Thanksgiving: An “I Heart This Manifesto”

Introduction

In October of 2022, I decided to start a podcast about things that I loved. At the time, this seemed like a not-terrible idea. It turns out that I am the world’s foremost authority on things that I love, so I was actually somewhat qualified to speak on the subject. And seeing how it was focused on my own obsessions,it was also pretty much guaranteed to interest me . But mostly, in a media world populated with trolls, cynics, and conspiracy-pedaling gadflies … well … talking about delightful things seemed like a novelty. Like I said, all in all, a not-so-terrible idea. 

The next thing I probably should have asked myself was “Who would want to listen to hours and hours of some random guy talking about the things that he loves?” But I kinda skipped that part. 

Instead, I asked myself, “What do I love? What do I want to talk about?” I liked that question better because it meant I got to write a list. And I really love writing lists. In fact, “making lists” is #20 on my list of things that I like, and it will probably end up with its own episode at some point. I put this list in a spreadsheet, because, well, I also really like spreadsheets. (They’re #65). 

But now that I Heart This has reached the end of its first season, it seems like it’s probably time to ask the existential questions that I avoided asking at the beginning.

Because, y’all know, the last thing the world needs is a new podcast. We’ve got enough “influencers” and “personalities” and hucksters and reminders to like and subscribe. We’ve got enough people feeding the algorithms, thank you very much. What good could it possibly do to add yet another voice to the media circus. It’s like shouting into the void. 

Why spend hours of a good life scripting and revising and recording and listening to the same sentence over and over again to edit out all the weird noises my voice makes? 

And … why listen? There are a thousand other things you could tune into to right now. You could listen to the news … or someone who will make you laugh … or financial advice … or, y’know, like nine out of ten podcast listeners, you could tune into an endless and moderately disturbing stream of true crime. 

So, even it is a bit belatedly,  let’s go there. “Who would want to listen to hours and hours of some random guy talking about the things that he loves?” Why gratitude? Why a project like this at all? 

Move over Karl Marx.  It’s a Thanksgiving I Heart This manifesto. 

I’m Ben Lord. You’re listening to “I Heart This.” 

Story of me. 

Kamana Naturalist Training Program. 

First, let me tell you a bit about how I came to be such a gratitude cheerleader in the first place. 

In my mid-twenties, I enrolled in a nature study correspondence course for cavemen. Okay, it wasn’t really a course for aspiring cavemen … but it was for people interested in wilderness survival and wild edible plants and stalking around in the woods and getting close to wildlife. So … y’know … cave man stuff. And it really was a good old-fashioned, pre-Zoom correspondence course. Assignments would arrive in my literal IRL mailbox. And I would use these things called stamps to send envelopes full of my work back to the school. 

About half of these assignments had me researching local animals and plants in books. But the other half were a kind of in-the-woods practicum. The approach was simple. Go to the same spot in the woods every single day. Sit there until all the things I’d scared away relaxed and returned to going about their business. And then … watch. 

Does that sound boring? I guess that sometimes it was. And sometimes it was wicked cold or wet. In June there were swarms of mosquitoes. But not a day went by without something miraculous happening. I found ovenbird nests and watched mother birds feign broken wings to lure me away from their eggs. I watched from a few yards away as a black bear mauled a hemlock sapling to mark its territory. One time, I nearly stepped on an hours-old white-tailed deer fawn, curled into a little oval of spots and legs in the ferns. 

But watching was only the first half of the assignment. Every day, before I left my sit spot, I was supposed to give a litany of thanks. I wouldn’t have to say anything out load. And there was nothing to memorize like the catechisms I had to learn in Catholic school. All I had to do was start with the Earth  and think of the good things it had given me. Then move out in concentric circles. I’d send thanks to the waters, the crawling things, the plants, the trees, the animals … all the way out to the stars. The guiding principle was to treat everything as if it had a wish to be appreciated. 

I wasn’t really looking for a gratitude practice. Mostly I wanted to get good at tracking and and getting close to wildlife. But the effect that this ritual had on my life was unmistakable. 

For years, I’d wrestled with painful anxieties …  repetitive thoughts that would keep me awake for hours each night, afraid of things I knew to be irrational but that I just couldn’t tune out. And over the course of several months, I began to notice that the little thanksgiving prayer that I said on my little pine stump by the sphagnum bog was providing some breathing room. A daily respite from my own neurotic mind.

