Dear sweet peas,
As long-time readers of this column know, it’s my tradition that every time I reach a “new decade” of columns I write shorter answers to several questions instead of the usual longer, single question column.
We’ve arrived at column #90, but I’d like to do something a bit different this time. I want you to help me write the column—not by sending me your questions, but rather by sending me your answers. I’ll choose a few of your answers (or more if length permits) and compile them into column #90, which will be published next week, on Thanksgiving Day.
My question is simple, but complex: for what are you grateful? (And why, if you feel so inclined.) Every year when I was growing up my mother asked whoever sat at her Thanksgiving table to answer that question and we did, each of us taking a turn, even when my siblings and I were teenagers and we grumbled about having to do so. It’s a tradition I’ve carried into my own family, one I’ve come to cherish.
My inbox is full of your sorrows and complaints, of all the things you want and never got, the things that you lost or can’t understand. I’ll turn my attention back to those concerns on December 1, but for now, fill my inbox with what you have and what you treasure. The dark and the light. The sad and the sweet.
Please do your best to be brief, though if your gratitude demands a bit more space, that’s okay too. You may put your name on your answer or make up a name. You may email me your answer via my anonymous form at the bottom of this page or you may send it to me directly at sugar@therumpus.net. Either way, please write the word “gratitude” in the subject line, so I know what it is. The deadline for submissions is 9am PST Tuesday, November 22nd.
I can’t wait to read what you send me.
Love,
Sugar
31 responses
Hi, Sugar.
This is what I say every morning: (as paraphrased from the Hebrew):
I am grateful to you, God, for trusting me with another day to do your work. Please continue to guide me and to have faith in me, and to “be the wind beneath my wings.”
And I believe it.
Thanks to you, Sugar for sharing your gifts.
I am thankful for sweat, for softening joints, for my accordian lungs and my internal perfect percussion, for a malleable body and malleable mind. i am thankful for my breathe and yours, for this moment in time, for chocolate and autumn leaves and sad cello songs and that honey sun taking it’s sweet time to drop beneath the horizon. for language, for that beautiful, complex abstraction. for words like gates unlocking and then getting closer into the center, that meaty, universal center. words that that makes aware the droplets of themselves, that brings them back to the sea. i’m thankful for this and more. oh, so much more.
On the sad and sweet end of the spectrum: disillusionment, the removal of enchantment when enchantment means being unwittingly held captive by ideas that don’t work. (The only hitch is that some of these ideas, although not fully reasoned and improbable, were really really warm and fluffy.) Yet all in all, I savor the loss of my idealism, and am left feeling sober (not in an AA way) and grateful.
After a day of searching from village to village and endless cups of milk tea, a small Muslim boy’s father said “Yes, we know where to find the Buddha” and his son led us up the mountain on a small dusty trail. Walking in line we passed a wall of pitted stone sheared from the hill and under the lichen, incised Pali writing from the reaches of time could still be seen. Then a small stupa, almost melted with age, a jump across a crevasse to a flat area where it was necessary to lie on one’s back in an open channel smoothed by countless bodies and use finger holds to pull along the length up to a kind of grassy platform near the top of the mountain. And there, carved into the living rock, the Buddha sat, perhaps 20 feet tall or more, serene, part Greek, part Asian, looking out over green terraces that dropped away into the setting sun. I sat in his hands and heard nothing but the wind and the sounds of distant goat bells. I am grateful that so many years later, I carry this memory in my heart fresh as the day it was made.
I’m thankful that all of the experiences of my life have added up to make me the person I am today – and that that person is someone who I am proud to be.
I am grateful right now for every day my brother is alive. I am grateful for the 87 years my father has been on this earth taking care of all of us. I am grateful that my daughter found employment before she and her husband and sons lost their home. I am grateful for 30 years of marriage to a man I still love, and who knows every atom of my being, the ugly with the sweet, and still loves me. I am grateful for my faith, my friends, my job and the breath in my body. And I am grateful for the gifts given to me by the people I have lost: my brother in law, my mother and my sister. Life is such a treasure!
I am ever-grateful for the ability to write like a motherfucker! Because without that outlet, I am a stone!
For cross-country skiing.
For riding my bicycle to work.
For being able to create things with my hands.
For the cold nose of a cat against the tip of my nose.
For the warm fur of the same cat between my feet at night.
For roaming in the forest (without a goal).
For living in Sweden.
For being alive.
