The Goddess of Gratitude

Gratitude hasn’t come to me easily.
The feeling or the practice.

For me, real gratitude is an intense emotion.
It combines awe, wonder, love, humility, and a sense of magic.
It’s the positive emotion most likely to bring me to tears.
When it arrives, it is unmissable. Unmistakable. All-consuming.

True gratitude is a numinous experience.
It lets you know — without question — that you are in the right place at the right time,
and that some beautiful, powerful force in this life adores you completely.

There is no such thing as a small amount of gratitude for me.
I’m never a little bit grateful.

It’s either a wave crashing through my door,
or it’s off visiting someone else — another time, another place.

Gratitude comes when she wants to.
She stays only as long as the conditions please her.
And I have never, not once, been able to conjure her up from a list.

I’m not good at gratitude the way other people are.

Ironically, the closest I’ve ever come to the Goddess of Gratitude
is the moment I give myself full permission
to stop trying to feel grateful at all.

I think my emotions are too needy for the average gratitude practice to work on me.
They don’t want to be brushed aside so I can feel something else.
They crave my attention
like someone would crave water in the desert.

They don’t want to be forgotten.
They don’t want to be passed over.
They want to be seen — first.

And I don’t blame them.
I understand that part of me.

So I will tend to her.
I will feel what she needs me to feel —
even when I’d much rather be feeling something as lovely as gratitude.

I’ll feel to the ends of the earth if she needs me to.
To the very bottom of my well.

Because this — this full-bodied devotion
to everything other than gratitude —
this is the only way I know to make space inside myself
for her arrival.

Not commanded.
Not coaxed.
She comes like weather —
when the sky inside me has cleared.