How to Love the World More: Rachel Hébert’s “The Book of Thanks”

In a world that often feels overwhelming and fractured, artist and poet Rachel Hébert offers something rare and precious: a deliberate practice in gratitude that transforms how we see everything around us. Her latest book, The Book of Thanks: A Catalogue of Gratitudes, released in November 2025, is far more than a collection of poems and artwork—it’s an invitation to fundamentally reshape our relationship with existence itself.

A Masterpiece of Visual and Verbal Art

Rachel Hébert has built her career on a singular gift: the ability to weave together the visual and written word into profound expressions of the human experience. The Book of Thanks represents the culmination of this talent, featuring 52 short poems paired with 108 exquisite pieces of artwork across 304 pages.[4] The book is crafted with remarkable care—bound in linen and printed on tree-free paper, with a minimalist display stand built into its slipcase—making it as much a tactile experience as an intellectual and emotional one.[4]

What makes this work extraordinary is its refusal to be merely decorative. While the book functions beautifully as a coffee table companion, it operates simultaneously as a meaningful tool for anyone seeking to cultivate a joyful life. The sparse prose paired with Hébert’s considered drawings and paintings creates a rhythm that invites readers into deeper presence and appreciation.[4]

The Theology of Belonging

At its heart, The Book of Thanks articulates something profoundly spiritual: the radical notion that there is nothing you must do to belong. This theological statement runs through the entire work like a golden thread, challenging the contemporary impulse toward constant self-improvement and worthiness-proving. Instead, Hébert suggests that belonging is already yours—the question is simply whether you’ll accept it.

The book radiates an invitation to open “the sunlit fort of your attention” and allow the world to rush in with all its minute and majestic loveliness.[3] She catalogs this loveliness with stunning specificity: stalactites and Spanish moss, spiderwebs and skylights, snow and the call of the snowy owl. But these aren’t mere observations. They’re doorways into recognizing the heart’s capacity for “an urgent, flashing, interrupting kind of love.”[3]

Training Gratitude as a Practice

One of the most important insights in The Book of Thanks is that gratitude is trainable. In our age of competitive complaint and perpetual dissatisfaction, maintaining a grateful perspective feels nearly impossible. Yet Hébert argues that it’s possible to become strong enough to be tender, to develop the spiritual muscles necessary to sustain wonder in the face of difficulty.

The work emerges as both prayerful and singing with praise. Readers encounter invocations like “more cellos, touch, and rain, please” alongside celebrations of the natural world: “roots gripping, canyon carved, spine woven of baleen a thousand years old.”[3] What emerges is not toxic positivity or spiritual bypassing, but rather a rigorous manual for living in gratitude while acknowledging genuine hardship. Hébert doesn’t ask us to deny the brutality of existence—she asks us to “trouble it with light” and “train our sights on the rebellious good.”[3]

Finding Wonder in Darkness

Perhaps the most courageous aspect of The Book of Thanks is its refusal to shy away from pain. Hébert acknowledges lostness, longing, and the “dim parade of brutality” that characterizes contemporary life.[3] Yet within this acknowledgment, she insists on the possibility of transformation. In the chapter called lostness, there is a friend. In dark woods, a gate. The book becomes a guide for those who have sat in early morning bleakness and wondered how all could possibly be well.

The poems themselves model this integration of difficulty and beauty. They don’t resolve the tension between suffering and joy—they hold both simultaneously. Hébert writes of loving “the thousand knives as they enter” while seeing that “your shape still sitting” remains whole.[3] This is not resignation; it’s resilience born from acceptance.

A Timely Gift

Released in November 2025, The Book of Thanks arrives at a moment when many of us desperately need permission to notice beauty and practice presence. The book was launched at Poet and the Bench in Mill Valley on November 23rd, where Rachel read from the work and shared original artworks with the community.[4] The event embodied the book’s central invitation: to gather together and celebrate life’s small moments of beauty.

For those seeking a gift that transcends the material, The Book of Thanks offers something genuinely transformative. It’s available through Poet and the Bench’s Mill Valley store and online, making it accessible for holiday gifting and personal practice.[4]

Conclusion

Rachel Hébert’s The Book of Thanks: A Catalogue of Gratitudes is one of the most miraculous books to emerge in recent years, trembling with tenacious tenderness for the bewilderment of being alive.[3] In its pages and paintings, we find not escapism, but rather a rigorous, joyful practice in how to love the world more fully—exactly as it is, exactly as we are. In learning to see through Hébert’s eyes, we learn to see through our own with new wonder.

Original source: The Marginalian – How to Love the World More: Artist and Poet Rachel Hébert’s Breathtaking Catalogue of Gratitudes