Archive for the ‘kindness’ Tag
This is a lovely essay by Annie Louise Twitchell
The bee is grounded on the hot asphalt in the grocery store parking lot. She’s taking a few slow steps but she won’t fly and it will take her far too long to find safety.
I crouch and pick her up. She wanders the unfamiliar landscape of my hand but she seems to like the warmth.
The flower planter is across the driveway and I take her over and slide her off onto a flower but she turns quickly and climbs back into my hand. She refuses to leave so I take her back and look closer; that’s when I see the injury, a long slash across her thorax. She sits still on my hand and I realize she hasn’t moved her wings the entire time.
I think she is dying.
I ask her again to sit among the flowers but she clings now to my fingers and I give up. I go back to the car, buckle one-handed, drive home one-handed. She rests in my open palm, soaking in the warmth from my skin.
There are no flowers at home, this late in the season, so I go to my aunt’s house to the flower garden there. I sit in the long grass next to the rows of flowers and I listen to the other bees working and I just hold my bee.
It is almost an hour before her movements become uncoordinated and confused. She lurches around on my hand and then slowly she stops moving.
I wait, forgetting to breathe, watching her. How do you know when a bee is dead? I don’t know. So I wait a little more, then I carefully slide her off my hand into the flower bed. I leave her there, hidden under the blossoms, and I stand up.
This is the first lesson.
Three years later I come home from class. We have learned how to try to stop someone from dying, how to negotiate with death, how to bargain for a little more life. It is late when I get home.
I walk into the kitchen and my rabbit B is standing up, leaning out the open door of her house, waiting for me. Her ears are tinged blue and her mouth is open as she gasps for air and I know, all at once, that she is dying. And I know that unlike most rabbits she is waiting for me.
I sit down on the floor and B flings herself out of her house into my lap. I lift her into my arms and all she wants to do is lean into my warm body. I have known her since the hour she was born and she has never asked to be held except for this moment, now, at the end of her life, but for such a silent creature her request echoes through the house.
I remember the bee.
I hold her, adjusting her position so she can breathe a little easier. She pushes her head under my hand, burrowing in for safety, and I let her.
I hold her. What else can I do? What can anyone do? I want to ease her suffering but she is already very close to the end. So I hold her, for a few minutes more, until I let her go.
This is the second lesson.
I have never seen an animal so distraught. My dog lunges at the dead rabbit in my arms, pushing at her head and mouth, whining and crying. She knows something is wrong: she wants B to breathe.
I hold her now, too, a dead rabbit in one arm and a frantic dog in the other. After a while I rest B in a box for the night and I take my pup upstairs, shut her in my room to sleep. For days she is listless and depressed, constantly sniffing B’s house, checking to see if she’s come back. I bribe her to eat with a bagel and cream cheese from the Cafe. I coax her out on walks. I ask her what she needs and when she does not know I do my best to figure it out.
This is the third lesson. I think this is the hardest.
Lesson One: Be there. Be open. Be willing to walk this road even if it might hurt.
Lesson Two: Know when to let her go. Know when to step back. Know when to say goodbye.
Lesson Three: The ones left behind need more care then the ones who died. Let the dead rest and let the others grieve.
All my life my mind has secretly been constructing an autobiography, pulling together all the tangled pieces of my past and turning it into a coherent storyline that defines me. Sadly, I am not kind to my protagonist. My mind narrates the time I joined with neighborhood kids in grade school to call our friend Bobby “Roto-rooter,” laughing at how mad it made him, and I wince with sadness and shame. I recall scolding my dearly loved collie Taiho, who had done nothing wrong, just to see the cute look of remorse on his face, and it seems so mean. The older I got, the worse I did, and in my retelling, the good that I did weighs lightly against the heaviness of my perceived failures. I become my story’s villain, a cautionary tale.
Most novelists are kinder to their protagonist. As I read, I find myself hoping good for the main character, even if she is a scold or he is a criminal. I am sad when she loses her best friend or when he ends up under a bridge in the rain. I am sympathetic to their failures and losses, understanding of their vices, and whispering to warn them against harmful choices. Just show me their humanity, and my heart is all in for them. What would it be like if one of these writers told my story? If they showed the good generously and the faults compassionately and made the reader love me like a dear friend? Would I be able to accept such a telling of my story or would it feel undeserved, even untrue like the overindulgent words of a doting mother?
Just yesterday it occurred to me that I do have a flawless Biographer of my story who writes with the kindest, most gracious heart ever known, a retelling of my life that is perfect and trustworthy in a way my own memory and judgment could never be. Imagine if my life were told from the perspective of boundless love–every failure told from pure sympathy, every wrongdoing wrapped in understanding, every flaw traced with caring fingers. What if the Author of my story, while clearly seeing my shortcomings, was my cheerleader who found deep joy in who I am in every moment of my life. What if Love defined me? That is the story I long for. I believe, help my unbelief.
