counting my way: a centenary of thanks in the making, prayer shawl for hard times
by bam

a few years ago — i thought it was three, but in fact it was six — i stumbled into the making of a gratitude list and found myself counting to 100, which made it a centenary of thanks. i fell in love with the word, of course, and the notion of reaching toward a number so high it took concentrated attention. simone weil, of course, tells us that attention is the launch pad of prayer. only she says it more poetically. she says this: “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
pádraig Ó tuama, the brilliant north ireland peacemaker and poet, says this about prayer: “i do love praying. like prier from french, ‘to ask.’ and what i love about that word is it doesn’t require belief. it just requires a recognition of need. and i think the recognition of need is something that brings us to a deep, common language about what it means to be human…”
and so, this year especially, when the wounds are deep, and the fears shimmer just below the surface, the sacred act of weaving ourselves and wrapping ourselves in the shawl of a gratitude litany — prayer purled — seems not only wise but necessary. surely an armament against the cold winds that will not abate.
i begin with the woods. i’m drawn there first for its tabernacle of sheltered silence, for the stirrings so faint you can hear tree trunks creaking, as if old bentwood rocking chairs, who let out a bit of a pinched and arthritic cry as they bend in the wind, rub hard against their fallen brethren.
i begin with the light there, the way the shadows play. one day dappling the leafy floor into odd-shaped checkerboard geometries, the next day diffusing the whole — the undulations of rises and hollows, the tangle of vines still holding tight to their berries — in a radiance that might be a kind of mystical halo.
the woods, a grove of old-growth oaks and a tumble of decades-old anonymous stumps, runs along a canal just a short ways from my house. i’ve taken to wandering there, squatting myself on the logs and the stumps that seem like children’s play blocks strewn from a leviathan’s toy chest. i listen and watch. a prayerful pose, if ever there was.
the litany of gratitudes tumble into my notebook, for i always carry a notepad and pen. these days, the woods are just about the holiest place i know. a tabernacle tucked under the trees.
the woods, it seems, are a fine place to sit in a time of pandemic. you might traipse through a meadow. or plunk in the sand and the sharp-bladed grasses along the lakeshore. or perhaps you’ve a river that bends, that offers up its whispering current, that serves as your launch pad for prayer.
these are the places that pay no mind to the cacophonies of the world, to the political banshee cries, to the ungodly images from inside the ICUs where breath itself verges on the impossible.
i turn, in times like these, to those carved-out holy places of God’s making. the opening in the woods, the prayer pew along the river bank or the lake’s soft edge. under the great star-salted dome of the night sky, just beyond my kitchen door.
but i might find holy altars even on the inside of my old house. at the cookstove, most certainly. that place where i stand, stirring, intermingling my incantations with the steam rising from whatever’s bubbling. call me crazy, but for me cooking, cooking for the ones i love, is nothing short of a prayer. sometimes i get lost in the launching of my litanies, and i wind up more or less burning my prayers. i’m rather infamous around here for my long record of burning the broccoli.
all this seems to be a circling around of the centenary itself. i’ve yet to get to the counting here. so perhaps the wisest thing to do is to slow count this year, to make it a week-long practice of paying simone-weil-level attention.
i’ll have an abundance of grist here: a boy i love is coming home from college, clear till the first of february. he and his papa will be motoring across the farmland of the great buckeye state, soon as we get the green light, soon as the precautionary COVID test comes back from the lab, with nary a worry.
the table this year will be sparse. only three of us. with our most essential fourth far beyond the reach of my hand, too far. but blessedly he won’t be alone.
we’ll partake of the traditional thanksgiving drive to grandma’s house, only we’ll be stationed outside. on her sidewalk, perhaps. or in the circular drive. and there won’t be any picking away at the turkey platter at her house. nor even the swapping of slices of pie.
but i promise i will make it to 100, cross that prayerful line of demarcation (i wouldn’t want to call it a finish line, as that might imply a stopping, and i’ve no intention of doing so). perhaps you might choose to play along. perhaps you’ll count to 100, too. weave your own centenary. if there are turkey trots galore this time of year, those early-morning chases down pathways and lanes, a preamble calorie burn to make room for more stuffing, there might just as well be a numerical exercise in the petitions department.
i will leave you with the breathtakingness of our friend pádraig Ó tuama who wrote this about prayer, in an essay entitled, “Oremus,” which means, in latin, “let us pray.”
“…let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. let us name the harsh light and soft darkness that surround us. let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. let’s lick the earth from our fingers. let us look up and out and around. the world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning. Oremus. let us pray.”
i invite you to pray to one hundred….
blessings and blessings upon us, in these hours of blessing to come….
even if you don’t count to 100, perhaps you’ll pay closer attention to the petitions you hold in your heart in this blessed season of gratitude. but i will see you here next week, with my centenary in hand, or rather at heart…where, and with what, will you begin?
p.s. that tepee above is a little miracle i stumbled upon in the woods yesterday. an architecture of sticks, gathered from the heap pile of fallen limbs. it hadn’t been there before and so it stirred a thousand questions: was it something for a boy scout badge? are there still children who play in the woods? was it some ancestral lodge in the making, a place from which smoky petitions might rise?



oops! i forgot that i was thinking of leaving a little something here. the other night there was a “book launch” for Stillness, and given these pandemic times, that meant a virtual gathering. so, from the cozy confines of my kitchen, we all gathered robustly. AND the wonders of technology made an instant recording, which you can click any time to play along. here’s the key to get in! (just click the word “key” and it’ll magically open the door)
Always thankful for YOU, and for this wonderful gathering place of chairs around your virtual table … happy Thanksgiving, friends!
it’s quite a table we’ve carved over the years. and it would be nothing without all the chairs pulled in around it. and for that i am eternally and effervescently grateful. xoxoxoxoxoxooxxo
thoughts from Eastern Branch library, Beth
hello, Eastern Branch library beth!
I’ll be joining you in the litany of thanks. Several years ago, I crafted such a list – I didn’t get to 100, but i had pretty many blessings on it! 100 is a challenge though that I want to meet so, I’m off to ponder abundant gratefulness. xoxoxo
it seems to me to be a helpful challenge, to reach toward a something. it needn’t be 100, of course. nor anything close. but if you get there, you’ve got a centenary. and that seems to be something! with a capital S even…Something.
xox
The photo of the tepee really caught my eye this morning amidst all your lovely words. i”ve been working on a little photo project in the woods and in the last month, I’ve found at least five of these crafty little “shelters.” At first, I thought they were spots where kids would gather, or maybe, a homeless person, but there was no sign of any habitation. So I posted one of the little “homes” on my instagram and asked if anyone knew what they were. I got two great answers. A friend who visits the arboretum often mentioned that there is an older man with two boys who she’s seen building two of these together. Then another friend told me that she thought there had been a class offered by the forest preserve last spring to make the shelters.Now when I chance to come upon one of them, it makes me smile. The woods: definitely a tabernacle and another cause for gratitude.
oh, wow, now I am really intrigued!!! there was one, the first time i stumbled seriously into my woods (i now call them “my,” funny how that possessive pronoun creeps in), i saw a structure made of what appeared to be cast-off shells of bark, as if somehow the bark had been surgically removed into half-shells. it seemed intentional, but not in the way the sudden appearance of yesterday’s tepee nearly knocked me over.
i’m keeping an eye for any traces of clue. i love that you found them in your woods too. is your woods Thatcher Woods? where a friend of mine was walking the other day…..where i once drove past and had to keep myself from leaping behind the wheel to traipse about….
Beautiful as always and thanks again for the other night – that was like a prayer too. I thanks the guy I know connected to the bookstore for that beautiful break in the tumult where we find ourselves now and bragged about the numbers you gathered to love and support you.
