A Thanksgiving Note From a Wandering Monk Who Burned the Rolls Again
A Thanksgiving reflection on presence, honesty, and the quiet grace hiding under the noise.
Thanksgiving is weird if you’re even slightly awake on the inside. Everyone talks about gratitude, but half the room is stressed, someone is quietly resentful, someone else is loudly spiritual, and the turkey looks like it survived a minor spiritual crisis of its own.
But beneath the chaos there is something real happening. It is small. It is subtle. It does not care about table settings. It is the soft click you hear inside yourself when you stop pretending you have to feel some particular way just because the calendar says so.
People make gratitude sound like a personality trait. They try to “stay grateful” the same way people try to “eat clean,” which usually ends with someone bingeing on pie and existential dread at 11 PM. Gratitude is not discipline. It is not a performance. It shows up naturally when the mind stops sprinting and settles back into the body.
Every lineage that has ever touched anything true eventually teaches that same thing. The more present you are, the more life shows itself without needing to be improved, fixed, or wrapped in a spiritual Instagram filter. You look around and think, “Oh… this moment isn’t perfect, but it’s honest. And honest is enough.”
Thanksgiving is the one day where a lot of people unknowingly touch that. Not because they’re trying, but because the pace slows down just enough that their inner static drops. A little crack opens. Presence slips through.
You notice the way someone laughs.
You notice the way the air smells when someone burns something slightly.
You notice how tired you are, but also how relieved your nervous system gets when you’re not rushing.
That’s gratitude. Right there. Not the list. Not the speech. The shift.
And yeah, some of you are spending the day with people who test your enlightenment more than any Zen koan ever could. If that’s you, your practice is simply not strangling anyone. Congratulations. Your spiritual growth is ahead of schedule.
Some are alone today. Not lonely necessarily, just… quiet. Those days carry their own kind of holiness. There’s a purity to simple meals eaten in silence. A clarity you rarely get in rooms full of clattering forks and unprocessed childhood memories.
Wherever you fall on that spectrum, here’s what I want you to know:
Nothing is wrong with you if you don’t feel “grateful enough.”
Nothing is wrong with you if today is messy.
Nothing is wrong with you if presence is all you can manage.
Presence is already the doorway. Gratitude is just what happens once you walk through it.
So here’s my blessing for you, offered with flour on my robe, because I absolutely forgot the bread in the oven while having a mystical moment:
May your heart unclench a little today.
May you notice one real thing. Just one.
May you remember that being here is the only miracle you ever needed.
And may whatever grace lives inside you rise up, quietly, without asking permission.
Happy Thanksgiving, friend.
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Your presence alone already helps.
Your support keeps the lantern lit for everyone else.
Brother V, I can just imagine you in the kitchen, making a mess with the flour!👨🍳 Thank you for reminding us that both presence & humor are good things to remember on a holiday.🎉
Thank you so much for this beautiful reflection! I love the spaciousness and grace in this piece for us to arrive just as we are and let presence be enough.