Among PermaCulture Designers,
planners and cooperative schemers,
choreographers and mappers,
therapeutic lyricists and historical poets,
and probably comedians,
there is a saying,
a principle of experiential truth:
For every healthy function
we discover many nutritional elements.

This has to do with commitment,
most resonantly shared with GaiaEarth,
to invest in polycultural multi-enculturing functions
to disinvest away from monoculturing
monopolistic pathologies of hubris,
a human environment supremely out of balance
with humane cooperative intent.

An important cultural health function in the U.S.,
as in other enriching societies,
is celebration.

Celebration is a health function
with many memorial and traditional elements.

Two of these celebrations
are in creative tension within U.S. cultural revolutions:
Thanksgiving Day and Independence Day.

Thanksgiving is healthy
and draws on elements of gratitude
grace
Earth and life as sacred ecological relationship,
as our shared evolutionary history
rooted in cooperative nurturing elements.

Independence,
like liberty and freedom,
is also healthy
and draws on elements of revolution,
too easily violent and emphatic disagreements
about redistribution of power and wealth
from royalist plutocratic homes
to mutually cooperative democratic co-investment networks
thankful for this new opportunity
to grow both Thanksgiving cooperation
and often-competitive WinLose crises
on thresholds of new-found Independence Days,
not possible to resolve
without dominance of interdependent Thanksgiving WinWin celebration,
memorials of Earth’s bounty
inviting humane benign parasites of Independence
from Earth’s other native elements,
back into more grateful abundance
through interdependent health functions
of more polyculturally empowering Thanksgiving.

Gratitude warmly embraces growing less defensively reactionary
about our grown-too-nationalistic and egotistic elitist
Independence Days.

To optimize health functions of Thanksgiving
and Independence,
Earth invites us to remember how ecosystems
create these two co-arising intentions together,
as root systems of multiculturing grace
interdependently flower mutually-held and celebrating
Independence Days
with ecopolitics cooperatively-owned and self-governed
liberty for all
capable of reweaving
Earth’s WinWin Thanksgiving Day supremacy
of healthy democracy for maintaining cooperative ecology
rather than over feeding wealth-hoarding plutocracy,
wherein every day is entitled to Christmas gifts
without the gratitude of a healthy Thanksgiving child.

While it is possible to celebrate Independence Day
each in our own King George throne room
and firing-up our own gated backyard grills
of me-first red meat,
Thanksgiving Day more patriotically invites
a table large enough
for all us native creolizing waves of immigrants
to give thanks for all Earth’s healthy gifts
brought together by these
grace-filling
nutritional polyculturing elements.