Monday’s Meditation: On Beaches, Going Barefoot, And Giving Thanks

November 23, 2015

Perfect thanksgiving quote from Thích Nhất Hạnh and a quote about the universality of giving thanks from Live Simply by Annie

I’m in Hawaii currently, and I can tell you this much with certainty: beaches are the great equalizer.

It doesn’t matter where you come from or how many beaches you’ve ever walked on before; when you reach the shore, you take off your shoes.

You do this because you’ve been taught or learned, perhaps, how clumsy it is to wade through sand in anything other than your own feet. But also, I suspect, because somehow your body automatically knows–it craves the immersion, the unobstructed connection to earth.

Up and down coastlines and lake shores around this globe, people are treading in and out of each others’ sand-footprints, toting their shoes in their hands, humbling themselves in the presence of nature–of what is vaster than they.

It’s the same way with giving thanks.

All of us have some brilliant blessing in our life, even the person whose existence is the bleakest.

This desire we have to celebrate that source of joy and nourishment, the exaltation we feel when we do so, that unites us, too.

We know somewhere within ourselves that giving thanks is what we are meant to do. That giving thanks is the most adept way to navigate through life–that the more we embody a perpetual spirit of gratitude, the more amplified and elevated the life we have to navigate becomes.

We give thanks for the things too big for us to understand and so small they seem trivial, but they nonetheless bring us happiness.

We give thanks for the variety that is the universe, and for our ability to select from out of that plenty.

We give thanks for our being. Right now. For our walking or motorized wheelchair-ing, our breathing; for our chance.

And in so doing, we tap into the richest source of all, a source we all share and all claim a part of as our own. A source that’s as basic as it is supremely complex and divinely designed. That rises and peaks and crashes and rises again like the waves. That hardens and crumbles and gives way to itself over and over like the sand.

 

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