I remember one afternoon in particular.  I went out with this cloying tension in my gut, feeling like my life would never be right and that there was no escape from the fears that followed me wherever I went. I could hardly pay attention to the woods around me at all. But as I sat on my stump stumbling through my thanksgivings, I was struck by an idea. If I was supposed to “treat everything as if it had a wish to be appreciated,” then wouldn’t that also include my fears. Was there even a reason to be thankful for something so miserable? And even if there was, could I do it? Could I find it in myself to be thankful about something I just  wished … so badly …  to go away. 

The answer, it turned out, was ‘no.’ on both counts. 

The thought didn’t make any of the fears disappear. But they did allow me this moment where I could see more than just my anxieties … a moment where I could be both anxious and grateful at the same time. 

BOSS course. 

Some years later, while on a wilderness survival trip in the high altitude deserts of southern Utah, I leaned on years of gratitude practice, as I faced thirst and hunger and cold. On days when every step felt impossible, I found myself turning my mind explicitly to thankfulness. I would intentionally imagine how much worse my situation could be. And through that, I could feel the discomfort ease. I would turn my eyes to the small beauties. The cacti and birds for whom thirst and hunger were ever-present. 

I remember one evening crawling out of the pile of pine needles that was my only bed to pee. The sun had not yet set, but the clouds were thick with distant storm, and everything had this odd grey light. And I kept thinking of Laura, two thousand miles away and pregnant with our first child. Thunder rumbled and I thought of how fatherhood, was, for me, like the threat of that impending storm. I had so many things I wanted to do in life. And I was afraid of the sacrifices that being a parent would entail. What things would I have to give up? Was I ready to do this biggest, most commonplace thing? And looked at the pine trees in that eerie light as if they would somehow give me the answer. A bolt of lightning flashed to the west. And at first, I thought that the grumbling buzz that I heard was thunder. 

But the sound swooped down over my shoulder like a helicopter. And there, just inches from my nose was a hummingbird, its long needle of a beak pointed right at my face. It was so close, I could feel the air thrown from its wings against my cheek, and I looked into its tiny black eye. 

It must have been only a few seconds, but it felt like an hour. That hummingbird hovered face-to-face with me like it was some kind of messenger. And all I could think about was the baby girl who, in a few short months, would change everything about my life. 

And then it was gone.  

My friends, the world is a big and mysterious place, and I cannot pretend to understand what happened that night or what it had to do with parenthood, but when I packed my few belongings and headed out the next day at noon, I knew that I was ready to be a dad. 

I know that in a previous episode of I Heart This, I’ve told a version of this story–how upon my return to civilization and to home and to family, the fears that had dogged me for years seem to have lost their power over me. They were still there, of course, but I had learned that I could carry them. 

This too, I think, was due to a kind of thankfulness. Those weeks in the desert, when I had done without so much, helped me to see the abundance of my everyday life for what it was. My tiny ramshackle house was so warm and so bright. The water was hot at the turn of a knob. There were people there who loved me. I was rich beyond measure. I had walked in the footsteps of our human ancestors for only a few weeks, but that was all it took to see the extravagance of modern life for what it is. Gratitude wasn’t just a way to endure hardships or soothe anxiety. It was the secret to seeing the world for what it really was. 

Surface reasons

Gratitude is kind of a thing in certain circles right now. It’s not like a Harry-Potter-like sensation or anything, but gratitude evangelists have carved out their own little pop culture niche. There are books and TED talks and the occasional inspirational quotes that make their rounds in the social media meme confetti. There are several reasons that people tout for cultivating an attitude of thankfulness. But most of the discourse centers around one big reason, the promise that gratitude makes you happy. 

Surface reasons 1: Happiness 

In a much-cited 2003 study, Robert Emmons et al. asked their subjects to write stuff down in a journal. They asked some to write down five things that they were thankful for, others to write down five hassles, others to write just five major events from the week. They did this for ten weeks, and at the end of each week, the subjects reported on a whole battery of things: their life satisfaction, their health, etc. And what did they find? Not just that the gratitude-journalers said they were happier, but they also said that they had fewer headaches and coughs, fewer symptoms of any kind. They even reported that they did more exercise. Other studies have replicated these results. 

