Giving Thanks After Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!   Sending love from Dianne & Alan

Holidays focus us on the highest expression of our humanity.

What a beautiful ritual we invented, celebrating holidays!
Rituals generally train us in the ways we desire to be on all days.
Holiday rituals focus us on the highest aspects of ourselves.

You may know that the word “holiday” comes from the Old English meaning “holy day,” a day to honor that which is sacred.
In the United States in November of each year we celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, the essence of thankfulness, gratitude and appreciation. It is known that the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Canadians, and surely many other cultures also pay homage to the harvest, the resplendent fruits of the Earth that sustain us and give us pleasure.

Holidays are also a wonderful time to reflect …

We give thanks for our physical harvest. What about our spiritual harvest?
What greatness are we cultivating in ourselves, moment by moment? What seeds are we planting?
What nourishment do we give, day by day, to the seeds of kindness, of compassion, of respect, of cheerfulness, of thankfulness, for ourselves, for others, for all the amazing treasures of creation – from your morning grapefruit to the person sitting across the breakfast table from you sharing it.

Do we share and are we thankful and kind and loving for just one or two days? For a season?
To reap a bountiful harvest of our humanity really does require daily attentiveness beyond the momentary celebrations that so beautifully and dutifully remind us to be grateful for all we receive.

As we make this quantum leap in awareness, our “holi”-days will not only conjure our sacred qualities—they will be a true celebration of them.

On Thanksgiving we come together with family and friends to feast and honor the bounty that is ours, that daily, we have come to expect, and in these uncertain times, that none of us can take lightly. We’re grateful for all we’ve been given, and consciously bestow thankfulness and appreciation on the people who matter most to us.

In contrast, we know that holidays can also bring out loneliness and remind us of those less fortunate in worldly possessions or emotional and spiritual fulfillment. Holidays provide the opportunity to share our bounty, our gifts with others. From the perspective of a QuantumThinking new world view, looking from the whole of life, you realize that the fact of the holiday itself cannot be taken for granted.

IT TOOK A FEW HUNDRED YEARS BEFORE PEOPLE COULD AGREE
THAT THANKSGIVING SHOULD BECOME A NATIONAL HOLIDAY

When I researched how Thanksgiving came about, I discovered that even a day dedicated to giving thanks went through trials and tribulations before people could agree that a national holiday should be established. Thanksgiving originated when a group known as Pilgrims left England for religious freedom, came to what was then considered The New World, and were aided by Native American Indians to survive a harsh winter in 1620. When their crop was bountiful the following year, they celebrated.

The Governor declared a holiday for the settlers and for the Native American Indians who could now live in peace together. That peace soon turned into conflict again. There are divergent stories as to what actually happened during the ensuing years of continual conflicts over land ownership and other racial, religious, and political power struggles. It took a few hundred years before people could agree that Thanks Giving should become a national holiday.

Through the efforts of a journalist, Sarah Josepha Hale, who fought for it for 40 years and a president (initially Lincoln) who finally declared it as a national holiday, we get to celebrate many Happy Thanksgivings.

We truly are interconnected and interrelated well beyond our own era and our own lifetime. Ironic isn’t it that even a holiday meant to celebrate harvest and peace was itself fraught with controversy and conflict. This does tell us something about ourselves and the state of our own human evolution.

THE TASK OF OUR OWN MASTERY IS TO EXPRESS THE HIGHEST, NOT ONLY ON DECLARED HOLIDAYS,
BUT AS OUR DAILY WAY OF LIFE

When you realize we have the opportunity now to consciously evolve ourselves to a multidimensional, interconnected quantum reality — wow, we really have something extraordinary to be thankful for!

With love and gratitude for all of you in our lives, our colleagues, our friends, our family and the QuantumThink community,

Happy Thanksgiving!!
Dianne & Alan

Bibliography:

Fourth World Documentation Projecthttp://wilstar.com/holidays/thankstr.htm

The Thanksgiving Story article by Jerry Wilson

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