Thanksgiving. It’s a wonderful word, and a noble intention:
Let us sit down together with family and friends at the culmination of the harvest season, enjoy a bounteous meal and give thanks for our good fortune.
But with each passing year I have more trouble composing myself to write about Thanksgiving.
My early Transition Times Thanksgiving posts focused on the Native American dimension to the holiday—reminding myself that the original Massachusetts celebration was actually the beginning of the end for the pilgrims’ generous Native American hosts, whose suffering at the hands of the rapacious Christian-capitalist overlords of this continent still continues, along with their fiery and stubborn resistance.
Last year at this time, we were sending supplies to Standing Rock and I was giving thanks for the brave water defenders who were standing up for all of us as they built their camp on the banks of the river.
This year, having witnessed the brutal repression of the water protectors at Standing Rock, we are preparing for more fights over the zombie Keystone XL pipeline and watching in disbelieving fury as the Trump administration undoes regulatory protections for wilderness and national parks and actively promotes logging, mining, fracking and drilling as well as hunting endangered species at home and abroad (oh, my beloved elephants!).
It’s been quite a year, and it’s not over yet. How should I give thanks, and for what?
It feels self-centered and callous to give thanks for not being in the line of fire—this time. Should I give thanks that I wasn’t born as an elephant or lion? That at least this year my home isn’t in the path of a pipeline or a hurricane, that the water coming out of my tap is still clean?
Of course, in my typical egocentric human way, I am grateful to have a warm, safe home, good food and loving family and friends to share it with.
Of course.
But it’s hard to relax and enjoy that good fortune when so many others are suffering.
We know now that our world is profoundly interconnected: when we hurt and despoil one species in an ecosystem, the reverberations spread out to all. Because humans are the most empathetic of species, it’s hard for those of us who are aware of the deep suffering and sickness of so many on our planet to simply ignore it and continue with business as usual.
On a spiritual level, we suffer too—and I believe that even those who profess to be entirely uncaring of others’ pain—Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Ryan Zinke, I’m looking at you—are harmed by it on a subtle level, growing more zombified day by day.
We who are aware have an essential role to play in awakening others. It’s sort of an anti-zombie effect, our touch having the potential to draw the psychically dead back into the realm of the living.
To live is to suffer. But to live is also to “take arms against a sea of troubles,” in the cause of Life. To live is to offer our lives to the future, to work on behalf of future generations to leave our world better than we found it at our birth.
Those of us lucky enough to be counting our blessings this Thanksgiving must use our good fortune to step up our activism for a better world for all. And I don’t mean merely all humans.
Here’s something you can do to support a very important giver of life this Thanksgiving season. Please contribute to the Indiegogo campaign to underwrite Mary Lyons’ book of ancestral Wisdom Lessons.
Mary Lyons is an Ojibwe elder who, despite a long life filled with all kinds of challenges, continues to travel, teach and inspire others with the wisdom of her ancestors—wisdom we all need today.
Please contribute, in the spirit of giving thanks at Thanksgiving-time. Only two weeks left in the campaign and a long way to go to the goal.
Today I give thanks for the many shining lights who are out in the forefront leading the way to the more beautiful world we know is possible. I have written about many of them in Transition Times over the years, and I continue to honor them as my inspirations, every day.
Here’s a partial list of my guiding lights (among those still alive today). What names would you add?
Transition Times 