Gratia is grace + kindness

I could feel the excitement rising as I walked down the wooded path. I had a bag of candles in one hand and my cell phone in the other. The path was covered with a layer of big leaf maple leaves, brown and gold and wet, so no crunch as I walked over them. It was only about 4 PM, but this is the winter season, already the light was falling. As I came around a curve in the path, huge stones monoliths rose in my vision, this giant stone circle— an anomaly here on the western coast of the US, passion project of Chuck Pettis, the owner and creator of Earth Sanctuary meditation gardens on Whidbey Island. A place of sacred intention, the perfect spot to stage my meditation on gratitude.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how surface and superficial ‘thanks’ can be. I realized this form of gratitude is a social contract. We call it common courtesy; a culture’s rules about when something is done for you, the appropriate response is appreciation, thank you, because this is a contract, an expectation. If it’s a rule, with an expectation, and if it’s important to me that people follow rules, and my ego is now involved in that expectation, as it will in any kind of contract, then if I don’t get the expected result for my action, I feel irritation, or resentment, or frustration, or disengagement. My judgment arises that I am in the right and you are in the wrong and if this is what we think gratitude is then we’re missing the deep and beautiful depths of the crystalline azure alpine lake of real gratitude, which comes from gratia— in Latin, meaning grace and kindness entwined.

As I set the candles in the center of the 30 foot stone circle, the sky darkened. I adjusted my headlamp, and checked my cell phone battery. Getting low, already. I prayed for the energy to last, to speak words from spirit, to offer this gift, a time for being in the nourishing presence of darkness, and turning with kind devotion to the Light. If you would like to listen to the replay of this meditation podcast, click on the photo below to take you to the crowdcast replay, the link is also below the photo.

I wish you peace, grace, love and kindness,

Terra Lea

REPLAY: https://crowdcast.io/c/1ytqh7g8grll