Giving

It's not that I'm so incredibly generous. Really, it's a compulsion with me. Mind you, it doesn't put it's imprint on my every act of giving. It seems to have to do with wanting to connect, instantly, or repeatedly, with people whose organic connection to me I don't trust, so I manipulate it. Remember R.D Laing's book, "Knots"?

It's sort of like filler, or insulation: stuff this perceived gap with gifts (both humble and extravagant) and favors and I don't have to feel the burning heat of loneliness. Which brings me once again to Pema Chodron who talks about cool loneliness. How many ways are there to say it: the things we do to postpone discomfort create ten times their weight in future discomfort. There is no real or lasting insulation from the truth that does not cause far more suffering than the truth would cause.

Sometimes, I give with strings attached. I couldn't possibly calculate how many friends this has cost me because I suspect I repeated this behavior often without knowing about it. But I know about one friendship where the connection was so strong that we managed to keep it alive long enough to come out two years later, our love for each other still in tact. A. and I are so lucky, because it might have been otherwise.

Sometimes, I give because I feel a debt. Sometimes I'm a counter and I don't like owing.

Sometimes, I give for the sheer joy of it. There are people who have given me so much that I can't help but shower them with appreciation. It's one of a number of ways of saying thank you about a million times over.

I have a lot. It's nice to spread it around--shirts from the stack in my bedroom cupboard, table linens from the kitchen drawers, hydrangea bouquets from the garden, Pyrex storage containers on sale at Sears.

There's a lot I can't do to help relieve suffering, but this I can do--cook a meal, make a bed, give a massage.

And zazen is the place for sitting with all of this, with the "best" and the "worst" of my motives for giving. And the breath of zazen makes space in and among all these impulses and actions and offers the possibility of extending that breath out into the world where breathing and giving mindfully, and breathing and not-giving mindfully are a dance, a song, a prayer.