Gratitude and Suffering

Appreciating the wonder of being alive

This moment, just as it is, is all there is. This moment, just as it is, is exactly, perfectly, just what it is. This moment, just as it is, is not happening to me, or inside my mind; the whole world, of which I am an inseparable part, is what's happening, right here, right now. There is no place to stand outside this moment, outside of myself, outside of the world. This moment, this self, this world, all one thing.

– Zen teacher Barry Magid

Suffering and Gratitude

There is a great deal of pain and suffering on this planet. So many in this world are living in truly unimaginable conditions. I think of the people in Gaza and other war zones. Old people, pregnant people, people with disabilities of all kinds, people who are ill or injured, people who were in the middle of cancer treatment or who had just undergone major surgery when the war broke out—their homes gone, the hospital destroyed, walking for miles, sleeping in tents, not enough food, water or sanitation, no medical care—never knowing when the next bomb will fall on them, seeing their loved ones, their children, parents, grandparents, siblings, partners, animals, gardens, homes being blown up in front of them. There are people at this very moment locked in horrible prisons being tortured, people being raped and beaten, people growing up in dire poverty, children, animals and elders being abused. All over the world, there are so many people without enough food or water, without housing, without medical care. And even among the more fortunate, most have to work long hours, often at tedious or backbreaking jobs with poor working conditions and also care for children. For most people on this planet, life is very hard, and for some, it is unimaginably hard.

I’ve had a very lucky life. I had loving parents and a great education. I have a roof over my head, food to eat, good medical care, heat in the winter, AC in the summer, and I’m not living in a war zone. Yes, I lost my right hand before birth, faced various challenges growing up lesbian and gender nonconforming back in the 50s, nearly died from alcoholic drinking, have survived cancer twice, currently have back pain from a new spinal fracture, and I live with an ostomy stoma named Otto and a bag of poop attached to my belly. But I’ve had a great many blessings and lucky breaks that far offset the difficulties in my life, and each of those difficulties has itself been a blessing in many surprising ways. I am filled with gratitude to be alive. As Lester says in a voiceover after being shot in the head at the end of the movie American Beauty:

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it’s hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.

—Lester's final lines in the movie American Beauty: Look Closer, screenplay by Alan Ball

Like Lester, I’m filled with gratitude. He found the beauty in life shortly before he died, the beauty his daughter’s boyfriend describes to her while watching a plastic bag he has filmed drifting in the wind:

American Beauty is one of my all-time favorite movies (and I love the subtitle: “Look Closer”). I love the movie because it captures both the hidden pain of modern suburban life among relatively affluent people and also the discovery of the beauty in life in what is simple and ordinary when we are awake to it, when we look more closely, the beauty that is here even in this world of birth and death, love and loss.

Amazingly, some people find grace and gratitude even in the midst of truly unfathomable suffering. Some find it in simply being alive, finding the love, beauty and wonder even in the midst of unimaginable pain and horror. But this isn’t any kind of shallow New Age happy-happy. It’s a profound joy seasoned by pain, and it doesn’t deny or gloss over the pain in this world or the difficulty.

My friend and teacher Toni Packer grew up half-Jewish in Nazi Germany. One of her favorite books was And There Was Light, Jacques Lusseyran’s autobiography. Lusseyran (1924-1971) was blinded at the age of seven, and almost immediately, he saw this new way of perceiving the world as a gift rather than as a hinderance. He was a leader in the French Resistance against the Nazis, and he spent fifteen months in Buchenwald concentration camp. He went on after the war to be a university professor, married several times and had children, and eventually died in a car accident. He also wrote a collection of essays called Against the Pollution of the I. Lusseyran met adversity in an amazingly open-hearted way. Some have called him a mystic. He was focused on the blessings, not the adversities of life.

But for all of us, even in the luckiest of lives, there are moments of unhappiness and grief. This is part of being human. The bodymind is vulnerable to age, disability, illness, death and loss. At age seventy-six, with chronic back pain and Otto (the ostomy) as my constant companion, my life is more limited in many ways than it was in earlier years. Taking long walks was one of my greatest joys in life, but now walking and standing are painful. Now I find joy in shorter, more limited walks.

