The Ground We Stand On

Thanksgiving, Genocide, and the Work of Beginning Again

🤖 This text has been lightly edited with AI for readability & grammar

Growing up, I’d sing, “This land is your land, this land is my land. From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters…” and I got behind that, until I didn’t.

As I grew older, I began to see more clearly how land and ownership have long been fertile ground for domination, greed, and, in some cases, evil. Even with my limited knowledge of history, I can recall so many figures over the last couple thousand years who embodied the mindset of conquest. Advances in weaponry and military strategy (from fighting on foot, to horseback, to guns, to nuclear weapons, to cyber warfare) have continually expanded the terrain on which human aggression can operate. The landscape of consciousness where the shadow walks is vast and laden with separation. The conquering tendency isn’t new. The cycles are evident even in our most incomplete history books.

A simplified storyline at this point in time might be: Whose land is it? Really? Now?

What I know in my bones is this: when I’m threatened, and as my ancestors were, something alarming and deeply unsettling happens inside. There is a profound destabilization when people are moved—or forced to move—because their lives are in danger simply because of who they are.

I have both British and Irish ancestry: one part that colonized, and one part that starved. Forced to flee with little resources, my family eventually settled in the Southern United States, between North Carolina and Georgia. They were among the early settlers and later migrated into the mountains and piedmont of North Carolina displacing the native Cherokee people. I was born in the Blue Ridge—Appalachian mountains—and grew up with the deep pain of knowing that the traditions I inherited were built on the backs of many others. Even though many of my ancestors were sharecroppers and lived in poverty, they were white, and they played a role, directly or indirectly, in the domination and genocide of people I would be taught to love as my neighbors and as myself.

I’ve spent many moments of my life unpacking and experiencing the grief, guilt, terror, and disappointment that arise when persecution, on all sides, lives at the root of one’s story. I could collapse into victimhood and roll around in my own white fragility, or I could acknowledge that yes, these tendencies live in me, and still vow not to perpetuate them.

Before Jane Goodall died, she participated in a documentary in which she allowed herself to say whatever she wanted, knowing it wouldn’t air until after her death. Isn’t that a beautiful premise to consider? What would you, or I, or we say if we knew we’d only be heard after we had died?

In that documentary, she shared her belief—based on decades of observation—that chimpanzees have innate aggression. Remembering that humans share so much DNA with chimps, she inferred that we, too, are innately aggressive. Her hope for us was that we cultivate compassion.

And here we are again—at a point when human aggression is accelerating at such a rate of domination that, if left unchecked, it will continue to rupture the very foundation of what in Buddhist wisdom is called bodhicitta: the sense that we are connected from the start, and that anything which violates this sense must be brought into question.

Christian wisdom points to something similar. “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” This implies that we do not fully understand our shared connection—that bodhicitta is within each of us. When we act out of aggression, we act from a profound misunderstanding of our connection to something far greater and more loving than any single human or group of humans.

Maybe it’s because I was born into circumstances where I could not deny that genocide lived, however subtly, in my bones. I’ve been feeling my way into a relationship with that truth for over forty years. And from this place, I can sense how some enclaves of Jewish identity are now being threatened at such an alarming rate that it is shaking the core of a collective—calling forward the recognition that they, too, carry the innate human capacity for genocide.

All of it is being called to light.
To be spoken.
To be known.

Last year, my Mom and Dad, my Sister and Wife, my Kid, and I all went to my Husband’s American Palestinian family’s home for Thanksgiving. Jabar, my Husband’s uncle, served hummus beside an apple-and-cranberry dessert. We all laughed at the spunky combination. He grinned and said, “It is good! It is good!”

Something in that moment calls me back now to the symbols of Thanksgiving—the sharing of culture, food, warmth, and good intentions. The seeds for something to grow.

Not seeds sown only in the soil of hostility and genocide. Seeds planted in ground that also holds love, connection, hope, and beauty. Soil that knows the truth of its roots and still chooses to grow with tenderness and not-knowing. Leaning toward wisdom and love.

Growing up in the piedmont of North Carolina, I went to Baptist church with my Grandparents, and later to the Episcopal church with my Mom and Dad, siblings, and Aunt’s family. It was a big deal when bishops and archbishops visited. As a little girl, I wondered why there were so many churches and so many power structures—and why there were fewer and fewer positions the closer you got to the “top.” Some of the symbols were the same: all the churches I knew had a cross, and Jesus, and God. But the Catholic church had THE POPE.

These symbols work on our psyche. My teachers drilled this into me again and again. After spending months on retreat, I returned home and worked at Naropa University, taking classes in the Masters of Divinity program and later the Transpersonal Psychology program. I was endlessly fascinated by symbology, power, and how to translate experiences that live beyond words.

This is why I am struck that the “new” Pope has brought his popemobile into Gaza and is handing out food. The behavior, meaning, affect, image, and embodiment are loud and clear. Today, the Catholic Church is being moved by this.

May the religious leaders in the Insight Meditation lineage recognize the power inherent in symbolizing both spiritual life and public moral stance. In a world moving through profound moral reckoning, to remain absent or silent is to raise a shield that deflects the force of non-separation. Looking away and being silent—especially in voice—can be a form of cruelty. And cruelty plants the seeds of genocide.

Even if support happens behind closed doors, the Pope merges the private and the collective to say, “Not here. Not today.” In doing so, he moves the cycle toward “may it be on earth as it is in heaven.” A non-duality that Buddhist wisdom expresses as form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.

In some sense, perhaps it is easier for religious leaders who have been the persecutors in more recent history to take a public stand. Perhaps they have had longer to digest the failures of theories that, being impermanent, repeat tragedies until there is finally a willingness to imagine offering a lion’s roar for Gaza. No matter what.

Nonetheless, the time is now to begin again. To sense into the interconnection of body, speech, and mind. To the power that is innate within all of us. And to re-program any sense of hierarchy that leads to domination and separation—everywhere. In religion and beyond.

Feeling deep into the bones.
Remembering: “Hatred never ends by hatred, but by love, and love alone.”
May it be so.