There’s this subtle difference between entitlement and gratitude.

GRATITUDE

There’s this subtle difference between entitlement and gratitude.

Subtle but immense.

I think I am working my way out of the one into the other.

Like, when good things happen, the meaning I make of it is “Of course it did. That’s the way the universe works.”

Conversely, when something doesn’t go my way, I alone suffer this cruel fate at the hands of an uncaring universe.

Both experiences seem to spring from the same “me-ness.”

But as the world is revealed to me to be less the utopian playground for my wishlist of “The Secret”-like dreams and visions, and more like an ecology where the costs of my lifestyle are outsourced to invisible stakeholders upstream and downstream, my entitlement dreams and visions just seem more and more empty, and embarrassingly child-like. Even the good ones, the “soul-directed” ones, where I’m in an earth-connected community, raising kids in a Waldorf-inspired farm school, eating organic veggies, have a thriving professional life and experience true flow.

I realize that my present work is not to “manifest” a painless (or even appropriately painful) idyll, but to find ways to let cold reality break in.

I could say my work is to learn to let the whole ecology of reality live in my heart, and cultivate gratitude for all the many blessings woven through the bittersweet, harsh love-song that is naked reality.

That is a better thing to want, I think, than any checklist.

At least, it is for us, those that came here to embody soul, in this time, on this, our blue-water home.