A kaleidoscope of images come at me at warp-speed on this day dedicated to giving thanks for the blessing in our lives, on this day we call Thanksgiving. I have chosen to spend the day alone with myself, and am filled with raw images of people and events in my live. Choosing to be alone, I feel alone, and on the side of a road where so many people have passed before me, on their way to some transient entertainment, or social drama that keeps us struggling human beings occupied and sufficiently distracted during the span of our very short lives. A few years ago I was in a hospital bed recovering from open-heart surgery, just hours before my body would have died from lack of blood circulating throughout my body. Difficult and painful as it was, I stepped out of that hospital bed more confident, more determined, and more goal-oriented than ever before in my adult life. There was no second-guessing the blessing that I had been given—-a second chance at life, a bit more time to sink my feet into the earth and make a difference, or maybe just a sand-castle that was mine and mine alone. My favorite words of poetry come to me now on this Thanksgiving Day: Longfellow wrote: “Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime; and departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time. Footprints that perhaps another, sailing o’er life’s solemn reign, a forlorn and shipwrecked brother seeing may take heart again.” My cardiac event made audible the ticking of the clock that will measure my particular life, and three years ago I planted my feet firmly on the hospital room floor with a sense of self-determination, and the feeling that comes when one finally realizes that there’s “so much to do, and so little time to do it.” My first task upon this new awakening three years ago was to wrap things up from my old way of living, and to grant myself the “room for myself” that had been missing my entire life. Until that point, I had only read from other people’s scripts about who I am, and who I should be. But don’t get me wrong, this “wrapping up” of a way of living was not a pretty sight. Messy in relationships that really “never were”, messy in anticipating a future from all the wrong vantage points. Mistake, after mistake became my newer life, but at least the mistakes were mine. A newborn infant must crawl before she walks, and that is an apt description of the “limbo years” that found me dressing and undressing until I could find the space and future and promise that was just right for me. On this Thanksgiving Day I give thanks for my God and community of angels who directed me away from the bright lights of San Francisco and back to my humble roots of Fresno—-my home. While I continue to struggle in finding the kind of meaning that “being alive” so richly deserves, I am finally engaged in a struggle that is of my own making. I am not alone, though that is the obvious conclusion that others would form about my way of living. I am, rather, in the company of my family, and all those who love me. Perhaps unaware, but I have lived a life of giving, and for that “I give thanks.” I am alive and searching, and I’m filled with gratitude for the years that have awakened in me that essential sense of purpose. I hold fast to a community of belonging where all of us will spend out eternity together—free of doubt and free of fear. On this Thanksgiving Day, I give thanks for “being alive!”
Thanksgiving 2009
Advertisement
