A Small Gratitude Takes Root

Feeling depressed? Make a gratitude list. Resentful? Get to a gratitude meeting. All you need is an attitude of gratitude.

It can border on the trite, the saccharine, the listing small blessings for which one might be grateful: the rain didn’t become torrential until after I got home, that driver let me merge into the exit lane, I caught a whiff of azalea, my favorite pair of jeans are clean, my brand of peanut butter is on sale, I heard the grumpy crossing guard laughing with a passing child this afternoon.

I’m often the one preaching the wisdom and benefits of noticing and recognizing and celebrating these tiny, ordinary moments of blessing. I’m usually the one toting the physical and mental health benefits of a gratitude practice: reducing anxiety and depression, supporting heart health, lessening stress, boosting immunity, and improving sleep. I say, sometimes, that a further reason for the observance of Thanksgiving beyond the traditional is to give us a sort of gratitude booster to keep us well-conditioned for the spiritual practice of gratitude throughout the year. And I believe all that mostly.

There have been periods when I’ve followed my own advice (and that of my wisest teachers) and kept a daily gratitude journal for months on end. And there have been times I’ve let that practice lapse. But always, always, the table grace said in my home or wherever I might be invited to say grace, after offering thanks for the food about to be received, contains space for me and anyone else gathered around the table to add thanks for whatever additional blessings might be topmost in our minds or on our hearts, before concluding with thanks “for all our many other blessings”. The tough tendrils of this practice of gratitude, instilled by my parents, run too deep and spread too wide through my soul to be neglected or extinguished.

Still, there are times, like 2025, when the opening lines of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem Thanksgiving 1950, seem to speak the only truth of the moment:

"Hard, hard it is, this anxious autumn,

To lift the heavy mind from its dark forebodings;

To sit at the bright feast, and with ruddy cheer

Give thanks for the harvest of a troubled year.

…

Ah, but is it right to feast in a time so solemn?

Should we not, rather, fast—and give the day to prayer?"

What good do discount peanut butter, clean jeans, a momentarily less grumpy than usual crossing guard, the scent of flowers that after all bloom and smell lovely every year, or rain that is only heavy not torrential–what good do these minutia do anyone when stacked up against echoes of the KKK, and open embrace of Nazism, and widespread greed and deliberate cruelty, and extrajudicial killings carried out by government actors on the orders of a dangerous president, and attempts at eradicating the lives and histories of entire races, classes, genders of people? All this and more in our country alone. The same or similar widespread in other countries around the world. Of what practical or correctional purpose is it to be grateful for small blessings in such a world?

My grandparents’ best friends, when I was growing up, were a couple named Harold and Irene Kath. Harold and Irene owned a flower shop in a small western Minnesota town, just a few blocks walk from Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house. Come June or so, upon our arrival for a summertime visit, we’d race down the hill in great expectation. And there they’d be: a vast perfusion of purple petunia amid lush green leaves, growing out of a crack in the sidewalk just to the side of the shop’s front door. The delight of those volunteer petunias appearing year after year would definitely have made my gratitude list, if I’d been keeping one at that age. And at this age, even feeling a bit over the whole gratitude list-thing at this moment in time, I wouldn’t quarrel with the claim that the annual reappearance of those unplanted flowers was worthy of my gratitude.

That said, today I’m thinking of those petunias a bit differently, through the lens of Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem about small gratitudes taking root in tiny, inhospitable places. Rather than casting the flowers themselves as a source of gratitude, I’m viewing them as a symbol of what gratitude can accomplish when it finds its way into the poor soil and arid ground of souls–our souls.

Perhaps the point, hard, hard though it is, this anxious autumn, isn’t to see if we can force ourselves to be grateful for twenty-five or ten or even just two blessings every single day even as the world seems to be ending, or at the very least hellbent on destroying our loved ones. Perhaps the point isn’t even to be able to gaze upon those two or ten or twenty-five things and see them as proof that all isn’t lost if such blessings still exist in our world. Perhaps the point is what is transformed within us when we allow gratitude for even just a single blessing to take root in the rocky soil of our broken, weary lives. What if, in fact, the mechanism by which gratitude reduces anxiety and depression, supports heart health, lessens stress, boosts immunity, and improves sleep is by filling the cracked, parched places in our souls with new life, with metaphorical volunteer petunias? And what if it doesn’t stop there?

A window box or planter filled by human hands with flowers brightens a store front, adds color to a retail street, and lifts spirits of passers-by. Petunias forcing their way up from under concrete, through irregular sidewalk cracks, in search of sun and air, bring a dimension of untamed vitality, of unforced and boundless possibility. What wild, unimagined beauty and vibrant life might spring from these spirits of ours that have been worn out, malnourished, trampled down, and depleted by a pandemic bookended by two Trump administrations–what might emerge from our spirits if but a single seed of gratitude were to take root in us and be allowed to find its way to blossom despite the rocky, arid soil?

Would it be openness to new friendships or deeper relationships? Motivation to enter recovery? Works of music or art to delight creator and community alike? Bold partnerships across lines of race, class, gender and party? A desire to volunteer? A sense of generative playfulness? Fresh energy and renewed purpose for tackling the work of healing the world?

Gratitude for small blessings itself isn't corrective and doesn’t stop the harm caused by systems and individuals, corporations and administrations destroying our planet, starving children and families and adults, abandoning whole segments of society, closing doors of opportunity, and disregarding our Constitution. Rather, gratitude for small blessings (and big ones) through the new life it plants in us, revives and strengthens us to stop the harm, taking up the work with renewed vigor and fresh perspective. The task before us is immense and complex, and will be the work of decades. We need to follow all the pathways and practices that might sustain us along the way. Even the practice of gratitude.

I’m not suggesting that gratitude for gratitude’s sake is meaningless or that a gratitude practice, whatever form it might take, is without merit. But if like me you’re finding gratitude heavy lifting this autumn, then perhaps embracing it as one more tool to apply to the task that’s uppermost in our minds – “doing something about what’s happening” – might help you find your way back to noticing and offering thanks for life’s many blessings. And blossoming life might follow. May it be so. Amen.