Essays, -  Nov 27, 2024

This day called Thanskgiving

Dear Friends,

This is a harvest festival. Around the world, societies celebrate a year of enough food and safety and well-being.

Here in the United States, since Abraham Lincoln set the date, it’s been a Thursday in late November. Most of our stories remember 1621, when settlers from Europe celebrated the gifts of the earth, after a winter in which half of them survived, and that only because of the kindness of the Wampanoag people. Meanwhile, some Native people, especially in New England, call it a National Day of Mourning, because it symbolizes how settlers drove them out of their homes and killed them. They remind us of the Thanksgiving declared in 1637 by Governor John Winthrop, in thanks for their successful massacre of the Pequot people. In those days settlers often called such days for harvest and for victory in war – however immoral the war.

So it’s with sobriety that I will gather with family for this day.

Prayer

Usually I share the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving address.  It helps us to come into right relationship with the earth. Yet today it feels lazy, like stealing, and I take responsibility for offering my own words.

In thanks for living upon this earth,

gratitude for the four directions and the center, for earth, air, fire, water, and spirit,

gladly receiving the gifts of community and family, of youth and age and the middle, of generative well-being and wondering beginning and quieting age,

finding our place among every living thing on, above, and within the earth, the grasses, the soils, trees, waters, sky, sun and moon and stars, every animal that has its own being and its own life, every plant and every microbe, every cell in this body

and among the humans, two-leggeds, wise or foolish, blessing or harming, joyful or suffering,

with enormous gratitude for those who have sacrificed so that we can live, with humility for receiving what has been stolen too often,

I take my place, we take our places, no more or less than any others a part of the whole,

and give thanks for being here, thanks for not being all-powerful or the lords of creating, thanks for being small and light as a feather,

carried through every day and every season by the great working of the universe.

And I offer my own bit of life for the sustenance of every other, in the great chorus of all being.

 

Blessings to you.

Shodo