Thanksgiving day thoughts for folks of settler lineage

Hey y’all. Loving everyone in my community and everyone on this planet today. Sharing some writing here that I did this morning about Thanksgiving, and the continuing violence that surrounds it that our collective consciousness still wants to deny.

My prayer for all of us of settler lineage today is that, if we are gathered with others, we can take a moment to acknowledge and sit with sadness and guilt, not to beat ourselves up but to become whole, to be in truth and to move toward accountability and healing. This poem is for you, with love. A few links at the bottom for orgs you can donate to today. Please join me in doing that, even if it is just a little. 

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to deny wrong-doing is to evade our humanity.
don’t you want to become whole?

Rev. angel Kyodo williams said that whiteness is not who we are. but people feel threatened as though it is.

i’m learning about the ego’s identification with labels, and how the ego fights back when threatened.

our collective is identified with our label of whiteness and our egos are fighting back.

this morning, i heard —

you’ll see that as you do the work of opening your hearts to listening and understanding, as you divest from your need to be right and your fear of being wrong

that opportunities for amends will come to you.

it takes a lot of breathing and softening.

it is not easy.

bounty, earth, blessing, cornucopia --
labor of hands, labor of the earth, sharing the harvest.
humanity has been doing this for centuries.

our psyches are smart. they detect lies. do you think that you can receive the nourishment from the earth while you are protecting yourself from truth?

In this life, it's always the light with the dark. You may celebrate but in your hearts you will also mourn the ones who are not there. this is the richness of your experience.

when you cut off your guilt, you do a disservice to yourself and to the world. you rob others the opportunity for healing and you keep them underneath you, and you do violence to your own soul.

love does not just start and end with the family or with the people that you know. love extends to all and that love does not have to be cordoned off. this is the illusion of the other.

you can be greedy in love when you create boundaries for it. love is not boundaried, that is not its nature. it is like water. let it rain, let the flood gates open. there is enough.

don’t you want to become whole?

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donations for orgs that support indigenous people:

Portland: 
Naya: https://nayapdx.thankyou4caring.org/
Red Lodge Transition Center: http://redlodgetransition.org/

National/global:
international indigenous youth council: https://indigenousyouth.org/about/
Earth Guardians: https://www.earthguardians.org/
We R Native: https://www.wernative.org/