That feeling-tone of grateful wonder is what poet and philosopher David Whyte celebrates the “Blessings & Prayers” suite of poems found in his altogether vivifying collection The Bell and the Blackbird ( public library). It can bless with the surprising cymbal of a robin’s egg out of time and out of place or with the murmuration of a moonlit tree. That feeling-tone can come as symphonic as a total solar eclipse or as quiet as the rising tide. For me, blessedness is a feeling-tone of grateful wonder.

(Which might, in the end, be one.)Įven for the unchurched among us, who worship at the altar of reality, blessedness can be a beautiful concept unbaggaged from religion. “Blessedness is within us all,” Patti Smith wrote in yet another century as she contemplated life, death, and love. “Now I will do nothing but listen,” the young Walt Whitman resolved as he pressed his ear against the eternal song of being a century before Aldous Huxley found in the transcendent power of music a portal into the “blessedness lying at the heart of things.”

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