On Having a Good Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving 2011

I had a fine night's sleep, not that common when you're in your seventies, and awoke with a peaceful mind.  I'm going to a planned-potluck Thanksgiving dinner at the church, and have only one thing to cook.  Japanese sesame spinach from the Low-Fat Moosewood cookbook is served cold, so I won't have to dance in the flash mob in the kitchen to heat it up.

Into my empty mind came the remembrance of Thanksgivings past, in which I drove I-71 from Columbus to my parent's house on Greenlawn Avenue in Akron in the worst traffic of the year - bumper to bumper at 72 mph.  During that drive I would vow things like, "He's not going to get to me this time," and "I'm not going to get mad at anybody today."

In time my parents moved to a small apartment in a nearby town, and Cassie held the Annual Dysfunction, as someone later termed it, not in jest, then my father died and we all went to a horribly expensive restaurant.  Then I held it in my house.  Then my mother died.  Then my sister moved to Australia.  Then my brother finished his dying of liver cancer.   Things change.

Midstream we began the Thanksgiving dinner at the church.  It was something Tina came to - her family didn't like her, either - but she died last year.  I miss her acerbic presence in my life; she was irreplaceable.  Well, they all are.  We all are.

I didn't know much about vowing back then.  Nor was I in the habit of expressing my anger, irritation, resentment - just kept them on simmer.  Of course, that kind of vow is an evil virus that can take over all your feelings and put them in the deep freeze we call depression.

I've been teaching the Great Vows for all, and thinking how the second vow is a natural for this great family holiday in this country of rampant consumerism -

Greed, anger, and ignorance arise endlessly, vowing to cut off the mind road.

They do arise.  And the vow is not to stop them.  The vow is to let them pass, the way you do when you meditate.  The vow is to get off the long train of resentments, preferences, desires, by doing something else.  Cut off the mind road of long stories, hear the music, and enter the dance.

Getting Pinched

When you are practicing generosity, you should feel a little pinch when you give something away. That pinch is your stinginess protesting. If you give away your old, worn-out coat that you wouldn’t be caught dead wearing, that is not generosity. There is no pinch.
Gelek Rinpoche

So this morning my dharma mailing from Tricycle got to me. Generosity, is it? Yesterday I pledged to my church for next year, more than I had thought I would. It put me in mind of the fact that I had not made my monthly donation to extreme poverty. (You can see a post about this here.)

What I pledged to give to poverty is not that much money every month. Heck, only yesterday I spent $10 on clothes at the thrift store that are pure luxury - I do not need the colorful unlined blazer or the nice woven straw purse, irrespective of what great bargains they were. I have purses enough to last how many lifetimes? I don't know. They are mostly from my old life, I mean pre-old economy and pre-Buddhist practice. As for unnecessary spending, I don't have the heart to tell you what I spent on my weekly lunch at Red Lobster with my good friend. You do that, there's a brief pinch, Ouch, when you get the bill. But it's different - you gave that to yourself. In a way, flaunting the rules. (Delusion?)

Ah, the pinch of stinginess. Me, mine, want. In Zen we say the Four Great Vows, one of which addresses this:

Greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly; I vow to abandon them.

So it means I, in myself, vow to step back from my greed, or call it stinginess. The Bodhissatva vow, for that matter, is about giving, listening, helping out a little bit.

Giving and feeling that pinch of stinginess - this detachment from the constructed ego and reflexive desires is hard to explain. It is not self-sacrifice or martyrdom but detachment from our preferences, call them desires. We still have them. They pinch sometimes. Ow.

. . . Ha, a chickadee on the near bush. He hung upside down for a moment, then off. Spring has retreated here to cooler weather, but the birds are singing and nesting and the daffodils are pushing up, committed to their annual agenda, to bloom in the snow.