How to Accept a Gift

Sherlock always appreciated the Christmas bounty of tissue paper

Now, I am not going into general Buddhist wisdom of the day, which talks about accepting every [obscenity] thing that happens to you as a great blessing that gives you plenty to work with and become wise.  I am really tired of hearing that, and am pretty sure it doesn't apply to my bipolar brain, which has often been given acute depression just because my happy/sad switches are genetically broken.  It's some logical fallacy, I think, to suggest that a depressed mind can be glad to be depressed; clinical depression is a neurochemical disaster one simply endures by eating potato chips and watching old episodes of Gray's Anatomy, and you are not grateful for those things, either.

No, I am not talking about cultivating that dance-with-the-demons wisdom.  I am talking about actual giving and receiving stuff as our biggest consumer holiday is barreling toward us here in America:  Christmas. Which has nothing to do with religion for most Americans today.  My subject is not giving, but receiving gifts with a generous heart.

We get out of the starting gate wrong as middle-class children in America, who are asked by Santa what they want.  Who are encouraged to write to Santa, detailing the list.  Who have seen enough TV commercials to internalize acute desire for some particular toy and begin nagging for it on Black Friday.  Thus is formed the habit of seeing Christmas as the time when you hope to get your heart's desire.  So it has nothing to do with generosity or gratitude; it's a kind of payday in the consumer culture. Though it never works for long.

As for you, a grownup, your heart's desire certainly isn't a hairy angora scarf knitted by Aunt Melba that will shed all over your new mulberry pea coat.  It's so weird, and so huge, this scarf, that at first you didn't even know what it was.  (Sometime, drinking wine with friends, you'll make a sort of funny-ironic story out of this.) It is totally not the right thing for that coat.  And you're allergic to wool, and isn't angora wool? Doesn't she know that? You resent that failure of knowing your needs and taste. You don't wear scarves like that.  It's ugly, it doesn't express your style.  So you say, "Thanks," and toss it aside and let's get on with things.

Now let's turn to the other party in this transaction.

Aunt Melba made this scarf especially for you, with loving memories of you as a child.  It took many hours, something you don't know, since you don't knit, and knitting always looks easy.  She had to work in fits and starts because now knitting makes her arthritic hands ache.  Sometimes she had to tear out rows, and figure out how to get it going right again; her mind isn't as quick as it used to be.  She had to be very dedicated to get it done in time.

She'd been looking forward to this annual visit.  She spent a happy hour picking out a yarn she thought was beautiful and would be warming and remind you of her love for you.  Yarn is not cheap; this yarn probably cost more than the designer scarf that would have pleased you.  And the scarf turned out just perfect, she thought. Your microexpression (a tiny frown of resentment at how wrong this gift is, it will go to the thrift store) does not escape her.  If you were paying attention, her expression would suggest that her heart sank.

Not all gifts are this important.  Suppose you meet with a girlfriend you only lunch with a couple of times a year, though it's an old friendship going way back, and you like each other.  Last summer you picked up a very special beeswax candle at the Farmer's Market, thinking it was just perfect for her; beeswax burns bright and long and has its own delicate natural fragrance. You know she likes to take baths by candlelight. You went to some trouble to wrap it in a nice box with tissue and ribbons. 

She says "Thanks" in an offhanded way.  Okay.  That didn't seem to work.  Then we are on to your gift from her, some bath oil.  Has she forgotten you can't take baths? a deprivation certain health problems brought about.  You thought you complained about it often enough that everybody knew this little bit of hard  luck.  The bath oil seems impersonal, like she was just getting one more gift out of the way.  In fact, is it possible she is just regifting what you gave her last year?  Maybe. You're afraid so.

Now, what do you say, dear?

You say, "Thank you.  This is beautiful."  You look at it.  In even the wrongest gift there is something to appreciate - the color, the packaging, the daintiness of it.  You say so. And lavender, my favorite scent.  

