Thanksgiving is supposed to be upbeat and believe me I tried, like a good mythologist, to find something specific to this national holiday that truly signified or inspired gratitude. I am blessed daily, and gratitude is essential to any well-lived life, but the common, holiday story--that Pilgrims and Indians gathered together in late fall like one big happy family, to eat turkey and corn ---needs a rewrite. The native Americans did save the Pilgrims from starvation, but Thanksgiving was a one time, secular event that probably occurred in late September. (FDR choose the fourth Thursday in November as the date for a national Thanksgiving celebration and Congress ratified his choice in 1941).
Pilgrims did celebrate religious days of thanksgiving, as did the Puritans (who were not the same group of people by the way). What they often gathered to celebrate was the destruction of the people who were here first, the people who sat at that imagined table of good cheer. That's the pioneer credo again--we create the world when we arrive and nothing existed before-- and something more I think. Fear of the dark, of the thick woods and rustling in the shadows, of the unfamiliar (and uncivilized) people, of witches and wolves and the chance meeting with the devil, dancing round a fire, under the stars. Different times in many ways and it's pointless to critique people long dead, but we can recognize and reflect upon our ancestry, and admit that we are still afraid of the dark.
There is the literal darkness, from which we insulate ourselves with electric lights available at the flick of a switch. There is also psychological darkness, kept at bay through an endless round of activity and the practice of positive thinking. A certain fundamentalism of optimism pervades American culture, an optimism that demands a well-lit self-improvement and progress towards an acceptable vision of the good. This optimism denies the meaning of failure or suffering by insisting that they are correctable mistakes, merely obstacles to overcome or lessons to learn. Through optimism we are often told, all of life's difficulties can be transformed into what they really are, golden opportunities to succeed once again, which means improve one's practice of the positive as well as one's circumstances.
If you, like me, are searching for something particular and inherent to this moment for which to be grateful, let it be the dark. Historically, most cultures celebrated the harvest around the Autumnal Equinox in late September, when the fields lie fallow and we enter the dark half of the year. There is a timeless cycle of dark and light, fast and slow, springing up and falling down, hot and cold, work and rest, life and death. The scales of Libra, the astrological phase that begins with the equinox, symbolize this balance. I think this image of balance is especially important today. If you want an example of fundamentalist optimism, lack of balance, and ignorance of natural cycles, look at our economy, based on the premise of grow, grow, grow as if there could never be a limit, a period of idleness or decline, a crash, or exhaustion. What are we collectively trying to avoid now? A depression. The dark.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that people out of work, foreclosures and bankruptcies and inflation should be met with a shrug because, this shit happens. I am suggesting a parallel between our frantic lives and overheated economy and our collective fear of the dark. I am suggesting that these dynamics create and reinforce each other.
Darkness is slow, heavy, intimate, and interior. Think of the Underworld or the hidden processes of the earth, decay and the blind progress of worms. Darkness is an invitation, no, an imperative, to go down into the psychological depths, to brood and reflect and even suffer. Yeats writes "Now that my ladder is gone/ I must lie down where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."
The foul rag and bone shop is the garbage heap and place of origin. Not pretty, not pleasant, but Yeats connects these discards with the heart, with life. When I read these words I feel compassion because all of us come from such a place, no matter how high the ladder or how far we climb. Compassion is the gift of acknowledged suffering and the dark. When we embrace our own dark days and give them meaning in our life story, we become sensitive to the cycles that contain us all. We feel our mortality and the fragility of life, the tender mystery, the need for mercy. If we attend to the darkness, to our inevitable death and disintegration, we are more alive.
Compassion and gratitude are spiritual and community values often connected with the light, but that is not their source. They are fruits harvested in the dark.
