Thanksgiving

Today is the day for abandonment as a part of the state of truth, for with it we can turn away from all kinds of lives.

It's also, in the United States of America, the Thanksgiving holiday.  We're supposed to remember a feast provided by indigenous peoples to pilgrims on these shores seeking religious freedom or something.  The pilgrims later repaid that hospitality with genocide.  So much for the spiritual values of their religion.

I used to post William S. Burroughs' cynical Thanksgiving Prayer every year, but I no longer feel comfortable doing that because of his use of the notorious n-word.  To be sure, he's echoing the sentiments of racists cops when he drops the word, but it still doesn't feel right to my ears. A lot of beat poets and writers of that period (Kerouac, Ginsberg, and more) used the word, thinking I suppose that it made them sound street-wise and tough, but today it makes them sound like bigots and racists.  Most of their work was overrated, anyway.

I'm thankful to be alive and sentient and occupying a human body.  I'm thankful that I have a home and a bed to sleep in and enough money set aside that I can afford to retire and live these next several years without subjecting myself to the office or other workplace.  

I'm thankful for electricity and thankful for a whole year without a tree falling on my house.

I'm thankful for the books and the television shows and the video games that amuse my days, and that the Andersons, both Wes and Paul Thomas, continue to make movies I enjoy.  I'm thankful for the Coen brothers, too, and I don't know, the Wachowskis? I'm thankful that there are still artists out there making satisfying and interesting music.  I'm thankful for the existence of coffee and banana bread muffins.

I'm thankful for the innumerable labors of workers unknown to me who provide food and clothing and tools from the farms and factories to the marketplace, and to those who provide me with essential - and sometimes nonessential - services.

I'm thankful that meditation exists and for all the centuries of Zen teachers who've handed the tradition down to this day and age. 

And finally I'm thankful for the attention of whoever it is that reads these little missives I post each day.