Dear friends,
I’m sending warm greetings from northern New Mexico where we are visiting family, enjoying the warmth and fragrance of a morning piñon fire, gazing into spectacular big skies, admiring ginormous flocks of Sandhill cranes wheeling overhead, and reveling in the hundreds of Crows who gather in the crowns of the nearby cottonwood trees along the Rio Grande river.
I’m grateful as ever for the teaching of Francis Weller, reminding us that the task of a mature human being is to hold grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. May we be well stretched, and ripened by the expanding, and may we remember ourselves as large enough so that we do not have to choose one over the other.
On this complex day, a holiday that weaves together so many discordant threads, I send greetings and care. I appreciate that this holiday invites authentic gratitude and thanksgiving, a practice we need so much more of in this society. I bristle at the urgency of the capitalist sales machine that has been filling my inbox with “Black Friday sales” for weeks, sales that once started on actual black Friday which doesn’t even happen until tomorrow. I grieve on the national day of mourning for indigenous peoples of this Turtle Island; for the history of this nation founded in, among other things, the terrible dehumanizing violence toward the native residents, historically and still ongoing today. My heart is irrevocably pierced by heartwrenching grief at the genocides and erasure of indigenous people around the world happening today. I grieve that many people in this country are so defensive that they cannot even acknowledge this history and its repercussions, let alone grieve and begin to repair it.
This morning during meditation, for our second sit, we read the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address together. In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s beautiful book Braiding Sweetgrass, she shared this beautiful practice along with words from from faithkeeper Oren Lyons. When she asked him whether she could have permission to write about the Thanksgiving Address he said,”Of course you should write about it. It’s supposed to be shared, otherwise how can it work? We’ve been waiting for five hundred years for people to listen. If they’d understood the Thanksgiving then, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” May we listen. It is time.
Whenever I read the Thanksgiving Address in community, a common experience arises in the group – that famous stretch. So much gratitude infused with the sense of wow, we really are so rich, so blessed, and don’t need to buy anything – there is so much to be grateful for that I often take for granted. Along with this settling contentment and vast gratitude comes the deep grief of noticing how absent this practice is in modern society. In fact, as we read these sacred words, we notice that the modern world tends to be oriented in the opposite direction… with very little noticing of the natural world around us, even less gratitude, and seemingly endless wanting and consuming more more more.
The Thanksgiving address is referred to by the Mohawk people as “words before all else” and as we read these sacred words, we can imagine what it might be like if we offered these words before all else. I imagine each session of congress beginning with expressing our thanks to the trees, the waters, the winds, the food plants. What if each business meeting began remembering the truth of interbeing and speaking out loud the knowledge of how entwined our wellbeing is with that of the land, the waters, the birds, the fish, the medicine plants, the animals, the people? The grief waves come along with the question – What are we doing instead of this?! Recognizing the glaring absence of gratitude or acknowledgment of the natural world in the overculture, reckoning with the way our modern lifestyle, fueled by corporate greed and a profound disconnect from Our Mother who art underfoot, is destroying so much of life, and that the survival of our own species stands on the brink. It hurts to recognize this.
It pains me to bear witness to the erasure, dehumanization, and suppression of the lives of the indigenous people around the planet who uphold cultures rooted in such beautiful wisdom as to honor the practice of Thanksgiving on a regular basis – before all else.
Who is worthy of reverence? Worthy of reproach? Those who practice praising the natural world before anything else, or those who destroy it with utter abandon and no consideration of the impacts on future generations?
May we remember what indigenous teachers continually remind us – that the division between the ecosystems we inhabit and human rights is 100% artificial. We are woven into this web of life and nothing we can do, even forgetting this truth for centuries on a mass scale, could change that fact. May we continue to recognize the beautiful truth of interbeing and treat others, not only humans but the entire web of life, as if it was our own beloved body, because it is. And it is all so worthy of love and cherishing and thanksgiving. Every single day.
Block 4th
Dwelling in the stretch is where I want to be.
Brokenhearted by the grief. And wow, am I ever.
Genocide. Ecocide. A culture of domination.
Broken open by the beauty. And wow, am I ever.
Did I mention the hundreds of Sandhill cranes and their throaty call as they spun in the skies in giant formations this morning?
I’m a devoted possibilitarian, forever inspired by the possibilities here still. I am wholeheartedly determined, in my own humble ways, to make my life a stand against the harm. I’m here for full and imperfect participation in this beautiful mess.
Whether you are on Turtle Island where Thanksgiving is celebrated and/or mourned today or whether you are anywhere else on this gorgeous earth, I highly recommend reading the Thanksgiving Address with others, with great reverence for the people who have upheld this practice for millennia, the original stewards of Turtle Island. May it break our hearts wide open.
Let us make a culture of authentic gratitude, not just one day a year. May we remember these as words to be spoken, remembered, and felt before all else, again and again and again. Let us also grieve what needs grieving so we might move forward together.
Paul Hawken writes, “Inspiration is not garnered from the recitation of what is flawed, it resides rather in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine and reconsider.”
And we cannot do this restoration and reimagining until we stand on the honest ground of the history and the present, with humble hearts stretched by grief and gratitude into the ripened adults we came here to become.
May we be fierce in our commitment to use even the most challenging circumstances as ways to deepen our understanding and compassion. May we keep finding creative ways to serve the collective thriving of living beings and this gorgeous, generous Earth. If we engage life as an ongoing opportunity to wake up from the trance of self-absorption and hyperindividualism, how can we go wrong?
I’m wishing you well and ever grateful that we’re in it together.
From my heart,
Erin
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