Thanksgiving in Canada is designated as:
"A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed – to be observed on the 2nd Monday in October."
For me the “Almighty” is the natural world, Mother Earth. Today is a chance to recognize our relationship to the natural world. This harvest, locally, we get to eat and celebrate comes from the natural world that we are a part of, and in turn, affect. The challenge of Thanksgiving is we have created a food industry has skewed our understanding of this concept of harvest
Leopold reminds us that it is important to know where your food comes from and how to heat your home, without this knowing you will never understand the complex relationship we have with the planet. He goes on to say that in order to be fully human in this world we must take the time to learn to work with the planet in order to understand the complexity.
“To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue
To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February tosses trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own oak, and let his mind work all the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and the wealth of detail denied to those who spend the weekend astride a radiator”
A Sand County Almanac
There is much to consider in this prescription that rings true today.
As my family and I struggled through canning peaches, which admittedly we didn’t grow ourselves, in order to prepare for a winter of progressive food sovereignty, we knew that the odds were against us.
9 jars of peaches/4 hours work, 4 people working
12 Eggplants grown, 6 months of work.
14 Zucchini grown, all eaten, 5 months of work.
25 lb. of Tomatoes, 15 of which are still ripening - 6 months of work.
The math of these efforts don’t equal out in obvious terms to the cost of purchasing vegetables in my grocery store. There are unobservable costs that must be noticed as Leopold was pushing us to consider. Clearly, the value of my spiritual health is not factored in.
The enormous costs that comes along with an out of balance food industry are rarely considered. We need only consider XL foods, soil erosion, starvation, malnutrition, seed hording, seed patenting, large scale factory farming, pollution, climate change (not to mention the cost of extracting fuel from this earth to transport food from one continent to another) and we start to see that there are costs we are creating that go ignored. "Externalities" that we participate in creating daily, that are very real and important to consider.
The future cost to our home goes unobserved.
I often think of the generation of older Canadians in their 80's the majority of their lives in rural communities vs urban. I know those stats have changed and now more people, in Canada, live in urban centers rather than rural. With this comes less of a relationship to the natural world. Every wonder why grand dad or great grandma knew how to do stuff? Because they had to. Granny raised sheep, carded wool, spun wool and knit because that was how she was going to get a sweater. She couldn't go to the Bay.
If we don’t remind ourselves and future generations that this is how it is done, this is it works in our part of the planet. We lose the vital, life giving relationships to nature that make us more human.
It is easier to have a relationship with those of your own species... it is important to broaden your caring beyond that. I, personally, have a big crush on the miracle of seed (many of which are freezing into the soil as we speak, preparing for a long winter, in order to renew themselves and their species again in the spring.
Perhaps with we humans spent more time in winter reflecting on that process of heating and eating and the transgenerational expression of our humanity, we might be able to move towards the future with some wisdom and humility. But that takes a level of caring we have not been prepared for through our cultural programing thus far. That takes reaching out beyond to what we know is there, embracing it, learning, admitting our place at the table and working.
So, if I pray for anything to anything on this day, it is to the universe, including our home planet - Earth, all that has come before us, that which is to come long after I am here and for the long term recognition that we are part of the ecosystem, not on top of it.
Happy Harvest.
