Carnival of Healing #18 - Grace & Gratitude

"The greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it means to live. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life: giving thanks for everything." - Albert Schweitzer (via the clear still waters of Whiskey River)

That is surely a healing attitude. Often we sift out what we chose to be grateful for. The words grateful and grace derive from the same Latin root, gratus. Gratitude, says Sarah McCroskey, is interrelated with with grace "one begetting the other - action and outcome. By expressing gratitude we invoke a state of grace."

I am grateful for the opportunity to host this week's Carnival of Healing #18. The week's submissions fall neatly into wellness and wealth categories - two expressions of our bounty and prosperity on this Thanksgiving holiday weekend. (Next week's Carnival of Healing will be hosted by Lucy MacDonald at her Positive Perspectives blog.)

(Bonus: Rumi's poem "A Small Green Island" is a good read to reflect on plenitude and gratitude and grace.)

On the wellness side, Different River starts off the carnival by putting a human face to what is often abstract policy in "Will the FDA kill Brian White?" regarding the FDA's 1962 policy change from issuing approval for "safe" drugs to "safe and effective" drugs:

I’m sure most of the FDA’s employees are hard-working scientists, doctors, and bureaucrats who do the best they can with what they’ve got. But these [folks awaiting drugs] are human beings we’re talking about.

Through Range Guide we can be grateful that an Avian Flu pandemic is not necessarily a given in his post "Bird Flu Hoax":

"[Peter Palese of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York] notes that studies of serum collected in 1992 from people in rural China indicated that millions there had antibodies to the H5N1 strain. That means they had been infected with an H5N1 bird virus and recovered, apparently without incident."

Reb Chaim HaQoton presents a fascinating exploration of wine's significance and symbolism to the Jewish in "Wine and Alcoholism":

Through different struggles and challenges, this baby grows into an adult, similar to wine’s fermentation process. The external factors in a human’s life are represented in wine by the yeast. As time flows, the wines taste is greatened and a human’s wisdom increases...

Maharal (Rabbi Judah Loew (1525-1609) of Prague) gives an interesting explanation: While all physical desires lose strength as time passes, spiritual concepts gain strength. Wine is the only physical object that shares this property of improving with time, placing wine as in-between the physical and the spiritual. Wine can go either way. 

Marilyn at California Fever reveals her wise life lessons in Lesson Plan. Here are just two gems she generously shares:

"The most powerful transformations can begin by doing just one kind or compassionate thing a day. Do one nice thing today for someone you really dislike...not for them, for you"

"Most people think they crave fame...when what they really crave is to be known."

After nearly two years of blogging my submisssion this week is one of my own favorite posts. I speak of many things including poet Mary Oliver's line: "We succumb to grief so we can fully live." I realize how grateful I am even when stuff shows up as "fierce grace." As The Corner says "This Year I Am Thankful for Falling, For Grief, For Loss" (yep, me too). The post is titled "This is What Things Can Teach Us" after a line in a Rilke poem.

The hip & zen pen is grateful for the wider lessons of Zen aesthetics in "The Zen of PowerPoint?" An undivided life is healing.:

Showing how zen principles can be applied to even the most business-focused parts of our lives is a reminder that we don't have to be two separate people...our personal selves and our business selves...we can try to integrate our principles into our one self.

(p.s. Scholar Huston Smith says, "The genius of Zen lies in its determination to fuse the temporal and the eternal; to widen the doors of perception so the wonder of the satori experience can flood everyday life.")

Gratefulness and grace oozes from Joe Vitale's Beyond Marketing when he writes about his encounter with modern day shaman Dr. Len's teachings in "Living Bliss, or, My Awakening at the Hands of a Hawaiian Shaman":

In a previous post: Two years ago I heard about a therapist in Hawaii who healed people but never saw them... This therapist worked on the mental hospital patients by "working on himself, doing an updated ancient Hawaiian healing method called ho'oponopono... What he would do was look at the patient's file and then look within himself, trying to clear what was in him that created the patient and his condition.

They don't need healing; you do. You have to heal you. You are the source of all the experiences

Steve Pavlina offers an uncommon and grace-embued take on "Titheing":

As I’ve driven myself to shed scarcity thinking, I eventually dropped the practice of tithing in favor of aligning my entire life with what I perceive to be the highest good of all.  I realized that if I’m giving money to a worthy cause, then perhaps I’m also telling myself that my own life is inherently a less worthy cause.

BTW, I loved Steve's observation: "I no longer think in terms of giving vs. receiving.  They’ve become the same thing for me." Now this is how grace in invited into our lives.

I thank you, deep power

that works me ever more lightly

in ways I can't make out.

The day's labor grows simple now,

and like a holy face

held in my dark hands.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, (The Book of Poverty and Death, I, 62)

Bonus: Via Shaboom, I found out about SoulCollages (see blog): "Find images. Cut. Paste. Magically you have a collaged card that is a message from you to you -- your Soul speaking." The image at top in this Carnival of Healing is a card entitled "learning to love brokenness" by Sheila Filan.

My thanksgiving wish: May the prosperity we experience bless all people.

Comments

[Elisa Camahort]

Great job, as usual, Evelyn.

[Rebbie]

"The greatest thing is to give thanks for everything..." What a great quote. I've been looking deeply into gratitude lately and I'm delighted to see your beautiful expression of the relationship between gratitude and grace. Thank you!