Happy Thanksgiving! This is a newsletter that I sent just now, and it just feels right to share someplace more permanent, too.

It’s my favorite holiday!

It’s simple, and nonsectarian, and there’s no gifts to give and no mountains of wrapping paper to toss away. And it’s a time for us to reflect on what we are thankful for, and the whole country, just for a day, practices gratitude. And even the air outside on Thanksgiving Day feels settled, and quiet, and holy, like early Sunday morning, but all day long.

So, 2020, huh? We’re in the home stretch of a year that, for pretty much everyone I know, has been a journey, a challenge, and a trial. I’m not inclined to blame the date on the calendar for the super-hardness of this year, but there’s no denying it has been a bumpy ride. Especially for teachers. For everyone. Sure. But especially for teachers.

Or maybe it’s just that teachers are the folx that I am hearing from. How they are breaking, how they are crying. How they work all day, every day, and half the night. Or all the night. How eight hours on a Saturday and eight hours on a Sunday is a “light weekend” now. How they miss the classroom. Or how they feel trapped in their classroom, behind a mask, behind their desk, behind a Zoom camera, and mostly, behind fear. And anger. And disbelief.

And we were ALREADY at the breaking point. We were ALREADY stretched so thin and taut that it was “take a deep breath in September and let it out in June.” I think often of how my teaching partner Becky once said that August finds us yoga’d, and meditation’d, and camping’d and rested and fresh and HUMAN, and then the maelstrom begins (usually like two minutes into the first little welcome-back speech from the principal in the first staff meeting of the year) and we are Back in the Soup.

Except this year, the soup is sort of spilled all over. Many of us never got out of the soup, all spring, all summer, every day, all day, and at night in our dreams, too, up till here we find ourselves at The First Thanksgiving.

Not the “first Thanksgiving” like your elementary school play…the First Thanksgiving Since the Pandemic. And it’s so different. And it also feels like a safe harbor, finally. It finally feels like a little pocket of repose. And I hope, more fervently than I have hoped almost anything for teachers – and I have hoped so much for so long for teachers – I hope that you can find some measure of inner peace, and take time to sit, and stare, and breathe, and rebuild yourself a little. I hope that so much for you.

Because it has been a doozy.

And I hope that you can take the time to look past the viciousness of 2020, because it has been vicious, and find what has been GOOD. Because even though it’s certainly not been EASY, it has certainly been transformative. And transformation, real transformation, is not easy, at least how I have experienced it, in my 44 years going round and round the star we call home.

So, it might not be a POPULAR point of view, but I am grateful for 2020, at least partially. It’s worth remembering, when we think of how we feel about our situation now, that the “good old days” weren’t necesarially SO good. And that the good that we took for granted was not equitably shared with everyone. And that many of us, especially those of us whom our unjust society granted a larger portion of privilege because of the “race” that our ancestors and we are percieved as, or the gender we are percieved as, or because we have faced fewer obstacles due to physical and/or mental disabilities, were going about with blinders on to one degree or another.

Growth often brings discomfort, “growing pains,” conflict, and inner turmoil. But we need to grow. We need to rethink, rebuild, revise, repair.

So, for the opportunity to rethink and repair, I am truly grateful. Despite the sleepless nights and the long long days and the sore backside from the hours, weeks, and months spent sitting in front ouf our computers that so many of us have endured. Despite the loss, the enormous losses, both among those we know and love personally, as well as the devastating toll it takes to have death so close, and so constant, and so hungry. Despite the exhausting sense of uncertainty and newness and not-quite-getting-it, and that feeling of slogging through chin-high molasses to get to a place that feels bearable, only to see the rules all change, or more loss come and make it unbearable, again. Despite the feeling, the sickening feeling, of watching the high tide of white America’s collective and general outrage slowly grow softer and lower. Despite our nation’s deep, pervasive, murderous, and reprehensible anti-Blackness and racism and the more-strident voices that defend it and apologize for it and seek to strengthen it. Despite the fires. Oh, the fires that have destroyed wide swaths of the West. Despite the hurricanes and the floods and the political campaigns and the peril and doom and danger.

So, how can I say this?

It’s worth remembering, when we think of how we feel about our situation now, that the “good old days” weren’t necesarially SO good. And that the good that we took for granted was not equitably shared with everyone. And that many of us, especially those of us whom our unjust society granted a larger portion of privilege because of the “race” that our ancestors and we are percieved as, or the gender we are percieved as, or because we have faced fewer obstacles due to physical and/or mental disabilities, were going about with blinders on to one degree or another.

It’s also worth thinking, especially in this time of Thanksgiving, that despite the significance of the losses that 2020 has wrought in our lives, that so many of us, I daresay the vast majority of you reading this, are so well-off, materially speaking, by global standards, that the 30% of the world’s population without running water, including 2 million people right here in the United States (in particular Indigenous people) would certainly find your material situation quite enviable.