In one of them, Martin Seligman compared a battery of different happiness interventions. His sample included more than 400 people. (And, incidentally, their control assignment, to write about early memories, was very clever.) The intervention with, by far, the greatest effect was for a subject to write and deliver a letter of appreciation and thanks to someone who had been kind to them. Even a month later, without any other interventions, the letter-writers still reported being happier than any of the other groups. 

There’s a growing body of such studies, and they’ve led some people to claim that a regular gratitude practice is a kind of happiness panacea, a good life wonder drug. But… it’s devilishly hard not to fool yourself about such things. There are placebo effects. The line between correlation and causation is often unclear. And how does someone really measure happiness? It is easy to exaggerate and over extrapolate. 

Real progress has been made in positive psychology, but no one has yet found a secret to happiness. Mostly, and quite usefully, psychologists have corroborated common sense:  Exercise, get enough sleep, spend time with friends, and be grateful for the good things you have. It’s a mundane list … But gratitude is on that list! Based on the evidence, it really does seem that a regular habit of being grateful for your blessings will make you happier.

The evidence might be limited. But, limited evidence is all we’ve got. And I, for one, am not about to sit around and wait for certainty that will never come. Thankfulness seems as likely as anything to make me happy. And it seems to be a surer bet for my long-term well-being than making more money, nabbing more likes or followers, getting nicer things … surer even than finding a loving romantic partner.  

In short, gratitude seems to be a critical ingredient to a happy life.   

Surface Reasons Counterargument 

Distraction 

But, hold on just a second there, Mr. crunchy granola Vermont guy! You might live in your little hippy, yoga commune. Happy or not, the rest of us have other things to do besides updating our gratitude journals. Sitting in the woods and doing your little Thanksgiving ritual isn’t going to pay the bills or keep the lights on. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the world outside your little Christmas ski village is in trouble. Fascist and demagogues are rising to power around the world. Democracy is eroding. The rich are getting richer on the backs of the poor. Even the Earth systems that our whole civilization relies on are imploding. And the suits who are in charge do little more than wave their arms and make empty promises. 

What if gratitude is a distraction from the fact that shit is going down? What if the bumper sticker is right? If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.  

Pollyanna-ism 

Are you going to be just another voice in the chorus of toxic positivity that tells everyone to “consider their own self-care” while simultaneously assigning them more uncompensated responsibilities? That is the kind of thing that shames people for not being happy and cheery all the time… for not being grateful enough. 

‘Cause news flash, Pollyanna, we shouldn’t have to be glad all the time. Sometimes we have really good reasons to NOT be grateful. To complain about things that really ARE unfair. And you don’t get to tell other people, especially people who’ve inherited centuries of disadvantage, that they should be “grateful for what they have.” 

Surface Reasons Rebuttal

And, yeah, I wouldn’t argue with any of that. They are all good cautions. But I would say this. 

I once attended a conference of yoga teachers who had gathered to talk about the environmental disaster. Everyone there was terribly earnest in their concerns. Some were angry. Some were afraid. Some were hopeful. Some were full of despair. Some people seemed to want to get beyond the feelings and just get down to work  … to do something, though it was seldom clear just what exactly that was. But the voice that struck me most was of one teacher who had, only a few months before, sat by her mother’s hospice bed and watched her die. And amidst all of the discussion of what to do about an ill and maybe even dying earth, she said … very quietly … when my mom was dying … I did what I could to make her comfortable and then I held her hand … and I told her that I loved her … even when she couldn’t hear. 

Gratitude isn’t an emotional eraser. It’s never going to replace grief or our anger. But it can exist right alongside them. Inviting thankfulness into our hearts doesn’t mean that the other guests have to leave.  

And there is no reason to be inauthentic about that. I don’t look for reasons I “should” be grateful. I just pay attention to what I am grateful for. There are lots of moments when I’m too sad or grumpy to sing the praises of anything … And that’s okay … But it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye out for blessings when the come. 

Nor do I think it’s my place to tell other people that they “should” be grateful. Hell, if I know what anyone should do. 

Yes, there is work to do. Yes, the world needs us. Maybe it even needs our righteous anger and our complaints. But it also needs our admiration. And it needs us to hold its hand … and remember the good things that it has done for us, and for us to tell it we love it … whether it can hear us or not. 

