In honor of the upcoming Thanksgiving... gratitude

I woke up today. I am grateful for the chance I have again to make the best of a day. If I should fail to meet my or others' expectations, I will hopefully get another chance tomorrow to again, wake up, and feel grateful...

Every day, think as you wake up: Today I am fortunate to have woken up. I am alive. I have a precious human life. I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry, or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can. --The Dalai Lama

At times today I have felt desire. I have so many desires. I think the good news is that I have few needs, and none are unmet. I am grateful for my wellbeing and an awareness of my desires...

When you are discontent, you always want more, more, more. Your desire can never be satisfied. But when you practice contentment, you can say to yourself, 'Oh yes – I already have everything that I really need.' -- The Dalai Lama

At mealtime my family expresses gratitude for the day and what is before us. I am grateful for my friends, and family and the tremendous prosperity that surrounds me...

The creatures that inhabit this earth – be they human beings or animals – are here to contribute to the beauty and prosperity of the world. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, have not just dropped from the sky. This is why we should be grateful to all our fellow creatures. --The Dalai Lama

I have been reading from David Whyte's Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. His meditation on gratitude is particularly excellent. The emphasis is mine. I am grateful for wise men like Whyte and the Dalai lama to point out the things the good and positive people all around me have been telling me for years...

Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a-priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously, part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face in the mountains, of a son’s outline against the sky, is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witness all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.  --David Whyte

A Buddhist Un-still life... alone

1. Once upon a time, forever now,  there was a short-haired monkey with long braids who lived at the edge of a desert near the flatlands where the big water meets the broad sky amidst the tall trees of the jungle in the highlands of the craggy plateau. Now you might imagine that the certitude of this space was fantastical in its nature, and there, you might be correct in your disbelief of the thought required to accept that which is most certainly ambiguous...

2. That is to say, quite circuitously, nothing is as it seems to be; and all that is, is a function of its proximity to that which isn't—in its being—there...

3. Now "all great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town," but this isn't great literature, nor is it even much of a story, and it isn't even about a man... therefore our primate of discussion will neither travel nor be visited in this moment... for no destination is distant to him (as he is there already), and no stranger will come to visit him (as all who might arrive are not strangers, and as he is already present despite being a stranger to himself)...

4. The monkey is alone and he is afraid. He does not know his fear and so is happily, spastically, hyper-ly reflective in his calm tranquility of speedy unaware introspective being...

5. He runs about his clearing, visiting with all those who are not there and chattering away to each in their own tongue, babbling and cheetering while waving his hands—with elegant opposable thumbs—about the sky as if painting something profoundly mundane in the air with pigments of his own imagination...

6. The monkey is not aware of the fear of being alone that lingers in his hairless core, as his self-awareness is tied to his self-compassion. If he were to place thought to this, he would realize a deep reluctance to being left to himself in that jumbled clearing of mind...

7. It is a noisy life of seclusion in the cluttered no-space where the chorus sings voicelessly to the monkey—who would seek peace if he were only able to grasp the no-monkey nature of his non-monkey mind. "For a solitary life to flourish...aloneness asks us to make friends of silence." And the monkey chatters away waving his hands until he becomes exhausted with the volume of the lack of other-sound...

8. And then, in that tiredness, in an instant of immense improbability the self-condemned monkey stumbles upon the random idea of non-monkey-ness and chooses to swim. He dives deeply into he nearby pool to drown out the cacophony of silence. And there in the pressure of the depths—a clamorously muffled murky green—choosing replaces sentencing and the silence mingles with the chatter. The monkey-fish emerges from the settled sediment-less waters and settles himself upon a nearby white lotus... prepared to sit in the stillness and watch his monkey-mind alone. Ah, the lotus, though! He seems to fit upon it as if it were fashioned to be just so... (and yet we know that too to be just perception, as fit is more in the mind than in reality)...

•. And the monkey sits fitted with the lotus in the silence. And to describe that fit, upon the lake, seated in the afternoon light, in the space between the extremes, while connected to everything and nothing (all at once and in succession) would defy words, save one, right. And the monkey, aware, raises his head, lets loose a quiet squeak of immense contentment and peace, and he lowers his eyes to gaze upon nothing in its perfection...

The donative heart: An implicit promise for the future...

The quirks that give us away: It is not so strange when we acquire language from others that is unique, quirky, identifiable as such by those who pay attention to language; I say wicked (Boston), and ya'll without a drawl (Mid-Atlantic). I make my A's long (Can't and Aunt sound like Ant), and turn my T's into D's (Baltimore is BALL-di-more, hon). The web is full of question and answer games that place your linguistic footprint, or try to guess your location from these clues. [Here is a really interesting one from the NYTimes. The graphics are such fun.]

Of acorns and trees: But it is a little more strange when we acquire words—or more importantly word usages—from individuals (that is not so regionalized), and are able to gain an insight into where we picked up that usage...

The heart of the giving: One such word is my love of the word donative. I've used it for years, preferring it to it's kin, charitable. It seemed normal to use, yet I have realized that others around me do not always understand how I use it. This summer as I was speaking with my father about kindness and giving while using the word donative my father pointed out to me that he likes how I use the word; I realized then that I use his word. I had not specifically thought that it was his, but realized that I have long heard him use it; it makes sense that I picked it up from him. He pointed out to me that the word is not used much anymore, and I laughingly told him it is a good word anyway...

Popularity of the word "Donative."

Donative shows up in writing in the 16th century, but has Latin roots. The oldest Latin is just "to give," and over time came to be a formal giving tied to an organization. I realize my father and I use it incorrectly. The definition of the word is:

It seems so formal, this definition. It is not how we use it. We use donative in a way that describes the spirit of the gift, the heart of the intent as a selfless act. There is a purity implied in the way we both use the word to describe, that reflects our deep value of the charitableness that we are all capable of when we place the other ahead of ourselves—the love that is implied in the act of giving. It is not about merely cutting a check for a charity we like. It carries with it the baggage of Kindness (with a capital K), the example that he might attribute to the love of Christ, or I, the full understanding of a bodhisattva's compassion...

An implicit promise for the future: I have been blessed with such a wealth of positive relationships in my life that I am at times overwhelmed with the gift of it all. I continue to grow and see more and become more as a result of these people in my life. One good friend recently sent me a book of meditations on everyday words by a poet named David Whyte, Consolations. The following are excerpts from his entry on giving. Although I have stripped these lines from their larger linear context, I believe what I offer below represents good wisdom. It captures what I see as part of the heart of that word donative that my father and I use so similarly...

Giving is a difficult and almost contemplative art form that has to be practiced to be done well; to learn to give is almost always the simple, sometimes heartbreaking act of just giving again.

...all gifts change with the maturation of their recipients.

...it means getting beyond the boundaries of our own needs, it means understanding another and another's life...

Giving means paying attention and creating imaginative contact with the one whom we are giving, it is a form of attention itself, a way of acknowledging and giving thanks for lives other than our own.

...to surprise the recipient by showing that someone else understands them and through a display of giving virtuosity, can even identify needs they cannot admit themselves. The full genius of gift giving is found when we give what a person does not fully feel they deserve...

To give is also to carry out the difficult task of putting something of our own essence in what we have given. 

...but to give appropriately, always involves a tiny act of courage, a step of coming to meet, of saying I see you, and appreciate you and am also making an implicit promise for the future.

Quotes from David Whyte's Consolations.