Welcome to Living a Life of Gratitude.
I'm Sarah Wiseman.
Becoming Luminous Some things happen once in a lifetime.
For whatever reason,
We find ourselves in the right place at the right time with the right person to bear witness to the exact miracle we are witnessing.
These convergences,
In which all the elements come into play with the precision of Swiss clockwork,
Happen to us millions of times a day.
But it's only when we pay attention,
When we see with clear eyes,
That we are able to witness these miraculous unexpected events.
Years ago,
I was on a beach in Puget Sound,
A small,
Secluded beach,
Where it's common to spot eagles soaring overhead in the spring.
In the summer,
Salmons flip over waves,
Their silver bellies flashing.
In the winter,
The mountains in the distance shine with white snow.
It's in the fall that things glom up.
They go all gray and gloomy,
So misty that your clothes hold moisture for months at a time.
It was one of those days,
October maybe,
Or November,
That I found myself sitting on an old piece of driftwood,
A giant tree trunk gone silvery dark with sea and air and salt,
In a down coat,
Highly unsuitable for the wet weather,
With no mittens and no hat.
Already my hair was curling from the moisture,
And pretty soon it would be wet,
Dripping with the rain that seemed to condense upon us with every minute.
It was night,
And our plan was to drum,
My partner and I,
On the beach.
Our plan had started out as a very good idea.
He is musical,
Able to play instruments,
And drumming is one of his fortes.
I'm not a good drummer,
But he doesn't seem to mind.
We thought it might be fun,
A word I used a lot back then and still use a lot now,
To drum on the beach in the foggy moonlight.
After lugging two heavy African djembe over a quarter mile in wet sand,
It seemed a little less fun.
After having to move from our spot three times because the first two times we inadvertently sat too close to the place on the cliffs where there was an eagle's nest,
And the eagles had begun to screech at us in a threatening way,
It seemed even less fun.
By the time we moved even further down the beach,
Looking back over our shoulders for attacking eagles,
I was wet,
Cold,
And a little defeated.
Finally,
I just stopped where I was,
Plopped on a nearby driftwood log,
And said,
Let's drum here.
And we did drum for a few minutes,
Until it soon became clear that our hands were so wet that the drum heads were getting wet too,
And the only sounds we could produce were alternately a slippery slide or a dull thump.
We sat there for a moment with the rain dripping down our foreheads,
The moon full overhead,
As the realization sank in that we were not having any fun at all.
And that's when my partner got up and started throwing stones into the ocean,
Heaving them out far at first,
Then skipping them in little skips closer to the shore.
And that's when we saw that the water was phosphorescent.
I'd only read about this phenomenon in books the way the water trails green light,
A luminescence caused by the presence of tiny ocean organisms,
Sometimes even crustaceans,
Jellyfish,
Or certain fish.
We did not know the source of this bioluminescence.
Yet here it was in front of us,
And I raced to the water to see it for myself,
To throw stones and watch the glowing circle of light create an aura in the waves,
To trail a stick through and watch the green-white wake that formed behind it,
And finally,
To trail my fingers directly in the water and watch the light spark and dance.
We stamped our feet in the water and laughed and shouted as flashes of green sparked before us.
In this moment of light,
In this experience of phosphorescence,
Our plans for drumming were forgotten,
And we were suffused with joy.
Sometimes plans change.
Sometimes we think we're being led in one direction,
Only to find that the universe has been leading us towards something else entirely,
An experience or understanding that we could have never directed or anticipated.
Think back to a time when you made plans that changed unexpectedly.
Recall the gift this unexpected change brought into your life.