Deeper Reasons: Meaninglessness, Nihilism, Relativism

So, yes, I do believe that paying attention to and praising the things we love is good for us, even in a world that needs more than just our gratitude. But there are other, and I think, more important reasons to live a life of thanksgiving. Happiness is wonderful. But most of us would give it up for something greater. People do it all the time–for the prosperity of their children, for creative work that will enrich the lives of others, for faith, for justice … for love. Meaning trumps happiness. 

Several years ago, I wouldn’t have given much thought to this. But since then, I have seen something that makes “meaning” impossible to ignore. A widespread and spreading despair among the teens that I work with. I see it in their faces. But it isn’t something that I need to infer. They are frank about their hopelessness. More kids than ever come from homes damaged by drug addiction. They live in a world that seems to be quickly unraveling, and the adults who hold the reigns seem unable or unwilling to try and hold it together. They tell me things like, “Human destroy everything they touch.” “Nobody’s going to stop it as long as there’s money to be made.” and worst of all “It doesn’t matter, the world I want to live in will be gone by the time I get there.” 

And then they turn their faces back to the screens of their phones and feed that despair with news of the latest outrage, the latest shooting, the latest war. 

Those kids need meaning right now. Desperately. And we are experiencing a global deficit of it–right at a time when the last thing we can least afford the paralysis it brings. Where do we find the meaning we so desperately need. 

The world IS meaningless

I took a few philosophy classes in college. But instead of following the normal sequence and starting with a survey course, I skipped all of the pre-requisites and jumped straight into classes on Heidegger and Wittgenstein. I mean, what pre-requisites did you really need for a philosophy class? I’d had some pretty intense conversations with my scouting buddies. Like– 

“Hey, man, did you ever think about the fact that right now there might be some aliens from that star looking up at our sun and wondering whether there might be alien life? Think about it.” 

“Dude. That’s deep.” 

“Hey, pull my finger.” 

Needless to say, when I got into said classes, I was clearly in over my head. I’d expected to be talk about how to live a good life and what its meaning might be. But mostly we talked about the nature of being and time, rules of formal and informal logic, and the peculiarities of language? Most of those classes passed over my in a stream of meaningless words. 

But there is one class that I remember clearly. Somehow we’d ended up talking about enlightenment. And my ears perked up. Here was something I thought about a lot. I was neck deep in yoga and fancied myself to be a kind of Buddhist. I’d read Siddhartha and loved it. this was my jam. 

But our professor talking about enlightenment mostly to take it apart. “How would it be to be happy and peaceful all of the time? Can you imagine? You are walking along the road, and your friend is in a horrible car accident right in front of your eyes. What do you do? Continue walking with some relaxed half-smile and say, ‘Ah, so it goes!?’ As if none of it matters! Of course, not.” 

I felt this comment like a personal blow, especially because my idea of enlightenment was uncomfortably similar to one that he had just unceremoniously deflated. I had to do something. So I raised my hand and asked, “But what if none of it does matter?” And John shook his head at me and said, “Oh, don’t do that. You’ll just drift off into nihilism, and we’ll never get you back.” I had no idea what nihilism was or what might be wrong with it, and I was already struggling just to follow the conversation as it was, so I didn’t ask any further. The subject changed and that was the end of it. 

But it wasn’t the end of it for me. 

I eventually learned that nihilism was the idea that there was no absolute meaning or right and wrong in the world. And by the time I’d figured that out, I saw no reason to discount nihilism out of hand. I’m not sure I could have if I tried. 

By that point, I’d stopped believing in god, and doubted that I had anything like a soul that couldn’t be explained by electrochemical gradients in my brain, and had even given up on enlightenment. I had learned about the long slow heat-death destiny of the Universe. Looking around, it seemed to me that right and wrong were just made up. Oblivion was our destiny. Everything is just a shout in the void. And there was an awful lot of void out there.  

As far as I could tell I was completely insignificant. My consciousness was only that of a mayfly’s … here for one disorienting instant and then gone … one brief little matchstrike that would flare out with only time for a few befuddled thoughts.  

