Thank You For Today
| history | 2,076 words
TAGS: personal essay, gratitude, Métis, Indigenous, linguistics, theology, spirituality, history, science, time, Urban Planning, community
ORIGINAL: https://brennan.day/thank-you-for-today/
I often remind myself to shake the dust, and I think why I've ritualized the act of getting rid of things is because of the holy clean. I wrote in my last post about how I have the urge to delete everything and start again, but I'm too long in the tooth to keep that pattern up. Regardless, I suppose you could say that I get my spring cleaning started earlier than most, in late October of the year before.
To start again from the beginning means everything is reset to the easiest register, sure. But it also means to be naked, to be empty. To be bare. You find yourself weighing far less than before. A cleanse. To purify the self--and to become clean once again.
Holy Cleaning
John Wesley, in his sermon titled "On Dress," wrote how "slovenliness is no part of religion" and that "cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness."
That specific phrase, though, doesn't appear anywhere in the Bible. But you can look at how Mosaic Law gave both physical and ceremonial purification rules. As well as specific washing rules, and dietary laws, to distinguish the Israelites and prepare priests for worship.
Christ shifted away from outward rituals, teaching instead of internal purity--cleansing. To wash the heart of greed, malice, and dishonesty mattered much more than physical washings. Disciples were, too, instructed to "shake the dust off your feet" when leaving a town or home that rejected their message.
I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for this absurd life I've been gifted. And I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to pay back the random indifferent universe for this gift. When I wrote about this on Dreamwidth, my friend Melo reminded me that gifts are not something you pay for. That removes the entire point and essence of it.
Life is a Freefall
But, regardless. I want to vocalize my gratitude. If I cannot repay this gift, and if not for everything, then just for today.
Each morning we are born again. The sleep-and-wake cycle gives us a clean slate. You are continually re-creating who you are through your daily choices. Waking up bleaches away the narrative of yesterday, leaving only the radical freedom to decide what your life means right now.
Marcus Aurelius wrote about the struggle of leaving warm blankets at dawn, reminding himself that he was born to contribute to the world's order, no different to bees or ants. For consciousness is a privilege, and waking up is not a neutral event. It is a rare, active miracle. To breathe, think, and enact. You transition from a dreamer to something far more raw and rare.
At the same time, waking life is a freefall. To exist is to be "kicked off a precipice". The world is constantly falling apart, and the act of waking up is a bold, open-ended gamble.
We are a history, etched into an unknown sand that the tide will swallow whole in just a moment's time. We are always in the past, a memory of a memory. An archive. The finite time we are living and breathing with blood pumping through our thousands of veins and vessels is, really, a blink of an eye.
Now, with that preamble out of the way, let's get down to the brass tacks of specifics.
The Bus Driver
In January 2009, Peter Rukavina asked on his blog whether people in other cities thank the driver when they get off the bus, because in Charlottetown it seemed to be "the rule rather than the exception." Going through the comments, Chris Corrigan wrote that in Vancouver, people "will holler through a crowded bus 'thank you!'" from the back doors. Chuck McKinnon wrote that in Calgary it was "a noticeable but diminishing custom," and he couldn't tell whether the city was giving it up or his memory was wrong.
I try to thank the bus driver every time. I love public transit. When I get off at the back of the accordion during rush hour, I call it up the aisles to a driver who can't hear me over the doors and the sardine-packed riders and the rumbling heater. Most nights I say it again in bed, to my popcorn-white ceiling: thank you for today.
Coral Rings and Alberta Time
In March 1963, the Cornell paleontologist John W. Wells published a three-page paper in Nature called "Coral Growth and Geochronometry." A coral adds a fine ridge of calcium carbonate to its outer wall each day, about 200 ridges to the centimetre, and the ridges get thicker and thinner with the seasons. Well-preserved coral records days and years at once. Wells counted ridges on Middle Devonian corals from New York and Ontario. "In every instance," he wrote, "there are more than 365 growth-lines per annum, usually about 400."
The year has stayed about the same length since then, but the length of days has not. J. B. S. Haldane, writing about Wells in the New York Times, pointed out that the ridges "can be counted with a good hand lens costing perhaps $10," compared to the much more expensive estimate of people who were asked, as most would "guess at $10 million or so." Regarding our estimates of time made by astronomers, and the geophysicists' isotope dates, palaeontology of coral can "supply a third stabilizing, and much cheaper, clue."
Most of the difference in the length of days comes from the Moon, tides slowing the Earth's rotation. In 2016, F. R. Stephenson, L. V. Morrison, and C. Y. Hohenkerk used records of ancient and medieval eclipses going back to 720 BC, and timings of the Moon passing in front of stars since 1600, to measure how much the day has changed. The mean solar day extends by about 1.78 milliseconds per century. Tidal friction alone predicts 2.3. The gap is due to the coupling between the Earth's core and mantle, and to post-glacial rebound, which is land still rising, now that the weight of the last ice sheets is gone.
Today, here in Mohkínstsis, the sun came up at 8:20 a.m. and went down at 6:19 p.m. 9 hours and 59 minutes of daylight. According to timeanddate, it is 3 minutes and 36 seconds less than yesterday.
On Sunday, the clocks will stay where they are. The Official Time Act defines time in Alberta now as "the time 6 hours behind Coordinated Universal Time," and the province calls it Alberta Time. It's the first fall in more than fifty years where we aren't turning our clocks back. From November 19 to February 9, the sun won't rise here before 9 a.m.
"Alberta Time doesn't give us any more daylight. It moves it later in the day." The Legislature can't add a minute to the day. Only the Moon and the Earth's core and the ice do so.
The First Thanksgiving
Martin Frobisher's third voyage had fifteen ships and more than four hundred men, sent to mine gold ore on Baffin Island and start the first English colony in North America. Storms scattered the fleet across Hudson Strait for most of July. When the ships regrouped in Frobisher Bay, according to Richard Collinson's 1867 edition of The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, the chaplain Robert Wolfall "made unto them a godly sermon, exhorting them especially to be thankefull to God for theyr strange and miraculous deliverance in those so dangerous places," and they took Communion.
This is known as the first thanksgiving.
Then, they went back to mining. The island they worked on is now called Kodlunarn, from the Inuit word for white man, written in EARTH Magazine. Kent's Historic Environment Record says 1,435 tons of "Black Ore" from the voyages went to a smelting works in Dartford. It turned out to be worthless. Some of it was later reused "as hardcore and building material."
In 1957, Parliament proclaimed the second Monday in October "a day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed." This year that was October 12th. I ate stuffing made with vegetable broth and went back to writing.
The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address is different. It isn't annual, it is said before a gathering starts, and before anything else is done. In "Allegiance to Gratitude," a chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the Onondaga Nation School, where "the school week begins and ends not with the Pledge of Allegiance, but with the Thanksgiving Address." Freida Jacques, a clan mother and the school-community liaison, tells her:
"It reminds you every day that you have enough. More than enough. Everything needed to sustain life is already here."
Kimmerer adds that "gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness."
The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian version was published in 1993, courtesy of the Six Nations Indian Museum and the Tracking Project. John Stokes and Kanawahienton (David Benedict, Turtle Clan/Mohawk) are credited for the English, Rokwaho (Dan Thompson, Wolf Clan/Mohawk) for the Mohawk, and Tekaronianekon (Jake Swamp, Wolf Clan/Mohawk) for the original. It thanks the people, the Earth, the waters, the fish, the plants, the food plants, the medicine herbs, the animals, the trees, the birds, the four winds, the Thunderers, the Sun, Grandmother Moon, the stars, the Enlightened Teachers, and the Creator, and after each one the speaker says, "Now our minds are one." The closing words are these:
We have now arrived at the place where we end our words. Of all the things we have named, it was not our intention to leave anything out. If something was forgotten, we leave it to each individual to send such greetings and thanks in their own way.
Mercy
"Thank you" is marsii in Southern Michif, my People's tongue, from Elder Norman Fleury of St. Lazare, Manitoba, or marsi in French Michif, both from the French merci. For Northern Michif, from Elder Ted Ratt and Elder Vince Ahenakew of Île-à-la-Crosse, Saskatchewan, it lists marrsî and kinanâskom'tin.
The Gabriel Dumont Institute has a set of recordings called Speak Michif in the Office, and you can hear Norman Fleury say maarsii. And maarsii poor toon taan: thank you for your time.
The Cree word is a verb. The itwêwina dictionary lists nanâskomêw as "s/he thanks s.o., s/he is grateful to s.o., s/he speaks words of thanks to s.o.," and gives kinanâskomitin as the form for "I thank you." The ki- at the front and the -itin at the end mark the speaker as I and the person being thanked as you.
In Cree, you can't say thank you without saying who is thanking whom. English permits you to skip both. "Thank you for today" has no I in it, and the you could be anyone.
Kinanâskomitin
"If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough." is from A Bucket of Surprises, a 2002 book by J. John and Mark Stibbe.
The Haudenosaunee Address leaves whatever it forgot to each person, to thank in their own way. So these are mine, for Tuesday, October 27.
Thank you to the driver of the first bus I take tomorrow, who won't hear me. Thank you to Peter Rukavina for keeping a comment thread from 2009 online, and to Chuck McKinnon, whom I've never met, for writing down what Calgary buses sounded like years ago.
Thank you to the corals in New York and Ontario for adding a ridge every day for years with no one around to count them, and to John Wells for then counting. Thank you to the endless miles of land, still rising after the ice, changing the length of my day by a fraction of a millisecond.
Thank you to Norman Fleury, your voice on a museum website allowing anyone to hear how maarsii is said in my endangered language. Thank you to my mom, who taught me to say it to the bus driver in the first place.
Thank you for the 3 minutes and 36 seconds of light that today had and tomorrow won't.
Kinanâskomitin puts back the I that English allows me to leave out, and it requires a you, even though I can't say who that is, exactly. But I'm not asked to know, but only that someone be there to receive it.
Thank you for reading this, reader. Thank you for being my reader for today.