Its already August! The summer is running its course, but the need for kindness has not. It seems more important than ever these days. Most of the posts will be from my book, Great Love in Little Ways: Reflections on the Power of Kindness.
Phrases posted on Facebook, August 2020
When two people genuinely smile on one another, they create a mutual radiance. Imagine what this might be like if there were hundreds of thousands of people smiling on one another this way. The world would glow . . . A genuine smile is kindness made visible. It is a sign of welcome. It is the good in goodwill. It is sunshine in your face.
Patience is not a life sentence. It is life lived in a certain spirit. It is possible toe cease impatient waiting and instead “wait upon” the events in our lives and the longing of our hearts. It is the spirit of kindness that holds things gently in time.
How long will it take, and how many of us will be a quorum that can bring about reverence for our planet? Let us begin soul walking and loving the earth for itself and not just for what it gives. Let us trust that awareness is a force, and that care can send kindness down to the magma.
Can we think of kindness as a way to breathe? Our lungs fill and empty without our having to make them do so. However, when we attend to our breathing, something changes. The air seems to fill us more than otherwise, and it also releases us, empties us, so that we can take another deep inhalation. Paying attention to breathing has been classical in most spiritual practices. Making the breath a vehicle for kindness is therefore not strange but natural.
What if we thought of a limitation as being like a womb? By stopping any hostile feelings we have toward our limiting circumstances, we can be conceived again. We can begin to experience the kindness inherent in the limitation. We can sense what there is for us in the circumstance, and what can grow with our participation. Something new can be born that may even help others.
Farmers in the past didn’t throw away the stones they dug up. They found a new use for them in walls that made good boundaries. So, too, when we clear our inner field, we don’t discard what was once there. We treat it with respect. We let it be seen as part of our wholeness, rethought and reconstructed to serve in a more useful way.
I never thought of kindness as having a fragrance, but, of course, it does. Something lovely suffuses the air between a receiver, a giver and the given. Don’t you love this quote by Mahatma Gandhi? The fragrance remains on the hand that gives the rose.
Deep down at the core of our being, we all have a well of compassion and kindness. The rope and the bucket that gives us access to that living water may be severed from time to time. Then we can’t seem to bring up those words and actions that demonstrate what at other times we could be giving to heal and to help. Repair is required. I believe we are able to repair the connection when we trust that what we deeply are can’t ever be lost.
A favorite quote from Bishop Desmond Tutu is: Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.
Our words are vibes for goodwill or ill will and everything in between. They are powerful tools of creation and destruction. When kindness is the underlying vibration, then good always comes into being. We have that human gift to voice goodness into the world. May we use that gift with great care.
The following seems true. I hope you think so, too: In his stirring Syracuse commencement address, George Saunders confessed with unsentimental ruefulness: ‘What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.’ I doubt any decent person, upon candid reflection would rank any other species of regret higher. To be human is to leap toward our highest moral potentialities, only to trip over the foibles and actualities of our reflexive patterns. To be a good human is to keep leaping anyway. Maria Popova