Meaninglessness Doesn’t Scare Me

But this didn’t scare me, the way it seemed to scare other people. Nor did it leave me with the vacancy I would later recognize in the faces of my students. Actually, I liked the sense of weightlessness it gave me. If there was no right and wrong, no god, no legacy, then my life was truly mine. How I lived, and what I lived for were my choice. If I really didn’t matter at the cosmic scale, well then at least I couldn’t seriously fuck everything up. I was free.

And I did know how I wanted to live. Somehow, whether from some inborn conscience, or just by drinking at the waters of culture, I knew what was good. 

To see what I mean, consider the spectacularly weird 2022 film, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. In it, Michelle Yeoh gives a virtuoso (and Oscar-winning) performance as Evelyn Wang, a washed-up middle-aged immigrant woman who owns a laundromat that’s being audited by the IRS and whose relationship with her only daughter is … strained … to say the least. When it turns out that she alone can save the multiverse from destruction by the mind-splintered Jobu Tupaki, she ends up bouncing from one parallel universe to the next and fending off adversaries with Matrix-like martial arts powers. Yes … if you haven’t seen it. This movie is as strange as it sounds … but I urge you to watch to the end.  

In one scene, the only thing that stands between Evelyn stands ready to face off with the gange of universe hopping commandos who have been sent to take her down. And all that stands between them is her seemingly weak-minded and naive soon-to-be-ex-husband, Waymond. 

“Please!” he begs, “Please! Can we just stop fighting. I know you’re all fighting because your scared and confused … I’m confused too … All day … I don’t know what the heck is going on … but somehow … this feels like it’s all my fault … I don’t know … the only thing I do know … is that we have to be kind … Please! Be kind … especially when we don’t know what’s going on.”

I am like Waymond. Despite the absurdity and confusion. I know … I know we’ve got to be kind. I don’t have to check with anyone about that any more than I have to ask people whether I enjoyed a book or whether I thought a joke was funny. 

Meaning isn’t a metaphysical question. It’s an aesthetic one.  

And as far as my heart is concerned, gratitude passes the Waymond test. If I truly am only that mayfly … if my insignificant life is only long enough for one thought … what better thought than, “Oh my god, how glorious!”  

Here’s the meaning I choose. 

In a universe where I get to forge my own meaning …  where I get to choose … I choose to believe that appreciation is one of the highest callings of a human being. And for that I need no reason. 

You’ve got to grateful just like you’ve got to be kind. Look at this world we’re in. Look at the stars and secret spiders’ web that you find under the eaves, and how beautiful your kids are when they don’t know you’re watching them. 

We don’t need reasons in the face of heartbreaking beauty. 

But I’ll give reasons here just the same. 

1. Gratitude is the antidote to the malaise of “taking for granted” that we seem otherwise unable to escape. It navigates us between the rocks of entitlement and guilt. Nothing else I know can. It makes us generous and tolerant. In a world where our tendency to social comparison is amplified by the barrage of curated happiness we see online, gratitude makes us see the riches we already have. We become wealthy just by changing our perspective. 
2. When we lose what we love … as we inevitably will … gratitude gives an option besides despair. We always have the option to remember how blessed we were to know the who and what was good while we had them. 
3. Gratitude teaches us about being uninhibited. To love what we love without embarrassment, no matter how nerdy or hokey or silly it might be. It can open us to exuberance … to dancing and cheering. It gives us the courage to be the first one up for the standing ovation when the high school play touches your heart, even when the rest of your reserved Yankee fellows in the audience clap politely from their seats, glancing side to side to see if someone else will stand. 
4. In a world of entrenched rancor, gratitude helps us listen … and to speak without pushing other people away. If the last few years have taught me anything, it is that all the explaining in the world won’t convince ideologues to change their minds. Nor does all the well-intentioned “informing” people about the “facts” do much to assuage the fears of people who, for example, distrust vaccines. I don’t know if anything ever will. But I do know that, whether it changes minds or not, that people listen to me when I tell how grateful I was when I’d gotten my first COVID vaccine and I could finally hug my parents after nearly a year. About how thankful I was for all the smart people who worked tirelessly for months to figure out how to make them. About how lucky I felt that the technology that made it all possible to manufacture mRNA vaccines was so serendipitously ready, just when the world needed it. In a world that needs more bridges than wall, speaking of our gratitudes with those who disagree with us gives us something that indignation, however righteous, cannot. 
5. I don’t need a scientific study to validate the joy that comes when I pay attention to the people I love or the place I get to live, to the fractal and delicate intricacy of the forests, or the cold, sharp starlight of a winter’s night. As Mary Oliver says: 

