Be grateful for everything. This statement recently came to my attention. But how does one find gratitude for EVERYTHING? I mean, really. So I decided to look up the word grateful in the dictionary but that turned out to be rather unhelpful and redundant. It simply said, “thankful”.  So I took it to the next level and checked my etymological dictionary and found a more thorough definition. The word grateful is derived from the word gratus which means agreeable or pleasing. Hmmm. Not exactly thankful but something a bit more broad. When someone tells me they are thankful for something that implies that they are glad that that something happened. From what I had gathered so far grateful has more to do with acceptance than happiness. Piecing together the word gratus and ful, the word literally means full of agree-ability. The word pleasing comes from the Greek word plakos, which means “to make smooth.” This was getting more and more interesting. The word agree is from Old French and means “good will.” So putting all this information together the word grateful means something like this, “to be agreeable, to have good will.” Can I then be agreeable to all things in my life? Can I have good will toward all people, places, events and situations at all times? Yes I can do that. Am I always glad that certain things have happened? No, my personality is easily upset and disturbed but I am not my personality and I can choose to view life through a larger lens. I decided to take the word grateful one step further: There was another English word that is closely associated with gratitude and is derived from the same root word-gratus; that word is grace. Again, grace is one of those words that simply defy definition. The etymological dictionary helped out a bit by pointing to the words earliest meanings. From that the word grace varies slightly from grateful. It means, “given freely.” In a theological sense it means “God operating through humans.” Hmm. This certainly gave me much to consider. By agreeing to what is, I allow grace into my life. By being grateful for everything, in essence I am allowing God into my every waking moment.

I recently had a speaking engagement at an abuse recovery center in Oregon. It was the first time I have spoken to an audience about my book and my healing process. I was nervous at first as I stood at the podium and looked out at all the faces looking to me. Then something extraordinary happened. All the fear dissolved and I saw a room full of beautiful faces and I was connected to each person at some divine level. I realized then, the moment was not mine but ours, it belonged to us as a whole and not to all the fragments of individuals. I said a lot of things that I didn’t know I was going to say and many other things that I simply have no recollection of saying. There was a  pulse in the room, a palpable singular energy that united us. I was honored to have been apart of that. After the hour long speech which I found was not long enough I had women coming up to me to thank me or to say hello. I felt the oddest sense of seeing myself in each one of them and I wondered if they were feeling the same way about me. I felt their souls through the exchange and I was touched very deeply by the experience. I hugged these strangers with an openness of a family member for I saw at once that they were part of my family, my human family. I am grateful for the opportunity I had to see into so many lovely faces and witness so many lovely hearts and to know that I am that.