Gratitude is a Practice

Thanksgiving is a conflicted holiday for many of us. Despite the sacred civic myth that has grown up around it, Thanksgiving as the USA has come to celebrate it has roots in colonial violence and hides a much more complicated history. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thanksgiving-myth-and-what-we-should-be-teaching-kids-180973655/ )  But in 1863, Abraham Lincoln was not as interested in historical accuracy, or in reckoning with the nation’s colonial violence, as he was in creating a unifying national holiday amid the terrors of the American Civil War. Over the centuries, our collective avoidance has perpetuated a lot of harm that we are hopefully beginning to address. There are, after all, good reasons why many Native communities call it “Thanks-taking.” 

  The conflict comes when people (not me) have fond memories of Thanksgiving and genuinely enjoy the traditions and gatherings. Having just passed through another year of civic myths, televised parades, football games, and comprehensive coverage of Black Friday sales, it’s probably a good moment to reconnect with that kernel of goodness in Thanksgiving. That is, gratitude is truly essential to our health, both personally and socially, and practicing gratitude is something we can all do to make life better for ourselves, others, and the earth. 

We Take Our Space in the World: Transgender Day of Remembrance

I offered a guided meditation at the close of our local Transgender Day of Remembrance as a practice to help us get in touch with our bodies and feelings; reconnect with our community and aspirations; and recommit to working together to create a world where justice, equity, and joy are the norms. 

Listening to these names and getting glimpses of the vibrant lives our trans siblings have lived, we realize the loss our communities have experienced and the deep pain that so many of us carry every day. Let’s pause to recognize and honor our feelings in this moment, whether it is grief, anger, fear, despair, hope, a mix of all this at once, or something else. 

(Bell)

Each time we gather like this, we can’t help but remember the world we live in. It is a world that makes it very clear that we are misunderstood and unwelcome. We have named that violence tonight, and we also recognize the violence that so often excludes our transgender and gender expansive siblings from families, jobs, housing, medical care, educational opportunities, and citizenship. We especially remember the harm inflicted on members of our trans family that are Black, Brown, and Indigenous, who also suffer the injustices of racism in all its forms. 

“Almost All of the Land in the World is Claimed”

Necoclí is a small town on Columbia’s Caribbean coast, known mostly for, as one travel headline put it, “Crabs, coconuts and volcano swimming.” When Tom Heyden wrote that column in 2011, he could focus on how “the town’s charm relies on its surrounding natural beauty, which provides visitors with the opportunity to relax and soak up the sun.” His descriptions include gorging “yourself on sweet, juicy mangos,” crabbing, and walking to the local volcano, where you can jump “straight into the murky, muddy crater of the volcano. … The feeling is truly bizarre as you half-float, half-sink in the midst of this active volcano, toying with the squelchy, infirm floor beneath you.” (https://colombiareports.com/Necoclí-crabs-coconuts-and-volcano-swimming/ )

“No Choice But to Keep On Going”

It sounds idyllic and delightful, and I very much wished that this was all we could say about the lovely town of Necoclí. But I would guess that, if you have heard of Necoclí at all, it is not because of the juicy mangos or volcano swimming. Beyond sunny beaches perfect for napping in a hammock, the roads that take you there also take you as close as you can get to Panama, where refugees seeking asylum in the USA must cross a dangerous stretch of jungle known as the Darién Gap.  

Halloween, a Holiday of Acceptance and Possibility

    Today is my favorite American holiday. It might have something to do with Autumn, enjoying the dip in temperatures without the worry of an ice storm, the steam on a mug of hot tea on the patio in the early morning, the vibrant purple of the asters against the golds and reds of the changing Maple leaves, and the simmering pot of soup on the stove. Halloween itself is pure revelry in the human condition. We return to make believe and fantasy. We face human mortality, look the skeleton in its eye socket, and make friends (or at least shake hands) with our own impermanence. We know the world is full of scary monsters, and Halloween is when we get to openly, if not playfully, be honest about our anxieties and fears, whether inside or outside of ourselves. And it’s never more true than when it comes to our own selves. We open the lid on what we are, or what we might be, with fear, excitement, or both. 

Domestic Violence Awareness Month

Before I begin, a brief word about terminology may be useful. There is no universally agreed-upon phrase to refer to what we alternatively call domestic violence, intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and family violence. Often, these phrases are based in a specific discipline and reflect that discipline’s approach. Moreover, definitions may categorize different kinds of violence, such as physical, sexual, emotional, financial, and social. There are also legal categories and definitions, such as battery, assault, and homicide. Then there is the question of who is included, since domestic violence can involve parents, children, lovers, ex-es, and extended family. Its affects can range from mild to severe, from temporary trauma to death. Whatever this violence is called, its effects are pervasive and destructive. And our personal and social well-being cannot be separated from bringing domestic violence to an end. 

"We Are Enough"

“How amazingly unlikely is your birth”

Attempts to calculate the improbability, or the inevitability, of any particular human life surface every so often. A decade ago, in 2011, Dr. Ali Binazir posted an entry on the Harvard weblog that became a bit of a rage. It was a thought experiment that assigned probabilities to key moments leading to your existence: your parents meeting, getting pregnant, getting pregnant with the particular egg and sperm that led to your particular genetic makeup, and, working backwards,  that happening with each set of your ancestors. His conclusion was that the probability of any one person existing is something like 1 in (10)x(2,685,000). For everyone who replied that the probability of existence for something that actually exists is 1, Dr. Binazir emphasized that –

“One is called to live nonviolently..."

    Twenty years ago, Holly and I were living in the woods. I had left my position at a university in 2000 because we wanted to live close to the land, and we had some friends with property where we could all learn together. We were young, and we were enthusiastic and optimistic, though not so much about society in general as confident in ourselves. We believed we could help change the world, with our bookshelves full of Foxfire anthologies, Back to Basics, The Encyclopedia of Country Living, and essays by folks like Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Aldo Leopold. This wasn’t a complete leap of faith; all of us came from families where we grew up with some combination of gardening, camping, backpacking, building, or farming. We weren’t against technological innovations, but we were trying to be intentional about our lives and livelihoods. We wrote poetry, painted landscapes, and hosted literature-themed dinners. There were some hardships and frustrations, but, looking back, it was idyllic.

On September 11, 2001, we were working on the cabin. I was in the front yard, prepping lumber for a window repair. We got a call to turn on the news, that the US had been attacked. We spent the rest of the day listening to NPR on a little battery powered radio. The news did not slow down over the weeks and months ahead. Congress authorized US forces to be used in response to the 9/11 attacks on September 18. By October 7, the United States and United Kingdom invaded Afghanistan in an operation they named Enduring Freedom.