Naomi Shihab Nye – 1952-
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
“I wrote [this poem] down, but I honestly felt as if it were a female voice speaking in the air across a plaza in Popayán, Colombia. And my husband and I were on our honeymoon. We had just gotten married one week before, here in Texas, and we had this plan to travel in South America for three months. And at the end of our first week, we were robbed of everything. And someone else who was on the bus with us was killed. And he’s the Indian in the poem. And it was quite a shake-up of an experience.
“And what do you do now? We didn’t have passports. We didn’t have money. We didn’t have anything. What should we do first? Where do we go? Who do we talk to? And a man came up to us on the street and was simply kind and just looked at us; I guess could see our disarray in our faces and just asked us in Spanish, “What happened to you?” And we tried to tell him, and he listened to us, and he looked so sad. And he said, “I’m very sorry. I’m very, very sorry that happened,” in Spanish. And he went on, and then we went to this little plaza, and I sat down, and all I had was the notebook in my back pocket, and pencil. And my husband was going to hitchhike off to Cali, a larger city, to see about getting traveler’s checks reinstated.”
“Be gentle and kind to yourself” I blogged two weeks ago. “Take full measure of your pain and with compassion find a way to give the help your weary, struggling heart needs.” Great advice, and as it turns out, useless. I was suffering acutely, but didn’t know why. How could I relieve a pain that I could not locate? Loneliness may be remedied with a friend, loss may be resolved with healthy grieving, but the phantom pain of depression is often untraceable to any source. I was completely stuck.
For a long time now I have been struggling to find relief from my pain… or at the very least find the best way to cope with it. Should I follow a plan or be spontaneous, should I read or write, should I sleep in or get up early–what would be best for my soul? I kept taking my emotional temperature, trying to figure out what helped or didn’t help, but the solution was a will-o’-the-wisp, dancing just outside my insight and control.
“And then somehow it came to me,” I journaled the next morning. “What my heart needed was not support to find and apply a solution (friends, good job, insight, etc.), but just support as an end in itself. What my heart needed was simply that gentleness and kindness, for me to have an attitude of constant gentleness and kindness in how I saw myself, thought of myself, felt about myself. I needed self-compassion for my own pain and struggle and fear and confusion and sense of worthlessness—not to find a solution, but to just be on my own side through it all.”
I am a fixer from way back. When I see others in pain, I want to help, give them suggestions, offer them a way to find relief. This often backfires, unintentionally causing more hurt. Kimberly wants me to listen with compassion, understanding, and empathy rather than solutions, but I’m a very slow learner. I keep defaulting back to problem-solving even though I’ve discovered through her how greatly I also need to just be heard and not fixed.
If the best a friend can offer is not to stop my pain, but to hold my hand through it, then why have I never thought to practice this with my own heart, to be my own best friend? What if I walked through each day with a tenderness towards myself, an empathy for my struggle, an awareness and responsiveness to the fluctuations of daily events and how they impact my heart?
I feel as though a new way of being has started to open up in my mind. I’m just learning the initial steps, but it seems to hold real promise for the next leg of my spiritual journey. It does not mean my misery will lighten, but that I will be sensitive and caring about my ongoing pain.
This is the kind of eulogy I would wish for myself–not to be remembered for my intelligence or talents or accomplishments, but for a sweet spirit. I think it will take another couple decades of fermenting to become what I wish to be. Here is Daniel Radcliffe’s (Harry Potter) remembrance of Alan Rickman, the late actor:
Alan Rickman is undoubtedly one of the greatest actors I will ever work with. He is also, one of the loyalest and most supportive people I’ve ever met in the film industry. He was so encouraging of me both on set and in the years post-Potter. I’m pretty sure he came and saw everything I ever did on stage both in London and New York. He didn’t have to do that. I know other people who’ve been friends with him for much much longer than I have and they all say “if you call Alan, it doesn’t matter where in the world he is or how busy he is with what he’s doing, he’ll get back to you within a day”.
People create perceptions of actors based on the parts they played so it might surprise some people to learn that contrary to some of the sterner(or downright scary) characters he played, Alan was extremely kind, generous, self-deprecating and funny. And certain things obviously became even funnier when delivered in his unmistakable double-bass.
As an actor he was one of the first of the adults on Potter to treat me like a peer rather than a child. Working with him at such a formative age was incredibly important and I will carry the lessons he taught me for the rest of my life and career. Film sets and theatre stages are all far poorer for the loss of this great actor and man.
Be gentle and kind to yourself. Your soul needs it. Be patient with yourself, life is hard enough without your self-criticism. Learn to support yourself, not superficially with cake and new shoes, but at the deepest levels towards your heart’s real needs. Lovingly forgive yourself for your failures and shortcomings as you would those of a dear friend. Be your own best friend. You are in as much need of a true friend as anyone else.
What does your heart need today? It will only be honest with you if you are gentle and kind to it. It is not luxury or indulgence to give first-aid to your bleeding heart-wounds. To ignore them or diminish them would be neglect, so take full measure of your pain and with compassion find a way to give the help your weary, struggling heart needs. With a little courage, ask for assistance from others and accept what is offered freely and without apology, but with real gratitude.
Be kind to yourself today, and gentle. It is the root from which compassion springs up for others. Practice it on yourself first and you will be better at giving it to others.
Janathan Grace Reflections 