I am sitting at my desk, the day after Thanksgiving, overfull with blessings and food. My partner and I were committed to getting a locally raised, “organic” turkey and we ended up with a 26 lb. bird. Given our Covid situation that turkey served three people. Lots of leftovers! I have many charmed Thanksgiving memories of being together with my birth family at my grandparents. My grandmother, who had done the bulk of the cooking, ( Grampy was in charge of the basting) would chortle as she sat down at the table, “I want the bum [of the turkey].” As my chosen family grew, we hosted many Thanksgiving dinners, attended Thanksgivings with parents and inlaws, participated in gatherings of friends and cosmic orphans, passed on many traditions and learned/created many others. Nothing is more important than the spiritual traditions of expressing, manifesting, feeling, adopting, cultivating gratitude and giving thanks.
As an individual, gratitude is central to my relationship to the earth, the animals and plants, other people and myself. If I am full of resentments, anger and greed, and always want more and more of what I perceive I lack, I am confined to a miserable existence, crawling from meagre pleasure to restless sleep, lashing out at others and bristling with a lack of appreciation. As a teacher and a parent I want to instill, cultivate and uncover for the children under my care a grateful, generous, loving heart. To this end I wrote on a large piece of birch bark 4 “rules,” guidelines for being in the world. 1) Be kind to each other; 2) Be kind to the earth; 3) Be kind to yourself; 4) Discover the true joy and pleasure of living. As laid out these are just disembodied “rules.” To manifest them in our day to day lives we can support children in a growing love and appreciation of the earth, other people and all the other inhabitants of the earth, and their own unfolding, individual journeys and lives.
The compost for this love and appreciation are engaging, memorable encounters and experiences with the world and other people that provide the ground for a developing a sense of appreciation, love and gratitude. Today what I want to foreground are the expressions of gratitude through giving thanks, prayer, contemplation, song, story, and celebration that usher children into this way of life.
Last night before we began eating ( okay, as we started eating!) each one of us gave a short list of “things” we were grateful for. Certainly many families make this part of their daily routine and say some form of prayer that gives thanks to the food, the earth and whatever divine being(s) that they might want to invoke. While there are always dangers of mechanizing and routinizing these rituals and turning them into empty conventions, or worse yet, warping expressions of gratitude into ideological weapons, the spirit of expressing gratitude in personal and communal ways is a powerful spiritual tool. If you find yourself lost and despairing it can be helpful to write a gratitude list to reorient your perspective on things.
Contemplative, meditative practices around gratitude can bring into focus a fundamental humility that de-centers the child’s evolutionary and cultural “self-centeredness” and privilege, and allows each person to participate in the rich, overflowing abundance of something bigger, vast, and endless. I orchestrate a “food meditation” with the children in my class with the intention of lifting them out of the endless cycle of hunger, greed, satiation and hunger, where I am hoping that children can “luxuriate in the boundlessness of interbeing” (Thich Nhat Hanh), and appreciate the effort and pain involved in there being food on their plates. Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t always go well. I won’t get into the gory details but the larger goal is to slow down, savor and appreciate the good things in life. ( This doesn’t address the political/economic problem of food insecurity and hunger of far too many children, but the goal remains to raise grateful children with an engaged, skillful, generous compassion that will rise to the occasion of these challenges.)
Poems, prayers and songs are one of the world’s great repositories of gratitude and giving thanks. Katherine Patterson gathers many of these in her book Giving Thanks: Poems, Prayers and Praise Songs of Thanksgiving. For example Christian Morgenstern’s “The Waldorf Verse.” “Earth who gives us this food,/Sun who makes it ripe and good,/ Dearest Earth and Dearest Sun./We’ll not forget what you have done.” Or this gem from E.E. Cummings, “I thank you God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes”
To me some of the most moving stories and songs of giving thanks and gratitude come from Native American communities and authors. One of my favorites is Giving Thanks: A Native American Good Morning Message retold by Chief Jake Swamp and Illustrated by Irwin Printup, Jr. In the author’s note Chief Jake Swamp writes “Children, too, are taught to greet the world each morning by saying thank you to all living things.” Here is my reading of this wonderful, good morning message of gratitude.
Cultivating gratitude in oneself and sharing the practice of regularly giving thanks with children and young people should not be confused with the political propaganda, ideological mystification and bullshit racism of celebrating some mythical, original first Thanksgiving between Native peoples and European immigrants and colonists. Thankfully this seems to be on the decline but still has a stronghold in many American and New England communities, religious institutions, and most frighteningly in the public schools. Elementary classes continue to churn out school plays where some children wear “pilgrim hats” and others wear “Indian feathers.” Part of the problem is that respected authors like Gail Gibbons continue to write nonsense like “The First Thanksgiving.” But the larger problem is America’s unwillingness to address the horror of an in house genocide, and an inability to reckon with the “survivance,” renaissance, resilience, vibrancy and presence of Native people and communities in the present! See Matika Wilbur’s “Project 562 which reflects her commitment to visit, engage and photograph all 562 plus Native American sovereign territories in the United States.”
http://www.project562.com/blog/a-thanksgiving-message-from-seven-amazing-native-americans/
So this Thanksgiving dig deep into your own experience and into your family and cultural traditions for ways of manifesting gratitude and the practice of giving thanks in your everyday life. Educate yourself about other cultural traditions and practices of gratitude and how they can shift us away from “me-centered lives,” toward lives where we recognize ourselves as but small pieces in the mosaic of the earth and its inhabitants. It especially behooves people who are not indigenous to North America to humble themselves and listen to the stories, songs and voices of Native people both past and present. Perhaps, in this way, together, today, and in the future, we can usher in a new age of courage, creativity, peace, harmony, appreciation, humility, reverence and gratitude for the earth, all of its inhabitants, and each other.
Practice: 1) find ways to offer thanks and manifest gratitude in throughout your day and in your life;2) Find, create and put into practice specific forms of expressing gratitude and appreciation with your children; 3) Actively engage with and learn about other individual, familial, and cultural practices of gratitude especially of indigenous people, and even re-imagine and reconstruct indigeneity in your own ancestral past ( John Trudell). If we truly believe in a multi-cultural world beyond colonizer and colonized, master and slave, and in an ecological world where we as humans are stewards and helpmates rather than masters and instruments of domination, there is no better place to start than in everyday acts of gratitude. “Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” (Desmond Tutu)
The song of the week is Prayer Loop Song by the contemporary Navajo musician and rapper Supaman. I was sharing the Navajo story/legend of the corn spirit teaching the people how to grow corn and be grateful and appreciative of the abundant gifts of the earth (adapted from Bruchac and Caduto in Keepers of Life), but I was leery about trapping Native Americans in a mythological past. So I introduced the children to this contemporary prayer song that utilizes both traditional and modern instrumentation and lyricism. Teaching and learning goes on and on till the break of dawn.
Thank you for reading this.