Nov 22, 2018

Thoughts on Gratitude, Thanksgiving 2018 Edition, Midweek Missive #511 (XII-12) to My Son, Ryan Davison-Reed

November 22, 2018

My Beloved Ryan---

My, my, my, my, my---  what abundance of blessings do we have for which to be grateful this Thanksgiving Day. 

I hope that you and Sydney share my conviction that this Journey is to be lived each day as a Song of Gratitude and that on this day set especially aside for Thanksgiving celebration you hear that Song strumming effortlessly, fluidly, at the Core of Your Being.

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What general statement can be made about the moral responsibility to be grateful, given that each individual experiences life at once uniquely and in concert with those who by happenstance are met on that person’s Journey?

I, por ejemplo, am the son of a hardworking, savvy West Texas farm boy, most likely the best young farmer not only in McCauley but within at least a 100 mile-radius of Abilene.  Da was not exactly humble about such matters, but in listening intently to his stories, mostly confirmed by others in the family, of his driving a tractor at the age of five on his daddy’s knee and by the time he was twelve years old coming up with innovations in redirecting rainwater for most advantageous outcomes in irrigating the cotton and corn fields, I glean from his many accounts the reality of a young farmer at the upper tier of agrarian talent.

But he didn’t heed his daddy’s call to take over the farm.  That call was testimony to his talent, given that Dad was the second youngest among seven children of Lillian and Will, and the youngest of three sons.  Da learned how to sew with the goal of putting that skill to use in crafting cotton bags rather than having to pick the stuff all the time, but he still put in enough time in the latter grinding labor to contribute to the production of a slipped-disk-bad-back-by-middle-age and was eager to leave the hard scrabble life by the time he departed for Texas Tech for a semester and thence to North Texas (at the time NT State University).

By chance, as is similarly so for all of us, did he then meet Betty Jo Geer and Etta Marguerite Geer and that much of my life was thenceforth determined.  The hard scrabble West Texas farm boy went from lower middle class to middle class to upper middle class status in the span of my first 17 years of life, a life borne on mostly joyous waves that pounded back against spats and bouts of anger and dysfunction with the overwhelming force of an ethic of Love and Joy and Hope.  In the latter all shared, but Etta Marguerite, Nanno, Great, was the Captain of Joy, the Liver of Life, the Indomitable Human Spirit.

Later I met the best, Barbara Edith Reed.

We then produced the best, Ryan Courtney Davison-Reed.

So, as for me, why would I not live life gratefully?  For what petty matters would I ever personally complain?  To do so would be profanity against Extreme Favorable Fortune, blasphemy against That Which Gave and Revealed All of This to Me.

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What, though, about the abused Native population of Minnesota living along East Franklin Avenue in cardboard houses with brains clogged in wine-numbed self-medication against the pain of a shameful national history for which hippy-dippy-liberals rename lakes rather than provide that level of educational excellence that would go to the root of Atonement?

What about the child of Yemen, dead before ever really living, body slowly decaying, perceptibly more skeleton that organic flesh, without life, hope, future?

What about the majority of peoples of the world experiencing the cruelest of regimes in a world of generally inept politicians and chief executives who exist because people cannot or do not embrace the responsibilities of citizenship?       

For what do these people have to be grateful?

The children of Yemen are without hope,  never having learned what gratitude can be for lack of anything for which to be grateful. 

Some of the others are able to see in each new solar explosion at the east a Ray of Light that might point the way, to feel in Nature and their familial or emotional kin the glimmer of some better day to come.

The gratitude that those folks feel should be our inspiration.

If they can be grateful despite all of the abuse that we have directly or, in our inaction,  indirectly heaped upon them, then gratitude for us---  you, Barbara, me, all to whom much has been given so that much should be rendered---  should come as easy as our healthy hearts pump our blood and our clear and strong lungs give us each Divine Breath.

It is, then, for us, to live Life with that Song of Gratitude strumming constantly Deep Within, to be in attitudinal Gratitude each day our feet hit the ground---

and to hope that those with less reason to be grateful can nevertheless be, until we awake to consider each child our own, each woman our sister, each man our brother, and treat them as we would in our families, as we should in the family named Human.

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I am Grateful for you each day my own feet hit the ground, and for that hardworking West Texas farm boy, for the connoisseur of beauty whom he married, for the woman of unrelenting joy who was her mother, and for the sweetest child of the sweetest mother who ever roamed the earth, Yo’ Sweet Mama, My Beloved---

Happy Day of Gratitude, from one who should be abundantly Grateful, to one whom I trust is---

I love you so very much, My Dear Son---

Gary   

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