Sunday-on-Tuesday Stories: Gratitude and Glühwein
Sunday-on-Tuesday Stories: Gratitude and Glühwein
After a long weekend in the Pacific Northwest with friends aboard a boat called Gratitude, a few thoughts on how being grateful can change, well, everything.
“The universe is a gift,” my friend Diana Butler Bass writes in her gorgeous book, Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks. “Life is a gift. Air, light, soil, and water are gifts. Friendship, love, sex, and family are gifts. We live on a gifted planet. Everything we need is here, with us.”
For all of this and more this Thanksgiving week and in every moment, may we give thanks. Thankfulness, i.e. “having an attitude of gratitude,” is a practice that, Diana astutely notes in the title of her book, has the power to transform our lives and and the world entire.
“The single trait that correlates the most with happiness is gratitude,” psychologist Martin Seligman, a pioneer in the scientific study of gratitude and happiness, told the late Larry King in a 2018 interview. “Grateful people are naturally happy. A lot of people don’t have gratitude. I’ve had to learn it.”
My college friend Paul Bultema had to learn gratitude and its transformative powers, too. I spent the last few days in Seattle and on the Puget Sound, visiting with Paul, who, for much of the global pandemic and more than 12,000 nautical miles, has been traveling on Gratitude, literally and figuratively.
Gratitude is a 43-foot Nordhavn boat Paul and his partner, Heather Brewer, acquired in early December 2020 at the height of the global pandemic and where they have spent the bulk of the last two years “working reboatly” — building a life anchored, propelled, and navigated by gratefulness.
For each other. For leaps of faith and second chances. For choice, serendipity, and providence. For the ability in every way to live and work “reboatly.” For their very lives.
Bultema, 54, who works for Amazon Web Services and Brewer, 50, a consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers, met online in February 2020, just two weeks before COVID0-19 threw Seattle and much of the rest of the world into a locked-down existence none of us, nevermind two world-travelers such as they, could have imagined. They quickly decided to lock-down together, along with Paul’s Vizsla Mira, now five years old (who has recently been joined by seven-month-old full sister Hala, whose name means “grateful”).
To say these two are adventuresome is a gross understatement. Leaps of faith seem to be second nature, so they moved with Mira onto Paul’s 31-foot Sea Ray (with one plug and one burner) to work “reboatly” for what turned out to be five months cruising around Washington’s San Juan islands.
Almost two years ago exactly, after looking at hundreds of larger boats for sale online in a market where the vessels were moving like hotcakes with the world on fire, Paul and Heather found the Nordhavn in Florida, bought it (sight unseen), got themselves (and Mira) across the country to sign the papers by Christmas 2020, spent six weeks outfitting it with state-of-the-art communications and navigation equipment, two pallets of everything they needed via Amazon.com, hired a captain (did I forget to mention neither one of them had any real boating experience?), and on February 25, 2021, cast off from Fort Lauderdale. Their epic journey (so far) took them through the Bahamas, the Panama Canal, Costa Rica, and seven months exploring the Sea of Cortez, before traveling up the West Coast of the United States to Seattle where the Gratitude has been docked since late August.
Gratitude is, for these two, much more than an ideal or aspiration. It’s a practice.
Rather than put words in their mouths, on Monday morning, I sat them down and asked if they’d hum a few bars on camera about how living in an intentionally gratitude-forward way has transformed their lives.
You can learn more about Paul and Heather’s joy-filled and continued adventures on Gratitude via Instagram, where they’ve been sharing their story since 2020 @ Working Reboatly.
A toast to gratitude!
While Paul has been sober for a decade and I can’t drink for a year because of my encounter with the rattlesnake back in September, oenophile Heather discovered a scrummy glühwein — a traditional mulled wine served warm — at Details Wine Bar, a new wine shop in the charming sound-side village of Poulsbo, Washington, where we docked overnight this weekend and which was the destination of the couple’s first boat-date back in 2020.
It’s delicious (I had a tiny sip) — like Christmas in a glass — and bears the name of its winery, “Woo Hoo,” which is the Gratitude’s unofficial motto.
