Wild Sun, 36th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Electra): Before starting your Thanksgiving feast this week, you should consider the innumerable efforts that brought you your food. 

The first and most obvious is the hours of shopping, baking, mixing, and cooking by the hosts. Don't forget to acknowledge their efforts, help with the dishes, and if appropriate, tip your server.  Awareness of those immediate efforts, though, can then expand to the grocers, and then to the farmers, and then to the truckers who hauled the food farm to market.

But look even deeper. Someone had to build that supermarket, someone had to build the farmer's tractor, someone fueled the truck. Someone else milled the steel used to build the girders, the engines, and the truck body, and yet others mined the iron used to mill the steel and pumped the oil that fueled the entire enterprise. Someone felled the trees to pulp the paper in which to wrap the food. 

If we look deep enough and with enough imagination, almost every effort in the world has directly or indirectly led to the food appearing on the table. The city paved the road from farm to market, some venture capitalist provided the funds to start the iron mine, a vast industry was established to obtain and distribute the fuel for the tractors and trucks, and armies and policemen provided stability and safety for all of these activities to proceed - sometimes to protect against other armies and police who were trying to disrupt the activities.

There exists an enormous, universal web of interdependence that ties all the world's activities together, and while it all wasn't done for the express purpose of putting that cranberry sauce of your table, that cranberry sauce on your table is an inseparable part of the web. Everything is everything, and your Thanksgiving feast is a result of pyramids built, oceans crossed, wars waged, and continents tamed.

May I suggest that instead of some trite and probably untrue fable about the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, or some prayer to a deity who probably doesn't even exist in the first place, try reciting to yourself or among yourselves the following verse:

Innumerable efforts have bought us this meal.
We should consider how it came to us, 
and whether our virtue and practice are worthy of this offering.
We regard greed as poison of the mind.
We regard this meal as medicine to sustain our life.
May all be equally nourished.

The first portion is to end all evil.
The second is to cultivate every good.
The third is to free all beings.
For the sake of awakening, we now receive this food.