THE SECOND HELPING

At the feeding frenzy that is Thanksgiving, it's not hard to see what Americans mean when they insist God helps those who help themselves. I for one am still waiting to taste the Harvard beets that never got to me six years ago because somebody else short-stopped them and dug in too deep. This year the white meat was gone by the time I got to the turkey.

The morning after this beloved ritual of stuffing, grabbing gravy, and insisting everything has been served with a sprinkle of God’s blessing, it's also easy to see how the Protestant ethic, God helps those who help themselves, is the modus operandi of America's gluttonous economic system too. That's become the same sort of feeding frenzy, only with different people at the table. Once we ordinary “turkeys” are eagerly killed and gobbled up, these stuffed ones help themselves to the gravy made from us. Only they don't bother to pretend to give thanks.

A society this devoted to helping yourself has created a weird hierarchy in which people get rewarded in inverse proportion to how they benefit others. We so value grabbing over sharing, those who actually commit their lives to doing something vital for somebody else—social workers, schoolteachers, caregivers-- end up trashed at the poverty level of an income scale that shoots to the moon for people who do absolutely nothing but play with money, people who say of themselves, "we eat what we kill" without the slightest compunction to share. If you don’t believe me about the perversion of payrolls, read the Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman who this morning said in the New York Times, “there’s broad agreement — I’m tempted to say, agreement on the part of almost everyone not on the financial industry’s payroll — with Mr. Turner’s assertion that a lot of what Wall Street and the City do is “socially useless.”

The Buddha, of course, said the cosmos helps those who help others, because what goes round comes back at you. That’s karma, or destiny, a promise that it really is good for you to do and be good to others. And it isn’t supposed to be fattening.

As it happens, on the Dzogchen Ponlop paramita practice calendar, November is for meditation, which he says actually means honing the qualities of a Bodhisattva. First and most famously among them is the will to help others. So to balance the press prattle about takers, I’d like thank some givers. And I’d like to start with all those anonymous folks who spend their entire work year sewing up and blowing up those awesome balloons in the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Snoopy… Superman… Santa Claus…how wondrous to work only to put joy in the world! What would life be like if everyone’s job goal was to make others innocently happy like that?

I would like thank those who actually forego all monetary income and physical pleasures to become bearers of the Buddhadharma, actually living out the aspiration to help all sentient beings. This is not so easy. The Rinpoche level requires the stamina and stoicism for endless airport marathons of security checks, visa approvals and missed connections. Plus a punishing schedule with a different location almost every week, surprise food and strange beds, infinite interviews with total strangers, infinite requests for help. How they suffer to alleviate others' suffering.

At the lower levels, the food is terrible and the accommodations anything but gracious. Think floor. I think about an accomplished monk who struggled mightily without English language skills or familiarity to stick to his post in the middle of nowhere Colorado. Last year at this time, when he was packed and ready, he was denied a visa that would have let him go home to see his seriously ill mother in the Himalayas. He is still here, smiling and guiding those in retreat while other monks considered also seriously devoted to the Dharma burst out of their robes because the bright temptations of our culture—the gifts, attention and meals respectfully offered—blinded them to the beauty of their calling. Suddenly it seemed bleak. Now one is wandering somewhere in Ohio, struggling to find a job, finding out that no one tends to the needs of just another unemployed, unskilled guy in jeans.

I give thanks to the Nepali bamboo flute genius Manose who for the last two years has been circling the globe delighting and inspiring people with intensely sacred sound from his bansuri. His music so touches the human spirit that his CDs keep topping the charts and selling out, not only at yoga centers but Target stores. “I have enough money,” he says, “and it just keeps coming so I tell people: ‘Don’t pay me. Send money to help people in Nepal.’”

Thanks also to everyone who plucks a guitar string, hits a piano key or blows into a flute because no harm can come from this, only joy—after all the frustration of getting it right, of course. But thanks for sticking to the flatted fifths and syncopations and scat singing, because I totally agree with the country music disk jockey who used to close his hour-long NPR show with the tag line: “Just remember, making music is never the wrong thing to do.”

