I add the following to the Thanksgiving Thoughts columns of the past eight years. In gratitude to all readers, I thank you and wish you well.







In Thanksgiving



I stood on a hillside vineyard where dew-frosted grapes

Draped in tight clusters on twirled stems. On the hilltop,

Red and yellow-leaved maples rustled in the wind and cloaked the vines.

The scene, its perfectness, stilled me.

I wondered:

How does a grape or maple know what it is to become?

What color to be?

How tall to lift its branches?

They carry life to its fullest,

Then relax into dormancy, before, once again,

They awaken to a new cycle of life energized and

Fortified by a unique mixture of

Sun, soil, and moisture.



What about man? How do we know what to become?

Is man a combination of all living things - with the skills of a wolf,

the taste of wild blackberries, the fragrance of teeming tilth, the billow of wind over the Strait?

Does the seed grow to a thought that we can do as we wish? No rules.

No destinies. No reasoned outcome.

Or does the seed

Direct us to become more humane and gentle,

Guarding all life and protecting others who need support?

Does the seed open our hearts in thanksgiving?

Where we bow in gratitude? Or do we believe it our path to become

Sarcastic and hateful?

Does the seed within man have a duality that other plants and animals do not have?

Sometimes we wrestle thoughts of being polarized, even within ourselves.



Man carries and tends the seed of the Sacred, the Wise.

Man has held it dear for thousands of years,

And passes it from one person to another, from one generation to the next.

It is like sunlight tightly held and then passed as a torch.

Man tastes the kernels of the Holy

And finds the gift blessed and good.

With gratitude,

Our knees bow.