Thankful

This may be my longest and most incoherent post ever, hope it rewards sloging through. As I about to go to my first 5 hour chemo and 2 hour radiation session I am reflecting on expressing, ‘for what I am about to receive let me be thankful’. 

This expression has had a long history with me, sometimes in my life it fits better than other times. One spiritual practice I do is an annual 3 day retreat at Mt Baldy Zen Center called an Enlightenment Intensive, it is something of a western Zen practice (although nondenominational) where participants  work on ‘questions’ (koans) like Who Am I?, What Is Life? What is Another? and a few others. These are done in dyads, sitting, walking, eating, sleeping, all the time 24/7. It is a hard practice but I find it very effective in clearing out the ‘Juicy Fruit’ commercials and major noise from my consciousness. The questions never quite get answered but they do get ‘resolved’ with increased consciousness and compassion. 

So in 1982 I am doing my second one , working on the question 'What is life?' and get into a huge mental paradox. I have an ‘insight’ that I have never fully communicated with another person in my life, ever. Now in this process the instruction is to fully communicate insights to the dyad partner or leader. How can I ‘fully’ communicate that I cannot communicate? So a soft voice inside asks me, ‘so whats the problem? I have lived 30+ years of a fairly successful life, what did I want to say anyway? And then I am overwhelmed, there is something I REALLY want to say and it is simply; THANK YOU! That is actually all I want to communicate to anyone anytime, all the rest is commentary. I am alive, on fire and everywhere I look I see the gift that life is. Everything, the flowers, the weeds, pretty houses and broken glass. Its existence, all existence is a miracle, The Hebrew name Nathan comes to mind, I understand that it means ‘gift of God’ and I expect to see it everywhere, on ants, dirt, people, everything is a gift. And as this goes on an old memory wells up, stuck somewhere deeply in my mind, of an old black and white movie, just a bit of it, set probably in the 1600s a British sailing ship is fighting with several Spanish ships. The British ship is small and faster and through near miraculous seamanship got off several salvos before the inevitable happens, they are side to side with the Spanish ship and will get a broadside. Now the movie, the script, has the UK captain saying “For what we are about to receive, let us be thankful”. And this is stuck somewhere in my memory as I could not process it. Really, why not curse the enemy or encourage your fighters to take two for every one we lose, but not in any way can the word ‘thankful’ fit in this event. But now I see it, when everything given us is a miracle, everything is a gift. Nothing is left out.

And a song that expresses some of the wonder: Thank You by Alanins Morissette
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62504573/01%20Thank%20You.m4a