This Thanksgiving…
I give thanks for my heritage and my ancestors, for those hearty, strong souls who came before me whose genes run through my blood. I thank them for enduring through hardships, sadness and loss. I thank them for getting back up after failure and adversity, failure and pain. I thank them for looking beyond their insecurities and being willing to grow, discover, learn and stretch beyond their fears to look for solutions.
I thank them for loving and in spite of losing, daring to love again. I thank them for their courage to stand firm in the face of adversity and for never compromising their values. I give thanks for their ability to laugh things off, to forgive and accept situations beyond their control and for persevering with renewed energy with the lessons learned.
I thank them from the bottom of my heart for giving me hope for a brighter tomorrow.
A House Called Tomorrow
By Alberto Ríos
You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—
You are a hundred wild centuries
And fifteen, bringing with you
In every breath and in every step
Everyone who has come before you,
All the you that you have been,
The mothers of your mother,
The fathers of your father.
If someone in your family tree was trouble,
A hundred were not:
The bad do not win—not finally,
No matter how loud they are.
We simply would not be here
If that were so.
You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.
You are the breaking news of the century.
You are the good who has come forward
Through it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise. But think:
When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words—
It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.
From those centuries, we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,
The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:
That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,
Is ourselves. And that’s all we need
To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.
Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.
Be good, then better. Write books. Cure disease.
Make us proud. Make yourself proud.
And those who came before you?
When you hear thunder, Hear it as their applause.
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