The Haudenosaunee Flag (image from Naraya Cultural Preservation Council website)

Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as people. Now our minds are one. Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address – Greetings to the Natural World

So continues the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. It begins in this way

Words Before All Else: Greetings to the Natural World

As we approach the Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S., it is ironic that for some the way to end Covid and prevent future pandemics is to impose vaccines on everyone yet our ancestors brought disease from Europe to these shores as colonizers centuries ago.

Muse startled me awake with that thought this ‘blog’ morning, one day after I’d both read a news clip about the possibility of renewed interest in mandating Covid vaccines for all, and I’d retrieved the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address – Greetings to the Natural World – with the intention to read it aloud each morning before Thanksgiving and perhaps beyond. If you’ve been with me for a while, you may remember last year’s post about this sacred, indigenous gift (find it here).

There are of course many ironies around this holiday that we Americans have morphed from a time of giving thanks for all that is and for what we have to a time of plugging into the consumer culture of getting more. Muse and I will leave such ironies for another time (or not).

Honoring the awareness that what my attention feeds is what grows, I put aside thoughts about vaccines and events of the past, and focus on the Thanksgiving Address, a beautiful prayer encompassing ALL life, reading each verse aloud.

Tears fell as I recited the prayer, touching that place of knowing that all too often in the ‘doing’ of life, I forget the interconnectedness and interdependence that makes life possible. Tears fell too for the treatment of indigenous peoples from the time our ancestors landed on these shores to today, for the agreements/promises made and to this day not kept. Tears for all who experience injustice in its many forms.

I’m grateful for the awareness Muse’s thought brought me and even for the sadness evoked. I’m grateful for how the ironies seemed to both broaden and deepen in me as I read each verse and opened to that sadness. Sadness for our culture’s lost connection with the Natural World of which we are but a tiny part. Sadness that we continue our colonizing ways, not just of lands and peoples, but of the very gifts of Mother Earth, Gaia herself. Sadness for cultural ways that try to colonize us each day of our lives.

The sadness lifts giving way to wonder as Zadie Byrd and I embark on our ritual morning walk this cold morning. The sky is bright blue, and the air, crisp and still. All is quiet except the occasional squawk of a Clark’s Nutcracker. Zadie picks up a scent of interest and we zigzag across the road and then off road into a grassy meadow.

As I often do, I wonder first how I might deepen my awareness of ‘all my relations’ and honor that in the daily choices I make. And I wonder how might our world be if everyone could connect with the beauty of place in a deeper way?

The Naraya Cultural Preservation Council says of the Thanksgiving Address:

When one recites the Thanksgiving Address the Natural World is thanked, and in thanking each life-sustaining force, one becomes spiritually tied to each of the forces of the Natural and Spiritual World.  The Thanksgiving Address teaches mutual respect, conservation, love, generosity, and the responsibility to understand that what is done to one part of the Web of Life, we do to ourselves.

I intend to recite it as part of my morning practice each day until I feel it more deeply in these bones. I invite you to join me.

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