And thanks to those like Emmanuel from Silicon Valley by way of Nigeria who two weeks ago saw a photo of school kids in Nepal playing soccer in bare feet, and immediately tapped out an email message saying: “Soccer is my sport so I’d like those kids to love it too. I want to buy them shoes. How can I do that?”

Like Sioga who wrote from Ireland last week, “I am a retired nurse, a Buddhist for 35 years…a mother of two adult sons, widow and farmer, horse breeder and master gardener, with a passion for gardening. This past summer I spent in voluntary work with Wwoof Ireland, 'willing workers on organic farms traveling around Ireland, working in various gardens, tunnels, restoring a walled-garden, composting, soil amending, small animal care, and learned so much, shared of myself, time and talents in this exchange. …So, I have experience and confidence in the garden, and kitchen and would be glad to offer to be of service.”

Thanks even to those like the San Francisco dentist who last week said: “Even if you don’t have insurance coverage, I feel so strongly you should have X-rays that I will only charge you half price.” What a tidy resolution to a health care crisis!


~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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YES WE CAN

Forget the title above,
It's incorrect.
Computers are despotic.

The real title is Season's Eatings!
The real point is Joy to the World!
Thanks and giving at the table.

Chinese with Tibetans
Korean and Mexican
Nepalese and a Spaniard

What the world's coming to
is the table.
Happily.

Birthday in Zanskar
Married in Brooklyn
Reunion in San Francisco

A few friends
A little food
A thrill to be alive.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.

Yours In The Dharma 2001-2008, Sandy Garson @copy: 2001-2008 Sandy Garson
All rights Reserved

STUFFING

America’s Color War had truce for a day. Squabbling stopped so everybody in the country—the rednecks, bluebloods, greens and blacks-- could sit down to gobble turkey, except perhaps those who were eating crow. In the roughly same nine-hour time frame, over 250 million human beings spread from the squat of Aroostook County to the splat of San Diego became one giant turkey focus group, 30 million forkfuls per hour of dark or white meat with cranberry, stuffing and pumpkin pie. That includes a huge extended family of Tibetans worrying because they’d never cooked a turkey before, a Chilean family that went to a friend’s, the Chinese family that came to my house and the South Africans I joined afterwards. The newspaper says even our troops in Iraq stopped fighting long enough to eat Thanksgiving dinner. Isn’t the power of food awesome? Grease on earth.

Like a magnet waved over the landmass from sea to shining sea, a bird herded us, despite our flaunted diversity, into one robotic feast food nation. It makes you wonder if in his heyday Stalin had such totalitarian conformity. Hitler did because he made the Gestapo dumpster dive to be certain housewives were serving only German fare like ham hocks with sauerkraut and not foreign food like roast beef or coq au vin. But that can’t happen here because we are a freedom crazed people, a nation of rugged diehard individualists who insist with guns in our pocket that life be served our way. Nobody orders us around-- except the fourth Thursday of November when an invisible hand pushes us to pass on the cheeseburger and order turkey. DeToqueville admired us as a nation of plucky volunteers and look how we all volunteer to be cowed into sheepishly flocking to the supermarket to herd into the same brightly lit aisles desperately seeking the very same menu ingredients.

It’s a bit odd of course that a nation so gaga over the new, so proud of disposables and so keen on makeovers, a country whose men are going to the moon while its kids are going to hell, has yet to throw over this quaint tradition for something younger, mean and lean. We may go through airport security lines instead of over the river and through the woods, we may be wireless with earphones on our heads instead of Pilgrim hats, but we are still wired up to get to the table on the same old day to eat the same old dinner. And nobody wants to be the turkey who messes with it. We are in fact so slavish to the set menu, there are turkey camps and turkey hotlines. Friends of mine went to dine with a strict vegetarian who assured them she knew how to make a fabulous brined turkey.

