Giving Thanks
Work That Reconnects #1: Gratitude
For those who don’t know, I’m a trained facilitator of the Work That Reconnects, a beautiful body of work, originally inspired by the late Joanna Macy, that supports the ‘Great Turning’ we all want to see. I first met the work, at least consciously, 13 years ago on a five-day adventure called ‘Dancing with the Heart of the World,’ run by the School of Movement Medicine with strong links to the Pachamama Alliance. I’ve subsequently trained in the processes with my wife at the helm (another Joanna) and co-led a number of workshops with her. The central aspect of the work is a 4-fold spiral of principles to dive into and embody. So here’s my own philosophical dive into the first one, the starting point for the whole enquiry. I’ll look at the other key principles in the weeks and months to come. Those interested in exploring this work in a more embodied way, do drop me a line: there will likely be more opportunities soon, particularly for those living in the Cape, but also online.
Over on the podcast you can hear audio versions of my last two articles, the most recent being Jazzy Jungles, and prior to that my midwinter musings, Hollow Lanterns.
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The rain is pouring as it has all day, and the water tank is filling up, just as the groundwater reserves are. The green of the garden, visible through the large glass windows, is likely to get greener still. The colour of the heart chakra, the centre of the rainbow. It’s a Sunday afternoon, a moment of pause. In front of me, a small ginger cat is purring, his older companion tucked in to my blankets upstairs. I’ve got an order of wood in, and a fire is blazing in the hearth. The couch, which we moved recently to its winter position, is well-placed before it. I’ve had a simple lunch and my belly is full; I’ve boiled up a tea. Earlier today I opened the lid of the old family piano, a little in need of a tune but still better than honky-tonk and able to help me express a little of my soul in another way; my soul and what my soul is experiencing all around me. Books, a favourite pastime when I have the space, also surround me in various shelves – some of them even opened recently. Full of the fecundity of the human imagination. Right now, I’m alone at home, though the garden birds are chanting to remind me of yet more life. Pictures, photos, keepsakes dotted around the place remind me of my connections, my family, those I’m proud of and what they’ve created.
Any of these things I notice are opportunities for me to tune in to the radical notion of gratitude, which is much more than a call for positivity and optimism, though I’m a big fan of both of those attitudes. But gratitude is also an opportunity to recognise how much we already have, before we dive too quickly into the world of lack, of division, of desire for more, that the global system insists we need to feel. Gratitude is, therefore, a spiritual action. It is recognised as such within the philosophy and practices of the Work That Reconnects, though of course multiple other traditions have the same teaching. When we talk of prayer, it is often couched in terms of requests for divine aid for things we lack, and I wonder if this, too, is not a recent ideology, a version of prayer for materialists to laugh at. Meanwhile they pander to our desires instead with advertising aimed falsely at our souls. Sometimes it is a lot less easy to access thankfulness than on my cosy Sunday afternoon in a secure home, and yet we have to find it (and often I’m humbled by how much gratitude for life people have with ostensibly much poorer qualities of life than mine).
For gratitude is also a vital piece of our communication with the invisible, the imaginal, the more-than-human world, however we choose to identify it. It is essential to a fuller understanding of prayer. When I duck into cold water, I feel the bracing renewal of the waves, and I can be thankful. When I see the colours of the beach huts, hear the call of the gulls, I can be thankful, not just for the variety of life but for the senses that allow me to experience it. These are starting points; my beating heart, my breathing lungs. The mere fact that I got some sleep. My knees work, my body can still move, I have teeth to brush. What a miracle life is. And it exists amidst this oxygenated air, the wonderful warmth of the light-bringing sun – there even on cloudy days. There’s solid earth for my feet to find their steps. All of this feels more and more like a blessing: one I hope will continue.
And perhaps this is where the tipping point of the spiral, that the Work That Reconnects outlines, is eventually seen. For I am grateful for much more too: for the electricity powering my fridge, for the food in it my family will eat. For the municipal connection delivering clean water out of our taps. For my car safe in the carport, and yes, the petrol in it – good heavens, I’d better give thanks for that, given how people have laboured to get it to me and what the earth has had to experience for us to be burning it in a combustion engine, even as clever alternatives jostle their way to the forefront of wealthier economies, and hopefully soon less privileged ones too. For the money in my account allowing me to buy such things. And there are plenty other feelings there, aware of my privilege that these things point out: part of the one-fifth of humanity that has a car in the family; and the proportion is even less than that here in South Africa. Aware of the compromises involved in filling up again with a limited resource from the blessed earth. Aware that I want inequality to lessen, but ideally not via the ‘Business As Usual’ model of extraction and pollution that still dominates. Aware of the continuing damage to the more-than-human world from the mode of operating that means our car ownership is so very useful.
There’s a little nagging fear there, too. Perhaps tomorrow I won’t be able to afford the petrol, the electricity, the food, the shelter. Perhaps my body won’t work like it has (in fact, pretty inevitably, there’ll come a time when it works less, and our society is pretty mercenary towards elders). I could approach this all with that fear predominating. Or, again, with the radical conception that I’ll still have so much to be grateful for in this life.
