Thanks Giving

Thanks Giving

Thanksgiving is a complicated holiday. As a child, it was simple – a happy day of family and feasting. I would awake at dawn to help my mother stuff the turkey that would roast all day in the oven, and while she prepared all the rest of the meal, the younger of my brothers and I would head downtown with my nextdoor neighbor to delight in the Christmas displays in the department store windows. Our home would be filled – my older siblings returned from college and their adult lives, with a roommate, or girlfriend, and in later years, spouses and children. We would stuff ourselves with turkey, stuffing, and cranberry jelly, mashed potatoes and gravy, black cherry jello, squash with mini marshmallows, and as my mother would always say, “corn for the Indians.” That would be the only mention of Native Americans on this day celebrating what has become a romanticized version of a harvest feast, shared by a few of the Waumpanoag people and the English settlers who owed their survival to the Waumpanoag’s generosity.

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To Live in Touch with the Spirit: Audre Lorde on the Power of the Erotic

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Certain books have changed me in deep and profound ways, shocked me into recognition, helped me see aspects of myself or the world I had not previously seen, brought unconscious truths into conscious action. They are the ones where I’ve starred passages, underlined multiple times, or simply written “Yes!” in the margins; the ones I return to again and again for guidance and inspiration. Among these, probably none is more my lodestar than Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, and among the fifteen essays, none more than “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”

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For Love of this Life: The Wisdom of Carol Christ

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During the last few weeks of October, I hiked often to the place on Hawk Ridge overlooking Lake Superior where I had taken students in our Women and Spirituality classes to dive deep into our spiritual connections with nature. We would encircle the large spruce to ground and connect, and occasionally given a blessing by an eagle soaring overhead. The students would then disperse throughout the ridge, taking time in solitude for their own personal encounters with nature. As we reassembled, each would share their discoveries, and then one by one, they would share their favorite passages from the readings for the day. Always we would come to the point in our time together when I would invoke these words from Carol P. Christ: “There are no hierarchies among beings on earth. We are different from the swallows who fly in spring, from the many-faceted stones on the beach, from the redwood tree in the forest. We may have more capacity to shape our lives than other beings, but you and I will never fly with the grace of a swallow, live as long as a redwood tree, nor endure the endless tossing of the sea like a stone. Each being has its own intrinsic beauty and value….” (Weaving, 321). How can one listen to these words and not be changed?

“Gleanings”: Being Things, Ideas, Inspiration Gathered from Various Sources

As I was preparing to retire from teaching at the University of Minnesota Duluth, I looked around at the thousands of books on the shelves in my office and said aloud to the student who was sitting there with me, “What am I going to do with all of this knowledge?” What would become of all the insights, perspectives, and wisdom I had gleaned over the years from these thinkers and writers, many of whom had shaped my life and my being in the world? For years I had been passing the wisdom along to generation after generation of students. Now where would it go?