese Proverb

I visited the grave of a dear family friend today with my sons.  The anniversary of his death, already two- years- old just recently passed and the flowers on his grave were dried and dead in a tipped over vase. We sat and talked about our friend and his neighbors, each with a name and the dates of the beginning and end of life. The whole of  life and all the wonders and emotions that made up their lives is represented only with a hyphen.  In 1827, two brothers, Augustus and Julius Hare wrote, “Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit…”  which pretty well sums it up.

As we lay in the grass, looking up at the sky, missing him and thinking of what he would say if he could have commented on the day, made me realize again how much of the small essential things in life I so often take for granted. Lost in the myriad details of the days, taking the time to fix what breaks, overcome with frustrations or anguish about things that won’t last or even matter in a few days, I forget to pay attention to the small things at the heart of life.

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“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” ~John Muir

The beauty of the earth is an invitation to the felt sense of gratitude; not the kind that you think of, but the sort that inhabits your body and reminds you how good it is to be alive. Any experience of nature has the power to heal and give strength like a direct transmission from the earth to the body. I am incredibly fortunate to live in the midst of Pacific Northwest forest. My back porch is like a nest in the trees.

As I have been working to cultivate the experience of gratitude and not always able to feel the thoughts I can conjure with my mind, I never realized until today how frequently I feel deeply grateful for the beauty of the world. The recognition reminded me of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s comment: “After all, I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.”

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“Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all” –William Faulkner

I like the idea that gratitude exists in the world like an electric current. The more that it is expressed and experienced, the more energy that gratitude builds. I know I am not alone in having felt appreciation for someone’s help or effort and not expressed my gratitude for their thoughtfulness or trouble. Do other people experience our gratitude when nothing is shared? It has been said that silent gratitude isn’t much use to anyone and as I think of the moments when I walked away without communicating my gratitude it did feel a little like a short circuit in the energy of life.

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“When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude” -Cynthia Ozick

I was searching for the feeling of gratitude for much of the day. I let it be a slow day, not jumping out of bed early to exercise, letting myself have quiet writing time at home, taking the dogs and kids on a walk through my favorite nature park. I accomplished the necessary and left early for a late afternoon swim at the lake. When the kids all took the floatie out, I lay gazing up at the blue sky and heard the warm summer breeze on the banks while the dogs resting on either side of me.

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“To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kind that will stand behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.” -Albert Schweitzer

It occurred to me today that I have hit a roadblock in my positivity quest. Although I have experienced moments of deep gratitude over the last seven months in the process of seeking a positive life experience, I have not mastered any real practice of gratitude. I bought a gratitude journal but have never trained in the daily practice of writing in it. I can make a mental list in a moments notice about things in life that I have to be grateful for, but often even as I say them out loud, I feel the distance between the words and the feeling.

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“We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” -Paul Bowles

This thought often is my wake up call in life. It occurs to me when I am in the midst of a moment that is true. Today my son, on the brink of becoming a much older version of himself, walked with me around the park and lamented about all the time that my work takes up, away from him. I reminded him of the days he is gone with his friends, and the hours that I spend accompanying him to his athletic events, but still he was sad and hardened by a feeling of missing something.

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“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” ~G.K. Chesterton

In a houseful of teenagers, preteens and young adults I rarely know how many there will be for dinner. It could be as small as the three of us left, or as many as twelve with the steady boyfriend or girlfriend, or the clan of boys surrounding my younger son. It is rare, however for it to be all four of the kids and my husband and I. The last time we had any consistent time as a family unit was last Christmas when we spent two weeks in Hawaii. I treasure the moments when it is all of us, if only because I see the writing on the wall and I know that these times will increasingly become the family holiday.

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“Gratitude is the memory of the heart.” -French Proverb

When we store a memory in our heart and not in our mind we create a pathway for gratitude. One of my favorite new meditation techniques is called the Midline Meditation. In this meditation, practitioners focus on the physical sensation of the midline of the body, the root of our nervous system and the connection to a source of energy that is referred to as dynamic stillness. The meditation technique was derived from the study and practice of dynamic cranial sacral work, and is based on working with the primal streak, which is the most primary embryological structure in all life forms.

Much of the midline work originates from the heart field, which extends and has been measured at least ten feet away. Sixty percent of heart cells are neurons, which like brain cells, are the intelligence of the organ. What your heart senses and feels is often shrugged off as somehow less accurate or reliable than brain thought, which is ironic considering that the heart has an energy field 60 times as powerful as our brains.

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