Everybody who smokes knows the high though: It shows up around the second hit, feels like the most important idea you’ve ever had, and is gone by breakfast. High Journal is our case for writing it down. Take a few prompts, a pen and whatever you’re smoking. This month, for Thanksgiving, the prompts are about gratitude.
Gratitude lists have a reputation for being a little vague. My health, my family, my friends. All true, and all easy to write without thinking about any of it. There’s a much older way to give thanks and it asks for a lot more attention with a lot more reverence.
The Haudenosaunee, the Six Nations of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora, open their gatherings with a Thanksgiving Address. In Mohawk it’s called Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the words that come before all else. Before any other business, the speaker gives thanks to the natural world one part at a time: the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the trees, the birds, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars, among others. Each section closes with the same line: Now our minds are one.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes in Braiding Sweetgrass about hearing the Address open the school week at the Onondaga Nation School. It’s long, she notes, and non-Native visitors sometimes get impatient with it, but the length is there because there’s that much to be thankful for.
The Address isn’t ours to recite, and we’re not going to borrow it. You can read the English version from the Six Nations Indian Museum and the Tracking Project, hosted by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (https://americanindian.si.edu/environment/pdf/01_02_Thanksgiving_Address.pdf). What we can learn from is how it’s built. It’s specific and goes in order. It starts with the things that keep you alive, the ones so constant you forget to notice them. And it closes by inviting everyone to give thanks, in their own way, for anything that was left out.
That’s a pretty good outline for a gratitude list, so it’s the outline for this one.
What’s something ordinary you’d genuinely miss if it disappeared tomorrow? Start where the Address starts, with the things too constant to notice. Hot water in the morning. The light in your kitchen around four o’clock. The person at the corner store who already knows your order. The more boring it sounds, the better it works.
What’s gotten better that you almost forgot used to be hard? Good things stop feeling like gifts once they’re normal. A hard year that’s finally behind you. A fight you don’t have anymore. For a lot of us, walking into a store and buying weed with a receipt. Write down the before and the after.
What’s something someone taught you without realizing it? Most of the people who taught us the most never knew they were doing it. The friend who showed you how to roll. The grandmother who always set an extra plate. The coworker who said no without apologizing. Name them, and if they’re still around, maybe tell them.
Before you start, a little set and setting. The phrase comes out of 1960s psychedelic research, and it means that how you feel going in and where you are shape where you end up. It works for journaling, too.
Set refers to your head. Before you write anything, take a minute to notice what’s already on your mind. Maybe it’s the night before a big family day, maybe it’s the quiet after one. Write that down first, so it isn’t sitting on top of everything else.
Setting is your space. Pick one spot and make it yours for half an hour: a chair, a candle, a blanket, paper instead of your phone, which will absolutely pull you somewhere else. Roll one or grab a Mini, light the candle, and give yourself ten minutes per prompt without editing. Quiet Times is built for this kind of evening, with softer terpenes like linalool and bisabolol.
Read it back the next morning and keep whichever line still holds up sober. If you’re hosting this year, you could read one answer out loud before dinner, or keep it in the notebook. Both count!
One more thing worth writing down: Since 1970, United American Indians of New England has gathered in Plymouth, Massachusetts, every Thanksgiving for a National Day of Mourning, to tell the history the holiday mythology leaves out. This year it falls on Nov. 26. Being grateful and knowing where things came from aren’t in conflict, and a good gratitude list has room for both.
Now go find a pen and a joint. Ideally, one of ours.
