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thanksgiving with the family

between meals briefing:

i got to totally relax this weekend, as my family and my love were all under one roof and i could just be here.

i still can be made to feel 5.

love is a choosing, i love the moment when we all choose to be here with each other.

even though i think i am completely over holidays focused around buying and indulging, whenever i go through them i feel even further away and more over them, and even stranger for participating, even if that’s how to see my family.

that said, i do love time with my family, and know we’re all in different places with our feelings towards holidays. some of my family loves trees, lights, wreaths, hymns, carols, and gifts. i love giving, but most everything about the holidays makes me feel ill inside, the things we celebrate expose our true values.

we watched wall-e last night and i kept thinking, how boneless are we willing to become as a species, celebrating light, wealth, materials and colonization?

that said, i love my family. i love any excuse the world gives us to spend time with each other.

my nephew is more interesting to me than anything else in the world right now, and i want to be like that, see everything with new eyes, basic needs, easily moved to smile, praised for my size and appetite, appreciated for the softness of all of me, and beyond emotional attachment to suffering.

when i was younger i wrote scathing pieces about thanksgiving, about holidays, all of it.

right now i feel like withholding my energy from that debate, it feels circular. i’d rather go for a walk, garden, learn to build something, raise money for the Indigenous People’s Power Project, or do something equally useful. i can really feel the shift in my analysis on a foundational level away from the negative, the anger.

even the disgust. on black friday, a shopping-hungry throng stampeded a wal-mart temp employee to death in long island, ny, injuring several others including a pregnant woman. they tore the doors off the hinges after waiting all night to…shop. of course, my initial reaction was surprise and disgust, but then…it feel like a natural next step to me. in a culture of addiction to “stuff“, we must all always remember that people will do anything to feed an addiction. not to generalize away from the horror of the specific. the horror is just so overwhelming that it can become paralyzing, to remember we live in a world so out of control, just so polite about it that people can be shocked about violence, but not the whole context of the day.

i have spent a lot of time feeling that horror – recently i was in a meeting with adele nieves, who said that she’s been in a state of shock since she became politicized. that resonated for me. that may always be the case.

but i also feel drawn to solutions, to visions, to people sustainably and powerfully living right now, carving out a space for a different way of life, light in the darkness types.

with my family, i also see that the full range of addiction and health exists in each person – i’m not in some advanced space relative to my loved ones, we are each part of the problem and parts of the solution, in small and large ways.

non-judgment returns to me, and surrender. surrender to being present, and moving without judgment and nonreaction though this blessed world.