Complexity
Holding Thanksgiving in all its Paradox
This year, my gratitude spilled a little. It fell from the trees months ago as blankets of golden petaled rain. It arrived with the curving of the earth through her elliptical path, little by little, streaking the sky. It hung in jeweled space as pillow puff clouds tempering the heat of a summer day. It floated in the pond, countless small white flowers peaking above the horizon of rippled water. This used to be my favorite holiday. A day to turn toward gratitude. Alas, maybe I have grown more aware or more informed, at least. Why prescribe a day for this most life-giving posture? Why isolate the impulse to a moment in time, whether to mark the harvest, or to try to wipe a stain from history’s past? I have lived the dull weight of a time in which gratitude felt distant, even foreign. It was a long season where the soils gave but I could not receive. Deeply now, more deeply than before this dark chapter, I know the value of gratitude, because her absence is a tight belt that makes breathing hard. Today I offer my breath, always the first breath, always a new breath, always tied to every prior breath, equally independent of each prior breath, to the wind. May she carry prayers filled with gratitude through the trees, into the swirling clouds, beyond the horizon of local waters to the heart of someone who has been torn from their loved ones, denied a voice, mistreated or misrepresented, misguided by misinformation. May prayers of love reach those who need it, for whatever reason, be it hardship or grief, distance or loss. And may I remember to be grateful for each tender breath, each prayer and each now moment full of life and all her complexity, always. We thrive on the breath of our ancestors, the people who loved this Earth in her youth allowing her to flower into the Goddess she is. To this miraculous unfolding of life, I bow, humbled by the work of the cyanbacteria, the amoeba, the phytoplankton and their cousins and kin and all those who knew their place in the silky web of life, threading themselves into the matrix to support to the wellbeing of the whole.
