By guest blogger Emily K. Grieves
I originally wrote this as an email to my friends shortly after I arrived here in Mexico 7 years ago. I like to dig it up and read it every year because it tells me something about myself and my relationship to Life. And it reminds me to reconnect again and again to gratitude. It reminds me that nothing opens the heart more quickly than gratitude. While the holiday is not celebrated here in Mexico, I love their translation for it: “Dia de Accion de Gracias” – Day of Action of Thanks … it reminds me that gratitude is active, something we can always be acting upon and putting into action. In gratitude for you and your friendship, I hope you will enjoy this, and I wish you a very happy Thanksgiving this year!
Happy Thanksgiving to you all, my dear ones! As you are probably sitting down to a table of turkey and mashed potatoes, maybe some pumpkin pie, the day here has passed as uneventfully as ever. Instead of stuffing and gravy, I ate chile-laden meatballs, rice and some mysterious green sauce wrapped up into a tortilla, all cooled off to a coagulated room temperature, as I have been a bit antisocial today and came an hour late to lunch. I’m often antisocial on major holidays – I’ve spent the past few Thanksgivings alone, begging off well-intentioned invitations to make small talk with the random relatives of random acquaintances. I usually try unsuccessfully to broil up a slab of turkey breast and a slab of butternut squash, not caring much one way or the other whether it turned out. So this Thanksgiving is in some ways a relief – it is a day like any other here in Mexico, where the Mayflower never landed, and where everyday is a fiesta anyway, fireworks going off near and far at 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m., where some tequila-saturated imbeciles thought it would be a good idea to get either an early start or a late end to a party in honor of the fact that its Thursday.
I often spend this day trying to get in touch with what I am thankful for. And sometimes it’s hard, but its a good antidote to antisocial behavior. Ordinarily I ponder my thanks from the flimmering dark of a movie theatre, which is a great place to be at 3 o`clock on Thanksgiving afternoon since everyone else is at home eating. Here unfortunately the nearest movie theatre is 45 minutes away, so today I pondered my thanks while doing my daily pacing in the sunny yard to thaw myself out from the old house’s interior chill.
I’m thankful for my feathers. I’ve taken to gathering feathers, having enough ceramic pieces to satisfy my inner archeologist. The feathers just began presenting themselves at some point, so I began picking them up and saving them – little gifts from the birds that sing and rustle about in the branches of the giant peppercorn trees that line the yard. Every day I wander beneath the trees as they wag their clusters of red berries at me, my eyes scanning the ground for lost plumage. There are usually a few – black ones with white tips, and the brownish red ones from the wings of my beloved mourning doves, and tiny downy ones floating across the grass blades. I fear I occasionally have the neighborhood cats to thank for the feathers, but that is the cycle of life, no? Its a “human run over a dog eat a cat eat a bird eat a worm eat the decaying corpse of the human who ran over the dog” world, right?
One day, Panchito, the family parrot, gave me one of his brilliant bluish green feathers and I carried it reverently over to the other house to add to my collection. It’s an exotic brushstroke amid the more earthy muted tones of the wild birds’ feathers. I keep them all in a bowl on my altar, and I’m not sure quite why I have them, except that they are sacred to me, little reminders of the ability to fly. I probably have enough to make a whole bird. I suppose someday I’ll have enough to make myself wings and fly away. And then I think that perhaps I already have wings and I’ve just forgotten or haven’t noticed. Perhaps these are my own feathers I’m losing and finding again as if they were foreign. Perhaps I was on to something all those times I played at being a bird in First grade, flying around the school yard with that kid Matt Newman, gathering up piles of pine needles and twigs to build a nest. Perhaps I really can fly. And perhaps I can have a nest, a cozy little home lined with down, with a spectacular view over the treetops, someday. I am thankful for the birds.
I am thankful for duality. Why am I thankful for duality? Because the mere fact that I’m noticing it brings me one step closer to an experience of oneness in my reality. I scanned a mental list of things I love and hate about this place, and noticed that I place everything here in comparison and contrast with what I know from the States. I realized that not only do we constantly compare ourselves to other people, but we compare cities, countries, hemispheres, lifestyles. Ultimately, we compare every aspect of our lives to other aspects. Every single thing we notice or observe, we place in contrast to something else we have experienced, thereby instantly setting up duality. This is better, that worse, this is faster, that cheaper, this smarter, that prettier. No thing passes by us unnoticed, unjudged in some way.
