thanksgiving blessing from ankur

Thanksgiving Day, 2006

In the swirling mi(d)st of the twin understandings that because Everything is to be honored as sacred, Nothing must be treated as such, a Thanksgiving prayer.

1.

Dearest Amazon, divine and tangled mother of all that is and crawls, we bow our heads in awe and thanks and offering of thy colors, thy danger, thy abundance, and thy everpresence, thee who are the diversity of our jungles and the monoculture of our fields, thee who are the terror of our hurricanes and the banality of our air conditioners.

We only begin to understand the contorted depths of our ignorance.

In your honor, bowing to knowledge and to a morality more ancient than our own, we eat this apple whole. [seeds, little wooden stem, and everything]

2.

Dearest Farmers, brothers and sisters in spirit and in toil, we bow our heads in awe and thanks and offering of thy dedication and midwifery, of the most noble and demanding of human pursuits, of the arrogance and fortitude to stand atop the Mother. Thee are the roughest and the finest of our twisted tapestry, the most important and least evolved.

In thy honor, bowing to the forgotten wisdom whose sores cover our sick societies in loving remembrance, we roast this tray of root vegetables with a little salt. [parsnips, turnips, beets, potatoes, sweet potatoes, radishes, rutabega, onions, garlic, carrots, burdock]

3.

Dearest Drivers, engineers, generals, soldiers, explorers and harvesters of that black gold that shines through all our sustenance, we bow our heads in awe and thanks and offering of thy perseverance and perspiration, of thy shoulders bearing our collective sin and violence. Alchemists all of us, we transmute death to life, destruction to creation, violence to love in our every munch and morsel.

In thy honor, bowing to the forces we don't yet understand and the liberation and struggle inherent in our future, and to those whom we must trample in order to survive, we blend together this oil into mayonnaise. [1 1/2 cups of silken tofu, 3 tablespooons of lemon juice, salt, ground mustard seeds, 1/4 cup of raw sesame oil]

...

A beginning, mind you. Each bite is to be an offering, a present and meditative appreciation of the fragility and contigence of our survival, a celebration of the madness and diversity of existence. Stanzas remain unwritten for the helpful and slaughtered natives, the industrial reserve armies of Latin American workers without whom all of us in this nation would starve, the erstwhile salespeople who sling tons of vegetables without ever losing boots to the morning mud, the dedicated chefs whose love and toil is the spice no Columbus ever found, and, of course, to your mother.