Gratitude: The Glue That Holds The World Together
At this time of year, the Thanksgiving holiday invites the whole nation to pause and reflect on all that we are grateful for. We gather with loved ones and spend a day feasting and sharing in the bounty of the harvest. It is a beautiful tradition of sharing connection and warmth. And maybe, it is the whole purpose of being human.
Gratitude can also be a beautiful daily practice because as we focus on all we are grateful for it does really great things for the brain. Gratitude increases dopamine, the neurotransmitter linked to motivation and positive reinforcement. Gratitude increases serotonin, enhancing mood stability. It strengthens the prefrontal cortex associated with attention and emotional regulation. It decreases activity in the amygdala, reducing stress and anxiety. Gratitude activates the hypothalamus and releases oxytocin, a bonding hormone, making us feel more trust, connection, empathy, and safety. This is great stuff! Why do we only take one day a year to really focus on all that we are grateful for?
The neuroscience offers us a way to understand the individual physiological benefit, but what about the spiritual and emotional dimension of Gratitude. All of Life has Spirit, humanity included. In the relatively recent human history, we have forgotten the basic reality that Spirit underpins all of Life on Earth. Ancient cultures knew that Gratitude is the spiritual and emotional glue that holds the world together, and this reality was part of their teaching stories and rituals that continue today. Gratitude is known to be one of the spiritual gateways to rejoin Creation in the web of Life. As we cultivate Gratitude, our Spirits, Mind/Emotions, and our Bodies literally change to connect us back into our proper place in Creation. In our current culture, the power and responsibility of Gratitude have been forgotten, leaving us feeling stressed and disconnected, as strands in the Web of Life break under the strain of misguided human activity and the forgetfulness of our true purpose.
It is helpful to understand how our European ancestors were separated from their relationship with the Land and the spirit of Nature so long ago that we have forgotten it was ever part of our lives. Fortunately, this connection lives in our bones among the other “gifts” of our ancestral lineage. It is simply a matter of remembering the connection is there and spending a little time awakening it.
Briefly, indigenous Europeans were separated from Nature by a series of conquests and cultural shifts that took place over the past 2,500 years. Beginning with the spread of the Roman Empire across Europe (50 BCE to 400 CE), separating people from their religion, language, and laws. This was followed by the Christianization of Europe, infiltrating to the general population by about 1000 CE. The Witch Hunts (1450 to 1750 CE) erased Folk practices of seasonal ritual and destroyed the communal authority of women in healing, farming, and spiritual leadership. Capitalism and Enclosure of the Commons (1500 to 1800 CE) deeply affected people’s relationship with Land and Nature, as lands were fenced off as private property, and the general population lost access to their ancestral lands known as Commons—shared lands for grazing and gathering herbs, food, and fuel. Without access to their ancestral lands, their traditional ways of life became impossible as the common folk were pushed into wage labor, toiling for a growing wealthy class. This is the moment that common European people lost their relationship with the Land and Nature because they were no longer directly interacting with Her to sustain their lives. Layer by layer, Europe’s people were severed from land, ancestral tradition, spirituality, and the sacred feminine, Earth. Once gratitude, reciprocity, and relationship were stripped away, a greedy, never satisfied culture emerged that could extract from the Earth without love, gratitude, and reciprocity for all She gives us, leading us to the breaking point we face today.
Photo by Franc and Jean Shore, National Geographic, 1956
We cannot go back, but we can remember, as Robin Wall Kimmerer explains, “It was gratitude that braided the world together.” We can pick up the dropped threads of connection, gratitude, and reciprocity and rebraid them into our modern lives, reweaving ourselves into the Web of Life. These threads live in our ancestral memory and arise in us like hair color, the gift of healing, music or art. Since the old teaching stories of Europe have been erased and forgotten, we can look to the one thing that hasn’t changed since the beginning and step back onto the spiral of Creation—the journey of the Earth around the Sun.
Before Enclosure, Witch-hunts, Christianization, and Empire, the daily life of most people in Europe was governed by seasonal time, not by the abstract time of clocks, or man-made calendars. Time was not linear, it was cyclical, a spiraling through Creation’s stages of birth, maturity, decline, and death/rebirth. Time was relational, marked by Solstices, Equinoxes, and the cross-quarter days (the days halfway between the Solstices and Equinoxes). The people followed the outbreath and inbreath of Creation as the Earth journeyed around the sun over the course of the year.
The Celtic Wheel of the Year offers a framework for gratitude and reciprocity that we can still use today. The Earth’s orbital journey hasn’t changed despite human forgetfulness and disregard for the Earth as a living spiritual being. The sacred dance of Cosmic forces and the Earth that give rise to Creation is still happening every day, constantly inviting us to join in. Following the Celtic Wheel around the sun, we can see that every six weeks or so there is a shift, a new step in the sacred dance of Creation. Every six weeks we have an new seasonal invitation to join the dance in connection and relationship with the Earth and Cosmos through the gateway of Gratitude and reciprocity for the gifts of the last six weeks and looking forward to the gifts of the next six weeks. When we miss the signal to join the dance, Creation is without the “gratitude that braided the world together,” and over time, as we now see, things fall apart.
Including Gratitude in your daily life can be as simple as writing “10 things you are grateful for” on a sticky note with your morning coffee. If you already have a meditation practice, Gratitude is a beautiful way to begin each session. If you like, create a little ritual around the Solstices, Equinoxes and cross-quarter days. These are simple, beautiful ways to rejoin the sacred dance of Creation.