So part of today’s tasks are about living a day I can feel good about, so I can also be grateful in looking back; that I’ve made some stand for change, in my day, that’ll make it easier for more people to feel grateful tomorrow. For thankfulness is already such a source of the re-connection we need. In some ways this is the roots of the plant of growth: the parts that join unseen. Even being grateful just to myself and my body, I have to include that acknowledgement of the billions of bacterial beings that miraculously make up more of me than “I” do. Gratitude quickly extends us beyond that modern false notion of the discrete and separate self. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the grace we might say before eating. It’s an opportunity for ‘Kairos’ time: a reflective ceremonial moment before the Chronos clock ticks on. And it arises from this curious ritual we humans have (in common with many other species, though we’ve made it rather more explicitly religious): putting bits of other species into our mouths. Plants, animals, plenty of minerals, and lots of those connecting fungal types too. Native Americans thank such beings for their ‘giveaway’ to us. Gifts, giving away, is in fact something we all do, and it’s in gratitude that we get to acknowledge that it’s happening. So there’s definitely a place for gratitude at the end of the day too, for reflection that allows us to sift through for the moments we received, or those we love received.
I’ve heard plenty of people feeling sceptical about gratitude as a tool, mostly because gratitude pretty much always makes you feel good about stuff. When the world’s in such an insane state, that’s not surprising, and of course, early sessions of Joanna Macy’s work (founder of the Work That Reconnects) with activists focused much more on grief as a core thing to experience, express, and not get numb about. Definitely important, and I’ve heard expressions over the years like “don’t put sugar on sh*t” that get to the heart of this concern. What is this feel-good thing all about when the planet’s under such stress, our societies are collapsing, there’s species going extinct at an unfathomable rate, etc.? How can we possibly spend time feeling grateful for this moment? There are many answers to this but the one that rings most true for me is that we just have to. Even if it means zooming out until we just see the majesty of the universe in which our beautiful little home planet is a tiny speck of brilliance among untold others. The old saying goes, life is a tragedy close-up, and zoomed out it’s a comedy. So countering all that current focus on the dangers of ‘toxic positivity’, we need to remember the basic rule: happiness leads to a better life, which is what the social science tells us. And it’s that way round: happiness generates success. I’ve looked into this in some detail, and when you do, it’s super clear why gratitude is where the WTR spiral begins these days. A decade ago, care workers in Soweto families affected by AIDS – usually very stressed-out people, for fairly obvious and entirely understandable reasons – began ‘laughter sessions’ in the mornings. They pushed their bodies into feeling more playful, more positive, more upbeat, and their depression levels dropped rapidly and stayed lower, even though it undoubtedly felt very weird to begin with.
I’ve given talks in the past on the four basic rules of happiness: these can be boiled down in terms of proven results for good emotional health. (I sound like I’m marketing something here, I know, there’s a sceptic in me too that’s raising eyebrows, and yet, of course there is. We’re almost hardwired to look for the dodgy things in life). So the rules are: work imaginatively with a positive vision for the future, have compassion (and experience compassion), rediscover how to be playful with life, and be present and mindful. Gratitude helps us know what we want more of. It helps us feel for what others don’t have that we do. It helps us find joy in the little things, and be present to what there is all around us, so it ticks all those four boxes. And we can do a lot of things to help build this feeling. It often helps to be in a group – we’re such social animals, think of singing together for example as such an uplifting way to give thanks. Yet finding gratitude alone is also an essential part of centring ourselves.
How do we use this gratitude for change? The Work That Reconnects talks a lot about Active Hope, which is a lot more than just blind optimism. Small steps. Seeing the good stuff helps us orientate to what we want more of in the world; perhaps that’s very male of me, wanting a map and direction as usual, but it’s a great guide to have. I’ve just put another log on the fire, added a little more flame. When I was in a playback theatre company years ago, Bonfire Theatre, that’s how we started all our gigs. An imaginary fire and we threw into it qualities we wanted to embody, and then the show was going to be great. People have made altars since forever as a visible mark of gratitude, a prayer made solid, yet another word for them is sculpture. Human creativity and art is essentially a gratitude project in origin; we would do really well to remember that!
But this fire is also super essential because there’s some dark stuff we need to acknowledge too, and it is easier if we have this gratitude as a bedrock to face it, to do something about it ultimately. Ground, roots, rock: and stillness. Gratitude sits very close to the emotion of joy, and deep joy is the spiritual truth of all traditions; good to touch in with and take a breath to feel, deep down. That little grin of wonder right there, pushing us into connection. Perhaps the danger people speak of when dealing with positive emotions is the quality of insistence that can come with it, rather than the wonder of actually being able to find it. One upbeat truth is never everything, and when gratitude has its space within a constantly moving spiral, it is accessible to us all. Indeed, when times and spaces are very dark, the spiral really helps me: because I remember that gratitude is always around a corner or two.
That’s the satisfaction aspect of gratitude: a job well done. Which we can look forward to when down in the grittier places and spaces, wrestling with the results of a couple of thousand years of separation gone into overdrive. As I walk next to the estuary near my home, there’s the very visible result of lots of effort: newly planted indigenous fynbos, cleared and protected areas to rehabilitate the land, all after much community conversation that’s led to this possibility. For me this ties in with the other important aspects of the Work That Reconnects, which lie within that vision piece, the Great Turning. Not just the holding actions that help preserve what we’re still grateful to have, but the rebuilding, re-imagining, re-creating of society and our relationships with nature. In this respect, gratitude is revolutionary. There’s a history out there, of the huge majority of human societies across our hundreds of thousands of years of history, where gratitude was far more prevalent than feelings of covetousness. Revolutions are spirals too. Let’s spiral back towards deep connectivity.
