Thankful

I am touched, honored, and deeply thankful for the response to my last post. I place both hands over my heart and bow to the kindness of those who sometimes see their own warmth of spirit mirrored in my words and images. 

Thursday is Thanksgiving in the USA, a day built on a myth lately being skillfully exposed and countered with testimony from Native Americans, anthropologists and historians. I love expressing gratitude, and as I am still knocked flat by a rhinovirus, I offer this image of one thing I am thankful for: my home. Because of my gender, class, and the values I live by, I have never owned property and I don’t have enough money to live in a place like this, were it not for government subsidies for the aging poor. Therefore I begin by thanking the universe for my immigrant ancestors who came to this country in pursuit of their various dreams, and I thank the people in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s government for establishing housing subsidies. 

Roosevelt said, "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." 

That belief was echoed in the Occupy movement of 2011, and it continues to be carried forth in The Portland Occupier, the blog of the local movement which it was my privilege to edit in October and November, 2011, and to which several of my Blip friends back then made splendid contributions. The current issue includes a wonderful list of local activists and groups for which Pete Shaw (the current editor) is grateful, and I say ditto to every word of his essay. Soob commented on my last blip that I am her favourite American news feed, and I need to thank Pete Shaw and the many Portland activists for being mine. 

I am thankful for more than you have time to hear about, for more than I have the brains to remember: for the many sources of beauty in my life, for life itself and for my faculties that still work (not ever taken for granted), for friendship, for books and music, for light and shadow and the poetry of words and images, for Blipfoto and the people it has brought into my life, for the people who call me mom, and of course for the two people who give me love, delight, and renewal whenever I see them: Sue and Bella.