I searched all over the woods in central Wisconsin in October for bittersweet and so envious of your photo.
Domibus Nostris Oremus (from my St. Cecilia Latin)
Love
MDP
thank YOU for pulling up a chair here, and there, the other night, in my virtual kitchen. well, it was virtual to you, it is very much real to me. anyway, yes, the bittersweet! i nearly fell over when i came around a bend and discovered a huge bramble of it. i admit to having it tucked all around my house at the moment, a perfect thanksgiving adornment. it’ll be swapped out for red berries soon enough.
anyway, you remind that i was going to post the magical link to a recording of the other night’s virtual kitchening for anyone who couldn’t saunter by. i’ll add it up above at the bottom of the post.
happy blessed thanksgiving. and whatever is the reply to your lovely memorized inscribed-in-the-heart latin…..xoxo
Yes, Thatcher Woods I’ve found them both on the Chicago Avenue side across from Trailside Museum and also just along the railroad embankment just north of Washington Blvd and Thatcher.
i have a wee bit of woods envy — your thatcher (right down to the name) is among the loveliest in the whole chicago metropolis…..
I so love that you are making these quiet pilgrimages to a stand of old-growth oaks to spend time in their good company. I wish for you the peace of wild things, as dear Wendell Berry would put it… Several years ago, my best friend from college gave me a blessing bracelet made of shining silver links interspersed with four white pearls. A little card that came with the gift said that whenever I slipped the bracelet on my wrist, I should acknowledge one blessing in my life for each pearl on the bracelet. I loved that bracelet and wore it until it wore out. Ultimately, alas, it broke. But I’ve never stopped counting my blessings. Wishing you and all the lovely chair folk a Thanksgiving replete with blessings. xoxo
ah, dear amy. the aforementioned river up above was just for you. and as soon as i spied something of eeyore’s tepee in the woods, i thought of you. i love the way you employed wendell b’s blessing above. the peace of wild things…..a peace thick like no another, and yet transparent, translucent, too.
you know i count you on my blessing beads, bracelet or otherwise.
xoxox
And you know I count you on mine… Sending love~ ❤ xo
We’re all living through tough times right now, and I have been trying very hard to count my blessings regularly. I know I am blessed, very lucky, but with everything going on in the world my mind seems to want to dwell on that. Practicing gratitude is a great way to get beyond the noise of this month. One of the things I’m very thankful for is that wonderful reading you shared with us the other night, BAM. It was a true escape from the madness of reality. Thank you for that! And happy, happy, happiest of Thanksgivings to all at the table. May this holiday be a good one for you!
Ohhhh!! I love that you were there!!! I didn’t know! And here I am, days later, melting.
I only wish I could have seen you — and all of you! You could have waved a flag that said “JACK!!!” I would have spun out of my chair….
a little gift, a poem i’ve never heard before…a poem, perhaps, for the coming of Advent, season of anticipation…..
“Making the House Ready for The Lord”
by Mary Oliver
Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but
still nothing is as shining as it should be
for you. Under the sink, for example, is an
uproar of mice — it is the season of their
many children. What shall I do? And under the eaves
and through the walls the squirrels
have gnawed their ragged entrances – but it is the season
when they need shelter, so what shall I do? And
the raccoon limps into the kitchen and opens the cupboard
while the dog snores, the cat hugs the pillow;
what shall I do? Beautiful is the new snow falling
in the yard and the fox who is staring boldly
up the path, to the door. And still I believe you will
come, Lord: you will, when I speak to the fox,
the sparrow, the lost dog, the shivering sea-goose, know
that really I am speaking to you whenever I say,
as I do all morning and afternoon: Come in, Come in.
+ Mary Oliver
[…] week, my friend Barbara Mahany wrote a a blogpost about creating a centenary of thanks. I loved that idea and the challenge of coming up with a 100 things I’ve been grateful for during […]