Archive for November, 2006
Happy Thanksgiving Rituals
The Thanksgiving holiday is steeped in ritual and meaning. We gather family and friends in a single location to remember we are part of a nurturing community. We tell each other stories about what is happening in our lives. Stories are a uniquely human way to communicate. Long before to-do lists there were stories that instructed us where to find food, guided us about community norms and values and warned us of dangers to avoid.
The Thanksgiving dinner is highly ritualistic. Beyond the settlers and Indians story, sharing food is a way of spreading abundance among the people in our inner circles. Feeding each other at the start of the darkest season harkens back to needing nourishment to face certain struggle during the cold and fruitless winter.
We watch games…
God Bless Us Everyone?
Now is the time of year we “give thanks” for all our blessings, right? Even in the office we tell each other stories about how we celebrate Thanksgiving with friends and family. We talk of our favorite foods, favorite football teams, favorite ways to spend an afternoon, our favorite relatives. How pretty it all is.
We feel good about ourselves when we feel thankful for the abundance in our lives. We feel strong when we take time to share that abundance with others. We feel closer to God when we act God-like and warmly embrace the people in our lives we enjoy most and who enrich us. What do we do with the people we dislike and who dislike us?
What has me thinking is how we will express our thanks to…
Falling Behind the Listening Curve
Yesterday our defense secretary was fired because of the election results. Our president said he had heard what people had said by voting out a significant number of republicans and in a significant number of democrats for local, state and federal offices. And since the exit poll research said the primary issue for voters was their dissatisfaction with how the Iraq war was being handled, our president decided to fire the man (almost) at the helm of the program, Donald Rumsfeld.
Then President Bush went on to say he would work to establish good bipartisan relations with the people in the majority party who had supplanted the folks from the now minority party.
Now, this brief analysis is not about politics; it is about listening. It seems to me that what…
