Sometimes what we admire most in a garden is the elegance of a single rose or the voluptuous lines of one creamy calla lily. But often times what really strikes the eye is a mass of color, a patch where you can’t make out any single blossom, but only the brilliance of the whole. Sometimes when each one of us is not all that impressive or effective, all of us together can have a big impact.
How do you join with others to create something bigger than you can do alone?
Throughout the eight nights of Hanukkah it is traditional to play a sort of gambling game with the dreidel, a little top with Hebrew characters on the side which indicate how many pieces you may take out or must put in. But the game only works because at the start of each round each player contributes to the common pot. You never know how much you will take out; you only know that the game is possible because each person contributes.
What will you put in for the common pot of a community today?
What better to adorn the Thanksgiving table than a cornucopia of squash, a crazy assortment of colors and shapes, of textures and tones? What better day to rejoice in assembling the crook-necked with the pear-shaped, the fluted with the warty? This kind of kinship isn’t always easy, but it is the way families or communities assemble, not by being the same, but by welcoming everyone to the table.
Who or what are you grateful to be welcoming in today?
In a tiny village, each person is very visible to their neighbors, while the town is invisible to the larger world. In a great city no one knows all the people who surround them, but the city is recognized everywhere. And yet, each human soul, known and unknown, is of equal worth.
Where do you feel known? Where do you feel invisible?
“One definition of eternity is that we are not alone on this planet, that there are those who’ve gone before and those who will come, and that there is a community of spirits.”
—Rita Dove
Who would you name as important members of your personal community of spirits?
