Gratitude is the Key to Lasting Happiness

by Mariana Bozesan

Last year I became a "Guardian of Gratitude" which makes me a committed supporter of gratitude, but also of the person and work of the renown Benedictine monk, book author, and sage, Brother David Steindl-Rast. Brother David has changed my life as he has changed the life of more than six million people who visit his Network for Grateful Living every year.

Last Sunday, February 3rd, 2008, I attended an evening with music and poetry with brother David, the famous Rumi Translator Coleman Barks, Drew Dellinger, and many other extraordianry artists.

Here I would like to share with you a poem by Drew Dellinger that touched me deeply and which I got from his webpage Drew Dellinger:

Hieroglyphic Stairway

it's 3:23 in the morning
and I'm awake
because my great great grandchildren
won't let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?

surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?

as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?

what did you do
once
you
knew?

I'm riding home on the Colma train
I've got the voice of the milky way in my dreams

I have teams of scientists
feeding me data daily
and pleading I immediately
turn it into poetry

I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech

I am the desirous earth
equidistant to the underworld
and the flesh of the stars

I am everything already lost

the moment the universe turns transparent
and all the light shoots through the cosmos

I use words to instigate silence

I'm a hieroglyphic stairway
in a buried Mayan city
suddenly exposed by a hurricane

a satellite circling earth
finding dinosaur bones
in the Gobi desert
I am telescopes that see back in time

I am the precession of the equinoxes,
the magnetism of the spiraling sea

I'm riding home on the Colma train
with the voice of the milky way in my dreams

I am myths where violets blossom from blood
like dying and rising gods

I'm the boundary of time
soul encountering soul
and tongues of fire

it's 3:23 in the morning
and I can't sleep
because my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the earth was unraveling?

I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech"

Be blessed!