Samain New (Moving) Moon
Holiseason has begun to gain strength. Thanksgiving preparations are underway in millions of households across the country. Tickets have been bought; cars checked; phone calls and e-mails made. America’s festival of gratitude has a lot of momentum. Yes, the earliest Thanksgiving (at least the one projected back into the founding history of the English colonies) has a negative image. Perhaps deservedly so, I don’t know the history well enough.
Since Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday though, the family focused day has united Americans of diverse backgrounds and religious orientations in a secular celebration of extended family and friendship. Whatever form of Thanksgiving works for you, it is a day to remember the blessings we each have in our lives. No matter how great or how small they may be.
Of course, there is the dark pall of Black Friday, a habit so twisted in its mercantile logic that Best Buy tried to come out the good guy by saying that they were letting their employees go home to sleep. Not many sales, the spokesperson said, were made late at night anyhow.
Ursula Le Guin gave a wonderful speech at the national book awards last night. I heard it on NPR today. She made several striking points and I’m embedding her speech in the next post, but she took a cut at capitalism that sunk the knife in deep. We live, she said, in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So, she went on, did the divine right of kings.
Whatever your plans I hope they include gratitude for the gift of life and for the wonder of this earth on which we live. What a privilege it is to be alive now.
