Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you have a wonderful time with family, friends, and many others. Yesterday at Sangha we spoke about how Mindfulness is a practice of gratitude. In fact, it is our inability to be grateful for what we have that keeps us always looking for more, dissatisfied and craving -- hence stoking our suffering. If a formal mindfulness practice is not what you do, consider that the folks who study gratitude claim that a practice of gratitude, even if just a bit every day, can make all the difference in terms of relieving stress, being happier, and improving health and sense of well-being. All it takes is simply noticing what is around you. Paying attention to uniqueness. Not taking things (or others) for granted.

But... and yes, there is always a but, because we don't want to just let our practice become a fetishistic affectation -- what about those folks who suffer great calamity,who are suffering from lack of food, water, shelter? Those who have been having nothing but bad news, whose children have died in their arms, and who are enslaved, or otherwise oppressed? In short, what about the wretched of the Earth (to use Fanon's phrase), or even those for whom the day has just gone terribly wrong? What do they have to be grateful about? Easy answers about how we can be grateful for everything just don't cut it here, even if they hold a nugget of truth.

A friend of mine argues that at bottom we ought to realize that we are grateful for Being. Part of his argument is that life continues, that regardless of religion or other belief, what we can come together on is a gratefulness that there is, that we are. Perhaps. But my answer to the challenge of suffering above, is that those who suffer extremely need a refuge, need the solace or fellowship in suffering (compassion from compati, "to suffer with") that caring others can provide. That fellowship in suffering, such compassionate others, constitutes a Sangha -- and, as Thich Nhat Hanh tells us, the next Buddha to manifest (Maitreya) will take the form of the Sangha. We are it my friends. I don't have an answer to the question of extreme suffering, but I believe that throughout or after those moments, we will be grateful for any refuge, solace, compassion we can find, and our task as potential next Buddha-to-be, is to work to at least make that happen.

Have a great Thanksgiving celebration. Make it last. Go slow.