Thanksgiving is a warm-hearted holiday.  Thanksgiving is a transformative place of heart and mine.

Giving thanks is a chance to reset our inner programs, to notice the cornucopia of gifts we’ve been given, to rest in gratitude.  I can feel the shift when I focus on the untold gifts I’ve been given, rather than what’s missing or concerning.  A better place to rest and act from.

At this challenging time, full of blessings and horrors, gifts and punishments, beauty and ugliness, let us set aside time to be grateful, to celebrate together, to share, be generous, kind, inclusive, and loving.  And to cherish this time of gratitude, no matter where we live. 

This poem about a cold Thanksgiving day, written by John Berryman, touches my heart.  We read it together this morning, and wept.  It seems very appropriate to our times, stirring and poignant.  Love the Yippee! 🙂

Minnesota Thanksgiving

For that free Grace bringing us past great risks
& thro’ great griefs surviving to this feast
sober & still, with the children unborn and born,
among brave friends, Lord, we stand again in debt
and find ourselves in the glad position: Gratitude.

We praise our ancestors who delivered us here
within warm walls all safe, aware of music,
likely toward ample & attractive meat
with whatever accompaniment
Kate in her kind ingenuity has seen fit to devise,

and we hope – across the most strange year to come – 
continually to do them and You not sufficient honour
but such as we become able to devise
out of decent or joyful conscience & thanksgiving.
Yippee!
   Bless then, as Thou wilt, this wilderness board.