Raw Gratitude

What if there's nothing else to learn, nothing else one needs to do to have a fulfilling and good life except this one secret--gratitude? It seems too simple, huh?

I just read, Kissing the Virgin's Mouth, a novel by Donna M. Gershten that proposes the above, through and through. Here's how the book opens, and I don't know about you, but I was captured in the first paragraph:

I have begun to teach Isabel the important things. Just as I taught my hija. Feel gratitude. That's what I told my little five-year-old cousin yesterday when she found a coin in the grass. Wrapped her fat fingers around a peso, eyes bright. Say thank you, I tell her; like this: I kneeled beside her, pretending the peso was inside my tight fist and I closed my eyes and filled my heart and kissed my fist long and firm like a mother who finds her lost child, like a father saying good-bye. She did it too. Thank who? That is not important. 

Some people think that I am religious.

I am not. 

I believe in gratitude.

Gratitude, raw gratitude. I aspire to begin each day, end each day and smatter the day with gratitude. Feeling it when I'm hooked up to my HeartMath gets me in the green coherent state every single time. Is it enough? What if it is in fact everything, all we need to learn? Raw gratitude.

Do you ever wake up in the morning and get a snippet in your head clear as a bell? This happens to me sometimes in the moments between sleep and waking. The day before the Boston bombings, I woke with this snippet--Sit and open, Creator will come and do the steady work.

Once I was up and moving about (and doubting mind was fully awake), I questioned, how do I open? Answer seemed too simple to be effective--gratitude. Later the following day, when I turned on the news for information about the bombing and felt the pain to the heart that I'm sure you all recognize, I experimented because I didn't know what else to do: I sat, opened and let Creator do the steady work of repair. I continue to give thanks to the fine people who rushed in to help with compassion overpowering their bodies, rather than fear, I give thanks to the cameras that held steady so that information could be gleaned, I give thanks to the men and woman who used their medical skill and expertise to save lives.... In my own life experience, through joys as well as tragedies, raw gratitude has softened and opened the heart.