The duality of this place? It’s in the way I can walk down a street, past a shiny new Ford SUV with the car alarm going off, and then turn a corner and be met by a running flock of bleating sheep, followed by goats and slower lumbering cows, herded through the center of town by some sharp dogs and a couple cowboys reining in their nervous horses, shying at the honking of an exhaust-spewing VW mini-bus. What’s left after the duality of this scene? A street full of shit. Not just from the animals, but in general – because I’ve judged and compared every aspect of the scene – the SUV and car alarm judged as familiar, similar to home, and at the same time judged as bad, moneyed, gas guzzling American imperialism, air and noise pollution. The bizarreness of a street full of hooves clomping on pavement – judged as charming and novel, how sweet, like in a movie, judged as backwards like what the hell, are we in a movie here? 21st century? Buncha hicks. A million ways to compare San Sebastian to Oakland, a million ways to compare myself to some hardworking vaqueros, to compare this day to that day, to compare this house to that house, this goat to that goat, this life to that one. As I hunch over the cement sink with the washboard built in, and the drainage pouring right out the backside of the wall into the yard, scrubbing and kneading water through my laundry, I think why the hell do they use the same detergent to wash their clothes as they do to wash their dishes? Back home, we’d yadayadayada and on and on and on goes the comparison.
There are always two sides to the coin, never just one coin. I had this revelation that every time we set up duality, this contrast of opposites in our lives, what we’re actually doing is creating separation. Because if we place things in opposition, then something will always be separate from us, and we will never have to surrender into oneness. Even our perspective of oneness is tainted with duality – we both crave it more than life itself and yet fear it more than death, all the while blind to the fact that both life and death are innately part of oneness. Perhaps I’m just off on philosophical musings to try to justify what the hell I’m doing here, but on a day like today, a day for giving thanks, I have to think I’m on to something. I have to hope that someday the judge in my head will shut her rusty trap and gracefully make way for a little silence and a little union with all that is, thank you very much.
Some days I compulsively eat sugar to try to sweeten the bitterness that creeps up out of hiding from some internal organ, flowing now through my veins like a blood infection, seeping up to the surface of my skin like an angry rash that won’t be soothed. Beyond the genetic coding on this bitterness, I stop today between bites of chocolate to take a deeper peek at its source. There are whole lifetimes cooking in there – of feeling alone and unloved and rejected – of feeling like the sun shines for everyone but me. And today I see that the bitterness keeps me inside, hiding in the dark, never letting me step out to turn my face to the warmth of the sun who is a star, shining starlight especially for me if for anyone. I realize that one of the blessings of this place, of living with a family, living communally – I mean when is the last time I lived like that? – is that I am noticing that I am really nothing but a collection of habits. Sometimes I wonder if I am any more than that. Someone told me I’d have some great stories to tell some day about living here.
And I wonder if that’s why I’m here – so I’d have some great stories to tell. I am a collection of habits and stories -flowing in and out of this physical form like so many cells dying and regenerating and dying again. The tricky part is finding what’s left when you strip all that away. What will I look like when I peel back all the layers of the story onion? Will I become invisible? No more need for home or work or money or lover partner, all the things that we humans quest for if lacking and guard ferociously if not. Or will I become hyper-visible, larger than life, a glowing tower the likes of which this planet hasn’t seen since the Elohim? Or are those just more stories, more onion layers … I am thankful then for the opportunity of this lifetime to ask myself these questions, to try to peel away the richly storied layers that life has built around me. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes when your chest is weighted by the pressure of heartache, or your tear ducts have run dry, parched and swollen eyes squinting into the inevitable continuation of days. But other times it’s beautiful, the process of this life. It’s beautiful when you look up from your laundry and find 50 snails above your head, little twirled homes suctioned to the moist wall, riding out the dry winter in the damp shade of an old cement garage. It’s beautiful when you find an orange fuzzy caterpillar booking down the dusty street faster than you ever though a hundred legs could carry you. And its beautiful when Pancho twists his tongue into the earnest and foreign sounds of “Good morning. How are you?”, grinning proudly after his English efforts. I can’t help but smile with my expected response of “I am well. Thank you.”
And I am well. Thank you. And as proper observers of this day would pray, I pray also. For blessings to you all, in gratitude, in Christ’s name, in Quetzalcoatl’s name, in Mary’s name, in Coatlicue’s name, in Buddha’s name, in Tara’s name, in all the names the divine has been given around the globe, in the name of all that is, we pray. Amen. Happy Thanksgiving! Much Love, Emily
Image: The Hand of the Giver of Life, photo, Tetitla, Teotihuacan
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Today is the 5 year anniversary of my dad’s passing. He died suddenly and at home. It was a good death for him, but less so for us. When I think back to that day, I remember everything so clearly. I answered the phone at 9AM and it was my mom. She tells me to come to Sonoma and wants to know if there is someone there to drive me. And then I hear it. My mom asks someone else, “is he gone?” Is he gone?!!?!? WTF. Then she says “just come down to Sonoma right away” and hangs up. I wander around my cabin, looking for something to wear, muttering “I don’t choose this” over and over again, like a fool. I don’t choose this, I don’t want this, I don’t choose this, no no no no. I get into the car with my best friend and start the long drive to Sonoma. Along the way, I realize I need to know what my mom meant by “is he gone?” I call my sister and my brother-in-law answers. He says my sister can’t talk. She’s crying in her bed. Then I ask him, “did my dad die? My mom wouldn’t tell me.” And he says, “yes Heather, he died. I’m so sorry.” And that was it. He was gone.
