Independence Daze

Among PermaCulture Designers, planners and cooperative schemers, choreographers and mappers, therapeutic lyricists and historical poets, and probably comedians, there is a saying, a principle of experiential truth: For every healthy function we discover many nutritional elements. This has to do with commitment, most resonantly shared with GaiaEarth, to invest in polycultural multi-enculturing functions to disinvest away from monoculturing monopolistic pathologies of hubris, a human environment supremely out of balance with humane cooperative intent. An important cultural health function in the U.S., as in other enriching societies, is celebration. Celebration is a health function with many memorial and traditional elements. Two of these celebrations are in creative tension within U.S. cultural revolutions: Thanksgiving Day and Independence Day. Thanksgiving is healthy and draws on elements of gratitude grace Earth and life as sacred ecological relationship, as our shared evolutionary history rooted in cooperative nurturing elements. Independence, like liberty and freedom, is also healthy and draws on elements of revolution, too easily violent and emphatic disagreements about redistribution of power and wealth from royalist plutocratic homes to mutually cooperative democratic co-investment networks thankful for this new opportunity to grow both Thanksgiving cooperation and often-competitive WinLose crises on thresholds of new-found Independence Days, not possible to resolve without dominance of interdependent Thanksgiving WinWin celebration, memorials of Earth's bounty inviting humane benign parasites of Independence from Earth's other native elements, back into more grateful abundance through interdependent health functions of more polyculturally empowering Thanksgiving. Gratitude warmly embraces growing less defensively reactionary about our grown-too-nationalistic and egotistic elitist Independence Days. To optimize health functions of Thanksgiving and Independence, Earth invites us to remember how ecosystems create these two co-arising intentions together, as root systems of multiculturing grace interdependently flower mutually-held and celebrating Independence Days with ecopolitics cooperatively-owned and self-governed liberty for all capable of reweaving Earth's WinWin Thanksgiving Day supremacy of healthy democracy for maintaining cooperative ecology rather than over feeding wealth-hoarding plutocracy, wherein every day is entitled to Christmas gifts without the gratitude of a healthy Thanksgiving child. While it is possible to celebrate Independence Day each in our own King George throne room and firing-up our own gated backyard grills of me-first red meat, Thanksgiving Day more patriotically invites a table large enough for all us native creolizing waves of immigrants to give thanks for all Earth's healthy gifts brought together by these grace-filling nutritional polyculturing elements.