Thankful
This morning as I walked into the kitchen, our Echo device prompted me to ask Alexa for today’s word of the day. I couldn’t help it, I had to know (I also learned about the Mcnab, the dog breed of the day).
Alexa told me today’s word is “convivium”, Latin for feast, banquet or gathering. Fitting, since many families across America are gathering for Thanksgiving feasts today.
As the news of the war raging in Gaza continues to dominate the news, and the ongoing war in Ukraine takes a back seat despite the unimaginable toll it continues to take on life, I’m struck by how fragile life is, and am thankful for the gifts of life, peace, safety and abundance.
It’s hard to reconcile that while we gather with loved ones in the US to celebrate Thanksgiving, people on the other side of the planet are experiencing incredible suffering and loss caused by war, climate change, disease and other human made disasters.
Life and its extinction
My son and I have been binge watching the breathtaking Netflix series Life on Our Planet (narrated by Morgan Freeman in that distinctive baritone). We are now on the fifth episode, which describes the five mass extinction events that obliterated most of the species on earth over the last 500 million years.
It brought to mind another spectacular series I watched some years ago, National Geographic’s Cosmos, with America’s favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. In the episode The Halls of Extinction, Tyson leads us down several tall arched corridors, each representing a previous mass extinction event on earth.
He gravely informs us that this place is “a monument to the broken branches of the tree of life.” Names like Ordovician, Permian and Triassic are carved into the imposing high stone arches leading to the different hallways. He guides us through various museum-like dioramas of our planet that tell the stories of how these five cataclysmic events killed off almost all life forms on earth.
As Tyson comes to the unnamed sixth corridor in the halls of extinction, he slows down and seems to hesitate. He pauses and looks up at the eerie entrance. He gives us a strange look then turns away, telling us, to our relief, that we won’t be going down that hallway – yet.
It’s a chilling and sobering moment that leaves us with disturbing questions. Is our extinction imminent? How long before we go down that dreaded corridor? Are our fates sealed, or is there something we can do about it? Between the terrifying COVID lock down of 2020, wars that are erupting all over the world, and increasing deadly climate change disasters, it seems evident that the sixth mass extinction is upon us; we are clearly already in its throes.
Growing up in Kenya, war was always around the corner, just on the other side of our borders. I was a student at Kenyatta University during the horrific Rwandan genocide of 1994. We held our breaths and wept as we watched the unthinkable happen. Our other neighbors in the region, including Somalia, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda have all experienced wars at different times in recent history. Somehow I lucked out just by being born on one side of an imaginary line on the ground. When civil unrest has come to Kenya, we have been fortunate that the incidents have been few and short lived. More recently, we are keenly aware that we dodged a bullet in last year’s general elections that could have ended badly.
A warning of how fragile peace is.
A thanksgiving blessing
I end with these opening words from a traditional Native American greeting, the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address:
Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as people.
Now our minds are one.
May our minds and hearts be one on this Thanksgiving Day as we give thanks for the life that we collectively share with our fellow humans and all life forms on our planet earth.
Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash