Out of Gratitude, Generosity
Now, Pumpkins* isn’t a typical Thanksgiving story. And it might not even really fit our monthly theme of generosity. The man was creative and acted with a sense of whimsy and determination, an admirable sort, but he didn’t send his four hundred sixty-one thousand, two hundred and twelve pumpkins all around the world out of generosity. He asked for money to be sent to him in return, even though no one had ordered his pumpkins in advance. He even kept one pumpkin back for seeds, after he’d raised enough money to buy his field. Seeds that could have grown more pumpkins that could have made him rich. But in the end, he gave those seeds away, “because somewhere, someone might love another field pumpkins could save.” He’d saved his field. Out of his gratitude, generosity not riches.
Pumpkins the Sequel, as I imagine it, is a story of generosity growing out of that man’s gratitude. Planting, harvesting and selling pumpkins to save a forest, a stream, a swamp, home to an endangered species. Planting, harvesting and selling pumpkins to restore a mosque, temple or black church that has been firebombed. Planting, harvesting and selling pumpkins to build a school in a remote village. To post cash bail for mothers with young children at home. To fund rural health care. To save a museum, a library, a dam.
And all the sequels after that–Return of Pumpkins, Pumpkins Never Die, and Pumpkins Without End–would tell of the generosity of the grateful church, temple, mosque members, the generosity of the grateful schoolchildren, the grateful mothers and their children, the grateful patients whose lives were saved or improved by access to health care near home. Would tell what the third wave of generosity, born of their gratitude for transformed lives, saved. And so on.
Revenge of Pumpkins would be the cautionary tale of what happened to a hapless group of library patrons and board members whose gratitude didn’t move them to act generously when the library in the next town over needed the temporary loan of a children’s librarian to do storytime for a few months while its own children’s librarian was on parental leave. But Revenge of Pumpkins would be the end of the franchise, because cautionary tales aren’t much fun, and negative examples of not doing the right thing don’t seep into the heart or the mind, prompting generous impulses and right behavior the way stories about the rewards of doing the right thing do–but the only if the story is good, and the lesson not too preachy. Like the OG–Pumpkins.
When I talk about about holidays I often say that while we can (and perhaps should) express love, remember our dead, give ourselves to joy, recognize rebirth any day of the year, we observe the holidays for two reasons:
Because everyday human life gets in the way of continually doing all those things, so it is good to have occasions set aside to focus on love, remembrance, joy, rebirth; and
Because the concentrated dose and intense practice of love on Valentine’s Day, remembrance on Memorial Day or All Souls’ Day, joy at Christmas, rebirth at Easter, the concentrated dose and intense practice at holiday time both fill us up for the year ahead and condition our hearts and our minds, making it a bit easier and a bit more automatic to access and express and live into love, remembrance, joy, rebirth throughout the year.
So too with gratitude. Some days and weeks and months we just have to pay the bills, and get the kids to bed, and care for our elders, and keep sober. And some years are haggard. Thanksgiving comes around again this week, just in time to remind us that our blessings are here, even when it is hard, hard. Our gratitude is here, even when it is masked by survival mode. And our generosity is here, stored up within us, as so many pumpkin seeds, for when our capacity to give finds space to flow again toward needs that arise.
We need not strive to live our lives as constant embodiments of altruism. Yet may the abundance that comes our way, from beyond, spark in us such gratitude that we can do no other than turn, now and then, toward generosity, the fruits of which we will never know, so far will they flourish in space and in time. Amen.
*Pumpkins: A Story for a Field by Mary Lyn Ray