We overlook that none of this needed to exist — that we weren’t owed mountains and music by the universe. And possibly we’ve got to overlook — or we might be too stupefied with gratitude for each raindrop and each eyelash to get via the every day duties punctuating the unbidden marvel of our lives. However it’s good, each on occasion, to let ourselves be stupefied by gratitude, to solid upon ourselves a spell towards indifference by transferring via the world with an inside bow at each littlest factor that prevailed over the percentages of in any other case so as to exist.
Artist couple Mayumi Otero and Raphael Urwiller, who work collectively beneath the pen title Icinori, supply a vibrant invitation to this countercultural means of seeing in Thank You, The whole lot (public library) — a meditative but exuberant journey via 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 amass after being of service on the planet 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 via cities and landscapes, thanking each giant and little factor alongside the best way: bicycle and bus and airplane, sky and clouds and streams, night time and fog, binoculars and birds, caterpillar and leaf, spring and silence.
The vacation spot, moderately than a spot, is a state of being — the recompense of paying every part in our path the gratitude and reverence it’s due for merely present. For we overlook, too, that dignity — this deepest reverence for being — isn’t one thing we will ever have for ourselves until we accord it to every part and everybody else.
Couple Thank You, The whole lot with Oliver Sacks on gratitude and the measure of residing on the horizon of loss of life, then revisit poet Marissa Davis’s love letter to every part alive.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; images by Maria Popova
