Dear friends,
These two lovely, loony people arrived from Vermont on Tuesday and it’s easy to feel gratitude.
Lena and Ben, being their authentic selves. Photo by MH.
Thanks are not a small thing when they are sincere. Years ago, Lena introduced us to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. In it, Kimmerer describes the Thanksgiving Address that marks the beginning and end of each school week at the local elementary school. These ‘Words That Come Before All Else’ are words of gratitude.
Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now let us bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one.
In the pause, the assembled children “murmur their assent.”
The words continue, with thanks to Mother Earth, to the waters of the world, to the fish, the fields, the berries, the food plants — especially the Three Sisters: beans, corn, and squash. They thank the medicinal herbs, the trees, animals, birds, the four winds, the thunder beings, the sun, the moon, and the stars. Finally, they thank “the enlightened teachers” and the Great Spirit “for all the gifts of creation.”
It is an inspiring accounting of things for which to give thanks.
Here’s another: “As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse” from Billy Collins.
I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slowso that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.
I hope you are in good company today, wherever you are.
with love,
L