Giving Thanks to Divine Unity
It was Thanksgiving, but 18 years ago, at my parent’s house in New Jersey. My days and nights were filled with dreams, wide-open dreams and experiences that revealed the magical possibility of our humanity inside a deep purging.
My body—in its pain and opening—had become a vessel through which ancients truths could emerge and awaken. I was in bed, unable to fall asleep on Thanksgiving night because my body was speaking to me. I could feel intensely that my reality was a memory of shapes that move, shift, and change like reality shifts into dreams and dreams into everyday reality. I had never experienced this before…that all was malleable, that everything was fluid, that the physical and emotional were all the same…that we are a kind of liquid of sorts, and that if we could see that, we could experience the potential of magic.
During those days, I had also been reading a book by Lynn Andrews, and it prompted me to dream about and reflect on a character in her booked named Agnus, who carried a “marriage basket.” In my dreams, she represented the Virgin Mary, and the marriage basket was the “Holy Grail”, the child within her that is the “Unity of All Things.” Mary gave birth to Jesus, but more symbolically, as all women do, she gave birth to the feminine and masculine within herself. In doing so she created a child that was in the image of God, and she, in essence, through giving birth, became the unity of all things.
Those days 18 years ago offered some deep reflections that, in this simple blog, may be hard to fully express. But what I saw then, and I see now, as we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving—a holiday first shared between Native Americans and North European settlers who gave thanks to the native people for showing them how to grow and harvest corn and other crops to survive in new lands—is that we are so much more than the extreme masculine energy of competition and winning, and the extreme feminine energies of pity and plight, and that it is time for us to give birth to the magic child within us, the unity of all things.
In the past months, so many of us have felt the fear, pain, and horror, of change as the extreme masculine has reared its ugly face during the elections and at Standing Rock (where thousands of native people and supporters are fighting to protect the waters, as they are brutally attacked and their graves and that which they hold scared are desecrated). We have also seen people speaking up with more courage and heart than ever before to protect each other and the earth.
And now, as we all come together with loved ones during Thanksgiving, and we give thanks for that which has blessed us, it may also be a time to plant a seed for the spring—a seed that gives birth the unity of all things. Maybe this time of upheaval is a chance for us to look at the separation we have been living—the extreme masculine and feminine energies we have been carrying—and to give birth to the divine unity that we all are. Maybe we are being pushed to see who we truly are: fluid, divine beings with malleable colors and shapes that we can creatively rearrange to create a beautiful painting and landscape we can all celebrate.
Michelle Adam is an experienced writer, teacher, and healer. She recently published her novel, Child of Duende, after twenty-plus years as a magazine and newspaper writer. Her articles have appeared in The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education Magazine; Hibernia Magazine, an Irish magazine; Vista Magazine, a Hispanic insert of major national newspapers; and multiple other publications.
Michelle has also been a photographer and artist; has taught middle school students Spanish for the past dozen years; and has worked as a healer and shaman. Michelle has created healing and teaching circles of song and sound, assisting others in awakening the spirit of the earth, “duende,” within them, and creating a space for the celebration of life.
