Thanksgiving — blog — Anne Benvenuti

Tryptophan stupor has got me not thinking. It’s a good thing, a quietly glorious thing, the big and permissive time out that follows the feast.

But leading up to the feast, I was trying to recall the illustrations of cornucopias in my childhood geography books, woven horns of plenty, stuffed with the stuff of fall harvest. Recently I have been trying to remember what was in those baskets because I am thinking the contents would not really have been all cultivated crops. Surely there were some nuts and seeds, some grass heads and fruits that just happened to grow, along with the cultivated pumpkins, ears of corn, stalks of grain.

ecospirituality, human-animal relationsAnne BenvenutiNovember 22, 2012Thanksgiving, suffering, Iago, harvest, turkeyComment

Elemental Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving! Now that’s an elemental innovation. And it can be as elemental as we care to make it. I give thanks for the bacterial cellular life that makes up about 90% of the material of ‘my’ body. I give thanks for the house plants that refresh and recycle my spent breath. And, while I am thanking the green lung of the planet with my red ones, I give thanks to the fish who so long ago gave me lungs, to the Neanderthals whose genes I’ve always felt sure I carried, for the music I am sure they made (read Stephen Mithen’s Singing Neanderthals), and for my new little piano, Magic, who is well named. I give thanks for my own elemental role in the macrocosmic real.

critical thinkingAnne BenvenutiNovember 25, 2010Thanksgiving, elemental innovations, e, elemental nature, Stephen Mithen, Sierra Nevada, Marx, religion, neural processesComment