Despite how much the year has hurt. Despite the stress, and the loss, and the grief, I know that all I have to do is go over to the faucet, turn it, and unless something really weird is happening, within 45 seconds I can have water as hot or cold as I like it. Among other comforts and necessities that are not equitably distributed in the world.

I’m not saying it’s not hard. It’s been hard. It’s been really hard.

So, why be grateful for this difficult, challenging, dangerous time? I’m grateful for the opportunity for growth.

Growth often brings discomfort, “growing pains,” conflict, and inner turmoil. But we need to grow. We need to rethink, rebuild, revise, repair.

So, for the opportunity to rethink and repair, I am truly grateful. Despite the sleepless nights and the long long days and the sore backside from the hours, weeks, and months spent sitting in front ouf our computers that so many of us have endured. Despite the loss, the enormous losses, both among those we know and love personally, as well as the devastating toll it takes to have death so close, and so constant, and so hungry. Despite the exhausting sense of uncertainty and newness and not-quite-getting-it, and that feeling of slogging through chin-high molasses to get to a place that feels bearable, only to see the rules all change, or more loss come and make it unbearable, again. Despite the feeling, the sickening feeling, of watching the high tide of white America’s collective and general outrage slowly grow softer and lower. Despite our nation’s deep, pervasive, murderous, and reprehensible anti-Blackness and racism and the more-strident voices that defend it and apologize for it and seek to strengthen it. Despite the fires. Oh, the fires that have destroyed wide swaths of the West. Despite the hurricanes and the floods and the political campaigns and the peril and doom and danger.

Despite all that, or maybe because of it, I am grateful for 2020. Because it has upended the old normal. Which every one of us knows needs to change. We might disagree on the why and the how and the details, and I don’t say that lightly, given our society’s enormous rifts and divisions and the deep pain that accompanies them. We might disagree on the details, and disagree mightily. But we all have something – or a lot of somethings – that we know needs to change. And deeply. Profoundly. And fast.

So, for that I am grateful. Because it feels like we have grown less-complacent in 2020. We have seen some of the illusions lift from our eyes. We have read, and listened, and we have observed and watched and learned.

It feels like this year has been ten years in one. It feels like everyone has shed their old skin, and then shed it again, and again. And, for many of us, it has only been through a screen that we have been able to see the changes in those we love and care about and serve and teach. So it has also been a lonely time, a time of introspection. A time of internal reckoning.

It’s a time of tearing down AND a time of building up. It’s a time of reaping AND sowing. It’s a time to be silent and a time to speak. It’s like all the times, all at the SAME time. And it’s exhausting.

It’s exhausting, on top of what we were already carrying. And teachers near and far were already carrying so very much, far too much. Teachers, the nobelest profession, the profession that creates all professions, living out our souls’ calling, are on the front lines of it all.

So, please take time to breathe, and please, I implore you, please go easy on yourself, and on your students, and on your loved ones. And please, if I may, address the white readers of this newsletter directly, and by white readers I also mean the white writer (myself) — If by chance you have felt the high tide of your commitment to fighting for Black lives and racial justice and for equity for all people, and you have felt yourself slip back – even a little – into complacency and the amnesia that your whiteness affords you, please, please get back in the struggle.

Let’s not let the enormous stresses and losses and pain and grief of 2020 be in vain. THAT would be the ultimate loss and tragedy. Here on the north side of the planet, we are turning towards the shortest day of the year, the darkness gathering and growing and the world growing sleepy and still. On December 21, the Solstice, we tirn the corner, towards rebirth and renewal, and then we turn to a new calendar year.

In this last cycle of the growing darkness, may we also turn to the darkness, and explore it, and allow it to teach us, and change us, to soften us and also to strengthen us, and strengthen our resolve.

It’s been a year. May it be, despite its greedy devouring claws, and its relentlessness and its pain, may it be the crucible of our transformation. I would wager that, if you manage to carve out some time this week of Thanksgiving and reflection, you will find much to be grateful for, in your own growth and in the deepening of your own humanity.

If you do find the time to do some reflecting, and you want to drop me a line to share, it would be a gift to me. And it might help you to firm up your resolve, to hit send and put it out there into the world. Plus I just love hearing from you.

Thank you for reading this far. May your holiday be restorative and delicious and may your sleeps be long and deep.

And may your teaching be as haphazard as it needs to be so that you can be well and safe and sane and whole.

Thank you. Truly and gratefully and with bone-deep, deeper than bones, soul-deep, awe and wonder that you are still going. After all this, and only you can know how hard “all this” was and is for you, after YOUR “all this”, YOU ARE STILL GOING.

Thank you and Happy Thanksgiving to us all.

Tina