Because, like you, she wants her gift to be appreciated.  The fact that you can't use it has nothing to do with it.  This is not about you getting what you want; this is about the ritual of receiving with gratitude, even if the gift it is a child's wilted bouquet of dandelions.  It is about receiving with the understanding that the gifts you are given have nothing to do with your dreams being fulfilled.  It is ancient ritual, the full circle of giving and receiving.  For that to work, the receiver has to genuinely receive, and be nice.

If you see some Buddhist wisdom sneaking into that, okay, it can't be helped.

Touching Base

[image: Thanks to Chris Hardin for suggesting this illustrated quote as a fitting homage to Teena Price, who was a wild flower.]

I have relatives who don't love me the way I wish they would, don't you?  The weather has been too hot, the air quality is so bad I have to wear a mask outside, my moods are up and down, I'm having an awful time with sleep, and I have to wear elastic on three of my four limbs, and sometimes I hate all this...... But today I am shrugging these things off (all but the depression, to be truthfull).  The universe has been giving me opportunities to see my problems in perspective.

As I wrote previously, Saturday night was a wrenching memorial service for a friend who died last Thursday.  This morning a beloved friend was at our front door to tell us that another friend died yesterday.

Greg Houston was 61 years old and seemingly in good health.  His truck went off the road for no apparent reason, and he was dead by the time the medics got there.  Greg and his wife of over 40 years are important to us, and to many, many other people, because they are lovely people who exemplify a life of compassion and generosity.  For a couple of years Greg has come over periodically to help Tom with projects around the house; it was a joy to me to hear them working together, both so polite and careful.

Yesterday Tom got an e-mail from Greg asking if he'd like help with anything.  The subject line was, as always, Touching Base.  If you want to know what it means to "lead with your heart," Greg was a fine example; Greg actually touched base; he looked at people and saw what we needed.  And he didn't just say, "Call me if you need anything."  He offered specifically to come and help with projects, and did that many times.

Many people had to be called about Greg's death, because many people love someone like that, and he was a pillar of the church.  I expect his service to attract hundreds of people, and we will all weep.

I want to say something very quietly here about the contrast with Teena's death and her service that I wrote about yesterday.  She was 76 and had been ill and uncomfortable with advancing COPD for years.  She took months to die, gasping for air.  Her death was a release from suffering, and I was glad she finally got to rest.  You feel different when someone who dies is much younger than you and vital, and it is an accident.

And it is logical that many people loved Greg and Judy.  But is it logical that so few loved Teena?  I don't know.  It's not uncommon, but it feels wrong.

I have heard from several friends who relate strongly to the post I wrote yesterday that talked about the stigma we feel if we are mentally ill or just, like Teena, unconventional.  I have thought about how many Buddhists work in prisons, often as volunteers, where they know the suffering is acute, and they might be able to offer someone a little peace.  Many others work in hospices, spending time I'm sure with people like Teena, whose own families don't want to be there, or can't.

But out in the social world there is, generally, a sharp division between the people we find easy to love and the people we avoid, or downright dislike.  Too often, people bond in groups on the basis of their mutual loathing for Sarah Palin or their mother or people with brown skin or Christians or those that have not accepted their idea of God. 

Teena was disliked for exactly the qualities that some of us liked about her:  she was open and honest, she was an original.  She said what she thought without regard for the niceties.  She was generous to me and never in my life hurt my feelings, and I never saw her say anything mean.  But she was outspoken, and had an attitude about that.

I don't know what she might have said to another woman in the church who just a few months ago told me she didn't want Teena anywhere near her private birthday celebration.  Teena had wandered into the room where it was being held, having come to church to make a payment on her pledge.  She was in a wandering condition then, liked to go spend time at Whole Foods talking to anyone who would listen, and came to church at every opportunity.  But she was not invited to that small party, not that she should have been; it was private.

I asked that friend, "You have issues with Teena?"

She said coarsely, "Doesn't everyone?"

I said, "I don't."

I didn't like that, but it didn't rankle me until Teena died.  Then I found myself furious with that woman (who has some annoying qualities of her own).  She felt entitled to hate Teena, as I gather some of Teena's children may have, too.  I was afraid that woman would show up at Teena's service, for she is another person who hangs around the church a lot.  I knew I would not contain my anger at her if she did, and I would probably regret that and it would create an uncomfortable break in our social set. But she didn't come.

