My Work Is Loving the World

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This Thanksgiving, and every day, I am grateful for the big and little things that make up my life. This practice of gratitude was instilled in me at an early age. When I was a young child, my mother cut a giant tree out of brown paper and taped it to an inside door for the whole month of November. She cut hundreds of leaves out of colored construction paper. And every time one of us thought of something we were grateful for, she encouraged us to write it on a leaf and tape it to the tree. By the time extended family arrived on Thanksgiving Day, the tree was an autumn-hued expression of abundance and joy. In my twenties, I used bendable wire to create a reusable version of my childhood giving tree, and I have several decades of gratitude leaves to look back on each Thanksgiving.

This way of facing life with gratitude has a purpose: scientists say it reduces our stress and depression by focusing our attention on what we have, rather than what we don’t have.

“Studies show that specific areas of the brain are involved in experiencing and expressing gratitude. Brain scans of people assigned a task that stimulates expression of gratitude show lasting changes in the prefrontal cortex that heighten sensitivity to future experiences of gratitude.”

—”Gratitude” in Psychology Today, www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/gratitude

My husband teases that I am a walking advertisement for things I love—I gush. I praise. I ooze gratitude. But, as I learned from Mary Oliver, “My work is loving the world.” My whole job as a human is to look for the amazing and mundane bits of goodness all around me … and to share them with others.

Messenger
by Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and
learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium,
the sheep in the pasture, and the pasture,
which is mostly rejoicing, since
all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and
a heart and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren,
to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

So this Thanksgiving, I invite you to write an ode to the things you love. Create a giving tree for your family. Keep a gratitude journal. Write a daily expression of thankfulness on social media. Send thank you notes. Do one thing today to fulfill your work of loving the world.

—Andi Lewis, Prairiewoods marketing coordinator