Draw the Tough Stuff

Building Our Gratitude Muscle, part 2

Hey beloved GUT fam,

How did we all do?? Everyone survive? Thrive even? Get enough to eat? Help others get enough to eat?? I hope everyone is feeling at peace post-complicated-holiday, and enjoying some well-deserved rest.

This week, I want us to continue using our creativity to cultivate gratitude, but from a different angle. Instead of focusing on the immediate, obvious things we appreciate around us, we’re going to explore developing gratitude when life feels hard. Maybe even gratitude for life being hard.

It feels like the right moment to bring this lesson back from the archives (especially after last week’s return to another favorite: the 5 senses gratitude practice). There is so much to be grateful for. And at the same time, so much is hard right now, personally and politically, locally and globally. How we perceive and respond to what’s happening in our lives and in the world matters. We may not get to choose what happens, but we can choose how we respond.

This week, we’ll use drawing to strengthen our gratitude muscle so it’s there for us when we need it most.

Practicing Gratitude in Hard Times

Anyone lucky enough to live through their 20s will agree: we learn the most from our mistakes and tough times. But when we’re in the midst them… whew. Hard times feel like forever, like things will never change. But then… time goes on. And things change. A little at first. Or all at once. And later, when we look back, the experience looks different. It still sucks. But we can also see what came before and what came after. If we are lucky (and work at it) we find things to be grateful for. We can be grateful for who it helped us become.

All this makes me think of a quote I shared earlier from author and monk David Steindl-Rast, known at the “Grandfather of Gratitude.”

So yeah, finding gratitude — even joy — in hard times. That’s what we’re doing today: getting grateful for the tough stuff.

But first, a poem.

This poem is by the US’s former poet laureate Ada Limón. It’s called “Instructions on Not Giving Up”.

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

What I love about his poem is how Ada brings us into a present moment of explosive joy and beauty by painting so vividly with her words (much like how you called on your senses to draw last week’s assignments.) And then come the other seasons, when the tree loses its hues (you can imagine it brittle and barren) and then becomes a green tree again. “A return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess in us, the hurt, the empty.” This is a poem about resilience. About life’s different seasons. And how if we keep our eyes open and pay attention, we learn so much from each of them.¹

Okay, now onto our drawing prompt for the day. I can’t wait to see what you all create and share, and how much we all learn from our hard experiences. <3

Assignment: Gratitude for the Tough Stuff