For many years, I was lucky to live in many apartments that had gorgeous views, sometimes in all directions. I feasted on all the movements of the natural world that I saw every day from my windows. When I had to move from my last apartment a few years ago, I was able, with the help of several very generous friends, to buy a small condo in a retirement community, the first place I’ve ever owned. It’s on the ground floor, with windows only on one side, facing north, looking out on a pedestrian walkway and the side of another building. I can no longer see the sky, the sunrises or sunsets, moonrises and moonsets, rainbows and lightning bolts as I did in previous places where I’ve lived. But I find beauty in what I do see, which is actually quite marvelous and infinitely new in every moment. There is a beautiful stone wall, some plants and bushes, an ailing redbud tree I’ve been nursing, which is flourishing more and more. I’m so deeply grateful that I’m here, that I have a home, that I’m in this supportive community, that there’s a wonderful park here with wildlife where I can walk and sit.

I find that I’m ever more content to simply be alive, without knowing the nature of ultimate reality, without claiming to have found Truth, without needing any special, transcendent experiences. I’m happy sitting in my armchair watching light dance on the leaves of the redbud tree outside my window. I see hummingbirds, lizards, occasionally a deer traveling down the walkway, sometimes a flock of tiny newborn quail babies stumbling out of the bushes with their mother. I’m happy meeting people on Zoom or having dinner with a friend. I’m happy changing my ostomy bag and having conversations with Otto. I’m happy taking out the trash and washing the dishes. I’m happy going for a walk even with the pain in my back. I’m grateful I can still walk, that I can still see, that I can still hear the birds, that I can still breathe.

I don’t know how I’d feel if I were in Gaza or any other war zone, or if I were being tortured or unjustly imprisoned at some horrible place like Guantanamo. Would I become terrified, angry and bitter, or would I somehow find the light in the darkness, as Lusseyran and so many others have done? I remember years ago watching all nine hours of Shoah, the documentary about the holocaust, and I was especially moved to see how some people had emerged from all the cruelties, horrors and brutalities to which they’d been subjected with light in their eyes and a gentle smile on their faces.

An Outpouring of Love

I recently watched Apollo 13: Survival, a Netflix documentary about the Apollo 13 moon mission that suffered a disastrous explosion 200,000 miles away from Earth while closing in on the moon. The three astronauts survived through the incredible ingenuity of the folks at Mission Control back on Earth and the courage and skills of those astronauts, who spent days in cramped, dark, freezing cold conditions without power, not knowing if they would make it home, knowing there was a good chance they would not.

What I found especially moving about it all was the fact that after the explosion happened, people around the world were tuned into this unfolding drama—there were shots in the documentary of newspaper headlines from all over the world. In the final hour, as the vulnerable capsule re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, not knowing if the heat shield had been damaged in the explosion and if they would burn up, giant crowds were gathered all over the world waiting and watching and praying for them. Three men in trouble, and the whole world united to bring them home. It said something about the human spirit, about love, about our common humanity, about possibilities—and yes, also about our love of suspense-filled drama—but there was something deeply touching about it. It was a massive outpouring of love.

The other thing that always moves me about space travel is the views of the Earth. I remember the day back in the 1970s when that first image of Earthrise appeared, and the pictures of the whole Earth. It changed human consciousness in some profound way. From space, Earth is a radiant blue ball suspended in utter darkness, and it has no borders and no nations. It looks fluid, seamless, whole. It’s the world that meditative exploration can reveal, the world that we can begin to see right here in each ordinary moment. It’s the aliveness of this present experiencing that is infinitely diverse and seamlessly whole, ever-changing and yet always just this, this one bottomless moment right here, right now. We can begin to see and enjoy the radiance, the beauty, the wonder that is everywhere. We can feel gratitude for all our blessings. We don’t need to know what it all means or why it’s here or which comes first, the chicken or the egg. We simply need to be here, which we can’t not be. We’re inseparable from this flowing wholeness, there’s no actual boundary between inside and outside, it’s one undivided happening.

At some point, the heart may open to the totally indefinable, unpredictable, and often unwanted movement that life is. Love is that openness of heart…

– Darryl Bailey

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Love to all…