I like to think of “WOO HOO!” as a prayer of thanksgiving for all wonders and happy surprises, great and small.
More thoughts on gratitude from Father Richard Rohr:
In his Sunday dispatch, our beloved teacher Father Richard said in part:
“Only a pre-existent attitude of gratitude, a deliberate choice of love over fear, a desire to be positive instead of negative, will allow us to live in the spacious place (Saint) Paul describes as ‘the peace of Christ.’
”It is important that we ask, seek, and knock to keep ourselves in right relationship with Life Itself. Life is a gift, totally given to us without cost, every day of it, and every part of it. A daily and chosen attitude of gratitude will keep our hands open to expect that life, allow that life, and receive that life at ever-deeper levels of satisfaction—but never to think we deserve it. Those who live with such open and humble hands receive life’s ‘gifts, full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over into their lap’ (Luke 6:38). In my experience, if we are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over. Moreover, to ask for ‘our daily bread’ is to recognize that it is already being given. Not to ask is to take our own efforts, needs, and goals—and our selves—far too seriously….
“All the truly great persons I have ever met are characterized by what I would call radical humility and gratitude. They are deeply convinced that they are drawing from another source; they are instruments. Their genius is not their own; it is borrowed. We are moons, not suns, except in our ability to pass on the light. Our life is not our own; yet, at some level, enlightened people know that their life has been given to them as a sacred trust. They live in gratitude and confidence, and they try to let the flow continue through them.”
WooHoo, indeed.
Saying Grace
Looking for a blessing for your Thanksgiving/Friendsgiving gathering? Here’s a beautiful blessing/prayer/meditation/benediction from Diana Butler Bass’ Grateful:
“This food was born from the bounty of the Earth, in warm sunlight, rich earth, and cool rain.
“May it nourish us, in body and mind, and provide us with the things that are good for living. We are grateful to those who cultivated it, those who harvested it, those who brought it to us, and those who prepared it.
“May its consumption bring about the pleasures of friendship, love, and good company. And as we partake of this food in each other’s company, as what was once separate from all of us becomes part of each of us, may we also remember what we have in common and what brings us all together.
“May this sharing of food foster peace and understanding among us, may it bring us to the recognition that we depend on each other for all the good we can ever hope to receive, and that all the good we can hope to accomplish rests in helping others in turn.
“May it remind us that as we reach out to others to brighten their lives, so are our lives brightened in turn.”
AMEN.
On Heather’s recent 50th birthday, one of her sisters gifted her with an annotated copy of the late Irish poet-philosopher John O’Donohue’s book To Bless the Space Between Us. On the page with his poem “Axioms of Wildness,” Heather’s sister inscribed the dictum, “For waking up surrounded by water and wilderness.”
I thought I’d leave you with the poem as we approach Thanksgiving in a couple of days. No matter where you find yourself, may you find the space for a few moments to take stock and be grateful.
Alive to the thrill
Of the wild.
Meet the dawn
On a mountain.
Wash your face
In the morning dew.
Feel the favor of the earth.
Go out naked in the wind,
Your skin
Almost Aeolian.
With the music inside,
Dance like there is no outside.
Become subtle enough
To hear a tree breathe.
Sleep by the ocean,
Letting yourself unfurl
Like the reeds that swirl
Gradually on the sea floor.
Try to watch a painting from within:
How it holds what it never shows.
The mystery of your face,
Showing what you never see.
See your imagination dawn
Around the rim of your world.
Feel the seamless silk of the ocean
Worm you in ancient buoyancy.
Feel the wild imprint of surprise
When you are taken in by your lover's eyes.
Succumb to warmth in the heart
Where divine fire glows.
—John O'Donohue's"Axioms of Wildness"
And may you be brave and kind, never forgetting that you haven’t met yet everyone who will love you, and you haven’t met yet everyone you will love.
Thanksgiving blessings to one and all and lots of love from me. Woo Hoo!
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Every word of this is beauty. Love you. ❤️