Gratitude is the one thing in the world that feels nicer when given away completely.

It’s not meant for us to store. It’s cargo that sits too bulky in the center of us. It doesn’t fit quite right. It nests in the place just above our ribs, begging to feel the breeze of our open airways. It’s not really ours to keep. It’s meant to be gifted.

The world gives us these things we ask for. Begging hands on battered knees, it doles us out our dreams in patient generosity. Our gratitude for them is the pollen that reseeds the Earth. The fair exchange of the extraordinary and our affinity for it.

Once, I noticed that hours that pass like air through a breezeway instead of like an ocean through a bottleneck. And tonight I realized that life passes through me like a breezeway. That feelings don’t catch in the stopper between my collarbones anymore. My silenced windpipe no longer the bottleneck securing the ocean. That my body doesn’t quiver against the force of its combining gravity. The bones of my ribcage have swung open like wrought iron gates. The world is free to pass through me as it will, as it is. I am inviting all that the world wishes to dole out in patient generosity to meet with me, and surround me, and become me.

I am simply grateful for being. Being here with you, being in love, being a witness to all that I have and all that I am standing before. I don’t go chasing after follies anymore. I don’t try to direct the wind, I don’t try to instruct the turning of the world. The minutiae of life will find their way without my toiling. If I start walking, they will follow. I guess I’ve just found that I am going in the right direction and nothing else needs to occur now. I just walk it. I admire how it curves. I feel gratitude for its ever presence. I feel my feet on the earth and my arms outstretched to a generous universe and I let it pass over me, and under me, and through me. And I spill my gratitude for it forth and reseed the world.