“I wasn’t able to lean into gratitude for the amazing life I had. And this, to me, was a sign that something was seriously wrong, and I needed more support.” —Rachel Zucker

Most people say be grateful first, and everything good comes from that. But something shifted in me when poet Rachel Zucker reframed gratitude as an emergent property of support. I really felt that.

If a plant isn’t flourishing, I’m not yelling at it to be grateful for what it has. I’m looking to see how the ecosystem can be restored to support the plant. We are lucky that we can speak, and in some cases, name what we need.

Our ecosystem is broken. The air we breathe is poisoned, the water is toxic, and our infrastructure is insane. The societal body in general is not siding with the plant.

But there are other bodies. Community bodies. Idealogical bodies. Ancestral bodies. Ecobodies. We can call upon connections that support us and engage our root system to receive the nutrients we need. We can name them in the presence of a benevolence that is able to listen or even give—a friend, a prayer, an organizing principle. We can let small acts of sanity slowly become habits.

At the same time, it's not solely on us to feel supported. Taking responsibility for ourselves is helpful. Privatizing our desperation is not. We can register the lack and the loss of our era or of our circumstances. It would be an insult and an irony to ask more of someone who has nothing left to give. We can hold the paradox of this together. Togetherness is an infrastructure that matters.

We are part of networks we can’t see. People we don’t even know, living and dead, have our backs. Strangers and acquaintances send us love. Grandmothers prayed for us generations ago. Monks on mountaintops sing our balance into being. Let their prayers in. Open like a gate to all that unseen love.

Searching deeply for where I come from, geographically, culturally, and beyond, has moored me to a soil that supports, from root to star. Training my mind to inhabit my body really helps. This is a form of minding my own business. Being in my body respects my closest, most fundamental support system.

Creating support for myself by strategic withdrawal, and going into “receive” mode also helps. Receiving feels like a physical mode of being that creates more of itself. Receiving is a language of trust. We can’t count on people, health, or circumstances, but that doesn’t mean we can’t trust as a way of life. These are some of the ways that I am able to feel grateful, and it has everything to do with feeling supported. I just never thought of it that way.