Thanks

This year I learned something essential: giving thanks is a way of being awake.
Not as a learned gesture, but as a deep recognition of what already is.
The years — and the voices that have accompanied them — have told me that life
is not lost only when it ends,
but when it slips away unnoticed.

I am grateful for living close to the mountains,
because their silence has taught me how to pay attention.
Because their permanence reminds me that not everything must move in order to be alive.
Each sunrise along their steady lines has been a lesson in patience,
and also in quiet urgency:
the mountain does not rush, but it does not waste the day.

I am grateful for having found, even if only a little, understanding.
Not the kind that boasts certainty, but the kind that accepts questions.
The kind that does not shout, but arranges.
That does not demand, but clarifies.
The years have taught me that this understanding
does not arrive all at once,
but appears when we stop living distracted
and begin to embrace each hour.

I am grateful for having learned to be better with those in front of me:
with the other face, the shared word, the difference.
But above all, I am grateful for having been more just
with the one who looks back at me each morning from the mirror.
Because old voices and new ones agree on this:
the greatest negligence is not failing others,
but abandoning oneself without noticing.

Thank you for the gift — apparent or real —
of being able to form syntactic structures
that are pleasing to the minds of others.
Thank you for giving me so many ideas in the form of ink,
for allowing thought to find its channel
and for letting the invisible take shape.
I have learned that when the mind finds order,
life slowly begins to follow.

Thank you, life.
And thank you, God, for being the Word.

For the word is my most beautiful possession.
It is the word that makes possible the manifestation
of material, visible things,
which are nothing more than the faithful result
of an invisible mental cause.
Nothing appears without first being thought,
and nothing endures without attention.

Thank you for the quality of thought required
to live such a full life.
A life that is not yet entirely the one I desire,
but that today appears far clearer
than it did in many past yesterdays.
Time has taught me
that poverty is not having little,
but failing to care for what has been given.

Thank you for the sunrises,
for each one is a moment that will not return.
Thank you for the birds that come close to the window
and remind me, without words,
that abundance is quiet
and that nothing has promised them tomorrow —
which is why they inhabit the now.

Thank you for everything and for everyone.
For the bonds that sustain,
for the encounters that heal,
for what remains
and for what teaches by leaving.
Even what is lost
does not disappear in vain
if it was lived with presence.

Thank you for being.
Thank you for allowing me to be.

Thank you for everything around me
and for all that makes it possible
to see bluer skies
even on days when they are not.

The years and the voices that have accompanied them
have told me, again and again,
that time is not honored by using it,
but by inhabiting it.

And in that simple act,
when attention finally returns home,
life stops passing by…
and begins, at last,
to stay.