The gift of all of it
This is the moment that comes back to me, combing memories of my Ibu Adventure last month in Laos. A blistering hot day is melting into evening. We are in the middle of the Mekong River. The slant sun washes our little boat where dinner is set. As darkness falls, faint fluttering lights begin to trickle toward us over the river silk, small perfect clusters of leaves and bright marigolds, each wreathing a candle of hope. It's the end of a season in Luang Prabang, the beginning of another, the river a festival of fire light.
Below the surface of these glittering waters lurk vestigial bombs from the Vietnam war, never detonated. Over this persistent danger, women cross each day like flickering candles, like hope itself, to join with other women and weave a flourishing future. We have come to join them, to bring our small torches to theirs and make of our common hope . . . a blaze.
On this auspicious full moon night, they are returning their thanks to the river that sustains them. How it holds incomparable beauty and yet tragedy . . . .how it holds all of this devastating, incandescent life in its long flow to the sea.
Tomorrow, I will gather with my larger family to feast on the goodness of the table, to embrace their children who are my joy. I will count my copious blessings—for them, for the remarkable team of souls at Ibu with whom I work, for the women in every part of the globe who lift their light to ours. That is a prayer that rises easily from my grateful heart.
But come evening, I want to stand in the middle of the river of my life, and receive all that has flowed through me this year. The losses, too. The unrest of living in this precarious world. I want to open myself to the risks I must take in the year ahead, the challenges and changes I didn't see coming. I want to receive even the deep waters that will—one surprising day—take me back into their silence. That, I think, is the real work of Thanksgiving. Standing in gratitude for all of it—the gift that I am here at all—loving this complicated, precarious, dazzling river that runs through us.
That night on the Mekong, each in our band of eleven lowered our own gift of hope and thanks into the river. The fierce indomitable women we came to visit also lit up the waters with their luminescence until the river glistened in a blanket of light, and our candles flowed together to the wide, wide sea.
Tomorrow, I want to join you and women all over the world I have come to know and trust in their radiant hope, against all odds. And together, in gratitude, to offer our tiny lights into the dark.
Because together . . . together . . . hope will blaze.