These days I’m grateful for a poor memory. In the past when something triggered that familiar, anxious need to fill in the gaps in my past, the parts of my childhood I’d locked away, I would spend weeks considering (and occasionally undertaking) hypnosis or therapy until the angst went away. It always did. Now I’ve decided to be grateful for what I once considered a failing. So many people are haunted and terrorized by memories they can’t escape, so I choose to feel blessed not to be able to remember.
I am grateful for my best friend’s new pregnancy after her baby was stillborn last April.
I am grateful that I understand the difference between “thankful” and “grateful”. And it has everything to do with the power of forgiveness and the endurance of love.
I’m grateful for the writing you share with all of us through this column. Man, your words have heart. I am consistently floored.
This has been a year of things falling away, to the point where I’ve lost a lot of the relationships and activities and “things” I associate with being an adult, much less a successful one. It’s tough, but there’s also a lot of freedom in it, which I didn’t expect. I’m grateful that things are getting really simple. I’m grateful that I’m starting to figure out who I really am, without the partner and the travel and the trappings. I’m grateful that I’m slowly becoming okay with that.
Although my Thanksgiving was a few months ago, this is always worth doing.
I am thankful for the opportunity to make a difference. For the struggles along the way that remind me how valuable this education of mine is. I am in awe of the friends and family whose love encourages me to keep chipping away. And I am grateful to you, Sugar, for showing me that writing like a motherfucker is the only way to stay true to yourself in academia.
In particular, I’m thankful that I can still be there for my loved ones when they’ve needed me, regardless of the physical distance. This year has been difficult for many close friends who live far away – I’m going there soon, to hug them and cry and talk till our voices wear out and fall asleep in one great pile.
In sum: I am thankful for love.
I’m grateful for warm socks on cold mornings and two-for-one night at McGillicuddy’s.
I’m grateful for functioning organs after years of abuse. The Hammond and Wurlizter, specifically, but also my liver. And maybe my penis.
I’m grateful that I’ve been able to spot and avoid those trained to kill me. So far.
I am grateful for deep holes dug with my own hands. I am grateful for ropes thrown. I am grateful for the rope-throwers.
I’m grateful to find out that my existence isn’t just some sort of cosmic joke. Or if it is, the joke isn’t on me.
I am grateful for love. As painful as it is, I am grateful for love.
In recovery, I have learned that thankfulness is about receiving and that gratitude is an action — it is something we express and, in turn, give back into the world we touch.
I have deep gratitude for being able to do the work that God created me to do: teach at the local Community College as a full time professor. I bring my spiritual and sober self into the classroom so that perhaps, even if it is just a handful of students, are moved to do the same in their work as helpers. I awake with joy as I prepare to go to campus and hardly believe that I get paid to do that which I love.
I could not do this without the gift of my sobriety and my relationship to a Higher Power. The way I am seated as a teacher and as a friend and a sponsor and a daughter and a partner are expressions of my gratitude.
Knowing since i was 13 years old that I never wanted children, never forgetting that, and now being happily childless at 36 years old.
For my family and the closeness that we share. It’s such a lonely world when you aren’t able to trust anyone with your heart.
For the children I care for at work who trust me enough to tell me their thoughts, dreams and concerns.
For the knowledge that I am enough.
I am grateful for a loving husband who is forgiving and thoughtful and darling. I am grateful for my two grown children who still seem interested in their parents. I am grateful for the “annoying” puppy we have that freely gives love and makes me take walks. I am grateful for work that is still amusing and challenging after many many years. I am grateful for the hammock in my backyard where I can see the sky, watch trees sway, and feel the wind.
When I was a kid, I never believed that anyone would love me enough to want to marry me.
Finally, at the age of 47, I am celebrating Thanksgiving with the man who proved me wrong.
Every day I wake up with gratitude surging from my deepest inside place. And then I turn to my husband and say, “Good morning, my love.”
I am grateful for the ability to communicate with people in the ways that I have.
