Being thankful for all of it

A gift from Bill and Jaime, Thanksgiving 2005

It is easy to be grateful at Thanksgiving. I have lived a charmed life, and I have blessings on all sides.

The wonderful reminder that comes to me on Thanksgiving is to broaden my notion of what I am thankful for so much that it literally includes everything, not just that which is obviously dear and sweet. I have worked for many, many years to come to embrace the stubborn, resistant, troublesome, and inconvenient parts of myself.

Joseph Campbell said, “What is the obstruction in your life, and how do you transform it into the radiance?” He said to look for the message the obstacle has for us. “When you find that, the symbol will lose its blocking force, or it will become a guide.”

James Hillman wrote on the same theme. He said, “This means that problems are secret blessings or, let’s say, they are not so much problems as they are emblems—like Renaissance emblemata showing a terrible impossible group of intertwined images that don’t make sense and yet are the motto, the coat of arms, the basic family raised to the dignity of an emblem which sustains…There is a secret love hiding in each problem.”

There is a secret love hiding in each problem.—James Hillman

Dr. Hillman says our problems often persist because we depend on them. They define the landscape of our lives, and we may cling to them because of their familiarity to us. Better the devil we know, as the saying goes. Another reason problems persist is that we refuse to meet their demands.  He said, “Until the soul has got what it wants, it must fall ill again.”  If we refuse to answer the call of our soul, be it to play the violin, take photographs, or to sit under a tree and meditate, the soul experiences the refusal as illness, and it is reflected in the body.

Viewed this way, even my aches and frailties are messages of friendship and compassion.  We are well advised to study and cradle in awareness the images and symbols that attach themselves to our lives. Dr. Hillman says that images come to us with a “moral claim.” He said, “It haunts or obsesses until we respond to it in some fashion.”

In this Thanksgiving season I turn my thoughts more diligently to the inconvenient aspects of myself. What soul’s request have I denied? How does an obstacle want to become my guide? Where would that guidance take me?

The wise counsel of Dr. Hillman, Professor Campbell, and Rumi help me welcome my own inconveniences. Gratitude toward these obstacles somehow sweetens even those blessings that are already so very sweet to me. My toast this year to one and all is simply this: May we all seek the love hiding in our problems. Namaste.