At another great tribal feast, Passover, four pointed questions get asked about why at this moment certain items must be on the menu. The one question not asked at Thanksgiving is why 250 million of us have turkey on ours. It is not exactly a top of the food chain A List heart’s desire like lobster and while we were out grabbing our 20 lbs this year, historians were arguing whether or not turkey and Thanksgiving even existed. Maybe the fowle mentioned in the scribble was duck or flyover Canada geese. Maybe like native seacoast tribes they ate seafood such as smoked clams and oysters or like English fishermen who came way before them the Plymouth pilgrims were a people under cod. Maybe they had nothing to eat. But we do and it’s so terrifying to overturn the turkey tradition to which we all cling, I’ve steadfastly cooked turkeys for the last 25 years. I may have broken more than my share of rules in my life, but I am not about to be the revolutionary who cries: Let them eat hake!

You could say this meal has four questions too: turkey in or out of the bag? Truss? Stuff or don’t stuff? How much should you stuff yourself? After all, this is great gorge, the annual manifestation of all American know how, harvest of can do. The celebration of abundance isn’t celebrated properly until you’re sickeningly full from doing all the eating you can do. And then you run it off by running around doing all the shopping you can do, stuffing stockings and mailboxes and shopping carts in 30 days or less. This, our one universally scripted and shared American holiday, begs the question: is our nation’s motto really: in God we trust, or Fill’er up!

We even supersize by stuffing the refrigerator. Evidently we’ve got not just an imprinted impulse to fill the oven with a big Bird on Thursday morning and our stomachs on Thursday afternoon but an imprinted fear of not having weekend leftovers to groan and brag about. I must’ve cooked a dozen Thanksgiving turkeys before I discovered my guests weren’t taking any home because they’d secretly roasted their own birds before showing up, to avoid feeling cheated by emptiness when they got home. Turkey a la king, turkey tetrazzini, turkey sandwiches and all those conjugations nobody would be caught dead cooking in April became a cherished part of the gobbling rites/rights because, it seems, we are so addicted to replays we can’t just be done with turkey at once and move on to lox and bagels.

We chafe of course at conformity and feel superior to societies that are highly structured like China’s with its rigid family ties. But the late Trungpa Rinpoche said that discipline, structure and routine are true sources of free expression. In the inflexible framework of thangkha painting, for example, where figures must adhere to absolute metric proportion and be presented in a text mandated way, you can clearly see the individuality of the artist managing to make something out of these inviolable strictures. In the kitchen confines of turkeydom, you can taste the individual chef’s personality in the sage or butter, Gravy Master or Julia Child technique, the typical roasting or daredevil deep frying, or in my case the slathering with a homemade barbeque sauce that makes what someone this year called “a real kickass turkey.”

You could also do an anthropology thesis on the difference between the servers of the butterball turkey with the pop-up thermometer built in as a body part, the heritage turkey, the organic turkey, the all natural turkey, the freshly shot wild turkey, the turkey from the wild farm up the road, the take out turkey either from Trader Joe or the Ritz, the turducken. And include those Slow Food folks who actually asked me to drive two hours up to Sonoma County to help kill elite turkeys—no experience necessary—to appreciate the whole process.

It’s in fact a Dharma point that there is no such thing as conformity, all of us seeing things the same way. Perspective depends on where you are. Often the teaching analogy is a glass of water: thirsty humans see it as life support, airport security sees it as a lethal weapon, fraternity boys see it as useless because they want booze, a fish sees it as a place to live in, an insect sees it as a death trap, a Westerner who has just eaten chili laden Asian food sees it as a fire extinguisher. And yet it is merely a glass of water. So we imbue the fourth Thursday of every November with our own meaning. For everybody it’s a food tradition to which we are stubbornly attached: mashed turnip or sweet potatoes with those melted marshmallows on top, Susan Stamberg’s mother’s cranberry horseradish sauce or cornbread stuffing not Pepperidge Farm. You can't mess with this culinary clinging. I am still getting flack for serving mashed celeriac instead of mashed potatoes six years ago.