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Finally, and most importantly. Instead of thinking about happiness and whether gratitude might help you find it; think instead of what appreciation does for every heart around you. When I saw the alienation and loneliness and hopelessness on the faces of the teenagers I did science with everyday, I didn’t know what to do. And then, after we returned from the pandemic, it was worse than ever. As one student wrote to me in an email when I checked in about her spotty attendance. “I want to connect, but it feels like everyone is judging me all the time. I wish I could understand what people think of me. Am I a nobody sitting in the back of the class or am I some type of significance to anyone in this world. I’m sorry I can’t be a better student or person but I want you to know that I try so hard.”  Sheesh, man. How does one middle-aged guy in an institutional high school lab could make a difference in all that despair.

But I was willing to try anything. What were they going to do? Fire me? They were desperate for teachers everywhere. And so, every Wednesday, I shut down my class for the first half of the block and arranged the chairs in a circle and passed an old fossil around as a talking stick. Here was the only rule–you could say whatever you wanted on subsequent rounds of the talking circle (or not … that was fine too.) but on the first round, the only things we could say were appreciations of each other. In those first weeks hardly anyone said a thing. But then, as time went by, appreciation tumbled out like a waterfall. Some of it was mumbled. Some of it was ludicrous. Some of it was heartfelt. But you could feel the difference in the air. 

At the end of that semester, the girl who had written to me, wondering if she had “some kind of significance to anyone in this world,” would come in laughing and walking arm-in-arm with her classmates. She knew she mattered, because people had told her. Unsolicited. In public. Over and over again. They’d appreciated her help with homework, her partnership on a project, her talent as an artist, and her quiet sense of humor. 

Your appreciation, expressed with heartfelt authenticity, is a gift that can transform someone else’s heart. I watched it spark little sprinklers of joy on the faces of my students all semester. And it is so, so easy to give. 

No, gratitude alone will not fix our problems. And, yes, those problems are grand and terrifying. But even if the end is nigh, what better, more courageous way to to go out than to sing the praises of the good lives we’ve had as we do. To ride forth and take care of what we can, even if we know it will make no difference in the end. 

Story of us 

I recently went to a talk by Jeff Sharlett, the author of a new book called The Undertow about the rise of anti-democratic extremism in the United States, and listened with an anxious fascination as he told stories of being escorted out of churches … churches … by men with semi-automatic weapons. In my mind, at least, it called forth ghosts of fascists who had risen much the same way almost exactly a century ago. 

And at the end of his talk, one person asked the obvious question. “How, amidst all of the self-reinforcing conspiracy theories, do you help these people return to reality–both for their sake and for ours?” 

And without hesitation Jeff said, “You don’t. You don’t talk them back to reality. You build something brighter.” 

What might the world be like if subtly, without scheme or dogma or organzation … what if without ideology or evangelism … people everywhere started building on the brightness that is already there … just by giving more thanks? What if we appreciated the good things we saw in each other just a little bit more? What if we started to sing the praises of the things in which we find delight? I’m not so simplistic as to divide the world into trolls and fans. But take on this simplistic model for a moment, just to ask the questions, what if the cheers of the fans were louder than the grumbles of the trolls and the critics. How might that change the world? 

Would our politicians stop arguing? No way! But would they might be more willing to eke out some common ground and escape the zero-sum trap that they seem to be caught in? Would it fix the economy or finally bring justice? Doubtful. But maybe it might energize our neighbors to take better care of each other, the world around us, and ourselves? 

Might there be more joy? More curiosity? More kindness? More tolerance? Less alienation? More connection? 

We cannot really know. But even if it made no difference at all, it would still matter. “The thing I do know … is that we have to be thankful especially when we don’t know what’s going on.”

