Another Year of Being Grateful for Abundance All Around Us

 

This essay follows up on the previous one about the French Revolutionary Calendar.

In the original calendar, as explained in this wikipedia entry, each day was named after something to be found in the world of an ordinary person. These days were named after ordinary things, not after kings or saints or presidents. It may have seemed difficult to find 360 things after which to name the dates of the calendar, but the world is so full of things about which we can be grateful that it was not difficult at all. In my daily journals from that time in my life, I named each day after a tree or other plant one year; in another, after people who had been important in my life.

In the original calendar, the first day of Vendémiaire was named after the grape (raisin), as you would expect in France. Many of the later dates were named after trees and other plants, many of which would escape the attention of all but the closest observers. These included the érable à sucre (sugar maple), colchique (autumn crocus), and belle de nuit (beauty of the night, otherwise known as the four-o’clock flower). One day was named for hemp (chanvre), which is the same species but not the same breed as marijuana. The French make distinctions that we often ignore in America, such as potiron (winter squash) and citrouille (pumpkin) for the purposes of making soup. The list was made after the Europeans had incorporated food plants from North America, such as pomme de terre (potato), piment (hot pepper), and tomate. Of course, they also included domesticated animals, including those one might not expect a day to be named after, such as âne (donkey), bouc (billy goat), and grillon (cricket). They had days named after fuels and other materials such as tourbe (peat), houille (coal), argile (clay), and even fumie (manure). Of great importance to ordinary people were the tools such as herse (harrow), hoyau (fork hoe), pelle (shovel), and of course the pressoir (wine press). One might not expect an environmentalist like me to be thankful for coal, but when used in moderation coal can be an essential part of a sustainable and healthy economy.

Salvatore Fresca made a series of engravings, one for each of the French Revolutionary months, each of them of voluptuous women scarcely clad. But only in the three summer months were the women bare-breasted.

By naming each day after something, I had my eyes opened not only to biodiversity but also to the diversity of little blessings that we all have but about which we, concentrating on our own problems and stresses, do not think about. I seem to remember in my journal (which now has over 13,000 entries) I had a day named after the pencil. How often have you thought about and been grateful for pencils? Today’s list could be so much longer than the 1792 French list, and would include telephones and computers and vaccines and antibiotics and…

Few have said it better than Robert Louis Stevenson: “The world is so full of a number of things/That I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” Not to mention the fact that few kings have been or are as happy as most of us ordinary people! Today, and this year, look around you and be grateful.