For all of the capacities through which communication is possible: my ability to empathize and to listen, for those who speak and write more brilliantly than I could ever dream, for movies, books and TV shows, for the Internet and websites likes yours, Twitter or Facebook, for the people who still love to sit down and talk face to face, for the tears that have felt necessary me and to anyone who’s cried at me, for the openness in my friends and strangers’ hearts and mouths, for the treasured hand written letter, and mostly for the silences that communicate more than any words ever have.
hope.
i am thankful for my laughter,
for the love i give and receive
i am thankful for the sun that shines on me
for the moon and stars that guide me during the dark times
and for the ocean breezes that tickle my senses
i am thankful for the salt air surrounding me
for the mountains i climb that strengthen me
the birds that prove to me
yes i can fly! –
i am thankful
for the healing of broken bones, broken hearts, broken dreams
and you…
I am so very grateful for music and musicians. Music has always affected me on a deep level and I can’t go very long without listening to my favorites. All of my friends have gone. Some to school, some just moved away to find better prospects. But I’m still here. The job I have is kind of awful, certainly not something I want to do forever. Some days are bad. They’re really, really bad Sugar. And when I want to talk to my friends, I can’t. So I find solace in music. Whether they know it or not, Pink Floyd has always been there for me when things get shitty. The Clash has always greeted me at the end of a tough day. Elvis has always (and will always) crooned my sorrows away. Thank you for providing the soundtrack to my life. I’m forever grateful for you all.
i am grateful for the folks in my life whose eyes reflect me from before the after. for shared grief, when going alone goes nowhere. for the faith that one day i’ll once more recall gratitude in all of its full-bursting brightness, rather than having to tell myself that i ought to, almost all the time now…
i am grateful for that one shred of hopeful in the frail form of an email. for writing within the inherent limitations of context. for building words atop each other recklessly, and for the haphazard sentences sure to follow in the failed fall’s wake.
i am grateful to be awake, and in waking to give free reign to the things i’ve really no power over anyway. for that peaceful sensation of powerlessness, to look time straight in its dozing eye. for being able to allow each moment’s beat – to feel the flow of perceived time in its singular rhythm. and for gratitude endless, allowing me now and then to be grateful.
I am grateful for my journey from a young life of trauma, addiction and mental illness to a vibrant life as a community leader, more true friends than I ever imagined possible, two healthy and happy young adult children, and a new Love who is so good to me and perfect for me it blows my mind. I am grateful to finally know real happiness.
just the suggestion of thinking about that which i am grateful makes me pause. there is no beginning to it. words cannot start.
My two old dogs, soft and sweet and full of kisses. The sun and the rain and the moon in the sky. The trees; their spring blossoms and their fallen autumn leaves. The friends I walk with, eat with, talk with. The man I fall asleep beside and wake up next to. The world, still turning. My heart, still beating.
I’m grateful that I had Guillain-Barre when I was 15: completely paralyzed and in ICU for 1.5 months, and in rehab for another 1.5. Without that I don’t know that i would have ever known that my body is not who I am. Without that I don’t know that I would now be so sure that I have a soul.
For my house, although somedays I still feel trapped here, for my health, although somedays it beats me down, and for continually seeming to have a bona fide, big ass sense of humour. I cherish that. For the fact that after 20 years i’ve finally made a journey that’s transforming me from self-flagellating, woeful pessimist to striving for the life I want, and seeking out joy and giving out love, even if somedays it still feels like a battle. For the sheer sweetness of finally loving being alone, when I used to think I was condemned to it because I believed I wasn’t worthy of a partner. I’m grateful I’ve finally started letting the light shine a little on myself.
For this dazzling world in which we life, for the technology, the music and the beauty. For all the strong women who have forged rich lives through bravery and hard work. Mostly, I’m grateful for kindness, compassion and generosity – and for how I’ve realised, now I notice them, and not just the bad things – how they multiply and reproduce and spread. That floors me, these days.
For pretty much everything, one way or another.
Silly me, I thought I had until 9 PM!
I am grateful for that specific and timely kick in the ass that usually comes when I bitch and moan unnecessarily, because it’s all unnecessary. Sometimes I take heed. I’m grateful for that too.
Lately, I’d developed two time consuming patterns: fussing with my son, and whining about getting old. Last week I read a facebook post that delivered the aforementioned ass-kick. On behalf of his grief stricken wife, a man wrote that his beautiful, 39 year-old, happy, seemingly healthy step-daughter went to sleep the night before and never woke up, much like my mother did. My heart aches for this family, especially the young child she left behind. I know the pain they’re feeling now, and the excruciating road ahead of them. What the hell am I bitching about?
I am grateful for all my loved ones, for the memories left by those long gone, and those who woke up this morning. I am especially, perpetually grateful for my son. There’s nothing we can’t work out.
I’m thankful for you, Sugar, for always encouraging us to rip it all away until we get to the ugly, face it, deal with it and build back something strong and beautiful. Writing or not, you are one bad motherfucker, and I say that all year round.
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