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Of course you want the turkey to be done. You’d like the mashed potatoes to keep warm, the stuffing to stay moist and the gravy to taste homemade. You’re hoping the pies turn out, the guests turn up and the TV gets turned off. You’ll be grateful to have it over with, but can you take a week of hectic cooking and turn it into a mindfulness practice?
The sages did, and still do.
I have a new photo-post up at the Huffington Post this week, “7 Ways to Make Thanksgiving Mindful,” and it’s worth your while to notice. Follow these instructions step-by-step and see what comes of it:
1. Click on the link to read the post on Huffington.
2. Once you’re there, click on the blue thumb to “like” it.
3. Click on “Facebook Share” to share it on FB.
4. Click on the red “Retweet” to share it on Twitter.
5. If you don’t mind a few ruffled feathers, join the cackle of Huff Post commenters by adding your own.
6. Come back here and leave a comment on this post telling me anything and everything you’ve done. For each step taken you earn a point in my prize drawing.
You must know I would never tell you what to eat or how to make it. I’m simply illuminating the power of your own evenminded attention.
For each step you take, you’ll earn a point toward a drawing for a fabulous gift: an autographed copy of the organic cookbook Food to Live By, an inspiring and passionate 400-page cooking cornucopia by Myra Goodman, the co-founder of Earthbound Farms. The winner will be drawn this Sunday.
Good luck and good appetite!
It is time, and such a short time it is, to say yes.
Can I write the tooth fairy a note asking to keep this tooth?
Can I sleep with you?
Can I ride with you?
Can I walk with you?
Can I go with you?
Can I keep the bottle cap?
Can I save the ribbon?
Can I have the last piece of candy?
Can we go to Disneyland?
Can I get this doll?
Can you wash my jacket because at lunch I looked down and saw a bug on it.
Yes, I say, yes, yes. Because there is an end to these questions, and yes is what you say when you see them go.
Oh good, she says. Because I was afraid I was supposed to outgrow it.
Nearly every day something arrives out of the blue with an answer to my deepest fears and doubts.
Hi Karen, I’ve never written an author before but I so profoundly connected with Hand Wash Cold that I felt I had to write. I have gotten copies of Momma Zen for my daughter who is expecting her first child, my daughter-in-law who is mother to my grandson, and Hand Wash Cold for a dear, dear friend.
I am currently raising my second family. We have custody of our two granddaughters. They are 6 and 7 and we’ve had them since infancy. I went through a period of madly buying parenting books for advice (apparently forgetting that I already raised four pretty ok human beings). What you say about trusting yourself and just seeing how it goes struck such a chord with me – a big sigh of relief.
Thank you thank you thank you for your books!
For more questions and answers to our deepest parenting fears and doubts, see the Q&A with me posted today on Fans of Being a Mom. We all need a second chance to help one another.
The photo above was shot and sent out of the blue by my friend Janet Marshall, who captioned it “To Whom We Are Beautiful When We Fall.”
And you are the only gardener. Meditate on this.
We’re sometimes told that one key to an ethical lifestyle is to not take anything personally. That sounds like a good idea but practically speaking, your honor, I object.
State your:
Area of Residence
Occupation
Marital Status
Spouse’s Occupation
Occupations of Adult Children
Previous Experience as a Juror
I studied the instructions posted on the courtroom wall. The judge said, “Pass the microphone to Juror Number 11.”
I told him where I lived, and then I said, “I’m a Buddhist priest.”
***
I like to think of myself as a good citizen, but let me come clean: I haven’t been upholding my civic duty for the last few years. When you are a full-time caregiver of children under school age, you are exempted from jury service. After that, you have to dodge and deceive to exempt yourself, and that’s what I’ve done for the last five years, vexed by the question of after-school childcare.
Then, as we expect of our civil society, the court came breathing down my neck with a high-dollar penalty. So I showed up at the criminal justice center downtown for a day of jury service. I hadn’t found a way to manage an unforeseen absence at home, but I did have an epiphany. I realized I could tell the truth about myself, and that alone might disqualify me from participation in our system of justice. Truth, you see, is the ultimate defense. It’s the defense of having no defense.
Maybe doing good would do me some good, I bargained.
It was 11:30 a.m. before I landed in a big courtroom with 40 other potential jurors, a charming judge, and two sides in a criminal case expected to last up to eight days. The judge warned us that with the late start, we might be required to come back an extra day before jury selection could be completed, and I began calculating the collateral impact at home.
