What to do on Thanksgiving

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Take

the torch

down from the wall

and bravely wake

the sleeping giant

of your soul

Stir

dormant magnificence

out of her crouching

fraction of light

Strengthen

hibernating

hips arms and legs

into stomp

and thunder

on the dance floor of

your particular praise!

This is my daily goal, not just on Thanksgiving.

Friends around the world do not necessarily know about American Thanksgiving, how it began and why we celebrate, what we celebrate. Here's an explanation I wrote to a friend in another country. It's the traditional, happy, non-NativeAmerican view of the holiday:

Legend is that it began with the first European settlers to America. They didn't know about the New World's agriculture. The Native Americans befriended and helped them understand and raise the crops that were new to them, like corn. So when harvest time came, they had a big feast and included their new friends, celebrating together. Every year they celebrated again, and so the tradition continued. Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday in the 1860s. Since then it has become the most beloved holiday in the U.S., because there is no religious affiliation, no gifts to buy, no commerce outside of food, no complications (except family). People just gather and express thanks for what we have. Traditionally we eat a turkey, which they would have eaten in the 1600s, along with fish and other meats and vegetables like pumpkin, squash and corn. It is a beautiful idea.

BUT the truth is that the European immigrants to the New World brought the most horribly annihilating devastation to the Native Americans that it almost seems like a cruel joke that we celebrate with thanks today. (I also sent this information to my friend.) I don't know how to reconcile these two perspectives, and I don't think there is any reconciliation. I do think the day provides an opportunity to face straight on what has been done in the name of God (the Pilgrim settlers thanked God, not the Native Americans), commerce, and "progress." You can watch a powerfully honest look at the Native American view of Thanksgiving here; I warn you, it isn't pretty or happy.

So, this is what we do. We investigate our shadow and destruction. We do what we can to make it right. We wake up. As Rob Brezsny says, we can always, always be thankful for all our blessings, both the pleasurable ones, and the painful ones, because they wake us up.

Wake up, wake up, and be thankful that you are awake. Love your family and friends, love your neighbor, love your enemy, and celebrate when you stop seeing them as your enemy. Isn't that something to dance about, in wild abandon?

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"Freedom from Want": Thanksgiving and grandmothers

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What I want is not the turkey on the platter, which seems too big for the spot where Grandma is placing it. And how is she carrying it anyway? My weak wrists would never make it, and the turkey would crash onto the floor. I’d let Grandpa carry it and smile sweetly, basking in the oohs and ahs.

What I want is Grandma herself. And Grandpa. How kind and cuddly they look.

The song associated with Thanksgiving is “Over the River and Through the Woods” which continues with “. . . to Grandmother’s house we go.” I never did such a thing. The only time I went to a grandparent’s house was at the time of Grandma Olive’s death and funeral, in Bayonne, New Jersey, when I was four. I played with toy cars in the steep driveway of my grandmother’s home on the bay. That’s what I remember.

When childhood friends said their grandma died, I thought, big deal. I had no heart pocket for such a relationship.

Grandpa Reuben is the only grandparent I remember, and he was not my mom’s biological dad. He was Grandma Olive’s second husband, who happened to be the cousin of her first, my mom’s dad Sidney. Olive didn’t have to change her last name when she married Reuben. I met Grandpa Reuben twice and was in love with him, the way a girl is in love with her grandpa. He was posh in suits but intensely kind.

Is there a word for being a grandchild orphan?

It is an odd and empty feeling not to have met my grandparents. But it is even odder now to contemplate that my grandparents did not meet all of their grandchildren. Dad’s dad was 70 when he was born; he fought in the Civil War in 1865; he died when Dad was 9. Dad’s mom died in the ‘50s before I was born, the last of eight kids. Mom’s biological dad Sidney was divorced from Grandma Olive and far away when we kids came along. Grandma Olive died when I was four; maybe she held me, I don’t remember. Then there was Grandpa Reuben, a fine substitute, but once on his jostling knees and once after his stroke in a wheelchair is it for memories.

Now, I’m going to be a grandma. When I first found out our daughter was pregnant, I thought I would need advice for my new role, since I had no grandparent memories to speak of. But guess what, there seems to be a heart pocket (think cargo pants) for this relationship after all. Strangely enough, while I’m loving my unborn grandson, it's almost like I'm sitting on my own lap, feeling loved.

Note about the painting: "Freedom from Want" was one of four "propaganda" posters by Norman Rockwell inspired by Theodore Roosevelt's speech to Congress January 6, 1941, urging the country to enter World War II. Read more here.

