We overlook that none of this needed to exist — that we weren’t owed mountains and music by the universe. And possibly now we have to overlook — or we’d be too stupefied with gratitude for each raindrop and each eyelash to get by way of the day by day duties punctuating the unbidden surprise of our lives. However it’s good, each occasionally, to let ourselves be stupefied by gratitude, to solid upon ourselves a spell towards indifference by shifting by way of the world with an inside bow at each littlest factor that prevailed over the percentages of in any other case with a purpose to exist.
Artist couple Mayumi Otero and Raphael Urwiller, who work collectively below the pen identify Icinori, supply a vibrant invitation to this countercultural approach of seeing in Thank You, The whole lot (public library) — a meditative but exuberant journey by way of the world inside and the world with out, impressed by the Japanese notion of tsuumogami: the soul, or spirit, that inanimate objects are believed to accumulate after being of service on the earth for 100 years.
Out of what begins as an impressionistic portrait of gladness — “thanks, blue”; “thanks, morning”; “thanks, glass” — emerges a narrative syncopating the summary and the concrete.
Day breaks with gratitude, breaks right into a mysterious journey, every step of which is a bow — we see the protagonist transfer by way of cities and landscapes, thanking each giant and little factor alongside the best way: bicycle and bus and airplane, sky and clouds and streams, evening and fog, binoculars and birds, caterpillar and leaf, spring and silence.
The vacation spot, quite than a spot, is a state of being — the recompense of paying every thing in our path the gratitude and reverence it’s due for merely current. For we overlook, too, that dignity — this deepest reverence for being — just isn’t one thing we are able to ever have for ourselves except we accord it to every thing and everybody else.
Couple Thank You, The whole lot with Oliver Sacks on gratitude and the measure of dwelling on the horizon of loss of life, then revisit poet Marissa Davis’s love letter to every thing alive.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; images by Maria Popova