Before anything could begin, we had to break for a 90-minute lunch. read more
Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva doing deep prajna paramita clearly saw emptiness of all the five conditions. – Heart Sutra
We are on a death watch at my house. Which is to say, we are on a life watch. Redhead, the fantail I once boasted to be the world’s oldest living goldfish, has become the world’s newest dying goldfish. To watch her transit is a powerful and fitting thing at this hour. And although I kept her alive for so long by absurdly arrogant and heroic measures (see How to Keep a Goldfish Alive in 20 Easy Steps) now I am doing what is even more heroic: letting her disappear into her own insurmountable mystery.
Death surrounds at this time of year. It surrounds at all times, but in these dwindling of days we might see it. We might see it in the surrender of the sun and the swift triumph of night. Feel it in the grip of the wind, the cataclysm of leaves, mud, dirty windshields, paw prints, rain-dank rugs and snot: the whole soggy rot of life’s residue.
Yesterday we observed Obon at the Hazy Moon, a ceremony honoring our departed loved ones. The altar was crowded with photos of more people loved and remembered than have ever stood alive before it. Such is the way, and it is always the way, and it is always sad. Grief is our mother, and when we grieve, we taste her tears. We taste eternity, the brimming fullness from which everything rises and to which everything returns.
I can see the cycle of things that have lately come near:
A mother quaking in bottomless shock after her baby died at birth.
A friend moored in friendship’s final vigil.
A granddaughter answering the clear call of goodbye.
And right here too, come unexpected calls and emails, late word of swift departures and funerals on Thursday at 3. My daughter’s third-grade teacher was stunned six months into her happy retirement by her husband’s sudden crumbling fall into a mean disease. She walked into the school assembly last week, to see and be seen by the children she last cradled, the ones who will be the last to remember her. She whispered her widowed vacancy to me, “It’s the absence, the absence!”
I know that awful yawning space, that thunderclap after a jagged bolt rends the sky. It is the infinite ache of a mother’s heart, the heart we all have whether we are men or women, mothers or not. It is the absence that contains, curiously, our own presence, the tender fearlessness to watch and weep and let angels sleep.
Edited to add: Leave a comment on this post and I’ll include the name of your departed loved one in memorial services I do this week at my backyard altar.
Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva is you, the embodiment of infinite compassion.
1. Everyone seems to be selling something.
2. No one seems to be buying anything.
3. It’s easy for anybody to be quoted. And I mean your average ordinary nobody.
4. Mistaking quotations for wisdom is like mistaking fruitcake for dessert.
5. Twitter seems awfully noisy until you realize that what you hear is nothing at all.
6. A lot of tweets read like air kisses.
7. If you think air kissing is like kissing, you might like fruitcake for dessert.
8. Here, take my fruitcake. _/|\_
9. You can have stacks of fruitcake and you still don’t have anything to eat.
10. Personally speaking, no one seems to be as interested in what I have to say as I am.
11. Tweet this: Things I Learned on Twitter http://bit.ly/d9rbGF
12. RT this: RT @kmaezenmiller Things I Learned on Twitter http://bit.ly/d9rbGF
13. Quote me. – Karen Maezen Miller
If you liked this, you might like: Things I Learned on Facebook.
I am in-between writing assignments and trips. Not really in-between anything, but it feels that way and so I looked up the other day and muttered out loud, “I have time to clean out my closet.” My husband came over and patted my shoulder and smiled wryly with what looked like pity. I gathered myself up. Oh no, sir, do not pity me. Few recognize the sound, the swelling relief, the dawn’s light of hope, the crack in the door that comes with the two words “Rescue Mission.”
I’m about to leave Portland, and like every place I go, I love it. I love it on sight. I love it without effort. I love it simply because I’m here, and because Portland is too. It reminds me that I love my life every time I actually step foot into it.
When I drove to LAX on Friday morning under clouds and drizzle I thought to myself, This reminds me of Portland. When I got to the Portland airport that afternoon I thought to myself, This reminds me of Milwaukee or Denver. On the windy waterfront later having clam chowder I thought, This reminds me of Boston or San Francisco. At the little church where I spoke I thought This reminds me of Minnesota or Scottsdale. Some women walked in and I recognized them, and they reminded me where we had last met. Seattle.
The real world is like this, when you meet it face to face. It always reminds you that you’re home.
I like to sum things up as simply as possible, so when I give a talk, I say, “Everything I say, the whole point of the teaching, the only reason I’m here is to get you to come here.” Then I stick my index finger out and curl it toward me, “Come here!” And by that I mean come out of the confines of your head and all those thoughts that tell you what you can’t do or where you can’t go and come into the bright wide open field before you. “Make yourself at home here,” I say, “in your life.”
But today I see that’s only half of it. The whole point of the teaching is to get me to come out, to step forward, to keep going, so I can meet you and love you on sight, without effort. Because there’s no place like home, and no place that isn’t already home.