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A Note of Thanks

To my Blog Friends on Thanksgiving ~

In the rare hush over America
when Thanksgiving closes out November,
when Democrats and Republicans shelve their squeaky horns,
and early commercial Christmas crooners mute their carols,
in this silence when the sibilance of our familial

kissing and embracing,
back slapping and handshaking,
head bowing and glass raising

whispers sighs and murmurs of thanks,

I want to say thank you to You.

You shine your flashlight on aspects of life
and the world that no one else illuminates.
You help me think. You teach me your ways,
and you listen to mine.
I learn about music, art, biographies, history, culture, travel, films, books
all through your inimitable voices.
You write wild and wise stories and poems.
You show nature surrounding you through luminous photographs.
You let me see your grandchildren, and I pretend to hold them.
When I am afraid, you give me tips!
We play, you make me laugh!
You teach me to cook!
When you get sick, I pray.
When we’re happy, we’re happy together.
When we’re sad, ours is a chorus of weeping.

Thank you, my friends, for what you bring to this place,
which is not held captive in screeny web boxes,
but suffuses and inspires my heart-mind.
Yes, you're here, in my heart,
which is full and fat, and still hungry for more.
Soon it will have to lie on its side
like the 200-pound pumpkin Don grew!

I will be away for a few days.

Happy Thanksgiving!

-P
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Thank you: a warm, cozy house

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Next week Thursday my country celebrates thank you. No fireworks. No pink hearts or leprechauns.
No gift buying. In the holiday year, Thanksgiving remains a warm, cozy house with flickering lamp and candle light, with leaves of bittersweet orange and tawny saffron spread on the table. The smells and tastes that hum from the kitchen as we glide and bump around each other jockeying for space to chop, blend with the mixer, stuff the turkey, or watch the Lions play football whisper warmth, and love, and thank you. I rejoice. I simply rejoice.

It's a time when words are hard to find, because either they feel clichéd, or we don't know how to be grateful for the tragedies of existence, while also being thankful for what we hold dear. The words of my dear friend and former boss Ed ring in my ears when I asked him how to thank someone who had written a powerfully supportive recommendation letter for me, for my current job. Wise Ed said, "Sometimes there is nothing more valuable than a simple, heartfelt, thank you."

In the gliding and bumping heart prep for Thanksgiving week, I'd like to share THE DOG-EARED PAGE from the hard copy November issue of The Sun, which touches me, and perhaps will also meet your heart. (I don't believe THE DOG-EARED PAGE can be found in the online edition.) The text below about Merwin is copied directly from The Sun.

Thanks

by W.S. Merwin

New York City-born poet William Stanley Merwin has written more than thirty books of poetry, translation, and prose. A Buddhist and environmentalist, he often addresses humankind's separation from nature in his work. His writing has received two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, and in 2010, at the age of eighty-two, Merwin was appointed the Library of Congress's Poet Laureate. Since the late 1970s he has lived in Hawaii on a former pineapple plantation that he has restored to its original rain-forest state. "Thanks" was first published in The Rain in the Trees by W. S. Merwin, copyright 1988 by W. S. Merwin. 

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

standing by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

talking our feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities

growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

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Happy Thanksgiving

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NOTE: Blogger is having trouble, and I wanted to come back and enable comments at this post, but editing posts is not working for the moment. So I am posting this entire post again. I'll delete the other one (with comments disabled, which I later thought better of) when Blogger fixes this problem.
Harika! On December 9, 2009, at last I am able to edit posts. Duplicate deleted.

All the days gather forward
to this.

We survived another year.

We were held close.
We lost, we gained.

What winds and storms battered
and tattered and made us turn our heads,
- and oh - see something new?

There was good reading - those essays and short stories!
Movies moved and disturbed us.

There were visits and visitations.
Good-byes,
setbacks, illness and pain.
Jobs lost.
There were shocking funerals!
There was emptiness, disappointment and longing.
Frustration, loneliness, confusion and fear.

And there were weddings and engagements!
Births and hatchings and
new friends!
Surprising raises and sales of houses.

As things got worse all around,
writers turned words to the heart,
artists applied paint and clay outward to a cause of love,
musicians supported the hungry and desperate,
playing tim-tim-tim-tee-tim.

Friends and strangers alike
paid more attention and helped more.
People paused longer in the hall at the office to talk.
Strangers passed
cash forward in the checkout line at the store.

I feel all this
in my
heart
mind
and soul
in health, compassion,
deeper sadness and broader joy.

