6/5/17

i'm thankful for good art, which can do many things. i'm thankful that one of the things good art does is make me appreciate being alive, appreciate that being alive allows me to experience so many things and that so many of those things are beautiful. i'm thankful that good art suddenly brings all of those things into relief, shines a ray of light on them so that i see them when the mud of days has prevented them from reflecting and being visible. 

i'm thankful also for the other thing that great art makes me feel, which is a desire to be a better person than the person i am most of the time. i'm thankful for the way that great art helps me to realize how much of my life i spend being petty and small and being irritated or fixated on things that just don't matter. i'm thankful to sit in the wake of something great and feel, for a few moments, that the world has been unlocked, that i know what is important and what isn't important and what i need to care about and what i don't need to care about.

i'm thankful we use the word wake to describe a number of very different (and yet, in a way, not so different) things: emerging from sleep into consciousness, the ritual held after someone has died, the patterns of disturbance left by bodies traveling through water. i'm thankful that each of those senses involves a sudden awareness of your place in the universe—in one, your eyes open to see the person lying beside you; in another, you understand that you won't see a person you've lost ever again; in another, you see the trails of ripples left on the surface of the water behind you as you keep moving forward.

i'm thankful that forward is a relative direction, that we are all always moving forward even if it doesn't always feel like it. i'm thankful that there is no such thing as going backwards, even though sometimes we wish there is. i'm thankful for something i try to do sometimes when i feel sad or afraid or confused, as i did last night before the show aired and after it and do this morning, which is to count. 

i'm thankful for 1, 2, 3. i'm thankful to be aware that when i count, even if it feels like i am sitting still, everything is moving forward. i'm thankful for 4, 5, 6. i'm thankful that even if that constant movement is frightening, because there are so many other things moving all the time and i can't track all of them and i know that at some point, at many points, i'll lose things, things that are important to me, that counting still feels soothing because it makes that movement feel manageable, like something i can hold. i'm thankful for 7, 8, 9, 10. i'm thankful to look up into the sky and watch clouds pass in and out of view.