MY OWN WALKING - Journal April / May

Count your blessings while you may - so goes the song - one I used to sing as a prepubescent boy soprano, many many years ago. There are two versions of Count Your Blessings; a late 19th century hymn and a secular popular mid 20th century one, sung by Gracie Fields. Both versions encourage you to recollect the ordinary things in life and to be thankful and grateful for them, particularly when you feel despondent or low in spirits and optimism. The hymn places that gratitude before god from whom such 'blessings' were said to originate. The later version simply asks you to bring your blessings to mind, to place ones present, perhaps more emotionally difficult experience, into a broader perspective.

The idea of life as a 'blessing' is currently resonating with me. I'm finding it useful in shifting the emphasis away from the habitual views I hold to what I've been given -  life as a gift I could to be more consciously grateful for. Brother David Steindl - Rast wrote a book 99 Blessings which extolled ordinary aspects of life that we either take for granted or overlook. I'll post an extract from this after this post 

I guess for some the idea of  'blessings' will be too entwined with the idea of a deity who dispenses them, to be useful to them. Certainly the hymn version of Count your Blessings, makes this clear that 'it will surprise you what the lord has done'. Brother David's - Blessings, however, can be read with or without a deity in mind.  He has very consciously couched them so they don't necessarily require a belief in a divine origin in order to be meaningful or useful. Blessings are given. But the source of them, can be seen as arising from the process of nature, from the interactions of time and space with being, from conditioned co production, from karma, from our interdependence, from the universe, as part of our consciousness interacting with the entire cosmos. God is only one of many possible imagined sources for these blessings.

Brother David regularly reminds you that you need to recognise your blessings in order to be grateful for them. And recognition of blessings is becoming part of my current practice. In last months Journal I was exploring the relationship between appreciation and gratefulness. That it can be hard to see exactly what moves the heart from a basic appreciation to a lively sense of gratitude. After the arising of an appreciation for something, a feeling of being blessed by it sits in the place between that appreciation and the arising of gratefulness and joy. Once one can feel something to be a real blessing, then it becomes possible to take it into ones heart. Gratefulness emerging out of the feeling of having been blessed.

I've been placing this idea of life as a 'blessing' alongside the Buddhist idea of human life as a 'precious opportunity'. In life we are blessed with many precious opportunities, that having a body, mind and consciouness enable to happen. You can endeavour to progress spiritually, to see the true nature of what our life is part of.  First we must appreciate that our own human life is this rare, precious thing, because it is so fragile, fleeting and finite. Our lives arising in the world are akin to planetary alignments or conjunctions, momentarily throwing up consciousness. This blessing freely arrives and equally freely departs.  

Yet, because this comes free and without apparent reason, we can take it for granted. Its easy to drift through life as though its this money tree forever dispensing the wealth of life to be spent, rather than a valuable resource, an endearing yet time limited thing.  Unrecognised blessings can be seen as like a letter, delivered but left unopened on the doormat. Never to be read. Never understood. Never taken to heart. Never opened to life.