All the days gather forward
to this
Gratitude.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Turkey season

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Don keeping watch over his flock by day

Has it really been almost a year since we saw Sarah Palin talking with a reporter about being Vice President and pardoning a turkey from being killed for someone's Thanksgiving table, while turkeys were visibly being slaughtered behind her? It was a grisly example of someone being out of touch with their surroundings.



In the U.S., if you call someone a "turkey" it's an insult, meaning the person is stupid (out of touch with their surroundings -- yikes). Or if you say some project was a turkey - like a movie - you mean it was a failure. Apparently this arose from the fact that turkeys are thought to be stupid. You know how we call someone a "bird brain" if they don't seem to have terrific mental capacity? Well of all the birds, turkeys have the smallest brains in proportion to their size: 2%. Domestic turkeys have supposedly been known to drown standing out in a rainstorm - looking up, mouth open, "hey, what just hit my little head?" as it pours down their throats.

Some say turkeys get a bad rap, since their mortality is not good, and they die from other things more than from drowning. But there is some truth that domestic turkeys have been bred away from their wild instincts to find shelter from the elements.

After we lived in the country of Turkey we encountered a few individuals out of touch with their surroundings who, after chuckling a bit asked in disbelief, "You lived in Turkey? What do you mean, there's a place called Turkey?" Actually the real name for the country is Türkiye. If you pronounce it correctly by rounding your lips and putting that ü just behind your teeth, no one thinks you're talking about living inside a big bird. (Did you know that Sesame Street's Big Bird was made with 4000 turkey feathers?) I remember going to bed at night after speaking a lot of Turkish and my cheek muscles were sore from all those ü's and ö's. Here's an exercise in something close to stupidity for you: When you go to the turkey farm with the kids this year, try saying "göbble göbble göbble" and make the correct sound for the Turkish ö. Öh, and in Turkey they call a turkey a hindi. Now what's that about? I think it went something like this: Turkeys have to do with American Thanksgiving -> American Thanksgiving has something to do with American Indians -> Indians -> Hindi. Phew. I feel like I just flew around the world.

Two of the big toms in the photo at top - the ones with tail feathers fanned, and big pink and blue drooping gobbledy-goop under their little 2% heads, one bronze and one white - died recently after each breaking a leg. See, I told you they die from other maladies. Don doesn't know if they were in a fight, or just too heavy for their drumsticks. :| They have another two months to grow before Thanksgiving dinner - one for us and the rest to be given away. I'm afraid the one tom that's left won't fit in an oven.

I can't say that I think turkeys are dumb, but they look dumb the way they stand and stare at you inside your personal space. Or maybe they just look curious, because they certainly are that. In fact, they look the opposite of being out of touch with their surroundings if I really think about it. Can you be dumb if you're this curious?



So this is what you can say if you don't want to call someone stupid, or a turkey:







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thanks go round and round

Thanksgiving Day morning Aunt Ruth needed apples peeled and sliced for pie. So Uncle Don brought out the handy dandy apple-corer-peeler thingy that he just bought and was dying to use.

Chadd and his sister Kaeley watched and helped. Chadd, who is a student of science had to figure out how the corer mechanism worked. Just exactly which blade did what, and how?

Piles of apple peels for the chickens.

Each apple produced one smooth spiral of peel and one smooth spiral of apple flesh, which was then sliced in half in one knife stroke for the pie.

We'll do it again next year.

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yes, it was a happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving morning we woke up to snow.



Our dear little Phoebe bravely faces another Michigan winter. But this time she has a new birdbath at her back.

Bishop acted like she didn't remember what snow was. You can see Don, Mike and little Kaeley going for a walk, getting needed fresh air after being cooped up in the house.

I wish I could bring the hydrangea inside for chandeliers above the big table. I think the candles would make them sparkle.

It felt good to get outside into the air that smells like sunlight refrigerated in earth.

To see our kids at home together for a few days warmed my heart.

Indoors, Grandma is the cuddler of choice for little Kaeley.

Games, games and more games are what my husband's family loves at holidays. Peter brought "Guitar Hero" which was a challenge and a hit. You thought playing a real guitar was hard? Try playing this video game. The expert gives tips to his dad and sister.

"Cranium" is more my speed, with word and picture challenges.



I had to draw something to make my all women team guess more quickly than the men's team. This drawing is a "place." Can you guess what/where? We won this round. Wish I'd taken a pic of the men's drawing so you could see why.


Of course Thanksgiving is not all fun and games for the people doing the preparations. For all that good food, there is work, work, work. But when we do it together, it is fun.