I wish Rev. Mark had thought to focus Teena's service on our need to soften our hearts toward "the people we find difficult to love," a phrase he used once in a service to encourage us to say aloud or silently during the Silence the name of someone we love - or find difficult to love.  That was valuable to me.  It let me whisper, that Sunday morning, my own father's name.  My father was a shit to me, but the extent of his venomous hatred was only revealed to me after he died. When I found out that he was giving my siblings huge sums of money, and none to me because I was "mentally unstable," I was beyond hurt and angry.  I was the only kid who drove to Zanesville to visit him a few months before his death on Father's Day.  We took him and my mother out to eat.  He gave every appearance of loving our company that day.  There you are.  Life with alcoholics.  They hate you behind your back.

But saying his name in church let me open my heart that little bit and begin the long, long journey of learning not to hate him (and the rest of them, in fact).  Speaking his name with a wish that he rest peacefully let me begin the work of adjusting to that painful reality.

Some of us who are wounded have to work to open our hearts at all, for anyone.  Almost everyone needs to work on opening it all the way, to a cheating spouse, to a neglectful mother or a father who raped you or the man who killed your son in a fight.  Maybe cultivating this willingness to love is actually the fundamental practice.  Jesus thought so.  If enough of us did it, there would be no more war.  Because there would be no more concept of "enemy."  Maybe there would be no more unhappiness.  Because anger and hatred, that's hell, you know it is.

Ten Tips for Not Ruining Your Life

Cruising the internet with my morning coffee, I have observed how attractive posts are that give numbered tips, maybe because a "tip" sounds easy, like "running" to the store or "popping" something in the oven.  We so hope that there's some easy way to fix our lives; I do, anyway, and increasingly I universalize me to we, in the conviction that we're all human.

My main tip, and this is really important for you young people, is --

1.  Just don't ruin your life.
You can do this with one spectacularly stupid act.  Bear in mind that whatever enhances Charlie Sheen's career - drugs, destroying things, sexual antics - will ruin yours.  (Is that why people are fascinated by Charlie Sheen?  Not my readers, of course, but the watchers of NBC's Inside Edition, which comes on right after the evening news, so I can hardly avoid seeing what they're covering each evening - which has been Charlie Sheen for some weeks now.  Maybe forever, since I have only been noticing this for a couple of weeks.)

2.  Never lie your glasses down on the bed.
Do I have to explain this?  It is one of the tempting little careless acts that end up with broken glasses, costing money and time and forcing you to go around half-blind, driving illegally and unable to read.  It will ruin at least one day and cost money.  There are many other small ways to trip yourself up, like not tying your shoes.  Be careful.

3.  Take the damn medicine.
Right now I personally have to stop this and take my 8:00 a.m. immunosuppressants.  There are some things you just shouldn't fool around resisting, or you can lose the transplant.  But there are many other cases, such as finishing the antibiotic, even though you definitely feel better.  Ah yes, and you can universalize this to such things as stopping to gas up the car and get some milk, things that are not so appealing as many other ways to spend time.  But that's reality.  So -

4.  Get over it.
Every life has its difficulties and disappointments, you'd be surprised.  All right, maybe not every life.  On the other hand, every life ends in death, and before that, experiences illness - if it's not chronic insomnia it's migraines or high arches.  Your suffering is not that special - Buddhists even have a chant to cover this, called The Five Remembrances.  Also note that hearing the recitation of your special hardships bores most people. If there is someone in your life who isn't bored by it, they are probably bad for you.

