Honoring Complexity & Complicity As We Give Thanks
A practice & prayer for tomorrow's day of gatherings
True Human births into the world on Friday. After four years of discipline and surrender – it’s finally (almost) here!
But I’d like to talk about what’s happening tomorrow—the American social phenomenon known as Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving has different connotations for different people. To many, it’s a special day of gratitude, feasting, and shared time with family and friends. Yet, if we are honest, it’s also a day layered with complex histories of harm and erasure—histories that remain unhealed.
This year is particularly poignant. When farmworkers, soils, and waterways are poisoned, people are being disappeared, support systems dismantled, and the lands and more-than-human relatives who sing the song of creation are being dismembered through extraction and hunting and greed... there is MORE to be with, more to reckon with, more to respond to... it seems that response is the true path of Gratitude.
What does it mean to give thanks in a way that doesn’t bypass the truth of the land, the peoples who inhabited it before us, and the ruptures we inherited and have the chance to heal?
Thanksgiving invites us to gather around a table with honest awareness of the lineages we carry. Some are laden with pain we didn’t choose—patterns still unwinding, silences that speak volumes about what our ancestors couldn’t name. Others are filled with dignity, creativity, and beauty—songs and recipes and rituals that have been passed down through the generations.
Both the positive and negative histories shape our resilience.
They also shape our silences, our defenses, and sometimes… our unwillingness to own our complicity in historical and systemic harm.
So, this year, as you gather round the table, I invite you to give voice to the complexity of this holiday. Speak the names of the original peoples of the land. Offer honest words of gratitude that includes the land, human inhabitants past and present, all more-than-human beings, and the future ones who will come after us. Then pepper one of the questions below into your dinner conversation to nurture depth and awareness.
True gratitude is a process of remembering.
We hold all of it.
You may also want to read A People’s Medicine Prayer (from my book). It’s excerpted below.
Speaking of...
True Human launches Friday! Yes, Black Friday… the beginning of the holiday consumption frenzy. It feels sacred to launch a book about remembering on a day that’s become synonymous with forgetting.
Buy it on Amazon. I’m offering the Kindle edition for $0.99 on Friday and Saturday.
Love,
Samantha
Questions for your Thanksgiving Table.
Lineage Reflection: What is one thing you carry from your lineage—whether a challenge or a gift—that you feel grateful to acknowledge today?
Land & Honesty: Whose land are we on, and how can we meaningfully include the original peoples of this place in our gratitude today?
Collective Future: As we give thanks, what is one intention we each want to offer for the beings and the generations who will come after us?
A People’s Medicine Prayer
You are your ancestor’s best prayer. On some level, all of life is held together with a prayer. An ancestral supplication sings back and forth through the corridors of time. It calls for a good life and for a beautiful future. It sounds something like this:
Come pray with me.
Kneel down in the sweet grass. Let your skin feel earth.
Drop dogmas. This is no religion. This is how we come home.
Thank you for this One Life we all share and for the One Prayer that prays itself through us, generation upon generation!
We pray for more Life, please! We pray for a world where all children are safe, healthy, happy, and free. Where the love-labor of all mothers and fathers is honored. Where elders are valued and listened to. Where the wisdom of our indigenous relatives is upheld by courts, states, and countries. Where we love and respect teachers, farmers, foresters, artists, storytellers, song weavers, seed keepers, and all workers of the earth.
We pray attunement to nature’s rhythms. To Spring’s resurrection of new shoots and flowers. To Summer’s fertile growth under the high sun. To Fall’s abundant harvests. To Winter’s death, rebirth, and inner light. Let us live in season and cycle.
We pray to collaborate with all species and ecosystems in a way that is good! To offer our attention as a resource within Creation. To be listeners, lovers, learners of our places, our watersheds, our bioregions. To speak the holy names of home mountains, rivers, valleys, and reefs. To be and become flows of reciprocity, regenesis, and beauty.
We pray for old-growth forests, thriving wetlands, plastic-free oceans, living soils, safe migrations, harmonious hydrological cycles, and wild spaces for all beings to play.
We pray to open the aperture of awe, to travel currents of curiosity and wonder, to touch and be touched. Let us be so alive, so permeable, that we can easily communicate with land, plants, animals, elements, ancestors. Let us hear the songs that sing in praise of Life and raise our voices to liberate all souls.
We pray to commune with nature as a mirror for our souls. Help us to recognize ourselves in the stability of granite, the persistence of ants, the connectivity of mycelium, the patience of a crocodile, the insight of a jaguar’s gaze, the elevation of redwoods, and the art of a hummingbird’s flight. Help us to learn from our more-than-human allies and teachers—not to attain power but to embody the diverse powers of love that co-construct Life. Help us partner with these beings, learn their habits and ecologies, receive their wisdom, and protect them!
Help us breathe. Inhale and exhale. Taste each molecule. Feel our bodies as bodies of the Earth—metabolizing, instinctive, intuitive, entangled.
Help us love. Boldly, bodily, mystically, profanely. Help us love ourselves, each other, our communities, our places, our planet. Give us compassion. Give us the strength to ask for help, to apologize, and to forgive.
We pray to remember to remember that all of Life is sacred. We are sacred.
And when we are done praying, help us create these visions! For the true prayer is the one we live in each moment.
Together, we are a sacred storm of prayer, a rising tide of remembering. We are strands in the holy tapestry of Life’s Loom. We are the singers, and we are the Song.
We are true humans. And we say . . . More Life, please!