Roof Beam Reader

Thanksgiving.

It’s never been my favorite holiday. Halloween, yes, with all its childish humor, suspended reality, neighborhood fun and friendly competition. Independence Day, too, which is a shock for most people to learn. I’m not a patriotic person, but there’s something about summertime barbecues, a family of friends, and shimmering colors lighting the dark that gets me going. Christmas, of course, has its advantages. Cozy clothes, good food, and giving gifts, not to mention the music and movies that I can’t help but delight in, and the nostalgia that lingers from childhood and past lives. But Thanksgiving?

Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place,

that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it?

The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment.

The wicked are denied their light, and their upraised arm is broken. (Job 38:12-15)

This week in literature class, I discussed with my students the concept of bravery. We had just finished reading Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give and one student remarked on Starr’s bravery. I mentioned that Starr herself often comments on her lack of bravery, about how she often feels too scared to act. This opened up an interesting discussion about what bravery really is. They came to the conclusion, naturally enough, I think, that if there’s no potential cost to an action, then there’s no bravery required in acting. As such, it’s exactly when we are scared but act anyway, when we are most brave and, ironically, when we feel it the least. We can recognize this bravery in others because we know, intellectually, what it means for a person to act strong when they feel weak; to show courage when they feel fear. We have the benefit, in those situations, of judging the actions themselves, because we cannot possibly feel what the person is feeling inside. But when it comes to ourselves, the feelings come first. So, if we are afraid, even when taking action, it’s that sensation of inadequacy that lingers.

Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep?

Have the gates of death been shown to you? Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?

Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?

Tell me, if you know all this. (Job 38:16-18)

I wonder this year if, to be thankful when you feel anything but, is itself an act of bravery. It’s been a very hard year for me. One of the worst, and it’s hard to put into words, or even logical thought, why this is. Nothing extremely terrible happened, but sometime back in January, I sprained my ankle badly. It happened just a couple of weeks after returning home from a trip to Chicago, to see family and friends. In retrospect, I realize now that that injury and its very long recovery had a much bigger effect on me than I acknowledged at the time, which is bizarre because I was absolutely aware of it at the time. Still, it somehow colored the rest of my year, in the way I reacted to life, the universe, and everything, and that color was decidedly umber.

What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside?

Can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings?

Surely you know, for you were already born!

You have lived so many years! (Job 38:19-21)

Can I find things to be thankful for this year? Sure. But the joy I usually begin to feel about this time is lacking. I try to talk myself into it. You have your health! Yes, despite this terrible cold that persists, I have my health. Despite a relatively unhealthy year and the almost willful destruction of a lot of the hard work I’ve done over the last three years, I have my health. I have a job I love, too. The students seem to strike me with positivity just when I need it most. An unsolicited email thanking me for inspiring someone to read again, and love it. Or comments overheard during break about how much a group of students are going to miss my class, how much they’ve loved it. I have my partner and 13 years of memories with him. Family and friends, though far away, remain present in their way and remind me what it is to have good and loving people in my life. A niece and nephews that I adore, and a completed first draft of a novel that was sitting deep inside of me for a very long time. Music and books and art, and everything else that makes life bearable in the bad times and meaningful in the good. All these things I have to be thankful for, so despite the best efforts of a tired and weary spirit, I’ll remind myself that the good is there.

What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed,

or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?

Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm,

to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert,

to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass? (Job 38:24-27)

Speaking of books, there are two that I want to specifically mention, while I sit here pondering the bravery of feeling gratitude while mired in the depths of despondency. The first is Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and the other is Ziggy, Stardust and Me by James Brandon. I managed to write some thoughts down for the Vuong when I finished it back in June, but I never managed to get anything down about Ziggy. At the time, I remember tweeting something about finding a book soulmate. Is that possible? It’s like James had written the book I’d been waiting to read for so long. It made me feel more than a little envious, if I’m being honest, because, like Shaun David Hutchinson’s Brave Face, it captured a particular experience and worldview that I thought was uniquely my own. As I wrote recently, though, I’m trying to find the benefits in these connections, even connections yielded from a difficult place, because there’s something about sorrow and loneliness, and pain, that not only allows for but encourages the most fiercely human understanding between people.

Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water?

Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you,

‘Here we are’? (Job 38:34-35)

Trying to measure up. That’s the thing, maybe. The great and terrible error for us all, but especially for me. To compare myself to anyone else. To wonder if, when, or how I’ll achieve what I intend to achieve. To be satisfied. Buddhism reminds us that there’s the decision to take action, and then there is the action. The first is a start, but there’s no movement to it, and so no satisfaction; in fact, to decide only, but not to do, is perhaps the most painful state of being. To act, there’s the magic. When one lingers in fantasy and best laid plans, there’s nothing left for him but to measure and measure and measure. But like cups of salt being poured atop each other on a kitchen counter, the peak will ever only reach so high before spreading, without form or direction, and falling over itself into nothing. A pile of salt. An empty vessel of gratitude, filled with a thankfulness that never seems more than thought-deep.

Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?

Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens

when the dust becomes hard and the clods of earth stick together? (Job 38:37-38)

The first step? As with anything else, I suppose it begins with attitude and proceeds with action. So, I’ll turn on Christmas music and get out the boxes of decorations. I’ll listen to Judy Garland sing, haunted, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” while I put up my tree and turn on the lights. I’ll imagine feeling something different and deeper. And then I’ll do something to stoke that feeling from dream to reality. A lesson on the guitar. A page in the journal. A chapter revised.

To act and be thankful that action is possible.

To try, and accept the effort as enough.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The weather is changing.

Do you remember the line from Mary Poppins?

Winds in the east, mist coming in, / Like something is brewing’, and about to begin.

Thanksgiving in the Las Vegas Valley is usually a mild time. The tradition for most is to barbecue because temperatures are usually in the 60s and 70s. My first year here, in fact, it was about 80-degrees and sunny. This feels not like anything that’s “happened before,” though. A cold front has moved in and the winds have begun to pick-up. It is always windy here, so when we get a wind advisory, we know there’s something special going on. Temperatures will drop to the 40s, and there might be up to 24-inches of snow falling in the mountains this week. This is all to say, after a week of being sick and while looking forward to a healthier holiday, the weather seems to be having its little fun with me. Instead of preparing for outdoor adventures, long walks, and a la carte dining, I’m cozied-up inside, candles lit, heat turned on, and donned in fuzzy socks and a puffy sweater.

I’ll spend my time with music, maybe, working on the guitar that so troubles me. It’s a terribly humbling thing, trying to teach one’s self how to play music. I can’t think of anything much more maddening, in fact, except perhaps trying to teach one’s self a new language, when there’s no one to practice it with. The guitar. It still feels awkward in my hands. I don’t know how to sit, how to handle its sleek neck. I haven’t played enough to callous these fingers, yet, and that troubles me. I feel like a failure, though nothing makes me happier than spending time with music. Perhaps not even spending time with books. And this reminds me of a line from one of my favorite songs:

The end of paralysis, I was a statuette

Now I’m drunk as hell on a piano bench

And when I press the keys it all gets reversed

The sound of loneliness makes me happier.

I’ve always been “an emo kid,” comfortable in sadness and loneliness. It’s something I imagined I’d outgrow, eventually, but the truth is, that hasn’t happened. I approach age forty strikingly different from who I’ve ever been, but like those winds in the east, “The threads of [life] unraveling undone . . . I feel what’s to happen all happened before.” As much as I’ve changed, grown, progressed, developed, or whatever word best fits the occasion of growing up, aging, getting older, well–as much as all of that has happened, I remain the same. Comfortable in sadness. Lonely, with all the complications this brings, but not lamenting the fact.

I wonder sometimes if it’s this disposition that brought me to Buddhism. The core philosophy of Buddhism is that one must, in a way, go beyond acknowledging that life is suffering, but to embrace that truth. To eagerly accept that suffering. It was, I’ll admit, a very strange concept for me to understand at first, and I might not be getting it entirely right just yet either. But yes, I think it’s a good thing that my first reaction to the idea that I should be happy to suffer was something along the lines of, “what the fuck?”

Of course, I was getting it a bit wrong. Buddhism doesn’t want us to glory in suffering, or to live as if suffering is all there is, all that matters. Instead, as I understand it anyway, the reason Buddhism places such an emphasis on the power of suffering is that it, more than anything else, connects us to who we are, deep in our being, and to the suchness of others. To understand suffering is to understand people, even at their most complicated and least available. To understand that life is suffering is to know, beyond platitudes, that we are all in this together. That we all experience pain, sometimes a pain that, in loneliness, heartbreak, loss, brings us to our knees and makes us question absolutely everything we’ve ever felt, known, or believed.

Kurt Vonnegut is probably my favorite writer. The sadness in him, expressed through humor, is the deepest humanity I’ve known in another being. He writes,

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.

I think he is getting at this suchness of life. The idea that adversity can make us either hard or tender. To choose tenderness is what allows us to reach out and to reach within. Without it, we go hard and cold, we become incapable of absorbing warmth, and if we cannot contain warmth, we cannot express it.

Be soft.

Pema Chodron describes this another way. She writes that,

Bodhisattvas practice ‘in the middle of the fire.’ This means they enter into the suffering of the world; it also means they stay steady with the fire of their own painful emotions. They neither act them out nor repress them. They are willing to stay ‘on the dot’ and explore an emotion’s ungraspable qualities and fluid energies–and to let that experience link them to the pain and courage of others.

The pain and the courage. What is one without the other? What is light without darkness?

For so long, I thought that my way of being in the world was something to be ashamed of. Call it depression, melancholy, or saturnine. Many adjectives have been used, by myself and others, to explain the way I look at the world and the way I’ve acted in it. How liberating, how freeing, to turn the darkness on its head and see it as a beautiful softness. To accept my comfort with suffering, my tendency toward the sad, my hypersensitivity to the unfair, the unjust, and all the pain the recognition of these brings me, and to connect it with the pain and the courage of others.

O Me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

How many ways are there of being in the world? How many of them good?

Thus behold the utter frailty of goodness!

Except for the perfect awakened heart

There is nothing able to withstand

The great and overwhelming strength of evil. (Shantideva 1.6)

To suffer and see suffering; to know pain and want nothing but to save others from it. This is one way.