How to Have Happy Holidays in Spite of it All

With empty hands, I take hold of the plow

The last couple of days have been hard for me, with a major weather system blowing me away yesterday, as it can fibromyalgics.  Three days ago, Wednesday, I came home from collage to find Tom at the kitchen table looking stressed, with a bloody gauze pad on his forehead.  He had fallen and hit his head on a corner of the hutch.  He may have been saved from being blinded in that eye by the fact that his glasses initially took the blow.  We are so close that I "lose it" when I am frightened for him.  Lose my equanimity and become all a-tremble.

I was already shaken.  My beloved women friends and I had been sharing the general pain of the Sandy Hook shootings here in America - 20 schoolchildren, six teachers, and two mentally ill people all died.  The mentally ill people were Nancy Lantz and her son, Adam.  Nancy owned at least five weapons, including the semi-automatics that can kill a lot of kindergartners in a minute, whether you can aim or not.  But Adam knew how to aim -she'd taken him target shooting.  And he knew where to get his hands on guns.  Nancy was a brand of everyday walking-around paranoia, a survivalist, who'd stocked up on food and water and guns. 

A lot has already been accomplished.  I read this morning that various of the United States, including my own Ohio, have passed funding for the treatment of autism. So many of us have petitioned the White House that President Obama has replied via a video.  People are turning in guns in Connecticut, where they understand now that people with guns kill people.  But the work is far from done.

It is our work as people of good will, Christians, Buddhists, atheists, all citizens, to stay with this work, but not to let it destroy us.  I awoke this morning realizing that I need to bring myself back emotionally from too much empathy and emotion.  It is a very good motivator, but the work of change needs a clear head.  So there's a Zen koan, "With empty hands I take hold of the plow."  I can actually visualize this, hands relaxed on the plow.  (The painting above is one of several van Gogh made of ploughmen.) 

The empty hands mean we work from our understanding of the universal, of all the dynamic and potential of life.  So we need to be refreshed by spiritual practice and by celebration, by love and friendship and our understanding of the constant miracle of birth.

Botticelli, The Birth of Christ (attended by the animals)

If the people are buying dreams . . .

This morning, on the heels of writing about Oprah last night, I am remembering a song I loved, by Melanie. This kind of protest music was what was so good about the seventies.  Note the line "If the people are buying dreams, I'll be rich someday." 

We do buy dreams.  God knows I like the controlled dreams we call fictions; I like them on the page and all my screens - Kindle, TV, Droid.  I like to play the dreams like Spirit in which you try to beat back those forces of death - very realistic, because you can never win. But you get your adrenalin up trying. And it diverts you from your pain.

I don't like the dreams that are sold to us constantly on these screens.  Just watch commercial TV for an hour, or make note of the ads that come to you in an hour online, in your inbox, on Facebook, on YouTube, almost everywhere you go except here and Wikipedia (that's why I contribute to it).  For men, poor guys, the dream of a car or truck that is so masculine it can do anything, speed, drag out stumps.  For women, the feminine dream of youth, beauty, desirability.  For kids, the dream of winning.  Gender-free, the dream of Something for Nothing.  Damn.

You can't stop this sludgy flow like a river through your life unless you live off the grid in Montana.  Even there I suppose a blimp could fly over, or a plane towing a banner.  What you have to do is distinguish dream from your reality.  The news is telling me a lot of people are doing that right now, returning Christmas gifts they bought in the fever of Black Friday, and apparently got home and realized they'd been out of their minds, and couldn't afford these things they bought on credit, and are now returning them.  (That's why paying actual cash dollars is so helpful - you know when you run out of cash.)

So, this Christmas, also be careful of the dreams of perfect family, of drastically re-forming yourself with resolutions, of gaining eternal life through exercise or herbs, of giving or receiving the perfect gift.  Just take it as it comes, good old reality.  In a way, it never lets you down.

A Christmas Memory

Every day's a bad day in an alcoholic family. Yet, my Christmas memories include some joys.

What made joy possible was that at Christmas, my father relaxed, deeply and in some indefinable way. A smart, good-looking veteran of World War II, he would today be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder; he was hypervigilant, inappropriate, and habitually abusive. But at Christmas he touched down for a while into the place that is represented in the movies by soft, golden light.

This transformation was signalled by his purchase of a couple of pounds of mixed nuts in the shell, which he enjoyed cracking and picking in his easy chair, and a five-pound box of Brach's mixed chocolates. I don't think he ever knew gourmet chocolates existed; maybe he remembered Brach's from his childhood, when it would have been a great treat. He was born in 1920 to a steelworker who eeked out the family income by raising vegetables and pigs. When storebought ketchup came into the house, he and his brothers would fight over it, and drink it all straight from the bottle.

Like many children of the last great depression, he was obsessively uncertain about money. Thrift was automatic. But at Christmas, that relaxed, as if he temporarily stepped into enlightenment, into the reality of our middle-class prosperity.

We of course put up as large a tree as the front room would hold, and hung it lavishly in just a certain way (three strands at a time) with tinsel that was saved neatly year after year. It was always topped by a simple, rather ugly star. He strung more lights across the valance of the draw drapes, all this with much swearing and people tiptoeing around the bad mood that was habitual when he was working. It must have been after all that effort that he could count the job done, and come home with candy and nuts and relax into a sense of being on vacation.

It didn't seem to have anything to do with Christianity. I never saw any sign of him caring about religion until after his death, when I found an old poem on his desk, "Crossing the Bar." It speaks about the hope of meeting God after dying. I don't suppose he ever thought he met God while he was alive. He wouldn't have thought of his Christmas happiness that way, or of his joy in buying generous gifts at the last minute as being a virtue, the way we talk about the practice of generosity in Buddhism. It was fun. It was "taking it easy for a change."

But it was more. The other place one might see him in a similar mood was at "the farm," a large piece of hilly acreage he bought as soon as he could afford it, as a place to go camping and eventually build a pond and a cabin. Nature does that for a lot of people, even those who are disillusioned with organized religion and everything else about human society. He probably experienced it as soothing, comforting.

On the farm, which was 240 unfarmable acres, there were places he could stand and turn, and everything you saw was his. Not even a fence in sight. He died there alone in 1997, of a massive stroke. Rather than imagine that, I like to remember him as he was in his forties, relaxed and expansive in his armchair, an Old-fashioned at hand, cracking walnuts so they came out in two perfect halves.