Lesley cleaned and polished all the silver, bless her. We have a collection passed down from my mom's and my dad's families. I love using old things that my grandparents and aunt used. Imagine, those big serving spoons in my Grandma Olive's hands! Oh I love thinking about that.

I made pies, apple and pumpkin (remember, with Don's home grown organic pumpkins).

And I arranged flowers.

Don and I did the turkey, stuffing, potatoes, gravy and I don't know what else. And the dozen other people in our home contributed to the meal in their own ways, and they cleaned up with energy and joy.

It's all about the meal, you might think. All the days of preparation, the hours of cleaning up.

But the meal is only a symbol. Our fingers mixing the ingredients. Our hands moving the furniture around to make room for the big table. Our hands laying the white tablecloth as clean and fresh as the snow outside. The perfect tiny flowers bordering the table on the good china. The polished silver, the flowers like jewels, the white candles lighting our familiar faces more softly than usual. Why do we do this?

We do it because we love each other, because we're thankful for each other, and we don't want to forget that our closest family and friends deserve special attention and the best we can offer.

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Happy Thanksgiving

It didn't occur to me until after I was taking some still life shots in the living room (too cold and yucky outside to go out with the camera, without enough interesting payoff) that they were appropriate for Thanksgiving week.

Above, turkey feathers found on the farm, with a backdrop of a Navajo rug my great grandfather Arthur and great grandmother Carrie picked up on one of their mountain hikes out West, all sitting on a 200-year-old chair that belonged through the years to my mom's family. It made me so happy to realize the significant juxtaposition of an Indian rug and turkey feathers. I love that Thanksgiving started with a feast where immigrants and their helpers, the new land's native inhabitants, broke food together that they had worked together to raise. This human reliance on the kindness of strangers touches me, and I love remembering it.

Below, Don's grandparents Marshie and Guy behind the Thanksgiving cactus. Guy was one of 10 boys. These two were strong people. I met Guy, but not Marshie. Don says of his grandpa that he was a "brusque teddy bear." Guy was 6'4", and you can see Marshie was right up there too, at 5'11".

Wednesday we will welcome our children, and some of Don's family, for a few days of feasting, gratitude, family stories and laughing, and just treasuring each other. All too soon, all we have left are feathers, travel souvenirs and photographs.

I'm thankful this week, as always, but still, I'm huffing . . .

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holiday cactus (Schlumbergera)

I think they're supposed to be "Christmas cactus."

Or "Thanksgiving cactus."

But they seem to be "Halloween cactus" again this year.

I take the schlumbergera out to the porch in the summer. They love it and grow a lot.

Then in October when I bring them inside, they immediately begin to bud and bloom. It must be the decrease in light that triggers the bloomin'.

I think the blooms will be gone by Thanksgiving (November 22), when we'll have Don's family at our place to celebrate the holiday.

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Human Exchange

Ok, so if this is about human exchange, why the animals? Read on.

It’s been a tough week for me in some ways. I’m nearing the end of week 2 of something called The Presence Process (a book by Michael Brown) that takes 10 weeks, one week for each session. It’s not a complicated process at all but is meant to help you see how and why you react to things with upset, stalking them and really looking at them to understand yourself and how you react to things out of past experiences. The point is to learn to respond (implies responsibility) instead of react.

Well, just as the author forewarned, things have popped up and seemed exaggerated while going through this process. When you’re really paying attention to the things that get your goat, you realize how uncomfortable you become when your ego is bruised. That woman who was rude to me on the phone, who does she think she is? That comment I left on a blog post seemed to be totally misunderstood – how can I communicate it better, and how could he have thought that of me?

This Thanksgiving week, having a relatively compact house full of 10 adults, one baby and two dogs for four days stretched me to my limits energetically. When others don’t “do it” just the way you do (and why the hell not?), first you get that internal upset, and then you say “and why does this bother me?”

Thankfully we had a gorgeous week with temps in the 50s, very unusual for this time of year. This meant we could go outside and play. Don and the kids played ping pong in the garage, basketball and foursquare on the driveway, and we all went for a lovely walk Friday (but no Lesley, how we missed her). We wandered through the barn (where we found kitty Bishop in her secret hiding place), took Rusty the Brittany Spaniel for a walk through the woods and by the pond. (Above may be one of the last photos of Rusty, a 14-year old who is now blind.)

Animals are consistently faithful, responsive, loving, forgiving. They don’t have egos. They have personalities, but not egos (although some domesticated animals do seem to take on human emotions).

Watching Rusty romp on the path made my heart long to be that free. Free from previous hurts that make me see new experiences through a projecting lens that need not be there.

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