Post from Dan
We woke this morning to a beautiful world of snow-clad trees and homes.
It had started snowing lightly yesterday afternoon; the overnight forecast was for rain, but nature had
other ideas, and decided to grace us with a pure, fresh-fallen blanket. The first snow feels highly sattvic:
Calm, with storm winds stilled. Quiet, with the snow absorbing sound. And of course everything is a
pristine, absorbing white, not yet sullied by mud and salt and the seep from mouldering leaves.
It’s easy to connect with gratitude when the universe decides to unfurl in a beautiful way. This is when
the world insists on a witness.
Here is the gift.
Beauty requires a witness.
Gratitude is not the appreciation of something experienced, something gained. Gratitude is not even the
act of recognizing the beauty in something that exists; beauty is not a quality that is inherent to nature.
Beauty is not available to any object until it is gracefully perceived.
Gratitude is the act of instilling beauty into what the world presents.
Beauty requires a witness. Nature desires a witness. She asks in innumerable ways. She asks in three
ways. Sometimes she is subtle, sometimes antagonistic, sometimes irrefutable. Everything is an ask, so
everything is an opportunity.
The snow is melting now, dropping from branches and shrinking into itself. Soon the sand from the
plows will line the streets. Soon the leaf stains will bloom. The sun will coax the snow into mud and the
night will freeze this new water into slicks of ice and jags of solid earth, and the next sun will change
those too. It is all the ask and the opportunity – the chance for gratitude, the chance to grace the world
with beauty.