5.  Curb your envy.
A corollary to number 4.  Yes, Oliver Sacks found his way to a stellar career at a young age, and you (that is, I) still haven't.  But most envy is much closer to home, isn't it?  The brother Mom loved more.  That woman in church who has so much charisma and energy, and kept her figure, which isn't fair.  That leads me to --

6.  Don't expect life to be fair.
Not in the short run, that is.  The principle of justice the universe runs on is cause-and-effect, and that can take a while to play out.  This way of understanding things is not particularly owned by Buddhists, though we are famous for calling it karma.  It's in the Christian Bible, too:  you will reap what you sow.  Therefore --

7.  Be generous and kind.
Honest to God, it feels so good to take someone a casserole or surprise them with flowers or just really listen.  And the universe will send kindness back to you, though not necessarily from the same person.

8.  Don't think too much.
There's high-level thinking, like constructing crossword puzzles or addressing the problem of multi-resistant TB, but that's not what most of us do much of the time.  Most of us drift around in repetitive and useless thoughts, like how insane the Sarah Palin phenomenon is, or what Al Gore should have done.  (See how quickly these things pass?)

9.  Don't express your opinion.
Actually, hardly anyone cares what you think, except for the person who's going to take offense.  And if someone does ask you what you think, be wary - they might be trying to trip you up. Or just waiting for their turn.  And do you really want to hear their opinion?

10.  Don't insist on learning everything the hard way.
That is, by bitter experience.  Listen to your grandma and wear your boots.Yet, even as I write this I know you - ah, we - do have to learn most things on our own.  I wish I could spare you some suffering; that's why I've written these tips.  But if you don't learn anything, at least I've given you a short break from work.

Well, this is tempting me to go on to enumerate some of life's hard facts, my favorite these days being, It's always something.  I could say a lot about this.  For instance, it is not necessarily one thing at a time, and you don't necessarily get a chance to catch your breath.  But I'll save that for another list.

Last night I got a conjunction of circumstances you could read something into.  I looked up from my reading to find a red-bellied woodpecker (oh, the naming of birds, for he has no red on his belly) hanging onto the feeder, which has been given a designated woodpecker mix for a week now, eating hard.  That’s how they do eat with that long, sharp bill, designed for probing bark.

The bird was not in the little bird book we keep there.  I wandered the house until I found in my study the field guide, a much more inclusive bird book, that gave me his name.  The ID was solid: a male, with the long bright cap they have.  They go 9 - 10 ½ inches long, a handsome piece of bird.  They are described as having a zebra back.

It must have been while I was hunting the book that Susan left the orchid at the door.  You don’t leave orchids sitting around in just any weather, but it was still about 80 degrees and humid, threatening rain - just what an orchid likes.  Susan is visiting from out of town and had written that she wanted to get together.  The card on the orchid said that she has a cold, and that’s the one thing she doesn’t want to give me.  So here’s another orchid.  That gives me a nice little orchid farm, two big ones and a healthy little one.  It seems to be fairly hard to kill an orchid, as long as you don’t overwater them.     The one she gave me last year has done well, and is blooming again.

The squirrel at the feeder was cute for a while.  Now I am tired of him.  I want that juvenile cardinal back, to make sure that’s what it was.  And what happened to the blue jay?  The goldfinches don’t like that particular feeder, and the woodpecker seed is much too big for them.  They should like the Niger thistle in the adjacent feeder, but they don’t. The squirrel seems to discourage everything else.

The squirrel is insatiable.   Tom comments that he is a self-limiting problem.  I thought about that.  The squirrel(s) will eventually get too darn fat to jump from the side of the house to the feeder, or go down face-first off the roof.  Thus an equilibrium will set in, in which the squirrels sit obese on the ground and eat acorns like they should and lose some weight, and the feeder is visited by the birds of my choice.

“Self-limiting problem” is one of those fundamental laws of physics, like equilibrium.  Like the humidity that has been hanging in the air.  The air can only hold so much water; then it gathers and falls.  This is happening right now beyond my window.  Individual leaves on the Carters’ bush bounce and shine wet.  Maybe the rain will let loose, and we’ll all feel better.  Or maybe this cold front will pass on.  Either way an equilibrium of sorts has been restored, the way your heart feels healed by a generous, unexpected gift and the sighting of a beautiful bird taking what you have to offer.
[image:  male Red-bellied woodpecker, photo freely given by Ken Thomas]

Monetizing yourself

[image: a morning glory in a local garden, unrelated to the subject today, perhaps]
I like to observe "hits" on the blog, so I have Statcounter up along the side. Today around noon it topped 10,000. That's individual times people logged on, that's all, not how long they stayed. Still, it tickled me.

