We forget that none of this had to exist — that we weren’t owed mountains and music by the universe. And maybe we have to forget — or we would be too stupefied with gratitude for every raindrop and every eyelash to get through the daily tasks punctuating the unbidden wonder of our lives. But it is good, every once in a while, to let ourselves be stupefied by gratitude, to cast upon ourselves a spell against indifference by moving through the world with an inner bow at every littlest thing that prevailed over the odds of otherwise in order to exist.

Artist couple Mayumi Otero and Raphael Urwiller, who work together under the pen name Icinori, offer a vibrant invitation to this countercultural way of seeing in Thank You, Everything (public library) — a meditative yet exuberant journey through the world within and the world without, inspired by the Japanese notion of tsuumogami: the soul, or spirit, that inanimate objects are believed to acquire after being of service in the world for a hundred years.

Out of what begins as an impressionistic portrait of gladness — “thank you, blue”; “thank you, morning”; “thank you, glass” — emerges a story syncopating the abstract and the concrete.

Day breaks with gratitude, breaks into a mysterious adventure, each step of which is a bow — we see the protagonist move through cities and landscapes, thanking every large and little thing along the way: bicycle and bus and airplane, sky and clouds and streams, night and fog, binoculars and birds, caterpillar and leaf, spring and silence.

The destination, rather than a place, is a state of being — the recompense of paying everything in our path the gratitude and reverence it is due for merely existing. For we forget, too, that dignity — this deepest reverence for being — is not something we can ever have for ourselves unless we accord it to everything and everyone else.

Couple Thank You, Everything with Oliver Sacks on gratitude and the measure of living at the horizon of death, then revisit poet Marissa Davis’s love letter to everything alive.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova