Thanksgiving Proclamation
Today recognizes the tragic story of an invaded land founded on terrorism.
People from another continent invaded and decimated the natural born citizens of this land, who honored their role as stewards of this land and life itself. These invaders dragged unwillingly the african kings and queens and placed them into slavery. They beckoned and coerced people to come willingly in order to support the greed of an extractive, capitalistic culture where inevitably someone always has to be taken advantage of. They took what was not theirs and destroyed what was in their way.
The game was rigged from the beginning, in what is called The United States of America. The invaders had almost all the pieces, yet the piece they never had was integrity. Without integrity, like a house built on flimsy foundation, the outcome has no chance of integrity. We must transform the adversarial patriarchal paradigm which exists right now into a relational matriarchal one.
May we recognize and abandon the familiar attitudes and practices that do not serve the whole. We are who we are and we have the opportunity to be who we want to be, to create a new inheritance for the future. May our thoughts, words, and actions, in our daily lives assist in dismantling paradigms of oppression and suffering. May we give thanks for our individual place in time and space, to our families and our relationships that touch and change us. May we give thanks to the wise teachers that help us remember how to be and the chance to make it so. Underneath and within these stories and histories is our humanity. Being human means we are of this earth, we are these waters, we are fire, we are atmosphere, we are the sun, and the moon and the stars. We are all that we see and the wisdom is revealed by looking in between.
