I am in the US these days and witnessing the preparations for one its biggest festivals, Thanksgiving, which is usually considered the official start of the holiday season here, with the lighting of the trees and streets for Christmas. Shops have begun holiday promotions and there is a general spirit of bonhomie in the air.
Thanksgiving was originally a post-harvest festival — farming communities offered their gratitude to settlers who brought farming traditions from Europe. But today Thanksgiving has come to symbolise a very special sentiment in American life of family bonding. This is that time of the year when families make the effort of travelling long distances to share the Thanksgiving meal together at one table. At a time that has been witness to dysfunctional family, this festival provides a wonderful excuse to bring sons and daughters often to ageing parents, with grandchildren in toe, a rare luxury not easily afforded by the busy lifestyles of the current generation.
Thanksgiving in America is always on the final Thursday of November, so it becomes a long relaxed weekend to enjoy turkey dinners with pumpkin pies and many other typical festive offerings. Besides an opportunity for family reunion, the big message of the day is to inculcate the spirit of gratitude for all the endowments that life and nature have brought our way through words of prayer and simple acknowledgement. This is a tradition that is equally relevant and popular in the Eastern cultures. We in India have our own harvest festivals every year, in early January, celebrated under different names like Pongal in the South, Bihu in the East, Lohri in the North and Makar Sankranti in other parts of the country.
The experience or expression of a sense of gratitude, however, need not be restricted to just one day of our lives. As William Shakespeare said, “O Lord that lends me life, Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness.”
There are some very nice meditative practices that can help us connect with our sense of gratitude on a daily basis. “Eating meditation” is when we eat any meal of the day with awareness and offer our gratitude for the contribution of all the inputs of human and natural elements that have made it possible for us to receive a particular food item for consumption. For instance, if you are having an orange, you may, with awareness, feel gratitude for where the fruit started at seed stage, with the labour of the farmer joined by the contribution of mother nature’s nutrients of soil, rain etc. followed by storage and transportation of vendors and so on. The long chain that eventually got us the pleasure of enjoying our orange; this is a simple but very powerful method of nurturing a deep spirit of Thanksgiving in our lives. As we express our gratitude, in the words of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, “We must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”
— Poonam Srivastava has published a book of Zen poetry titled, A Moment for the Mind.
She is also involved in popularising new ideas of change in the social sector. She can be contacted at m4moment@gmail.com
Links:
[1] http://archive.asianage.com/poonam-srivastava-837
