“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche.

I have a complicated relationship with the Thanksgiving Holiday.  Like most people born outside of the USA, it was not a holiday which permeated my consciousness until I arrived here in the late 70s.  Since I moved to be with my conscious, ‘woke’, activist boyfriend, I soon realized that the celebration was based on an idealized version of history, one which totally ignored the real relationship between European and Native American.  As our family grew and we became more aware of the significance of traditions, we were fortunate to meet up with his cousins who did Thanksgiving Jamerican style.  Curried goat alongside the roast turkey.  Collard greens as well as candied yams.  And nuff rum and Jamaican music.

That tradition has continued over the past forty years.  I was able to work Thanksgiving (time and a half for holidays, Baby! It may even be double-time now!) and my kids would go down to the Southwest (Miami) for their family get-together.  For which I was very thankful. 

My ambivalence was confirmed recently when I casually asked a lady if she had big plans for Thanksgiving.  No, she responded, we’re Native.  And I immediately understood that for her it was personal.  She told me her mother had made sure to teach them their history, of the massacre of Native Americans by Europeans.  This was reinforced by a series I watched about ‘American Frontiers’ and how land was illegally taken from Native Americans and given to Europeans to settle.  Treaties which had been signed assuring Native Americans of land rights were ignored.  And to this day Native Americans are living in conditions more resembling a third world country on those lands they were able to keep.

There is a term in research, when you are studying a group of people, that has been coined: you must understand their ‘lived experience’.  It is along the lines of walking a mile in someone’s shoes, to truly appreciate what they have gone through.  We tend to make assumptions about people’s lives without really considering what it feels like, what their experience is.  Unless we are willing to learn from people, we cannot truly empathize. 

As a nurse, I learned a lot about illnesses, about how the body responds to diseases when things go wrong.  But it wasn’t until my father-in-law (who was recovering from a stroke) admonished me by saying that I may be a nurse, but I don’t ‘know sick’, that I realized the difference between theory and practice.  In other words, he who feels it knows it.  Which made me stop and think about him, about what it was like for him.  A friend (also a nurse) who suffered from gout (which I know and understand intellectually from textbooks), described the pain as feeling as if there was ground glass in her toe joints.  And all of a sudden, I understood gout far better than from reading the textbook.

It seems that it is more important than ever that we try to understand each other.  In another historical TV series they were talking about the struggle for civil rights, and the period of time when protests were met with cruelty, with fire hoses, police batons, and dogs.  While the real world was being presented in newspapers and on TV, the movies coming out of Hollywood were bravely tackling subjects of racism too.  Sydney Poitier was the face of the African American, and in one of those movies (In the Heat of the Night) there was the ‘slap heard around the world’.  If you haven’t seen it, Poitier plays a detective investigating a murder, and he interviews a white man who slaps him.   Poitier immediately slaps him back.  Unheard of! How could he do that and not get shot?  But the movie provided an outlet for Black people to see themselves having agency, having equal rights.  And forced White people to come to a reckoning. 

It seems to me that it is time for the artists of the world (novelists, poets, film-makers, musicians and visual artists) to step up.  Sometimes the difficult conversations can be more effective when they are fictional, less personal.  In the week leading up to Thanksgiving, there were a number of segments on news shows advising how to handle conflict at the Thanksgiving table.  Ways of maintaining the peace, deescalating possible confrontations.  This is where we are, needing therapists to sit with our families to make sure we don’t come to blows over a meal created to celebrate gratitude. 

I recently rewatched the movie ‘Moonlight’, a coming-of-age story about a young gay Black man who grows up in Miami-Dade county in the 80s, son of a crack addicted mother.  It won many Academy Awards, and was notable for using children from a local school in many of the early scenes.  But what made it most noteworthy was that it captured the pain of growing up gay in a society that treats homosexuals as less than, as other.  Through the lens of the film you were able to imagine the loneliness and fear that the young man experienced.  Great art teaches empathy.

This Friday morning I am grateful for my own lived experience, one which has enabled me to imagine the lives of many which may be very different from my own.  I am grateful to the patients that taught me what it means to be sick.  I am grateful to be able to share stories in order to enlarge the possibility of empathy in the world.  I am grateful to all those who have taught me to see the world through their eyes, for it has broadened my horizons considerably.  I am also grateful for having given birth around Thanksgiving, and losing my mother on Thanksgiving Day, nine years ago, for both are celebrations of the circle of life.

Have a wonderful weekend, Family!

One Love!

Namaste.