Thanksgiving Day is mainly a celebration of the harvest, giving thanks for bountiful crops. Traditionally, a particular meal in 1621 is thought to be the first Thanksgiving. Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians sat down together to an autumn feast of venison and wild fowl. This meal is remembered as a celebration not only of the harvest, but of the friendship and cooperation between the indigenous peoples and the settlers.
Food and family are the cornerstones of the holiday. Thanksgiving traditions include preparing sumptuous meals of turkey, stuffing, gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie.
This year we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving on November 23, so today is a good time for me to offer thanks for my luminous life and our miraculous existence as human beings:
Now that I am full of years and white of hair and the evening star glows in the sky, now that my sere, my yellow leaf falls from bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang, I know that as life accumulates, the beauty steals inward. And I find myself filled with one overmastering emotion:
Gratitude —
For my wife Simone van Egeren and the saucy Holland days I have so loved with her; for family, which now embraces seven grandchildren; for enduring friendships; for a lifelong addiction to learning; for the privilege of sharing my words about words in the Union-Tribune for 12 years, and for the abundant benison of our astonishing city, to which Simone and I moved 26 years ago and which felt like home the minute we set foot here.
We give thanks for language — the skin of living thought, more to the mind than light is to the eye.
May we try not only to hear, but to listen; not only to write, but to communicate; not only to speak, but to say something.
May our thoughts and aspirations become words that serve to build bridges from mind to mind and from heart to heart, creating a fellowship of those who would hold fast to that which is good.
Thank you for reading this column. You are doing so because you belong to the only species among the millions that fly, walk, run, swim, and burrow on this planet that can read. And, as a reader of this column, you understand English, graced by the most prodigious and democratic vocabulary — the most widely spoken global language ever.
Let us give thanks for this astonishing planet we all ride. Earth was shaped 4.6 billion years ago through colossal, catastrophic collisions with space debris, with asteroids, and with other planets and pulled and ripped by the gravity of Jupiter, our solar system’s bully.
In the beginning, our globe was a lifeless hellscape of fire and brimstone, more like the surface of the moon than the home we know today. For two billion years our planet was devoid of oxygen wrapped in a toxic atmosphere of methane.
But over countless eons, a vast wasteland became the only planet in our solar system to be festooned with liquid water, the only planet among 100 billion in our galaxy that we know has given birth to life. If you picture Earth as an apple, our atmosphere is, on scale, the thickness of that apple’s skin — so many eons to create, and frighteningly vulnerable to corruption.
Despite five mass extinctions brought about by arctic freezes, scorching heat, incendiary lightning strikes, cataclysmic asteroids, volcanic detonations, and pulverizing tectonic shifts, life has always found a way to burst into bloom, to be fruitful and multiply. The play goes on. Old characters depart; new casts of characters enter.
Then, around 230,000 years ago, we homo sapiens (“thinking man”) entered the earthly stage. How many who came before you had to join together over that vastness of time to create you? If any one of those couples had bred a day before or after or even an hour before or after and a different sperm had won the lottery, you wouldn’t be you. You might be a different height, have hair and eyes of a different color, and you might be a different gender.
But here we are. Here you are.
The scientist Richard Dawkins has calculated the odds that you are you — one in 400 trillion! So give thanks that you are you, a unique member of the human race (as is everybody else).
After 4 billion years of life on our planet, 99% of all species that have existed have gone extinct. We humans are among the 1% that have survived.
We give thanks for the miracle of life: what it has been, what it is, and what it will become.
Hurrah!