Story of now

Once, many years ago, I dreamed I was on a wide sandy beach. It was a black and moonless night. My feet were bare and I could feel the wet sand between my toes. Waves made their rhythmic hiss on the shore. In the starlight I could see dark shapes scattered across the beach, and I started toward them, worried that they might be whales stranded on the sand. But as I got closer, I could see that they weren’t whales. They were people. Wretched people, exhausted and bedraggled, tangled in rags. I dropped to my knees beside a woman there and rolled her over so that I could see her face. It was crusted with salt. And through her cracked lips, her voice came as a barely audible whisper. “Thirsty,” is all she said. But I had nothing for her to drink. And the nearby ocean waves were all salt. I turned to another shape in the darkness, an old man. His skin was withered and cracked. “Thirsty,” he said, “Water.” 

I stood up and looked down the beach, and there were thousands of them … and I could hear their voices all inside my head. “Thirsty. Water. Help me. Please.” 

I ran down the dark beach, tripping over people, their bodies stiff as corpses or reaching out weakly to me for help. And I could do nothing for them. I’d had many a nightmare in my life, but this was different. I wasn’t afraid. I was overwhelmed by anguish. It was a griefmare. All those people. All that suffering. And I could do nothing. 

I ran until I came to an old tower, a lattice of rusted iron beams. I leaned against it and wept so hard that I could barely stand … and when I put my hand up to steady myself I found a box attached to the I-beam and inside was an old radio transceiver. And at the top of the tower, I could barely make out in the darkness an old megaphone. 

I don’t know why I did what I did next. It was a dream … so, y’know, … they don’t really make sense. But the only thing it felt like I could do to ease all that suffering was sing. So I did. 

I don’t remember what I sang. Just that it was sad. And I was singing all the despair I was feeling and how much I wanted to help and how I was going to be there singing as long as I could. 

And then the horizon started to grow light. 

It was almost as if my singing was somehow bringing up the sun. And so I sang harder and the sun began to rise … right over the ocean. The stars disappeared and rays of light lanced across the waves and all over the beach where the people lay. And I almost couldn’t sing anymore for seeing them all there. But as light of the rising sun fell on the people, they began to move. 

Slowly at first. They rolled. They crouched. And then they began to stand. All over the beach people were standing up and facing the sunrise. And then they began to sing right along with me. A different song. A new song. A song of hope and joy. And I could see the woman and the old man, their faces soft and clean and smiling. And when I woke, the winter sun, the real sun, was coming through the window over the hills. Never before or since have I awoken to find my cheeks were wet with tears.  

I’m not one to attach much significance to dreams. And certainly not one to find life advice there. But over the last year, as I’ve been recording this podcast, I’ve thought of that dream quite a lot … the feelings of it … the sense of not really knowing whether it was my song made the difference or not, but the urgency I felt, just in case it was. 

I was 22-years old then. And here I am now, a middle-aged guy with a microphone whose life and work took a far more mundane turn that that 22-year-old self every expected. I still harbor a few delusions of grandeur, but most of them have evaporated over time. And I have come to terms with the fact that all of my life and work will no doubt be forgotten before another century has passed, this podcast included. 

But this isn’t a solo gig, y’all. It’s a chorus. People have been singing songs of praise for as long as they have had voices. And our songs are a gift to each other. The only reason I know how to sing in it is because I grew up with people who knew how to sing. John Muir, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman. Thoreau. My uncle. My dad. So many poets and storytellers and musicians and artists and teachers. My family. My wife. My friends. Even my kids. I can’t tell you what a debt I owe them. They have saved my life a thousand times over. I have just one small voice, but I get to join in the great song for a measure or two. 

Do we really need a new podcast about gratitude? I hope so, I dearly hope that my part of the song is heard and loved and moves other hearts to sing. I hope that it brings joy and delight to friends and strangers alike. I hope that in some small way, I pay forward the gifts of the poets that have taught me to see the hidden blessings around me. But even if there is no ear on the other end of this wire, this song is worth singing. It passes the Waymond test. 

Sing with us! Everyone is invited. You don’t have to sit in the woods on an old pine stump or walk in the desert. There is nothing special or esoteric here. You already know how. Become a fan of the things that you love. Dive into the cold ocean waters and feel the sting of your own aliveness. Send that letter of appreciation out of the blue to the teacher who doesn’t know she changed the course of your life. Express your unbridled, unapologetic exuberance. Be the first to stand for the ovation. Even as you make your daily bread and fight for justice. There is no shortage of goodness in this world. Even as the glaciers melt, there are great whales nursing their calves in the mighty seas. Even as the bombs fall in Gaza, there are flowers growing in the cracks.