Walking in gratitude
In nature, the reasons to be thankful are all around us if we only look

On a recent walk through the woods of southern Oregon, I found myself thinking about my feelings of gratitude as I looked at everything around me that spoke of a long and brilliant fall. 

I took delight in the abundant crops of acorns and bright red madrone berries. The madrone trees were thronged with feeding robins and hermit thrushes, and the oaks were alive with squirrels, jays and woodpeckers. Although neither acorns nor madrone berries will be part of my Thanksgiving feast, my feeling of thanks for this bounty came easily and naturally.

Then, farther up the trail, I passed through a stand of dead ponderosa pines. Throughout the West, many forests are experiencing severe conifer die-offs, and these skeletal dead trees represent fuel for the wildfires that we all fear. Looking up at them, I certainly didn’t feel any stirrings of gratitude. 

But just then, a hairy woodpecker landed in the largest snag and began to hammer away, anticipating a feast of beetle grubs. For the woodpecker – and the beetle grubs – the dead trees were a gift, something to be grateful for. 

So, what else was I missing? I looked down at my feet. There was the usual jumble of the forest floor: fallen leaves and conifer needles, bits of lichen, with some scattered manzanita berries. If anything in nature deserves to be called humble, it’s layers of decay like this. 

But as soon as I knelt and focused my attention, there it was, waiting to be acknowledged: gratitude. From a nearby clump of brush came the sounds of a towhee’s big feet scratching through the fallen leaves. For towhees, the duff is a banquet table, spread with a cornucopia of seeds, insects, sowbugs and spiders. For the seeds, the litter of the forest floor is where they need to be, where they have their only chance to germinate and grow. For the insects, sowbugs and spiders, it is a world complete, their grazing land and hunting ground, the habitat that makes their lives possible.

I stood and took a long drink from my water bottle. That water came from the watershed surrounding me, its stream fed by snowmelt and filtered through the ancient granite soils of the Siskiyou Mountains. I took a deep breath. The oxygen that filled my lungs and keeps me alive is the gift of photosynthesis, produced over billions of years by plants and cyanobacteria.

To state the obvious, none of this – none  – is humanity’s doing. The birds, the berries, the decaying leaves, the spiders and the sowbugs, the life-giving atmosphere and the live-giving water – all are gifts that we receive, some so essential we cannot imagine their absence. Others are so useful it seems they were made for us especially, and for those, we sometimes remember to be grateful. Others appear to be of no use to us whatsoever, or even intended for our harm – would we ever be grateful for those?

But nothing in nature is wasted. 

Every gift given is accepted: the dead tree by the beetle, the beetle by the woodpecker, the woodpecker by the hawk, the dead hawk by the scavengers, then by the decomposers, then by the germinating ponderosa pine seed rising from the fertile duff. 

All of this is one oversimplified cycle of gift exchange. The world we inhabit is a web of reciprocity far beyond our ability to comprehend, much less control. To be alive at all seems a miracle.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, let us imagine the world we share with every living thing. Let us give thanks for this planet, this blue and green ball spinning in a lifeless void, holding us all and making possible our every heartbeat, our every breath. And not just ours, but the existence of all life and all the interrelations that make our world healthy and resilient and diverse and beautiful.

This year, when I sit down to my Thanksgiving feast, surrounded by loved ones, I will try to be mindful of every kind of giving thanks. 

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and ecologist in Oregon.