GRATITUDE is an Art
What makes a life charmed? Circumstances, good timing, many things. But an important factor in determining a charmed life is a capacity for practicing the art of gratitude. My mother, who is now experiencing in-home hospice care, continues upon a path of gratitude that she has cultivated for a lifetime. Her neuropathways are etched so deeply in this mode of being that her life naturally continues to flow in this direction. My mother always had a keen intellect, but the slow work of dementia has lessened her powers. What I experience with her now is a highly spiritual love energy that radiates from her essence, her soul. And that soul is grounded in love, in weakly blown kisses, in gratitude.
My mother wanted to be an archeologist in Greece, but when she met my father on the island of Rhodes she got sidetracked for a lifetime. While one of my pastimes has been reading fiction and leading an emotionally intense life, often through fictional characters, my mother has spent her life studying history, traveling, visiting museums, and mastering the art history of all of the major civilizations. Her love of art, history and civilizations doubtless originated in her early life, when she moved from her birthplace outside of Paris to Hungary, South America, the United States, and later to Egypt. My grandfather was an expert in the area of discovering vaccines for infectious diseases like Yellow Fever, and this kept the family on the move.
There were many times that being a wife and mother frustrated her intensely. She was bound to domesticity during a time of very restricted gender roles. How she must have missed the times in her twenties when she was an archeologist living in Corinth, Greece and reconstructing a mosaic as one of her first jobs! As a child, I felt her frustration, but now I understand that not all women have the maternal archetype. Not all women, of course, long to have children, and yet my mother had three. She loved us and cared for us in the best way that she knew how.
When I was about five years old, my mother was swayed to give up the job that she loved as a middle school history teacher at Westlake High School in Los Angeles. Having put her working days behind her, she became a docent at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She then became the Chairwoman of the Art Museum Council, and during the time of the Shah she organized an exhibit of Iranian art, after which she traveled to Iran at the personal invitation of the Iranian ambassador.
When we moved from Los Angles to the Bay Area, my mother continued to cultivate her life in creative ways. Her daily routine included gardening, cooking, and running long distances effortlessly. She ran two marathons in her forties and fifties. She also learned flower arranging at Filoli Gardens and later studied Ikebana. When one of my dearest friends got married, she pulled out a recipe for pomegranate chicken that she had picked up on her trip to Iran years earlier, and she cooked it effortlessly for a large crowd. For her, entertaining was an art. She cultivated a garden and sought out branches and blooms on walks, which were inevitably transformed into exotic dining room table arrangements.
She sought beauty and creativity, nurturing her artist archetype, her athlete archetype, and her student archetype (she went back to school to get a master’s degree when I went off to college). She made the choice, perhaps unconsciously, to embrace beauty in the world around her. Whenever I asked her about her life, she immediately turned to discussing her great good fortune, focusing on what she had made of her life and not on what she might have missed. She never made another human responsible for her happiness.
And now I know this too. No human being is responsible for making me happy, and I must choose where to dwell in my mind and heart. I do believe that this realization has made my personal relationships stronger and more loving.
My mother has shown me what it looks like to be frustrated, but she has also shown me what it means to dwell in that enchanted and elusive place of gratitude. Today, many have access to information and resources that help us to process the trauma that we inevitably experience as incarnated beings. My mother and many of her generation lived in the opposite extreme of unacknowledged, often ongoing wounding. There were no safe spaces in my mother’s world to acknowledge grievances, even to herself. Instead, she chose to channel her deepest passions into appreciating and living life from day to day in ways that brought beauty and artistry into the world and that also fulfilled her. She created a rich life with her energy, imagination, and creativity. And while the idea of acknowledging her personal hardships was foreign territory, she nevertheless found within the resilience and courage to follow the rhythm of her soul. This oriented her toward a deep appreciation for the world around her and a willingness to embrace with grit and gratitude the many opportunities that timing and good fortune afforded her.
My mother has lived into her blessings. The wonderful English writer Elizabeth Goudge expresses what I mean through one of her characters, a bookseller named Jocelyn, in her novel A City of Bells: “We’re all too apt to think that things are as we feel them to be, forgetting that they have an objective value apart from what we feel about them. An embittered mind colours the world black for its owner, yet that does not alter the fact that the world is a treasure house of beauty and love.”
My mother in her frailty now sees, more than ever, through the eyes of her soul, where love and gratitude dwell, where there exists a mystical awareness of “a treasure house of beauty and love.”