Thank you, all of you, for always encouraging me in my practice.
Washing dishes is like bathing a baby Buddha – Thich Nhat Hanh
People often quote this to me as their understanding of mindfulness. I only hope it is not their understanding of dishwashing or baby bathing.
First off, let me be clear. In an absolute sense, dishes are indeed the baby Buddha. The Buddha is indeed the dishes. As is the water, the dishwashing liquid, the scrubber and the baked-on lasagna. Everything is nothing but Mind, which is nothing but Buddha. So this instruction is absolutely true. It’s in the application that the baked-on lasagna gets sticky.
In a relative sense, our understanding of mindfulness poses difficulty. (Any understanding poses difficulty and the relative sense is where all our difficulty lies.) We might infer that we are to bring a certain something extra to the sink, like an attitude of holiness or reverence. Maybe we should slow down and contemplate the sacredness of the task, its deeper meaning and value. We might even extract a self-satisfied fulfillment from how we see ourselves. I’ve finally got it! I’m really washing dishes like bathing a baby Buddha!
Even though the dish is the baby Buddha, it is still a dish. And a baby? A baby is not a dish. To wash the dishes is to wash them as they are: dishes. To bathe a baby is to bathe the baby as it is: squirming, splashing, crying, laughing, slippery. To be mindful is to bring nothing more to your life than what is there already. Seeing things as they are, you already know exactly what to do and how to do it. Wash the dish. Bathe the baby. As they are.
We just forget, and look for something more to add to it than our own straightforward attention. Attention is more than enough. It is pure love for everything in life as it is.
Attention! Someone dropped the baby in Portland! Whether you’re a mother or father, spiritual or not, into Zen or far out of it, come to this event and help me stack the dishes. Please share with anyone who has an interest in peaceful parenting, and especially those who have no interest at all.
Saturday, Oct. 16, 9-3:30 p.m.
Portals of Love: The Spiritual Practice of Parenting
Hosted by Zen Community of Oregon at St. David of Wales Church
Portland, Oregon
If you ever prayed for an easier way to parent, this one day workshop is for you. We’ll examine how to find a spiritual practice amid the demands of home life. If you’re not a parent, you’ll still benefit fully because there is no prerequisite for finding personal peace. The day includes morning coffee and vegetarian lunch, beginning meditation and other mindfulness practices, ample time for personal questions and book signing.
More information and registration here.
Between the giver, the receiver and the gift there is no separation – Maezumi Roshi
The world can seem stingy, competitive and cruel. Or it can seem generous, welcoming and kind. A single gift can make the difference, and it always comes back to us. The gift we offer is the same gift we receive. Like the coffee we put into our cup, what we pour out is what we drink in: all of it an inseparable extension of our own hand.
The world I share with author Katrina Kenison is welcoming and kind, because she is, and she brings that out in me. It does me no good to bemoan how rare this quality is in any of the realms I occupy. Cups look empty until we fill them again.
In Katrina’s two books, Mitten Strings for God, and The Gift of an Ordinary Day, she welcomes us into a world infused with natural wisdom. She is the kind of mother we all are, aiming to change her family life for the better amid the inevitable undertow of change itself. She doesn’t pretend to know how. She doesn’t make any self-satisfied assessments. She simply follows her instincts into blind curves and doubt. Settle into the pages of her memoirs and what spills out is the fullness in every mother’s wistful heart. read more
Warning: Falling rocks ahead.
A few months ago, a young newspaper reporter asked me a very good question, the kind of question that comes from the mouths of keenly observant babes:
“Do you encounter resistance because you don’t fit the stereotype of a Buddhist teacher?”
Honestly, I had never presumed as much, but it makes sense given the human proclivity to idealize and worship images.
Some people might like a little more Dalai in their Lama, I laughed.
I know I did, at least when I was starting out. And I know that most of us still do, taking a measure of comfort and even confidence when a teacher appears to be so altogether other, so unattainably spiritual, so removedly saintly. It must have drawn me closer, then, when Maezumi Roshi fit the bill of a short, smiling, impish Asian. He was nothing that I thought him to be, but his appearance upheld my standard of the real thing.
Being Maezumi, being a man, being an American, I once heard him say to describe his life, to no one in the room who believed him. We had a stake in him being a holy man.
Why this comes up I’m not so sure, although it may have something to do with an email I received yesterday telling me about a public talk by a revered Buddhist author. The talks are rare, I was told, and routinely sold out. There might not ever be another one, the message urged. I could get on the bandwagon and even make a little profit from the books I sold through my website.
All those things may be true, but this line of thinking does not sit with me, and so I sit with it. read more