For middle aged men Thanksgiving Day means football day, for middle aged women it’s labor day, for kids it’s a school day off with no homework, for those who left home it’s time to go back home ready or not, for the Rotorooter guy it’s a banner day, busiest of the year (I heard this on public radio), for turkey farmers it’s count the cash day at the close of the season and for retailers it’s opening day of open season: wrap music. We claim it as a harvest holiday but the New England harvest on which it is predicated comes early in October, the time of Canadian Thanksgiving. Congress craftily set the date for this meal of wretched excess deliberately to set off the whole season of wretched excess known as Xmas.

We like to brag that this is thus the sort of secular, religion free holiday that defines our culture. But Americans build banks in the style of grandiose Greek temples and financial office buildings with the awesome ceiling height of cathedrals because money worship defines our culture. Ingot we trust. That's why Thanksgiving has all the hallmarks of its sacred rite: after the ritual killing of our native fauna, seers look into cash registers on Friday and pronounce the future just like Cassandra, the oracle of Delphi and any gypsy reader of tea leaves. The omens on this Black Friday evidently portend a good following wind for the fleet. The season won't be a turkey. Prophets predict profits as the headline blares: SHOPPERS FLOCK TO ANSWER THE SIREN SONG OF SAVINGS.

On Thanksgiving Day our paper ran an article on research into how to find happiness. An East Coast life coach was pictured, and quoted saying she went to Harvard, therefore she knew how to handle complicated issues. Perhaps she should get out of Cambridge and into the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade because this year against the wind it took a militarily strategic effort --aerodynamic engineers and meteorologists and emergency managers and Santa Claus and of course piles of police armed with pole mounted anemometers and hand held computers. Frankly that magical parade is the only source of happiness I know that can get complicated.

The rest is as easy as…apple pie. As that other life coach the Buddha said: it’s just takes clear seeing, taking the blinders off. We’ve put the pursuit of happiness right up there with life, liberty and a juicy turkey but we're so blinded by the bright lights of salesmanship we've gone off in hot pursuit, seeing happiness as something that can be purchased. Egos get as inflated as Macy's gigantic balloons by the idea of having the thingamajig juste, the IT as EBay says. As we see it in our marketing induced visualization, the iPod, the Nike Airs, the Mercedes SUV c’est moi! So the crush of the supermarket moves to the mall where at dawn on Black Friday as shopping cart stuffing revved into high gear fisticuffs erupted in the aisles of discount electronic stores. This is the crescendo the economy has been waiting for all year. The cheerleaders are good to go. Black Friday turns green before dawn, the New York Times announced.

We stuff our turkeys, our faces, our mailboxes, our closets, our academia, our lives, filling up with "happiness" to prevent a way for the Buddha’s truth of suffering to get in. But you can’t keep it out. The morning after Thanksgiving when the Playstations were flying and the new Snoopy balloon deflated, my South African host and his very pregnant wife were cleaning up the gold plated dishes in their Bay view triplex when he got a call that his best friend, age 42, inexplicably dropped dead in London where he’d gone to help his aging mother.

Suffering is what's complicated. So is all that manufactured cheer that makea us think we can escape it and makes those who know we can't feel depressed this time of year. All that stuffing. We’re up from the table and zig zagging like chickens with their heads cut off on a stress baste marathon of voluntary must-dos: gotta get the presents, the wrapping, the cards, the tree, the treats, the airplane tickets, gotta yatta. And smile! for the digital camera. Just like getting the turkey and cranberry and pumpkin pie on the table Thursday, everyone’s clinging to the same unexamined self-imposed volunteer must-dos for the same moment, certain the world will come to a crashing end if we don’t stuff the stockings, get to the Bahamas or get the new Zune for Junior by December 24th. There is nothing out there but a frenzy whipped up out of thin air like the cream that went on the pumpkin pie (can’t have pie without whipped cream, I was told by a Chinese American guest). Thursday was the proverbial calm before the swarm when all the stuffed turkeys got up from the table.

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