Happy Thanksgiving. On holding Blessing and Ache.

For some, it’s a day of thanks, a moment to gather around a table, to remember abundance, to feel the weight of our own good fortune. For others, especially those whose ancestors lived here long before the idea of “America,” it’s a day that echoes with loss: cultures shaken, lands taken, stories fractured.

Both truths live in the same soil. And we feel them, whether we speak them aloud or not.

And then, almost before the dishes are dry, we are launched into the bright roar of Black Friday, a cultural ritual of desire, generosity, and frantic appetite. A day that asks us to buy in order to love. A day that asks us to want.

There is nothing simple about any of this.

If we listen mythically — if we let the old stories remind us how human beings have always held contradiction — we find ourselves in good company.

We find Hermes, god of merchants and thieves, standing at the crossroads, reminding us that exchange is always double-sided: gift and bargain, blessing and gamble.

We find Brigid, tending a flame that warms and a flame that melts what must be remade in Irish myth.

We find coyote, trickster, stealing corn and teaching survival in the same motion in Southwestern indigenous culture.

We find the Hero Twins from the Diné culture— one who heals and one who strikes — proving that balance is born from the interplay of opposites.

We find Demeter grieving her child even as the fields she teaches us to plant offer their harvest.

Myth tells us what we already know in our bones: We are creatures of contradiction.

We contain longing and gratitude, grief and generosity, ache and abundance. We can mourn what was lost on this land and also give thanks for the people we love. We can recoil from the frenzy of buying and also feel moved to offer gifts from our hearts. We can be shaped by both the shadow and the warmth of the fire.

This season, may you feel your own inner mythic threads — the ones that hold sorrow and celebration in the same hand.

May you offer what you can, rest where you need to, and remember that complexity is not a flaw of being human. It’s the whole art of it.

And in that, may you find joy.

Leigh

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Leigh Melander, PhD
Co-Founder, Spillian