Season of gratefulness, reflections…
Greetings CSA Members!
Late November is a time of both formal and informal Thanksgiving for us at Featherstone Farm.
The Turkey Day ritual itself has always had special meaning for me as a farmer, with the celebration’s original roots in the autumn harvest (if one can disentangle this from magical thinking about communities of colonists and native peoples sharing the celebration as equals!). I love the food, the family gatherings and the fundamental idea of gratitude as the foundation for a national holiday. Always have, always will.
On the informal side, many members of the Featherstone Family are celebrating a huge Thanksgiving of their own this week, returning to their homes in Mexico after 6 months of work here at Featherstone Farm. It is such a poignant deal for all of us here, watching the folks pack for the trip home, sensing their anticipation and delight in homecoming. Sure, they make the trip north completely voluntarily, and consider themselves very lucky to have legal, visa supported jobs in the US. But who among us would ever choose 6 months’ separation from our young children, (grand)parents and extended family, if economic necessity were not a crippling reality?
This particular Thanksgiving, however, I feel a distinct new sense of humility as part of my reflections on the season. A big part of this has to do with health issues that have plagued me since spring, and the limitations they have put on my activities this fall. But much of the world around us seems more unknowable, more unjust, more unsolvable to me, this year more than ever.
Jenni and I have attended the Unitarian Universalist fellowship in Winona for 20+ years. Yesterday we celebrated our annual Thanksgiving feast with this fellowship. I had been asked way last summer to give the blessing for this meal (we are a “lay led” group), and as the time approached I felt increasingly uncertain about what I might say. General statements on the order of “gratitude and thanks for the great fortune, bounty and prosperity of the season” (or of the Thanksgiving meal itself) have come to feel a bit hollow for me recently, given the turmoil and suffering we see all around us in the world. Offering such a blessing again this year seemed necessary, perhaps, but woefully insufficient. Maybe, maybe even a bit self-congratulatory.
So instead I thought long and hard about things that we can truly all be grateful for as human beings this particular season. Black and white, red and blue, Israeli and Gazan. And I came upon two which I cited in my UU Thanksgiving blessing yesterday.
The first is the idea of life itself, however fragile or fraught or downright nightmarish it may be at any given time. As one of my favorite singer songwriters, Nanci Griffith wrote, in a song I now recognize is fundamentally about grappling with depression: “It’s just another morning, and it’s a miracle it comes around every day” (emphasis on the word miracle). Simply being alive is such a blessing, if we are open hearted and present in the moment enough to acknowledge it. Seems like a big cliché, but it sure rings true.
The second is the idea of family and friends, close relationships with other people, past and present. As I was struggling to prepare for the UU welcome, Jenni reminded me of a poem/ prayer titled “A Harvest of People” written by UU minister Max Coots, one that we had learned about first when a good friend read it as a surprise at our wedding 29 years ago. The poem begins with the line “Let us give thanks for a bounty of people” and goes on to celebrate different sorts of people who bring different qualities and flavors to our lives, like various vegetables and flowers harvested in the garden. You can read this Thanksgiving poem/ prayer at https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/poetry-prayers-visual-arts/max-coots-a-harvest-of-people/.
It is the blessing’s final line which reverberates with me most profoundly this Thanksgiving season, when so many people around me and around the world seem to have lost so much. This line reads:
We give thanks for friends now gone, like gardens past that have been harvested, but who fed us in their times that we might live.
What more could I possibly add to this?
I hope that you have had a good Thanksgiving yourselves, grounded in an awareness of life and the blessing of friends and family, despite the turmoil around us in the world. And that you are kind to yourself and to one another, particularly the folks you disagree with, even profoundly.
Gratefully and Warmly,