Decompiling Oppression #50
Sam McVeety
This week, I'd like to meditate on the topic of gratitude, as we contemplate the meaning of Native American Heritage Day and Thanksgiving and the threads of gratitude and recognition that animate both of them. When I thought about voices who might guide us through an exploration of gratitude, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer came to mind. As a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, her words on the topic are (again) powerful and urgent:
How are we called to live when we recognize that we are living in a world of gifts?
When we don't take time to notice the gifts around us, we become disconnected from our natural surroundings. This disconnection manifests at a human level, as well, and I want to thread those two ideas together. When I happened upon an article about the supply chain, it struck me how the psychological barriers that we have erected against the rest of the world (both people and planet) are insistently falling down, despite our most determined efforts to reinforce them. How could we approach this differently? She continues:
Deep attention calls us inevitably into deep relationship, as information and energy are exchanged between the observer and the observed, and neither partner in the exchange can be anonymous. They are known; they have names.
Let's take a minute to recognize the radical implications of this lens of naming. The anonymity of consumer goods shipped from around the world feeds the same cycles of consumption that harm the natural world. When we think about naming things, what if we didn't just refer to "the supply chain", but instead we unspooled all that it collectively meant? What if we stubbornly insisted on naming the fact that one of the reasons we aren't able to enjoy our former standard of instant gratification is that countries like China and Malaysia are trying to avoid mass casualty events? What if power and privilege were not a thing to be violently denied, but a calling to act in solidarity towards healing the deep injustices in our society? Naming is a gift:
Naming responsibility is often understood as accepting a burden, but in the teachings of my ancestors, responsibilities and gifts are understood as two sides of the same coin. The possession of a gift is coupled with a duty to use it for the benefit of all.
It's hard to feel gratitude for something that we do not name. For me, gratitude has begun as a practice made up of small things. Sometimes it is a check-in of things that you are grateful for today, or recognition, during the cold, rainy month of November in Seattle, what it is to be dry and sheltered, and have the agency and options to go in and out of the rain as recreation and leisure. Gratitude is a gift:
Gratitude is our first, but not our only gift. We are storytellers, music makers, devisers of ingenious machines, healers, scientists, and lovers of an Earth who asks that we give our own unique gifts on behalf of life. ... Let us live in a way that Earth will be grateful for us.
It's okay to start small. What is additional naming and gratitude that we could do in our daily lives? We speak of essential workers, yet how many of us know who many of them are, beyond an anonymous class? When we see them in grocery stores and restaurants (indeed, how often do we really seek to see them?) do we imagine the fear and risk that they bring to their role? Do we think with gratitude? Do we remind ourselves that they have names?
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: What is a gratitude practice for you? How has it evolved over time?
Communal: What does gratitude outside of your community look like? How do you keep it from becoming anonymous and transactional?
Solidarity: Support an organization that inspires gratitude in you. For me, this is Communities in Schools of Seattle, for their work to center equity in education.
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