Читать книгу Giving Thanks - M. J. Ryan - Страница 22

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

—Emily Dickinson

Last night I watched my daughter Ana, whom we recently adopted from China,

lie on the bed in an ecstatic trance of bottle sucking. Her eyes closed, her rosebud

mouth pursed, her exquisitely long fingers curled around the plastic bottle, she

gave herself over to the experience. She wasn’t obsessing on past wounds,

although perhaps she had a right to. Neglected for over a year, when we got her

she had been covered with second-degree burns on her buttocks from lying in

urine. Nor was she worrying about where the future bottles might come from,

although she had a right to do that also. Abandoned on Christmas evening on

a cold street until someone heard her newborn cries, she had been fed only

watered down milk and seemed to be starving the first few weeks we fed her.

Rather, she was so focused on appreciating the warm milk as it went down

her throat that everything else, past and future, simply disappeared. As I looked at

her, I realized that this total and complete absorption in the present moment is

available to us all when we choose to let gratitude wash over us uninhibitedly.

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