It was too cold for a walk in the woods at Stone Mountain, but we went anyway.
The woods were cold and quiet, and I thought of Mary Oliver’s poem “The Country of the Trees.”
The poet observes how trees protect the weak, delicate things like violets, offering them shade in summer and a blanket of fallen leaves in winter. Such are the ways of trees. And then the poet says this:
And none will ever speak a single word of complaint,
as though language, after all,
did not work well enough, was only an early stage.
Neither do they ever have any questions to the gods —
which one is the real one, and what is the plan.
Walking through the woods, I started thinking about how gratitude might be just a feeling. But a life touched by gratitude is something else, something as remarkable as the life of a tree.
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