After Giving Thanks

On Thanksgiving Thursday, we Americans reflect on all that we have and try to be grateful for it. We offer our prayers of gratitude to our gods and we issue a collective sigh of contentment through a haze of tryptophan and wine and refined carbohydrates. We love our loved ones and we momentarily forgive our enemies.

And then the very next day, we rise at 4, 3, 2 in the morning, rush out in hoards and droves, and purchase ourselves into glutted, indebted, consumerist oblivion, wanting and needing and not thinking of everything we already have that fails to sate our relentless craving to have stuff. We trample the weak and slow in order to snatch our material prizes, because this is what the television networks and toy manufactures and conservative economists say is our sacred right and solemn duty as middle-class Americans.

Does anyone else feel manipulated? My response to this state of affairs is to stay home and read.

Last night, as we sat down to our cold turkey sandwiches and leftover pie, I had just finished talking to my mother, and I felt the most overwhelming sense of satisfaction and gratitude. She usually spends Thanksgiving by herself, and I usually spend Thanksgiving thinking about how she's by herself. I don't dare go to her, but I can't enjoy the day when she is alone. But yesterday, she spent the day with friends. She has friends right now. I can't begin to describe how relieved and happy this makes me.

And as I released my guilt and grief over my mother's loneliness, here are the things that flooded that space in my heart.

I'm thankful for my life.

I'm thankful for a husband who is as wonderful as husbands get, who listens to me and respects me and will make any sacrifice for my well-being. Who married me even though I think for myself and who wouldn't dream of having it any other way. Who eats the vegetables I feed him and turns off the TV when it's been long enough because he appreciates my efforts to do what is best for us and wants to take part. Who wants to know me and who is gentle with my very fragile heart. Who makes me tea every morning, pays the bills, cuts the grass, goes to buy our drinking water, changes the oil, brings in the mail, fixes the house when it breaks, and does whatever housework I ask him to do. (You are my world, honey. I love you.)

I'm thankful for my intelligent, responsible, passionate, loving, kind, talented baby sister, who thinks far more highly of me than I deserve. I really need that. (Don't we all?)

I'm thankful for my friends. I often feel so very alone, but I never am. Friends, your presence in my life keeps me afloat, keeps me humble and my heart open and full. I love each of you so much, and each of you is ineffably precious to me, whether I've known you for a few months or for twenty years and whether I saw you last week or haven't seen you in a long time and whether I know you intimately or have only just penetrated the shell of your public persona. I want to honor each of you by name, but that may be for a different post. If you're thinking "I wonder if that applies to me," it does.

I'm thankful for all the women who have been mothers to me in some capacity, including my own. I'm thankful that together they have taught me how to love my children.

I'm thankful for my education. I'm thankful for every museum I've visited and every library and every lecture and every book. I'm thankful for my teachers and fellow students and for all the people in my life who challenge me to keep learning.

I'm thankful for humor and whimsy and beauty and the ability to experience the emotional and psychological complexities of human existence through them. Humor and whimsy and beauty keep me sane.

I'm thankful for Ben and Rachel, who masterfully coax the vegetables I eat out of the ground, without intervention from Monsanto.

I'm thankful for my little white house on a hill. I'm thankful for my bed and my books and my kitty and my computer and my car. I'm thankful for my kitchen and my table, where I cook meals and share them with beautiful people. I'm thankful for my job and for my health insurance. I'm thankful that I can take yoga lessons now. I'm thankful that I have clean water to drink and enough food to eat, food that is good for my body.

I'm thankful for the amazing world in which we live. I'm thankful for trees and oceans and rabbits and daisies and rocks and apples and onions and tea and wine and warmth and sex and birth and the way sand feels beneath my feet.

And I'm thankful to the God I worship, whose name is Jesus, because I believe he is the source of all things and that he loves us, all of us, and wants us to love and care for each other.

I hope each of you has a blessed, full, contented, peaceful Black Friday. Shalom. Namaste.