Endings don't seem to be waiting for December 31st this year. After a 12-month cycle that saw the deaths of three in my inner circle, Amber and I traveled to Tucson this month to close a 13-year chapter in our lives.

It actually started back in 1999 when, on the uncertain brink of Y2K, we decided to sublet our houses and travel the country in a 1973 motor home we named Betty. Our originally-planned six months turned out to be not long enough. With summer gigs in Michigan and long-distance contract work, we managed to live in Betty for 18 months, until my father's brain cancer diagnosis called us back to the Pacific Northwest.

We spent the winter of that magical sojourn on some women's land just west of Tucson's Saguaro National Park. The Sonoran Desert was endlessly fascinating to us, with its idiosyncratically animated cactus shapes and all manner of bird and animal life: quail, coyote, rabbit, dove, owl, lizard, javelina.

After my Dad died and we resumed "life as normal" back in Portland, the desert continued to call our names. We returned on vacation and noticed many houses featured casitas out back. We contacted a realtor and not too much later, we'd sold Amber's condo in Portland and bought a three-bedroom house in Tucson with a separately-fenced, one-bedroom off the alley that became our beloved retreat for the next 13 years.

Not exactly a "vacation home" - no pool, no view. But the sky was nearly always blue. The plant and bird and animal life, abundant. The rental income from the main house pretty much paid for itself. Every time we visited, we enjoyed old favorite places. Every time we visited we discovered something new. ​We joined, most years, with over 100,000 others in the remarkable All Souls Procession, first memorializing my father with a personal altar, later processing in Marcy's nightgowns five months after her death.

But in this time in which we all must learn the ending of things, it was time to let go of the responsibility of owning property 1,500 miles away. We sold the place easily and booked a flight to go down to clear out our humble but cherished casita.  

​While I knew it would be sad to say goodbye to our sweet little place, I didn't expect to have so many endings wrapped into this one. ​

Growing up in New Haven, Connecticut, my childhood was steeped in the whitewashed origin story of Thanksgiving.

As summarized by educator-activist Sarah Sunshine Manning: Pilgrims came to America, in order to escape religious persecution in England. Living conditions proved difficult in the New World, but thanks to the friendly Indian, Squanto, the pilgrims learned to grow corn, and survive in unfamiliar lands. It wasn’t long before the Indians and the pilgrims became good friends. To celebrate their friendship and abundant harvest, Indians in feathered headbands joined together with the pilgrims and shared in a friendly feast of turkey and togetherness. Happy Thanksgiving. The End.

While my understanding of the truth of those times matured as I grew older, it wasn't until I researched this blog post that I learned how Thanksgiving became a national holiday. As Manning explains, "Truth be told, this beloved lie was packaged solely for nationalistic consumption when, following the bloody Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863. Back then, Americans were desperately in need of unity and inspiration. Hence, the myth of the first Thanksgiving was born to inspire and unite."

Today, at a time when we again feel the desperate need for unity and inspiration, what myths colonize our minds? And what stories offer another way?

There's been some awareness during my lifetime of the debt the American political system - mythologized as the world's first participatory democracy - owes to the Iroquois Confederacy (now known by their historically accurate name, the Haudnosaunee). US Senate Resolution 331, introduced in 1988 by Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the highest ranking Asian American politician in U.S history, acknowledged, “the confederation of the original thirteen colonies into one republic was influenced…by the Iroquois Confederacy, as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the constitution itself.”

Of the many shameful developments resulting from traumatized Europeans reenacting their trauma on this continent, on this Thanksgiving I mourn, in particular, that the founding fathers weren't equally influenced by the Haudenosaunee relationship with the rest of creation.

The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address is one expression of that relationship. Ramona Peters, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Mashpee Wampanoag (descendants of those mythologized in the "pilgrims' first Thanksgiving" story), explains: "We give thanks more than once a year in formal ceremony for different seasons, for the green corn thanksgiving, for the arrival of certain fish species, whales, the first snow, our new year in May—there are so many ceremonies; and I think most cultures have similar traditions. It’s not a foreign concept. Human beings who recognize greater spirit would have to say thank you in some formal way."

An understanding of the world as alive had been burned out of the pilgrims' culture; for the Puritans, there was one God only. Early Thanksgiving combined the austere thanks owed to that God with the older European traditions of harvest festivals.

Perhaps what we really need now is less unity - one God, one superior race, the false pride of nationalism - and more radically inclusive diversity: a valuing of the life in all things, a pledge of allegiance to the divine's many faces, praise like that practiced by the Standing Rock Water Protectors, gratitude like that voiced in the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address.

"Never lament casually," said the late, great Leonard Cohen. "And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.”

And so in this week since the election of Donald Trump, I have said very little. I have not joined the nightly disruptions to life-as-usual in Portland - lampooned as "white riots" by Dave Chapelle on Saturday Night Live. 

I'm taking some time to consider the focus and the form of my lament... considering: What happened such that Donald Trump seemed like a good idea to the people who voted for him? Is his election a betrayal of all that landed on these shores to become America, or its fulfillment?

I'm immensely grateful to have had the chance to attend, for three years now, the Orphan Wisdom School, where Stephen Jenkinson troubles us with such questions, including the biggest of all: How do we love a dying culture?

Two days before the election Stephen visited Portland unexpectedly, speaking for an afternoon to nearly 90 people assembled with less than a week's notice. He spoke in and of "the syntax of sorrow, the grammar of the gone, the manner of mortal mystery." Unwilling to collude with "the mania for fixing things that is everywhere," he made the case for increasing our emaciated appetite for "real heartbreak and the tutelage that comes from it."

His plea: To swivel our chair alongside the young people, to try to see what they see. "It's not the world you were born to. That's not coming back. In their eyes is the end of most of what you believe." Be willing to learn the end of all you hold dear, he asked. That's the act of love I'm asking of you.

The night after the election Amber and I took my 9 year-old niece Josie to a neighborhood vigil for loving kindness. Several hundred gathered outside the high school holding candles. Voices of sorrow were witnessed by flames held high. "This Little Light of Mine" was sung, with impromptu verse after verse upholding all that is at risk. The angry face of grief marched by the thousands just a few miles away, shutting down two interstate highways. This gathering we joined sought to elevate kindness.

I recited a poem on "the rhythm of kindness" posted on Election Day by a friend. And when it came time to speak my own mind, I voiced my gratitude for the Water Protectors at Standing Rock, that we would have them in our midst at this time, insisting on a bigger story. 

While I will find other words and actions, one week now after the Election, I stand by what I wrote that first night: Beneath the storm clouds of catastrophe that have gathered over this idea called America since our founding, there is goodness, and beauty, and love, and kinship - and that's what I'm determined to amplify in every way I can.