The Season of Thanks

For the past forty-seven days, I’ve been observing a “season of thanks.” I didn’t plan to do it. It just happened. And it’s been magical.

I’m having a hard time setting down in words how it started. Here’s a jumble of them: Akilah S. Richards. Liberation pedagogy. Unschooling. Columbus Day. Thanksgiving Day. Indigenous ways of knowing. 30 Things I Love Right Now, the practice. Gratitude lists. Endorphins. Saturday. S— upstairs, learning to play the violin, in this musty cinderblock building where I’ve worked for more than two decades, learning how to teach and write and read...

Does any of that make sense, to me, much less to somebody else? I don’t know. But that sunny Saturday morning, as I ate a big jar of overnight oats and drank from an even bigger jar of ice cold green tea — a long weekend in front of me, and all those words/ideas/experiences swirling around inside me — I wrote yet another list of 30 things I loved right then. And it felt good to do it. I resolved to do it once a week until Thanksgiving. Because that’s what felt right to me, right then.

I ended up doing way more than that, though. A simple promise to myself has yielded a burst of creativity and (re)connection. Not just lists of things I love but the revival of a podcast series I piloted years ago and then abandoned. Also a hybrid thing-a-ma-jig — part micro-memoir, part poem, part erasure, part mixed-media visual art. It’s a bit of a mess, but it exists, and it didn’t exist forty-seven days ago. There’s also a poem taking shape somewhere in my psyche. I can feel it, like a ghost limb. It may make itself into words someday. We’ll see.

But it’s the connections that have surprised me. It has been a season of rekindling. Friends in far-flung places, fellow laborers in the craft of writing. Mentors. Golfing buddies. Alma maters. It’s been magic, nothing less. I can’t explain it any other way. I don’t know if it will last, or how long. But it has happened, and I believe it happened because I (somewhat unwittingly) invited it to happen forty-seven days ago. For that, I’m surely thankful.