Harvest Time

This Thanksgiving I am focused on the blessings I did not plant, and yet still, I enjoy the harvest.

This is such a spectacular exercise in expanding gratitude, it blows my mind. It can be as simple as acknowledging the green beans on your plate, a harvest you didn’t plant, yet you enjoy. (Unless of course you grew them!)

My two biggest harvests I’ll share here, in the hopes this continues for you.

I did not “plant” the kids laughing in my home right now, I didn’t bear the burden of their birth, and yet here they are bringing me so much joy. I received the marital gift of being entrusted with them as a stepmom. I witness the gracious love of my parents and siblings treating them as if they were our own blood kin. So many harvests from this, since my wedding day almost exactly ten years ago.

Second, I did not “plant” the scary journey to this amazing country, my grandmother Marie did. My great aunt Ann also made the journey. When she was escorted to a separate room upon entry to Ellis Island, her frightened teenage mind translated the gun on a police officer’s waist as a sure sign she would be killed. It was actually that she had a relative there to meet her. As a result of their guts, I get to live in this amazing country, and be awake to witness a historical transformation of it that I believe will be prosperous and positive, even if the road there is an impossibly bumpy one.

This morning,

Sasha Stone

wrote

“Thanksgiving is an idea, like America is an idea. It’s about a nation filled with people from all over the world who must somehow find a way to get along. It is about a complicated past that requires coming to the table to find kinship and forgiveness.”

I was inspired by that, alongside a meditation on harvests that we ourselves did not plant.

What have you harvested, by the mysterious grace of God and good fortune?

Happy Thanksgiving. I am so grateful for you, dear reader.