Woman must be the pioneer in this turning inward for
strength. In a sense, she has always been the pioneer.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Just two weeks after celebrating the end of World War I on November 11, 1918, much of the country was abruptly under a quarantine, against wearing masks and angry that they weren’t celebrating the Thanksgiving they had anticipated after winning the war to end all wars. Yet America, along with the rest of the world, was suddenly battling an invisible enemy-- The Spanish Flu—the deadliest pandemic since the “Black Death” plague of the middle ages—and Thanksgiving 1919 would be postponed as well.
You might be approaching this Thanksgiving with dread in your heart for the future and sorrow for what has happened this past year and unfortunately continues to happen every day. The deadly Covid virus now spreads beyond our comprehension with double the deaths on our Homefront in nine months than four years in the French trenches.
When deep discouragement comes, I comfort myself by thinking of the long line of heroic women who came before us. For we are not the only women who have known difficult times, survived them and started over. I find solace drawing upon the wisdom and strength of generations of women who died before we lived—our pilgrim mothers, the pioneer women on wagon trains, native American mothers, enslaved African women who became freed African-Americans; wild west immigrant homesteaders, migrant Hispanic women, European and Russian Jewish refugees, Asian mothers crossing the Pacific and young Irish women like my Nana, Rose, carrying a baby in one arm and a suitcase in the other. I think of my Kentucky Granny, Lucy Eliza Lyttle Donnelly, rolling out biscuit dough in her salmon-pink chenille bathrobe. The world could end tomorrow, but come what may, there would always be fresh hot biscuits for breakfast. These extraordinary women have come to represent grace under pressure in the archives of my heart.
We need to remember that to be one woman is to be all women. That all women are endowed with a blessed DNA—the genetic code of courage, ingenuity, creativity, perseverance and determination. Our Destiny, Nature and Aspirations are Heaven endowed, so why wouldn’t we be given the spiritual wherewithal to fulfill them?
We have and it’s called Moxie. I want you to think of a woman’s spiritual Moxie as an indomitable feminine strength hidden in the secret recesses of our hearts; small time-capsules containing the seeds of resilience, restoration, and self-reliance that grows best from the ashes of its previous existence, like the giant Sequoia trees in California.
I love the word Moxie. It’s great American slang—a noun that means grit, gumption, sass, pluck, know-how, nerve and verve. I love its exhilarating combination. Originally coined as the brand name for a non-alcoholic health drink in 1885, Moxie was good for whatever ailed you especially if you were shy and modest. And while at times we can feel fraught, frazzled, fragile, frightened and worn to a raveling as we think about the future, Divine Grace always knew we would come to this turning point—the choice between giving up life and our dreams or going forward with just one tiny step. Accessing our own Moxie was designed for this very moment.
Think of Moxie as a feminine force that can only occur when two separate elements—inexhaustible courage and stubborn faith—are mixed. Through the spontaneous combustion of necessity and passion they create an entirely new compound: steely determination. Now ponder an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, and you’ve got the spiritual Moxieof your Authentic Self pushing through everything standing in the way of your happiness.
Only after we have been broken and emptied of all pretenses; only when we’ve faced heart-wrenching reckonings and impossible situations; only when the only opinions that matters are the Great Creator’s and your own, only when you remember who you were before the world shaped you into an acceptable version of who you should be, only then, do we become our Authentic Selves.
This is the Thanksgiving to gratefully take stock of what was working in your life and what wasn’t. Could the disguised blessing of this horrible pandemic be the opportunity to be ruthlessly honest, both inwardly and outwardly and make different choices about how we would like to go forward? Last Thanksgiving, the 25th anniversary of Simple Abundance which I rewrote and updated for the women we are today was published. I wanted to help both of us discover more moments of contentment than distress in this ghastly 24/7 “Breaking News” culture. I hoped we could encounter everyday epiphanies, find the Sacred in the ordinary, the Mystical in the mundane, and fully enter into the sacrament of the present moment, even if we’re alone and eating a turkey sandwich.
“Don't you love being alive?" asked Miranda. "Don't you love weather and the colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?,” Katherine Anne Porter asks in her 1939 novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider, one of the few novels to explore the Spanish flu through the changed destiny of a couple who have just fallen in love.
This Thanksgiving will be different from those we have shared in the past. But hopefully in the days to come you will make the thrilling discovery that everything in your life is significant enough to be a continuous source of reflection, reconnection and revelation. Even wearing a mask.
Sending dearest love and blessings on your courage.
XO SBB