Giving Thanks
“Thanksgiving, after all, is a word of action.” It’s been well over a decade since I clipped this comic from the morning paper (the Boulder Daily Camera) at my Mom’s house in Colorado one Thanksgiving morning.
I remember sitting at the sun-soaked kitchen table after having slept in, sipping steaming tea and taking in all the usual Thanksgiving kitchen smells. I remember feeling relaxed and grateful to be home with my family. And I remember being really struck by this little rectangle of colored ink on newsprint, the words it contained, and their full meaning. It’s not often, after all, that something from the funny pages speaks to you so deeply that you cut it out and carry it around with you for years afterwards.
This year I won’t be home for Thanksgiving. At most these days, we make it home for the holiday every other year (although I make sure there are Cape Cod cranberries on the table each year, regardless of whether they’ve been hand delivered or not). But this was supposed to be a Colorado Thanksgiving year. There’s a lot of sadness in me about not being able to be with my family, to hang out with my brother and nephew and nieces, to take the traditional Thanksgiving walkabout with my Dad. And the sharing of food, and stories, and hugs, and laughter…being with the people I love most in the world.
That grief is being shared by a lot of people this year, as the pandemic continues to rage and we all struggle with how to do the right thing. There’s a lot of shared emotion about missing Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving “not happening”…really, just a lot of “missing.”
So this year, perhaps more than any other since I first clipped that snippet of paper from my Mom’s newspaper, I’m coming back to the message within it, the message that changed the way I’ve spelled the word ever since: ThanksGiving, with a capital G. When I think about it this way, ThanksGiving is as much a state of mind as it is a date on a calendar. It is a word of action. There is always something to give thanks for, something to be grateful for (in my case, an awful lot of things). Most importantly, there is always some kindness we can actively pass forward.
Without depreciating the sadness I feel (it is genuine and I honor it), I am also making space alongside it for an equally valid emotion: gratitude. Because my family is safe, healthy, and well. Because I will be spending the holiday with my husband, who is my favorite human on the planet. Because there will be bounty on my table. Because I live in an incredibly beautiful place, where I can breathe deeply the smell of the sea. Because I am blessed to share the practice of yoga with others. Because the list goes on.
In this week of ThanksGiving, I’ll be closing my yoga classes with these words from Buddhist meditation teacher Jack Kornfield. Happy ThanksGiving.
Gratitude is a gracious acknowledgement of all that sustains us, a bow to our blessings, great and small, an appreciation of the moments of good fortune that sustain our life every day. Gratitude is confidence in life itself. It is not sentimental, not jealous, nor judgmental. Gratitude does not envy or compare. Gratitude receives in wonder the myriad offerings of the rain and the earth, the care that supports every single life.