Thanksgiving day is one of those paradoxes for me, a day where so many people feel truly grateful for the opportunity to spend time and share food with family and loved ones, yet so many people feel torn, isolated, and hungry, physically and emotionally; a day when we are supposed to remember what is good and important in our lives while we are being bombarded with commercials and sales and “once in a year opportunities”; a day where we get to celebrate the bounty of the earth and the harvest but we also get to “celebrate” the colonizing of this land. It seems all too often that we gravitate towards one end (let’s all hold hands and be thankful) or the other (this is a celebration of genocide). Yet the world and all of us who inhabit it are complex (and often perplexing) and full of paradoxes. The world is more about *and* than *or*. A friend posted a little while ago a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Being Peace that is worth being reminded of:
“The superpowers now have more than 50,000 warheads, enough to destroy our planet many times. Yet the sunrise is beautiful, and the rose that bloomed this morning along the wall is a miracle. Life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects.”
“The superpowers now have more than 50,000 warheads, enough to destroy our planet many times. Yet the sunrise is beautiful, and the rose that bloomed this morning along the wall is a miracle. Life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects.”
I still struggle with this. Some days it is too easy to just be angry. Some days I am so tired of being angry. I want to focus on the wonderful stuff. But to do so while ignoring the dreadful is to intentionally put on blinders and thus rob any beauty from what is wonderful. I want to work for social justice and freedom and be honest about history. But to do so while ignoring the beauty all around me is to put on a different set of blinders and thus rob any dignity from the lives of all those who came before us who fought for beauty. So I still struggle with this. And I am grateful to have enough friends and comrades in my life who also struggle with this and who also believe that life is about AND, not OR, that we must always hold life with all of its complexities, the joys and the sorrows, the sacred and the profane, the horrors and the beauty. Anything less than that would not really be living.
