Thursday 27 November 2014

Day 861: Thanks for Thanksgiving

'There's not a day in all the year but holds some hidden treasure...'

I really  admire the American holiday of Thanksgiving. It's such a wonderful idea. To dedicate a day to gathering together and being thankful and grateful for our blessings is a beautiful idea, especially in these modern times when we so often miss or overlook the 'blessings common in our sight.' Unfortunately we do tend to take for granted 'our daily store of pleasures sweet and tender', but the act of being grateful recalls our attention to them, and engenders a greater awareness of them, not to mention appreciation.

There is, as GK Chesterson has put it, happiness and wonder involved in gratitude. Today I am grateful for finding this poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox which narrates the sentiments of Thanksgiving and is full of so many lovely phrases, too many to quote.  As everyday, I am so very grateful for poetry and its ability to pique our attention to the wonder of the world in mere words. 

Happy Thanksgiving!



Thanksgiving - Ella Wheeler Wilcox 
 
 We walk on starry fields of white
   And do not see the daisies;
For blessings common in our sight
   We rarely offer praises.
We sigh for some supreme delight
   To crown our lives with splendor,
And quite ignore our daily store
   Of pleasures sweet and tender.

Our cares are bold and push their way
   Upon our thought and feeling.
They hang about us all the day,
   Our time from pleasure stealing.
So unobtrusive many a joy
   We pass by and forget it,
But worry strives to own our lives
   And conquers if we let it.

There’s not a day in all the year
   But holds some hidden pleasure,
And looking back, joys oft appear
   To brim the past’s wide measure.
But blessings are like friends, I hold,
   Who love and labor near us.
We ought to raise our notes of praise
   While living hearts can hear us.

Full many a blessing wears the guise
   Of worry or of trouble.
Farseeing is the soul and wise
   Who knows the mask is double.
But he who has the faith and strength
   To thank his God for sorrow
Has found a joy without alloy
   To gladden every morrow.

We ought to make the moments notes
   Of happy, glad Thanksgiving;
The hours and days a silent phrase
   Of music we are living.
And so the theme should swell and grow
   As weeks and months pass o’er us,
And rise sublime at this good time,
   A grand Thanksgiving chorus.

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