Every time I get on to write a new post, I am given the choice to go bigger, to "monetize" the blog. A new word? No. Merriam-Webster tells me it appeared around 1879, and can mean -
3 : to utilize (something of value) as a source of profit

There's a lot of that around, isn't there? Times being harder, many people are trying to make money doing things they used to do for fun, to sell their arts and crafts on websites like etsy. I shopped for Christmas in the gymnasium at our community rec center, and bought two hand-dyed silk shirts and a glass-bead necklace of Mittens and snowmen, which my mother-in-law loved. All were priced so that the artist probably didn't make minimum wage for her labor. It made me kind of sad. It appears again and again, the hopefulness of the talented that somehow you can make a living at art. But almost no one does. I wish I could talk to aspiring young artists and explain, first you figure out what to make a living at, something that doesn't sap your creative energy or demand overtime. Figure out how to live on very little, decide what will be enough for you. Then use your spare time to throw yourself into your art. Think of your art as your gift to the world, not your passport to wealth.

According to Sunday's NY Times, the young people entering college are figuring out, some of them anyway, that they will eventually need to make a living. They want useful majors. I used to hate that crass commercialism when I was an idealistic young teacher, willing to work for not very much to do something I loved. Now I see it as enviably realistic.

There's always a Zen story back in my mind somewhere. This one appears often, about the old Chinese Zen master Hykujo whose students try to get him to retire. You can read the short anecdote here. I have come to realize that this aphorism is not an abstraction about How We Should Live. As the Great Recession grips in, with the real unemployment rate at over 17%, according to some analysts, a lot of people are starting to understand what our simpler ancestors never doubted: "No work, no food."

Men, women, and giving

I often think of the real (though, of course, general) differences between men and women, and of how urgently we need to elevate the qualities of the feminine. One of those is not making war. Another is nurturing, feeding others, which I think is a feminine quality that goes deeper than socially conditioned roles. Today, a little story in The Urban Dharma Newsletter in my mailbox struck me as almost amusing, because it illustrates the difference, though not to say anything about the sexes. It is making a larger point about how scrupulous piety is no substitute for authentic compassion. Here it is, in my words.

The Bhagavata Purana tells of a time when Krishna's hungry friends ask him to feed them. Krishna tells them, "Go to the nearby temple, where the learned Brahmins are performing an elaborate ritual to attain heaven. Tell them I sent you, and ask them for some cooked rice."

The young men go, bow deeply to the priests and say, "Venerable saints, we are the servants of Lord Krishna. He is hungry and has asked us to seek food from you."

The Brahmins are busy. This is like interrupting Sunday morning service in the middle of the sermon. It isn't done.

Anyway, they are important people, and their lives are scheduled, meditation at certain hours, study at other times, purification rituals. They brush the young followers off. Maybe one of them says, "Come back when we're open. We only do food between the hours of 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. And go around to the back door." Something like that. I don't know whether these young men are homeless, but if they're hungry, they clearly aren't of the same class.

They go back and tell Krishna what happened. He is not surprised. This whole thing is meant to be instructive. He tells them, "Now go to the same men's wives and ask them."

Maybe the young followers are somewhat dubious by now, but you do what the boss tells you. They go to the women. This time their story is, "Lord Krishna is in the neighborhood, and he told us to ask you for food for our hungry group." [So it's like I'm raising money for my high school band.]

When they hear this, the women drop everything, gather huge bowlfuls of the best food in the house, and rush "like rivers towards the ocean" to Krishna, glad to have a chance to give, their hearts full.

Here ends this part of the story. Now, don't anybody call me a femininazi. I didn't make it up. And in any case, bless Christmas. Whatever else is wrong with our holidays, in this season we are sometimes moved to give from a genuine surge of generosity and compassion.