Gratitude

How many times a day do you breathe, pulling swirling air, fresh and sweet, into your lungs? How often have you said, "Many thanks, air, for always giving me what I most need? " How often do you see Sonya's watercolor of the musician in Renaissance attire playing fiddle for a dancing couple and walked blindly passed it, with no melody in your mind, no rhythm in your gait? How often have you finished writing a poem to your satisfaction and ignored your debt of inspiration the Muse hovering close by? And then you will tell your friends a likely story, "Today I wrote a poem." What of your luck sleeping through the night visited only by benign dreams of fountains and waterways, the scent of pine trees, and the kind regard of yellow-eyed owls? Do you acknowledge the Gate of Ivory? When you re-read "Hamlet" yet again, are you once again churlish to sweet Ophelia and oblivious to thoughts beyond the reaches of your soul? Does the Abyss open its maw only after you have passed by? What makes you so callow? Is it a hidden life that isolates your waking life? Is it a stony heart that crushes your tenderest feelings? Have the threads connecting your soul to the Soul of the World snapped? Observe, my friend, the signs that flash behind your eyes, to the sounds that linger after listening to Schoenberg's "Verklarte Nacht", to the sudden illumination that floods your mind when flesh and soul clasp flesh and soul.