Happy Thanksgiving, All

Yesterday, I received an email from a colleague in Canada, indicating that they're still working this week (they celebrate a Thanksgiving holiday similar to ours in October).

Last night, I practiced my Spanish at the local La Salsa restaurant and learned that Spanish for "Happy Thanksgiving" is "Buen día de acción de gracias."

Even though Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, the idea of a harvest festival is not. We are so closely tied to this earth that many people in this long list of cultures have a tradition of celebrating a special day to give thanks for sustenance. In our American culture, we conflate the celebration of the harvest with the notion of divine deliverance in a new land.

To be blunt, Thanksgiving in America is typically celebrated by over-eating with family, indulging in the bounty of food, nestled in the bosom of loved ones. "Perhaps moderation can take a pass today," I'll tell myself, "it's Thanksgiving." It's hard not to overindulge when the feast lies before you, and its all so good. I'll be reminding myself though, of the Swedish concept of Lagom, which introduced this new blog yesterday. As it occurs to me, we might translate the strategy of Lagom in American English as "Quit while you're ahead."

Funny how football, a uniquely American sport, has joined the holiday tradition, at least in our family it has. Tonight, we'll leave our family meal and drive down to DKR Memorial Stadium to fight for a parking spot, so we can watch the UT Longhorns pound the Texas A&M Aggies, striving for those "style points" that will convince human voters to keep us at the top of the BCS polls - come on National Championship!

I'll probably lose my voice from yelling. At least, that's the plan.

What I'm Thankful For Today

I'm thankful of so many things, as I sit here in the quiet living room, with my family fast asleep. I know that many/most of the rest of the world doesn't have the peace of mind I do when it comes to family and loved ones. So of course, I'm thankful first for my family and our health. For the many communities that embrace us and give us social sustenance, starting with St. Mark's Episcopal Church, home for two decades. For the wonderful City of Austin that we call home, for the view of the Hill Country out my back yard. For the University of Texas Longhorns - 19 years now with season tickets! Hook Em, Horns! And I'm thankful that my fellow citizens elected Barack Obama, so we can hope again.

Finally, I'm thankful for the insights I've gained over the past two years, as I've come to look at the world through the eyes of an appreciative house guest. I'm thankful for my newfound sense of urgency and for this opportunity to make a difference in a critical time in history.

I'll not be here but for a short while longer - really, just a blink of an eye - at least when measured in terms of deep time that the Earth (or the God) we are thanking today can relate to.

One of the first uses of deep time in a general interest publication may have been by John McPhee in his 1981 book, Basin and Range, parts of which originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine. One of the metaphors McPhee used in explaining the concept of deep time, which was cited by Stephen Jay Gould in Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (1987), was to

Consider the earth's history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.

Basin and Range was republished with four others and additional material in Annals of the Former World,^[10] a title McPhee borrowed from James Hutton's observation about the geologist's preoccupation with the "annals of a former world," the stories figuratively told by layers of rock laid down over many millions of years.

Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia (1999) is non-fiction book by Gregory Benford.